Counter-Cultures in Germany An Central Europe - From Sturm Und Drang To Baader-Meinhof (2003)

COUNTER-CULTURES
IN GERMANY AND
CENTRAL EUROPE
Steve Giles
Maike Oergel
Editors
PETER LANG
COUNTER-CULTURES IN GERMANY
AND CENTRAL EUROPE
This page intentionally left blank
COUNTER-CULTURES IN GERMANY
AND CENTRAL EUROPE
FROM STURM UND DRANG
TO BAADER-MEINHOF
STEVE GILES & MAIKE OERGEL

(EDS)
PETER LANG
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
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Contents
Acknowledgements
STEVE GILES
Introduction: Culture as Counter-Culture
11
GUSTAV FRANK
Sturm und Drang: Towards a New Logic of Passion

and the Logic of German Counter-Cultures
25
NICHOLAS SAUL AND SUSAN TEBBUTT
Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern

German Cultural History
43
MAIKE OERGEL
Revolutionaries, Traditionalists, Terrorists? The Burschenschaften and the German Counter-Cultural Tradition
61
CARL WEBER
Performing Counter-Culture in the Vorstadt: Nestroys

Theatre in Times of Reaction and Revolt
87
MALCOLM HUMBLE
Das Reich der Erfllung: A Theme in

Wilhelmine Counter-Culture
105
DAVID MIDGLEY
Los von Berlin! Anti-Urbanism as Counter-Culture in

Early Twentieth-Century Germany
121
MARGARETE KOHLENBACH
Walter Benjamin, Gustav Wyneken and

the Jugendkulturbewegung
137
Contents
COLIN RIORDAN
The Green Alternative in Germany 19001930
155
SABINE EGGER
The Roots of the East German Green

Movement in the 1950s
171
STEFAN BUSCH
Bluthochzeit mit Mutter Erde: Repression und Regression

in der Blut-und-Boden-Literatur
193
STEVE GILES
Limits of the Visible: Kracauers Photographic Dystopia
213
JEROME CARROLL
The Art of the Imperceptible: A Discussion of the

Aesthetics of Wolfgang Welsch
241
CARMEL FINNAN
The Challenges of Zrichs Autonomous Youth Movement
259
MATTHIAS UECKER
Aufrufe, Bekenntnisse, Analysen: Zur Politisierung der

westdeutschen Literatur in den sechziger Jahren
273
INGO CORNILS
Writing the Revolution: the Literary Representation of the

German Student Movement as Counter-Culture
295
JAMIE TRNKA
The West German Red Army Faction and its Appropriation

of Latin American Urban Guerilla Struggles
315
GERRIT-JAN BERENDSE
Aesthetics of (Self-)Destruction: Melvilles Moby Dick,

Brechts The Measures Taken and the Red Army Faction
333
Contents
UWE SCHTTE
Heilige, die im Dunkel leuchten: Der Mythos der RAF

im Spiegel der Literatur nachgeborener Autoren
353
MORAY MCGOWAN
Ulrike Meinhof im Deutschen Drama

der Neunziger Jahre: Drei Beispiele
373
Notes on Contributors
395
Acknowledgements
We wish to express our gratitude to the British Academy for

magnanimously supporting the International Symposium on CounterCultures at the University of Nottingham 1416 September 2001,
where the papers compiled in this volume were initially presented. We
would also like to thank the University of Nottingham for its generous
financial support towards the production of this volume.
STEVE GILES
On 15 March 1920, two days after the Kapp Putsch, a painting by

Rubens was damaged by a stray bullet during fighting in Dresden
between opponents and supporters of the attempted right-wing coup.
Oskar Kokoschka, the renowned Expressionist artist and Professor at
Dresdens Akademie der Knste, immediately issued an appeal to the
combatants to relocate their conflict away from the art gallery, so as
to protect works of art which in Kokoschkas view were the
peoples most hallowed possession. The Marxist Dadaists John
Heartfield and George Grosz responded to Kokoschkas heartfelt plea
by way of a diatribe which is iconoclastic even by Dadaist standards.
Decrying Kokoschka as Der Kunstlump the art scoundrel they
welcomed the fact that bullets were hitting artistic masterpieces
instead of exploding in the dwellings of impoverished workers.1
Their article launched a scathing attack on Kokoschka, whom
they took to embody the dominant views on Art typical of bourgeois
culture. Art is said to provide a spiritual haven, a transcendent
vantage point from which the bourgeoisie can contemplate the
everyday world with delight, secure in the knowledge that aesthetic
culture invests life with meaning and significance. Grosz and
Heartfield, on the other hand, dismiss artistic masterpieces as mere
scraps of canvas and bourgeois culture as no more than the beguiling
faade of ruthless capitalist exploitation. Similarly, the RomanticIdealist concept of artistic genius is unmasked as a piece of elitist
ideology which covers up the fact that the artists head simply
recycles the world-view of his audience, much as a sausage machine
The key texts in the Kunstlump debate are those by Heartfield/Grosz and
Alexander; their theoretical and historical contexts are admirably documented
in Fhnders/Rector, 43103.
12
Steve Giles
processes meat. What is needed, they conclude, is the development of

an authentic working-class culture which rejects the bourgeois
heritage in all its oppressive manifestations.
Needless to say, Grosz and Heartfields invective was perceived
to be outrageous even in the early, revolutionary phase of the Weimar
Republic. Crucially, Gertrud Alexander, the editor of the cultural
section of Die Rote Fahne, the German Communist Partys daily
newspaper, was utterly appalled by their vandalistic attack on the
cultural heritage, and she steadfastly defends the universal and
humanist dimensions of the bourgeois artistic tradition. The ensuing
debate prefigures conflicts and controversies over the bourgeois
cultural heritage that were to dominate Marxist aesthetics for the next
fifty years or more, and receives a provisional counter-cultural coda in
the guise of Heiner Mllers assertion in 1977 that der Humanismus
kommt nur noch als Terrorismus vor, der MolotowCocktail ist das
letzte brgerliche Bildungserlebnis. (Mller, 40)
When compared to the systematic vituperation of Grosz and
Heartfield, the critiques of bourgeois culture articulated by the students
movement in the 1960s seem almost tame, but the Kunstlump debate
is significant not simply because it pre-empts the possibly parochial
posturings of disaffected 68ers (see Dirke, 4249). It also compels us
to reconsider the very notion of counter-culture, which all too often has
tended to be associated with American and European radical
movements of the 1960s and 1970s.2 The Kunstlump debate also
maps out a terrain and delineates a series of theoretical parameters on
and within which other radical critiques of bourgeois culture and
politics for example feminist, Black Power, post-colonial were
articulated, as well as inviting us to consider the extent to which the
polemics of Marxist Dadaists were truly counter-cultural, as opposed
to marginally sub-cultural at best.
This latter dilemma is particularly important for Sabine von Dirke
in her classic study of West German counter-culture, All Power to the
Imagination! As she rightly points out in her introductory comments
2
On the international dimension of these movements, see Caute. The West

German context is discussed in Dirke, passim; the American situation is
critically reviewed in Bell, 12045.
13
on culture and hegemony, the investigation of counter-culture

immediately raises fundamental theoretical questions. These concern
the nature of culture; the relationship between culture and politics; the
distinction between sub-cultures and counter-cultures; the class basis
of culture and counter-culture; and the broader sociological frameworks
within which culture, politics, class and dominant institutions may be
configured. At the same time, because Dirke focuses on counter-cultural
movements in West Germany from the late 1960s through to the mid
1980s, she does not engage with a variety of issues which are relevant
from a more expansive historical and theoretical perspective.
Taking the historical dimension first, there is a case for arguing
that all the ground-breaking cultural developments in Germany and
central Europe from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism may be
construed as counter-cultures not in the perhaps trivial sense that
any new cultural development is critical of its predecessors, but in
the more drastic and fundamental sense that modern German culture
has been characterised by a series of paradigm shifts, or even caesuras,
whereby the conceptual and institutional presuppositions of the prior
cultural formation have been decisively rejected. Moreover, deploying
the category of counter-culture as a tool of historical analysis also
enables us to rethink contemporary controversies concerning, for
example, the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, or
the relative priority of the avant-garde as opposed to counter-cultural
manifestations in initiating and defining radical artistic movements
from the late nineteenth century onwards.3
At the same time, rethinking counter-culture as a historical
category also has theoretical implications. Instead of approaching the
historical development of culture in linear or evolutionary terms, as
one formation is succeeded by another in a process of inheritance or
Aufhebung, the counter-cultural perspective outlined above suggests
that our primary object of analysis might be not artistic evolution, but
cultural revolution. Similarly, attending to radical shifts and ruptures
at the overarching historical or chronological level also raises
questions concerning the internal cohesiveness of any particular
cultural formation if such fundamental changes are to be possible. In
3
For further discussion, see the essays compiled in Giles, Theorizing Modernism.
14
Steve Giles
other words, the underlying dynamic of endogenous cultural

development might itself be counter-cultural, in the sense that the
domain of say artistic phenomena is constantly reshaped, as the
centre becomes the periphery, low culture is transmuted into high
culture, and vice-versa.
Defining and deploying the category of counter-culture in these
various ways would suggest that counter-culture can be conceived of
in critical, historical, and even methodological terms. In the remainder
of this Introduction, I shall first flesh out the notion of counter-culture
with reference to Dirkes very helpful theoretical discussion. In order
to consider in more detail the sociological and aesthetic issues
highlighted in her argument, I shall then examine a series of perspectives
Marxism, Russian Formalism, Czech Structuralism, and Rezeptionssthetik which are particularly apposite when conceptualising counterculture, by drawing on the work of Jameson, Tynjanov, Mukarovsky, and
Jau. This discussion will be informed by the general assumption that
cultural analysis must avoid the pitfalls noted by Adorno in his
critique of traditional approaches to the sociology of music:
Je gesicherter soziologische Befunde ber Musik, desto ferner und uerlicher
sind sie ihr selbst. Je tiefer aber sie in spezifisch musikalische Zusammenhnge
sich versenken, desto rmer und abstrakter drohen sie als soziologische zu
werden. (Adorno, Vermittlung, 209)
Finally, I shall give a brief overview of the essays compiled in this

volume all of which were first presented at an International
Symposium on Counter-Cultures at the University of Nottingham in
September 2001 indicating in particular the generic concerns which
they address.
Sabine von Dirkes approach to counter-culture draws heavily on
the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies in the 1970s, especially its pioneering appropriation of
Antonio Gramscis account of hegemony. She begins, though, by
considering in more general terms the relationships between subcultures and counter-cultures, and culture and society. While the term
culture is often used, particularly in literary circles, to refer to the more
elevated and edifying manifestations of human creative endeavour, it
15
may also be employed in a more comprehensive manner to designate

the variety of ways in which we make sense of social relations.
Moreover, she continues, the precise character of the inter-connections
between culture and society is complicated by the fact that society
may well not be a homogeneous or harmonious entity, but a site of
struggle where different social groups seek to achieve cultural
dominance or to use Gramscis term hegemony. The term
hegemony refers to the ways in which dominant groups in a society
establish the legitimacy of their position by means of consent rather
than coercion, as the rest of society is encouraged to share in their
views and values.
The emergence of counter-cultural groupings or beliefs implies at
least a partial breakdown in hegemony, whilst the appearance of subcultures may question dominant values only marginally. Dirkes
argumentation is quite emphatic in this area, in that she advocates
what one might call a maximalist conception of counter-culture, in
order to distinguish it more sharply from merely sub-cultural
phenomena and thus underscore the radicality of West German
counter-culture in the 1960s and 1970s. In her view,
Countercultures position themselves explicitly and fundamentally against their
dominant counterpart and try to develop an alternative way of life. They
challenge the hegemonic culture with a holistic approach, negating all of its
values and traditions and struggling for radical and comprehensive change.
(Dirke, 4)
She therefore implies not only that counter-cultures are either

intrinsically rejectionist or revolutionary, but also that they do not
operate simply at the artistic or intellectual level: they call into
question the entirety of social and political relations.
Such a conception of counter-culture may well apply to
alternative social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, and evidently
characterises proletarian cultural manifestations in the 1920s,
particularly in the early years of the Soviet Union.4 But this
See in particular the excellent compilation of primary materials in

Gorsen/Kndler-Bunte.
16
Steve Giles
conception is perhaps too stark to be able to take proper account of

less fundamentalist counter-cultural developments which certainly
have more than a tangential sub-cultural impact, yet may operate
primarily in the artistic sphere, or stop short at rejecting the entirety of
hegemonic views and values that permeate a particular social
formation. Dirkes maximalist approach to counter-culture also
adumbrates the notion of cultural revolution, not just as historical
event but also as a structural principle of cultural development in the
manner outlined by Fredric Jameson.
Towards the end of On Interpretation,5 the theoretical
monograph which forms the opening section to The Political
Unconscious, Jameson invites us to entertain the proposition that the
overarching category in literary history should be cultural revolution.
He had previously argued that a Marxist critique of cultural texts
should operate at three distinct levels, construed as concentric
frameworks,
first, of political history, in the narrow sense of punctual event and a
chroniclelike sequence of happenings in time; then of society, in the now
already less diachronic and timebound sense of a constitutive tension and
struggle between social classes; and, ultimately, of history now conceived in its
vastest sense of the sequence of modes of production and the succession and
destiny of the various social formations. (Jameson, The Political Unconscious,
75)
Cultural revolution is located in this third framework, and Jameson

implicitly assents to the view that historically significant events are
those which initiate or constitute ruptures, mutations or more
generally transformations in social forms (Bhaskar, 47).6 Such
transformations are generated by contradictions within social
formations that are overlaid by antagonistic modes of production.
Jameson now proposes that the emergence of all previous modes of
production has been associated with cultural revolution, but goes on to
5
6
Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 17102; my discussion is based primarily

on pp. 95100.
Bhaskar also gives a particularly sophisticated account of Marxs transformational
model of social activities in the course of his general discussion of societal
structures and relations in classical sociological theory (see Bhaskar, 3456).
17
insist that the category of cultural revolution does not only apply to
transitional epochs. This is because any society is characterised by a
permanent process of conflict and struggle between antagonistic
modes of production. Jameson therefore concludes that the individual
cultural text whether it be a play, a painting or a poem must now
be reconfigured as a field of force in which the dynamics of sign
systems of several distinct modes of production can be registered and
apprehended (Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 98). Moreover,
these sign systems operate both in society in general and within
particular artistic processes, so that, he continues, formal features of
texts themselves transmit ideological messages which may be at odds
with a texts ostensible content.
Although Jamesons argument appears at various points to be
indebted to Adornos account of artistic mediation, it also bears a
striking resemblance to the early work of the Russian Formalist Jurij
Tynjanov; indeed, it might almost be seen as providing a materialist
foundation for Tynjanovs otherwise overly abstract conception of
dialectic.7 In his brilliant but neglected essay Das literarische Faktum
of 1924, Tynjanov rejects the view that literary evolution is a
straightforwardly linear process. He concentrates instead on categories
such as interruption and disjunction, and argues that innovations in the
literary sphere involve a fundamental shift in the terms of reference of
the literary system: Das ist nicht planmige Evolution, sondern
Sprung, nicht Entwicklung, sondern Verschiebung (Tynjanov, Das
literarische Faktum, 395). In other words, literary evolution does
not move in a straight line, but is broken and disrupted. Similarly, new
artistic developments do not modify or amplify a tradition, but
supplant existing forms. In fact, at one point in this essay, Tynjanovs
terminology seems to be implicitly Marxist, when he suggests that the
underlying principles of literary development are struggle and
supersession (401). Elsewhere, however, the implication seems to be
that the dynamics of literary change are rather more abstract, and
See Adorno, Vermittlung; Jamesons account of mediation is discussed in

Giles, Against Interpretation. Jameson briefly considers Tynjanovs work in
The Prison-House of Language, 9195, but does not refer to the Literary Fact
essay, possibly as it has never been translated into English.
18
Steve Giles
virtually automatic. He observes that any dynamic system necessarily

generates its opposite within itself thanks to a dialectical process
governed by chance developments, errors in and violations of that
system (409), rather than referring to a properly Marxian dialectic
grounded in the conflict between forces and relations of production. In
fact, the motor of literary change almost seems to resemble a cultural
tumbler dryer, given Tynjanovs emphasis on the constant interchange
between the centre and the peripheries of a system which is clearly in
a condition of endemic flux (399).
Tynjanovs model of the literary system can be seen as countercultural in both synchronic and diachronic terms, so much so that the
very categorisation of literature becomes an essentially contested
domain. In that respect, his theoretical position is comparable to that
of the Czech Structuralist Jan Mukarovsky, who takes on board many
of Tynjanovs central precepts but also in the mid 1930s at least
provides them with a more substantial sociological foundation, as well
as applying them to the cultural sphere in general.8 Mukarovsky
contends that the history of art involves a series of rebellions against
ruling norms, in that there is a constant tension between old and new,
between tradition and innovation. Indeed, the development of modern
art in particular seems to presuppose that the aesthetic value of a work
entails a rejection of existing aesthetic norms, the consequence being
that aesthetic value and the nature of art is inherently mutable. The
dynamics of normative change are dialectical in the manner outlined
by Tynjanov, as Mukarovsky indicates that the aesthetic realm of
culture is governed by a series of opposing factors whose conflictual and
contradictory interaction generates cultural development. At the same
time, though, Mukarovsky also presents a more concrete and specific
account of the societal dimension of aesthetic norms.
Mukarovsky shows that in any social formation there
simultaneously exists a variety of systems of aesthetic norms, which
are in conflict and competition with one another. These normative
systems are dynamic, ever-changing and permeable, so that norms
may, for instance, shift from the aesthetic realm to the domain of
8
For a more detailed analysis of Mukarovskys work in this area see Giles,
Sociological Aesthetics. My discussion here is based on Mukarovsky, 3366.
19
ethics, and vice-versa. Crucially, aesthetic norms share a key property

of all norms, as they are organised on the basis of societal
stratification and differentiation. Just as we are able to express
ourselves linguistically in various social dialects, so too, Mukarovsky
maintains, we may well be conversant with a variety of aesthetic
norms. Moreover, he continues, social stratification must be defined
both vertically in traditional social class terms and horizontally,
with reference to categories such as age, gender and occupational
group (categories which might, of course, be supplemented with
others, such as religion and ethnicity). It therefore follows that not
only different social strata, but also different sectors within the same
social stratum, may adhere to different and conflicting sets of aesthetic
norms, so much so that they may even construct alternative artistic
canons.
The interplay between social stratification, aesthetic norms and
cultural canons also has an institutional dimension. Society has
developed a range of agencies which, for example, regulate the
evaluation of art-works and thus enable society to influence aesthetic
value. These institutional forms include literary criticism, public
libraries, museums, academies, prizes, and even censorship. Although
the primary role of these and other agencies may well not be to
influence aesthetic value, in that they in fact carry out a range of
societal functions and mediate a variety of societal tendencies, their
regulation of aesthetic value is closely connected with general social
developments. Mukarovsky thus provides us with a more
sophisticated and differentiated way of characterising the shifts and
gradations between sub-cultures and counter-cultures through his
account of the relationship between social stratification, aesthetic
norms and cultural canons. He also emphasises that the societal
mediation of those norms and canons involves institutional structures
which play a crucial role in the reproduction of the cultural sphere.
How, though, are we to establish whether a specific cultural
development or seeming innovation is merely reproductive of
dominant modes of discourse, rather than being transformative or even
revolutionary? This question was addressed in a particularly
instructive fashion by Hans Robert Jau in his classic essay
Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft, where
20
Steve Giles
he attempted to transcend and supersede the supposed limitations of

Marxism and Formalism, and thereby heal the rift between the
sociological and the aesthetic in modern literary studies and, by
extension, in cultural inquiry in general. At the same time, Jau does
nonetheless endorse certain key premises of Russian Formalism,
starting with the notion that the course of literary history does not
proceed in a smooth, linear or teleological manner, but is permeated
instead by discontinuities, conflict and revolution. In view of the fact
that Jau maintains that epochal shifts in literary history and the
artistic value of specific works both depend on their rejection of
prevailing aesthetic norms, his theoretical approach could be
characterised as being intrinsically counter-cultural, as the category of
counter-culture implicitly informs his historiographical and his
evaluative presuppositions. From Jaus own standpoint, however, his
key theoretical notion and his most innovative contribution to cultural
inquiry is the horizon of expectations, or Erwartungshorizont.
Jau contends that readers and audiences always perceive literary
texts against the background of a series of assumptions which establish
the nature of literature. But, in order to escape the accusation that such
assumptions are merely arbitrary or subjective, he proposes that they are
in fact embedded in an objectifiable referential system of coordinates or
expectations, namely an Erwartungshorizont. The Erwartungshorizont
of a particular grouping of readers or even writers and critics
incorporates elements such as a prior understanding of genre
conventions, formal and thematic aspects of texts already known to
the reader, and the opposition between practical and poetic language.
Epochal change or, we might say, a counter-cultural shift involves
a fundamental transformation in the Erwartungshorizont, inaugurated
by texts which radically reject or deconstruct prevailing artistic
conventions.
Basic structural changes in the Erwartungshorizont can, Jau
proposes, be identified by establishing the existence of ruptures and
discontinuities between those dominant referential schemas which
happen to be in force at different points in time. Rather like a cultural
gardener digging with an analytical spade, the literary historian would
make a vertical slice through a particular cultural formation in order to
reveal a cross-section of aesthetic space which incorporates the variety
21
of oppositional and hierarchical normative structures in evidence at a

particular social moment. This initial slice or cross-section would then
be followed up by further slices from earlier and later periods, so as to
enable comparisons to be made between these various moments in
order to establish the extent of normative change. At the same time,
the foundation would be laid for a new type of literary or cultural
history which focuses on diachronic ruptures rather than underlying
continuities.
Although Jaus new mode of literary history appears to lend
itself particularly well to counter-cultural analysis, it does have certain
shortcomings. First, Jau takes certain contentious Russian Formalist
precepts such as the opposition between poetic and practical language
to be self-evident, and he incorporates them into his general schema
of readerly expectations even though they are historically specific and
intimately associated with late modernism.9 Second, whereas he
insists that such expectations are not subjective or psychologistic, his
evidence for their objectivity is not derived from systematic
investigations into the underlying structures of readers responses but
refers instead to the occurrence of certain stylistic features in
parodistic texts. And, thirdly, the core components of the Erwartungshorizont are restricted to aesthetic norms and conventions. Nevertheless, his revamped methodology for literary history still provides a
productive starting-point for counter-cultural analysis, and I would
propose modifying Jaus theoretical model in three principal ways.
First, Jaus emphasis on expectations should be replaced by a
focus on discursive presuppositions, so that instead of establishing the
constitutive features of the readers horizon of expectations, we would
seek to reconstruct the relevant horizons of discourse which underpin
readers perceptions of texts.10 Second, the key conceptual components in a particular horizon of discourse should be identified on a
9
10
On Russian Formalism and late modernism, see my essay on Kracauer in this

volume.
I use the term discourse not in the Foucauldian sense, but to designate the set of
implicit and explicit beliefs and presuppositions which inform and constitute a
domain in their textual embodiment, eg in terms of figurative language, rhetoric
and syntax.
22
Steve Giles
strictly historical basis, so that inappropriate or anachronistic

normative and analytic categories are not built into the horizon of
discourse on an a priori basis. And, thirdly, the horizon of discourse
should not be construed essentially or primarily in aesthetic terms.
Jau is right to argue that reading and writing is located within an
objectifiable referential framework of norms and conventions, so that
no act of reading is theory-neutral. But the discursive presuppositions
which inform particular readings may also be ethical, political,
sociological, or even metaphysical, whether we are investigating key
moments in literary history or cultural transformations. To give but
one example, it would be illuminating to compare the contemporary
reception of, say Schlinks Der Vorleser and Grasss Im
Schneckengang, with the contemporary reception of Grasss Die
Blechtrommel and Weisss Die Ermittlung, in order to develop a
critique of the discursive presuppositions of the various sectors of the
German reading public and their shifting horizons. It might then be
possible to fulfil the stringent criteria set out by Adorno in his
specification of reception research:
Das kunstsoziologische Ideal wre, objektive Analysen das heit, solche der
Werke , Analysen der strukturellen und spezifischen Wirkungsmechanismen
und solche der registrierbaren subjektiven Befunde aufeinander abzustimmen.
Sie mten sich wechselseitig erhellen. (Adorno, Thesen zur Kunstsoziologie,
206)
In the closing session of the Nottingham Counter-Cultures

Symposium, which involved a wide-ranging discussion of general
implications arising from the papers which had been presented, various
questions were posed to which I was invited to respond in this
Introduction. Is counter-culture positional or relative, in other words is
one persons culture another persons counter-culture? Is counterculture intrinsically marginal or temporary? Is counter-culture only
valid as a polemical term, rather than as an analytic category? Does
counter-culture have to be explicitly political or politicised? If we
focus on the aesthetic dimensions of a counter-culture, must we
inevitably underplay its theoretical and political dimensions? While I
would hope that this Introduction has provided at least some useful
theoretical reflections on these issues, the papers that follow address
23
them rather more concretely. Chronologically, they cover aspects of

German and central European culture from the 1770s to the 1990s,
whilst in genre terms they deal with narrative, theatre, poetry,
photography, and a variety of counter-cultural institutional and
theoretical initiatives. Thematically, they engage with a similarly
broad range of concerns: the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century roots of counter-culture and terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s;
anti-modern, anti-urban, and green movements since the turn of the
twentieth century; new conceptions of art and the relationship between
aesthetics and politics on the left and the right which emerged in the
wake of modernism; and alternative political movements since the
1960s, notably the Red Army Faction and its literary affiliations.
Finally, the editors wish to note that the Counter-Cultures
Symposium was overshadowed by the horrific and traumatic events of
11 September 2001 which had taken place three days earlier. Several
US delegates were unable to attend, and discussions of terrorist
violence and the Red Army Faction proved to be particularly difficult.
Participants took the view, nonetheless, that it was important to
grapple with such issues in the hope of throwing some light at least on
their causes and contexts.
Works Cited
Adorno, T.W. Thesen zur Kunstsoziologie, in Brger, P. (Hg) Seminar: Literaturund Kunstsoziologie (Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, 1978), 20411.
Vermittlung, in Adorno, T.W. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Reinbek,
Rowohlt, 1968), 20833.
Alexander, G.G.L. Herrn John Heartfield und George Grosz, Die Rote Fahne, 9
June 1920. Reprinted in Fhnders/Rector, 5053.
Kunst, Vandalismus und Proletariat. Erwiderung, Die Rote Fahne, 23/24 June
1920. Reprinted in Fhnders/Rector, 5660.
Bell, D. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (London, Heinemann, 1976).
Bhaskar, R. The Possibility of Naturalism. A Philosophical Critique of the
Contemporary Human Sciences (Brighton, Harvester, 1979).
Caute, D. Sixty-Eight. The Year of the Barricades (London, Paladin, 1988).
24
Steve Giles
Dirke, S. von. All Power to the Imagination! The West German Counterculture from
the Student Movement to the Greens (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1997).
Fhnders, W./Rector, M. (Hg) Literatur im Klassenkampf. Zur proletarischenrevolutionren Literaturtheorie 19191923 (Mnchen, Hanser, 1971).
Giles, S. Against Interpretation? Recent Trends in Marxist Criticism, British Journal
of Aesthetics, 28, 1 (Winter, 1988), 6877.
Sociological Aesthetics as a Challenge to Literary Theory: Reappraising
Mukarovsky, New Comparison, 19 (Spring 1995), 89106.
(ed) Theorizing Modernism. Essays in Critical Theory (London, Routledge,
1993).
Gorsen, P./Kndler-Bunte, E. (Hg) Proletkult. 1. System einer proletarischen Kultur.
2. Zur Praxis und Theorie einer proletarischen Kulturrevolution in
Sowjetruland 19171925 (Stuttgart, Frommann-Holzboog, 1974).
Heartfield, J./Grosz, G. Der Kunstlump, Der Gegner, 1, 1012 (1920), 4856.
Reprinted in Fhnders/Rector, 4350.
Jameson, F. The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(London, Methuen, 1981).
The Prison-House of Language. A Critical Account of Structuralism and
Russian Formalism (Princeton University Press, 1972).
Jau, H. R. Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft, in Jau,
H. R. Literaturgeschichte als Provokation (Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, 1970),
144207.
Mukarovsky, J. Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (Ann Arbor,
University of Michigan, 1970), first published in Czech in 1936.
Mller, H. Verabschiedung des Lehrstcks, in Hrnigk, F. (Hg) Heiner Mller
Material. Texte und Kommentare (Leipzig, Reclam, 1989), 40.
Striedter, J. (Hg) Russischer Formalismus. Texte zur allgemeinen Literaturtheorie und
zur Theorie der Prosa (Mnchen, Fink, 1971).
Tynjanov, J. Das literarische Faktum, in Striedter (Hg), 393431.
ber die literarische Evolution, in Striedter (Hg), 43461.
GUSTAV FRANK

and the Logic of German Counter-Cultures1
die idealistische Periode fing damals an, Kaufmann war ein Anhnger davon,
Lenz widersprach heftig. (Bchner, Lenz)
Georg Bchners all too unhappy practical experience of countercultural activity when writing and distributing Der Hessische
Landbote made him take a step back and have a look at his
predecessors. As a member of at least one counter-culture of the
1830s, Bchner can therefore also be seen as the first historian of the
counter-cultures of the Goethe-Zeit (see Frank). It is this historical
interest in the potential of counter-culture that drives his investigations
in Dantons Tod into the competing factions of the French Revolution
with their different rhetorical strategies and contrasting prescriptions
for social renewal. And it is this same historical interest that
distinguishes his critique of the Romantic movement through his
literary exploitation of the subversive potential of its comedies,
making Bchners approach utterly different from, for example,
Heines Romantische Schule. In his novella Lenz, Bchner
investigates the prior counter-culture of the Sturm und Drang, perhaps
the origin of all German counter-cultures of young intellectuals, for
the sake of a later movement.
This essay will follow in the footsteps of Bchners historical
interest and depict the close relationship between the Enlightenment
and the Sturm und Drang, showing how the dynamic inherent in the
process of Enlightenment itself was bound to produce the Sturm und
Drang. It will then focus on some characteristics of the Sturm und
Drang as a counter-culture and consider the dialectical relationship
1
My thanks go to Elizabeth Boa for her invaluable help with the English version
of this paper. I remain, of course, responsible for the finished product.
26
Gustav Frank
between counter-movement and prior culture which arises from the

historical situation. In particular, the semiotics of segregation and
self-segregation may provide a sufficiently abstract level of generality to construct a history of German counter-cultures between Sturm
und Drang and the Baader-Meinhof group.
Enlightenment vs Sturm und Drang

The German scholarly perspective on the Enlightenment retains right
through to the 1990s a certain prejudice: that there was a revolt against
the rationalistic approach of the Enlightenment a revolt by the
younger generation of the Sturm und Drang, who were emotionally
disappointed by the cold rationality of Enlightenment (see Boeschenstein; Mog).
Regarded in this way, Enlightenment and Sturm und Drang are
seen as no more than stimulus and response (see Franke). A long
suppressed heilig glhend Herz to use the idiom of the Sturm und
Drang rises up against a public sphere, which, now no longer
controlled by a corrupt and immoral ancien rgime but constructed in
and through the workings of rational discourse, merely reproduces the
old ways of living, of belief, of social order. This argument, which
envisages the same cold rationality, irrespective of the ends, at work,
is established in such canonical works as Cassirers Philosophy of
Enlightenment (Die Philosophie der Aufklrung 1932) or Horkheimers and Adornos Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der
Aufklrung, 1944/1947).
Such a misunderstanding of the Sturm und Drang was itself a
product of the specific development which the Enlightenment took in
Germany from the 1780s onwards in the work of philosophers like
Kant and then in the German Idealism of Fichte, Hegel and others (see
Kondylis). The misunderstanding starts with Kants question Was ist
Aufklrung? In his treatise, Kant does not argue in favour of
Enlightenment, as has been generally claimed, a claim which turned
this text into the canonical incorporation of the supposed spirit of
27
Enlightenment. Quite to the contrary, Kants purpose is to set limits

on the frightening dynamics of Enlightenment as an ongoing and
seemingly endless process which questions all values and norms and
in so doing endangers the social order, or at least the order of the
academic world, that is to say the very order of thought and of
thinking. The Sturm und Drang, seen as the latest and most radical
step in this process, provoked at last Kants reaction. Its protagonists
aggravated the conflict between nature and norms and, in intellectual
terms, the conflict between studium and ingenium, i.e. a philosophy
dominating the intellectual discourse and a literature claiming
autonomy from domination, both of which so exercised Kant. This
conflict had periodically found expression since its popular version
had been propounded in Edward Youngs Conjectures on Original
Composition (1759). The authors of the Sturm und Drang found a
mythic paradigm for originality in Prometheus, as well as a historical
model in Shakespeare, so as to embody their concept of the Originalor Kraftgenie allowed to question all authority. Thus passion
dominates reason and the expression of passion in literature dominates
philosophy.
Horkheimer/Adorno, like Cassirer before them, take Kants
philosophical criticism to be the necessary fulfilment and paradigm of
Enlightenment and therefore construe it as the core representation of
its potential.2 The implicit danger they see in the paradigm which Kant
posits, the mere functional working of reason for any purpose, is
finally put on display in their view in de Sades oeuvre. In
Horkheimer/Adornos chapter about Kant and de Sade (Juliette oder
Aufklrung und Moral), de Sades works merely realise what is
implied in Kants critiques. In their view de Sade anticipates the turn
which modern capitalist society took towards Fascism, thereby
realising the implications of his contemporaries and especially Kants
philosophy. La Mettrie and de Sade show at an early stage where
rationality leads if it is set free in mechanisation, materialism, and
2
Their evaluation of Kants philosophy is naturally quite different from

Cassirers. My point is that even the more sophisticated negative reduction of
Kants philosophy to be the underlying building plan of de Sades nihilism
misses the crucial critical and counter-cultural potential of Sturm und Drang
and materialism/nihilism.
28
Gustav Frank
nihilism. Twentieth-century research annihilates the counter-cultural

quality of nihilism and Sturm und Drang as its forerunner by taking
Kant, who is the main opponent of monism, to be the representative of
Enlightenment. In the teleological implication of its historical
argument research tends to identify both opposing fractions and to
blur their origin in Enlightenment.
Dynamics of Enlightenment
To pursue the argument, let me now suggest a different view of the
Enlightenment. I shall treat this complex period by isolating three
phases, following the usual terminology of the early, middle, and late
periods of Enlightenment: Frhe Aufklrung with, for example,
Gottsched and his circle, Mittlere Aufklrung characterised by
Empfindsamkeit, and Spte Aufklrung. I shall argue that the literature
of Early Enlightenment and of Empfindsamkeit serves to illustrate
contemporary philosophical propositions, whereas from the Sturm und
Drang onwards an autonomous literature takes on a complementary
rather than merely illustrative function: literature separates from
philosophy to become more autonomous.
I take the Enlightenment to be a system of thought and of
thinking, of producing allowed or permissable thoughts, in the sense
that Foucault establishes in The Archaeology of Knowledge. There are,
accordingly, basic assumptions that allow us to speak generally of
Aufklrung and there are more specific elements that allow us to
differentiate between the sub-periods. In this view, the Enlightenment
has as a basis a common programme. As the programme is gradually
realised more and more fully and is expanded to embrace more and
more regions of thought, this process creates feedback effects,
producing the changes and developments necessary to adapt theory
and its perceived application. The phases or stages of Enlightenment
that I distinguish are produced by those who were no longer willing to
follow the intrinsic development of the programme. For them, the
advantages they gained by their participation in the preceding stage of
29
the process were in danger of being lost by the next step. By going
forwards they felt they would have to risk something that they could
not afford to lose or even to jeopardize. Crucially, their opposition to
further progress was no longer in line with that universal reason which
they claimed to be the measure of all things. It is this which lays them
open to criticism in the name of the very standards they themselves
upheld, and which invites investigation of their group or class values
and norms in the light of reason (see Pikulik; Titzmann, Klinger).
Due to the dynamics inherent in the process of Enlightenment,
controversy between struggling factions does not only emerge at the
moment when the guiding principles of Enlightenment were first
articulated with massive polemical impact on the ancien rgime and
on Christian orthodox theology. Rather, the battles continue throughout, so that controversy also breaks out when, around 1750 and again
around 1770, the programme of Enlightenment was expanded. Such
continuing expansion and struggle is a true sign of Enlightenments
success.
Sympathy, Sentiment, Passion

The fundamental postulate of Enlightenment defines human reason as
the arbiter of truth. But the Western Enlightenment3 uses reason as the
adequate human tool to realise its programme of the rehabilitation of
sensuality, of matter, and of nature (see Kondylis). Its rationalism is
no longer part of a dualistic approach like Descartes. In this context, a
radicalised concept of emotion becomes the heart of the developing
Enlightenment.4 Under the rule of universal reason, shifting concepts
of emotion evolve from Sympathie (sympathy) in the early part of the
3
4
To abbreviate English and French developments of the second half of the 18th
century.
In accordance with recent research (see Benthien, Fleig and Kasten; Hansen Die
Geschichte Emotionalitt; Schlaeger and Stedman; Schlaeger; Wegmann),
emotion is taken to be a historical practice of speaking and behaviour with
significant spatio-temporal differences.
30
Gustav Frank
period, through Empfindung (sentiment) in the middle, to Leidenschaft

(passion) in the later stage. The logic of this change creates one of the
prerequisites for counter-culture. When confronted all too vividly with
the consequences of passion in Sturm-und-Drang literature, the
German reception of Western Enlightenment came to an end and the
limits of reasons freedom were newly defined in the scholastic
language of Kants philosophy which still held sway and which,
marked by the insignia of power, quite lacked the esprit and elegance
of the essayistic style of his earlier works (see Bhme and Bhme).
Seen from the perspective of this dominant Enlightenment philosophical culture, what was a logical step in the process of Enlightenment became a dangerous counter-move.
While the early representatives of Enlightenment demonstrated
the immanent rationality of the world and of their philosophical creed
by a life of virtue and by accommodation with the existing social
structure, the constrictions of a narrow society which did not allow for
social mobility were increasingly felt to be a barrier to the promise of
happiness here on earth. The postulates of happiness and of the
theodicy, the vindication of divine justice despite the existence of evil
in the world, which had held sway since Leibnizs Thodice (1710),
were, however, satisfied for a time through the construction of a
private sphere where all promises were to be realised. Thus the private
realm was set against the frustrating public and political sphere of the
ancien rgime. As a consequence family, friendship and love became
dominant values, and literature depicted worlds with a familial
structure. The social conception of human relations was replaced by
an emotional definition. Family became the key sphere of human
interactions which fuelled group identity.
The early Enlightenment had already offered families as its
model of the world. The literature of Empfindsamkeit then uses the
topos of generational conflict to convey the transformation of a system
of thought. While the rational and norm-bearing figure of the pater
familias is the representative of the older phase of Enlightenment, the
new point of view is incorporated in the younger generation. The
tentative disintegration of the symbolic role of the father (Gottvater,
Landesvater, Familienvater) within this family foreshadows intellectual and political change, but this is change in the form of natural
evolution and not as yet of violent revolution. It is not by chance, then,
31
that in Rousseaus thought pedagogic and gender roles played out

within the arena of the family were combined with political theory.
The key shift is the Enlightenment invention of childhood and
youth (see Aris; Badinter), and a growing tolerance of conflicts
arising from the process of growing up to maturity (Mndigwerden)
which symbolises the process of Enlightenment in general, as we
know from Kants essay Was ist Aufklrung?
Emotion in the sense of Empfindung or sensibility becomes the
criterion which distinguishes an elite group claiming to be the
progressive force in Enlightenment. The value and strength of
Empfindung is proved by readiness to break social rules, especially
restrictions on love. But this transgressive potential was domesticated
through highly formalised rhetorical expression and ritualised
behaviour, so that emotions were conventionalised and turned into
expected norms of behaviour rather than retaining any socially
disruptive force.
As the representatives of the early stage of Enlightenment, the
progressive group had to justify their innovations by proving that they
would create not chaos but a new and stable order, which would outdo
that of the deficient status quo. Given that the intimate family realm
stands opposed to the public and political sphere of courtly life where
direct and immediate confrontations with power take place, the new
norms had to be mediated by new forms of communication, namely by
the writing and circulation of texts and the practice of reading (see
Koschorke).
The fact that weeping plays an important part in sentimental
ritual signals the ambivalent impact of Empfindsamkeit. As an
expression of happiness and of sorrow, tears undermine the assumed
autonomy of the sentimental individual. For tears are the symbol not
of a subject but of a victim of a world beyond the subjects control.
Recent research has therefore focused on the feelings of fear and angst
and their implications for subjective mentality in the eighteenth
century (see Begemann). The invention of Empfindung is thus a first
step towards a risky life because it includes decisions, for example the
choice of the one true lover, no longer with reference to rational social
criteria. Such decisions can then produce tragic failure. Because
Empfindung represents a whole spectrum of feelings that tend to be
out of rational and social control and the ambivalence of grief
32
Gustav Frank
undermines moral autonomy, an implicit selection of emotions

forbidden to the positive characters in the texts takes place in order to
maintain the norms: negative and ambivalent emotions and sexual
desire have to be excluded.5
The role of rogue in this sentimental world is normally played by
an aristocrat who stands outside of the bonds of family and friendship.
He is often the most interesting, because the most individualised,
character. Where he appears in the typical role of seducer he
represents a double transgression. He is shown acting in response to
radically egoistic emotion in the form of sexual desire, so making the
whole sentimental group a victim of the social world he dominates by
seducing the middle-class virgin. Moreover, he also dominates
through reason, which enables him to mislead the men and to produce
self-delusion in the loving woman.
It is the existence and the ideological construction of the
sentimental group that makes possible this correlation of power and a
cold, calculating and manipulative reason. This plot structure tends
to feminise the sentimental man, which adds a further moment of
ambivalence to the rhetoric of gender roles (see Kleinschmidt), and to
punish the victim instead of the guilty seducer, as in Lessings Emilia
Galotti (see Nolting Vol. 1). In Sturm-und-Drang drama, however,
this structure undergoes fundamental changes. On the one hand, the
successful seducer will be pursued, as in Schillers Fiesko. But on the
other hand, basic characteristics of this negative character reappear at
5
That this is really a deliberate selection is mirrored by the book market which
was selling under the counter the Marquis dArgens Thrse Philosophe and
other well-known works of philosophical pornography. The fundamental role of
this underground and its repercussions in pre-revolutionary France are well
known (see Darnton; Mason). This under-the-counter reverse of the literature of
sentiment is the basis of a socio-political counter-culture in France but not in
Germany, where the reception of Western European thought almost ends with
Humes scepticism, which Kant refers to in the introduction of his Prolegomena
zu einer jeden knftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten knnen
as the central stimulus that had awakened him from his dogmatische[r]
Schlummer (Werkausgabe V, 118). In the introduction to the second edition of
his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant lists all the enemies of his project in a
veritable whos who of obscure orthodox and radical thought: Materialism,
Fatalism, Atheism, dem freigeisterischen Unglauben, der Schwrmerei und
Aberglauben, [] Idealism und Sceptizism (Werkausgabe III, 35).
33
the moment when the seducer is pursued within the midst of the
family itself, destroying this family as a model of theodicy, as in
Schillers Die Ruber.
In Empfindsamkeit we can reconstruct the first roots of counterculture, the first basic elements. It develops the code of emotion that
creates the progressive and younger elite of the Enlightenment from
Klopstocks first works around 1750 to his heirs around 1770 in the
Gttinger Hain. But there was as yet not really an overtly oppositional
counter-culture, for the culture of Empfindsamkeit sought ways to
harmonise differences between theory and practice and to overcome
the concrete deficiencies of social life. Therefore it created
compensatory models both in theory above all in the philosophy of
history, which was to have such long-term influence and in literary
and social practice above all in terms of the family and the
sentimental code and rites of an elite. The status of the sentimental
elite depended on their moral superiority over the ancien rgime. But
because they needed this contrast, needed to be victims and celebrated
tears, they were in fact a constitutive element of the old society which
they served to consolidate.
Towards Sturm und Drang

During the twenty years when the culture of Empfindsamkeit prevailed
(17501770), however, the new philosophy of history introduced time
and change into the idea of the theodicy (see Kondylis), thereby
accelerating the production of desirable improvements and strengthening the experience of dissonance between a slowly developing
reality and what could be expected of the society to come. Thus the
success of this new philosophy of history forced the next step of
development. The compensatory self-perception as an elite was no
longer convincing and had to be replaced. Astonishingly enough, the
next generation invented a substitute for the deficiencies of social
reality by concentrating on sign systems and poetry. They laid claim
to individuality by self-exclusion from all existing groups in society
34
Gustav Frank
through genius and through the originality of their works. The basis of
a Strmer und Drnger was no longer a group but a single identity,
the criterion of membership no longer a common feeling but a
unique passion as the immediate expression of nature. Thus the
sentimental code and rites, with their rhetorical and formal similarity,
were negated.
For the first time, authors of the younger generation, following
the example of Goethe, constituted an opposition. And the fact that it
was and could be Goethe, an individual without the protection of a
coherent group, is significant for this change. Goethe reacted against
the failings of Empfindsamkeit but based this reaction in the cult of
sentiment by unfolding what had been implicit but suppressed. The
lyrical subject in his poems (see Wnsch, Lyrik; Wnsch, frhe
Lyrik), and the protagonists of his novel Werther and his early
dramas, not only prove their readiness to break the social rules but
dare to claim their rights and to live an intense life of passion.
Moreover, Sturm-und-Drang drama transmuted Empfindsamkeit also
through radicalising the negative impact of the brgerliches
Trauerspiel. The Sturm und Drang intensified the suffering of the
victim, not to show his or her guilt, but to criticise the social and
political state. Wagners Kindermrderin, Klingers Leidendes Weib,
Lenzs Hofmeister and Soldaten, and Schillers Kabale und Liebe
justify the demand for change and the act of revolt by the exceptional
individual.
The characteristics of the individual who transcends the group,
characteristics which had till then been delegated to negative
characters, are partly incorporated into the protagonists. The subject
now wants to realise all his potential in a passionate life and therefore
lives in explicit contradiction to the given world order. Resistance to
the social rules and transgression of the conventional boundaries
become the touchstone of the passionate individual. It is the necessity
to prove oneself, in accord with such an understanding of what it is to
be an autonomous individual, that makes of this figure the agent of a
counter-culture. Thus this new subject seeks to throw off the
emotional bonds that held back the sentimental subject from antisocial action.
35
Prerequisites in Theory
At this point, however, it is is necessary to look back for a moment to
the emergence of the aesthetic theory of Empfindsamkeit. Gottscheds
appropriation of the Aristotelian concept of art as mimesis of nature
would seem to qualify literature to be an ideal ally in the rehabilitation
of sensuality. But it was not until Baumgarten invented the term
sthetik for proper philosophical use that this alliance was established.
He argues for an emancipation of the sensually beautiful and vital
from mere service in applying the laws of reason, and requires an
independent logic for the realm of the sensually beautiful.6 Yet the
beautiful still remains subordinate to reason and so does not generate
any contradiction with it. The literary revolt of Sturm und Drang,
however, based on the new values of the individual, of genius, of
originality, and of transgressive passion rooted in divine nature, aims
to overthrow this last constraint: the beautiful not only obeys its own
laws and logic, but is also autonomous with respect to intervention or
domination by other discursive formations such as philosophy.
Studium and ingenium have not yet changed places, but if passion
proves maturity in the individual life, literature could become the
proof for progress of society as a whole. The master in the process of
coming of age should be nicht ein wissenschaftlicher Grtner,
sondern ein fhlendes Herz (Goethe, Werther, 8). Breaking the rules
of conventional poetry, especially the bonds of an obviously rhetorical
language, individualises the unique work and constitutes an act of
revolt. Here is another prerequisite of the counter-culture of Sturm
und Drang.
The case of Sulzers oeuvre proves the anthropological dimension of the

invention of aesthetics (see Riedel), an invention which is not just a chapter in
the history of the arts, but is a turning point in intellectual history marking a
fundamental change in the conception of human beings and their emotional
capacities.
Gustav Frank
36
Constraints in Sturm und Drang Worlds

A closer look at its literary texts, however, reveals boundaries specific
to Sturm und Drang. The texts all depict a world with unchanging
social structures, where moral values and norms are handed down
through the generations. The conflict of the new passionate subject
with this invariable world (see Duncan) subverts the key articles of
Enlightenment faith in theodicy and historical progress. But all the
revolts of these exceptional subjects remain illusory. Sturm und Drang
plays either depict spatio-temporally distinct worlds located
somewhere else or in some other time, as in the case of Gtz, Egmont,
Fiesko, Sturm und Drang and all the adaptations of Faust, or they are
located in a wild enclave on the periphery of the society as is
Schillers later (1782) Die Ruber (see Titzmann, Empfindung).
Thus the evolutionary concept of Empfindsamkeit did not turn into a
revolutionary programme as it did in some rare cases of later
Enlightenment materialism and nihilism. But it turned into the remote
revolt of an elitist individual who claims the privileges of deviance.
All these rebels fight for their own privileged place in the given
society which they find already occupied by legitimate instances and
heirs. Mostly it is a revolt against the symbolic father of the family, of
the state, of religion, often veiled by a conflict with his substitute, the
elder brother, as in Klingers Die Zwillinge, Leisewitzs Julius von
Tarent, and Schillers Die Ruber.
Though the conflict is unfolded and its epistemological
consequences demonstrated, the texts reveal the necessary failure of
the revolt. And in so doing, they imply the necessary failure and end
of Sturm und Drang, too. The reason warum der Strom des Genies so
selten ausbricht, so selten in hohen Fluten hereinbraust are not only
the gelassene[n] Herren [...], die daher in Zeiten mit Dmmen und
Ableiten der knftig drohenden Gefahr abzuwehren wissen7 (Goethe,
7
Werther/Werther is thus implicitly criticising the widespread use of metaphors

of restraint as in the anonymous tract of 1786, Ueber die Ehescheidungen,
which refers to the marriage laws as an embankment die den reienden Strom
der Naturtriebe so einschnken men, da er weder ganz durchbricht, noch zu
seiner Quelle zurckschumt. Vielmehr leiten sie ihn in die gehrigen Canle,
37
Werther, 16) as Werther assumes, but is also to be found in the

submissiveness of the young Strmer und Drnger themselves, as
Werthers and many other suicides prove, or was instanced by those
protagonists who end up dead or murdered. Sturm und Drang,
therefore, is the first example of an intellectual experiment with revolt
and the concurrent rejection of that revolts social, moral, and
theoretical implications, as Schiller, the late theoretician of the Sturm
und Drang explains in his poems Freigeisterei der Leidenschaft and
Resignation of 1786 (Schiller, 111115).
Schillers Die Ruber ends with a revocation of the anarchic
outcome of extreme individualism and total freedom, and a re-entry
into the social order. Moreover, Schiller uses a trick to devalue that
progressive tendency in the late Enlightenment which questioned the
social and moral order in toto on the grounds that this order could no
longer be justified by reasonable argument and was sustained by mere
sentiment. While the elder son in the play represents the typical career
of the passionate Sturm-und-Drang hero, here the younger son plays
the role of the rogue, deploying the weapons of reason not only to
destroy the emotional veil covering norms and values but also to
seduce and to deceive. By allocating particular qualities to the Moor
brothers in this way, Schiller indicates that the new conception of
Sturm und Drang is the older and legitimate one, while the radical
rehabilitation of sensuality by means of reason is turned into the
illegitimate younger and hence immature position.
Counter-Cultural Posing and Success

With Sturm und Drang, the phenomenon of the self-exclusion of
literary men, semioticians or sign specialists appear for the first time
in German intellectual history. The writers and their passionate
characters construct a realm of natural otherness, of originality, of
intense life and of transgressive love. The literary and semiotic
die das Erdreich, das er durchfliet, befruchten, ohne seine Ufer zu verwsten
(Koschorke, 21).
38
Gustav Frank
construction of otherness, the unmistakable individual and the unique

poetical product, were predicated on the emergence of a new public
sphere for sign systems circulating in printed media. This public
sphere initially comprised the sentimental family and circles of
friends. But the media were becoming autonomous to a degree that
allowed the authors of Sturm und Drang to build a counter-culture
without themselves constituting a group of friends or even a coherent
group of any kind. To a certain extent, then, the media produced the
movement. Sign systems and publicity became an unavoidable
companion of all further attempts at constituting a counter-culture. For
the elite individual subject was only able successfully to take on a
paradoxical exemplary status thanks to the role played by the
expanding media, whether printed media or the public institution of
the theatre, and the concomitant growth of a wider audience.
By publishing or staging individual passion, the authors of Sturm
und Drang begin to differ from the characters they put on stage.
Rhetoric and theatricality are part of the public sphere of commonly
understandable matters. Publishing or dramatisation then puts on
display what by definition allows no witness, the radical and
solipsistic emotionality of a singular passion without intersubjective
elements. Through this contradiction, the authors at once create and
betray this singular subjectivity. But why then this gesture of revolt
against the traditional values and norms, this pose of threat against
society, this seemingly paradoxical game?
The staging of passion threatens the old authorities with what is
brought on stage, but in the very moment of theatricality lie the seeds
of betrayal, for the gesture of revolt springs, as the mainstream
proponents of Enlightenment claimed, from the hidden and
unpredictable nature of passion (see Luserke). Friedrich A. Kittler has
argued that the induction of boys into literacy in their mother-tongue
installs the oedipal triangle and leads these sons to never-ending
speaking and ink-squirting writing (see Autorschaft; Aufschreibesysteme). Kittler overshoots the mark, however, because the middleclass society which became the object of the psychoanalytic gaze at
the end of the nineteenth century was only a developing social
formation around 1770 which was not yet stable. In those days, sons
were not compelled to talk and write, but in fact wanted to in order to
compel the powers that be to make a deal with them. The danger and
39
the remedy lie close together in their works: the danger lies in what
they say, and the remedy in the fact that they say it. The elitist
individual of Sturm und Drang was not to become the source of a
conspiracy against existing society. On the contrary, the simultaneous
literary production of the passionately transgressive individual
together with the remedy of allowing this subjectivity to speak and
write, guarantees the authors a place in society. On the 11 June 1776,
Goethe became Geheimer Legationsrat at Weimar. Polemically, one
could say that as a result the literature of the German Klassik would
realise the programme of the self-restraint of freedom (see Titzmann,
Sturm und Drang). The Strmer und Drnger enter the avant-garde
of modernising society by establishing literature as a semiotic
playground for innovation but with a limited binding force. As the
cultural influence of German Classicism proves, parts of the
conception autonomy of the individual/literature but self-restraint of
passion/topics were in the long run accepted and adopted by society.
Returning to Bchners Lenz where this essay started, the fate
which befell Lenz, and which is mirrored in some of his narratives,
illustrates what could happen to those Sturm und Drang authors who
were psychologically unable to operate with strategic threats or
treason. With the failure of Lenzs attempt to get rid of the
internalized father figure and the order this figure represents, Lenz
shows the real psychic bonds which construct the problem underlying
the claim of radical individuality. Most of the other Sturm und Drang
authors managed to hide this problem of an internal emotional link to
traditional norms and values through their theatralisation of the
Kraftgenie. Lenz never solved, either in literature or in practice, the
tension between the figure of the Sturm und Drang intellectual who
ends in despair and suicide, as depicted in Zerbin oder Die neuere
Philosophie (1776), and the utopian harmonising of autonomy and
social integration in the Oberlin-like figure of the country parson only
one year later in Der Landprediger. Thus the opposition between an
internalized culture and as only theoretically and rationally deduced
counter-movement, cuts through the individual psyche. Victims like
Lenz clearly demonstrate the price of counter-cultural activity under
the (post-)sentimental condition.
Some of those who drew a moral, social or political conclusion
from the logic of passion and voted for real social change represent
40
Gustav Frank
the active counter-culture of the late Enlightenment, of the French

Revolution, and of the first republican experiments on German
territory at Mainz. At the same time, the older customs of pre-literate
social groups, which changed only slowly, were also beginning to take
on the quality of a resistant counter-culture in response to accelerating
rationalisation. But the rapidly changing mainstream culture of the
industrialising first half of the nineteenth century would leave behind
the alternative counter-cultures which had been inspired by earlier
traditions of local riots that sprang up spontaneously in response to
unjustifiably high prices for basic necessities up to the late eighteenth
century.
Sturm und Drang seems, therefore, to be the first main festation
of very different counter-cultures. Sixty years later, Bchner would
understand those who, like Lenz, could not play the half-hearted and
ambiguous game of Sturm und Drang, but would criticise those who
lost themselves in a rhetoric of cold rationalism like Robespierre or a
raging sensuality like Danton, and those tormentors who forgot the
victims of modernisation such as Woyzeck. Finally, what makes
Sturm und Drang interesting as a way of reflecting on later countercultures, is its combination of passionate transgression with strategic
rationality, of semiotic competence with chaos, of destructiveness of
the elite with psychopathic destruction of the self.
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Christiana Albertina, 32 (April 1991), 514.
NICHOLAS SAUL AND SUSAN TEBBUTT
Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in

Modern German Cultural History
What exactly is a counter-culture? Heuristically speaking, it could be

a literary or aesthetic movement which opposes the implicit cultural
doctrine of another, dominant school (such as Romanticism); a
concrete social movement which defies existing social norms (such as
the Wandervgel); the literary representation of an alternative culture
by writers of the dominant culture (such as Gastarbeiterliteratur); or,
finally, a social minority group which presents its own culture in the
host culture (such as the Turkish community in Germany). This paper
focuses on the part played by the ethnic group still called Gypsies and
Zigeuner the Romany nation in the tradition of German counterculture, and finds several of the above modalities exemplified in the
history of their literary representation. The first part of the paper
examines the cultural anthropology and literary image of the
Romanies in the epoch around 1800 as emblematic of the role of art
and of the Gypsies in early modern German culture.1 The second
looks at the great changes which have occurred in the representation
of Romanies in the German literature and culture of the twentieth
century, especially since the Second World War and the Romany
Holocaust. The thesis is that the representation of the Romanies
around 1800 consistently followed the agenda of an aesthetic counter1
We define modernity with Silvio Vietta as a cultural macroepoch lasting from

the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, and characterised by the inner
continuity of a small number of basic features across several, superficially
distinct stylistic microepochs. The basic features are exhibited in elemental
form in Early Romantic culture: the historically new claims to untrammeled
autonomy of reason and subject which entail the end of traditional metaphysics
and the domination of nature, but also provoke the counter-discourse of
experimental-utopian cultural criticism which is modern art. See Vietta, 737.
44
Nicholas Saul and Susan Tebbutt
culture, namely, to serve as utopian foil to the norm, usually,

therefore, with critical and emancipatory intent the goal in this case
being the establishment of a true German identity. Around 1800,
however, this in itself laudable project involved a one-sided
idealisation of Romany culture derived finally from ambiguous
Orientalist energies in Edward Saids sense (see Said, esp. pp. 34).
Only in the twentieth century was this ultimately colonialist stance
overcome. Romanies in modern (and postmodern) German literature
are still the locus of counter-cultural utopian emancipatory energies.
However, the twentieth-century utopia rests for the first time on a
hybrid or dialogical notion of authentically intercultural communication: the post-Orientialist representation of the German Gypsy
voice.2
The Romanticised Gypsy around 1800

and the Nineteenth Century
Let us begin with a definition of terms. As already indicated, we see
the key term counter-culture as implying the notion of utopia. The
definition of utopia we prefer is that of Hans-Joachim Mhl, taken
from a key essay in Wilhelm Vokamps benchmark collection
Utopieforschung (1982). A utopia, says Mhl, is the Entwurf einer
hypothetisch mglichen, d. h. unter Setzung bestimmter Axiome
denkbaren/vorstellbaren Welt (Gesellschaftsverfassung, Lebensform),
entworfen in zeitlicher oder rumlicher Projektion als Gegenbild
(Negation) zu den implizit oder explizit kritisierten gesellschaftlichen
Mistnden der jeweiligen Zeit (Mhl, 274). There is a vast amount
of internal variation in the literary utopian genre per se. But all
utopias exhibit the characteristic oppositional distance maintained by
Mhls definition: Mores well-known Utopia (1516) sets its perfect
state at a spatial distance from European reality, Louis-Sbastien
Mercier sets his Lan 2440 (1786) at a temporal distance. The
2
The terminology derives of course from Bhabha, The Location of Culture.
Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History
45
Romantics however modify this representative strategy in two

typically modernist ways. First, if one considers a typical text like
Hardenbergs Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799), the Romantics
attempt in one sense to overcome utopian distance. They historicise,
localise and temporalise the utopian image by embedding it (by
contrast, say, to Schnabels Insel Felsenburg, 1731) in a narrative of
contemporary historical development. Thus Hardenberg presents the
theocratic Middle Ages in the context of post-Revolutionary chaos as
a lost and future ideal of political constitution. Second, however, these
utopian designs are ironically reflected and relativised in the texts
themselves, revealed modernistically as merely provisional, experimental and provocative in function (something non-specialists
perennially overlook when they try to define Romantic politics) (see
Malsch and Kurzke). Thus despite the attempt to overcome distance,
and to embed the utopia in everyday reality, the Romantics in fact also
preserve one fundamental characteristic of the utopian tradition in
literature, namely the insight that the realisability of a utopia is not in
itself an indicator of its value, which lies elsewhere (only Karl
Mannheim would disagree).3
That said, let us begin the argument proper by asserting that
Romanticism, in the senses indicated and whether early or late, is
fundamentally utopian in orientation. Once plausibly defined by
Lothar Pikulik as a generalised Ungengen an der Normalitt,4
Romanticism is quintessentially modern, both in its consciousness of
normal contemporary culture as characterised by the loss of meaning
and the fragmentation of human nature, and in its determination to
criticise and heal this state of affairs, always by means of
experimental-utopian aesthetic constructions such as those just
mentioned. It is this utopian orientation, this need to make the
fragmentary whole once more, which eventually leads Romanticism to
concern itself with the specific problem of cultural selfhood and
3
4
See Mhl, and Mannheim, Ideologie und Utopie (178). Mannheim argues that
only an historically realised utopia qualifies as authentic, the rest qualifying
merely as ideologies. Compare Gtz Mllers Gegenwelten.
Pikulik, 1334. Norm, says Pikulik (1314), means two negative things for the
Romantics: the everyday and that which is determined by convention; each
examplifies a kind of compulsion.
46
otherness. To take Hardenberg again, there are explicit signs of this

only towards the end of his career. In Heinrich von Ofterdingen
(1802) we find the first proper Romantic encounter with utopian
Oriental alterity, when the figure of the imperialist Crusader is
contrasted with his Muslim prisoner, the Saracen poetess Zulima
with decidedly negative consequences for Germano-Christian selfesteem. But only in later Romanticism is the tendency to seek utopian
energies in Oriental alterity fully developed, and we want in this
context briefly to examine a novella by Clemens Brentano, Die
mehreren Wehmller und ungarischen Nationalgesichter (1817). This
unfolds a full-blown Romantic intercultural utopia involving not just
an Oriental figure, but actual Gypsies (whose real provenance, should
you not know it, is todays north-western India). Die mehreren
Wehmller, we shall argue, is emblematic of the German Romantic
(and indeed Classical and Enlightenment) fascination with Gypsies, its
strengths and limitations. For the Gypsies figure here as the ultimate
ideal of human perfection, as ultimate cultural mediators, in short, as
the ultimate Bohemian counter-culture of early nineteenth-century
philistine Biedermeier.
The tale initially foregrounds a philistine artist, Wehmller, who
makes a living painting portraits of officers in the Austrian Imperial
army in the epoch of cultural crisis following the defeat of Napoleon
in 1815. Wehmller is a bad artist because, despite the nature of his
business (the rendition of individual character), he has gone over to
Biedermeier mass-production methods, and simply turns up at camp
with large numbers of ready-mades based on typified national
physiognomies, which he then hastily individualises (hence one part
of the title). At one level the tale concerns how this inauthentic artist
meets his aesthetic Nemesis. In a variation of the standard comic
scheme, Wehmller en route to his next market becomes separated
from his wife, whom he has sent on ahead to tout for business with the
troops in Hungary. Unfortunately, there occurs an infestation of
plague, and the route to his wife and his source of income is cut off by
the cordon sanitaire, so that Wehmller is trapped on the then border
of Austria and Hungary. Worse, he learns inexplicably that a
Doppelgnger of himself (hence the other part of the title) has already
crossed the border, and will soon be enjoying both his business and
47
his wifes favours. Wehmllers perversion of the individualist ethic

of Romanticism is thus aptly punished by the loss of his own sense of
individuality. The treatment of the border theme is where the
interculturality comes in. With other unfortunates, Wehmller lodges
in a run-down border tavern. In a travesty of Boccaccios narrative
situation in the Decameron, they pass the time until they can cross
into the plague-ridden terrain by telling stories within the story, all of
which in their turn also thematise the consequences of transgressing
borders between nation states. It is important to note that the company
in the tavern is a representative selection of pretty much all the
member nations of the Habsburg empire and its neighbours:
Austrians, Tiroleans, Savoyards, Italians, Croats, Germans, plus a
representative of the former enemy, the Frenchman Devillier (not to
mention Turks and others in the inset tales). All three inset stories (by
a Croatian, a Frenchman and an Italian) reflect thematically and
stylistically the nationality and individuality of their storyteller, and so
contrast powerfully with Wehmllers uniformitarian art. But the
greatest contrast is with two others, in fact the chief characters of the
tale. For now two symbols of authentic Romantic poetry, both
Gypsies, the handsome violinist Michaly and his beautiful sister
Mitidika, perform the task of sorting out the mess occasioned by
Wehmllers inauthentic art and symbolised by his entrapment behind
a boundary. They achieve this by a variety of means, usually aesthetic
in nature and involving the creation of order or the discrimination of
truth from falsehood. For example Michaly, whom the narrator likens
to a second Orpheus (Brentano, 160), quells an outbreak of
multicultural chaos in the tavern by playing his violin at a strategic
moment and imposing Orphic order. Mitidika, for her part, reveals the
true identity of Wehmllers Doppelgnger and rival in the
Biedermeier culture industry, and it is she too, an Amazon on
horseback in mens clothes, who breaks the plague cordon from the
other side. Thus she closes the comic circle of the plot, rescues
Wehmller from Amphitryonic cuckolding, and reunites him with
Tonerl. She also makes peace between the aesthetic entrepreneurs, and
even rediscovers her own lost beloved, the sceptical Frenchman
Devillier.
48
It should be evident even from this hasty summary with just how
much overweening significance this short work and especially the two
slight figures, Michaly and Mitidika, are invested. The tale of course
suggests that Romantic poesy is the ultimate mediator across all
conceivable borders and conflicts, and the medium for realising the
Romantic utopia, descendant of Schillers aesthetic state. With
forensic acuity Mitidika and Michaly discover hidden truth the
authentic identity of the Doppelgnger undiscernable to normal
intellects. They create intercultural harmony between the bewildering
mix of nations and cultures that is the Habsburg state (and there is
plenty of evidence that Brentano seriously intended this as a political
utopia).5 They make peace between various conflicting parties. They
rescue love from oblivion and re-unite divided partners. Mitidikas
Mignon-like androgynity even suggestively fulfils the ancient myth of
reunion of the divided sexes familiar from the Symposium and
Genesis. In short, Michaly and Mitidika transcend any kind of
boundary political, cultural, aesthetic, sexual in order wherever
they act to restore wholeness and harmony, and Brentano does not
shrink from promoting messianic associations around their person.
Die mehreren Wehmller, then, contain nothing less than a selflegitimation of authentic Romantic poesy in a philistine age, and
represent just as much of an apotheosis of poetry as the opulent early
Romantic Heinrich von Ofterdingen. And, to focus more narrowly, the
two Gypsies, representatives of Oriental otherness in war-torn and
philistine Europe, are the ultimate symbol of late Romantic selfunderstanding, vehicles of one of the last versions of the Romantic
poetic utopia, symbol of healing for all the ills of Biedermeier
Germany (or Austria).
But it is precisely the Romantic selection of the Gypsy among
all possible Oriental ethnic groups which is most remarkable about
this tale. For of course the Romantic Gypsy utopia entirely fails to
correspond to the reality of Gypsy life around 1800. If we look at
Brentanos main source, Grellmanns study in Enlightenment cultural
anthropology Die Zigeuner. Ein historischer Versuch (1783), then we
rapidly discover that Gypsies in Brentanos age were to a far greater
5
See Brentanos letter to Achim von Arnim, Vienna, early December 1813.
49
degree than even the Jewish nation (Jews were at least tolerated)
absolutely the most despised ethnic group. Naturally this had to do
with their vagrant status and irredeemably low public esteem. In every
German state save Austria they were obliged by law on pain of death
(as vogelfrei) to cross the border of wherever they happened to be.
With no national territory, they were therefore obliged to make their
home everywhere and nowhere, de facto outside of society, in fields
and forests in nature, and to make their scarce living by disreputable
trades or theft. Grellmanns unsympathetic account of Gypsy life
finally interprets the Gypsies under the Enlightenment category of
Naturvolk, as living in ultimate primitivity and wretchedness, lacking
in any but the most basic skills and techniques of civilisation, almost
entirely lacking in civilised thought and morality, whose only saving
grace is a certain affinity towards the arts (evident in their dancing and
musicianship and practice of chiromancy); his account culminates in a
pseudo-philanthropic Josephinist plan for their forced cultural
assimilation into the Austrian state, so as to maximise their economic
usefulness. Of course Brentano, although he excerpts many details
from Grellmanns book (including Mitidikas and Michalys names
and their songs), will already have known from his own socialisation
and personal experience of Gypsies in Bohemia (where he had lived
for years) just how far his poetic Gypsies were wildly idealised
versions of the unfortunate originals, as he himself commented.6
But at one level the stark contrast between this absolute
glorification of the Gypsies in Romantic art and their real-life
abjectness is not a contradiction. The negativity and marginalisation of
the Gypsies (rather like that of woman in patriarchal discourse)
paradoxically only increased their suitability as a poetic symbol of
sheer Otherness, and precisely this is what Brentano exploits. At home
everywhere and nowhere, recognising no borders, living close to
nature rather than culture, his Gypsies offer the ideal basis for
symbolising cosmopolitan humanity and are in fact the means
whereby early Romantic cosmopolitanism survives into the darker
days of late Romanticism regardless of Brentanos more sinister
patriotic and nationalistic fervour elsewhere. The same applies to their
6
See Brentanos letter to Wilhelm Grimm, 3 September 1810.
50
lithe physicality as a Naturvolk (which Brentano gleefully translates

into his particular brand of aestheticised eroticism) and their historical
trajectory (the myth of the return to Egypt, which Brentano translates
into Romantic Heilsgeschichte). But the key point is this: whilst there
does of course exist a traceable relation between the Gypsies of
Brentanos text and the real Gypsies of early nineteenth-century
Germany, and whilst Brentano in a sense should not be condemned for
portraying an abject ethnic group in a positive light, it should also be
clear that Brentanos Gypsies are in truth not Gypsies at all, not
anthropologically adequate representations of an ethnic group for its
own sake. Rather, they are rather tamed, fantasy Gypsies, real people
whose occasionalistic appropriation into aesthetic discourse follows
the precepts of Saids Orientalism as a Western style for dominating,
restructuring, and having authority over the Orient (Said, 3), rather
than those of (for example) Georg Forsters reflexive sensivity or
Clifford Geertzs thick description.7 Romantic self-irony is not
absent even in this late Romantic utopia. Brentanos Gypsy counterculture is in truth only fleetingly glimpsed, rather than realised
Mitidika as a Gypsy can never marry a non-Gypsy and have legitimate
children and the comic happy end therefore barely conceals latent
tragedy. Nonetheless, to borrow Suzanne Zantops term, so far as the
Gypsies are concerned, they remain a colonial fantasy which
effectively silences the Gypsy voice even as it preaches transcendence, emancipation of mind and body, to the normalised German
burghers around 1800.
But this criticism is hardly the point. For none of this prevented
the Gypsies around 1800 from serving as the perfect symbol of
everything a Romantic utopian looked for. So powerful was this
symbol of counter-culturality that the Romantic paradigm of the
Gypsy as the exotic and glamorous outsider who incorporates both the
deficiencies of normative German bourgeois culture and the potential
for healing that sickness, dominates not only Brentanos uvre, but
also that of his Romantic peers, his Classical and Enlightenment
colleagues, and in the end, the image of the Gypsy in the literature of
the nineteenth century schlechthin. As Nicholas Saul has shown,
7
On Forster, see Agnew.
51
Brentano himself, for a time, wholly identified with (his fantasy of)
them, and the autobiographical motif of the Gypsy as poetic sexual,
cultural and political messiah is omnipresent in his work of this period
from Gustav Wasa (1798) to the Romanzen vom Rosenkranz (1810)
and the Wehmller. Elsewhere, Romanticised Gypsies feature large in
the work of Brentanos sympoetic collaborator Arnim (Isabella von
gypten of course), in Hoffmann (Kater Murr), Kleist (Michael
Kohlhaas) and Eichendorff (Die Entfhrung). They also feature, often
at crucial junctures, in the non-Romantic texts of Goethe (Gtz and the
Lehrjahre), Schiller (Die Jungfrau von Orleans) and Wolzogen (Die
Zigeuner), as well as in the popular literature of the Enlightenment
(Vulpiuss Rinaldo Rinaldini and Kotzebues Die kleine Zigeunerin).
This is also the case for much of the nineteenth century in Germany,
through texts which cannot be explored here,8 at least up to Thomas
Mann, whose Gypsies symbolise everything Gustav Aschenbach is
not. The Romantic paradigm of the Gypsy, then, which effectively
silences the Gypsy voice even as it preaches emancipation and
transcendence, exerts a dominating influence over the literary representation of the Gypsy in the nineteenth century. It thus
inaugurated and controlled the discourse on the Gypsy for this period.
We shall now consider to what extent this received discourse of the
Gypsy retained its power in the twentieth.
Counter-Cultures and the Twentieth Century

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century the presentation of the
Romany universe in normal German culture tended to be restricted to
the Orientalist mode. It was an oppositional life-style, a bohemian
liberated and liberating space, an escapist aesthetic utopia, which was
available to cultivated Germans either in literature or in life. In the
8
For example: Storms Immensee or Raabes Die Kinder von Finkenrode; not to
mention other literatures, from Bronts Heathcliffe, to Scotts Meg Merrilies,
Hugos Esmeralda, Mrimes Carmen and Collinss Ezra Jennings.
52
first part of the twentieth century, however, the emphasis moved to a

more politicised awareness of the authentic Romany ethnicity which
echoed the accelerated marginalisation, registration and persecution of
the ethnic group. After 1945 Adorno signalled the perils of attempting
to produce poetry after Auschwitz, and it is equally hard to see how
after the extermination of half a million European Romanies the
cultural history of the German-speaking world could continue
unabashed to present the world of the Gypsies as a utopia. It was not
until the 1980s that Romany voices were raised and the dystopian
spaces around the Gypsy experience acknowledged. 1997 marked the
production of Elfriede Jelineks hard-hitting play Stecken, Stab und
Stangl, a post-modern representation of the cultural reverberations of
xenophobia directed against Romanies. The Romanies then strike
back, write back, paint back, portray dystopia, but go beyond that to
reclaim for themselves the relatively utopian world they once
inhabited.
Ethnicity and the Search for Utopia

in the Early Twentieth Century
Among the Expressionist writers and artists at the start of the
twentieth century there was an enthusiasm for other cultures, for other
peoples, whether they lived in Europe or beyond. Yet this enthusiasm
for utopian wholeness, which drew on movements such as the Freikrperkultur or nudist movement, also encompassed an awareness of
the foreigner within, the alternative life-style closer to home. Otto
Mueller (18741930) who reputedly had Gypsy blood and spent
several extended periods with Eastern European Gypsies created
images of their proud independent culture. Yet these paintings and
other images of Gypsies produced by the artists of Die Brcke are
similar to these artists images of naked bathers in Mecklenburg and
on the Baltic coast. In other words, the sensual delight in the human
53
body appears more important than the Gypsy origins of the artists
models.
Otto Pankok (18931966) also found in the long years of inner
emigration a cultural space for images of the Gypsies and other
marginal groups in the squalor of the shanty dwellings of the
sprawling Heinefeld estate in Dsseldorf, where he himself lived for
many years. In an exhibition in Bonn in 19909 some 400 images of
Gypsies bore witness to the ethnicity and individuality of the
Romanies, rather than showing them as outsiders.
Yet this artistic utopian landscape peopled by bronzed bodies, by
angular and often distorted facial features, and scruffy clothing,
defiantly staring out at the viewer, this glorification of what appeared
more like a primitive tribe, was pronounced unacceptable, likely to
inspire only disgust. Although these works portrayed the reconciliation of man and nature, and opposed urbanised civilisation, they
were considered decadent, not in line with Nazi classicist ideals of
beauty. The images of Gypsies flowing from the brushes and charcoal
of Mueller and Pankok were thus among the many banned by Hitler as
degenerate in the infamous Exhibition of Entartete Kunst in Munich in
1937.10 They were part of a counter-cultural initiative which was
deemed threatening, unhealthy, uncultured, to be abominated, out of
tune with the visions of organic wholeness to be strived for. Their
works were proscribed, removed from public view, consigned to the
storerooms of the galleries.
After this cultural cleansing, Pankok comments in 1945 on how
only one of the many Gypsies he had painted had actually survived the
Holocaust. (The others fell, victims of ethnic cleansing.) It was only
once the Aryan aesthetic ideals of the Hitler regime were unmasked
after 1945 in all their insipid shallowness and fatuousness that
Pankoks works of resistance, defiant in their eschewing of the Nazi
norms of beauty and form, were again on public display. Today they
9
10
The exhibition of some of Pankoks charcoal drawings, graphic work and

sculpture was shown in the Bundeskanzleramt from 22 May to 27 July 1990,
and then in the Landesmuseum in Mainz from 14 August to 30 September
1990.
In his speech on 18.7.1937 Hitler spoke in Munich of the need for a cultural
renaissance. Welch, 29, sees the results as overwhelming cultural mediocrity.
54
form part of the mainstream twentieth-century German cultural

heritage.
Post-1945 Acknowledgement of Dystopia

After 1945 the Romanies were no longer officially persecuted. But
does this mean that they ceased to be part of a counter-cultural group?
The fact that some forty years after the end of the war many Gypsies
had still not received compensation from the German and Austrian
governments was proof enough of the continuity of anti-Gypsyism. In
cultural terms Romanies still do not form part of the dominant
discourse and are marginalised.
At a time when the heyday of socially critical literature in
Germany was over, the Austrian writer Erich Hackl began to emerge
as the champion of the underdog, the exposer of the iniquities suffered
by various minority groups, be they in Europe or South America.11
One of the very first literary works to mark the dystopia of the
Gypsies is his Erzhlung entitled Abschied von Sidonie (1989) (later
made into a successful film by director Karin Brandauer) which has
been hailed as iconic and the Anne Frank of the Romany world.
Interwoven with the story of the life of the young Gypsy girl Sidonie
Adlersburg, who is adopted by an Austrian family, and later deported
to a concentration camp, is the reflective discourse around later
governmental and public responses to these events. The key issue is
Gadzo (non-Romany) complicity in the crimes.
Following in a similar vein, Elfriede Jelineks play Stecken, Stab
und Stangl (1997) deals in post-modernist style not only with
dystopian images of the persecution of the Romanies in the late 1990s
but with the discourse generated by the media. The letter-bomb which
killed four Romanies in Oberwart in Burgenland (an area in which
there have traditionally been large numbers of Gypsies) is the central
11
See Tebbutt Travel and The Trojan Horse, for an account of Hackls
cosmopolitan concerns.
55
issue of the play, but the bomb explodes before the play begins. For
Jelinek it is the cultural representation of the deaths, and the media
indifference and insensitivity, the oscillation between images of
misery and banality, the failure to see beyond the surface, which
intrigues. The play is not only about the deaths but their
memorialisation, the place which they take in history. In the
archaeological investigation of counter-cultures within Hackls and
Jelineks works it is possible to find traces of different civilisations,
or better, non-civilisations in which the Romanies were regarded as
personae non gratae. Yet in both works they emerge as an important
part of the literary counter-culture, and illustrate the cultural diversity
of the contemporary German-speaking world.12
Up to this point the focus has been on ways in which nonRomanies in the twentieth century have created utopian, and later
dystopian images of the Romanies. How do the minority group
themselves react, respond, generate a new genuine counter-culture?
The Romany Voice is Heard

In autobiographical works of the late 1980s and 1990s writers such as
Philomena Franz, Alfred Lessing, Anna Mettbach, Lolo Reinhardt,
Otto Rosenberg, Walter Stanowski Winter, and Austrian Romanies
Ceija, Karl and Mongo Stojka recorded the dystopian landscape of
their peoples immediate past. Written down some fifty years after the
end of the war, these autobiographies highlight the counter-culture,
the culture of the Romanies, which was targeted for extermination
12
Cultural history does not only relate to works of literature. Cultural memorials
to the past can also be seen as an attempt to acknowledge dystopia. Since the
1980s a substantial number of monuments and plaques have been erected in
cities, towns and other sites which mark the events of the Nazi regime in which
Gypsies were deprived of their liberty, tortured and murdered. In the debate
over the memorial to the Sinti and Roma in Berlin the old concerns about
whether the dystopian images should be brought into the foreground are raised
again.
56
alongside that of the Jewish people. Driven by the wish to record the
traumas which they had experienced, and perhaps themselves exorcise
some of the pain, the Romanies use writing as a form of therapy.
Collectively, these survivors testimonies contribute both to the
cultural heritage of their own people and to the cultural heritage of the
country in which they live. Whilst recording the depths of depravation
and inhumanity of the Nazi period, they attempt with remarkable lack
of bitterness to create a culture of tolerance and understanding, to
recapture those idyllic days in which they led a life free of threats of
violence and abuse.
The heterogeneity of the autobiographies is striking. Each writer
is searching for a personal utopia, whether it is from a womens
perspective that of Philomena Franz, Ceija Stojka or Anna Mettbach
or the strongly regional perspective of Lolo Reinhardt (1999) who
describes in broad Swabian the dangers of overwintering in hiding
under the constant fear of being caught by the Nazis. Here the
Romany counter-culture forms part of a further subculture a regional
counter-culture.13 A similar phenomenon is to be found in the lyrical
work of poet and song-writer Jos F. Oliver, born in Swabia to
Spanish parents, who mixes the Alemannic with the Andalusian.14
Counter-cultures within counter-cultures are also to be seen in the
writing about the alternative Romany tradition in music which
pervades the work of many of the autobiographies. When Alfred
Lessing writes of having to play in front of Nazi officials in
Buchenwald he is describing the paradoxical attitude to countercultures the Nazi at once proscribed Romanies and yet were
perfectly willing to enjoy their musical talents (be it wittingly, or as in
the case of Alfred Lessing who played for the SS in Buchenwald
concentration camp, unwittingly, since they did not know that he was
in fact a Romany).
13
14
Bei einer bertragung ins Hochdeutsche wre zu viel von der Ausdruckskraft
des Textes verlorengegangen. Zudem drckt diese Sprache die eigentmliche
Mischung von Fremdsein und Dazugehren aus, die das Leben dieser
schwbischen Sinti bestimmt hat (Reinhardt, 155).
Oliver also interweaves writing and singing and has made a number of CDs in
which he reads or sings his work.
57
In the writing of all these Romanies and in the art of Karl and
Ceija Stojka, both now internationally acclaimed as artists who depict
the horrors of the Holocaust, the dystopian world of the concentration
camp is described in all its inhumanity and excesses of barbarism.
Although relatively few of their works relate unambiguously to the
experience of Romanies some refer to those of Jews and other
persecuted groups the aim is to create an aesthetic space in which
the relatively utopian contours of a nomadic lifestyle prior to the
introduction of strict laws preventing movement from one town to
another are juxtaposed with the horrors which succeeded it.
Conclusion
In the cultural history of the German-speaking world the art and
writing about and by the Romanies illustrate the weakness of talking
of a major and a minor culture. Although the works of both Mueller
and Pankok were condemned as degenerate, they diverge from the
officially accepted art culture in different ways. The Romany may
appear as a form of noble savage, a primitive in an utopian landscape,
as in the works of Mueller, but for Pankok social inequality is
signalled in his inner emigration to a cultural space beyond the Nazi
propaganda machinery.
After 1945 it is impossible to represent the Romanies without the
Holocaust casting its shadow. The idea of utopian images of Gypsies
seems a contradiction in terms. Dystopian images of their treatment at
the hands of the dominant powers are to be found in the socially and
politically critical work of Hackl, and in Jelineks play Stecken, Stab
und Stangl. The continuity of anti-Gypsyism is perpetuated by the
journalists, but Jelinek interrogates the melodramatically dystopian
media images of the Oberwart bombing and sets against them her own
counter-interpretation. Rather than being seen as forming a minority
alternative group within society, the work of the Romanies is no
longer to be comprehended exclusively in terms of a counter-culture,
in opposition to something which is not, but as a valid culture in its
58
own right. This recognition of dystopia and the reaching to reclaim

utopia should not be dismissed summarily as a counter-culture, but
should be appreciated as an integral part of the multicultural world of
Germany and Austria today. Brentanos one-sided abstract utopia of
the Gypsy as a counter-cultural ideal of the German Biedermeier
bourgeoisie has been superseded, and not before time, by the concrete
utopia of an authentic multi- or interculture in which the Gypsy voice
is heard and echoed.
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Baumhauer, Ursula. (Hg), Abschied von Sidonie von Erich Hackl: Materialien zu
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deutschsprachigen Literatur um 1800 (Cologne, Bhlau, 1998).
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Schaub (Hg), Clemens Brentano. Smtliche Erzhlungen (Munich, Goldmann
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und Verfassung Sitten und Schicksale dieses Volks seit seiner Erscheinung in
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Hackl, E. Abschied von Sidonie (Zurich, Diogenes, 1989).
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(Hg) P. Kluckhohn, R. Samuel, H. J. Mhl, G. Schulz, 6 vols (Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1960), I, pp. 193334.
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1983).
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(Dsseldorf, Zebulon, 1993).
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1982), III, 273303.
Malsch, W. Europa. Poetische Rede des Novalis. Deutung der Franzsischen
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1965).
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einer Sintezza, die Auschwitz berlebte (Frankfurt aM, Brandes & Aspel,
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Catalogue of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1992).
Mller, G. Gegenwelten. Die Utopie in der deutschen Literatur (Wrzburg,
Knigshausen & Neumann 1989).
Pikulik, L. Romantik als Ungengen an der Normalitt. Am Beispiel Tiecks,
Hoffmanns, Eichendorffs (Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, 1979).
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1990).
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MAIKE OERGEL
Revolutionaries, Traditionalists, Terrorists?

The Burschenschaften and the German
Counter-Cultural Tradition
Throughout their history the Burschenschaften have been associated

with strong nationalist tendencies. Their public image has always gone
hand in glove with the political intentions and positioning of German
nationalism, which from the later nineteenth century onwards locates
them in the right-wing regions of the political spectrum. From 1870 at
the latest, modern German nationalism, reduced from its original
complexity to the simple priority of establishing national unity, was a
conservative force that aimed at consolidating an externally powerful
and internally obedient nation which could challenge its neighbours
for international supremacy. The left-wing end of the political
spectrum had meanwhile been claimed by the new movements of
communism and socialism. However, prior to the appearance of these
ideas to restructure a fully industrialised society, modern nationalism
was the most left-wing element on the political scene because of its
links with ideas promoted by the French Revolution, such as
constitutional representative government. The levelling tendencies of
nationalism, creating equal citizens of one nation, set it in direct
opposition to absolutist dynastic systems. It is in this politically
progressive and socially revolutionary context of nationalism that the
Burschenschaften originate.
This essay investigates the very early stages of Burschenschaft
development, from the first ideas about organising a student opposition around 1811 to the extensive clamp-down on and criminalisation of their activities in the wake of Carl Ludwig Sands
assassination of the writer August von Kotzebue in 1819, in order to
assess to what extent and in what respect the Burschenschaften were,
if only initially, a progressive counter-cultural force. On the one hand,
62
Maike Oergel
this investigation is a contribution to establishing the origins of

modern German nationalism as politically progressive, as a radical
opposition aiming at far-reaching social, political, and national
reform.1 On the other hand, it asks the question whether such extrainstitutional opposition, elements of which do not shrink from
illegality and violence, also represents a modern German political
tradition that begins with the Kotzebue assassination, which is after all
on record as the first act of modern German terrorism. In other words,
the essay asks whether there is a German tradition of opposition that is
intrinsically flawed. This approach redefines the perennial debate
about the political nature of the early Burschenschaften and, in a more
general sense, of German nationalism, which still revolves around the
assumption that the German political tradition is profoundly antidemocratic and set against the values of Western rationalism and
liberalism,2 by asking how and why solidly democratising tendencies
promoting civil rights and social justice occur in close proximity to
non-democratic activities which tend towards totalitarian dogmatism.
Although as a unique individual act it can only have signal function,
the assassination of August von Kotzebue by Burschenschaftler Carl
Sand represents these very different tendencies and persuasions: on
the one hand, it can be regarded as an act based on the revolutionary
desire for political liberation, i.e. the overthrow of the feudal
absolutist system and the initiation of national democracy. On the
other hand, it cannot be overlooked that the readiness to execute such
a deed results from a totalitarian dogmatism which decrees that it is
legitimate and necessary to eliminate those who hold opposing
1
Due to the particular political and social circumstances in the German territories
nationalism was an unusually new, politically effective and destabilising force:
this new post-French Revolution nationalism did not need to compete with
older traditions of institutionalised nationalism of national greatness that had
supported the Ancien Rgime. The grandeur of France, for example, had
already sparkled in the fountains at Versailles, before it was claimed by the
revolutionary Republic.
The recent study of the Burschenschaften by Dietrich Heither et al. is based on
such a definition of an anti-democratic and anti-Western identity (see Heither,
12). A similar view of the political tendencies of the Burschenschaften was put
forward by Walter Grab (see Grab, Ein Volk, 498501). Researching German
Jacobinism, Grab of course is keen to point out democratic tendencies in other
German contexts.
63
political and social views. It is evident that such violent opposition has
proved counter-productive. Militant and radical fringes, committing
acts of illegal violence to destabilise a system they find oppressive and
exploitative, have repeatedly brought entire opposition movements
into disrepute, thus paralysing all progressive powers. The question
arises to what extent there may be a direct line from Carl Ludwig
Sand, whose actions precipitated the persecution not only of the
Burschenschaften, but also of the entire liberal opposition, to the
activities of the RAF and its descendant groups, who caused
considerable problems to the self-understanding and efficacy of the
Neue Linke. A close analysis of the political and national ideas that
informed the early Burschenschaft movement will shed light on the
nature of any German peculiarity regarding political tradition and
especially political radicalism, and also suggest a number of parallels
to radical opposition movements in West Germany in the late 1960s
and early 1970s.
Let me begin with a brief look at the political and intellectual
background to the nationalism of the Befreiungskriege. Between 1770
and 1813 the basis for the modern German identity was laid. Political
and cultural (self-)definitions of a modern German nation were in
competition, until they eventually combined around the crisis-point of
1806, when after the Prussian military collapse Napoleon controlled
much of central Europe. The Sturm und Drang-movement demanded
reform in both the cultural and social fields, but had a mainly cultural
impact. The events of 1789 gave fresh impetus to political ideas of
representative and constitutional government the enthusiasm of the
German intelligensia for the early phases of the French Revolution is
quite legendary but the German situation laid the double obstacle of
feudal absolutism combined with territorial division in the path of
such ideas. These circumstances necessarily reinforced a link between
political reform or revolution and national unity. But political
enthusiasm declined in the wake of the Jacobin Terror and the unprogressive handling of the occupation of conquered German
territories by the French. It was replaced with the notion of the
Kulturnation, which claimed that culture needed to precede politics
and suggested that German culture, unsullied by political involvement
and unfettered by an ossified classicism, could prepare the
culmination of human culture for the benefit of humanity. This meta-
64
Maike Oergel
political approach was in turn forced to face political (and military)

facts in 1806, when Napoleons highly effective imperial war-machine
inflicted its crushing defeat on Prussia at Jena and Auerstedt, which
heralded the near-annihilation of Prussia, the final dissolution of the
Holy Roman Empire, and the founding of the Rheinbund, a
confederation of most West German territories, allied to Napoleonic
France. Although Napoleon brought no small degree of constitutionalism to the states of the Rheinbund, he came to be seen by
nationalists as a foreign oppressor whose sole aim was territorial
conquest. A new political-ideological German nationalism mobilised
resistance.3 German survival was at stake, and in the heat of the
moment no-one seemed to care much whether this was the survival of
a feudal or democratic Germany. So for once the princes and the
intellectuals stood on the same side to mobilise the people. This is a
unique constellation in the revolutionary phase 17891820. And it is
responsible for the peculiar mix of revolution- and tradition-based
approaches to reform, which has been taken as evidence of the
immature backwardness of German political thought.
It was clear that, if Napoleon could be defeated, the situation
would be conducive to lasting political, social and national reform.
Feudal absolutism had been weakened by the upheavals of the
Napoleonic Wars, and a nationally inspired resistance would pave the
way towards national unity on a constitutional basis, in conjunction
with the constitutional converts among the princes. The Prussian
government in particular saw no reason to dampen the zeal of the
nationalists and worked hand in hand with progressive nationalist
intellectuals, hoping the situation would lead to a united Germany
under Prussian hegemony. When in 1813 a realistic opportunity to
defeat Napoleon occurred, large numbers of young volunteers swelled
the ranks of those willing to fight against Napoleon for Befreiung
and Freiheit. Many of these young volunteers became the next
generation of politically active students (see Steiger, 423).
3
Fichtes Reden an die deutsche Nation (1807/08) are a typical example in this
context. The previously defined cultural superiority is now harnessed to invest
the need to fight French occupation with a world-historical dimension. Again,
culture, in the shape of education, must precede political action, but political
action is now paramount.
65
The history of the Burschenschaften between 1810 and 1820

divides into three distinct phases: a formative phase up to 1815, a
phase of growing radicalisation from 1817 onwards, and from 1819 a
phase of abolition and prosecution. The formative phase runs parallel
to the weakening of Napoleons grip on Europe and the resulting
unstable and hence open political situation. In 1811 Friedrich Ludwig
Jahn and Karl Friedrich Friesen put together an Ordnung und
Einrichtung des deutschen Burschenwesens, a proposal to organise
and mobilise students nationally into a political (and military)
opposition in line with their own political and ideological aims of
bourgeois emancipation and national unity. The Ordnung propagated
an active life in the service of Vaterland and the people, based on
middle-class efficiency and the Protestant work ethic. They intended
to politicise the students in order to facilitate their becoming socially
responsible and politically active citizens. (Schrder, Grndung, 74)
Both Jahn and Friesen belonged to the secret Deutscher Bund (the
irony of this name in view of its younger anti-nationalist namesake
should not go unnoticed), founded to agitate against French
occupation and prepare for national liberation (Elm, 18). The origin of
this ideological movement in a situation of military occupation and
partisan warfare kept the idea of the armed struggle always within its
sights, and throws a different light on the ambitions of Jahns
Turnerbewegung, which always had a paramilitary dimension. The
more radical thinkers of the Burschenschaften, such as Karl Follen,
intended the Turner to be militrische Kerntruppen der revolutionren
Erhebung (see Bssem, 62, note 2).
Jena, situated in the territory of liberal Grand Duke Carl August
of Sachsen-Weimar, became one of the hotbeds of liberation, i.e.
liberating the nation from Napoleon and liberating the people from
unconstitutional oppression. It was no surprise that the Urburschenschaft
was founded here. Jenas student intake was mainly recruited from
middle-class and lower middle-class backgrounds (Kranepuhl, 79,
Steiger, 49), i.e. those social classes that were struggling for political
participation, which were, or should be, the socially most dynamic and
revolutionary section of society. But it was also a class exceedingly
dependent on the good will of the (aristocratic) rulers and their
bureaucracies, because in the end they would seek jobs not in the
independent areas of trade and commerce, but in those feudal
66
Maike Oergel
administrations to secure their material existence. The great majority

of Jena students were preparing for some sort of office in the gift of
the state. Since the 1790s Jena University had attracted many young
up-and-coming academics, among them Fichte, Schiller, Hegel,
Schelling, and Schlegel, all of whom launched their academic careers
here. This no doubt contributed to the fact that Jenas academic staff
had a higher contingent of radical elements than average: between
1815 and 1819, several professors openly supported the student
movement, most prominently among them Heinrich Luden, Lorenz
Oken and Jakob Friedrich Fries. Oken and Fries both lost their posts
after 1819 and endured lengthy professional bans.4
The Jena Burschenschaft was founded on 12 June 1815, with half
of Jenas student population in attendance. In a ceremonial act the
Landsmannschaften dissolved themselves and united as one,
symbolising the overcoming of the territorial division of the nation.
The Burschenschafts constitutional charter focuses on the social and
political equality of its members and on the need for national unity to
guarantee such equality for everybody (Elm, 22), provided they were
German and Christian (and male). The former two qualifications have
tended to be used as evidence of the inherently vlkisch-nationalist
and chauvinist principles of the Burschenschaft movement. Notwithstanding this, the new charter endeavours to emphasise democratic structures: the constitution was read out and voted on, and
accepted. They proceeded to democratically elect nine Vorsteher and
21 executive committee members (Schrder, Grndung, 70). They
adopted du as general address amongst each other to stress their
equality, which was already practised by the Turner (Schrder,
Grndung, 76). The Landsmannschaften also used some democratic
structures, but were run along more oligarchic lines, priding
themselves on their hierarchical set-up. They had a large underclass of
trainees who had no rights. While the pat characterisation of
Burschenschaften as modern-democratic and the Landsmannschaften
as the class-dependent, decadent upholders of the Ancien Rgime is
too simplistic (see Haaser, 367), it is not entirely beside the point.
4
Both, however, resurfaced in the footnotes of political history: Oken became

Georg Bchners Doktorvater, and Fries acted as examiner of Karl Marxs
PhD Thesis, which he passed.
67
This is vividly illustrated by the vicious conflict played out at

Erlangen in 1816, when Carl Sand endeavoured to set up a
Burschenschaft at this conservative university with a strong
Landsmannschaft tradition (see Heydemann, 524). Interestingly
much in the Jena Burschenschaft charter is taken verbatim from the
constitution of the Vandalia Landsmannschaft. This has been
explained as due to time pressure and to the need to achieve a widely
acceptable consensus between old and new practices. (Schrder,
Grndung, 75) Herman Haupt, however, traced some general
sentiments to the (clearly most congenial) Ordnung by Friesen and
Jahn (Haupt, 31). It is also clear that members of the Vandalia were
the driving force behind the national reformation of student
organisations.
Eight of the eleven leading founding members of the new
Burschenschaft were veterans of the Ltzower Jger, the famous Free
Corps. Although militarily unimportant, they became immortal
through counting among them the young poet Theodor Krner, who
died in action in 1813 and left behind a collection of songs about
freedom and war, which was post humously published as Leier und
Schwert and became a breviary among the national freedom fighters.
The colours of the Ltzow corps, black, red and gold, became the
colours of the Burschenschaft, and they went on to become the
German tricolour, illustrating the political importance these events
have been accorded. The formation of the Burschenschaften is quite
rightly regarded as the origin of modern German political parties, as
the beginning of organised modern political activism, representing the
bourgeois opposition, whose party programme was to create a forum
for modern constitutional political activity (see Bssem, 57; Steiger,
53).
The Jena foundation ceremony in June 1815 occurred at an
historically interesting point in time, less than two weeks after the
foundation of the Deutscher Bund at the Congress of Vienna and three
days before the battle of Waterloo. Both events mark the political
crossroads that had been reached: Waterloo establishes the window of
opportunity for change, Vienna symbolises the powerful resistance to
it. Although Article 13 of the Bundesakte, signed in Vienna, which
promised constitutional rule, might have given the Burschenschaftler
some hope, the Deutscher Bund was dedicated to safeguard the
68
Maike Oergel
absolutist forms of dynastic and monarchic government, and hardly

any constitutions came to be agreed. One unsurprising exception was
Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, which received a liberal constitution in
June 1816, even guaranteeing the freedom of the press. However, due
to increasing pressure from Austria and Prussia, this freedom was
curtailed in 1817 and withdrawn in 1819.5
The mix of revolution-based and tradition-based approaches to
social reform, or, put more emotively, the proximity, and interdependence, of Deutschtmelei and Jacobinism, may at first sight
indeed look peculiar. The politically progressive ideas were closely
linked with a desire for national unity. The obvious lack of the latter
and the widespread view that French models had become increasingly
inviable resulted in a search for a distinctive German national tradition
of reform. The reformers were looking for a German tradition that
supported change, were looking in fact for a precedent for a German
revolution. The new historicist outlook, so prevalent among German
intellectuals at the time, suggested that social, political and cultural
innovations, in order to succeed, needed to be in keeping with
tradition and history. The young national democrats saw such a
prototype of a German revolution in Luthers Reformation.6 Fichte
had presented the Reformation as the Welttat des deutschen Volkes
in his Reden an die deutsche Nation, thus endowing it with a worldhistorical significance that defined the Germans role in history and in
the future.7 From this emerged the idea that what Luther had started,
5
Article 13 still dominated the discussions in Karlsbad in August 1819, where

the Austrians successfully derailed attempts to clarify the positive nature of the
Verfassungsversprechen by those states which were considering modern
representative constituitional systems (Wrthemberg) or had already inaugurated constitutions with which they did not want the Bund to interfere
(Bayern). The supporters of representative constitutions were a decided
minority, and the notion of the separation of powers was rejected. Traditional
solutions based on representations of the estates were just about acceptable.
(See Bssem, 380415.)
Most of the Jena students, certainly the vast majority of the original members of
the Urburschenschaft came from Protestant backgrounds, many studied
theology or were parsons sons. The ideologues of this student movement, such
as Arndt and Jahn, were Protestant, too.
Hegel echoed this evaluation fairly precisely in his lectures on the philosophy
of history. The link between the Christian and the Germanic, which had
established itself as a standard topos in the German self-definition from the
69
had not been finished yet. The liberation of the individual consciousness was merely the moral basis for the political and national
liberation to come, a notion that fits in well with the German idea
that culture needs to precede politics. So the politically responsible
and active Burschenschaftler felt called upon to complete the
Reformation.
This search for a tradition led to an (over-)emphasis on what was
considered original Germanness, which included Francophobia and
anti-semitism. It also led to more harmless activities such as wearing
altdeutsche Tracht, a black frock-coat, a white shirt with a long
collar and wearing your hair long. This outfit was worn and perceived
as a provocative political act, sending conservatives into fits of
disgust, as the comment by the Austrian Hofrat Friedrich von Gentz, a
close associate of Metternichs, makes clear: Der einzige Flecken im
Gemhlde [der Stadt Heidelberg] sind die grotesken und widerlichen
Figuren, die in schmutzigen altdeutschen Trachten [] mit Bchern
unter dem Arme, die falsche Weisheit ihrer ruchlosen Professoren
einholen gehen.8 These were clearly the jeans and parka of the time.
Revolutionary ideas were so closely linked with this Teutomania, that
the one indicated the other.9 In conservative circles Jena, the centre of
8
9
1770s onwards (in Protestant and Catholic variants), had become very
pronounced since the later 1790s, for example in Friedrich and August Wilhelm
Schlegels influential lecture cycles on literary and cultural history. It forms the
basis of Hegels definition of the modern Germanic world in his lectures on the
philosophy of history in the 1820s.
Letter from Gentz to Pilat, 9 Dec 1818, quoted by Bssem, 539, note 10.
Steiger observes that conservative authorities viewed these clothes as a German
variant of the French Sansculottes (Steiger, 55).
The link between Jacobinism, nationalism and Teutomania, and their shared
revolutionary nature, was taken to be an established fact for several decades, as
the assessment of the conservative historian K. A. Menzel of 1844 shows. He
too establishes parallels between Jacobinism and revolutionary nationalism:
Aber wie schwer auch der Gewaltige [Napoleon] und seine Helfer durch ihre
Blutthaten am Rechte gefrevelt, doch haben sie kaum so groe Schuld auf sich
geladen, als diejenigen ihrer Gegner, welche [] aus dem verwesenden
Leichnam der Revolution den Peststoff verbrecherischer, das sittliche Leben
vergiftender Grundstze zogen, und ihn einimpften den Seelen der Jugend. Zu
der Gedankenverwirrung, in welche der verunglckte Ausgang des
Franzsischen Freithums selbst Mnner und Greise versetzt hatte, waren die
Bemhungen der Cabinette getreten, Frankreichs politisch-militrischen
Despotismus, nach dem Beispiel, welches Spanien gegeben hatte, durch
70
Maike Oergel
the Burschenschaft movement, was also known as das Jakobinernest

(Heydemann, 73).
When the tercentenary of Luthers revolutionary act at the church
door in Wittenberg coincided with the fourth anniversary of the
Vlkerschlacht in the autumn of 1817, a commemorative event which
would also provide a forum for demonstrations and discussions was
inevitable. The Jena Burschenschaft set about planning the two-day
event of the Wartburgfest, a sort of national student congress. Jahn and
Luden were closely involved in the preparations, Fries and Oken
attended. It inaugurated the next phase in the development of the
Burschenschaften.10
Speakers expressed, and delegates felt, a strong sense of
disappointment and disillusionment: political reforms towards a
constitutional nation state were being blocked by the forces of
Reaction. It seems that this frustration led to the inofficial act for
which the Wartburgfest is really (in)famous, and which signals the
beginning radicalisation of some parts of the Burschenschaft
movement: the burning of books and other symbolic items on the
evening of 18 October on the nearby Wartenberg. All the books burnt
were recent publications. They either attacked the Burschenschaften
and their aims, either for being Teutomanic or criminal enemies of the
10
Erweckung des Selbstgefhls der Vlker, durch die Zauberkraft der Worte
Unabhngigkeit und Freiheit zu strzen. [] Die groe Masse der unreifen
Geister in Deutschland fand sich zeitig genug in denselben Hirngespinsten ber
allgemeine Freiheit und Glckseligkeit, Verdienstlichkeit und Volksgerechtsame verstrickt, mit welchem des unselige Spiel zwei Jahrzehnte frher
in Frankreich begonnen hatte (quoted by Prignitz, 139).
It has been pointed out that attendance by universities from the south of
Germany was sparse, because of their more predominantly Catholic student
intake and the abiding suspicion of southern students that the German unity
advocated in Burschenschaft circles was really a unity under Prussian
hegemony. But religious denomination alone was no bar to being an active
Burschenschaftler, as the example of the Catholic Friedrich Wilhelm Carov
makes clear, who was the last of the speakers on the Wartburg. He was a
moderate, who despite his commitment to German national unity, held the
ideals of the French Revolution and of French legalism in high regard. (See
Steiger, 11821.) The Catholic Josef Grres also sympathised with the aims of
the students, which necessitated his flight into exile once the persecutions set in
after 1819.
71
state, or they vigorously promoted conservative political principles.11

In the eyes of posterity, quite possibly the most damaging book to
burn was the Code Napolon, no doubt committed to the flames
because it had been written by the French oppressor. Its burning has
been interpreted as an indication of the political immaturity of the
students, who, blinded by their Teutomania, could not see the
constitutional foundations embedded in these laws. They also threw
into the fire what they regarded as symbols of physical and ideological
oppression by superpower militarism and authoritarianism, i.e. a
Prussian Ulanenschnrleib, a military Pracht-, Prahl- und Prunkzopf and an Austrian Korporalstock (Steiger, 115). These insubordinate acts of anarchic destruction gave the conservative rulers
throughout the Confederation the occasion to act tough. There can be
no doubt that many were worried. A high-ranking French diplomat in
Frankfurt compared the Wartburgfest to the French crisis of 1788
(Steiger, 131), in Berlin it was likened to the storming of the Bastille
(Grab, Burschenschaften, 12).
In the aftermath of the conservative backlash to the events at the
Wartburgfest, Heinrich Luden advised the Burschenschaften to draw
up a document summarising their ideas, which would bring the
Burschenschaften into the public arena of political opinion (Schrder,
Grndung, 78) and make them less vulnerable to accusations of
being a secret organisation and enemy of the state. The Grundstze
und Beschlsse des 18. Oktober, put together by Heinrich Hermann
Riemann, chairman of the Jena Burschenschaft, and his fellow student
Karl Mller, demanded national unity, constitutional monarchy, a
unified German code of law, public trials by jury, equality of all
citizens in all respects, freedom of speech and the press (Steiger, 153
56). And they contained the oft-quoted sentence that das Gesetz des
Volkes soll der Wille der Frsten sein (Elm, 28). The Grundstze und
Beschlsse also evince that mix of desiring change built on tradition,
which Gnter Steiger long ago defined as their crucial weakness: they
11
Among them were Christoph Karl Heinrich von Kamptzs Kodex der
Gendarmerie, a compilation of police laws in force throughout the
Confederation, Karl Ludwig von Hallers conservative-reactionary Restauation
der Staatswissenschaft, Saul Aschers Teutomania, August von Kotzebues
conservative Geschichte des deutschen Reiches, and the Code Napolon. (See
Steiger, 11115.)
72
Maike Oergel
were not rigorously anti-feudal enough. Although they demonstrated

progressive criticism of the princes, their authors at the same time
hoped for acceptance by and assistance from the feudal regents
(Steiger, 1567). The authors, both veterans of the Ltzow Free
Corps, clearly still believed in the possibility of an alliance between
the nation and the princes, holding on to the belief that had so
successfully underpinned the Befreiungskriege. But Ludens plan, and
Riemanns efforts, did not work out: the committed activists could not
count on the support of the majority of the student body. Many
students found the Beschlsse too radical and rejected them. Typical,
and correct, was the following assessment by one of their own: Wenn
ihr das unterschreibt, so kriegt ihr knftig keine Stellen. (Steiger,
157) The Beschlsse in fact remained secret and were only discovered
by the Prussian police in 1821 (Bssem, 56). At this point, the split
between a moderate majority, whose political opinions and
commitment were vague, and a radical politicised wing became
apparent.
Internally, the spectrum of the politicised members also stretched
from moderate to radical. The most radical political faction of the
movement came, not from Jena, but from Gieen: the circle of the
Unbedingten, also known as die Schwarzen, around the brothers
August and Karl Follen.12 Karl Follens political ideas evince a
thorough reception (and admiration) of the ideals of the French
Revolution. The Follens aim was the founding of a democratic
republic of Germany as a unified nation state. For this purpose they
drew up Grundzge fr eine knftige deutsche Reichsverfassung in
181718:
Alle Deutschen sind einander an Rechten vollkommen gleich. [] Alle Macht
der Beamten geht aus von des Volkes rechtlicher Allmacht und Alleinmacht, so
wie alle Bestimmung fr das Ganze. Seine gesetzgebende Gewalt bt das Volk
aus durch von ihm selbst gewhlte Vertreter. [] Seine richterliche und
vollziehende Gewalt bt das Volk aus durch Richter und Beamte, alle den
Volksvertretern verantwortlich. (quoted by Steiger, 160)
12
Karl Follen moved to a post as Privatdozent (in law) in Jena in October 1818.
(See Bssem, 63.)
73
The Follens constitution prescribed democratic processes in all

decision-making, the separation of powers and an elected head of
state. It intended to ensure citizens political maturity through the
introduction of free general education. (See Steiger, 16061;
Schrder, Politische Ansichten, 2289.) Unlike Riemann, Karl
Follen reckoned that this sovereignty of the people was unlikely to be
achieved through an alliance with the princes, or even by peaceful
means. It would require politicising the masses, which would in turn
lead to uprisings and the eventual breakdown of the current system.
Karl Follen composed a political poem, Groes Lied (1818),13 the
most propagandistic parts of which were distributed among peasants
and artisans, reaching a circulation of 6000 (see Grab/Friesel, 80). In
its entirety, however, the Lied is hardly a mass-propagandistic tool,
but a liturgy of mystic ecstasy for the conspirators, which was learnt
by heart and not committed to print by its author. The Lied conceives
of political revolution as a religious crusade that politically completes
the spiritual process initiated by the Reformation. In a grand historical
panorama it associates the desired national liberation with an ancient
Teutonic drive for independence from the Roman Empire.
Nevertheless, its political and social aims were clear: the overthrow of
the feudal lords and the priesthood. When unrest broke out among the
peasants in the Odenwald region in the autumn of 1818, the
Schwarzen hoped that this might be the beginning of the revolution.
Follens Reichsverfassung, and his Groes Lied, display exactly
the mix of German tradition and German revolution, producing an
amalgam of ancient Germanic traditions from Hermann via medieval
Kaiserherrlichkeit to Luther, Jacobin civil rights and natural law.
Hans Wikirchen argued that there are two distinct text levels to the
Reichsverfassung, which he ascribed to different authors (and which
for him explain the mix). Level one is more moderate and focuses on
ancient German traditions. This Wikirchen takes to be the ur-text
written by August Follen, which was subsequently annotated and
amended by the more radical Karl, who emphasised the Jacobin
democratic elements (Wikirchen, 59). Both the Reichsverfassung and
13
In content it is similar to Bchners Hessischer Landbote. Bchners

collaborator Weidig descends politically from exactly this line of Hessian
opposition. (See Steiger, 163.)
74
Maike Oergel
the Lied share an emphasis on religion, in particular on sentiments

surrounding and inspired by the Reformation, and on a glorious
mythic or medieval German past. Ever since Heinrich Heine, these
emphases have been interpreted as passive nostalgia at best, as an
indication of an irrational and dangerous German Innerlichkeit at
worst. For thinkers such as Follen and activists such as Sand, whose
Wartburgmanifest and his Bekennerbrief display exactly the same
mix of revolution and tradition, of religion and politics, it was clearly
part of a counter-cultural identity that they pitted against the
exploitative and disenfranchising systems run by the aristocracy and
their lackeys. The Reformation has a crucial status in this countercultural identity. Not coincidentally, the book burning on the
Wartenberg was to be a symbolic imitation of Luthers burning of
the papal bull in 1522. Historicist thinking decreed that only if the
revolution were anchored in a German tradition would its realisation
be plausible and successful. This connection, however, works on
more than one level: as a propagandistic tool in the way that the
imagery and context of the Reformation inform Bchners Hessischer Landbote nearly 20 years later14 or as a legitimisation of such
ideas which was genuinely believed. The French Revolution and the
German Reformation are the constant reference points in the
discussion about political change in Germany at this time. The French
Revolution, particularly its violent (and regicidal) phase, was by many
national(ist) reformers considered to be a failure rather than a model.
Riemann wished to make clear that the German Burschenschaftler
were no French revolutionaries. And yet the Revolution and
Reformation were seen as related. The Reformation was the (more
promising) German version of the French Revolution. Exactly such
configurations underlie Fichtes and Hegels interpretations of
European history. They appear against the background of theological
discussions that developed out of Enlightened theories of Protestant
theological rationalism (Lutherische Aufklrungstheologie), which
interpreted Luthers battle for the unconditional freedom of the
14
Interestingly, Treitschke considered the Christian-Germanic element in Follens

writings to be mere camouflage for purely Jacobin ideas, particularly St. Justs
(Wikirchen, 46). Nor did the religious language or the appeal to an ancient
German past suggest to the reactionary-conservative authorities that these
people were political traditionalists.
75
individual conscience as a battle for the freedom of individual reason.

This equation between spiritual and political freedom was turned into
a historical relation one precedes the other by constitutionally
minded (theological) thinkers in the early decades of the nineteenth
century and became a commonplace in liberal thinking. It is important
to note in this context that this equation is a topos congenial to
rationalist interpretations as well as to more Romantic or Pietistic
approaches that prioritise a living inner spirit of freedom and justice,
as evinced by the post-rationalist generation of Protestant theologians
such as Schleiermacher and de Wette. All these interpretations share a
focus on the need to complete the Reformation in the name of spiritual
and political progress (see Lange, 21530).
Even if this places the German national revolutionaries
preoccupation with the Reformation in a potentially rationalist and
politically-minded context, for observers rooted in Western political
traditions the religious dimension of this (political) identity must
remain a difficult aspect. Do such metaphysical and spiritual concerns
invalidate any political democratic principles, as has been argued by
those who take modern German political traditions to be intrinsically
non-Western? Does the spiritual always render the political irrational?
Does this endeavour to base reform or revolution not only on political,
but also on spiritual and historical principles necessarily lead to
dogmatic self-aggrandisement?
This mix of the political and the spiritual, of basing revolution on
tradition, lies at the heart of the problems that these ideas have
caused later twentieth-century researchers, because they seem to
combine a backward- and inward-looking, anti-rationalist stance with
progressive political ideas.15 Western historians have found here the
origins of German fascism, while GDR historians have praised the
hidden antecedents of Marxism. The national(ist) element, trimmed
with spiritual and cultural traditions, is dubious in both interpretations.
Its presence has led to a devaluation of the democratic and
constitutional trends in German thought in Western assessments, in
GDR treatments it has been brushed aside as a lamentable error of
immaturity. Yet it was integral at the time. In a pre-industrial
economic situation only the revolutionary national Volk can occupy
15
See Heither et al., 3741.
76
Maike Oergel
the political space that will in the next generation be taken over
theoretically by the revolutionary proletariat: both are invested with
the hope of revolution and emancipation.
The Follens constitution to some extent foreshadows what could
be considered the best and worst in German political traditions. Their
democratic principles and structures were realised reasonably
successfully compared to early twentieth-century attempts on
German soil in the later twentieth century, while their exclusion of
foreigners and Jews, common in Burschenschaft thinking, foreshadows German fascism. Their theory of resistance also foreshadows
arguments put forward by late twentieth-century German terrorists.
Particularly interesting in this context is their view of the morally
legitimate armed struggle, Duldets nicht mehr! [] Volk! Ins
Gewehr! are lines from what is known as the Odenwlder Bauernlied, one of the publicised excerpts of the Groes Lied.16 Pointing out
to the disenfranchised the inhuman conditions in which they exist
became a time-honoured practise among revolutionaries, from Bchner to Meinhof. One of the first publications of the RAF in 1970 runs:
Denen habt ihrs klar zu machen, die von der Ausbeutung der Dritten
Welt [] nichts abkriegen, die keinen Grund haben sich mit den
Ausbeutern zu identifizieren. Current social and economic practices
mach[en] das Volk nur kaputt. It was the RAFs aim to destroy was
das Volk kaputt macht (quoted by Backes, 634). Apart from leading
the masses into revolt, Karl Follen considered the single violent
act against an unrepresentative and repressive system not only a
legitimate, but also a successful weapon. He argued that a state
(Staatszustand)
welcher vielmehr, indem er von Einzelnen autokratisch gehandhabt wird, auch
nur diese Einzelnen als seine alleinige Sttze darstellt, da ein solcher
Staatszustand, auch wenn er die Volksmasse im Zaume hlt, leicht durch den
Vernichtungskampf Einzelner gegen Einzelne gestrzt werden kann. (quoted by
Wikirchen 567)
16
See Grab/Friesel, 734, and Steiger, 162. Nieder mit Thronen, Fronen,
Drohnen und Baronen! Sturm! is one of the closing lines of the Groes Lied
(quoted by Steiger, 160).
77
He held that individual acts of terror are necessary to wake up the

oppressed and disenfranchised people from its passivity and mobilise
them to engage in an (armed) struggle for liberation (see Bssem, 62).
A war of annihilation against selected pillars of the system would not
only have signal function but also accelerate the systems breakdown.
Follen made plans to set up a revolutionary organisation that would
have revolutionary cells nationwide. He hoped to do this through the
network of the Burschenschaften at the universities (see Bssem, 62).
Agitation among the masses, Basisarbeit, and individual acts of
terrorism are the two methods to bring about the oppressive systems
collapse.17 Compare this to Ulrike Meinhofs ideas in Konzept
Stadtguerilla (April 1971):
Wir behaupten, da die Organisation von bewaffneten Widerstandsgruppen zu
diesem Zeitpunkt in der Bundesrepublik [] richtig ist, mglich ist,
gerechtfertigt ist. [] Wir sagen nicht, da die Organisierung illegaler
bewaffneter Widerstandsgruppen legale proletarische Organisationen ersetzen
knnte und Einzelaktionen Klassenkmpfe [und nicht, da der bewaffnete
Kampf die politische Arbeit im Betrieb und im Stadtteil ersetzen knnte.] Wir
behaupten nur, da die eine die Voraussetzung fr den Erfolg und den
Fortschritt des anderen ist. (quoted by Backes, 634)
The RAF was inspired by Mao Tse Tung and Latin American
guerillas, yet they could have found these ideas closer to home.18
Carl Ludwig Sand, the Kotzebue assassin, belonged to the hard core
of the Follen circle.19 With his appearance we have reached the final stage
of the radicalisation of the Burschenschaft: Burschenschaftler Sand, a
theology student, dressed in altdeutsche Tracht, stabbed the writer
17
18
19
Bssem suggests that Karl Follen only became interested in terrorism after
attempts at inciting popular insurrections failed (see 623).
After 1819, Follen could not stay in Germany. To escape arrest, he first fled to
Switzerland (1820), but in 1824 made for the greater safety of the United
States. He planned to found a democratic German state as part of the American
federation. Once there, he returned to an academic career, introducing the
teaching of German language and literature at Harvard. However, he was
removed from his Harvard post after he became active in the cause of liberating
another group of oppressed people, the black slaves. He became an American
citizen in 1830. (See Steiger, 1956.)
Sand was involved in distributing the excerpt Dreiig oder dreiundreiig
gleichviel! of Follens Lied in the autumn of 1818 in Berlin (Steiger,
illustration 46).
78
Maike Oergel
August von Kotzebue to death in the latters home in Mannheim on 23

March 1819. After a failed suicide attempt Sand was arrested and
tried, and finally, on 20 May 1820, executed. This 14-month span is a
phenomenally long gap to intervene between arrest and verdict,
especially in a case where there is such a self-evident perpetrator to a
crime, who never denied his deed. The drawn-out nature of the case is
an indicator of the impact of the deed on the legal and political
landscape of the Confederation. It created an entire new system of
dealing with enemies of the state.
The assassination caused a stir all over Germany. A few months
later (1 July), there was an attempt on the life of the Nassau prime
minister Karl Ibell. There were even suggestions that a black list of
targets existed (Haaser, 45). It was widely believed that Sand
belonged to an extensive underground conspiracy aimed at the
absolutist system. While there is no hard evidence that an organised
underground group was planning and carrying out terrorist attacks, it
is fairly clear that Follen and his inner circle knew of Sands plans.
Follen is widely regarded as the geistige Vater of Sands deed. He in
fact condoned Sands action, and appeared impressed da da
Menschen seien, bereit und entschlossen, durch eigene Aufopferung
die Bande, die sich friedlich nicht lsen lieen, mit Gewalt zu
sprengen. (quoted by Wikirchen, 56) There was directly supportive
contact between Sand and Follen, and Follens associates, Karl
Christian Sartorius and Adolf Asmis, immediately before the
assassination.20 Among other things, Follen and Asmis took into their
care letters from Sand which were to be released to the press after the
assassination. The Mannheim judge who questioned Sand and
different members of the Follen circle afterwards, noticed a similarity
in their responses, which, he concluded, suggested that they had
discussed what to say beforehand (see Bssem, 143). Sand took great
care not to implicate his comrades. He denied acting on behalf of an
organisation, probably to protect his friends.21 He even officially
20
21
Follen had given Sand money to finance his trip to Mannheim (see Heydemann,
95). Sartorius assisted Sand in preparations for this trip to Mannheim (see
Bssem, 143).
He was not believed, but no directly incriminating evidence could be unearthed
to connect Follen to the attack (probably because Follen had had the foresight
79
resigned as a member of the Burschenschaft before he left for

Mannheim. Part of a group or not, Sand had, in true PietisticProtestant tradition, executed the demands of his conscience. Not
surprisingly, he saw his action in the context of completing the
Reformation.22
Sands premeditated involvement of the media is particularly
notable. His pre-prepared statements and proclamations, including the
Bekennerbrief to be left at the scene of the assassination, were
designed to create a counter-account and stimulate public discussion.
Uwe Backes has recently pointed out to what extent terrorism relies
on the media to amplify the impact of terrorist activities and to what
extent media and terrorists are in an almost symbiotic relationship:
spectacular attacks make good copy and extensive coverage makes the
most of the deed (Backes, 48). The resonance of the Kotzebue
assassination in the press was phenomenal. Bssem has pointed out
that the choice of Kotzebue as victim, often marvelled at in the past,
guaranteed this mass impact (Bssem, 153). Kotzebue was famous
and clearly identified with the unaccountable system of the Ancien
Rgime. His political views were conservative, and his provision of
information to the Tsar, which had become public the year before,
made him a hate-figure in the eyes of the bourgeois opposition. That
many members of the bourgeois public agreed with Sands assessment
of Kotzebues treacherous immorality is borne out in the scenes that
attended Sands execution, which was conducted amid tight security.
Large numbers of sympathisers lined the streets to the scaffold, some
in mourning garb, most of them silent, a few expressing their
admiration for Sand.23 While there was general condemnation of the
murder, there was widespread approval of Sands motives among the
22
23
and the opportunity to destroy any evidence before it could be found). (See
Steiger, 195.)
His Bekennerbrief is entirely in keeping with the spiritual-political approach
outlined above: Die Reformation [] ist noch nicht vollbracht! Denn noch
lastet Gewissenszwang, Knechtschaft, Zerrissenheit der Brder auf unserm
Lande []. Brder, lset die alten Ketten des Papsttums, die Ketten der
Herrscherwillkr! Glaube, Lehre und That sollen sich in Eines zusammenthun,
und in der christlichen Begeisterung des freien deutschen Brgers neu
aufleben! (reprinted in Heydemann, 11922, here 1212).
After the execution there was a rush onto the scaffold to grab souvenirs and
dunk handkerchiefs, scarves, shirt sleeves in Sands blood (Heydemann, 102).
80
Maike Oergel
bourgeois intelligensia, among them de Wette, Schleiermacher,

Grres, and Lorenz Oken. Even the Prussian minister Freiherr vom
Stein saw the reactionary governments as implicated in the murder
(see Steiger, 1869; Bssem, 12933).
The Wartburgfest and the Kotzebue assassination did not start a
revolution, they instead radicalised the forces of Reaction. The
Karlsbad Decrees, orchestrated by Metternich, were a direct
consequence of the assassination. They banned the Burschenschaften
as criminal and treasonous, re-enforced strict censorship of the press,
introduced strict and unaccountable policing of the universities, and
made it possible to prosecute as demagogues the leading figures of the
national-democratic movement. A Central Commission the first
confederation-wide institution of any kind was set up in Mainz to
implement and co-ordinate the investigations and prosecutions, and
Metternich mobilised his network of secret agents to keep anything
suspect under surveillance. While at first sight the assassination might
appear as Metternichs worst nightmare, it was of course his dream,
and he duly spoke of the vortrefflicher Sand (Grab, 502) who had
given him the occasion he needed to clamp down on all national and
democratic activities.
The measures of the Karlsbad Decrees were hardline, their
creation partly illegal.24 They were rushed through the legal channels
with the inconsiderate haste of emergency legislation. The Decrees
were discussed and prepared at the Karlsbad conference in August
1819, to which Metternich had only invited the ten most powerful
members of the Deutscher Bund, whom he considered most reliable.
This contravened article 3 of the Bundesakte, which guarantees the
same rights to all member states.25 On 20 September 1819 the
Bundesversammlung at Frankfurt passed the required laws to enforce
24
25
See Brmmer, 3842. This was noticed as early as 1844. Johann Ludwig
Klber and Carl Welcker pointed out the Rechtswidrigkeit ihres
Zustandekommens in Wichtige Urkunden fr den Rechtszustand der deutschen
Nation, Mannheim, 1844 (see Brmmer, 38).
To even prepare the preparations, Metternich had held a secret summit with
Prussia a few days before Karlsbad, meeting with Friedrich Wilhelm and
Hardenberg at Teplitz. Metternich secured from the Prussian king a
commitment not to allow the introduction of Volksvertretungen in Prussia.
They also agreed co-ordinated action at the forthcoming conference. (See
Bssem, 363.)
81
the decrees. To ensure a unanimous vote in favour, which was

necessary for additions to the Bundesakte, member states which had
not been present in Karlsbad were left in no doubt by the superpowers
about how to instruct their representatives. The usual debating period
of fourteen days was shortened to four and the reservations that were
voiced in Frankfurt were only recorded in a secret protocol. The
official protocol of the meeting only recorded the unanimous vote.26
The oligarchic-democratic institutions and forces of the Bund declined
to exercise their powers, a situation that could raise concerns similar
to those raised during the 1970s in the connection with the states
reaction to terrorism. On 26 Nov 1819, the Jena Burschenschaft
officially disbanded, and the bourgeois opposition was silenced for
ten, if not twenty years. Anyone versed in the history of the student
movement, the APO, and the RAF will no doubt have noticed some
parallels.
There is a generation conflict.27 An idealistic and dissatisfied
younger generation rebels against the values an older generation is
holding on to after a prolonged period of political and military
turmoil. They suspect that, despite promises to the contrary,
reactionary forces are setting up the same old nasty system again. In
the case of the Burschenschaften the period of turmoil originates in
French Revolution and its political and military consequences, in the
case of the 1960s revolutionaries it is the extended period of
instability beginning with the outcome of World War I and leading up
to their present. The historical situation has effected a moment of
unusual liberality, a window of freedom that allows ideas of complete
political change to flourish. Students and universities, i.e. the
intelligensia, are the breeding-ground for the rebellious, antiestablishment ideas, not the materially seriously disadvantaged classes
(or in the case of the Burschenschaften the economically active but
politically disenfranchised middle classes). The radical fringe of this
rebellious left-wing movement has become convinced that the change
26
27
See Bssem, 41719, Steiger, 19091, Brmmer, 3940.

Bssem suggests that there is not (4950). But the fact that some radical
professors are older than their students does not deny the fact that they too may
stand against a system that is supported and condoned by a generation whose
values are drawn from an earlier period (of monarchical absolutism in this
case).
82
Maike Oergel
they wish to see cannot be brought about by peaceful means. They are
convinced they are in the right because their consciences are clear,
applying the dogmatic method of self-analysis and self-justification
that originates in the Protestant and Pietistic background, which many
of the radical activists share; Sand for example shares such a
background with Meinhof and Ensslin. Neither movement manages to
get mainstream opinion, bourgeois or proletarian, on whose behalf
they thought they were fighting, actively on their side. In both cases
the activists question, and threaten, the basic self-understanding of the
state, which reacts with relatively severe measures. 28
What produces this similar counter-cultural, extra-systematic
kind of opposition? Leonard Krieger argued in his study The German
Idea of Freedom, with specific reference to the political aims of the
radical elements of the Burschenschaften, that social rootlessness and
critical dissatisfaction produced a critical negativity regarding political
systems:
The critical motif remained dominant even in the constructive process of
working out a positive democratic system. The persistence of a strongly
negative approach denoted the exclusive sponsorship of political radicalism by
socially uprooted intellectuals, whose characteristic political expression
consisted precisely in universal criticism rather than concrete engagement. The
general criticism of society involved [] the specific revulsion against the state
as such. [] This categorical rejection of the whole political system, which
found expression in essentially negative programmes like tyrannicide and mass
emigration, was evidence of the tendency to identify the state with the existing
form of the state and consequently find no rest short of the revolutionary
extreme. (Krieger, 268)
Such an anti-state attitude of critical negativity applies to the RAF too.

The German political tradition is the lack of a continuous
political tradition. This includes the absence of a clearly defined
tradition of opposition. Instead there is a plurality of different
28
The difference is that most of the political-constitutional demands made by the

student activists around 1817 seem to have been validated by the historical
process. They have become reality. On the other hand, many of the political
ideas of the radical left-wingers of the late 1960s, anti-capitalism and antiimperialism (anti-Americanism) in particular, seem to have become, after
198990, invalidated by the historical process. But perhaps it is still too early to
judge this.
83
approaches to and experiments in how modern society can be

organised. It is no coincidence that both the concepts of fascism and
communism received clear definition in Germany. Neither is it
coincidental that rival enterprises of capitalism and communism could
be set up within German borders, and last for 40 years. Equally, there
is a democratic-progressive tradition, which runs from the constitutional
hopes of the Befreiungskriege via the Frankfurt Parliament of 18489,
and the well-intentioned and ill-fated Weimar Republic, to its
fulfilment either in the Arbeiter und Bauernstaat, as GDR historiography argued, or in the West German Grundgesetz, as the other side
would have it. Both German states adopted the tricolour of the Ltzow
Free Corps. On the other hand, there is the tradition of the
Obrigkeitsstaat, running from Catholic and feudal dependence,
through enlightened absolutism and Prussian militarism, to the
authoritarian state of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Between 1750 and 1950, none of these approaches had been able to
establish a lasting presence. This leaves openness as well as
insecurity, which allows radical oppositional fringes not just to exist,
but to impact to a far greater extent than in a society that has an
established political tradition. It is not just a question of a terrorist act,
but the effect of this act on the national psyche. In a situation of
shifting or uncertain political structures, anarchic disturbances carry
much greater weight. By the same token, the radical fringe feels more
justification to suspect existing political structures whole-scale.
Political unease expresses itself in radicalism and violence, which,
although only practised by a tiny minority, provokes a severe reaction
on the part of the state. This in turn helps to foster the notion, or the
myth, of political incompetence and unreliability. So is the Kotzebue
assassination a typically German act, proof of the Germans irrational
political immaturity that has remained untouched by Western ideas of
rational political culture? In this context it is useful to remember that
political violence in the name of (national)-democratic change was no
isolated German phenomenon around 1819. Walter Grab gives a
concise summary of the activities of national revolutionary emancipation in Europe (and beyond) between 1810 and 1822, and marks a
bunching of violent climaxes and signal deeds, planned or executed
Maike Oergel
84
around 1819/20.29 The difference is that in Germany the following 200

years of political fluidity contributed to keeping the connection
between social and political progress and violent radicalism alive. Of
course, the political unrest of the 1960s had a decided international
dimension, too. But nowhere, with perhaps the exception of Italy, was
the radical fringe as violent and as committed as in Germany. So the
Burschenschaften, at least in their origin, emerge not so much as an
example of the undemocratic nature of the German mainstream
political tradition, but as an example of a political constellation where
some believe that violent radicalism needs to spearhead democratic
progress, a belief that gradually solidifying forms of (democratic)
government and opposition would in time make unnecessary. In
Germany, however, this process of solidification was interrupted too
often to succeed.
Works Cited
Backes, U. Bleierne Jahre. Baader-Meinhof und danach (Erlangen, Staube, 1991).
Brmmer, M. Staat contra Universitt. Die Universitt Halle-Wittenberg und die
Karlsbader Beschlsse 18191848 (Weimar, Hermann Bhlaus Nachfolge,
1991).
Bssem, E. Die Karlsbader Beschlsse von 1819. Die endgltige Stabilisierung der
restaurativen Politik im Deutschen Bund nach dem Wiener Kongress von
1814/15 (Hildesheim, Gerstenberg, 1974).
29
For example, in France Louis Pierre Louvel stabbed the French Kings nephew
to death in 1820. This assassination occurred against the background of the
conspiratorial activities of the Charbonnerie, a secret society of ex-army
personnel, students and republicans that aimed at overthrowing the Bourbon
dynasty. In Britain the severity of the Karlsbad Decrees is mirrored in the
fearful and hardline decision of the authorities in Manchester to violently
disperse a large crowd of demonstrators by sending in mounted troops, a
decision which resulted in killing or injuring scores of people, and which
became known as the Peterloo Massacre. These drastic measures were followed
by strict censorship of publications and a prohibition of public gatherings. In
response the radical wing of an extra-institutional opposition, led by Arthur
Thistlewood, planned a republican coup for the spring of 1820, which was
betrayed. (See Grab, Burschenschaften, 248.)
85
Elm, L. Von der Urburschenschaft bis zur brgerlichen Revolution, in Elm, L.,
Heither, D., Schfer, G. (Hg) Fxe, Burschen, Alte Herren. Studentische
Korporationen vom Wartburgfest bis heute (Kln, Papyrossa Verlag, 1992/93),
1645.
Grab, W. Ein Volk mu seine Freiheit selbst erobern. Zur Geschichte der deutschen
Jakobiner (Bchergilde Gutenberg, 1984).
Die Burschenschaften im Kontext nationalrevolutionrer Emanzipationsbewegungen anderer Lnder 1815 bis 1825, in Dedner, B. (Hg) Das
Wartburgfest und die oppositionelle Bewegung in Hessen (Marburg, Hitzeroth,
1994), 1129.
Grab, W./Friesel, U. Noch ist Deutschland nicht verloren. Eine historisch-politische
Analyse unterdrckter Lyrik von der Franzsischen Revolution bis zur
Reichsgrndung (Munich, Hanser, 1970).
Haaser, R. der Herd des studentischen Fanatismus und Radikalismus. Die
Universitt Gieen und das Wartburgfest, in Dedner, B. (Hg) Das
Wartburgfest und die oppositionelle Bewegung in Hessen (Marburg, Hitzeroth,
1994), 3177.
Haupt, H. Die Jenaische Burschenschaft von der Zeit ihrer Grndung bis zum
Wartburgfeste. Ihre Verfassungsentwicklung und ihre inneren Kmpfe, in
Haupt, (Hg) Quellen und Darstellungen zur Geschichte der Burschenschaften
und der deutschen Einheitsbewegung, Band 1, 2nd edition (Heidelberg, Winter,
1966), 18113.
Heither, D., Gehler, M., Kurth, A., Schfer, G. Blut und Paukboden. Eine Geschichte
der Burschenschaften (Frankfurt a M, Fischer, 1997).
Heydemann, G. Carl Ludwig Sand. Die Tat als Attentat (Hof, Oberfrnkische
Verlagsanstalt, 1985).
Kranepuhl, P. Die rechtsphilosophischen Auffassungen von Jakob Friedrich Fries
und ihr Einflu auf die Burschenschaftsbewegung, in Asmus, H. (Hg)
Studentische Burschenschaften und brgerliche Umwlzung: Zum 175.
Jahrestages des Wartburgfestes (Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 1992), 8092.
Krieger, L. The German Idea of Freedom. History of a Political Tradition (Chicago
and London, Chicago University Press, 1957).
Lange, A. Reformation und Revolution. Eine theologisch-politische Diskussion im
Umkreis des Wartburgfestes und des Reformationsjubilums von 1817, in
Dedner, B. (Hg) Das Wartburgfest und die oppositionelle Bewegung in Hessen
(Marburg, Hitzeroth, 1994), 21530.
Prignitz, C. Vaterlandsliebe und Freiheit: Deutscher Patriotismus 17501850
(Wiesbaden, Steiner, 1981).
Schrder, W. Die Grndung der Jenaer Burschenschaft, das Wartburgfest und die
Turnerbewegung, in Asmus, H. (Hg) Studentische Burschenschaften und
brgerliche Umwlzung: Zum 175. Jahrestages des Wartburgfestes (Berlin,
Akademie Verlag, 1992), 7079.
Politische Ansichten und Aktionen der Unbedingten in der Burschenschaft,
Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Friedrich-Schiller-Universitt Jena, Gesellschafts- und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, 15, Hft 2 (1966), 22350.
86
Maike Oergel
Steiger, G. Aufbruch. Urburschenschaft und Wartburgfest (Leipzig/Jena/Berlin,

Urania Verlag, 1967).
Wikirchen, H. Karl Follen und die Gieener Schwarzen, in Elm, L., Heither, D.,
Schfer, G. (Hg) Fxe, Burschen, Alte Herren. Studentische Korporationen vom
Wartburgfest bis heute (Kln, Papyrossa Verlag, 1992/93), 4665.
CARL WEBER
Performing Counter-Culture in the Vorstadt:

Nestroys Theatre in Times of Reaction and Revolt
The actor and playwright Johann Nepomuk Nestroy wrote and

performed exclusively for theatres in the Vorstadt, the outer
boroughs of Vienna, where he attracted, and was hugely admired by,
an audience comprised of all classes in the mid-nineteenth century
capital. Nevertheless, throughout his career he kept upsetting his
public, antagonised his critics, and was the focus of interventions by
the censor and the police. Could we identify Nestroys theatre that
is, not merely the texts of his plays as they have come down to us but
also the inimitable way in which he performed them as a practice
that might be subsumed under the concept of Counter-Culture? I
believe so and, in assessing the counter-cultural potential of Nestroys
practice as a playwright and performer, I propose as proof several of
his texts and Nestroys critical reception.
The actor Nestroy was the darling of mid-nineteenth century
Vienna and beyond, as his numerous guest appearances in Budapest,
Prague and other cities of the Habsburg Empire as well as in Berlin,
Hamburg, Frankfurt and other German urban centres, clearly
demonstrate. When he died, in 1862, the London Times reported that
between 40,000 and 50,000 persons were assembled in the streets
through which the coffin containing the mortal remains of the
Austrian Aristophanes were carried. (Yates, Nestroy and the Critics,
1) Viennas population had just passed the 500,000 mark; if the Times
was correctly informed by its correspondent, nearly one tenth of the
capitals populace paid their respect to the revered actor/playwright,
and one Viennese newspaper even claimed that more than 200,000
persons were in attendance (Schbler, 260). The number of roles
Nestroy performed is simply astonishing from 1822 to his death, in
1862, he played 879 leading roles, 70 of them in his own plays.
88
Carl Weber
Comparably prolific as a writer, he has more than 80 plays credited to

him the imprecision of that number has reasons: several texts have
been lost and most of those preserved were adaptations of existing
plays or prose texts, consequently Nestroys authorship of certain
pieces is still in dispute in this respect he may remind us of
Shakespeare. Indeed, critics among his contemporaries and even
more so after the rediscovery and revival of Nestroys uvre in the
twentieth century liked to call him an Austrian Shakespeare.
Nestroy did not fancy himself a classical author, he wrote for
the day and the commercial theatre he worked in. To that end he used
any source that showed promise of box-office potential, while
refashioning the source thoroughly to create his own inimitable kind
of play. In all the texts he wrote and performed he asserted his
opinions about the world as he experienced it, opinions that were
changing with the times, of course. There is hardly a play that did not
reflect the wretched aspects of Austrian society. Most of all, however,
his plays testified to the resilience of those who were victims of that
societys harshness, veiled as it was by the sentimentality and good
humour the Viennese loved to indulge in. He kept revealing that
indulgence as the mask behind which economic greed and sexual
aggression were hiding, and exposed their corrupting effect on all
human relationships before a public that often turned downright
hostile when recognising their own image on Nestroys stage.
Nonetheless, he retained his immense popularity.
Reading Nestroys texts, one is struck by his inventive use of
gestic language that is moving between Viennese street vernacular,
the often belaboured Schriftdeutsch used by the educated classes
and those pretending to belong to them, and the pompous Hochdeutsch that dominated the classical stages, such as the Imperial
Burgtheater. His sophisticated wordplay and coining of puns matched
Shakespeares ingenuity, as the critic Karl Kraus has pointed out,
among others. (Kraus, 10) During most of his career Nestroy was
forced to employ a kind of slave language, mainly derived from the
Viennese vernacular, with which he could communicate subversive
content in terms understood by an audience from the victimised
classes but not necessarily the bureaucrats in the censors office. It is a
language that is not easily decoded today, since we lack the
Performing Counter-Culture in the Vorstadt
89
experience of quotidian life in Habsburg Austria and can only guess at

the specific subtext that a given word or phrase may have suggested.
Nestroys audience were citizens of a large metropolitan centre
with a multi-ethnic population where at least ten different languages
were spoken. Inevitably, their ears must have been finely tuned to the
ways language reflected ethnic and social status. In addition, this
audience was extremely sophisticated in matters theatrical, certainly
no less so than our contemporary audiences are in regard to television,
motion pictures and pop music. Consequently, Nestroy could to great
effect exploit the genre of literary parody. He labelled 10 of his plays
Parodie, Parodierende Posse, or Travestie. Among them were a
parody of Flotows opera Martha (1848); the Musical-dramatic
Parody Lohengrin (1859); and a Tannhaeuser labelled: Futuristic
Farce with obsolete Music and contemporary Tableaus of 1857.
Moreover, his plays frequently contained visual details and textual
quotes that made fun of the classic German repertoire, opera and the
popular melodrama of the time. The mastery with which Nestroy
deftly employed and at the same time satirised the prevalent
contemporary conventions of drama and opera has not been surpassed
by any dramatist since.
It should be no surprise that Nestroy offended quite a number of
contemporary observers, among them fellow playwrights, journalists
and other intellectuals, though there were also critics who greatly
admired him. Condemnation of his writings and, especially, his acting
ranged from the right to the left of the political spectrum. When
reading reviews of his openings, and comments that appeared in
memoirs and critical essays, one is often amazed how deeply he
aggravated many of his critics.
For instance, a reviewer of the Morgenblatt reported, in 1839,
that Nestroys Die verhngnisvolle Faschingsnacht was a veritable
success and, while lauding it for its truthful scenes from the life of
the people and its humour, he went on to complain dass ein solches
Talent so von allem Geschmack und von hherer Bildung verlassen
ist (Yates, Nestroy and his Critics, 13). An especially amusing
statement if we recall that Nestroy had read law at Vienna University
for several years. When five years later one of his plays flopped, a
critic for the same journal lamented: Nestroys Muse ist tief in den
90
Carl Weber
Schlamm der Gemeinheit versunken; es ist hchste Zeit, dass er sie zu

retten versucht, ehe sie darin erstickt (Yates, Nestroy and his Critics,
13). Again and again we read accusations such as a dreadful
depravity launched against his plays and, even more so, against his
acting. Frequently they were accompanied by laments about the lost
innocence that supposedly graced the Viennese popular comedy of the
past, a decline that was blamed on Nestroys influence. For instance,
the acclaimed German author Friedrich Theodor Vischer declared:
Schon 1840 trat mir der Verfall der Volkskomdie unter den Hnden
Nestroys entgegen.( Schbler, 231).
On the left of the political spectrum, we find Karl Gutzkow, well
known dramatist, novelist, critic, and prominent member of the group
Young Germany. He complained, in an account of his 1845 visit to
Vienna, that the blasphemous Nestroy corrupted the morals of the
lower classes with the lewd insinuations and self-irony of his plays:
Das ist entsetzlich, wie Nestroy, dieser an sich ja hchst talentvolle Darsteller,
in seinem Spiel fast noch mehr als in seinen Produktionen dem sittlichen
Grundgefhl und der glubigen Naivett des Volkes Hohn spricht. Es berlief
mich kalt, ein ganzes Volk so wiehern, Weiber lachen, Kinder klatschen zu
sehen, wenn [...]. Nestroy, die Achsel zuckend, die Liebesversicherungen einer Frau,
die Zrtlichkeit eines Gatten mit einem satanischen O je! oder dergleichen
begleitet. (Gutzkow, 2345)
Gutzkow offers the striking example of an intellectuals arrogant

conviction that the ill-mannered masses need to be elevated by the arts
to a higher, i.e. bourgeois, morality. These were, of course, times as
W. Edgar Yates has pointed out when the development of taste and
manners in the German states paralleled that of the Victorian morality
in England (Yates, Nestroy and his Critics, 14).
As for the conservative position, the Viennese critic Moritz
Gottlieb Saphir, who frequently found fault with Nestroy, called him
the Boz of the popular stage, writing that, as in Dickenss novels, ist
bei Nestroy alles und jedes ein Individuum; alles ist materiell, alles
rohes Fleisch und Blut. And he chided Nestroy for sharing Dickens
91
Leidenschaft fr das Niedrige und Triviale im Leben, in der Gesellschaft, seine

Anhaenglichkeit an den [sic] moralischen Trotteln und Kretins in den
Spelunken des Volkslebens. (Yates, Nestroy, 5, 7)
Saphir claimed on another occasion: Es fehlt ihm durchaus der

Glaube an [die] Existenz einer hoeheren Idee und eines sittlichen
Ideals (Yates, Nestroy, 7). Friedrich Hebbel, regarded as the leading
playwright in mid-nineteenth century Germany, first appears to have
admired Nestroy but, in October 1848, he accused the Vorstadt
theatres mit ihrem Nestroy of fostering anarchy. However, soon after
he stated sicher wird ein Kunstverstndiger fr einen einzigen
Nestroyschen Witz de premire qualit eine Million gewhnlicher
Jamben hingeben (Hebbel, 381). In 1861, he simply called him der
Genius der Gemeinheit. By that time, the success of Nestroys Judith
and Holofernes, a biting parody of Hebbels drama Judith, had by far
surpassed the originals reception.
One conservative comment on Nestroys acting was voiced by the
Burgtheater actor Carl Ludwig Costenoble, a usually unbiased and
competent observer of his time, who complained
Sein Wesen [...] erinnert immer an diejenige Hefe des Pbels, die in
Revolutionsfllen zum Plndern und Totschlagen bereit ist. Wie komisch
Nestroy auch zuweilen wird er kann das Unheimliche nicht verdrngen,
welches den Zuhrer beschleicht. (Costenoble, 3356)
Remarkably, this was written eleven years before the revolutionary

year of 1848! Finally, there were these charges made by Friedrich
Theodor Vischer:
Nun aber dieser Nestroy: Er verfgt ber ein Gebiet von Tnen und
Bewegungen, wo fr ein richtiges Gefhl der Ekel, das Erbrechen beginnt. Wir
wollen nicht die tierische Natur des Menschen, wie sie sich just auf dem letzten
Schritte zum sinnlichen Genuss gebrdet, in nackter Blsse vors Auge gerckt
sehen, wir wollen es nicht hren, dies kotig gemeine Eh und Oh des Hohns,
wo immer ein edleres Gefhl zu beschmutzen ist, wir wollen sie nicht
vernehmen, diese stinkenden Witze, die zu erraten geben, dass das innerste
Heiligtum der Menschheit einen Phallus verberge. (Vischer, 351)
Quite a condemnation, one has to admit.
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Carl Weber
Reading Nestroys plays, it is hard to comprehend why they

triggered such an irascible response. On the evidence of the texts that
have been preserved, one would hardly expect them to rankle even the
most prudish Victorian author to the degree of Vischers response. It
must have been Nestroy, the performer, who provoked such reactions,
as Gutzkow complained. The prolific ad-libbing, the innuendo by
vocal inflection and mis-pronouncing of words, the pliable facial
expression with its curl of the lip and wink of the eye, and the
suggestive gesturing created with his long limbs and tall bony frame,
set Nestroy apart from other contemporary performers. One of his
friendly critics, August Silberstein, observed:
[s]eine merkwrdige unerreichte Gabe: durch eine einzige Mundfalte, ein
einziges Augenzucken die ganze geistige ironische Hoehe neben der scheinbar
tiefst-dmmsten Rede anzudeuten. (Yates, Nestroy and his Critics, 4)
He was complemented in this highly gestic acting style by Wenzel

Scholz, his principal partner during twenty-six of the thirty-one years
Nestroy performed on Viennas Vorstadt stages. Scholz was short and
fat, the perfect foil for the tall and bony Nestroy, who wrote leading
parts for both of them into nearly every one of his plays. Theirs was a
team comparable to film comics such as Laurel and Hardy, the Danish
actors Pat and Patachon, and, in television, Jackie Gleason and Art
Carney of The Honeymooners.
Nestroy endured a perennial contest with the governments
censorship, abolished only during the months between the March
Revolution of 1848 and Viennas capitulation to the Imperial army,
end of October. Except for that brief period, Nestroy saw his scripts
rigorously sanitised by the censors or sent back with a long list of
required changes, if they were not entirely banned. He became an
expert in self-censoring his texts while retaining lines and stage
business that could be made trenchant again by the way they were
performed. One censor complained: Nestroy [habe] mit seinen Stcken
wesentlich zur Entsittlichung des Wiener Volkes beigetragen, and that
nur zu oft die harmlosesten Worte durch sein Mienen- und Hndespiel
zur gemeinsten Zote werden (Schbler, 134).
93
The cunning with which Nestroy would insert subversive

connotations into his performance has rarely been paralleled, nor has
the way he braved a rigid censorship with his critique of contemporary
social and political ills. On several occasions he provoked the
intervention of the police and was, even if briefly, incarcerated whereas
he frequently had to pay substantial fines for his extemporising. If
there was a place in the German states during the nineteenth century
where counter-culture was performed, it was the stages Nestroy acted
on during thirty-seven years, nearly every night of the theatrical
season. To further demonstrate some of Nestroys counter-cultural
strategies, I will now present samples from plays performed during
and after the aborted 1848 revolution as well as in the preceding
period, the Vormrz.
During the brief censor-less interval of 1848, Nestroy wrote and
performed two plays, Die lieben Anverwandten and Freiheit in
Krhwinkel. The first one, a very free adaptation based on Dickens
Martin Chuzzlewit, was a spectacular flop. Premiered two months
after the March uprising, the text is brimful of satiric comments on the
despised aristocracy and the newly rich bourgeois, like many Nestroy
plays of the Vormrz. Probably the audience was put off by scathing
remarks about the ludicrous behaviour of those mightily revolutionary
burghers who suddenly appeared on the scene while previously having
been obedient subjects of the Metternich system. One song
commented on the unanticipated enthusiasm for the newly elected allGerman parliament in Frankfurt:
Es gibt mancher sein Stimm und er weiss nicht fr was; Gar mancher is als
Whler fr Frankfurt nein grennt, Der aussr d Frankfurterwrsteln von
Frankfurt nix kennt. (Nestroy, Stcke, 25/II, 4)
A deeply offended segment of the audience vociferously demanded

Nestroys apology. He did not respond himself but sent out the stagemanager to ask for the audiences pardon.
In Freiheit in Krhwinkel, on the other hand, he stated his ardent
belief in the rule of an enlightened and encompassing democracy,
while not ignoring the pathetic conduct of self-styled revolutionaries
who never dreamed of challenging the authorities before 1848. He
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Carl Weber
castigated their cowardice and ridiculed the way in which they were
acting at a revolution rather than actually accomplishing it. He also
offered his biting comments on Viennas political scene which
promptly earned him reproach for maligning the ideals of the citys
liberals. The highlight of his own performance as the liberal journalist
Ultra was no doubt Ultras appearance in several disguises, among
them a slimy Jesuit priest, a Russian Grand Duke, and emissary of the
Czar who promises the embattled rulers of Krhwinkel military
support while actually thwarting their efforts to subdue the rebellious
citizens, and his impersonation of Metternich who, having abdicated
in March, passes through town on his way to London and invites the
local rulers to follow his example. Ultra then reappears dressed as a
working man, pickaxe in hand on his way to the barricades, and
proclaims: Ah, mir gschieht ordentlich, seit ich wieder einem
rechtschaffenen Menschen gleichseh (Nestroy, Stcke, 26/I, 19).
Discovering on a good burghers door the inscription Heilig sey das
Eigentum he comments: Wenn diese Worte dem Arbeiter nicht ins
Herz geschrieben wren, was nutzet denn auf allen Tren das
Geschmier? (Nestroy, 19). Most surprising, and surely exhilarating the
audience, must have been the plays finale, when young women in the
disguise of revolutionary students mount the barricades and achieve
what their male fellow burghers were not capable to do, namely bring
liberty to the small German town of Krhwinkel, synonym for bigotry
and self-indulgence, as it was created by August von Kotzebues
popular comedy of 1802, Die deutschen Kleinstdter.
After the revolutions defeat and the renewal of censorship,
Nestroy wrote three plays that to varying degrees reflected on the
revolutions failure. The first one, Lady und Schneider, opened in early
February 1849. It appeared to many of his liberal critics as a loathsome
about-face, while conservative minds applauded lines such as:
Das Volk ist ein Ries in der Wiegen, der erwacht, aufsteht, herumtargelt, Alles
zusammtritt, und am End wo hineinfallt wo er noch viel schlechter liegt als in
der Wiegen. (Nestroy, Stcke, 26/II, 8)
Yet, this and similar statements come from the mouth of Nestroys
role, the tailor Heugeign (literally Hay-fiddle), an ambitious but
95
foolish young man who fantasises about a career in politics. The

quoted line, so he tells us, was the answer he gave when in his
inebriated sleep he dreamed of being sternly examined by a ghostly
apparition whose outfit and pigtailed wig, as Heugeign describes
them, clearly indicate that ghosts reactionary stance. Later Heugeign
explains to his prospective father-in-law:
(Mit Begeisterung) Sie mssen mich noch wo an die Spitze stellen, seys
Bewegung oder Clubb, liberal, legitim, conservativ, radical, oligarchisch,
anarchisch oder gar kanarchisch, das is mir Alles eins, nur Spitze! (Nestroy,
Stcke, 26/II, 10)
An early working title for the script was Der Mann an der Spitze.
One scene is concluded by Heugeign with a song that ends:
So weit iss jetzt kommen, fr Wien iss a Schand, Wir sind noch fadr als
Berlin mit sein Sand und Verstand Fallt dUmstaltung so aus, sag I, nein, Da
hrt es auf ein Vergngen zu seyn. (Nestroy, Stcke, 26/II, 17)
The audience expected Nestroys songs to express his opinions, and

here he clearly refers to the Vienna of the day, less than four months
after the Imperial Army had brutally crushed the revolution. His songs
were always cleverly constructed and strategically placed, their
meaning could either be supported or contradicted by the
accompanying music, not to mention the mimetic fashion in which he
might deliver them. Heugeign is a simple mind whose ambitions by
far exceed his talents, a social type that was the target of Nestroys
sarcasm in many of his plays. One would assume that his audience
was capable of understanding Heugeigns utterances in their frame of
reference and read them according to Nestroys performative gestus.
He created in Heugeign quite a complex character, laughable in his
flights of fancy but vulnerable and devoted to his fiancee, Linerl, who
is by far the most sympathetic figure in the play, as is often the case
with Nestroys young female protagonists. Her love for Heugeign
does not keep her from criticising his frequent stupidities. Early in the
play, she declares that she had joined the Deutsche Frauenverein, an
organisation founded in August of 1848, that pursued a socially
progressive and democratic agenda and the context of her line
96
Carl Weber
indicates the playwrights approval. Her father, played by Scholz, is

appalled by her declaration; he is the typical Vienna petit bourgeois
who constantly fears for his property and yet considers leaving town
at the slightest probability of political unrest.
At the time, censorship had been re-established, even if in
somewhat less restrictive fashion than under Metternich. Quite
possibly Nestroy inserted into his text statements that were intended to
outwit the censor, placing them in a context where audience members
would understand them as articulating a reactionary position, as in
Heugeigns dream, for instance. Furthermore, there always was
occasion to manipulate the text in performance according to the way
he wanted it to be understood. He also may have tried to convince the
authorities of his loyalty, to avoid feasible repercussions that his well
known stance during the revolution could have provoked.
In November 1849, Hllenangst opened, a farce Nestroy adapted
from a contemporary French comedy, moving the plot from seventeenthcentury France to an unspecified German city and changing it
thoroughly. It begins with the entry of a political fugitive, a Freiherr
von Reichthal who, returning from exile in England, discovers that he
had been deceived about the chief ministers death he was counting
on. He now seeks shelter in the house of his nieces former wet-nurse,
who is married to a cobbler (played by Scholz) and has a son
Wendelin (played by Nestroy), a former factory worker and then
prison guard. The son helped the political prisoner Reichthal to
escape, then absented himself from his post and now is in hiding from
the police. In the neighbouring building, a local judge, Thurming, has
paid a secret visit to his wife, Reichthals niece, whom he secretly
married, whereas her guardian, Freiherr von Stromberg, tries to make
her enter a convent, a step that would let her inherited fortune fall to
him. This is melodrama at its most convoluted form and, in Nestroys
hands, its most hilarious parody. Thurming has to flee from
Strombergs house abruptly in the wee hours of the night and, while a
thunderstorm is raging, he climbs over a roof and through the cobbler
Pfrims window into the room where Wendelin is asleep, who terrified
by thunder and lightning promptly believes he has been visited by the
devil. After a sequence of increasingly madcap actions and mishaps,
the narrative is brought to an improbable Happy End without the
97
slightest pretext of a reasonable conclusion: all the scoundrels are

punished and every boy gets his girl. The patently absurd ending
clearly signalled that in post-revolutionary Austria there were no
Happy Ends when evil ministers would suddenly die and honest
successors be appointed. Yet, the plays conclusion may also have
been a kow-tow to the Imperial government, to distract the censors
attention from lines that might have become quite subversive when
performed by Nestroy and Scholz. Audiences as well as the press did
not receive the play favourably; they seemed to be puzzled and upset
by its often contradictory responses to the moments political climate.
Nestroy, as the proletarian Wendelin, entered with a song
describing what would happen if Nature should rise against all the
injustices the Heavens decreed. Each verse deals with a different
segment of Natures realm in rebellion, i.e. the Minerals, the Flora and
Fauna, and ends with a variant of the refrain:
Doch das mcht ich sehn, wenn Vernunft tht erwachen In diese Drey
Reich, was der Himmel tht machen; Wenn s so kmen zum Himml ihre
Rechte begehrn, Meiner Seel, s msst dem Himmel hllnangst dabey wern.
(Nestroy, Stcke, 27/II, 7)
Another song of Wendelin/Nestroy seemingly complains that no one

believes anything anymore, but concludes all five verses this way:
Ich lass mir mein Aberglaubn
Durch ka Aufklaerung raubn,
s is jetzt schn berhaupt,
Wenn mr an etwas noch glaubt. (Nestroy, Stcke, 27/II, 17)
It might be read as a call for holding on to the ideals of the recent

revolution, yet cleverly disguised as the backward beliefs of a
proletarian who is the plays veritable, if somewhat foolish, hero. At
the plays end, Wendelin and his father appear as pious pilgrims on
their way to Rome to be absolved of the pact with the devil Wendelin
believes to have concluded a scene that ridicules religious beliefs in
a fashion that would never have escaped the censors pencil under
Metternich.
98
Carl Weber
Nestroys last play of 1849, Der alte Mann mit der jungen Frau,
presented a fugitive who had been sentenced to ten years imprisonment
after the 1848 Revolution. Having escaped, he hides in a cabin in the Alps
that is owned by the plays protagonist. Another one of Nestroys
preposterously absurd Happy Ends, a general amnesty, sets him free.
Banned from Austria, he emigrates with his young wife to Australia
and is joined by their friend and benefactor ostensibly for a better
life than Austria offers. Already in rehearsal, the play was cancelled
by the theatres director, Carl, apparently due to its controversial
content, and never performed in Nestroys lifetime.
But let us go back to the Vormrz, a time when no text that
implied the slightest criticism of the dominant culture could be
performed on an Austrian stage. Looking at the plays Nestroy
submitted to the censor, we find that comments on the Empire, the
Catholic Church, the corruption of the judiciary, and so forth, as they
appear in plays performed after 1848, could not be voiced during the
Vormrz. Even though, as Gutzkow wrote in 1845:
Metternich und Sedlnitzky lassen zwar kein einziges Shakespearesches Stck
auffhren, in welchem ein zweideutiger Knig oder schlechter Minister
vorkommt, aber was man so gewhnlich in Oesterreich Komdien nennt [...]
und viel Nestroy, das lsst man zu. (Gutzkow, 229)
It was obviously Nestroys manner of performance that earned him the

recurrent condemnations for being a cynic, a promoter of anarchism, a
pornographer, and a tasteless panderer to his lower class audience.
However, many of the seemingly innocuous Vormrz texts are full of
subtle and not so subtle hints that things are not quite well in
Biedermeier Vienna. A good example is provided by Das Mdl aus
der Vorstadt, oder Ehrlich whrt am Lngsten, a farce in 3 acts based
on a French comdie-vaudeville. Nestroy kept the bare skeleton of his
source text but changed all of the characters. Opening in November
1841, it was a success with audiences and also most of the critics.
Nestroy wrote for himself the role of the Winkelagent
Schnoferl (the name means literally Snooper); a Winkelagent was a
small time hustler and arranger of petty business affairs, a con man as
well as gossip monger. Not the idea of a particularly sympathetic
99
character, but in Nestroys play he is the only person who is not more
or less corrupted, aside of the girl from the outer borough, the
needleworker Thekla. She defeats the advances of several horny rich
swains and, in another one of Nestroys deliberately hackneyed Happy
Endings, finally gets the young man she loves, a certain Herr von
Gigl, who seems to be nice enough but has repeatedly shown himself
as a pretty daft fellow. A central character is the Spekulant Kauz, a
player of the stock market who persuaded Schnoferl to invest money
with him, which Schnoferl promptly lost. It turns out that Kauz not
only sexually harassed and nearly tried to rape Thekla in the dark of
night in Viennas unlit back alleys, an assault Schnoferl prevented by
his intervention, but that he is a veritable white collar criminal.
Schnoferl eventually manages to blackmail him into handing back the
money he had stolen from his victims. The action is supposed to
happen in A big city and the country house of Kauz. But this is
clearly Vienna, and no one would have had any doubt about it. In
Vormrz Habsburg Austria, attacks on the new breed of capitalist
business men were obviously admissible, and jokes about a useless
and idle aristocracy seemed also not to bother the censor they might
have been opportune since they provided popular scapegoats for the
widespread disaffection with economic and political stagnation. Yet,
any reference to democratic values, the slightest hint smacking of
criticism of the ruling system was not permitted.
As for the unscrupulous Kauz, Schnoferl keeps greeting him with
the exclamation: Schauts, der Herr von Kauz! ridiculing the newly
established habit of elevating commoners, who were successful in
business and loyal to the Empire, to the state of nobility of lower
rank, of course. (Macartney, 2656) The farce clearly reflects the
economic plights which haunted Austria during the Vormrz. In one
of his songs, Schnoferl/Nestroy ridicules the many ways people fool
themselves about their prospects in life. The last verse comments on
the conditions the class structure of Vienna imposed on those with
little or no means:
s wart Einer in ein Vorzimmer bei ein nobeln Herrn
Auf die Gnad, dass er einmal wird vorglassen wern;
Nach 3 Wochen kommt dReih an ihn und er darfs wagn,
Carl Weber
100
In Demut sein Bitt um ein Dienst vorzutragn
Man hrt ihn in Gnaden und antwortt ihm dann:
Wir wolln sehn, was sich thun lasst, adieu lieber Mann!
Der jubelt jetzt froh: I hab mein Glck gmacht heut!
Na, lass ma ein Jeden sein Freud. (Exit.) (Nestroy, Stcke, 17/II, 12)
By the time Nestroy performed his farce with songs Der

Unbedeutende, in 1846, the economic crisis of Austria had become
quite severe. Food prices doubled within two years after 1845. In the
city of Linz, one third of the population lived below the officially
acknowledged poverty limit. The capital Vienna was flooded with
starving people from Bohemia and other provinces that had been
devastated by the economic crisis (Macartney, 313). Der Unbedeutende
responded to that crisis. For himself, Nestroy wrote the part of the
carpenter Peter Span, the insignificant man of the title, whose sister
had been disgraced by Puffmann (played by Scholz), corrupt secretary
of the millionaire Herr von Massengold, a dumb and lecherous man
who has no opinions but those his cherished secretary and his
dishonest friends are suggesting to him. Span eventually succeeds in
establishing the innocence of his sister who had been maligned for
sexual and moral depravity, due to one of Puffmanns devious
schemes. Span is one of the most sympathetic but nevertheless funny
characters Nestroy created for himself. When Puffmann tries to bribe
Span, so that the latter will retract his justified charges against
Puffmann, the carpenter replies:
Sie wollen mir Ihren Reichtum produzieren? das is ja eine ganz verfehlte
Spekulation, wenn man die Nachsicht des gereizten Armenbraucht,
sollte man ihn am wenigsten erinnern an die angeborne Feindschaft zwischen
Arm und Reich. (Nestroy, Stcke, 23/II, 23)
Spans class-conscious argument makes us think of the final lines in

Brechts comedy Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti, when Matti
remarks about the irreconcilable difference of rich and poor that sich
das Wasser mit dem l nicht mischt. Spans statement of 1846
certainly is harsher than Mattis, written nearly a hundred years later.
Franz Mautner noted:
101
Zwei Jahre vor der Revolution musste neben den knstlerischen Werten auch
diese Haltung Beifall finden; dass Nestroy bei der Premiere fnfunddreissigmal
hervorgerufen wurde, hatte er gewiss nicht nur ihnen oder seinem Spiel zu
verdanken. (Mautner, 272)
Nestroys portrayal of Span made the play a hit with his Vorstadt
audience, many of whom were of Spans class. They must have perceived
him as a mouthpiece for their many grievances.
Eva Reichmann has argued that Nestroy conceived his
Gesamtwerk with a conservative agenda, bent on preserving the
positive aspects of the disappearing patriarchal feudal system.
(Reichmann, 24) There is, however, no evidence that Nestroy heeded
any specific agenda in his work. He worked as performer and
playwright in a theatrical environment that was metropolitan,
constantly changing, thoroughly commercial and highly competitive.
He certainly had convictions and evidently modified them over the
years. His texts reflect the historic moment in which they were
performed, most of them culled from a wide variety of literary
sources. True, they contain statements that voice conservative
attitudes, but those can easily be attributed to the particular motives of
a character, to the permanent pressure of accommodating the censor,
or an understandable disappointment with the many flaws of the
progressive movement in the Empire. A close reading of his texts,
especially in view to their performative potential, hardly supports the
argument that Nestroy maintained a consistent conservative position.
Nestroy unfolded in his texts a full societal panorama of Imperial
Austria, comparable in scope only to the works of his contemporaries,
Dickens and Balzac.
The social results of a steadily expanding capitalist market
economy were a central topic in Nestroys work, and he exposed their
devastating impact on all aspects of life. But that does hardly imply he
was nostalgic for [ein] an den feudalistischen Grundstzen von
gegenseitiger Treue und Verpflichtung orientierten Gesellschaftssystem
as Reichmann claims (Reichmann, 26). In fact, he had a specific
derogatory term for that feudalist past which is frequently voiced by
the characters he played: Rokoko, his label for all remnants of die
102
Carl Weber
Zeit der Zoepfe, the time of pigtails that were in fashion during the
eighteenth century.
Reichmanns study offers, however, much valuable sociological
information, in particular her analysis of the distribution of parts in
Nestroys plays according to class, gender, and professional status. As
specified by her, we find in the plays 302 Bedienstete of all kinds,
from footmen to secretaries, household staff to gentlemans men, not
to mention the many who appear as extras in crowd scenes
(Reichmann, 1939). From the aristocracy, there are 2 Freiherren, 19
barons, baronesses or counts, and several Chevaliers or Monsieurs
who usually are con men or similar frauds (Reichmann, 124).
Aristocrats are in the main negatively marked, except for some
younger men who gained an academic education and try to make a
living of it, or are involved in progressive activities as, for instance,
Freiherr von Reichthal in Hoellenangst and Frau von Frankenfrey in
Freiheit in Kraehwinkel. There are several English Lords and Ladies,
all presented in a more or less positive light England is frequently
characterised by Nestroy as a country where the liberal and
democratic values prevail that are sorely missing in the Empire. As for
the new business class, Reichmann lists 18 Fabrikanten and owners of
large-scale agricultural enterprises, 12 Kapitalisten, 10 Partikuliers, 8
Reiche Privatmnner, 5 Rentiers, 4 Spekulanten, 3 Millionre. As
we see, the majority of them are living on the income their wealth
provides. Thirty-four Herren and 15 Frauen are titled with von while
their class status is not specified (Reichmann, 123). With very few
exceptions, they represent the bourgeoisie and as such are negatively
marked, their attitudes ranging from shabby pettiness and vapid
stupidity to outright criminal behaviour.
A remarkable aspect is that few complete families are
represented, whereas Reichmann describes many as amputiert, that
is, they consist of single fathers or mothers with children whom they
are desperately trying to sell to the highest bidder on the marriage
market. Nestroy presents 72 single fathers, most of them widowers in
an age when women frequently died in childbirth; they usually try to
arrange marriages for their offspring that would resolve the fathers
financial troubles. There are 33 widows with one or more children,
equally bent on finding them well-to-do matches. Compared to 105 of
103
such single parents who tend to treat their children as commodities,

we find only 31 complete families, i.e. couples with one or more
children (Reichmann, 2067). They are usually of lower class and
show genuine concern for the well-being of their children. Nestroy
especially took aim at the legal guardians of wealthy orphans who
conspire to get control of their wards fortune. There is no comparable
body of work in German drama where the commodification of the
most intimate human relationships is so consistently criticised and
derided.
As an actor and author Nestroy never ceased to subvert the
prevailing values and mores of Imperial Austria while he kept ridiculing
the follies and pretensions of contemporary literature, drama and opera.
In a truly comprehensive meaning of the term, Nestroy was performing
Counter-Culture in the Vorstadt. He had no counterpart in the German
culture of his time.
Works Cited
Costenoble, C.L. Aus dem Burgtheater. 18181837. Tagebuchbltter. Hg. K. Glossy,
J.Zeidler (Wien, Konegen, 1889), Band 2.
Gutzkow, K. Wiener Eindrcke, in Gutzkow, Gesammelte Werke Auswahl in zwlf
Teilen (Berlin, Deutsches Verlaghaus Bong & Co.), Band 11, 223260.
Hebbel, F. Das Versprechen hinterm Heerd im Burgtheater. In Hebbel, Gesammelte
Werke in 3 Baenden ( Berlin, Karl Voegels Verlag. 1928.) Band 3, 340348.
Kraus, K. Nestroy und die Nachwelt. Zum 50.Todestage, in Die Fackel (Wien, 13.
Mai 1912), 349/50, 123.
Macartney, C.A. The Habsburg Empire 17901918 (New York, Macmillan, 1969).
Mautner, F. H. Nestroy (Heidelberg, Stiehm Verlag, 1974).
Nestroy, J. Stcke, in Smtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, Hg. J. Hein, J.
Httner, W. Obermaier, W.E.Yates (Wien, Mnchen, Jugend und Volk,
Deuticke, 1977).
Reichmann, E. Konservative Inhalte in den Theaterstcken Johann Nestroys
(Wrzburg, Knigshausen und Neumann, 1995).
Schbler, W. Nestroy. Eine Biographie in 30 Szenen (Salzburg, Residenz Verlag,
2001)
Vischer, F.T. Eine Reise. in Kritische Gnge, Hg. R.Vischer (Leipzig, Verlag der
Weien Bcher, 1914) Band 1, 309450.
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Carl Weber
Yates, W. E. Nestroy. Satire and Parody in Viennese Popular Comedy (Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press, 1972).
Nestroy and the Critics (Columbia, S.C., Camden House, 1994).
MALCOLM HUMBLE
Das Reich der Erf llung : A Theme in

Wilhelmine Counter-Culture
Satirical treatments of a society at a distinctive phase in its history can

have the (sometimes unintended) effect of blinding the reader,
especially in a later age, to the forces within it which ran counter to
the image it had of itself and the image which appears in the work of
its critics. Heinrich Manns Der Untertan (1918, serial publication
having been halted in 1914 in order to forestall censorship) seems in
retrospect to encapsulate those features which now appear most
repellent about the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II: militarism,
authoritarianism, rigid conformity, greed and hypocrisy. Surviving
photographs and film images, in which overdressed and self-satisfied
aristocrats and bourgeois strut the pavements, bow to and salute one
another and either ignore or despise the lower orders, can all too often
confirm this picture. Although Heinrich Manns principal satirical
device, the parallel he successfully establishes between his anti-hero
Diedrich Hessling and the Kaiser, is devastatingly effective, he can
offer little positive alternative which might provide his readers with a
strategy for future change, as Social Democracy, as represented by the
worker Napoleon Fischer, is shown to be complicit with the machinations of Hessling and his fellow Honoratioren. Moreover, the only
challenge delivered to these is the melancholy and nostalgic appeal to
the democratic principles of the abortive 1848 revolution made via the
Bucks, father and son, who are eloquent in words but ineffective in
deeds. It is generally agreed that the ending, in which Hesslings
speech in praise of the system on the occasion of the unveiling of a
monument to his sovereign is drowned by a thunder-storm, implies its
apocalyptic destruction. Within the terms of the novel, in which
survival is guaranteed only by the policy of wer treten wollte, mute
sich treten lassen or by a withdrawal into the passive aestheticism of
Buck junior, there seems no room for a counter-culture representing a
106
Malcolm Humble
viable alternative to the status quo from a reading of the novel one is
led to the conclusion that the Second Reich provides all the
conditions, even more than the situation in the Bundesrepublik of the
1960s, for a counter-culture which could take only a politically
subversive, even explosive form.
This conclusion finds support in developments in the early years
of the Reich (the Grnderzeit), which were after all marked by a
wave of politically motivated terrorism (or die Propaganda der Tat,
as the perpetrators called it), for which anarchists were mainly
responsible. While it is true that these acts were part of an
international movement and that anarchism in Germany did not, even
at this time, have a mass following, the Emperor Wilhelm I was the
victim of assassination attempts twice in the same year (1878), in one
of which he was seriously injured. Later, at the consecration of the
Niederwalddenkmal on 28 September 1883, attended by most of the
imperial family as well as Bismarck, Moltke and several Bundesfrsten, an attempt to blow them up was only frustrated by the
incompetence of the would-be assassins. The repercussions of the
events of 1878 were considerable: Bismarck succeeded in tarring the
Social Democrats with the anarchist brush and was thus able to carry
the Sozialistengesetz though the Reichstag in an atmosphere of fear
which, it has been suggested, was partly fostered by agents
provocateurs who infiltrated the anarchist movement and influenced
its publications (see Carlson). Consequently militant political
anarchism was effectively destroyed, to reemerge only later in a
gentler and more constructive form in the writings and activities of
Gustav Landauer, while Social Democracy was forced underground
until the revocation of the Sozialistengesetz in 1890. At all events a
genuine counter-culture was unlikely to emerge from the efforts of
political parties on the left; understandably their priorities lay with the
improvement of the material lot of their constituency. It is therefore to
the Bildungsbrgertum that we must look for evidence of countercultural tendencies at this time, in particular to that section of it in
which monism the view, based on the Darwinist revision of mans
view of nature and his place in it, that there is no division between
body and soul, thus challenging both orthodox Christianity and
materialism was gaining ground. It is therefore by invoking the
Das Reich der Erfllung: A Theme in Wilhelmine Counter-Culture
107
monist rather than the Marxist paradigm that we are best able to define
Wilhelmine counter-culture.
The conflict between culture and counter-culture in the Second
Reich seems to be epitomised by two events. After the premiere of
Gerhart Hauptmanns Die Weber at the Deutsches Theater on 23
February 1893, Kaiser Wilhelm II cancelled the royal box there, after
attempting to prevent its performance even after the courts had
permitted it. In 1901 in a speech made at the opening of the
Siegesallee, a promenade lined with bombastic statues mainly of his
ancestors in the House of Hohenzollern, he declared:
Wenn nun die Kunst, wie es jetzt vielfach geschieht, weiter nichts tut, als das
Elend noch scheulicher hinzustellen wie es schon ist, dann versndigt sie sich
damit am deutschen Volke. Die Pflege der Ideale ist zugleich die grte
Kulturarbeit, und wenn wir hierin den anderen Vlkern ein Muster sein und
bleiben wollen, so mu das ganze Volk daran mitarbeiten, und soll die Kultur
ihre Aufgabe erfllen, dann mu sie bis in die untersten Schichten des Volkes
hindurchgedrungen sein. Das kann sie nur, wenn die Kunst die Hand dazu
bietet, wenn sie erhebt, statt in den Rinnstein niedersteigt!1
The sculptures of the Siegesallee, since removed after damage at the

end of World War II, were considered even at the beginning of the
century to be an anachronistic approach to the commemoration of
Germanys past, and were consequently satirised in a spate of
cartoons. In attacking what he defined as the art of the gutter, Wilhelm
was pointing to a deep division within contemporary German culture
and within the Bildungsbrgertum which sustained it. For him
Naturalism, in its concern with urban squalor and its attachment to the
principle of radical mimesis, was not only ugly but politically
subversive. It was in his eyes the artistic expression of Social
Democracy and thus hostile to the system embodied in himself. It
would be easy to take the Kaiser at his word and view the conflict
between culture and counter-culture as one between official art and a
narrowly defined Naturalism. However, one is then left with the
problem of placing in relation to this opposition the vast amount of art
and literature which cannot be subsumed under these headings.
Decadence, Impressionism, Jugendstil, the increasingly monumental
art which has been defined as Stilkunst, all clearly the work of the
1
Quoted in Akademie der Knste Berlin, Berlin um 1900, 199200.
108
Malcolm Humble
Bildungsbrgertum, cannot in the majority of cases be assigned to

either of these extremes. In search of the counter-culture which existed
during the Second Reich, we have to look more closely at
conventional definitions of Naturalism, and then take into account the
development within the Bildungsbrgertum of an alternative culture
which is inspired by monism and Lebensreform.
Because the generally accepted view of Naturalism has proved so
useful in explaining what is innovative in those texts which have
survived the early prose works of Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf,
Gerhart Hauptmanns Vor Sonnenaufgang and Die Weber it is not
surprising that it should have remained unquestioned. Early Naturalist
theory accords with the characteristic features of Naturalist
production, as well as with the influence of scientific positivism, Zola
and Ibsen. Because earlier in the nineteenth century Heine and the
writers of Jungdeutschland had turned against what they called the
Kunstperiode in the name of political emancipation, it is easy to
draw the conclusion that the early Naturalists were politically
motivated in rejecting poetic realism, the aestheticism of Paul Heyse
and the bombast of Grnderzeit art. However, the relations of some
Naturalists to Social Democracy were complex and increasingly
strained, and the authors normally identified with a narrowly defined
Naturalism soon broke away from it. The career of Gerhart
Hauptmann provides ample evidence that this Naturalism represented
merely one of a series of options, none of which was in the service of
a political cause. If we adopt a broader definition of Naturalism,
however, which would associate it with Darwinism and monism, we
can view it as a paradigm which allows us to situate central aspects of
other major artistic and cultural trends of the time, including
Jugendstil and Stilkunst.2 It can be shown that the narrow definition of
Naturalism, epitomised by Arno Holzs Die Kunst. Ihr Wesen und
ihre Gesetze, cannot account for either Gerhart Hauptmanns
development or the contribution of the group of writers who settled in
the Berlin suburb Friedrichshagen, who included Bruno Wille,
Wilhelm Blsche, Heinrich and Julius Hart. Their view of a
2
To my knowledge only Dieter Kafitz has given this development the emphasis
it deserves, in an article which sets out to consider the semantic implications of
Natur in the term Naturalism. See Kafitz, to which I am indebted for part of
the following.
109
scientifically based literature, which draws on Darwin and his

principal German disciple Ernst Haeckel, leads to a revision of the
positivist concept of Naturalism. Haeckels reputation in the first
decade of the twentieth century was considerable; indeed, it spread
further than that that of Nietzsche, who, while his reception by key
figures in literature and art is well known, did not reach far beyond an
elite. Haeckel on the other hand was a best-seller from well before the
turn of the century, and his photograph decorates the living-room of
Vockerats house in Friedrichshagen in the first act of Hauptmanns
Einsame Menschen. His popularity peaked in 1904 with a special
Haeckel number of the magazine Jugend (February 16) and his
proclamation as anti-pope at an International Conference of Freethinkers in Rome. Haeckel and his disciple Blsche espoused
Goethes organic view of nature and saw in him a predecessor of
Darwin. Although Haeckel, as a pure scientist, emphasised the
element of conflict and struggle in evolution, even he was ready to
postulate a spirit (Geist) in natural phenomena in order to distance
himself from the mechanical materialism of his scientist predecessors
(Ludwig Bchner and Jacob Moleschott) and place his own view in
close relation to a longer German tradition, represented not only by
Goethe, whom he quotes extensively, but also by Schelling and
Gustav Theodor Fechner. Blsche was to write a long essay on the last
of these, which begins by pointing out that his birth almost coincided
with the death of Novalis (Hinter der Weltstadt, 1904), while Bruno
Wille was to include a Gesprch mit Haeckel in his Offenbarungen
des Wacholderbaums of 1901. As Haeckel put it in an essay of 1892,
which appeared in Freie Bhne, the periodical most closely associated
with literary Naturalism:
Unzweideutig drcken wir damit unsere berzeugung aus, da ein Geist in
allen Dingen lebt, und da die ganze erkennbare Welt nach einem
gemeinsamen Grundgesetze besteht und sich entwickelt. Insbesondere betonen
wir dabei die grundstzliche Einheit der anorganischen und organischen Natur.3
There could be no more succinct summary of the monist

Weltanschauung. Wilhelm Blsche took the acclimatisation and
popularisation of Darwin a stage further by reducing the element of
3
Freie Bhne 3 (1892), 1157 (quoted in Kafitz, 17).
110
Malcolm Humble
struggle in his exposition of evolution and reinforcing the aesthetic

element already present in Haeckels presentation of the biosphere in
his richly illustrated Kunstformen der Natur (1899). Blsche also
managed to combine idealism, suggested by the optimistic teleology
he sees present in the manifold processes of adaptation, with a
pansexualism which finds expression in the title of his most popular
work, Das Liebesleben in der Natur, which appeared in three
volumes, published by the Eugen Diederichs Verlag from 1898 to
1902.
The brothers Hart, remembered now, if at all, as theoreticians
reacting in a militant spirit against an art they despised (Kritische
Waffengnge), base their Naturalism on a monism which is
indistinguishable from that of Haeckel, Blsche and Wille. In the first
part of Julius Harts Der neue Gott (1899), contemplation, rather than
analysis, ensures that the divisions which normally characterise our
view of nature are resolved: Natur und Geist flieen ineinander und
werden zu einem Einzigen, unser Ich breitet sich aus als das All der
Dinge und das All der Dinge mndet in unserem Ich.4
In Julius Harts poem Nebeltag in Berlin, in which this
Weltanschauung is expressed in literary form, the metaphor of the
isles of the blessed is introduced at two points to define the goal of
mans evolution:
[...] Es treibt der Menschheit Schiff
Nach tausend Wettern doch zu jenem Hafen
Der Seligen Inseln, wo die Strme schlafen [...]
Euch Kommenden vorauf fliegt unser Geist,
Ein Feuer in der Nacht; der euch die Pfade
Zum grnen Wunderland der Seligen weist,
Zum blhenden Land der Liebe und der Gnade [...]
and the poem ends with a vision of the Himmelsstadt (quoted in

Kafitz, 20). These religious connotations indicate an attempt to endow
a modified Social Darwinism with some of the attributes of the
Christianity which all these Naturalists considered superseded.
The isles of the blessed is merely one of many metaphors
Arcadia, Elysium, New Jerusalem, Eden, Golden Age, Hesperides,
4
Julius Hart, 187, 220, 2312, 2624 (quoted in Kafitz, 20).
111
Shangri-La, Atlantis for an ideal future state or utopia, in this life or

the next, which through the ages have inspired people to overcome (at
least in spirit) the deficiencies of their present lot. Their appearance in
German literature, especially in Romanticism and its long aftermath,
testifies to the strong utopian strain in German culture. In the art and
literature of the turn of the nineteenth century they become
particularly prominent, as groups within the Bildungsbrgertum react
against the increasingly over-rational and bureaucratic tendencies of a
society which is transforming itself into a major industrial power at
the cutting edge of scientific and technological progress. The isles of
the blessed appear in a section of Nietzsches Also sprach
Zarathustra, in Julius Harts epic cycle Der Triumph des Lebens, in
Holzs Die Blechschmiede, Blsches Das Liebesleben in der Natur,
and finally in clear reaction against what had become a modish trend
in a poem by Gottfried Benn (Gefilde der Unseligen). Those who
espoused a monist Weltanschauung were unwilling to postpone the
fulfilment of their dreams until after death or in the distant future, and
so they were faced with the question how their ideal might be realised
here and now. Aware that neither state action nor political revolution
would effect the necessary radical transformation of society, they saw
the key to the future in the creation of communities close to nature
detached from the society they despised, for only in such a
Nischengesellschaft would the life-style reform they envisaged be
practicable.
The Lebensreform movement of this time is a complex
phenomenon covering a number of separate groups with specific aims
nature therapy, the creation of rural settlements, vegetarianism,
nudism (naturism), informal clothing, free dance which have in
common the achievement of a more natural way of life. These aims
continue to be fostered by similar groups to the present day, but while
the element of protest against the deficiencies of advanced industrial
society is a constant thread through all such efforts, whatever their
time and place, only in Germany in the Second Reich and to some
extent in the Weimar Republic can Lebensreform be defined as a
cultural revolt, pursued with an intensity which eventually finds
expression in the youth movement, new educational institutions and
even new forms of religion and racist ideology. Lebensreform seeks
a third way between capitalism and socialism; it is Janus-faced: on
112
Malcolm Humble
the one hand its core aims can be considered acceptable (if cranky)
within certain parameters; on the other hand they can be and were
often linked, especially in some of the movements later manifestations, via Social Darwinism and eugenics to militant nationalism
and a racist ideology. These later developments need to be borne in
mind in any consideration of Wilhelmine counter-culture, although
careful distinctions have to be made between groups in order to avoid
the conclusion that all are in any way harbingers of National
Socialism.
A number of groups of very different character demonstrate the
variety of responses to the alienation from the conventions of
Wilhelmine society. The first, the Neue Gemeinschaft, can be linked
directly to the ideas and personalities already mentioned. Along with
Wille, Blsche and others, the brothers Hart had already spent some
years in the artists colony at Friedrichshagen when they decided to
create a more formally defined group. The monist foundation of the
ideas which guided the Friedrichshagener is evident first in their
decision to mark the anniversary of the death of Giordano Bruno, who
was burnt at the stake for heresy in Rome on 18 February 1600. The
Giordano-Bruno-Bund was established after a commemoration of
Brunos death on its three hundredth aniversary in the Beethoven-Saal
in Kthener Strae 32, Berlin. The programme gives an idea of the
loyalty of the organisers to traditional cultural ideals of the Bildungsbrgertum: Beethovens Overture to Egmont, played by the
Berliner Sinfonie-Orchester, conducted by Carl Zimmer, was followed
by Julius Harts Prolog (spoken by the actress Louise Dumont), a
Festrede given by Dr Hermann Brunnhofer, a recital of Brunos
poems by Max Laurence, the whole procedings being rounded off by a
performance of Wagners Eintritt der Gtter in Walhall (see
Kauffeldt/Kepl-Kaufmann, 351.) The Bund was the brain-child of
Wille and Blsche. Wille spoke at an early meeting of the Bund on
Materie nie ohne Geist and prefaced the publication of his speech
with a description of the Bunds meeting-place:
Der kleine Saal war mit tiefsinnigen Ideenbildern von Fidus ausgestattet.
Zwischen Lorbeerbschen stand auf einem altarhnlich drapierten Tische das
mchtig wirkende Giordano-Bruno-Bild von Fidus. Davor lagen blhende
Fliederzweige. Dahinter auf ragendem Sockel Brunos Bste, flankiert von den
Bsten Goethes und Spinozas. Am Rednerpulte das Goethebild von Fidus.
113
Links an der Wand Haeckels Portrt. Wagners Vorspiel zu Parzival und ein
Satz von Beethoven gelangten zum Vortrag auf dem Harmonium durch Herrn
Carl Spohr [...]5
It would be fair to call the Neue Gemeinschaft and the Bruno-Bund

sister organisations, but the Harts (who were founding members of the
Bund) wished to go further than Wille and Blsche beyond the
propagation of a Weltanschauung to the practical realisation of their
ideas. While the activities of the Bund were confined to a series of
lectures and commemorations, the Neue Gemeinschaft proceeded to
establish an experiment in communal living which, while it proved to
be unviable in the long run, did draw into the circle a number of
figures whose later careers as writers and intellectuals have given
them more lasting fame than the Friedrichshagener have enjoyed.
Peter Hille, Else Lasker-Schler, Erich Mhsam and Gustav Landauer
have all left testimonies of their involvement, which are of interest
largely for their exposure of the groups deficiencies, but which also
throw light on the appeal of such experiments to those seeking
alternatives to the dominant culture. The Neue Gemeinschaft began
with meetings and Feste at various venues in the centre of Berlin
before finding a headquarters in February 1901 at Uhlandstrae 144.
Eventually it was able in March 1902 to establish a proper home in a
villa in the suburbs near the Schlachtensee (Seestrae 35/37), which
was decorated in a manner which reflected the ideology which
underlay the groups aims. An account of the interior survives in one
of the groups publications:
Von der Veranda aus, die zu ruhigem, beschaulichen Denken enldt, tritt man
ein. Rechts grt von einem Postament herab die bekannte Nietzsche-Bste,
whrend zur rechten Seite der Blick auf eine Kopie von Bcklins Toteninsel
fllt, die eine ganze Wandflche bedeckt [...] Auer den beiden Brdern Hart,
den geistigen Fhrern der Neuen Gemeinschaft, hausen dort noch Familien und
Einzelwesen. Mnner mit langem Haupt- und Barthaar und zarte Frauen in
Reformkleidern. Zu dem oberen Stockwerk fhrt eine sanft aufsteigende Ebene
keine Treppe. Auf einer Biegung steht das Rednerpult, von wo aus die neuen
Wahrheiten verkndet werden.6
5
6
Materie nie ohne Geist. Vortrag im Giordano Bruno-Bund zu Berlin (Berlin

1901), 3, quoted in Berlin um 1900, 377.
Heinrich und Julius Hart (ed.), Neue Gemeinschaft (1902), Nr. 7, 6 (quoted in
Sigrid Bauschinger, 63).
114
Malcolm Humble
Two flags, violet and green, representing positivism and metaphysics,

flew over the building, while the rooms were decorated with Taoist
epigrams, together with pictures and busts by Bcklin and Fidus. The
publications had a logo combining the infinity symbol for the new
Weltanschauung and the triangle as a sign of the unity of thinker,
thought and thinking power.
Communal life in the villa did not go beyond certain limits;
members had their private space, in which their property remained
theirs. A common kitty provided for basic expenses and shared meals.
The demise of the group can be explained partly by its dependence on
a basic subscription and voluntary contributions and by the reluctance
of many of its members to engage in the physical labour necessary if it
was to be self-supporting. As a report in the SPD organ Vorwrts
pointed out: Die Gartenarbeiten werden mehr zur Erholung von
geistiger Ttigkeit, nicht zu wirtschaftlichen Zwecken, betrieben: wie
denn die Mitglieder der Gemeinschaft berhaupt nicht die Absicht
haben, Bauern zu werden oder zu einem Rousseauschen Naturzustande zurckzukehren (quoted in Linse, 80). However, discussions
in the group led to the formation of the Deutsche Gartenstadtgesellschaft in 1902, and the archetypal Bohemian poet Peter Hille
was able to find refuge and care there from an unsettled hand-tomouth existence before his death in 1904. Further activities included
excursions to the rural environs of Berlin, one of which, held on 6
June 1900 and commemorated in a photograph, drew from Landauer
the following comment:
Mittwoch nach Pfingsten schlielich fand ein Ausflug der Hartgemeinschaft,
etwa 70 Personen nahmen teil, nach Friedrichshagen statt. Ein schner Moment
voll religiser Stimmung war es, als wir uns an einer schnen Stelle am Seeufer
gelagert hatten; ein wundervolles Mondlicht auf dem See und den Kiefern,
Gewitterwolken am Himmel und fernes Donnern, whrend eine Prologdichtung
Heinrich Harts [Zur Weihe] vorgetragen wurde, der ein lngerer ernster und aus
der Tiefe schpfender Vortrag Julius Harts [Der neue Mensch] folgte. Leben
Leben! klang aus diesen Worten der beiden Brder, und die Natur rief uns
dasselbe zu.7
Letter of June 8 1900 from Landauer to Hedwig Lachmann, quoted in Linse,

67.
115
Perhaps the most significant indication of the way in which the

members of the Neue Gemeinschaft attempted to live according to a
secular Weltanschauung while preserving a religious element, is the
series of Feste organised under new names to correspond to the cycle
of the Christian year. These included, after a number of Weihefeste
and Liebesmahle, a Fest des Todes and a Tao-Fest, and in 1903 a
whole series beginning with Neue Dionysien on the night of February
21/22 (a fancy dress ball), followed by a Fest der Vershnungen on
Easter Monday, a Fest der Seligen on Ascension Day, a Fest der
Unendlichkeit planned to take place at an astronomical observatory,
another Fest des Todes on Bu- und Bettag and a Fest der
Selbsterlsungen on Christmas Day.
The purpose of these feasts is outlined in the publicity material
for the Neue Gemeinschaft: Sie [die Feste] wollen dem modernen
Menschen ein Ersatz sein fr die alten religisen Feiern, die mit dem
Verfall der alten Religionen und Kulturen fr ihn Inhalt und
Bedeutung verloren haben.8
They represent a development of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which,
with its roots in Wagner, was a major preoccupation of many artistic
circles at this time:
wollen wir jeder Feier das Geprge eines in sich abgeschlossenen, organisch
zusammenhngenden Kunstwerkes aufdrcken, in dem alle einzelnen Teile
Rede und Musik, Gemlde, Plastik, Dekoration und Schmuck in inneren
wesentlichen Beziehungen zu einander stehen. 9
The publications of the Neue Gemeinschaft also include two

programmatic collections of essays under the series title Das Reich
der Erfllung. Flugschriften einer neuen Weltanschauung, the first
consisting of proclamations by the Harts and the second of further
speeches by the Harts, followed by contributions by Landauer (Durch
Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft) and Felix Hollaender (Von
festlicher Lebensfhrung).
A newsletter also appeared in two stages, from October to
December 1900 and from December to November 19012. The
manifestoes of the Harts can be read as sermons or occasionally even
as parts of a liturgy.
8
9
From a promotion leaflet quoted in Linse, 72.

Die Neue Gemeinschaft. Unsere Feste, quoted in Linse, 73.
116
Malcolm Humble
Jenes dritte Reich, das Reich der Erfllung, das Reich des Geistes in
entschiedenerer Weise heraufzufhren, als es der Menschheit in ihrer
Allgemeinheit mglich ist, es in engeren Kreisen schon heute vorbildlich zu
verwirklichen, das ist das wesentliche Ziel der Neuen Gemeinschaft. [...] Wer
[...] ein Mensch der Neuen Gemeinschaft ist, nicht nur dem Namen nach, der
ist in dieser Welt [...]
Ein Haloser unter all den Hassenden,
Ein Spendender unter all den Raubenden,
Ein Freier unter all den Verknechteten,
Ein Furchtloser unter all den Gengsteten,
Ein Wunschloser unter all den Gierigen,
Ein Krankheitsloser unter all den Bresthaften,
Ein Wissender unter all den Unwissenden,
Ein Seliger unter all den Bedrckten. (Quoted in Posener, 2712)
In defining the Reich der Erfllung as a Third Reich the Harts were
merely taking up a concept which can be traced back to the Middle
Ages and the eschatological writings of Joachim of Fiore; indeed
usage of this term before 1920 cannot on the whole be construed as in
any way of sinister political significance. What makes the Harts
monism as outlined in the propaganda for the Neue Gemeinschaft
problematic is its concern to dissolve all differences in an allembracing, indeed oceanic or cosmic unity which ignores the
practicalities of earthly existence. It was no doubt this watery idealism
which eventually alienated the more intelligent members of the group
and led to its break-up in 1904. The Giordano-Bruno-Bund proved to
have more staying power and led to the foundation of the Deutscher
Monistenbund in 1906.
Yet the example set by the Neue Gemeinschaft was to be
followed by those who formed other groups in the following years.
These include the Werdandi-Bund, founded in 1907 to encourage a
national renewal in art and architecture, the Sera-Kreis formed by the
publisher Eugen Diederichs to encourage his own version of festive
spirituality amongst the young, the colony established in Ascona in
the Swiss canton Ticino (Tessin) by a group of seven drop-outs, which
became the gathering point of a colourful mixture of anarchists, nature
therapists, unorthodox psychoanalysts and advocates of free dance
between 1900 and 1920, the St. Georgs-Bund initiated by the artist
Fidus (Hugo Hppener) and Gertrud Prellwitz in 1909, and finally the
garden suburb founded by Karl Schmidt and Wolf Dohrn at Hellerau
near Dresden. Hellerau resulted from six years of effort by the
117
Deutsche Gartenstadtgesellschaft, which had been the brain-child of

members of the Neue Gemeinschaft. Founded in 1908, it became a
centre not only of cottage industries modelled on the ideas of
Ebenezer Howard, the founder of the garden city movement in Britain,
but also of artistic developments, represented especially by the work
for the theatre of the designer Edmond Appia and the choreographer
Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (both Swiss), which made a significant
contribution to international modernism. In 1898 the furniture
manufacturer Karl Schmidt, inspired by William Morris, had founded
the Dresdner Werksttten fr Handwerkskunst; in 1906 he decided to
move his works a few miles from the city and build a settlement
which would differ from earlier factory villages in being controlled,
not by the employer, but by an independent company in which the
residents would be represented. In 1913 Heinrich Tessenow was
commissioned to build the temple-like theatre which had the yin-yang
symbol placed on the pediment over the entrance, a sign perhaps of
the holism also evident in the monistic Weltanschauung. Yet the
double aspect of Lebensreform counter-culture is evident even in a
place where more familiar aspects of modernity can be traced, for
Hellerau was also the base of two right-wing ventures: the
Hakenkreuz Verlag, run by Bruno Tanzmann, who was also active in
the Artamanen (a youth group formed in the cause of land settlement
in the East) and promoted the racist ideas of Heinrich Pudor, and the
land colony and school Vogelhof established by Ferdinand Schll.
(See Mosse, 117, 1212, and Sarfert, 912.)
An element of continuity is present in the efforts of all these
groups to cultivate a more natural approach to life and art within the
context of monism, for while those associated with Ascona and
Hellerau made no declarations of allegiance to monism comparable to
the pronouncements of the Harts, they demonstrated by their practice
a more radical concern to live out the implications of the cultural
revolt which had been adumbrated in the Neue Gemeinschaft. If there
is an event which allows us to link the pansexual monism of the
Friedrichshagener and the personal sexual freedom advocated by some
of the habitus of the Ascona colony (e.g. Otto Gross, Fanny
Reventlow and the dancer Rudolf von Laban) it is the meeting in
Bayreuth in 1904 between Ernst Haeckel and the American dancer
Isadora Duncan.
118
Malcolm Humble
Isadora wrote to Haeckel on 17 February of that year on the

occasion of his seventieth birthday after reading his work in the
British Museum; she had herself photographed sitting at a table with a
picture of him in her hand and his works beside her. In a reply dated
March 2, which she received when she was in Berlin, Haeckel
expressed his admiration for her art and the hope that they might meet,
for, as he put it, als Autor der Anthropogenie wrde ich entzckt sein,
in den harmonischen Bewegungen Ihrer anmutigen Person das hchste
Meisterwerk der entwickelnden Natur zu bewundern, before signing
off with best wishes for the growing success of her art-reform along
the lines of evolving nature. Engaged to perform in the bacchanal in
Wagners Tannhuser during the 1904 Bayreuth season, Isadora
invited him to attend the Festspiele and see Parsifal. She met him at
the station, persuaded Cosima to allow him to sit in the box reserved
for the Wagner family, and gave a party in his honour, to which she
invited Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria and other royalty. Haeckel,
although he failed to appreciate Parsifal, compared Isadoras dance to
the universal truths of nature, an Ausdruck monistischer
Weltanschauung.10 Although an American with a tenuous connection
to only one of the groups listed (Ascona, which she visited in 1913)
Isadora surely epitomises some of the important features of the
counter-culture which was emerging during the Second Reich.
Equally representative of the character of Wilhelmine counterculture is the artist Fidus, whose work is referred to in numerous
accounts of the turn of the nineteenth century. He was particularly
active at that time, providing illustrations to Willes Offenbarungen
des Wacholderbaums, including a picture of Goethe entitled Macte
Imperator which later appeared in the magazine Jugend (Nr. 32,
1900). His later career shows how the more spiritual side of the
monist synthesis appealed strongly to elements of the Bildungsbrgertum, especially the Youth Movement, for which Lichtgebet,
portraying a naked youth with outstretched arms, became an icon.
Fiduss work indicates how Kitsch ingredients (especially the style he
cultivated for the presentation of naked forms) could assist the
propagation of a world view which its supporters hoped would not be
10
See Duncan, My Life, chapter 16 and Niehaus, 33 (the latter for the quotations
in German from Haeckel).
119
confined to a few esoteric circles, and his designs for temples

demonstrate how Haeckels call at the end of his bestseller Die
Weltrtsel for places of worship dedicated to monism might be
realised.
Wilhelmine counter-culture is a complex phenomenon, on which
it is possible to take more than one view. On the one hand, some of its
features secularisation (or at least the dissolution of the authority of
throne and altar), the emergence of a group consciousness which
might overcome the extremes of individual isolation and submission
to state ideology, awareness of and occasionally involvement in an
international avant-garde which can be construed as part of the
movement towards a modernity compatible with democracy, seem in
the context of World War I and the turbulence of the Weimar
Republic to lead in no clear direction or to be undermined and stifled
even before the Nazi takeover. On the other hand later German
counter-cultures could be said to have built on the foundations laid at
this time, sometimes without being aware of their debt, at the same
time ensuring that whatever nationalist or racist overtones were
present in the cultural revolt of sections of the Bildungsbrgertum in
the early years of the twentieth century would be excluded from the
cultural developments of its second half.
Works Cited
Bauschinger, S. Else Lasker-Schler: ihr Werk und ihre Zeit (Heidelberg, Lothar
Stiehm Verlag, 1980)
Berlin um 1900: Ausstellung der Berlinischen Galerie in Verbindung mit der
Akademie der Knste zu den Berliner Festwochen 1984. Akademie der Knste
9. September bis 28. Oktober 1984 (Berlin, Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung,
1984).
Carlson, A. Anarchismus und individueller Terror im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1870
1890, in Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Gerhard Hirschfeld (Hg.), Sozialprotest,
Gewalt, Terror. Gewaltanwendung durch politische und gesellschaftliche
Randgruppen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Verffentlichungen des Deutschen
Historischen Instituts London Band 10) (Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1982), 20736.
Duncan, I. My Life (London, Victor Gollancz, 1996).
120
Malcolm Humble
Hart, J. Der neue Gott. Ein Ausblick auf das neue Jahrhundert (Zukunftsland Band 1)
(Florence/Leipzig, E. Diederichs, 1899).
Kafitz, D. Tendenzen der Naturalismus-Forschung und berlegungen zu einer
Neubestimmung des Naturalsimus-Begriffs, Deutschunterricht, 40, 2 (1988),
1129.
Kauffeldt, R./Kepl-Kaufmann, G. Berlin-Friedrichshagen. Literaturhautpstadt um die
Jahrhundertwende. Der Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis (Munich, Boer, 1994)
Linse, U. (Hg), Zurck O Mensch zur Mutter Erde. Landkommunen in Deutschland
18901933 (Munich, dtv, 1983).
Mosse, G. L. The Crisis of German Ideology. Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich
(New York, Howard Fertig, 1964).
Niehaus, M. Isadora Duncan. Leben. Werk. Wirkung (Wilhelmshaven, Heinrichshofen, 1981).
Posener, J. Berlin auf dem Weg zu einer neuen Architektur. Das Zeitalter Wilhelms II
(Munich, Prestel, 1979).
Sarfert, H. J. Hellerau. Die Gartenstadt und Knstlerkolonie (Dresden, HellerauVerlag, 1993).
DAVID MIDGLEY
Los von Berlin! Anti-Urbanism as CounterCulture in Early Twentieth-Century Germany
The growth of the industrial city generated some measure of revulsion

and concern wherever it occurred in Europe. The problems posed by
population density, pauperisation, unhealthy living conditions, and the
emergence of new and unfamiliar patterns of social and cultural
behaviour invited scathing characterisation by writers Dickenss
Coketown, Cobbetts Great Wen but they also prompted practical
suggestions for reform wherever they arose (see Mumford, chapter 3;
Glass). If German responses to the phenomenon have attracted special
comment from historians and prompted them to adopt a distinctive
line of analysis, then this is because of the way they relate to specific
elements in German cultural tradition and political development. The
particular rhetoric with which campaigners around 1900 respond to
the deleterious effects of industrialisation in Germany owes much to
the Romantic idealisation of nature, which had been a common feature
of literary writing during the previous century; and the strong
association between cultural identity and the natural landscape, which
had become a characteristic feature of German Romantic nationalism
during the same period, was taken up and exploited by the National
Socialist movement after the First World War even if anti-urbanism
as such appears to have had no significant impact on policies that were
actually implemented once Hitler was in power (see Bergmann,
35460).
In the standard literature on German environmentalism, the
connections between anti-urbanism and Romantic nationalism have
been traced back to Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl
in the early and mid-nineteenth century, who establish a powerful
sense of German identity as rooted in the landscape it inhabits, in the
rivers, hills and forests which are coming under threat from human
economic activity (Dominick, 2230; Riordan, 816). Arguably the
122
David Midgley
tendency of German writers to idealise rural life and to demonise the

city can be traced back further still: Friedrich Sengle, in a much
quoted article of 1963, saw the origins of the antithesis Wunschbild
Land, Schreckbild Stadt reaching back at least to the seventeenth
century (Sengle, 6212). Among the responses to Germanys rapid
industrialisation in the second half of the nineteenth century, there is
definitely a strand of vlkisch thought running from Paul de Lagardes
Deutsche Schriften in the 1870s to Alfred Rosenbergs Mythos des 20.
Jahrhunderts in 1930 which actively seeks to reverse the processes of
urbanisation and to restore Germany to a predominantly agrarian
economy (Stern, chapter 2; Rosenberg, 5507). Antipathy towards the
Grostadt is further reinforced in the 1920s by Spenglers apocalyptic
characterisation of urban civilisation in Der Untergang des Abendlandes as the degenerate last phase of any human culture (Spengler,
67387). The legacy of such stereotypical thinking evidently
continued to make itself felt in Germany well after the end of the
Second World War (Bahrdt, 5762). And those who look for evidence
of continuity between the thinking of early Romanticism and that of
National Socialism will find it in the writings and campaigning of
Richard Walther Darr, the leading exponent of Blut und Boden
ideology and the Reichsbauernfhrer in Hitlers regime (Riordan, 24
6; Dominick, 8595; see also Mosse, chapter 1).
Only recently has the scholarly investigation of German
environmental campaigning in the early twentieth century begun to
extricate itself from the dominance of these historical associations.
The volume Antimodernismus und Reform. Beitrge zur Geschichte
der deutschen Heimatbewegung, edited by Edeltraud Klueting and
published in 1991, took a fresh look at the actual nature of
campaigning activity and what it achieved; and William H. Rollinss
book A Greener Vision of Home (1997) presents a robust challenge to
the conventional view that the Heimatschutz movement in the period
before the First World War was essentially a manifestation of
Romantic aestheticism. In this paper I consider the Bund Heimatschutz, which was founded in 1904, as a counter-culture to the
dominant tendencies of its time, and attempt to situate that movement
in relation to other reforming developments of the early twentieth
century. In the light of the recent publications on the movement, I also
offer a suggestion about the kind of research which is needed to
Los von Berlin! Anti-Urbanism as Counter-Culture
123
clarify further the role the movement played in German cultural

history.
It is unlikely that the promoters of anti-urban attitudes in
Wilhelmine Germany would have recognised themselves as a
counter-culture, because as far as they were concerned, everything
they were fighting against amounted to Unkultur. They saw the city,
and Berlin in particular, as the focus of forces which were eroding
cultural traditions, harbouring new and insidious intellectual attitudes,
and generally fomenting a materialistic and individualistic outlook on
life which directly threatened the communal values they associated
with rural living and the small towns of the provinces. This antiurbanism was a way of focusing a broader antipathy for the impact of
a dynamic liberal capitalism on life in Germany. The phrase Los von
Berlin is most commonly associated with the Alsatian-born writer
Friedrich Lienhard, who used it as the title for an essay in the
periodical Deutsche Heimat in 1902, in which he denounced the
corrosive negativism and soullessness of contemporary literature
(behind which he detected the influence of Nietzsches psychology
and the naturalism of Zola), the scepticism of literary criticism, and
the cynicism of the feuilleton writers, and blamed the ambience of the
Grostadt for cultivating the sensational and the novel at the expense
of any sense for abiding values. It was the dominance of that
ambience that Lienhard was calling upon the rest of Germany to
combat (Schutte/Sprengel, 2204). But the slogan had been used
before in a similar spirit in the pages of Der Kunstwart (Riffert, 11;
see also Der Kunstwart, 17 (19034), 19, 357), a periodical
established in 1887 by Ferdinand Avenarius with the purpose of
defining and articulating cultural values for the German nation. Der
Kunstwart was receptive to many intellectual currents of the time,
including vlkisch thought and social Darwinism, but its sense of
ethical mission was focused above all on the notion of the integrative
power of art, for the individual personality and for the national
community, in an age increasingly marked by social divisions and
economic specialisation (Kratzsch, 15980). As such, the journal also
provided a natural forum for the discussion of the impact of
industrialisation on the natural environment, and of that special sense
124
David Midgley
of a relationship between human beings and their environment which

was implied by the term Heimat.1
The most tireless campaigner for the defence of the environment
against the effects of industrialisation was Ernst Rudorff, a Romantic
idealist who was bent on preserving the traditional system of social
relations on the land, as well as the landscape itself. His proclamation
of aims, published in 1897, speaks of the rape of the landscape for
such material purposes as railway construction, timber-felling for the
paper industry, and the modification of river courses for shipping and
for hydro-electric schemes; the revolting advertisement of nature for
the purposes of attracting tourists; and the general destruction of that
Ursprnglichkeit which, in his eyes, made nature what it was. He
complains that servants are hard to come by because the young
generation is being seduced away from the land by the prospect of
better-paid work in factories; and he notes that conditions in the cities
are even worse: im groen und ganzen ist die Durchsetzung mit
Mietkasernen, mit prahlerisch massiger moderner Architektur berall
dieselbe; Spekulationswut, gedankenlose Sucht nach Neuerung und
leerer Eleganz rumen hier wie dort mit dem charaktervollen Erbe der
Vorzeit auf (see Rudorff, Heimatschutz, 403). The curse of the age,
he concludes, is the subordination of socio-political and socio-ethical
considerations to the demands of machine-production and the market
economy. Rudorffs views were greeted in Der Kunstwart with
considerable sympathy, although its editor noted that his campaign
would need to temper its zeal with an awareness of the practical needs
of modern populations and a modern economy (see Der Kunstwart, 15
(19012), 7, 357; 17 (19034), 12, 6537; and Kratzsch, 21026).
In practice, three phases have been identified in the development
of the Heimatschutz movement (Sieferle, 14973). The first goes back
to Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl around the middle of the nineteenth
century, and a social conservatism which sought to preserve a sense of
intimate connection between cultural identity and landscape in the
face of the early effects of industrialisation. The second is the
Romantic idealism of Rudorff, which voices a nostalgia to return to an
imagined state of nature after industrialisation has undeniably made its
impact on society and the environment. But when the Bund
For the resonances of this term, see Applegate, 319; Boa/Palfreyman.
125
Heimatschutz becomes organised as a reformist movement pursuing

specific goals, then pragmatism does indeed temper the Romanticism.
In this third phase, which runs up to the First World War and beyond,
the most influential figure is Paul Schultze-Naumburg, another regular
contributor to Der Kunstwart, who in addition to being the first
President of the Bund Heimatschutz and the convenor of its working
group on buildings (see Der Stdtebau (1904), 5, 78), was also
involved in a variety of other organisations concerned with urban
development as well as environmental protection and the promotion of
cultural values. Schultze-Naumburg had been associated with the
artists Sezession in Berlin and Munich in the 1890s, and became a
founder member of the Werkbund and the Gartenstadtgesellschaft as
well as the Bund Heimatschutz and the Drerbund, the executive arm,
so to speak, of Der Kunstwart (Borrmann, 636; Jefferies,
Heimatschutz; Klueting, Heimatschult 1998, 501). Under his
presidency, which lasted until 1913, the primary focus of the Bunds
activities was on buildings, and their first major success was to press
for measures at national level against bauliche Verunstaltung in Stadt
und Land which were enacted in 1908 (Ringbeck, 217, 2201;
Jefferies 1995, 8292).
The time around 1904, when the Bund Heimatschutz was
founded, was also the moment when a variety of other reform
movements were getting under way. (These are now fully documented
in a Handbook edited by Diethart Krebs and Jrgen Reulecke.) They
included the legendary youth movement, which seems to have had its
roots in the largely spontaneous organisation of youth groups in
Berlin, who spent their weekends rambling and camping in the
surrounding countryside. They included the establishment of rural
boarding-schools (Landerziehungsheime) aimed at providing a more
wholesome education than could supposedly be found in the towns,
and a vigorous art education movement. They included a variety of
communal settlements, most of them short-lived, some of which were
based on utopian socialist or communist thinking such as inspired the
best-known Expressionist dramatists,2 some of which were decidedly
Romantic in persuasion and wanted actively to combat the drift of
populations to the city and encourage a return to the soil, and some
2
I am thinking here in particular of Gustav Landauer, whose idealistic

conception of human community inspired both Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser.
126
David Midgley
of which sought to cultivate a new awareness of nature and the body.

Several of these settlements, particularly those in the last category,
were associated with Berlin intellectuals, and were established indeed
on the fringes of Berlin (at Friedrichshagen and Schlachtensee); even
the famous artists community of Monte Verit at Ascona came to be
referred to ironically as a suburb of Berlin (Feuchter-Schawelka,
237). It was as if Berlin had itself become the focus for attempts to
overcome the dominant life-style of Berlin. It was out of one of the
Berlin-based communities (the Neue Gemeinschaft associated with
the Hart brothers) that a German garden city movement emerged in
1902, inspired by the example of Ebenezer Howard in England
(Welwyn Garden City did not yet exist, but Letchworth did); and the
most substantial achievement of the German garden city movement
was the new town of Hellerau near Dresden, which became a focus for
various experiments in reform living in the decade before the First
World War (see Malcolm Humbles contribution to this volume). It
even appears that most of the financial support for the Bund
Heimatschutz came from the big cities (Applegate, 105). But at the
same time that all these developments were taking place, approaches
to city planning itself were also changing radically, and a forum for
the discussion of these changes was established in 1904 with the
foundation of a new journal, Der Stdtebau.3
Municipalities themselves, of course, were faced with the
problem of how to respond to the pressures arising from the growth of
urban populations in the course of industrialisation, how to alleviate
the effects of dense and unhygienic housing conditions, and the
remedies were not as easy to achieve as they might appear to us
nowadays. There were complex legal issues to resolve, particularly
concerning questions of jurisdiction and property rights, before
German cities could break out of their medieval boundaries many of
them were still walled and develop less dense housing areas for their
swelling populations. Frankfurt came to be thought of as a pioneer in
this context because it led the way in resolving these legal difficulties;
Berlin was thought of as lagging far behind because it had been
committed since the 1870s to a particularly rigid and crude
3
The journals full title was Der Stdtebau. Monatschrift fr die knstlerische
Ausgestaltung der Stdte nach ihren wirtschaftlichen, gesundheitlichen und
sozialen Grundstzen.
127
development plan which amounted to cutting land up into uniform

plots on a gridiron pattern and allowing developers to do what they
wanted on each plot within certain limitations (Sutcliffe, 945). The
result was precisely that dense speculative development and
characterlessness that the anti-urbanists complained of. But other
cities were looking for more sensitive solutions to their problems, and
early numbers of Der Stdtebau reported on expansion plans for
towns as varied as Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Augsburg, Hanover, Jena,
Mainz, Wiesbaden, and Flensburg. Professional architects, as much as
environmental campaigners, were looking for ways to get away from
Berlin, or at least from that arbitrary and stylistically eclectic type of
urban development for which Berlin had acquired an unsavoury
reputation in the later nineteenth century.
The presiding genius behind Der Stdtebau, although he died
shortly before it began to publish, was Camillo Sitte, a Viennesebased architect whose book Der Stdtebau nach seinen knstlerischen
Grundstzen, originally published in 1889, became a common point
of reference for city planners and anti-urbanists alike (see Rudorff,
404) because it was deeply critical of the approach to city
development which prevailed in Berlin and which amounted to
treating the issue as a purely technical one. Sitte was no backwardlooking Romantic (see Collins/Crasemann Collins). He was fully
aware of the need to plan for modern industrial populations, but his
book was concerned above all with overcoming the characterlessness
of the geometrically planned industrial city and applying what could
be learned from older approaches, particularly those of the medieval
towns and the planned cities of the Baroque period, in order to make
the modern city more hospitable and more aesthetically pleasing. His
pet themes were the arrangement of public spaces (which should be
designed to show off particular features of the buildings which line
them, rather than being focused on their geometric centre) and the
advantages of narrow winding streets rather than wide straight ones
(because they, too, serve to show off attractive faades, and also
provide some protection from driving winds). Sitte himself was no
great friend of green spaces in cities (he preferred to see gardens kept
separate from public thoroughfares, tucked away behind screens of
buildings, and he did not like to see faades obscured by trees). But
another complementary development on which Der Stdtebau reports
128
David Midgley
in its early issues is a growing interest in the greening of the city,

providing public gardens and recreation areas as a municipal venture,
by contrast with the private patronage of aristocrats and entrepreneurs
(Krupps in Essen is the most often cited example) which had
previously been the primary source of public gardens.
So we now have a number of distinctive elements combining to
determine the complexion of arguments and attitudes about living
conditions and cultural values in the first decade of the twentieth
century. In addition to the lobbying of the Romantic traditionalists
who want to preserve whatever they can of earlier life-styles, we have
the pressures of an industrial economy which militate towards
maximising the financial return from individual building plots; and
alongside the utopian projects to restore humanity in one way or
another to living in touch with nature, we have the development of a
professional approach to city planning which takes account of social
and aesthetic questions as well as technical ones. Where the picture
gets really interesting is when these elements start to interact in
specific circumstances, in the context of specific building projects and
organisational developments.
Part of the record of such interaction shows an antagonistic
relationship between traditionalists and modernisers, and the Bund
Heimatschutz undoubtedly became a thorn in the side of those who
wanted modern architecture to reflect the character of modern life, or
to allow the individual architect scope for creative freedom. Der
Stdtebau was suspicious of the implications of Altertmelei from
the outset, and even before the formal foundation of the Bund
Heimatschutz a contributor noted that a number of cities were not just
trying to preserve the character of their existing old town, but
insisting that new faades should exactly match the old; the
contributor condemned this approach as a falsification both of the
historical record and of the lived reality of the contemporary age, and
wondered whether putting the control of city planning in the hands of
the municipalities had been such a good idea after all (Der Stdtebau
I, 4, pp. 558). And when the Deutscher Werkbund, the most
important association of architects, engineers and manufacturers, was
set up in 1907, serious differences soon emerged between a faction
spearheaded by Paul Schultze-Naumburg which wanted to commit the
organisation to the continuation of traditional building styles and those
129
like Henry van de Velde who wanted it to promote innovative design

(Campbell, 53; see also Der Kunstwart, 24 (191011), 4, 27884).
The campaign of the Bund Heimatschutz against buildings with flat
roofs was well under way before the First World War (Rollins, 133
4); and this sort of conflict was to sharpen and become more political
in the 1920s, when Schultze-Naumburg led a relentless campaign
against modernist architects although by that time he had openly
espoused racialist cultural theories, and had parted company with the
main Heimatschutz organisation, whose policies on the whole
remained distinguishable from Nazi ideology (Borrmann, 1513;
Campbell, 2702; Klueting 1998, 501; Ditt 2001, 3545). This is the
sort of evidence out of which the familiar image of the Bund
Heimatschutz as a reactionary or even a crypto-fascist force has been
constructed (see Bergmann; Speitkamp; Ditt 1990; Jefferies 1995,
535).
But another part of the record shows us the fruitful outcome of
collaboration and patient committee work. Birgitta Ringbeck has
described the results of building projects in the state of Westphalia,
where an official Kommission fr Heimatschutz was established in
response to the legislation against despoliation of the landscape of
1908 and appears to have worked flexibly and very effectively with
architects and local authorities. Ringbecks account may be coloured
by the fact that her research was part of a project initiated by the
Westphalian Heimatbund itself, but the achievements she highlights
include a plan for expanding the town of Soest, dating from 1915 (and
partially implemented in the 1920s), which appears to be well ahead
of its time because it attempts to conserve the medieval character of
the old walled town and incorporate that central feature into the
overall conception of an expanded town designed to meet modern
needs. The design includes a green belt, a ring road, and a polycentric
arrangement of garden suburbs with residential and industrial areas
carefully separated. Ringbeck also describes developments of a
garden-city type where the housing did not imitate traditional German
rural styles, but rather the idea of the English cottage, and was
designed to ensure modern standards of amenity for the families who
would be living there (Ringbeck, 257). And she points to housing
developments of the 1920s which combined the use of typical local
materials with the application of standardised components, as the
130
David Midgley
modernisers were recommending, in order to provide effectively and

cheaply for the accommodation of a mass workforce in a
predominantly rural area, and thus to counter the drift of industrial
labour to the cities (Ringbeck, 2689). The Bund Heimatschutz, she
implies, was absorbing the impulses of technical modernisation in the
pursuit of pragmatic solutions to the problems it cared most deeply
about.
Celia Applegate, too, in her close study of the Heimat movement
in the Pfalz, shows how necessary it is to distinguish between the
grand Romantic visions of the movements leading ideologues and the
specific policies pursued in the regions: the latter were less concerned
with opposing the processes of modernisation, and more with actively
developing a local sense of identity in response to the political
character of Germany that had resulted from the unification of 1871
(Applegate, 1037). And William H. Rollins, in his book A Greener
Vision of Home (1997), makes a bolder attempt to defend the
Heimatschutz movement of the decade before 1914 against its
detractors and present it as a pioneering development towards
environmental consciousness as it exists in our own time. Rollins
sharpest polemics are directed against those who apply an over-rigid
conception of historical modernisation as a yardstick by which to
measure the Heimatschutz and pronounce it backward-looking, and he
builds on the work of Geoffrey Eley and others in arguing that the
German bourgeoisie of the Wilhelmine period did not simply retreat
from political life, but found ways of intervening constructively in
public decision-making processes, of which the lobbying of the Bund
Heimatschutz is a prime example. He is able to cite specific instances
of such intervention; he provides information which shows that the
membership of the organisation included a significant proportion
from the commercial sector as well as the Bildungsbrgertum; and he
points to the importance of regional civil servants helping to mould
planning policies along the lines advocated by the Bund Heimatschutz, in support of his claim that the movement represented
a sober, methodical, and yet highly idealistic segment of the German
middle class that took the initiative in trying to adapt their system to
the changing needs of industrial society (Rollins, 128). Like Ringbeck he emphasises the need to relate the activities of the Bund
131
Heimatschutz to the actual record of housing reform and urban

planning.
Both Ringbeck and Rollins, then, show why a proper assessment
of the role of the Bund Heimatschutz should have due regard to the
pragmatic dimension of its involvement in local planning. But there is
one feature of the planning negotiations which Ringbeck describes
that might serve to remind us of the need to examine their ideological
significance as well. When justifications were made for the specific
developments in Westphalia on which she reports, they were not just
formulated in terms of the living needs of the prospective inhabitants
and the desirability of maintaining the character of the environment,
but often alluded to the intended relationship between the inhabitants
and their environment. A phrase which recurs in this connection, but
which appears in Ringbecks account without commentary, is
Bindung an die Scholle (Ringbeck, 256, 259). It is unlikely that this
phrase, as used before 1914, carries the implications of patriotic
fervour which were to become associated with the idea of German
national territory under the impact of the First World War and the
punitive terms of the Versailles Treaty. Nor should it be interpreted
over-literally: the settlements in question are for industrial workers,
not agricultural labourers. The metaphorical use of the term Scholle
can be documented at least from 1874, in Nietzsches essay
Schopenhauer als Erzieher, where it is associated with the smalltown parochial attitudes of which Nietzsche disapproves (Nietzsche,
289). But as a phrase it is clearly redolent of that strong Romantic
sense of association between communal identity and the natural
landscape which we know to have been an important initiating
impulse of the Heimatschutz movement. And without looking at the
detailed circumstances of particular negotiations, it is impossible to
determine with any certainty whether the evocation of Bindung an die
Scholle should be interpreted as indicating an underlying ideology
among the architects and planners making the proposals, or a
concession on their part to the political preconceptions of those to
whom they are making the proposals, or whether it is simply a gesture
towards the general concern about Landflucht and the undesirable
consequences of dense urban living conditions which had become
such a clich by 1910 that it tells us very little about the actual
attitudes of the parties concerned. Only an examination of the precise
132
David Midgley
circumstances in which these housing developments were discussed

could shed light on the ideological orientation of the community for
which they were conceived and of the lobbying organisations
involved.
As far as the relationship between the Bund Heimatschutz and
National Socialism is concerned, it is generally acknowledged that the
nature of the aims and interests of the Heimatschutz movement meant
that it was easily assimilated into Nazi culture (more precisely, into
the Reichsbund Volkstum und Heimat) after 1933, and that this close
association with National Socialism left the movement apparently
discredited in many peoples eyes after the Second World War (see
Klueting 1998, 55; Ditt 2001). By the same token, a pedantic
attachment to traditional styles of house design also came to be
disparaged after 1945 as part of the Nazi legacy (Sewing). But the
history of research on the Bund Heimatschutz gives a clear
demonstration of the importance of perspective in the evaluation of
cultural-historical developments. The article by Winfried Speitkamp
which appeared in the Archiv fr Kulturgeschichte in 1988 illustrates
the approach which had dominated since the Second World War:
Speitkamp highlights the senses in which true continuities may exist
between the use of such vocabulary as Rasse, Volkstum,
Volksgemeinschaft, and Lebensraum by members of the Bund
Heimatschutz on the one hand and by National Socialists on the other.
Ringbeck, in 1991, responds to that familiar claim of a close
connection between the Heimatschutz movement and Nazi ideology
by emphasising that (a) wanting to preserve traditional building styles
does not automatically make you a Nazi, and (b) Nazi interest in
architecture focused in practice on the monumental and megalomaniac
rather than the traditional (Ringbeck, 285). Among the secondary
literature in English, Dominick is subtler than Speitkamp in his
discussion of the ideological overlap between Heimatschutz and
National Socialism, and Rollins is more ambitious than Ringbeck in
his claims to have reinterpreted the historical significance of the
movement, but they present the reader with a comparable pair of
contrasting views. It seems to me that the respective approaches of
Speitkamp and Ringbeck can be used to demonstrate the inherent
dangers in two different types of perspective on the Bund Heimatschutz as a cultural movement, and in conclusion I should like to
133
develop this sense of contrast into a more general reflection on the

problems of interpreting the phenomena of cultural history.
If we view historical developments in too broad a perspective,
then we recognise only those features which appear generally
characteristic of the whole picture and thus obscure the differences
between one phenomenon and another. But if we adopt too narrow a
perspective, then we lose sight of the connections between
phenomena. The anti-urbanism we find in Wilhelmine Germany is not
just a vague manifestation of antipathy towards urban conditions such
as any individual may feel and act upon from time to time (as we may
do at holiday time, when we joke about escaping from or returning
to civilisation). This anti-urbanism distinguishes itself as an
expression of anxiety in response to the rapid changes in life-styles
and in the character of communities brought about by industrialisation
in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by
perceptions of the kind of city that is developing in Berlin in
particular; and this particular anxiety finds the focus for its emotional
energy in the physical appearance of locations, of what groups of
individuals perceive as their Heimat. These emotional responses are
occurring in a period when the sense of national and local allegiance is
being reinforced by political experience, a period when the cultural
identity of the unified German Reich is being constructed and
defended in contradistinction to the perceived cultural identity of other
European nations. In such circumstances it is the way that particular
indicators of cultural identity are used to justify action, or to persuade
others of the desirability of that action, that enables us to recognise
signs of an incipient political ideology in the writings and activities of
a movement. It is true that Heimatschutz, the desire to defend what
is perceived as a cultural heritage, is not in itself an immediate
indicator of ideological orientation, but this is a bland truth, and does
nothing to convey the sense of specific historical circumstances. On
the other hand, to assume that because two movements have certain
items of vocabulary in common they necessarily mean the same things
by them is to short-circuit the argument and overlook the possible
distinctions of historical situation. The approach which is likely to
lead to greater insight into historical processes surely lies in a
combination of the two perspectives. It consists in recognising that the
notion of Heimatschutz has its legitimacy when it comes to human
134
David Midgley
communities determining the character of the environment they live

in, but also that it became a terrain on which emotional commitments
were developed and nurtured which could in turn be used, under
particular circumstances, to reinforce ideological persuasion.
What we are dealing with is not a homogeneous phenomenon:
the Heimatschutz movement is made up of various groups pursuing
their particular goals in different parts of Germany, and the issues with
which they are concerned were simultaneously of concern to other
groups and organisations. The further research we need in this area
should therefore be multi-dimensional. It should be capable of
distinguishing between such factors as personal motivation, ideological orientation, organisational policy and regional variation, within
the broad cultural and political context. It should relate the
campaigning of the organisation in individual cases to the nature of
the specific issue and to the particular constellation of political and
material interests involved; and it should analyse the rhetoric used in
specific instances in relation to the broader developments of usage as
well as to the particular constellation of cultural factors involved at the
time. Given the inherent complexity of the issues and the regional
diversity involved, there is plenty of material there to keep a team of
graduates usefully occupied for several years.
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im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (Gttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969).
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(London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1964).
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Riffert, J. Berliner Literatur oder Deutsche Literatur?, Der Kunstwart II (188889),
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Ringbeck, B. Architektur und Stdtebau unter dem Einfluss der Heimatschutzbewegung, in Klueting, E. (Hg) Antimodernismus und Reform, 21687.
Riordan, C. (ed) Green Thought in German Culture: Historical and Contemporary
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German Architecture and its Changing Past at the Architectural Association,
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Kulturkritik und Nationalsozialismus, Archiv fr Kulturgeschichte 70, 14993.
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Der Stdtebau. Monatsschrift fr die knstlerische Ausgestaltung der Stdte
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France, 17801914 (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1981).
MARGARETE KOHLENBACH
Walter Benjamin, Gustav Wyneken

and the Jugendkulturbewegung
Walter Benjamins work became known to a wider public only

posthumously in the context of the student movement of the 1960s.
His Der Autor als Produzent (1934) and Das Kunstwerk im
Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (19351939) were
probably the two most important texts on which the more
aesthetically-minded theorists of that movement relied in their attempt
to define a materialist concept of counter-culture which could
1
accommodate their own Marxist aspirations. Benjamin himself,
however, first encountered a theory of counter-culture, and indeed
became involved in counter-cultural practice, in the context of the
German Youth Movement. Before World War I, he aligned himself
with the so-called Jugendkulturbewegung (youth culture movement),
an intellectually oriented sub-grouping, which was led by the
educationalist and cultural critic Gustav Wyneken (18751964).2 This
alignment is indicative of the interrelations that exist, in early
twentieth-century German society, between radical conservativism on
the one hand and counter-cultural orientations on the other.
Benjamin (18921940) first met Wyneken as his teacher of
German at the country boarding school of Haubinda in 1905 (see
Benjamin, Lebenslauf (1925), and Lebenslauf (1912), 5312;
Brodersen (xiii, 237)). Between 1905 and 1907 Wyneken and Paul
Geheeb founded their own experimental private school in Thuringia,
the so-called Freie Schulgemeinde Wickersdorf, which for Wyneken
1
2
See also von Dirke (557), McCole (1017) and Hillach (Walter Benjamin,
6489).
Benjamins commitment to the Jugendkulturbewegung is documented in the
editorial commentary in Benjamin, GS, II.3, 82588. See also Brodersen (23
76), McCole (3570), Brcker (1367), DeuberMankowsky (299313) and
Hillach (Ein neu entdecktes Lebensgesetz der Jugend, 87290).
Margarete Kohlenbach
138
would come to represent the geometrical locus and the only existing
realisation of what he called youth culture (Wyneken, Was ist
Jugendkultur?, 11628). Due to the suspicion of the authorities, as
well as to quarrels with parents and colleagues, Wyneken had to leave
the school in 1910 and became the unemployed founder of
Wickersdorf,3 who for much of his life would try to regain control
over his creation. Benjamin identified with the idea of Wickersdorf
almost without reserve. In 1912, he characterised his encounter with
Wyneken as the decisive intellectual event of his youth, calling
himself Wynekens strict and fanatic pupil.4 After Wynekens public
support for World War I, he broke with his mentor in March 1915, yet
while doing so stressed his determination to remain faithful to the
true Wyneken and his idea of youth.5 Finally, in a rather painful
autobiographical note probably dating from as late as 1932, he still
conceived of Haubinda as the place where the seeds for his later life
were sown (Benjamin, Noch einmal, 435). The first part of the
present discussion is devoted to Wynekens idea of youth culture and
the relations it bears to religion, art and politics. The second part
analyses Benjamins work as a writer and activist of the Jugendkulturbewegung between 1910 and 1915.
Wynekens Idea of Youth Culture

For Wyneken, youth culture is not a description of social activities but
an idea, an infinite task or ideal (Wyneken, Was is Jugendkultur?,
1268). He can therefore use youth culture to criticise the existing
Youth Movement. What he actually criticises are in particular the
3
4
5
Letter to Herbert Blumenthal, 30 July 1913, in Benjamin, GB I, 155.

Letters to Ludwig Strauss, 11 September and 10 October 1912, GB I, 6173,
6970, esp. 64.
Letter to Wyneken, 9 March 1915, GB I, 2634. See also Letter to Hans
Reichenbach, February/March 1915, GB I, 262.
Walter Benjamin, Gustav Wyneken and the Jugendkulturbewegung
139
activities of the Wandervogel.6 With the Wandervogel, he concedes,

Wilhelmine youth awoke to a life of its own, free of the deadening
philistinism of the bourgeois family, the duplicity of the metropolis
and the enslaving conventions of adult society as a whole. However,
the vitalist romanticism of the Wandervogel is also a masquerade,
itself full of artificiality, inauthenticity and escapism. The movement
effectuates an external, physical change in young peoples way of life
but fails to create a new spiritual culture. The Wandervogel therefore
also fails to realise its own nature, for according to Wyneken the fact
that the Wandervogel organises a new community life for the young
means that it is a spiritual movement. In criticising the existing Youth
Movement for failing to realise its own spiritual nature, Wyneken
suggests that he is proposing an immanent critique of that movement.7
Furthermore, we may describe his criticism as insisting, in the face of
subcultural activities, on counter-cultural intentions.8 The Youth
Movement, he asserts, ought to achieve a permanent and socially
comprehensive significance, indeed, it must effectuate a cultural
revolution. It can do so only if it does not, as does the Wandervogel,
ignore the school, the central institution in the life of the young; for it
is only the school, or at any rate Wynekens own school Wickersdorf,
which empowers youth to transform society as a whole by
appropriating and extending the spiritual inheritance (Geistesbesitz)
of society. Finally, Wynekens counter-cultural programme can be
described as being religious or quasi-religious. In Germany, he argues,
Geistesbesitz comprises the attitude of a Luther and Kant and their
uncompromising struggle to establish the ultimate foundation (letzter
Grund) of ones convictions. Youth similarly strives for the
unconditional. It ignores the demands of so-called reality and
overcomes the meansends considerations of Zivilisation by em6
7
8
For what follows, see Wyneken, Was ist Jugendkultur?, 11826, Wyneken,
Schule und Jugendkultur, 1012, 3343, 668, 814, 16381, Wyneken,
Studentenschaft und Schulreform, 18096, esp. 190, and the discussions of
Wynekens concept and rhetoric of revolution in Kupffer (18793, 28291).
On the importance of immanent critique and immanent criticism in
Benjamins mature thought, see for instance McCole (71114), Caygill (3479)
and Kohlenbach (sections 2.3.1 and 2.3.2).
For the distinction between counter-culture and subculture, see Dirke (4).
140
bracing the absolute and intrinsic values of Kultur. Adults will

appreciate this ethos again only if and when a new religion comes
over them. In the meantime, not only the transformation of society but
also the redemption of mankind, if not the world,9 is entrusted to
youth and its unconditional service of Geist.
However, the fact that the Wandervogel organises collective
events for the young does not in itself suffice to classify it as a
spiritual movement. This would only be the case if it were true that
any communal activity ultimately rested on spiritual or absolute
values, an assumption which the organisers of Fahrten and campfires
were far from embracing. In 1914 at the latest, the Wandervogel and
other groups of the Freideutsche Jugend rejected Wynekens attempts
to commit the Youth Movement as a whole to his own programme of
spiritual revival (Kupffer, 85103). Wyneken, for his part, was aware
of the fact that the allegedly natural idealism of youth would not on its
own realise his spiritual vision. He repeatedly emphasised the
autonomous character of youth culture but also stated explicitly that
its autonomy was possible only with regard to external circumstances.
The creation of a spiritual culture, in contrast, would not emerge from
within youth alone but required spiritual leaders (Fhrer) in whom
the new life originated. Youth culture was to be autonomous, then,
only to the extent that the influence of competitors the state, the
churches, the family or rival educationalists had to be discarded if
Wynekens own spiritual mission was to flourish.10 His apparently
immanent critique of the Youth Movement, in other words, reflected
his own interests and intentions.
The classification of youth culture as spiritual places youth at
the centre of Wynekens thought, which combines a Hegelian rhetoric
of objective spirit with elements drawn from Fichte, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche and the idealistic monism of Eduard von Hartmann and
9
10
For the cosmological implications of Wynekens thought, see his

Weltanschauung (esp. 1227) and Kupffer (934, 197217).
Wyneken, Was ist Jugendkultur?, 119 and 127. It is noteworthy that
Wyneken also construes the need for, and the will to comply with, spiritual
leadership as features of the coming youth culture. For the interdependence
between his notions of autonomy and leadership, see Kupffer (30512) and
Hillach, Lebensgesetz.
141
Arthur Drews. What matters in the present context is not a detailed

analysis of Wynekens eclecticism but the fact that he embraces
whole-heartedly the Romantic assumption that the human world is not
that of an independently existing external reality, but a counter-world,
posited by our own spirit (eine von unserem Geist gesetzte
Gegenwelt). The essence of humanity (Menschentum), accordingly,
consists precisely in living in a world created by spirit (Wyneken,
Weltanschauung, 1223). Traditional religions rely on the magical
power of the will and construe their counter-world according to
physical and psychic needs. Yet the creative Weltanschauung of
youth, which is to replace traditional religion, allegedly overcomes
both the dependence on human needs and any wishful thinking by
acknowledging what Wyneken calls the law of autonomous thought
and the categorical imperative of truth (Wyneken, Weltanschauung,
1517). Given that no reality independent of creative thought is
accessible or relevant, however, the truth to which he appeals cannot
consist in the correspondence of the envisaged Weltanschauung to
reality. Its conception rests on the presupposition that spirit, in
principle, is closer to truth than is the realm of physical and psychic
needs. And this presupposition cannot be ascertained objectively if, as
Wyneken maintains, any reality other than that created by spirit itself
is irrelevant.
In Schule und Jugendkultur (1913), Wyneken clearly acknowledges the voluntaristic nature of his programme. Youth culture, he
maintains, does not rest on positive religious belief or the socially
acknowledged authority of existing institutions, nor does it rest on
knowledge or objectively ascertainable reasons. In contrast, it rests
exclusively on a particular will or decision:
Aber wir handeln so, als ob wir wten, da, uns unsichtbar, hinter dem Dasein
Erlsung und Seligkeit auf ihre Stunde warten. Wir krnzen uns mit heiligem
Willen, wir entznden die Fackeln stolzen und tapferen Glaubens, und so
schreiten wir unseren Weg, ohne Ziel doch der Richtung gewi. Wenn es einen
Heiland der Welt gibt, werden wir ihm begegnen; wenn er ausbleibt, so knnen
wir doch nicht anders, als in seinem Sinne wirken. (Schule und Jugendkultur,
181)
142
In basic agreement with Hans Vaihingers philosophy of the as if,11

Wyneken here urges youth to live as if religion in general were true
and to do so on the basis of a heroic decision. With his religious
decisionism12 he responds both to the widespread religious scepticism
among European intellectuals after the Enlightenment and to the
equally widespread appreciation, around World War I, of religiosity as
such, that is, of a cultic exaltation of life that steers clear of specific or
traditional religious beliefs (see Janz; Linse, Barfige Propheten).
However, this characterisation should not lead us to underestimate his
religious fervour. Wyneken radicalises contemporary cultic escapism by
emphasising that the maxim Serve Geist! (Diene dem Geist!) ought
to be the principle of all our actions (see Wyneken, Schule und
Jugendkultur, 11). And he dismisses positive religions, above all
Christianity, as being too secular, as being too entwined in reality and
the worldly running of the planet (Wyneken, Weltanschauung, 1836).
He is unclear about whether or not the hoped-for Weltanschauung of
youth will lead to a new religion, but it is clear that what he wants to
provoke in and through youth is the radical spiritual impulse of
religions before their institutionalisation sets in.
Religious impulses are not created ex nihilo, however. The posttraditional character of his Weltanschauung notwithstanding, Wyneken cannot help drawing on religious traditions. Thus he conceives the
school with explicit reference to Luthers conception of the church as
an invisible assembly of souls in one spirit (Wyneken, Wandervogel
und Freie Schulgemeinde, 135). The congregation of students and
teachers in the so-called Schulgemeinden does not aim for the
representation of differing interests, the collective organisation of
school life or a playful preparation for the tasks of citizenship (see
Wyneken, Der Gedankenkreis der Freien Schulgemeinde, 8). Rather,
it is intrinsically valuable sie hat ihren Zweck in sich selbst (see
Wyneken, Die Aufgabe der freien Schulen, 10) and like the
Church receives its mandate not from the state, any particular social
group or its own members, but directly from truth (Wyneken, Der
11
12
See also Kupffer (17, 20912) and Hillach (Lebensgesetz, 88890).

For the importance of decisionism in German existentialism and radical
conservatism, see for instance Speth (16772), Greiffenhagen (24868) and
Thornhill (6275).
143
Gedankenkreis der Freien Schulgemeinde, 8). Accordingly, the spiritual

leader of the assembly, the creative educationalist, is answerable
exclusively to a supra-human agency (see Wyneken, Schule und
Jugendkultur, 27). Wyneken underlines the religious authority which
he assumes for himself by frequently comparing himself to Jesus
Christ, or by using the Latin terminology of the Church.13 Being
counter-cultural, however, the authority which he seeks may find
rhetorical support in, but cannot be derived from, existing religious
institutions and their language, practices and beliefs. Ultimatily, it has
to be based on the charismatic qualities of Wynekens own person.
Even while breaking with Wyneken, Benjamin expresses his
appreciation of his mentors charismatic authority: Wir erfuhren, da
[...] die Person ber dem Persnlichen steht; wir durften erfahren, was
Fhrung ist.14
In addition to the traditions of religious practice and thought and
to his own charisma, Wyneken draws on art (Kunst) to imbue youth
with the required heroic religiosity. It is only the experience of the
work of art (das Kunsterlebnis), he states, which is able to vouch for
the truth of religion independently of traditional belief.15 Art thus
becomes the cultic medium of religious edification for those doubting
the revealed truth of traditional religion. In his comments on literature
and criticism, Wyneken combines the emphasis on a genuinely artistic
approach with a metaphysical understanding of the work of art. While
criticising philistine audiences for failing to acknowledge the work
of art as such, he finds in its genuinely artistic apperception a Platonic
vision or adoration of beauty itself and, indeed, the confirmation that
the Holy Ghost rules the world. While it is wrong to look in art for
something other than art, the experience of art as art allegedly
13
14
15
See Kupffer (16873) and, for Hans Blhers corresponding report, Fuld (38).
Letter to Wyneken, 9 March 1915, GB I, 264. See also the similar passage in
Letter to Blumenthal, 30 July 1913, GB I, 155. For the wider appreciation of
Wynekens charisma among members of the young generation, see Arnold
Zweigs account in Die Weltbhne of 16 December 1918, quoted in Kupffer
(111). For the continuing affirmation and adoption of a spiritual, person-based
and intellectually inconsistent type of authority in Benjamins mature work, see
ber das Programm der kommenden Philosophie, (159), Ankndigung der
Zeitschrift: Angelus Novus, (242) and Karl Kraus, (243).
For what follows, see Wyneken, Schule und Jugendkultur, 15262.
144
discloses a true higher reality (eine wirkliche berwirklichkeit). The

autonomy of art, here, is the Trojan horse of Geist.
Taken as a programme for social transformation or even
revolution, Wynekens idea of youth culture amounts to the attempt
to replace secular, interest-based politics with the communal
realisation of spiritual values.16 The teaching of civics is only of minor
importance in his conception of the school. He aims to create in his
students a loving devotion to the spirit of mankind which in their later
lives they will defend against the political sphere of social egotism
and party fanatism. To the extent that politics figures at all among
the manifestations of objective spirit to be studied in class, he
conceives it not as a realm of social action and conflict, but as
mankinds practical profession of the sacred nature of the state, the
personification, that is, of the social will, and the only power in the
face of which the worthlessness of the individual is generally and
absolutely recognised. Politics, we may put it, is to be de-politicised
through the creation of a spiritual or sacred Gemeinschaft.17
Wynekens disdain for the political explains the opportunism
which characterises his attempts to find social support for Wickersdorf
and its idea.18 Since for him Wickersdorf represents the highest
aspirations of mankind, with regard to which political antagonisms are
irrelevant, he feels himself entitled to cooperate with the Social
Democratic government after the Great War and to court the Nazis
between 1933 and 1945. He defends Jewish colleagues against his
rival educationalist Hermann Lietz in the so-called Haubindaner
16
17
18
For what follows, see Wyneken, Schule und Jugendkultur, 10112.

For the affinities between Wynekens notion of politics, Hermann Keyserlings
thought and Theodor Lessings conception of antipolitical politics, see
Kupffer (245, 2378).
For what follows, see Kupffer (512, 10716, 14450, 15860). For
Benjamins related advocacy of a strategic alliance with the Left, see Letter to
Strauss, 79 January 1913, GB I, 83. Although Benjamin, in contrast to
Wyneken, never aligned himself with any variety of nationalism, his later
embracement of Marxism to some extent agrees with Wynekens practice of
a merely strategic association with political forces. See Benjamins correspondence with Gershom Scholem of May 1926 and early 1931 (GB III, 158
63, GB IV, 2536), Benjamins Moskauer Tagebuch of 19267, (esp. 3301)
and his Paralipomena zu Surrealismus of 19289 (esp. 1033).
145
Judenkrach, but tables an anti-semitic motion in 1937 when trying to

regain his former influence in the by then National Socialist
Wickersdorf. After 1945, he negotiates with the Communist
authorities of the Soviet Occupation Zone in order to resume his duties
as headmaster, and later, in West Germany, presents himself again as
a (critical) supporter of social democracy. His very acknowledgment
of German guilt for World War II reaffirms his anti-political
conception of politics. Germany, he maintains, is guilty in the
metaphysical sense of having deviated from the Platonic idea of the
German people.19
Benjamin and the Jugendkulturbewegung

Benjamin belonged to the numerous Jewish followers of Wyneken.
Siegfried Bernfeld, the student leader of the Academisches Comit
fr Schulreform (ACS), which supported Wyneken outside of
Wickersdorf, estimated that approximately one third of the 3000
supporters of the ACS and up to 90% of its Viennese members were
Jews (Kupffer, 76). These figures become less surprising if we realise
that Wynekens programme seemed to offer the possibility of a
dignified response to the dilemmas that had come to characterise
Jewish assimilation in Germany and Austria. On the one hand,
Wyneken could hardly have emphasised more the traditional German
value of Bildung, in which for some generations Jews had placed their
hopes for social acceptance. On the other hand, he presented Bildung
not as the property of the German establishment or Bildungsbrgertum, which to a large extent rejected Jews, but as a new life to
be created by (or in) young outsiders.20 In following Wyneken, young
Jews therefore no longer had to see themselves as begging for
19
20
See the discussion of Wynekens correspondence, from autumn 1945 onwards,

with Knud Ahlborn in Kupffer (1523).
For Wynekens belief in the cultural function of outsiders in general, see
Kupffer (45).
146
acceptance in a society and culture which already existed independently of their contributions, but could feel entrusted with a
cultural mission that made them the decisive agents (or the privileged
medium) of the true realisation of societys Geistesbesitz. Given the
religious dimension of Wynekens programme, this may explain
Benjamins characterisation of Wynekens followers as Auserwhlte
in dieser Zeit, the chosen of this time.21
The followers of Wyneken, however, did not form a homogenous
group. What united them was the attempt to create a Gegenffentlichkeit, an alternative sphere of public debate, among students
of secondary and higher education.22 In a number of towns, so-called
Sprechsle were set up, in which students discussed issues of common
interest independently of the (direct) influence of parents, teachers or
adults in general.23 Independent school magazines like the Viennese
Das Classenbuch and the both German and Austro-Hungarian Der
Anfang served the same end and caused considerable political turmoil,
fuelled in part by the fact that many of the young authors, including
Benjamin, published their attacks on schools and the family
anonymously. Themes ranged from the personal experience of sexual
and school life to topics of general cultural and political importance,
21
22
23
Letter to Wyneken, 9 March 1915, GB I, 264. For Benjamins reflections on the

Wickersdorf movement and Jewishness, see letters to Strauss, 191213, GB I,
6187, as well as Smith, Deuber-Mankowsky (282312) and Rabinbach (89
99). In my view, Benjamins reflections do not support the assumption that he
intends to construct a notion of Jewish identity.
For what follows, see Benjamin, Berliner Chronik, 47584, Linse, Die
entschiedene Jugend, Herrmann, Laermann, as well as Kupffer (7484) and
Brodersen (2973).
The indirect influence of Wyneken on the young activists was considerable.
The pretentious and forcible manner, for example, in which Benjamin
responded to an apparently minimal disagreement with his friend Fritz Heinle
imitates the style in which Wyneken conducted the controversies with his
colleagues and rivals. The same holds for the destructive manner in which
Benjamin, Georges Barbizon (= Georg Gretor) and others dealt with their
disagreement, in the early part of 1914, about the future editorship of Der
Anfang. See letter to Carla Seligson, 17 November 1913, GB I, 182, the editors
comments, GB I, 183, letter to Wyneken, 11 April 1914, GB I, 20210, as well
the correspondence between Benjamin and Barbizon, and the latters account of
the disagreement, reprinted in the appendix of GB I, and Kupffer (489, 5969,
84, 13443).
147
such as the romantic escapism of the Youth Movement or the function

of education in society. The young activists all saw themselves as
promoting Wynekens idea of youth culture and, indeed, as
establishing a youth culture in his sense, but differed in their
interpretations of what this meant. We can distinguish between an
inward and spiritual adoption of Wynekens programme on the one
hand, and a practical and socially-orientated one on the other. The
members of the practical faction, which was represented among others
by Bernfeld and Ernst Jol, came to pursue projects of working class
education and to a considerable extent later engaged in Social
Democratic or Communist politics. Benjamin, for his part, was an
outspoken defender of the spiritual interpretation of youth culture.
He worked hard to create the desired Gegenffentlichkeit between
1912 and 1914, first within the Freiburg Abteilung fr Schulreform,
then as President of the Berlin Freie Studentenschaft. When he
raised his own voice, however, he supported a highly elitist ideal of
spiritual practice and, indeed, prophesied a new religion. Der
Anfang, he claimed, had to be a purely spiritual journal, far removed
from politics, and the idea of youth culture an illumination, the
spiritual power of which excluded any determinate thought or
intention.24
In Die drei Religionssucher, published in Der Anfang in 1910
when the magazine was still distributed in hectographed editions,
Benjamin deals with the search of three youths for the true religion.
Neither the second seekers romantic engagement with nature nor the
search of the first in the established institutions of learning and cult
can provide what they seek. Only the mystic vision of a new world
that the third seeker experiences after a full working life may show
the right way. His vision conveys the idea of a remote supernatural
24
Letters to Blumenthal (23 June 1913) and Seligson (15 September 1913), GB I,
124 and 175 respectively. According to Kupffer (79), Benjamins spiritual
understanding of youth culture was closer to Wynekens intentions than that
of the political faction. However, Benjamins letter to Ernst Schoen (23 May
1914, GB I, 2301), which Kupffer quotes in support of this assessment, shows
that Benjamin did not feel sufficiently supported by Wyneken in his attempt to
establish an exclusively inward and explicitly apolitical community among
Berlins young intellectuals.
148
world which, however, is mysteriously connected to the position

where he stands. It thus already displays a simultaneity of remoteness
and proximity, or approachability, similar to that which will inform
Benjamins mature notion of aura.25 In Dialog ber die Religiositt
der Gegenwart (1912), Benjamin reflects upon the relationship
between such simultaneity and religion, claiming that the desired new
religion, like any, has to combine dualism, or the otherness or
remoteness of the divine, with the striving for mystical union.
(Dialog, 22, 301, 34) Any mysticism after work is now discarded in
favour of something eternal in our daily work and, indeed, the cultic
exaltation of convention.26 The young author rejects any moral
fulfilment on offer within contemporary society in humanism or the
belief in moral autonomy, progress or evolution, or in pantheism and
monism since it fails to provide the desired sanctification of the
everyday. Like Wyneken, he also rejects traditional religion as not
truly religious, Judaism, incidentally, no less than Christianity.27 And
he desires the sanctification of the everyday independently of any
positive religious doctrine: nothing is known of the new god. Being
external to contemporary and traditional beliefs, then, the desired
religion has to come from outside society.
The only short moments of happiness which Dialog acknowledges
are found in literature and art. In contrast to Wyneken, Benjamin seems
critical of any sacralisation of art and even attempts a critique of
aestheticism. Yet this critique remains ambivalent. On the one hand,
he states that art has lost the ethical and enlightened character which it
possessed in the truly pantheistic and humanist work of Goethe. The
reception of Goethe has become the incarnation of an aestheticism
which, since it ignores the suffering and consciousness of a
proletariat, is dishonest and cannot provide that religious foundation
on which the moral life of a community must be based. (Dialog, 16,
18, 212) On the other hand, it is precisely from the pathological
self-alienaton of the aestheticist literati that the new religion is said to
25
26
27
On Benjamins notion of aura in the context of contemporary conceptions of the

sacred, see Recki (esp. 269, 4959).
Dialog, 20, 2930. See also Wyneken, Schule und Jugendkultur, 67.
Dialog, 1, 17, 22, 25, and letter to Strauss, 9 September 1912, GB I, 64.
149
arise, and it is their culture of expression,28 and not the life of the
masses, that requires a new religious basis (Dialog, 2831).
Moreover, Benjamin discards the slogan lart pour lart in favour of
lart pour nous: art must provide life-values (Lebenswerte). At the
same time, the life-values which art can provide beauty, a sense of
form, Gefhl (feeling) are aesthetic in kind, and Benjamin follows
Wyneken in embracing lart pour lart as the barrier which protects
art, and life, from philistinism (Dialog, 1617). The aesthetes
profound thought (dieses Geistreiche) accordingly counts as both the
herald and the enemy of religion.29 The basic assumptions in
Wynekens cult of Geist explain Benjamins rejection of a political
response to the moral problem which he finds in aestheticism.
Benjamin dismisses as inferior the practical faction of the
Jugendkulturbewegung by ranking all those who find fulfilment
within society or social commitment (im Sozialen) as not the best
and lacking in depth (Dialog, 26). A political response to the
suffering of the proletariat, which undermines the aesthetes moral
integrity, is necessarily devoid of metaphysical gravity (Ernst), for
the loss of traditional religious belief has deprived human suffering of
all spiritual meaning: Man hat das Leid entgttert (Dialog, 19). The
absence of metaphysical grandeur can disqualify social commitment
for Benjamin only because he accepts his mentors imperative Serve
Geist! as the highest principle of all human action.
The importance of Die religise Stellung der neuen Jugend
(1914), the last text which Benjamin published before the outbreak of
World War I, lies in its strong performative dimension. Benjamin no
longer only expresses his desire for, or reflects upon, a new religion,
but through his writing tries to create what he considers the condition
of its possibility:
28
29
Benjamins phrase Kultur des Ausdrucks (culture of expression) modifies

the term Ausdruckskultur in the subtitle of the influential journal Der
Kunstwart und Kulturwart: Halbmonatsschau fr Ausdruckskultur auf allen
Lebensgebieten, in which Wyneken published some of his writings. See letter to
Strauss, 11 September 1912, GB I, 61 and Kupffer (367).
Dialog, 27. For the similarly ambivalent characterisation of spiritual
profundity in the Trauerspiel study (completed 1925), see GS I.1, 4046.
150
Eine Generation will wieder am Scheidewege stehen, aber nirgends ist die
Wegscheide. [...] Kein rein und unrein, heilig und verworfen leuchtet ihr
voran, sondern nur Schulmeisterworte erlaubt-verboten. [...] nach nichts
verlangt sie dringender als nach der Wahl, Mglichkeit der Wahl, der heiligen
Entscheidung berhaupt. Die Wahl schafft sich ihre Gegenstnde [...].
(GS II.1, 73)
This promise of a re-creation of the sacred in modern society

reinforces that decisionistic determination in Benjamin and his
young readers which, he claims, creates the sacred. Given this claim,
then, Benjamins manifesto tries to provoke revelation into being. Of
course, actual religious fulfilment must appear unlikely if the
scepticism of youth is, as Benjamin also states, without limit. Yet the
author counteracts this reason for possible failure by trying to make
his audience benefit already from the desired sanctification. The future
religion, he suggests, is already symbolically present in youth. The
struggles (Kmpfe) in which youth overcomes its reluctance to act
are already a form of religious practice: they are Gottesurteile
(ordeals) in which nothing matters except that the sacred be
revealed. Benjamin here enacts the very simultaneity of the
remoteness and proximity of the divine that he deems essential to
religion. Furthermore, he evokes the idea that Grace and the help of
God will answer the need and desire of youth. This implicit recourse
to personal conceptions of deity contradicts his claim that the new
sceptical youth has no connection with traditional religions. His
manifesto, however, does not aim for intellectual consistency but tries
to promote a newly religious life. Given this aim, he cannot help
following Wyneken in both drawing on, and rejecting, tradition.30
The assessment that the creation of a newly religious life among
the cultural elite is Benjamins primary concern is confirmed by those
texts of the young activist which do not directly deal with religion. In
Die Schulreform, eine Kulturbewegung (1912), he conceives
education as the transmisson of spiritual values sub specie
aeternitatis. The movement for school reform accordingly counts as
30
For more detailed analyses of Dialog and Die religise Stellung in the
context of Benjamins early (and not so early) thought, see Deuber-Mankowsky
(31740), Hillach (Lebensgesetz, 88690) and Kohlenbach (esp. sections
1.3.3 and 2.1).
151
the distinct and urgent expression of the socio-religious problem of

his time (GS II.1, 13). In Unterricht und Wertung (1913) he demands
a Nietzschean, untimely and undemocratic Humanistisches Gymnasium which would reject all compromises with the requirements
of vocational training (GS II.1, 401). And in the last text of his
period as an activist, Das Leben der Studenten (publ. 1915), he
appeals to the tradition of messianic thought as well as to Plato,
Spinoza, Fichte and Nietzsche in the attempt to construe the university
as the site of a continuous spiritual revolution, radically separated
from all practical tasks and social obligations (GS II.1, 7587,
esp. 82).
To sum up, in the cultural field before World War I we find
Benjamin in an extremely marginal and precarious position. His
affinities with the Youth Movement place him outside of German
hegemonic culture. His closeness to Wynekens idea of youth culture
separates him from the main streams of the Youth Movement. Among
the supporters of Wyneken, Benjamin is relatively isolated due to his
rejection of any political practice which is not at the same time
religious. Finally, at least from early 1914 onwards, Benjamin feels
deserted by Wyneken himself, who fails to live up to his pupils ideal
of a radically inward outside. It is not surprising, therefore, that after
his break with the Jugendkulturbewegung, Benjamin engages in a
highly esoteric form of writing, the intensity and intellectual isolation
of which is exceptional even within the mystic strands of German
twentieth-century thought. Yet there are things that Benjamin takes
with him from his time as Wynekens fanatic pupil: the necessity to
draw on tradition to define his idea of revolution, a religious
scepticism which separates him from any group of believers, and an
ardent desire for sanctification which alienates him from secular life.
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152
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Bnde (Frankfurt/aM., Suhrkamp, 197489).
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Berliner Chronik, in GS VI, 465519.
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Die drei Religionssucher, in GS II.3, 8924.
Die religise Stellung der neuen Jugend, in GS II.1, 724.
Die Schulreform, eine Kulturbewegung, in GS II.1, 1246.
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Noch einmal, in GS IV.1, 435.
ber das Programm der kommenden Philosophie, in GS II.1, 15771.
Unterricht und Wertung, in GS II.1, 3542.
Paralipomena zu Surrealismus, in GS II.3, 102741.
Brcker, M. Die Grundlosigkeit der Wahrheit: Zum Verhltnis von Sprache, Geschichte
und Theologie bei Walter Benjamin (Wrzburg, Knigshausen & Neumann, 1993).
Brodersen, M. Walter Benjamin: A Biography, trans. M. R. Green, I. Ligers, ed. M.
Dervis (London, Verso, 1996).
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Werte, Kritische Philosophie, vergngliche Erfahrung (Berlin, Vorwerk 8,
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Piper, 1971).
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Koebner, Janz, Trommler, 22444.
Hillach, A. Ein neu entdecktes Lebensgesetz der Jugend: Wynekens Fhrergeist im
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Literatur und Studentenbewegung (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1977), 6489.
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Anmerkungen zu Findus, Hesse, Hofmannsthal und George, in Koebner, Janz,
Trommler, 31037.
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Jugend (Frankfurt/aM, Suhrkamp, 1985).
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Theodor W. Adorno (Wrzburg, Knigshausen & Neumann, 1988).
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Weltanschauung (Mnchen, Reinhardt, 1940).
COLIN RIORDAN
Introduction
Although the dates given in the title are are chosen more for their
roundness than for their signalling of defining turning points, they are
not wholly arbitrary. There is a continuity to green ideas, depending
on how they are defined and delimited, which begins years, decades or
centuries before 1900, and neither 1930, 1933 nor 1945 provide any
convenient turning points in this respect. The definition of green ideas
will be explored in more detail below, but the reason that the dates
1900 to 1930 have been chosen is that they encompass a period during
which concerns over the environment begin to coalesce into actual
protest and various forms of activism. More than objections to a
particular development or industrial project, these concerns amounted
to protest which contained recognizable elements of environmental
ideas translated into action. This included, I would argue, attempts to
create an alternative culture underlain by a philosophy which today we
can recognize as environmental or ecological.
Green history is notoriously complex, often giving rise to
metaphors concerning tangled roots or interweaving branches.
Ecological ideas can stem from quite different traditions and
ideologies; as a consequence the green alternatives to which I will be
referring are not easily classifiable and are the product of several
different sources or strands. Anti-modernism is certainly one of the
major actuators, but so is disillusionment with orthodox Marxism and
a positive desire to protect nature and people (as part of the same
continuum) from the ravages of industrial society. However, before
exploring the origins of these counter-cultures it will be helpful to set
out some definitions of green ideas, so that it is clear what a green
alternative would amount to.
Colin Riordan
156
What is a Green Alternative?

The first distinction commonly drawn is between anthropocentric and
ecocentric approaches. The extent to which human interests can ever
be excluded from our consideration of nature, whether it is possible to
distinguish meaningfully between the human and the natural, or
whether it is possible for human beings to act in ways motivated by
the intrinisic value of nature, remain matters of controversy. The
distinction is further complicated in contemporary green debate by the
recognition that nature is a fluid social construct rather than some
static separate entity. Nevertheless, it will be useful to retain as a
criterion for a green alternative the question of whether a particular
group privileges or prioritises nature over what they would regard as
human interests. Another commonly used distinction is an
instrumental one which is repeatedly stressed by Andrew Dobson in
his Green Political Thought: that between conservationism,
environmentalism and ecologism.1
Conservationists hope to defend a particular natural feature or
area against development. Their motivation is typically aesthetic, and
is tightly focussed rather than arising from concern for the
environment per se. Examples of conservationist campaigns can be
found as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, but cannot
be construed as any kind of radical alternative.
Environmentalists, on the other hand, are actuated by a concern
for the environment itself. They are aware of ecological interaction,
but are not prepared to make a fundamental challenge to the prevailing
orthodoxy in order to defend nature. Instead, they attempt to mitigate
the worst effects of industrialism on the environment by adopting a
pragmatic or managerial approach, campaigning on particular fronts,
or against new developments which threaten the natural world. They
will make compromises to achieve limited aims which they regard as
1
See Dobson, 1438 and passim. The distinction Dobson draws has been
critically evaluated since the first edition of his book (1990); see especially
Hayward, 18799. Blhdorn (203) draws on Goodin to stress the continuity
between the categories of conservationism, environmentalism and ecologism, as
part of an argument to explain a paradigm shift in green politics.
157
practical and achievable. Rhetorical objections to human interference

in the natural environment (such as deforestation or river channelling
in the nineteenth century) might indicate a hitherto unsuspected level
of early ecological awareness, but are not in themselves evidence of
environmentalism in a modern sense. Environmentalism proper can
reasonably be said to exist where there is evidence of active protest or
campaign against damage to the natural environment which rests on a
knowledge of the ecological effects of human action.
To come to the third category, ecologists believe that tinkering
with or restraining industrial society is wholly inadequate. The finite
nature of the earths resources requires nothing less than a radical
change in the structure of society, change which arises from the
abandonment of economic growth and big industrialism in favour of
small-scale, dispersed economies and egalitarian democracy. On their
own, environmentalist objections to pollution, depletion of the water
table and so on do not amount to ecologism. Ecologism is an ideology
composed of a number of elements. Some of the elements have an
ancient lineage, but together they amount to a coherent world view
which, Dobson suggests, cannot have existed much before the
publication of Limits to Growth in 1972 (Dobson, 35). The ecologist
world view is holistic, that is, all things both organic and inorganic are
interrelated and interdependent; interfering with one will have
unpredictable effects on others. Ecologism must be based on scientific
understanding of the global effects of human interference in nature,
but is characterized by a critical stance towards the effects of science
(in its technological guise) on global ecology. Human beings are a part
of nature, but have no superior status or special right to exist within it.
The prescription for radical change outlined above is accompanied by
apocalyptic warnings of global doom, at least for the human race, in
the event of inaction. At the risk of some simplification, ecologism is
holistic, critically scientific, ecocentric, prescriptive and apocalyptic,
with varying admixtures of misanthropism and mysticism.
It is clear that in this definition, full-blown ecologism, or deep
ecology as Arne Naess would have it, would certainly amount to a
radical green alternative. That is the standard by which I wish to judge
some of the counter-cultural groups which existed in Germanspeaking countries in the early part of the twentieth century.
158
Colin Riordan
Forms of Protest
If environmental protest in itself were a sufficient criterion for
distinguishing a genuinely radical alternative to early twentieth
century orthodoxy in Germany, then two movements in particular
would have at least to be considered: the Bund Heimatschutz and the
Naturfreunde.
Founded in 1904, the Bund Heimatschutz was an umbrella
organization which embraced 250 affiliated groups by 1916. Nature
conservation was only one of the Bunds preservationist aims, others
including traditional architecture, folk customs and art. The
conventional wisdom has been that the Bunds concerns were hardly
environmental in the modern sense, but mainly conservationist. Arne
Andersen has argued that, in keeping with its reactionary origins and
its romantic idealization of nature, the Bund Heimatschutz judged the
preservationist value of natural features mainly on aesthetic grounds.
Its opposition to the building of a hydro-electric power station at
Laufenburg on the Rhine, for example, took the form of a proposal to
re-site the project somewhere less aesthetically damaging. Failing in
its opposition, the Bund was reduced to hoping that the design of the
power station would be as visually pleasing as possible (Andersen,
150). Andersens view of the Heimatschtzer as an ineffectual
campaigning group is contested by William Rollins, who suggests that
their aesthetic communication contributed directly to popular
environmental consciousness by proclaiming the value of beautiful
and healthy landscape decades before science could prove such value
(Rollins, 14982). While agreeing that the aesthetic aims of the
movement were paramount, Rollins argues that Bund Heimatschutz
policies on the importance of hedging and mixed forest, and their
understanding of the dangers of pollution, for example, do indeed
indicate an understanding of environmental problems and a
determination to take action to solve them which is recognizable in
terms of modern environmentalism. But we are left with a
fundamental problem: Rollins argues that the League was forced to
rely on the aesthetic arguments in the absence of scientific evidence
(Rollins, 154). Yet it is precisely the advent of convincing scientific
159
evidence which allowed the environmental movement to blossom in

the form in which we know it today. There seems little point, then,
in trying to show that the League was in fact environmentallyminded in any modern sense. At this stage we are still confronted with
a conservationist concern for the preservation of individual natural
features, albeit a concern which was, as Rollins shows, remarkably
well-informed. The most convincing argument in favour of the Bund
Heimatschutz as pioneering environmental campaigners is the way in
which the organisation raised the level of interest in damage to the
natural environment. But in this respect it was by no means alone.
Affiliated to the SPD, the Naturfreunde were formed as a tourist
club in Vienna in 1895. The club was composed of walking
enthusiasts and so-called Walzbrder, itinerant skilled workers
following the old tradition of walking to where the work was. These
workers were able to disseminate political propaganda as well as their
skills. In contrast to the Heimatschtzer, the Naturfreunde were, of
course, unafraid of criticizing capitalism, and especially private
ownership. In 1906 they began a campaign for free access to a
countryside large tracts of which lay in private hands. Their journal
Der Naturfreund urged the associations members to take part in an
escalating series of protests ranging from legitimate lobbying of
parliament to civil disobedience in the form of mass trespass. Whether
the desire to allow large masses of people access to otherwise sparsely
populated countryside can be termed environmentalist is debatable,
whatever one may think of the demerits of private property. But it is
clear that in resorting to extra-legal methods of protest, the
Naturfreunde were foreshadowing modern environmental groups in
ways unmatched by the conservative wings of the movement. Their
protests were directed at a whole range of environmentally damaging
projects from deforestation and industrial development to quarrying
and peat-moor plundering. The Naturfreunde were also ahead of their
time in making an explicit connection between capitalism and the
exploitation of natural resources. However, they were unable to make
the leap of faith necessary to reject industry altogether, and their
motivation remained resolutely anthropocentric: rather than primarily
wishing to preserve nature, their main aim was to make nature
accessible to the working classes.
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Colin Riordan
Neither of these groups, then, represented a radical alternative, or

a definitively green alternative, even if they can in some ways be seen
as the forerunners of modern campaigning groups. The Bund
Heimatschutz was timid and conservationist; the Naturfreunde
primarily anti-capitalist without being necessarily anti-industry. More
radical movements arose from different sources.
Origins of the Radical Green Alternative

There were three main sources which fed into the groupings which are
readily identifiable as counter-cultural: the Lebensreform movement,
the settlement movement, and the philosophical and political ideas of
Peter Kropotkin, Ludwig Klages and Gustav Landauer.
Lebensreform
The Lebensreform movement seems to have developed very much in
tandem with the rapid industrialisation of Germany between 1848 and
unification. Urbanization, industrialization and the sheer speed of
modern life were held to be harmful to health, the cure being to use
natural methods. Lebensreformer thus preached abstinence from
harmful man-made substances or artefacts: alcohol, smoking, even
spices were abjured (Hermand, 93). Vegetarianism, though not new,
gained in popularity, while nudism represented an effort to regain the
innocence of the natural state. Rudolf Steiners creed of
anthroposophy was perhaps the most influential and enduring, leading
to the foundation of organic farming. Lebensreform was essentially
anthropocentric, prompted less by a primary concern for nature than
by fear of the effects of technology on human health, even though it
frequently involved elements which would today belong to a certain
range of green politics, such as animal rights as a justification for
vegetarianism. But practising Lebensreform was only fully possible if
161
urban life was rejected, and it was this that led to the burgeoning
settlement movement.
Settlement movements
The first Lebensreform settlement was established in 1887 in the Isar
valley, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, hundreds of
groups existed in Germany practising vegetarianism, nudism and
abstinence of various kinds.2 Indeed, colonies practising the simple
life were set up all over the world. Nietzsches brother-in-law
famously founded a colony in South America, whose descendants still
live there.3 Most of these settlements were short-lived, or were
dissolved and re-established with a change of name and people.
One example, taken from the documents assembled and
published by Ulrich Linse, is EDEN die vegetarische Obstbau
Kolonie. This was founded as a limited company in 1893 by Bruno
Wilhelmy, with the aim of combining a Lebensreform approach with
common ownership of land. It was set up near Oranienburg outside
Berlin. The name was changed several times and the settlement went
through many financial and personnel crises, but survived both the
Nazi years and the division of Germany. It continued its existence as a
collective farm in the GDR, while one of the members founded a
western branch in Bad Soden in 1950, where in 1962 the EdenStiftung was founded, which not only still exists but has its own
website. Its aim, as stated today, is:
die Erhaltung, Frderung und Weiterentwicklung der ideellen, lebensreformerischen
und kologischen Grundlagen, die vor hundert Jahren von der EDEN
Gemeinntzige Obstbausiedlung eGmbH, Oranienburg Eden geschaffen, in
der Praxis erprobt wurden und sich in einer naturnahen Lebenshaltung und
Gesundheitspflege niederschlagen.4
It is clear from the original principles of the colony, however, that this
kind of Lebensreform colony was, in its original form, less overtly
2
3
4
See Linse for more details.

See Macintyre for further discussion.
See http://www.infomarketing.de/eden/index.html.
Colin Riordan
162
kologisch than concerned with the benefits to people of living close

to nature. Self-development was the primary aim, as an early
statement of principles reveals:
Als zusammenfassende, jeden einzelnen moralisch verpflichtende Grundidee
gilt der Vorsatz zur Fhrung eines naturgemen Lebens, im Sinne praktischer
Selbstreform, da heit bestndiger Selbsterziehung. (Linse, Zurck, 48).
The intentions are certainly of the best: Die sittliche Grundlage der
Gemeinde soll sein: Gerechtigkeit und gegenseitig bettigtes
Wohlwollen, sowie Milde gegenber dem Tier (Linse, Zurck..., 48).
There is a strong moral tone which might explain why such
settlements tended to lose members and struggle to recruit:
Wir mssen [] unentwegt darauf sehen, da als Mitglieder nur Menschen zu
uns kommen, die ernste Lebensreformer sind. Wenn Alkoholabstinenz und
Vegetarismus auch nicht immer und ohne weiteres genossenschaftlichen Sinn
verbrgern, so bietet ernste Selbstzucht und Meidung der Nervengifte und
schdlichen Reizmittel immerhin noch die beste Gewhr, Reibungen im
genossenschaftlichen Innenleben tunlichsts zu vermeiden. (Linse, Zurck, 42)
And sternly, in a similar vein:

Die Forderung naturgemen Lebens schliet in sich, da Nahrung, Kleidung
und uerer Aufwand nur Mittel zum Zweck, nicht Selbstzweck sein sollen und
also Genusucht, sowie uerer Prunk hier keine Sttte finden sollen (Linse,
Zurck, 48).
Puritan efforts of this kind to forge a new way of living undoubtedly

amount to a conscious attempt to create an alternative, and can
certainly be regarded as counter-cultural, though not in a subversive
way. They do not, however, amount to a green alternative, partly
because there is little or no evidence of any real ecological
understanding which could hardly be expected at that time and
partly because of the lack of any real political will to effect change.
Groups such as this were inward-looking; rigorously interested in the
health of their members rather than in recruiting the masses to a new
philosophy of nature. At most, they hoped to set a good example.
Among the best remembered of this kind of group are those
associated with the Swiss village of Ascona, perhaps because of the
163
fame of some of those involved.5 Ascona was founded by the brothers

Gusto and Karl Grser in 1900 (Green, 1202). Their initial colony
lasted only a year, but started a tradition, and led to the establishment
of the sanatorium Monte Verit, which prescribed vegetarian food,
sun baths, air baths, earth cures, and water cures for its patients, who
included Hermann Hesse. The treatment was more than homeopathic;
nature cures went together with cult celebration of air, water and light
(Green, 123). Asconans were not environmental campaigners. Nature
worship was, if not devoid of political content, then at least not overtly
political, and Naturmenschen, in rejecting society, simultaneously
had to renounce much potential influence. In any case, their long hair,
bare legs and sandals more often than not made them objects of
derision.
The influence of such groups was slight and their members
marginalized. But the very atomism and decentralization of these
groups made them into a kind of prototype for later views of how an
ecological society might look. The case must not be overstated: many
of the adherents of these ideas were not only mystical, but thoroughly
anti-science (the Grsers, for example). Modern ecologism is
inconceivable without a scientific basis to understand the world.
Further, they lacked the kind of political manifesto without which
radical ecologism has no blueprint for change. It was from the work of
thinkers such as Kropotkin, Klages and Landauer that such a
manifesto was to arise.
Kropotkin, Klages, Landauer
The work of Peter Kropotkin, particularly his Mutual Aid, gave a
crucial theoretical underpinning to the settlement movement.
Ultimately it is Kropotkins interpretation of Darwin that lies at the
heart of his theory of mutual aid. The thrust of Kropotkins work is to
focus on mutualism as the primary, though not the sole, factor in
evolution.6 Recognizing that Darwin had proposed for the first time a
5
6
They include Hesse, D. H. Lawrence, Kafka, Jung, for example: see Green.
Only relatively recently has Kropotkins pioneering work in this area received
the recognition it deserves. The reason for this may be that a socio-political
164
Colin Riordan
scientific theory which allowed a rational exposition of holism, or

unity in nature as Kropotkin puts it (Kropotkin, 83), the anarchist
geographer argued that practically all exponents of Darwinism,
particularly in Britain, propounded the doctrines of competition and
predation to the exclusion of other evolutionary factors. T. H. Huxley
is taken as the prime advocate of such an approach, and it is he who is
made responsible not only for the popularization but also the
widespread distortion of the notion of survival of the fittest. While
fittest was almost always taken to mean strongest, a more
appropriate interpretation would be best adapted. Mutualism,
Kropotkin argued, figured far more often as a successful evolutionary
adaptation than did competition.7 Deriving this lesson from examples
of evolutionary adaptation, Kropotkin applies it to the social
organization of human beings. Once the premise is accepted, the
politico-constitutional logic is inescapable: the best behavioural
adaptation for mankind is to live in small, cohesive communities in
harmony with the environment, although Kropotkin sees no necessary
conflict between industrial progress and preservation of the natural
order. Yet living off the land in close contact with the natural
environment has its compensations in terms of mutual aid and tribal
morality. The mutualist values of African tribes are described in
Mutual Aid as exemplary for the nations of the world.
The publication in 1913 of an essay entitled Mensch und Erde
by Ludwig Klages provided the communalists with an impassioned
case in favour of their attempts to rehearse an alternative way of living
on the earth. The vitalist philosopher Klages rejected technology
vehemently. In Mensch und Erde, Klages not only excoriates the
destructive effects of industry on the environment, but apocalyptically
accuses industrialists of matricide; they will end by destroying mother
earth. Industrial technology is equated with the destruction of life:
Zerrissen ist der Zusammenhang zwischen Menschenschpfung und Erde,
vernichtet fr Jahrhunderte, wenn nicht fr immer, das Urlied der Landschaft.
Dieselben Schienenstrnge, Telegraphendrhte, Starkstromleitungen durch-
climate ripe for competitive or negative interactions may have subconsciously

influenced the way in which ecologists formulate research problems in the first
place (Vandermeer, 221).
Vandermeer confirms this analysis (221).
165
schneiden mit roher Geradlinigkeit Wald und Bergprofile, sei es hier, sei es in
Indien, gypten, Australien, Amerika; die gleichen grauen vielstckige
Mietskasernen reihen sich einfrmig aneinander, wo immer der Bildungsmensch seine segenbringende Ttigkeit entfaltet; bei uns wie anderswo
werden [] Grben zugeschttet, blhende Hecken rasiert, schilfumstandene
Weiher ausgetrocknet. (10)
Some of Klagess analysis sounds astonishingly contemporary: Was

aber das heuchlerische Naturgefhl der sogenannten Touristik anlangt,
so brauchen wir wohl kaum noch auf die Verwstungen hinzuweisen,
welche die Erschlieung weltfremder Ksten und Gebirgstler nach
sich zog (Klages, 11). In 1913, Klages recognized and articulated the
possibility that mankind was exploiting the global environment in an
unsustainable way. There is a real passion and rage here, and it is
apparent that something approaching a modern environmental
consciousness can be found at this time. The important point though is
that Klagess attack is against industry per se, not just capitalism, and
it is decisively pro-nature as well as being straightforwardly antimodern. Incidentally, this polemic coincides with the period when the
science of ecology crystallized into a recognizable modern discipline.
After the First World War, alternative life-style groups began to
take on a more political and distinctively ecological tinge, a
development for which the anarchist Gustav Landauer was in some
measure responsible. Landauer it was who translated Peter
Kropotkins Mutual Aid into German under the title Gegenseitige
Hilfe in 1908. His adaptation of the ideas of Kropotkin and Tolstoy on
socialist communes exerted an influence not diminished by his
reluctance to become personally involved in the settlement movement.
His Aufruf zum Sozialismus (1911) proposed a form of non-Marxist,
agrarian socialism which Rhys Williams describes as follows:
What Landauer advocates, with increasing insistence in later essays, is a
decentralized, small-scale community, producing only enough to satisfy its
needs. Exemplary co-operative settlements on the land and the rejection of
urban industrialism are the basic tenets of his socialism. (Williams, 61)
To that I would add that in his unequivocal rejection of industrialism,

Landauer takes Kropotkins arguments a stage further. Like Klages,
Landauer too sees industry per se as the problem, rather than simply
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Colin Riordan
viewing environmental depredation as one of the many faults of

capitalism, as the Naturfreunde did.
Counter-Cultures: the Green Alternative

The intellectual resources which thus existed by the beginning of the
First World War brought about a qualitative change in the settlement
movement. For the first time nature was not just appreciated for its
intrinsic value, but placed ahead of human interests in order of
priority. For the first time too, settlements were founded with a
primary aim of reducing human impact on nature. Moreover, this
proto-environmental approach is, again for the first time, couched in a
political programme. At this point there is a case for identifying a
genuine radical green alternative. There is a clear prescription for
radical change accompanied by predictions of disaster in the event of
inaction. The changes proposed specifically privilege the interests of
nature rather than those of human beings, and implicite value nature
intrinsically rather than for its benefits to society. The radical
alternative is based on ecological principles derived from well
understood scientific processes, and includes small-scale but advanced
technology to achieve the stated aims. Though there is room for
mysticism, and certainly for a passionate veneration of nature, this
counter-culture is couched in a radical political programme which
derives much of its inspiration from the sources outlined in the
previous section.
In January 1921 settlement revolutionaries met at Heinrich
Vogelers Barkenhoff commune at Worpswede to plan a massive
demonstration. Its aim was to seize control of the means of food
production and to bring about a change in the way people lived their
lives: Brot, Sonne, Licht was the slogan. The two main initiators of
the action were Leberecht Migge and Paul Robien. Migge was a
landscape architect responsible for an innovatory approach to public
gardens. His concept of the sozialer Garten incorporated approaches
to recycling and building with a low environmental impact which are
167
readily identifiable as guided by ecological principles. A garden for

him was less an aesthetic object than a means of self-sufficiency. The
use of small-scale high technology would allow people to circumvent
the necessity for massive capital investment in industry, and give a
high quality of life with economical use of natural resources. At the
Sonnenhof artists colony in Worpswede, Migge experimented with
ecological approaches to gardening and to self-sufficiency.
Paul Robien was no less than a nature revolutionary, whose
political programme sprang from both a profound love of nature and a
rejection of capitalism. The crucial feature which distinguishes him
from others on the left such as the Naturfreunde was his rejection of
Marxism for a decisively anti-industrial stance. Robien despised
Marxist theory, inaccurately predicting that Kropotkins mutualist
approach would one day emerge victorious. He could not understand
why Marx did not regard agriculture as the key determinant in the
revolution. For Robien, common ownership of the means of food
production was the foundation of a just society, and the literal and
metaphorical machinery of industry needed to be abolished along with
capitalism.
Moreover, Robien had a political programme which he hoped to
put into practise by bringing about a Naturrevolution which would
motivate the masses to live on the land according to a carefully
calculated plan of settlement. Robiens renunciation of human
interference in nature was indeed radical. While Migge was willing to
countenance thoroughgoing cultivation of the countryside, and
regarded urban living as an inevitable necessity which could be
ameliorated by innovative planning of green spaces, Robien was
determined that cultivation should be kept to the minimum necessary,
and that as much countryside as possible should be left in a wild state
(Linse, Zurck, 95). It is quite clear that although Robien wishes to
improve the lot of the proletariat, nature is accorded at least equal
status:
Dem allgemeinen Naturschutz wre die grte Beachtung zu widmen. Wir
drfen nie von der Nivellierungssucht befallen werden, nie brutal und
gewissenlos die Naturdenkmler ausrotten. Die Natur wird da bald ihre
rchende Hand erheben [] (Linse, kopax, 96)
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Colin Riordan
This does seem to betray a sense of the consequences of our impact on

the environment, and is certainly testament to the value which the
nature revolutionaries place on its protection.
Even though the planned action was a miserable failure, lacking
any support whatever either from the unions or from the masses, there
is nevertheless early evidence here of an attempt to bring about radical
change through political action. And there are enough other reasons to
see precursors of radical political ecologism in Germany in this group.
Migge and Robien articulated many of the standard elements of
ecologist economics that we know today. Migges Das grne
Manifest, first published in 1919, recommends a series of measures to
promote the productivity of land use in a sustainable way, drawing on
a whole range of organic cultivation methods. The aim was to reach a
society which can live off the land using recycling to renew resources,
stretching small technology to its limits to do so. He drew on Chinese
methods of cultivation which achieved high yields without chemical
fertilizers, pesticides or weedkillers. He drew on Kropotkin, too, for
his vision of das grne Land der Jugend, der Gesundheit und des
Glcks (Linse, Zurck, 85). His Intensive Siedlerschule in
Worpswede put these ideas into practice (Linse, Zurck, 86).
Robien remained a tireless campaigner for ecosocialism, stressing, in
contrast to the nationalist Heimatschtzer, that an internationalist
approach was essential, and maintaining that the green vision
absolutely necessitated a reduction in consumption. He also argued,
on a scientific basis, that animals and human beings had an equal right
to existence (Linse, Zurck, 116).
Taken together, these ideas do amount to something approaching
an ecological vision, though it would perhaps be overstating the case
to say that that deep green ecology, or ecologism, existed in Germany
in the 1920s. Nevertheless, we do here certainly see a recognisable
analysis of environmental impact, and we do have recognition of the
finite nature of resources. Moreover, there is a prescription for change
which involves small-scale communities and the use of small-scale
technology to renew resources as much as possible. Although there is
no clear prediction of apocalypse if change is not made, these people
were certainly holistic in their approach, and there is no doubting the
commitment to nature. Perhaps their most significant deficiency was
support: they remained marginalized, despite persisting in their
169
settlement policy. But then, if they had had mass support, and made
uncompromising nature protection the orthodoxy, they would not
amount to a counter-culture, and the world would be a very different
place.
Works Cited
Andersen, A. Heimatschutz: Die brgerliche Naturschutzbewegung, in F.-J.
Brggemeier and T. Rommelspacher (Hg.), Besiegte Natur. Geschicht der
Umwelt im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1989), 14357.
Blhdorn, I. Campaigning for Nature: Environmental Pressure Groups in Germany
and Generational Change in the Ecology Movement, in I. Blhdorn, F. Krause,
T. Scharf (eds.), The Green Agenda. Environmental Politics and Policy in
Germany (Keele, 1995), 167220.
Dobson, A. Green Political Thought, 2nd edn., (London, 1995)
Goodin, R. E. Green Political Theory (Cambridge, 1992).
Green, M. Mountain of Truth. The Counterculture Begins. Ascona, 19001920
(Hanover (NH), 1986).
Hayward, T. Ecological Thought. An Introduction (Cambridge, 1994).
Hermand, J. Grne Utopien in Deutschland. Zur Geschichte des kologischen
Bewutseins (Frankfurt aM, 1991).
Klages, L. Mensch und Erde: zehn Abhandlungen (Stuttgart: Krner Verlag, 1956).
Kropotkin, P. Mutual Aid. A Factor of Evolution (London, Penguin, 1972).
Linse, U. kopax und Anarchie: Eine Geschichte der kologischen Bewegungen in
Deutschland (Munich, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986).
Zurck, o Mensch, zur Mutter Erde. Landkommunen in Deutschland, 1890
1933 (Munich, 1983)
Macintyre, B. Forgotten Fatherland : The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche (London,
1992).
Rollins, W. Bund Heimatschutz: Zur Integration von sthetik und kologie, in J.
Hermand (Hg.), Mit den Bumen sterben die Menschen. Zur Kulturgeschichte
der kologie (Kln, 1993), 14982.
Vandermeer, J. The Evolution of Mutualism, in B. Shorrocks (ed) Evolutionary
Biology (Oxford, Blackwell, 1984), 22130.
Williams, R. W. Community Plants the Forests of Justice: Gustav Landauer,
Ecosocialism and German Expressionism, in C. Riordan (ed) Green Thought in
German Culture. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1997), 5573.
SABINE EGGER
The Roots of the East German Green

Movement in the 1950s
It has generally been held that the first unofficial green movement in
the GDR emerged in the 1970s. The East German Protestant Church
provided spaces outside direct party control for discussion groups and
poetry readings, in which the official discourse on armed peace,
rational use of the human environment and the dominant concept of
progress as such were challenged.1 The alternative discourse can be
traced back further, however, to literary and non-literary texts of the
1950s and, to some extent, even as far back as Goethes pantheism,
or ecological arguments developed in the nineteenth century. I would
like to follow Raymond Dominicks argument, however, that
environmentalist discourse in both Germanies changed in two
significant ways after 1945: firstly by adopting a holistic argument,
and secondly by discovering the potential threat to human survival
inherent in scientific and technological progress governed by
instrumental reason (Dominick, 41).2 In my paper I will sketch the
development of both aspects in East German alternative discourse
from the 1950s to the 1990s, focusing in particular on the counter1
2
See Becker, Bruckmeier, and Goodbody for an overview.

In The Eclipse of Reason (1947), Horkheimer (4) defines the concept of
instrumental or subjective reason as thought which has relinquished its
capacity to reflect on the whole of human existence. He finds this exemplified
in modern scientific-technical discourse, which he describes as a utilitarian way
of thinking, ultimately concerned with the subjects self-preservation in the
short term. Instrumental reason, albeit less clearly defined, is at the heart of
Horkheimer and Adornos Dialektik der Aufklrung, jointly written between
1941 and 1944, a critique of the instrumental foreshortening of the substantive
concept of reason, advanced by representatives of the European Enlightenment
and German idealism, with the rise of modern positivism. For a critical
discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno, see Wolin (2361).
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Sabine Egger
cultural potential of Fortschrittskritik in the context of East German

culture.
Until the 1970s, the equation of scientific-technological and
economic progress with social and humanitarian development
dominated public discourse in the GDR. Despite growing concern
among GDR citizens, as the negative effects of an increasing
industrial production on the environment became apparent, there was
no public debate on the interrelationship between progress and the
destruction of the environment. As late as 1987, the government saw a
further acceleration of technological progress as the only solution for
environmental problems. This is illustrated by state philosophers
Wolfgang Eichhorn, Erich Hahn and Alfred Kosings keynote paper
Die wissenschaftlich-technische Revolution technischer Selbstzweck oder Realisierung sozialer Zwecke? presented during the
VIIth GDR Congress of Philosophy in 1987, in which the authors
reiterate the government view of the merits of technological progress.3
It was only in the 1980s that the discussion of ecological and peace
issues, first developing in groups within the Protestant Church,
reached a wider public. The related issues of peace and environment were even to be a uniting factor between different oppositional
groups in the Leipzig protest marches in 1989 and the subsequent
collapse of the communist system (Brand, 10). In literature, the
dominant definition of progress, instrumental reason and anthropocentrism were much earlier identified as a cause of environmental
destruction that might eventually result in the destruction of human
life. This is expressed in poems by Sarah Kirsch, Gnter Kunert and
other East German poets in the 1960s and then becomes a prominent
topic in apocalyptic writing of the 1970s and 80s but it is given
expression even earlier, in the poetry of Johannes Bobrowski and
Peter Huchel in the 1950s. Unlike the GDR environmental movement
of the 1970s and 80s, Bobrowski, Huchel and their contemporaries did
not set out to fundamentally change the dominant culture and its
institutions. They did not participate in a counter-culture which,
according to von Dirkes definition, challenge[s] the hegemonic
3
Published in Deutsche Zeitschrift fr Philosophie, 1 (1988), 1118, quoted in

Schenkel (51).
The Roots of the East German Green Movement in the 1950s
173
culture with a holistic approach, negating all of its values and

traditions and struggling for radical and comprehensive change (von
Dirke, 4). But in the absence of an open public debate on
environmental, as well as other social and political issues in the GDR,
poetry functioned as an alternative discourse to official ideology.4 It
could be said, therefore, that the critical discourse on progress in the
nature poetry of the 1950s had an emancipatory function in the
context of GDR culture, despite this genres otherwise non-political or
even conservative nature.5
The belief in the mutual interdependence of scientific,
technological, economic and political progress is central to orthodox
Marxist theory and Marxism-Leninism. Any criticism of this belief
therefore had much further reaching cultural and political implications
in the GDR than, for example, in West Germany. Marx had demanded
that progress should be the fundamental principle of a socialist states
constitution (Marx and Engels, Werke, 259). Marxist theory interprets
history as social, economic and humanitarian progress from non-equal
forms of societies, through capitalism and socialism, to the ideal of a
classless communist society, in which the individual as a collective
being will have achieved complete emancipation and self-fulfilment.
Historical progress in a post-revolutionary Soviet-type society is,
according to Marxism-Leninism, a linear and objectively determined
process. The development towards a communist society, however,
demands an increasing degree of control over the social and physical
environment. Economic progress can only be achieved through the
rational use of natural resources.6 External nature, in Marxist theory,
has therefore no intrinsic value except as the object of human work
and of the material for the survival of the human being. While Marx
had actually proposed the harmony of man and nature in a truly
4
5
My argument is based on Foucaults theory of discourse, as outlined in The

Archeology of Knowledge.
Herzinger and Preuer (209), as well as Joppke, have claimed that the German
tradition of zivilisationskritischen, antiwestlichen, unpolitischen und
utopischen Denkens which they detect in GDR and contemporary eastern
German culture is by definition not emancipatory.
Gorz (48ff.) even defines rationalisation, such as evident in the scientific
control of nature, as the underlying principle of communism.
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Sabine Egger
communist society in his early writings, the later Marx, as well as

Marxism-Leninism, discarded this concept and replaced it with the
idea that the human being defines himself against nature, through
working on nature and transforming it into different objects for
his use.7
Soviet-type of societies are dominated by a monosemic
discourse and unified by a shared goal: the realisation of communism
through progress (Zima, 78). The dominant discourse in the GDR was
monosemic in that it sought to prohibit any form of ambiguity.
Official socialist norms were enacted through a binary system that
juxtaposed Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment values. AntiEnlightenment modes of thinking, i.e. subjective, non-rational, emotional modes, were considered to be the negative side of the equation
and coded as irrational, bourgeois-individualist, reactionary,
or even fascist (Bathrick, 1516). The Enlightenment ideal of
progress, as a shared goal, particularly with regard to increasing
economic performance to satisfy peoples material needs, served as a
structurally integrating principle in the GDR. T. H. Rigby describes
socialist societies in general as mono-organisational: they are
complex hierarchical systems, centrally integrated by the Communist
Party, and less determined by a set of formal rules, as is the case in a
democratic society, than by the realisation of shared material goals
(Rigby, 12). Latenter Fortschrittsglaube was thus used to integrate
the political goals of the party with the diversity of values and needs
in society (Beck, 324). As long as the majority of the population
believed in the potential benefits of continuing technological and
economic progress for the fulfilment of their wishes, the idea of
progress was able to integrate a broad spectrum of interests and
values. It is worth stressing that the principles of consumerism and
economic growth were far from absent in the SEDs planned
economy. One SED slogan of the 1970s read Was leisten, um sich
was leisten zu knnen (Rddenklau, 44). The level of consumption in
West Germany was the ideal that the majority of East Germans
See Marx and Engels, Studienausgabe (101), for an example. For an analysis of
the relationship between man and nature in Marx, see Haupt (209).
175
wanted to achieve.8 Their realisation that this level of consumption

and growth remained out of reach lead to a growing sense of
disillusionment, particularly in the 1980s. Criticism of the idea of
progress itself and the rational control of the natural environment, as
voiced by the environmental movement, fell on open ears, and proved
detrimental for the ruling party. It undermined the fundamentals of the
dominant discourse, leaving the regime open to a whole range of
challenges.9
Advances in the peaceful uses of nuclear technology, as
publicised in the wake of the Geneva Conference on Nuclear Energy
in 1955, marked a new level of mans technological ability to
manipulate nature. The response of GDR scientists and politicians was
largely positive (Stokes, 9). But more sceptical commentaries
followed, arguing that the peaceful use of nuclear energy and the use
of the new technology for the development of nuclear weapons could
not be separated. In 1957, several scientific journals reported that
flocks of migrating birds had disappeared after crossing areas in
Nevada and the Bikini Atoll in which atomic bombs had been tested.10
Bobrowskis poem Vogelstraen 1957 (1957) responds to this event.
There was no public outcry in the GDR, comparable to the Kampf
dem Atomtod campaign in West Germany against Adenauers
nuclear policy, but poems such as Bobrowskis and Stephan Hermlins
Die Vgel und der Test (1957) point to the destructive potential of
8
9
10
See Rddenklau (445), Wensierski and Bscher (1223), and Rink (183) for
an analysis of East German attitudes to consumption.
Due to its rigid monosemic structure, the official GDR culture, unlike Western
commercialised mass culture, was unable to re-integrate counter-cultural, or
even alternative or subcultural discourses. Being no longer able to suppress and
exclude Fortschrittskritik and ecological debate meant the end for the
hegemonic culture itself. The initially counter-cultural environmental
discourse in the FRG, on the other hand, has become part of mainstream
culture, and succeeded in changing it from within even if in a less radical
fashion than had been envisaged in the early days. See von Dirke (15) and
Billington (1820) for definitions of sub- and counter-cultures (15), as well as
an overview of the West German environmental movement (von Dirke, 183
208).
Zugvgel frchten Atombomben, Das Gewissen, 8 (1956), 2, and reprints of
two Japanese publications in Die Vogelwarte, 76 (1955), 36, quoted in
Heukenkamp (806).
Sabine Egger
176
science and technology, the ultimate manifestation of which they see

in the atomic bomb (Hermlin, 11). Bobrowskis poem, stresses the
mutual dependence of human beings and the natural world. The
atomic explosion, described in part II, kills the migrating birds, which
represent non-human nature, and it also entails the end of songs,
which signify human culture.
I
Im Regen schlief ich,
im Regenrhricht erwacht ich.
Eh es blttert, seh ich den nahen Mond,
hr ich den Zugvogelschrei,
den Lufterschttrer, den weien
Schrei, der die Luft zerschlgt.
Schnell und scharf
wie die Wlfe wittern, I
Schwester, lausch! Winemminen
singt durch den Wind,
wirft aus Schnee den Fittich
auf deine Schulter, wir treiben
flgelnd im Liederwind
II
aber unter groen
Himmeln allein, verlassne
Straen der gefiederten
Heere, die vergingen
schlafend auf den Winden
fuhren sie, eine neue
Sonne flammte, die Lohe
schlug herauf, sie brannten
im Aschenbaum.
Dort sind aufgeflogen
unsere Lieder auch.
Schwester, deine Hnde
bleichen, du schlfst mir im Dunkel
fort wann soll ich
singen der Vgel Angst? (Gesammelte Werke, Band 1, 114115)
177
The poem bemoans the loss of the primeval harmony of humanity and
the natural world, depicted in the first two stanzas. However, this
ancient world, set in an indefinite, mythical past, is no Arcadian idyll
in the traditional sense. It is harsh and archaic, but the speaker lives in
harmony with the natural world. Synaesthetic effects suggest that man
and environment, but also senses, feelings, thought and language
constitute an as yet undivided unity. As Ursula Heukenkamp points
out in her interpretation, this world is held together by Waineminen,
the mythical bard and hero of the Finnish epic Kalevala
(Heukenkamp, 812). In the present, which is juxtaposed to this ideal in
part II, earth and sky are empty: this is a world without life of any
kind. The atomic explosion responsible for this is conveyed
metaphorically as an act of creation or rather as its negation: a new
sun, leaving behind nothing but an ashen tree. Bobrowskis poem
questions scientific progress from an ethical point of view. Man has
left his place in the cosmic order and put himself in Gods place,
ruling, however, by instrumental reason. The result is the destruction
of all life. Johannes Bobrowskis landscapes are always symbolic
spaces with several related levels of meaning. The darkness,
prevalent in many of them, is ambivalent: on the one hand, it refers to
an otherness of nature which the speaker is unable to comprehend
rationally, but is drawn to instinctively an earth mother from
whom the son has become estranged. On the other hand, it refers to
human history, portrayed negatively as a series of repetitive crimes
against the God-given natural order history as Schattenfabel von
den Verschuldungen (An Klopstock, Gesammelte Werke, Band 1,
161).11 Examples of this in his poems are the violent Christianisation
of Eastern European tribes, who lived in mythic harmony with nature
prior to this, National Socialism, the Second World War, and the
annihilation of life through nuclear weapons. The line Neues hat nie
begonnen, in his programmatic poem Absage aptly summarises his
view of history as being static or cyclical (Bobrowski, Gesammelte
Werke, Band 1, 73). Through human objectivisation and manipulation
11
In an interview, he describes the central theme of his writing as Die Deutschen

und der europische Osten [] Eine lange Geschichte aus Unglck und
Verschuldung (Bobrowski, Mein Thema, in Selbstzeugnisse, 23).
Sabine Egger
178
of nature, and recent acts in history, the original symbiotic relationship

between the human and non-human natural world has been shattered.
While Bobrowski draws for his imagery and portrayal of history on
mythology, his ethical point of view is firmly based on his Lutheran
faith with regard to the idea of Gods creation, underlying
Vogelstraen, and the concepts of guilt, punishment and hope,
evident throughout his poetry.12
Huchels post-war poetry is also dominated by images of a nature
bearing the traces of human history. The darkness of his increasingly
hermetic verse arises from the perceived loss of an adequate language
in a world devoid of meaning; it is a result of the disturbed
communication with the sign system of the natural world, and with
society. Huchels landscapes are symbolic of history and existential
fears but nevertheless informed by an ecological point of view in
that they stress the inter-dependence of all life. In Psalm, first
published 1963 in Chausseen Chausseen, but written in the late 1950s,
Huchel comments on the destructive course of human history. The
concluding lines of the poem point to a humanity caught in the limited
universe of instrumental reason, eagerly pursuing short-term goals,
while their narrow focus makes them blind to the fact that this will
eventually lead to their self-destruction.
Da aus dem Samen des Menschen
Kein Mensch
Und aus dem Samen des lbaums
Kein lbaum
Werde,
Es ist zu messen
Mit der Elle des Todes.
Die da wohnen
Unter der Erde
In einer Kugel aus Zement,
Ihre Strke gleicht
Dem Halm
Im peitschenden Schnee.
12
On the religious dimension of Bobrowskis work, see von Heydebrand.
179
Die de wird Geschichte.

Termiten schreiben sie
Mit ihren Zangen
In den Sand.
Und nicht erforscht wird werden
Ein Geschlecht,
Eifrig bemht,
Sich zu vernichten. (Gesammelte Werke, Band 1, 157)
The image in the second stanza of human beings sheltering vainly in a

concrete bunker beneath the surface of an earth turned into a desert
evokes a post-nuclear scene. Termites are the only survivors and
chroniclers; they will write an account of human history with their
pincers in the sand, as is envisaged in the third stanza. Huchel reverses
the subject-object relationship between human beings and animals as
representatives of the natural world. Human scientists will, this time,
not be able to do their research, as is predicted in the last stanza. Nonhuman nature will interpret the events from a different point of view.
This non-human perspective proves superior; it is the lasting one.
Humankind is seen as part of a larger natural world; the laws of the
latter are superior to human science. Human progressive history is
subordinated under the cyclical time of nature implied by the image
of the seed at the beginning of the poem, and by the fact that termites
survive the man-made apocalypse, whereas humanity does not.
Human hubris, which manifests itself in the failure of mankind to
understand its place in the cosmic order of things, i.e. to recognise that
Ihre Strke gleicht / Dem Halm / Im peitschenden Schnee, is
punished.
These poems are representative of both poets work, in that they
put forward a model of history based on cyclical natural time, rather
than linear progress. Their poetic approach re-instates nature as a
subject, instead of reducing it to an object. They thus participate in a
discourse which subverts the official discourse as outlined earlier, and
anticipate themes and perspectives which inform Gnter Kunerts
Warngedichte, the nature poetry of Sarah Kirsch, the apocalyptic
texts of Christa Wolf, Heiner Mller, Volker Braun and others, the
Ecopoetry of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the non-literary
180
Sabine Egger
discourse of the unofficial green movement. In this respect,

Bobrowskis and Huchels poetry occupies an exceptional place in the
GDR literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Most of their contemporaries
produced Aufbauliteratur, i.e., literature participating in the
construction of socialism, such as the poems of Georg Maurer or
Johannes R. Becher. Their poetic landscapes represent social harmony
in the Marxist sense of a humanised nature.13 In contrast to this,
Bobrowskis and Huchels critique of progress is based on a system
consisting, to varying degrees, of Christian, humanist and ecological
values14 the same value system underlying the wertkonservativen
but politically emancipatory discourse of the later green movement
in the GDR.15 While the poems discussed were exceptional in the
context of GDR culture, they were paradigmatic for a significant
strain in contemporary West German and other German-speaking
literary and non-literary writing. These texts, often nuclear dystopias,
envisaged the destruction of humankind caused by the fatal illusion
that man is placed outside and above nature. The experience of
Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and the fear of a nuclear Third World War,
the latter largely provoked by Adenauers rearmament policy, resulted
in a pessimistic view of technological progress propelled forward by
13
14
15
Agricultural and industrial scenes in Aufbauliteratur tend to depict a

productive subjectobject relationship between workers and nature. Further
examples include Hans Marchwitzkas 1950s image of the transformation of
nature into a new industrial landscape for the new socialist human being So
wie unter ihren Hnden die Hochfen und die ersten Wohnhuser von
Stalinstadt wachsen, wie aus dem einstigen Wald eine klirrende und
funkensprhende Schmiede wird, so festigt sich in ihnen immer mehr die
Erkenntnis, da sie Befreite sind, da es keine Knechte und Herren mehr gibt
(Schmid, 20) but also Huchels early unfinished cycle Das Gesetz (1950), in
Gesammelte Werke, Band 1, 2889, or Volker Brauns Durchgearbeitete
Landschaft in Gegen die symmetrische Welt. Gedichte (1974).
While their work is far from Ecopoetry, it is ecological in the broadest
philosophical sense, in that its assessment of mans relationship with nature is
defined by a holistic perspective which looks at the world as an ensemble of
inter-dependent systems. For a definition of the term see Egyptien (17).
This refers to Jrgen Wsts (404) contrasting of Erhard Epplers (254) term
wertkonservativ with the politically conservative strukturkonservativ, the
former describing an attitude combining traditional Christian and humanist
values and progressive democratic politics.
181
instrumental reason without the balancing force of an ethical

framework. Examples include Reinhard Demolls Die Ketten des
Prometheus (1952), Anton Bhms Epoche des Teufels (1955), and
the vlkisch-regressive novel Tanz mit dem Teufel (1958) by the
Austrian Gnter Schwab.16 They differ in their proximity to biologist
or vlkisch ideas, but share also with Huchel and Bobrowski a
view of technological progress as a Faustian or demonic, ungodly
aberration. While this view pertained to modern Western societies in
general, as it did in Horkheimer and Adornos Dialektik der
Aufklrung, written in the 1940s, it seemed to apply to an even greater
extent, to the East and West German context after the historical
experience of a totalitarian regime that represented a hybrid of
traditional forms of authoritarian rule with advanced technological
means of domination and control.
In the GDR of the 1950s and 60s, this critical discourse was
restricted to few marginal voices in literature, philosophy and science.
The official peace discourse, spearheaded by the East German
government, promoted armed peace, and maintained that the only
means of preventing conflict was the all-round strengthening of
socialism, which, as Peter Wensierski points out, implied primarily
the population work ever more productively in order to develop an
economically strong state (Wensierski, 80). There was no organised
alternative movement. Dissenting voices were those of individuals
who expressed their deep scepticism with regard to the official
definition of progress on a metaphysical and, apparently, non-political
level, and were therefore not regarded as threatening by the
government. It must be added, however, that Peter Huchels collection
of poems Chausseen Chausseen, including Psalm, was not published
in the GDR, and that he lost his position as editor of the literary
journal Sinn und Form in 1963 due to his non-conformist ideas of
literature and culture. Bobrowski, on the other hand, was able to
publish his work in the GDR until his death in 1965. One of the
reasons for this might have been that he was awarded the literary prize
of the Gruppe 47 in 1962, and had attracted considerate attention in
the West. Other voices, whose questioning of progress included
16
For an overview see Dominick (14860) or Hermand (11828).
182
Sabine Egger
explicit criticism of SED policies, were suppressed, as was the

philosopher Ernst Blochs, whose Prinzip Hoffnung (19549)
presented a vision of reconciliation between man and nature. He was
forced to resign from his professorship at the University of Leipzig in
1957. The philosopher and political theorist Wolfgang Harich, who
suggested a limitation of consumption in 1956, and Rudolf Bahros to
some extent ecological considerations in Die Alternative (1977),
shared a similar fate, as Wensierski and Bscher point out (478).
Until the late 1970s, the SED effectively suppressed such alternative
voices, thus severely restricting their impact on the emerging
environmental movement in the GDR.
I would like to claim, however, that literature did exert some, if
limited, influence despite repressive SED policies. Until the late
1960s, there was little censorship of literary texts dealing with
environmental themes. Until the Biermann affair in 1976, poets in
particular had, more freedom than prose writers to treat sensitive
issues, probably due to the non-utilitarian tradition of the genre and its
limited readership. Poetry readings, often held in churches, were later
to be a feature of the emerging environmental movement in the GDR
(Goodbody, Deutsche kolyrik, 392). Both Bobrowski and Huchel
played a role in this context. They had a sizeable readership, and
younger writers who were widely read in alternative circles, such as
Wolf Biermann or Sarah Kirsch, referred to them as constituting
important influences on their work and continued central aspects of
their discourse.17 This also applies to Volker Braun who placed his
poem Die Vgel und der Test 2 (1984) directly in the tradition of
Hermlins and Bobrowskis poems of the 1950s, by his use of
imagery and intertextual references. Gnter Kunert summed up his
own criticism of the dominant definition of progress, which was to
inform his poetry from the mid-1960s, in his much-debated response
to a survey carried out by the GDR student magazine Forum in 1966
about the role of poetry in a socialist society undergoing a
wissenschaftlich-technische Revolution (Bahro, 17). He stated that
17
According to Nijssen (38890), Biermann dedicated his song Ermutigung to

Peter Huchel. Bobrowskis writing had a significant impact on Sarah Kirschs
work, particularly with regard to her approach to nature and history, as Mabee
shows (20138).
183
technological advances could not be equated with social and

humanitarian progress. On the contrary, Auschwitz and Hiroshima
were, in his view, caused by a worldview exclusively based on
instrumental reason.
The East German peace and environmental movements, which
only came to wider public attention in the 1980s, were closely linked
with regard to discourse and membership just as war and the
destruction of the environment had been seen as problems stemming
from the same root in the alternative discourse of the 1950s (Rink,
Institutionalization, 122). The peace movement emerged mainly
from the campaign of conscientious objectors to military service,
which had begun in the early 1960s, and in opposition to the premilitary training that was introduced into school syllabuses in 1978.18
Independent peace activists remained a small but growing minority,
operating largely in scattered local initiatives under the Patronat of
the Protestant Church, (Bruckmeier, 13). Although the threat of
nuclear war became a major concern in the movement in the 1980s, its
members saw this in contrast to the official peace movement of the
GDR government and sections of the western peace movement as
just one issue among many. Thus the unofficial movement in the GDR
defined peace and its preconditions very broadly, and attended to
wider social, environmental, Third World and gender issues. Just as
priests of the Protestant Church provided groups with meeting places
and other resources through their Offene Arbeit, so Lutheran thought
also provided the umbrella for the discussion of these various issues.
While the movement was made up of a range of political and ethical
viewpoints, with a strong representation of reformist socialism,
Christian thought served as an ethical framework for the debate
(Bruckmeier, 27). 19 Engagement for peace and environmental
concerns were both seen as aspects of the individuals responsibility to
preserve Gods creation. Members of GDR environmental groups
were, according to Dieter Rink, particularly willing to set a personal
example, influenced by Christian values of asceticism and renun18
19
See Rddenklau (2837) and Becker (2236) for an account of the development
of the GDR peace movement.
Also compare Hoffmann (1668).
184
Sabine Egger
ciation (Rink, Institutionalization, 122). This inter-relatedness of

environmental, peace and Third World issues, within a Christian
discourse, is apparent in the design of the cover page of Die Erde ist
zu retten, a small booklet, published in 1980 by the Kirchliche
Forschungsheim in Wittenberg.
According to Christian Halbrock, Die Erde ist zu retten was of
great significance for the environmental movements development,
since it contained for the first time information illuminating the
ecological crisis in the GDR, which had previously been concealed by
the government (Halbrock, 44). The publication of this information
gave huge momentum to an ecological debate that had been sparked
off within Church groups after the report of the Club of Rome about
the limits of economic growth in 1972. The years that followed saw
the emergence of a growing number of environmental groups with a
workable grassroots structure and loose networks, mostly from within
peace groups, in Schwerin, Leipzig and Berlin. They organised
seminars, tree plantings, poetry readings and concerts. Attempts to
reach a wider public through leaflets, information stalls or
demonstrations were largely suppressed by police and Staatssicherheit
and ignored by the GDR media. In October 1983, for example, three
students were arrested for exhibiting dying trees from the Erzgebirge
in a church in Potsdam (Goodbody, Es stirbt das Land, 333). Others
were sentenced to several months in prison for similar actions. Many
members of alternative groups left the GDR to escape constant state
repression (Halbrock, 489). Compared to the total population, they
had a relatively small membership, and lacked both funding and
professional structures (Rink, Institutionalization, 123). Nevertheless,
they represented a politicised counter-culture with self-determined, albeit
basic, organisational structures. Thematically, environmental groups
focused on criticising industrial and technological development,
including its negative impact on the natural environment and the
actual political and ecological situation in the GDR. Unlike
proponents of the alternative discourse in the 1950s and early 60s,
they interpreted their moral responsibility in a political way and
attempted to influence the public and political sphere. The Friedensund Umweltkreis of the Pfarr- und Glaubensgemeinde BerlinLichtenberg, for example, which was founded in 1983, defined as its
185
main task the collection and publication of data on ecological and

political grievances in the GDR, in order to encourage a public
discourse on issues otherwise suppressed by the state. Its members
aimed for das Durchbrechen des allgegenwrtigen Schweigens by
debating topics such as the SEDs energy policy, particularly lignitemining and plans for the long-term expansion of nuclear power, the
invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet troops, or the dying of forests in the
GDR (Halbrock, Beginn, 50). The movements political weight was
further increased with the founding of the first Umweltbibliothek in
Berlin in the 1980s. It served as a national focus for the green
movement, publishing a regular newsletter with the title Umweltbltter, as well as several issues of the dissident journal Grenzfall,
which shows again the proximity of ecological, peace and human
rights issues in the movement. Under increasing pressure from abroad
and from the unofficial movement, a new official ecological
association had been founded in 1980, the Gesellschaft fr Natur und
Umwelt (GNU) with a membership of 40,00050,000. Its role
remained ambivalent, however, since it tried to maintain a balance
between co-operation with church-based groups and loyalty to the
state. By 1988 there were some 150 alternative, church-based,
ecological groups, and a co-ordinating organisation, the Grnkologischer Bund die Arche was founded in Berlin (Goodbody,
Es stirbt das Land, 3324).
Dissatisfaction with the environmental situation was one of the
reasons why East German citizens took to the streets in their
thousands in October 1989 and it continued to play a major role in the
March 1990 elections.20 Surveys, cited by Goodbody, show that the
environment took second place only to peace as a political concern
(Goodbody, Es stirbt das Land, 334). This sudden change in the
public perception of progress can be explained through disappointment with the GDR governments failure to achieve a standard of
living comparable to that of the West, as well as through the level and
visibility of environmental destruction and the governments
continuing efforts to maintain secrecy about pollution levels. The SED
state was held directly responsible for the environmental problems
20
See Brand (10) and Pollack (167).
186
Sabine Egger
caused by lignite-mining and chemical industries. The introduction of

a new, environmentally friendly economic policy was one of the civil
right movements primary and most urgent goals (Jordan, 240).
Various aspects of the environmental situation were articulated at the
mass demonstrations, especially in the severely polluted industrial
areas in the south of the GDR. Environmental concern proved to be a
uniting factor between different oppositional groups, it helped to bring
people into the churches initially, and later out onto the streets
particularly in environmental disaster areas such as Saxony and
Saxony-Anhalt (Jordan, 241). Calls for an kologische Wende
served, as Dieter Rink argues, as a vehicle for a whole range of
expectations concerning different areas of life. There was an
overwhelming feeling among the wider public that from now on,
everything will be different and better, which was, however, not
based on first-hand knowledge of the realities of the new free market
system (Rink, Institutionalization, 125). In November 1989,
members of Arche, of the official GNU, and activists of individual
church-related environmental groups founded the Grne Partei der
DDR, based on the West German model. In March 1990, the Party
won a number of seats in the first freely elected East German
parliament, and in December 1990 it was represented in the allGerman Bundestag, as part of Bndnis 90/Die Grnen. Other GDR
citizens action groups joined to form an independent association of
ecological groups, which later became the Grne Liga.21 This
marked a further development in the movements legalisation and
institutionalisation.
In comparison to other areas of life, environmental problems
have considerably declined in importance in eastern Germany. Since
the early 1990s, economic concerns, in the context of rising
unemployment, have been regarded as far more pressing. According
to Dieter Rink and Oliver Geden, the ecological reformism
fundamental to the movement until the Wende has, during the last
decade, come under pressure in the anti-nuclear power sector from
left-wing radical, anti-globalisation forces, and in other areas has lost
21
See Jordan (24060) for a detailed account of the transformation of eastern

Germanys political landscape in the 1980s and 90s.
187
ground to conservative, and even regressive, trends (Geden, 177;

Rink, Institutionalization, 12631).22 Particularly striking is, in their
view, the widespread lack of emancipatory, political ecology. Instead,
there now seems to be a strong emphasis on traditional conservation,
which is increasingly associated with Heimatschutz. Since the early
1990s, a considerable number of ecological villages have been
established in eastern Germany. A well-known example, singled out
by Rink, is LebensGut Pommritz in Saxony, which is run on the
basis of subsistence economy ideas developed by Rudolf Bahro in
Logik der Rettung (1990). The foundation of this community owes
much to support from Kurt Biedenkopf and subsidies provided by the
Bundesland Saxony (Rink, Institutionalization, 129). Pommritz is
one focal point within a growing network of new communities,
complete with their own website.23 While they represent a further
development of the commune projects of the 1970s, they are also
informed by ideas of deep ecology a spiritual ecology informed
by aspects of natural religion and a biologist view of society (Jordan,
248). Jrg Bergstedt and Oliver Geden have warned that even
politically right-wing ideologies are now gaining ground via the
reception of esotericism within the environmental movement, though
this claim has been challenged by other authors (Bergstedt, 14951;
Geden, 1767).
After its move from cultural marginality and illegality to political
and cultural centre-stage, the East German green movement seems to
have shifted back to a new kind of marginality and a rather regressive
outlook. Since its emergence as a counter-cultural movement in the
1970s, it has combined the forces of reformist socialism, conservative
conservationism, pragmatic environmentalism and radical ecologism.
In the 1970s and 80s it had a conservative dimension, not in the sense
that it applied the idea of an organically grown or God-given social
order that could not be changed, but in that its politically progressive
ecological reformism was rooted in Christian traditions, according to
Epplers definition of Wert-konservatismus (Eppler, 255). Until the
22
23
Heinze (329), however, finds a similar trend in much West German literary
and non-literary nature writing of the 1980s and 90s.
Here (129) Rink refers to: http//www.ecovillages.org, (accessed 20.03.02).
188
Sabine Egger
1990s, its views were largely based on a value system defined by a

combination of scientific ecological insights and alternative
Christian values, following models such as St. Francis of Assisi or
Albert Schweitzer in extending the sphere of moral concern to
encompass animals and plants. This provides the main link to
Huchels and Bobrowskis discourse of the 1950s and 1960s: their
critique of progress is based on a similar value system. The literary
discourse in their poems differs, of course, in a number of respects
from the later green counter-culture. Largely restricted to the specific
medium of literature, it remained on the non-political level of
Innerlichkeit, and so did not constitute a politicised counter-culture
with a view to reform society. Secondly, it put forward a deeply
sceptical view not merely of technological, but of historical progress
as such. It was not informed by a utopian, in either political or
conservationist terms, practical vision. Nevertheless, I would still
argue that these poems had a potentially emancipatory function in the
particular context of GDR culture in that they undermined the official
discourse on progress and reinscribed it at the level of formal
technique as well as content. They put forward, in a subjective,
emotional mode, a different view of the relationship between man and
nature, and thus participated in loosening the dominant, monosemic
discourse of the status quo, which eventually resulted in its gradual
marginalisation. On the assumption that literature, like any other
discourse, participates in generating collective meaning, the poetics of
individual lyrical poets partake in changing such meaning by
contributing to a gradual shift of cultural values particularly in
GDR-culture, where literature had a special function in providing a
forum for the discussion of topics largely excluded from the mass
media.
189
Works Cited
Bahro, R. Wozu wir diesen Dichter brauchen, Forum, 29 (1966), 17.
Bathrick, D. Die Zerstrung oder der Anfang von Vernunft? Lyrik und
Naturbeherrschung in der DDR, in Grimm, R., Hermand J. (Hg) Natur und
Natrlichkeit: Stationen des Grnen in der deutschen Literatur, (Knigsstein,
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STEFAN BUSCH
Bluthochzeit mit Mutter Erde: Repression und

Regression in der Blut-und-Boden-Literatur
Die Formel vom Blut und vom Boden ist nicht, wie man gelegentlich
behauptet findet (vgl. Corni, 16), eine nationalsozialistische Erfindung,
sondern wurde in den letzten beiden Jahrzehnten des 19. Jahrhunderts im
Kontext der agrarkonservativen Kampagne entwickelt, mittels welcher
Organisationen wie der Bund der Landwirte obsolete Besitzverhltnisse
gegen die voranschreitende Modernisierung agrarischer Strukturen zu
verteidigen suchten. In dieser ideologischen Konstruktion stand die
praktische konomische Bedeutung der Begriffe im Vordergrund:
Das Blut war eben die buerliche Generationskette, das Gut der
Boden, den diese bearbeitete, und das, was beides aneinanderkettete,
der Besitz (Zimmermann, 92). Doch schon in der agrarkonservativen
und in der Heimatliteratur waren viele Ideologeme enthalten, an
welche die sptere Blut-und-Boden-Literatur anschlieen konnte.
Dazu gehren u.a. eine rigide Stadt/Land-Dichotomie, in der die Stadt
fr alles Bse und Zerstrerische stand, eine weltanschauliche Antimoderne die sthetische Mittel der Moderne nicht grundstzlich ausschlo1 sowie nicht selten auch schon ein mehr oder weniger
aggressiver Antisemitismus. In Wilhelm von Polenz Roman Der
Bttnerbauer (1895) z.B. sind diese Elemente eng verbunden:
Stdtische Kapitalisten, darunter fhrend ein jdischer Getreidehndler,
nutzen die finanziellen Schwierigkeiten der Bauern, um diese mittels
Wucherzinsen von ihren Hfen zu vertreiben und mit dem Boden zu
spekulieren ein Schicksal, das auch den in Finanzdingen naiven
Bttnerbauern ereilt, der sich am Ende erhngt, whrend auf seinem
einst ererbten Boden der Bau einer Fabrik begonnen hat.
Vgl. Mecklenburg, bes. 7581.
194
Stefan Busch
Als Reaktion auf die soziokonomischen Entwicklungen des 19.

Jahrhunderts kam es zur Ausbildung eines internationalen modernen
Primitivismus, eines internationalen Antimodernismus bekannter
Autoren (Mecklenberg, 123), in welchem Kontext sich allerdings der
deutsche literarische Antimodernismus eher kmmerlich (Ketelsen,
26) ausnahm. Fr das erste Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts hat die
deutschsprachige Literatur im Genre der regionalen Literatur2 Autoren
wie Hamsun, Ramuz, Kazantzakis oder D. H. Lawrence keine Namen
von gleichem Rang an die Seite zu stellen. Es ist nicht nur eine Frage
der Perspektive, da die deutsche Literatur dieser Zeit im
Schlagschatten des Dritten Reiches erscheint, denn kaum, da der
regionale Roman als Genre greifbar wurde, war er auch schon durch
den vlkischen und nationalsozialistischen Roman diskreditiert
(Meck 19). Den bergang zur rassistisch-imperialistischen Ideologie
markierten Romane wie Hermann Lns Der Wehrwolf (1910) und
Hermann Burtes Wiltfeber der ewige Deutsche (1912):
Lns und Burte haben das von der Heimatkunst popularisierte Genre
geschickt benutzt, indem sie dessen agrarkonservatives durch das zukunftstrchtigere vlkisch-nationalistische Weltbild ersetzten. Ihre beiden Romane
sind symptomatisch fr den bruchlosen bergang von der Heimatkunst zur
Blut-und-Boden-Dichtung. (Mecklenberg, 100)
Am Blut der Fremden, das in einschlgigen Texten vergossen wird, ist

nichts Besonderes, so da es dem stets vorgngigen Anspruch der
Deutschen, die auch in der kolonisierenden Vorwrtsbewegung immer
nur ihre legitimen Ansprche verteidigen, keinen Abbruch tun kann.
Wenn jedoch deutsche Siedler bluten, bedeutet dies einen sakralen
Akt, ein Opfer, das Land und Leute untrennbar vereint. Der
propagandistische Wert solcher mystifizierenden Machwerke fr die
Nazis ist offensichtlich.
Es gab jedoch eine weitere Variante der Blut-und-BodenLiteratur, die von der kollektiv-expansionistischen als individuellregressiv zu unterscheiden ist. Nicht Lebensraumerweiterung und die
angeblich bedrohte Blutsreinheit des deutschen Volkskrpers waren
hier das Thema, sondern in ihr imaginierten Individuen ihre
2
Zum Begriff vgl. die Einleitung bei Mecklenburg, Erzhlte Provinz.
Bluthochzeit mit Mutter Erde
195
pathologischen Wnsche, Erlsung durch Regression in den Leib von

Mutter Erde zu finden. Das Blut, das da flo, war das eigene. In dieser
Variante der Mnnerphantasien verstrmten die Helden in einem Akt
verqulter Mystik ganz besondere Sfte in die empfangsbereite
mtterliche Erde.
Mud! Mud! Glorious mud!
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
(M. Flanders, The Hippopotamus Song)
Die Bildlichkeit entsprechender Texte erinnert in vielem an jene in der

von Klaus Theweleit analysierten Literatur der soldatischen Mnner.
Mit der entscheidenden Ausnahme der Mutter lsen Frauen hier wie
dort Gefhle der Bedrohung und nicht selten gewaltttige Abwehrreaktionen aus. Die faschistischen Charaktere, deren Mnnerphantasien Theweleit herausarbeitete, muten sich Frauen als eine
Bedrohung ihres starrgepanzerten Ichs vom Leib halten. Ihr Glck
fanden sie, wenn sie als unbewegte Beweger in der uniformierten
Masse mitstrmten. Der Wunsch nach Lockerung und Auflsung
bewirkte dann elementare Metamorphosen. Die Phantasien malen aus,
wie sich ganze Felsmassive verflssigen und die Glut den kollektiven
Schwellkrper zum Leben bringt:
Das braune Heer, gefgt aus kantigen Quadern,
Liegt wie ein Riesenleib erstarrt im Feld.
Die Gruppenzwischenrume scheinen Adern,
Die leer sind und von keinem Saft geschwellt.
Da bricht der Fahnen vielgeteilte Reihe,
Rot wie ein Lavastrom vulkanischer Glut,
Herein, und fllt zur feierlichen Weihe
Die hohlen Adern mit lebendigem Blut.
Aufblht der Leib, und reckt die braunen Glieder;
Ins groe Ganze fgt sich Teil um Teil,
[... reimt auf Heil ... etc.].3
Anacker, H. Fahneneinmarsch Zum Parteitag 1933; zit. nach Schne, 70.
Stefan Busch
196
Den Heroen der Blubo-Literatur in ihrer individuell-regressiven

Variante waren solche orgiastischen Auflsungen ins marschierende
Kollektiv versperrt; smtlich handelte es sich bei den Protagonisten
um Einzelgnger. Auch sie frchten die Frauen, und die gewaltsame
Abwehr verrt, was auf dem Spiel steht. Vllig gegenstzlich jedoch
sind die Empfindungen, welche die Berhrung mit der Haut der Erde
auslsen. Den soldatischen Mnnern ist nur der Strom der Bewegung erlaubt, den sie, wie es in einem nationalsozialistischen
Trivialroman heit, in ein einziges Bett lenkten4. Auerhalb dieses
Kanalisationssystems in dem alles offen zu Tage liegen und nichts
ein dem Blick entzogenes Innen verraten soll wird die Berhrung
mit Flssigem zu etwas Bedrohlichem. Der Feind flutet, wogegen
nur Dammbau an den Rndern, mehr der Krper als der Staaten, hilft;
alles Warme und Weiche, darunter Schlamm und Sumpf, droht mit
Untersplung und vermag panikartige Abwehr auszulsen. Dagegen
ist in den Romanen vom Blut und vom Boden das Verhltnis zur
feucht-weichen Erde alles andere als angstbesetzt. Das Waten im
Sumpfwasser, das Kriechen im Moor gewhrt das grtmgliche
Glcksempfinden.
So ist der eiserne Mller aus Konrad Bestes Roman Das
heidnische Dorf (1932) hart gegen die Menschen, so hart wie gegen
sich selbst; von ihm ist nicht bekannt, da er es je ber sich
vermocht htte, vertraute Zrtlichkeiten von sich zu geben, und seine
Frau war ihm untertan, gehorchte dem kurzen Befehl seines Wortes.
Insoweit knnte der Eisenmann auch der soldatischen Literatur
entstammen. Doch er ist auch ein Kind des Moores, diesem ist er
innig verbunden, und immer rief es ihn wieder, das mtterliche
Moor (Beste, 913). Die Betrachtung der mit sexueller Bedeutung
aufgeladenen Landschaftssymbolik zeigt,
wie hier die zwischenmenschlichen Schwierigkeiten einer sexuell unterdrckten
Gesellschaft lediglich in anderer Form wiederkehren. Sexualitt und Erotik, in
ihrer vollen Krperlichkeit und kommunikativen Funktion abgewehrt, wachsen
sich in dem bergeordneten Naturkosmos zu jenem Monster aus, das der
autoritre Charakter ohnehin in seinem eigenen Innern als bedrohende Natur
4
Zitiert nach Geyer-Ryan, 238.
197
empfindet nur da er bei sich selbst unterdrcken mu, was er auf eine hhere
Ebene projizieren darf. So kehrt die Sexualitt als verdrngte Lust am Krper in
den Symbolen des landschaftlich Krperhaften wieder (Kuppeln, Spalten,
Hhlen, glitschiges Moor). (Schweizer, 251)
Fgt man diese Beobachtung zusammen mit Klaus Theweleits

Erklrung, wie sich das krankhafte Verhltnis der soldatischen
Mnner zum eigenen und zu fremden Krpern herausbildete, so drfte
man den spezifischen Pathologien in der regressiv-individuellen Blutund-Boden-Literatur auf der Spur sein. Theweleit nahm an, da es zur
Verhrtung der Haut zum Krperpanzer kam, wenn die berflieenden Krperflssigkeiten des Suglings bei der gesamten Umwelt,
einschlielich der Mutter, auf Ekel und Abwehr stieen und dem Kind
auf diese Weise ein negatives Krpergefhl vermittelt wurde. Diese
totale Sauberkeitserziehung, die nicht zwischen guten und bsen
Flssigkeiten und Umgangsformen mit ihnen unterschied, fhrte dazu,
da ein solches Kind
sich nicht aus der (unlustvollen) symbiotischen Verbindung mit der Mutter
lsen knnen [wird], es wird, wenn es gewaltsam aus der Symbiose gerissen
wird, sich erleben als angefllt mit bsen Flssen und ohne Gefhl seiner
eigenen Grenzen. Wo andere Menschen ihre Haut haben, wird ihm unter
bestimmten gesellschaftlichen Voraussetzungen ein Panzer wachsen.
(Theweleit, Bd. 1, 428.)
Diese Voraussetzungen waren in der wilheminischen Gesellschaft

gegeben. Doch was geschah, wenn die Mutter eine Schwachstelle im
umfassenden System der Negativierung des Krperempfindens
darstellte? Da die Mutter der sozialen Deformierung entkommen
wre, ist nicht anzunehmen. Aber gerade dann, wenn die Mutter die
Trockenlegungsmachinerie mitbediente sowie diese gleichzeitig durch
Restformen einer liebevollen Anerkennung der kindlichen Flssigkeitsproduktion sabotierte, entstand mglicherweise ein Panzer, der
eine verwundbare Stelle aufwies. Eine solche Konstellation von
allgemeiner Abwehr und zumindest relativer Anerkennung seitens der
Mutter fhrte potentiell dazu, da fr den erwachsenen Mann das
Glck flieender Krperstrme allein durch ihre Verbindung mit der
Mutter ermglicht und legitimiert war. Wie beim soldatischen Mann
Stefan Busch
198
war der Austausch mit den Frauen versperrt, hingegen suchten die
Mnner, um deren Texte es hier geht, den krperlichen Kontakt mit
Mutter Erde. Die Liebe zu ihr und ihren Strmen nutzte eine Lcke im
System der Verbote. Das Inzestuse des Vereinigungswunsches blieb
aufgrund der symbolischen Ausdrucksform im Rahmen dessen, was als
Kunst galt. Die Texte machen jedoch fortwhrend deutlich, da die
Sehnschte auf diese Weise keine Erfllung fanden, und diese
unaufgelste Spannung zwischen den Wnschen der Krper und
der Symbolik des Vereinigungsversuchs bewirkte die Tendenz
zum Gewaltttigen und Autodestruktiven, die in den Texten zu
beobachten ist.
Die vorliegenden berlegungen erheben nicht den Anspruch,
mehr als nur erste Vermutungen zu sein. Auch wre ein wesentlich
grerer Korpus von literarischen und autobiographischen Texten von
Blut-und-Boden-Autoren notwendig, um zu verllicheren Aussagen
kommen zu knnen. Auf der Basis dieser vorlufigen Annahmen wird
jedoch das Verhalten, das die mnnlichen Protagonisten der BluboTexte in groer Konstanz aufweisen, in seiner Nhe zu und seiner
Verschiedenheit von jenem der soldatischen Mnner erklrbar.
Fr die um die Volksgesundheit ringenden nationalsozialistischen
Literaturwissenschaftler mute gesund gewesen sein, wer Liebe zu
deutscher Heimat und Natur bewiesen hatte. So galt Gustav Frenssen als
ein Stck ursprnglichen Germanentums, als ein ganz mchtiger Kerl,
ein im Freiland ungehindert und ungeschoren aufgewachsener [...]
Mensch (Braun, 458 u. 455). Doch die Naturliebe dieses angeblich
prototypischen, kraftstrotzenden Nordmannen war das Produkt
pathologisch deformierter Sexualitt. Auch in dieser Hinsicht ging
Frenssen, der mit seinem Heimatroman Jrn Uhl (1901) seinerzeit
hufig ber die Buddenbrooks gestellt wurde, den Vertretern des
Genres voran.5 Seine Romane sind durchzogen von einem
Sauberkeitsfanatismus, und dieser hat deutlich neurotische Zge, die
mit seiner sonderbaren Stellung zum Komplex Liebe, Sexualitt, Frau
zusammenhngen drften (Mecklenburg 121). Seiner Glorifizierung
im NS-Staat widersprach er selbst in seinem Lebensbericht (1940).
Gleich im zweiten Satz bekannte Frenssen dort mit verschmter
5
Zu Jrn Uhl vgl. Ketelsen, 14871.
199
Offenheit, da er mit [sich] selber und mit der Welt allerlei

Schwierigkeiten gehabt habe6. Dies darf als Untertreibung gelten, denn
tatschlich wurde er sein Leben lang von mangelndem Selbstbewutsein
und Sexualneurosen geplagt, und in seiner Jugend hatten ihn
Suizidvorstellungen verfolgt. Die im Lebensbericht beschriebene
Vision, da unser Volk als erstes im Abendland [...] den Quell des
Lebens, Sinnlichkeit und Zeugung, reinige (L, 308), verweist wie die
Phrasen von einer sauberste[n] Redlichkeit (L, 21) und natrlichen
Sauberkeit (L, 42) auf Reinigungszwnge, die ausgelst werden von
der Vorstellung, alle Krper- und Sinnlichkeit sei schmutzig. Es klingt
allzu bemht, wenn Frenssen rckblickend betonte, er mache sich
wegen [s]einer Sinnlichkeit (L, 82) durchaus keine Vorwrfe und sei
sehr froh, da er als junger Mann die Natur und ihr grtes Wunder,
das Weib, (L, 82) gesucht und, angeblich, genossen habe. Als Teil
der Schpfung entspreche solcher Naturgenu dem Willen Gottes,
denn alle Menschen seien Gottes Gemchte, leider jedoch Gottes
verunglckte Gemchte (L, 42).
Von den Beziehungen der soldatischen Mnner zu Frauen
schrieb Klaus Theweleit, es habe sich bestenfalls um Serenade[n] der
Beziehungslosigkeit7 gehandelt. Bei Frenssen ist die Unfhigkeit zur
Nhe an der berhhung der Frau zum Naturwunder abzulesen die
Bezeichnung Weib impliziert bezeichnenderweise gleichzeitig Herabsetzung sowie, durch den Anklang ans Bibeldeutsch, Distanzierung
durch berhhung. Wo es unumgnglich wird, Frauen unterhalb der
metaphysischen Sphre wahrzunehmen, und ihre Krperlichkeit nicht
mehr zu ignorieren ist, bedeuten sie eine Bedrohung, auf die mit als
Zchtigung der Frauen und/oder des eigenen Krpers deklarierter
Gewalt reagiert wird.
Die gefrchtete Sexualitt im eigenen Innern fand durch
bertragung auf die Natur ein legitimes, konventionell als rein
geltendes Objekt. Von Sublimierung kann dabei schon aufgrund der
hufigen Drastik der Bildlichkeit kaum die Rede sein. So heit es etwa
in Friedrich Ludwig Barthels Gedicht Von Mnnern und Mttern:
Mnner sind immer die Gleichen und immer liegen die cker /
6
7
Frenssen, Lebensbericht, 1. Im folgenden im laufenden Text zitiert als L.

Theweleit, Bd. 1, 17.
200
Stefan Busch
Breithin und dulden den Pflug.8 Und Hermann Stehr wute, da der
Mensch des Volkes durch Lockerungen seines Innern [...] manchmal
hart an den Rand mancher Ausschreitungen gebracht wird, doch diese
Gefahr durch ein inniges, fast brnstiges Verhltnis zur Scholle zu
meistern versteht. Den Ursprung solcher verqult-verquerer Sexualitt
sah Max Horkheimer in den durch die Moral der brgerlichen
Mnnergesellschaft geprgten Mutter-Sohn-Beziehungen. Aus diesen
habe jedes sinnliche Moment gebannt werden mssen: Sie und die
Schwester haben auf reine Gefhle, unbefleckte Verehrung und
Wertschtzung Anspruch. Dieser widernatrliche Purifizierungsproze
resultiere schlielich in der schwrmerischen, sentimentalen Empfnglichkeit fr alle Symbole dunkler, mtterlicher, erhaltender Mchte
(Horkheimer, 3523). Mutter Natur mu gewhren, was den Mnnern
von den Frauen nicht gewhrt werden kann und nicht gewhrt werden
darf, sollen sie nicht als Hure gelten.
Nach diesem Mechanismus laufen die meisten heroischen
Leidensgeschichten der mnnlichen Protagonisten in der Blut-undBoden-Literatur ab. In den frhen Werken Ernst Wiecherts, der spter
fr seine Zurckweisung der Nazis ins KZ ging, entsprechen sich das
verqulte Verhltnis zu den Frauen und das Glck des einsamen
Jgers in Wald und Moor.9 Frauen werden in dem 1922 erschienenen
Roman Der Wald mit der Peitsche geschlagen, und das Glck des
Helden liegt auf dem Rcken der Erde:
An den Stamm der Tanne gelehnt, blickte Henner in den Regen hinaus. Die
Tropfen fielen in sein Haar und liefen an seinen Wangen hinunter. Der Atem
der Khle durchbebte ihn wie den jungen Baum im ersten Laube. Der Dampf
der Tler durchtrnkte ihn wie mit heiligem Weihrauch. Das Leben der Erde
drngte sich mit warmem Klopfen an sein Herz. Er legte die Kleider ab und
warf sich ins Moos. Seine Hnde streichelten liebkosend ber das feuchte Gras,
das sanft zwischen seinen Fingern hindurchglitt; sein Ohr drngte sich an die
8
9
Zit. nach Loewy, 125. Das folgende Zitat Loewy, 114.

ber die Orte der Handlung in Wiecherts Romanen wurde gesagt: Sie lassen
sich zu einem typischen Muster zusammenstellen: Das Haus (in dem der
Protagonist aufwchst oder lebt und von dem aus seine Expeditionen ins
Menschenreich unternommen werden oder in das er sich zurckgezogen hat),
wahlweise im Moor oder im Wald, gelegentlich auch in Kombination, die
cker, der Boden, der dem Moor oder dem Wald abgerungen worden ist, meist
an einem Flu oder See gelegen (Delabar, 145).
201
Rinde des Baumes und lauschte auf den Herzschlag des fremden Lebens; seine
Glieder, vom Regen gebadet, schmiegten sich in das weichende Moos, das den
Leib der Erde verhllte. (Wiechert, Der Wald, 119)
hnlich wie Gustav Frenssen sprach Wiechert in seinem Lebensrckblick vom autobiographischen, egozentrischen10 Charakter seiner
frhen Bcher. Er nannte den Roman Der Wald ein krankes Buch,
eine gewaltsame Phantasie, die an die Stelle einer unglcklichen,
unbefriedigenden Wirklichkeit getreten sei, und meinte selbst, da
Psychologen und Psychoanalytiker [...] daraus eine Reihe mehr oder
weniger zuverlssiger Erkenntnisse gewinnen knnten.
Werdegang und schriftstellerische Entwicklung des Mecklenburgers
Friedrich Griese, eines der erfolgreichsten Vertreter der Blut-und-BodenLiteratur,11 knnen in vielem als typisch gelten. Wie auch Ernst
Wiechert berichtete Griese in einer Reihe autobiographischer Texte
von einer glcklichen Kindheit in Dorf und Wald, aber diese Jahre
waren sprbar berschattet von Spannungen im Elternhaus, mit einem
Vater, der zu alkoholischen Exzessen neigte und nchtelang ausblieb,
und mit einer Mutter, die still, aber fr die Kinder deutlich sprbar litt.
Der andeutungshafte Stil der Erinnerungen zeigt die Spannung
zwischen dem Willen zur Aufrichtigkeit und dem Verbot, Schlechtes
ber die Eltern zu sagen. Zweifel am idyllischen Familienglck htten
die Brchigkeit von Grieses Identittskonstruktion auch fr ihn selbst
unbersehbar werden lassen.
Wie Bauernromane nicht von Bauern geschrieben wurden,12 so
stammt Heimat- und Blubo-Literatur hufig von Autoren, die sich
nach Vergangenem als nach einem verlorenen Paradies, das nicht
einmal eines gewesen war, zurcksehnten. Wie Griese waren viele
solcher Autoren Shne des Dorfes, das sie eines Tages in Richtung
Stadt hatten verlassen mssen, um dort ihre Ausbildung, hufig zu
Lehrern,13 zu beginnen. Die Trivialitt ihrer Literatur ist nicht das
Ergebnis konomischer Erwgungen oder Unbildung, sondern
10
11
12
13
Wiechert, Jahre und Zeiten, 120. Die folgenden Zitate ebd., 202 u. 177. Vgl.
auch Wiechert, Wlder und Menschen, 2389 et passim.
Nheres zu Griese bei Busch, 3681.
Zu entsprechenden literatursoziologischen Aspekten vgl. z.B. Sengle,
Zimmermann, 60-66; Vondung, 4465.
Vgl. Vondung, 523; Weil, 378.
Stefan Busch
202
forcierter Naivitt. Fr den mythischen Charakter der Blubo-Literatur

bedeutet dies, da sie deutlich das Kennzeichen aller neuen
Mythologien an sich trgt: Der Mythos wird darin zur Konstruktion
eines fr die Vergangenheit angenommenen und fr die Gegenwart
oder Zukunft gewnschten oder erwarteten Zustands. Ein solcher
Mythos ist ein Widerspruch in sich er ist ein Kunstprodukt und
trgt ein rationales Moment an sich, das der Fraglosigkeit eines mythischen Zustands entgegensteht. Das Raunen von Ur-Zeiten und
ursprnglichem Leben ist der Versuch, sich durch eine Hinterpforte
wieder in das Wunschparadies der frhen Jahre hineinzuschmuggeln.
Grieses Gedicht Geschlechter, in dem der Autor sich anklagt, aus der
Art der Vorfahren geschlagen zu sein, stellt ein hervorragendes Beispiel fr solche notwendigerweise sentimentalische Heimatliteratur
dar:
Wehe, ihr alle, mir! Ihr schliet den Kreis um mich eurer Hnde,
schliet ihn fester und engt mich ein und schttelt die Hupter,
die wissenden Hupter, um mich, den Jngsten,
den Fehlgeborenen!
Unwrdig ist er der Vorfahren, die ihm als bermchtig erscheinen

wegen ihres Einklangs mit einer Natur, die sie gleichzeitig verehrt und
beherrscht haben sollen ihrer war alles:
Ich aber wohne auf fremdem Boden! Die Schwelle des Hauses,
der ich entschreite, die kargste Krume des Bodens unter den Fen
ureigen und fremd ist alles, ein Mietling
bin ich der Erde!
(Griese, Geschlechter, Im Beektal singt es, 7)
Da Griese zu einem der herausragenden Blut-und-Boden-Autoren

der zwanziger Jahre und des NS-Staates wurde, liegt gerade in den
pathologischen Zgen seiner Psyche begrndet. Wie bei Frenssen und
Wiechert findet sich in Grieses autobiographischen Texten eine Reihe
von Hinweisen auf ein verqultes Seelen- und Sexualleben. So wird
berichtet, wie der Heimat- und Kontaktlose als junger Lehrer nachts
vom Schreibtisch weglief und am folgenden Tag am Rand eines
Feldweges seine Handschuhe und das Loch fand, das er in den
203
verschneiten Boden gegraben hatte.14 In seinen ersten Publikationen,

den Anfang der zwanziger Jahre erschienenen Romanen Feuer und
Ur, schilderte Griese Versuche einer gewaltsamen Rckeroberung des
Einklangs mit der Natur. In Feuer ist es ein Kriegsheimkehrer
Griese selbst war Kriegsfreiwilliger gewesen , der sich von seiner in
der Grostadt Berlin lebenden Frau trennt und einen Bauernhof
bernimmt, um zum einfachen Leben zurckzufinden.
Das folgende Zitat zeigt zunchst das Schwanken des
Protagonisten, als sich ihm eine junge Buerin nhert. Griese lt die
anfngliche Lockung, die Mglichkeit sinnlichen Genusses, nicht
gleich abblocken, aber dann siegt doch das internalisierte Verbot. Die
ansonsten unerklrliche Gewaltttigkeit entspricht einerseits der
Gre der Bedrohung, andererseits entspricht sie dem Empfinden,
da eine Frau, die zur Sinnlichkeit auffordert, nichts anderes verdient
habe:
Und ich fasse sie pltzlich um den Leib, hebe sie hoch und setze sie auf das
Stroh in der Ecke. Sie lacht leise. Sie lacht vor Freude.
[...]
Schwer ist das, Frieda.
Ich wei es nicht. Schn ist es. Komm.
[...] Schwer ist es. Dies ist noch schwerer.
Dort steht die Peitsche.
Ich fasse den Stiel fest, lasse die Schnur einmal sausen und schlage sie Frieda
klatschend um den Leib.15
Die libidinsen Energien des Mannes gehren der reinen Mutter

Natur, allein mit ihr will er sich austauschen. Dazu begibt sich der
Protagonist als Jgersmann ins warme, feuchte Moor:
Wenn mich die Lust fat, gehe ich als Jger. Dann denke ich nicht daran, da
ich fr den Hunger schiee. Dann will ich einen balzenden Hahn haben [...]. Ich
lasse dann nicht von ihm und sitze soviele Morgen im nassen Moor, bis ich ihn
habe.
14
15
Vgl. Griese, Mein Leben, 336; Griese, Leben in dieser Zeit, 11112. Die Szene
wird in Ur einer Hauptfigur angedichtet.
Griese, Feuer, 401. Im folgenden im laufenden Text zitiert als F.
Stefan Busch
204
Oder ich bin auf den alten schwarzen Bock [...]. Ich krieche auf dem Bauche
durch scharfes Gras, durch gurgelndes Torfwasser, durch Schilf und Rohr; ich
schleiche mich hinter Busch und Baum an, versacke bis ber die Knie im
moorigen Grund, springe von Blten zu Blten, liege minutenlang auf dem
Bauche im Wasser und ruhe nicht eher, bis ich ihn habe. (F, 29)
Die Erde soll ihn heilen, indem sie seine gestauten Krfte und
Krpersfte in sich aufnimmt und ihn so vor den bedrohlichen
Verfhrerinnen bewahrt:
Ich lag auf dem Rcken, alles in mir bebte und flog, und ich lag doch still wie
ein gefllter Baum. Ein Saugen ging von der Erde in meinen Krper; sie versuchte, mir das schwrende Blut aus den Adern zu ziehen, um mich gesund zu
machen. (F, 145)
Mein Blut flo aus mir und flo mit dem Saft der Bume zusammen [...] und
ging wie ein Strom in die Nacht. Wie wohl ward mir. (F, 150)
Doch die Protagonisten bleiben schlielich unerlst. In Feuer endet

die Hauptfigur durch Selbstmord, in Ur hufen sich die Bilder
verzweifelter Gewalt. Alles beginnt mit den schon bekannten Bildern:
Im Frhjahr ist das Land ohne Ende. Warm und offen ist es wie ein
empfangendes Weib.16 Dort liegt man natrlich gern:
Warm liegt die Sonne auf den segendampfenden ckern. Im Walde hinter Jrgen Boye ruckst ein Tuber. Die Erde duftet wie ein junger Leib, der sich unter
einem dehnt. (Ur, 55)
Doch die Vereinigung gelingt nicht, und so endet, was als Liebe zur
groen Mutter Natur begann, in einer Vergewaltigung:
Jrgen Boye denkt auch wohl einmal an den Winterabend, an dem diese Sucht
nach der Erde bermchtig an ihm ri. Ihm war damals, als [...] msse er Blut
aus dem eigenen Leib stoen, um die harte Erde zu seinem Willen zu zwingen.
Und er htte auch verdammt, er htte! sein Blut in die Erde laufen lassen.
Und dort wre der erste Pfahl eingerammt worden. (Ur, 74)
Nicht nur kehrte die verbotene Lust am Krper als Liebe zu einer
Natur wieder, in der das Krperliche die symbolische Gestalt von
16
Griese, Ur, 51. Im folgenden im laufenden Text zitiert als Ur.
205
Spalten, Hhlen etc. angenommen hatte, gleicherweise ist nun

deutlich, da die libidinse Energie sich mit den Symbolen nicht
zufrieden geben konnte. Auch der Versuch, durch berhhung in
einen mystischen Akt eine Steigerung zu erreichen, blieb
unbefriedigend. Dieser Sachverhalt erklrt die wachsende Verzweiflung der Protagonisten in Grieses frhen, deutlich autobiographischen Romanen. Die Feuchtigkeit der Erde war schlielich
nicht mehr genug: Die Wasserphantasien frben sich blutig, und der
Wunsch nach Vereinigung wird, wie gesehen, zur brutalen
Vergewaltigung.
[...] und Blutverteilung ist im Gange17 mit diesem Vers
Gottfried Benns ist der hier behandelte individuell-regressive Teil der
Blut-und-Boden-Literatur gut charakterisiert. Deren Vokabular lt
sich beim frhen Benn mit seiner von regressiven, anti-rationalistischen Sehnschten getriebenen Lyrik durchaus finden:
Hier schwillt der Acker schon um jedes Bett.
Fleisch ebnet sich zu Land. Glut gibt sich fort.
Saft schickt sich an zu rinnen. Erde ruft.
(Benn, Mann und Frau gehn durch die
Krebsbaracke, Smtliche Werke, 16)
Bei allen Anklngen der frhen Gedichte Benns an Blubo-Vokabular

bleibt diesem gegenber jedoch immer die parodistische Distanz zu
hren. Der Grund liegt im Festhalten an der verhaten, aber nicht
aufgegebenen Rationalitt. (Vgl. Eckel, 4560) So folgt bekanntlich
dem Wunsch, ein Klmpchen Schleim in einem warmen Moor
geblieben zu sein, die Selbstreflexion einer Ratio, die sich ihrer
Unhintergehbarkeit bewut bleibt: Schon ein Libellenkopf, ein
Mwenflgel / wre zu weit und litte schon zu sehr (Benn, Gesnge
I, Smtliche Werke, 23). Jenseits der konjunktivisch formulierten
Wnsche, (Eckel, 50) wunschlos glcklich zu sein, liegen Lge,
Selbstbetrug und die verbale Gewaltsamkeit von Autoren, die sich in
einem Zirkel gefangen finden. Bei Benn ist es gerade die nolensvolens aufrecht erhaltene Spannung zwischen Ratio und der Sehnsucht
nach einer pr-rationalen Urheimat, die sein eigentmliches Pathos
17
Benn, O Nacht in Benn, Smtliche Werke, 46.
Stefan Busch
206
ausmacht. In der Fortfhrung von Blubo mit den Mitteln des

Expressionismus fhrt hingegen die irrationalistische Jagd nach einem
Ur-Glck unter Verleugnung der Vernunft nicht zur Erfllung der
Sehnsucht nach Auflsung in der Natur, sondern nur zu einer
aufgesteilten Knstlichkeit. In seinem Gedicht Mutter schilderte Paul
Alverdes, da er als der Scholle hingeschmiegter Sohn auf Mutter
Erde seiner Liebe freien Lauf lassen konnte:
Dann kss ich, die mich trgt, die braune Furche
und spreche grend also: Sieh, da bin ich,
der fortzuschnellen glhend ich begehrte,
Gescho, von Wnschen steil ins All gejagt 18
Es bleibt nicht bei der sprachlichen Gewaltsamkeit. Wo expressionistisches Pathos und Blubo-Kult sich in dem Wunsch nach
Verstrmen im Leib der groen Mutter trafen, war der metaphysisch
berhhte inzestuse Koitus nicht fern. Der drastischste Beleg findet
sich Hans Francks Drama Klaus Michel (1926). Der Held schneidet
sich auf dem Feld mit der Sense ins eigene Fleisch, doch er will die
Wunde keinesfalls versorgt wissen:
Nein! Nicht hemmen! In den Scho
der Sche mich wie vordem nie
verstrmen: in die Erde! Sie,
gleich Keiner keusch und ohne Scham,
schenkt tausendfltig, was sie nahm.
[...] Ich werde
lebendigen Leibes von der Erde
empfangen. Blut heit hier Samen.
Knie nieder! Bete! Amen ... Amen ...
(Franck, 310)
Fr solche Mnnerphantasien existieren keine Entsprechungen bei

Autorinnen. Ohnehin gibt es von Frauen nur wenige Texte, die der
Blubo-Literatur zugerechnet werden knnten. Und wo es sie gibt, sind
sie nichts weiter als Trivialliteratur mit einigen zeittypischen
Versatzstcken. Der fehlende Wunsch nach Vereinigung mit Urmutter
Erde fhrte dazu, da sie sich nur oberflchlich dem Vokabular sowie
18
Alverdes, P., Mutter; zit. nach Loewy, 119.
207
den formalen Vorgaben einschlgiger Texte anschlossen. In den

Femhof-Romanen der Josefa Berens-Totenohl etwa ist gleich zu
Beginn erkennbar, da die Sexualitt in einen zugelassenen, zur
ewigen Liebe verklrten und einen anderen dunkel-bedrohlichen
Bereich aufgespalten ist, wobei letzterer in stereotyper Weise von
einer Zigeunerin reprsentiert ist. Nicht nur wird die Romanhandlung
von diesen dunklen Mchten getragen, sondern sie bestimmen auch
die Rezeption des vor wie nach 1945 erfolgreichen Buches: Die Leser
genieen das Verbotene und drfen es gleichzeitig verurteilen. Zu
diesen trivialliterarischen Mustern tritt allenfalls mit dem
Kraftmeiertum des sauerlndischen Wulfsbauern-Geschlechts ein
Modephnomen der Zeit. Bezeichnenderweise verfllt die Autorin
andernorts, wo sie sich emphatisch zum Thema Blut auslt, im Stil
der Friederike Kempner der unfreiwilligen Komik: Ein tief
Geheimnis brennt im Blut / Der Bauern auf dem Munkhof ach!
Sehr bald schon nach dieser ominsen Klage werden die Fallstricke
erahnbar, die das Schicksal fr das starke Geschlecht bereithlt:
Unselig, wenn des Blutes Strom / zu Seiten sich ein Bette grbt.19
In Ernst Wiecherts Romanen und in der Mehrzahl der Romane
des konservativen Lagers i.w.S. werden Haltungs- und
Verhaltensnderungen meist als Erkrankung oder Gesundung
beschrieben, sie sind also nicht Resultat eines Lern-, Erfahrungsoder Anpassungsprozesses (Delabar, 140). Dies gilt nicht nur fr die
fiktiven Charaktere, sondern lt sich auch fr die Autoren und ihr
Selbstverstndnis feststellen. Wie Ernst Wiechert, der seine frhen
Texte als krank bezeichnete, tat auch Friedrich Griese seine ersten
Romane rckblickend als Symptom junger Leiden ab. (Vgl. Griese, Mein
Leben, 52 u. 54.) Diese Pathologisierung bedeutete ein organologisches
Sich-Zurechtlegen, ohne da ein eigentliches Verstndnis erreicht
worden wre; das Wesentliche galt aber ja ohnehin als dem Verstand
unzugnglich. Solche Parallelen drfen aber nicht ber den
entscheidenden Unterschied hinwegtuschen: Nicht nur ist die unbedingte Identifikation des Autors mit seinen Figuren, und sei es ber den
Nachweis pathologischer Elemente oder Strukturen, kaum zu halten
(Delabar, 141), sondern das Pathologische bedingt geradezu die
19
Berens-Totenohl, J. Einer Sippe Gesicht; zit. nach Loewy, 121.
208
Stefan Busch
Differenz. Der Akt des Schreibens nmlich ist der Versuch der
Erfllung ungelebter und unlebbarer Wnsche, gleichzeitig trennen
sich in ihm die Autoren und ihre Geschpfe. Letztere sind durch ihre
Distanz von der Welt des Geistes charakterisiert, ihr tiefes Wissen
stammt aus den Quellen der Natur. Indem die Autoren ihre
Wunschbilder auf Papier entwarfen, schlossen sie sich selbst aus der
Welt des instinkthaften, einfachen Lebens aus. Das Medium, in dem
die Wnsche erfllt werden sollen, vereitelt diese. Erzhltechnisch
schlgt sich dies in einer formalen Schlichtheit nieder, die nicht aus
dem Streben nach Konsumierbarkeit entspringt, sondern den Versuch
darstellt, das Medium zum Verschwinden zu bringen.
Die organologischen Selbsterklrungen der Autoren und das
Ausbleiben eines Verstehensprozesses fhrten dazu, da das
Grundmodell ihrer Erzhlungen ber Jahrzehnte hinweg das gleiche
blieb. Der Blick auf die Rezeptionsseite zeigt, da die regressivindividuellen Blut-und-Boden-Romane fr ein breites Publikum erst
Attraktivitt gewannen, wenn das offen Pathologische zurcktrat und
auf ein akzeptables Ma reduziert wurde. Entsprechend fanden
Grieses Erstlinge Ur und Feuer beim Publikum nur geringen Anklang.
Wirklicher Erfolg stellte sich erst ein, als es dem Autor gelang,
Distanz zu gewinnen von der kaum verhllten Selbstaussprache im
Medium pathologischer Charaktere. Seine folgenden Romane und
Stcke durchzog eine panerotische Atmosphre, so etwa das Drama
Mensch, aus Erde gemacht, das 1933 in einer Inszenierung von Jrgen
Fehling und mit Heinrich George in der Hauptrolle auf die Bhne des
Berliner Schauspielhauses gelangte. Grieses grter Erfolg jedoch
wurde der Roman Winter (1927), fr den er einen Literaturpreis
erhielt. Darin ist die Sexualitt gleichsam objektiviert. Erzhltechnisch
und inhaltlich soll alles in dem Buch seinen natrlichen Gang gehen,
und auch die Sexualitt soll ganz im Einklang mit den Gesetzen der
Natur gelebt werden drfen. Wenn die Gutstochter den geliebten
Knecht nachts in ihr Zimmer lt, so rhrt der Naturbursche wie ein
Hirsch in der Brunftzeit, nur leiser:
Sie fhlte seinen Arm um ihren Leib. Aus seinem Munde kamen Laute, tief,
verhalten, fast unhrbar. Und ihr zuckte noch ein Erinnern daran durch den
209
Sinn, da sie an warmen Dmmermorgen vom Moor herber hnliche Tne gehrt hatte. (Griese, Winter, 27)
Doch der Lauf der Natur vertrgt sich weder mit den Gesetzen der
Agrarwirtschaft noch mit den Moralvorstellungen der Dorfbewohner.
Die Gutstochter mu mit dem Knecht fliehen, und ihre Schwester, die
nach einem Gang in die Felder schwanger wird, entzieht sich den
Repressionen durch den Tod im Moor. Der Widerspruch zwischen
einer vorgeblich freien Sexualitt auf der einen sowie einer christlich
geprgten repressiven und nicht zuletzt konomischer Vernunft
folgenden Sexualmoral auf der anderen Seite durchzieht smtliche
Bauernromane, so neuheidnisch sie sich zunchst auch geben mgen.
Der Schlu liegt nahe, da gerade diese Antagonismen die Romane
zur geeigneten Lektre fr das stdtische Lesepublikum machten. In
ihrer Widersprchlichkeit boten sie sowohl den ngsten wie auch den
unterdrckten Wnschen Anknpfungspunkte: Einerseits erfllten die
Geschichten von der Liebe auf dem Lande einen Wunschtraum im
Wunschraum, andererseits waren die Urzeit-Idyllen unterschwellig
von den kulturellen Repressionen der Gegenwart geprgt. Die Leser
konnten sich also fr die Zeit der Lektre dem Unbehagen in der
Kultur entziehen; gleichzeitig empfanden sie, da nicht etwas ganz
anderes, sondern die eigene Sache verhandelt wurde.
Dies gilt auch fr Ernst Wiecherts sptere Romane, von denen
der Autor schrieb, da ihnen eine Genesung vorausgegangen sei. Sein
erfolgreichstes Werk wurde Das einfache Leben (1939). Doch die
Grundkonstellation darin gleicht in vielem noch der in den frhen
Texten, nur da deren aggressiver Gestus einem rein defensiven
Modell, dem Abkehr des Protagonisten von der unverndert als
negativ gezeichneten Gesellschaft, gewichen ist. (Vgl. Delabar, 146
50.) Am Anfang von Das einfache Leben steht die Trennung des
Protagonisten von der Frau, die in der Stadt der Sucht der leeren Betriebsamkeit und den Drogen verfallen ist. Erst zum Sterben sucht
sie wieder ihren Mann auf, der sich auf eine Insel in einem
masurischen See zurckgezogen hat. Die Liebe zur Natur beseelt auch
diesen Helden, doch ist die angestrebte Vereinigung nicht mehr
krperlicher Art, sondern als ersehnte unio mystica ins Metaphysische
berhht. Gerade die Allgegenwart des Eros in einer dezenteren,
210
Stefan Busch
vergeistigten Form machte neben dem offensichtlichen Eskapismus

das Buch zu einem enormen Erfolg beim Lesepublikum des
Nachkriegsjahrzehnts.
Zitierte Literatur
Benn, G. Smtliche Werke, Hg. G. Schuster, Bd. 1 (Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1986).
Beste, K. Das heidnische Dorf (Mnchen, Langen-Mller, 1932).
Braun, F. X. Gustav Frenssen in Retrospect, Monatshefte fr deutschen Unterricht,
deutsche Sprache und Literatur, 39 (1947), 44962.
Busch, S. Und gestern, da hrte uns Deutschland. NS-Autoren in der
Bundesrepublik. Kontinuitt und Diskontinuitt bei Friedrich Griese, Werner
Beumelburg, Eberhard Wolfgang Mller und Kurt Ziesel (Wrzburg,
Knigshausen & Neumann, 1998).
Corni, G. Richard Walther Darr Der Blut-und-Boden-Ideologe, in Smelser, R.,
Zitelmann, R. (Hg) Die braune Elite I. 22 biographische Skizzen (Darmstadt,
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 31994), 1527.
Delabar, W. Unheilige Einfalt. Zu den Verhaltenskonzepten in den Romanen Ernst
Wiecherts, in Caemmerer, C., Delabar, W. (Hg) Dichtung im Dritten Reich?
Zur Literatur in Deutschland 19331945 (Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag,
1996), 135150.
Eckel, W. Benns Entdeckung des Geistes, in H. Steinhagen (Hg.) Gedichte von
Gottfried Benn (Stuttgart, Reclam, 1997).
Franck, H. Klaus Michel. Dramatische Dichtung in fnf Akten (Leipzig, Haessel,
1926).
Frenssen, G. Lebensbericht (Berlin, Grotesche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1940).
Geyer-Ryan, H. Trivialliteratur im Dritten Reich. Beobachtungen zum Groschenroman, in Schnell, R. (Hg) Kunst und Kultur im deutschen Faschismus
(Stuttgart. Metzler, 1978), 21760.
Griese, F. Im Beektal singt es (Eisenach, Erich Rth Verlag, 1938)
Feuer (Wismar, Hinstorff, 1921).
Leben in dieser Zeit 18901968 (Flensburg, Wolff, 1970).
Mein Leben. Von der Kraft der Landschaft (Berlin, Juncker u. Dnnhaupt,
1934).
Ur. Eine deutsche Passion (Mnchen, Delphin, 1922).
Winter (Lbeck, Quitzow, 1928).
Horkheimer, M. Autoritt und Familie, in M. Horkheimer Kritische Theorie. Eine
Dokumentation, Hg. A. Schmidt. Bd. 1 (Frankfurt a.M., Fischer, 1968), 277
360.
Ketelsen, U.-K. Literatur und Drittes Reich (Vierow, SH-Verlag, 1994).
211
Vlkisch-nationale und nationalsozialistische Literatur in Deutschland 1890

1945 (Stuttgart, Metzler, 1976).
Loewy, E. Literatur unterm Hakenkreuz. Das Dritte Reich und seine Dichtung. Eine
Dokumentation (Frankfurt a. M., Hain, 1990).
Mecklenburg, N. Erzhlte Provinz. Regionalismus und Moderne im Roman (Knigstein/Ts., Athenum, 1982).
Schne, A. ber politische Lyrik im 20. Jahrhundert. (Gttingen, Vandenhoeck u.
Ruprecht, 1972).
Schweizer, G. Bauernroman und Faschismus. Zur Ideologiekritik einer literarischen
Gattung (Tbingen, Tbinger Verein fr Volkskunde, 1976).
Sengle, F. Wunschbild Land und Schreckbild Stadt. Zu einem zentralen Thema der
neueren deutschen Literatur, Studium Generale, 16 (1963), 61931.
Theweleit, K. Mnnerphantasien, 2 Bde. (Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1990).
Vondung, K. Der literarische Nationalsozialismus. Ideologische, politische und
sozialhistorische Zusammenhnge, in Denkler, H. Prmm, K. (Hg) Die
deutsche Literatur im Dritten Reich. Themen Traditionen Wirkungen
(Stuttgart, Reclam, 1976), 4465.
Weil, M. Vorwort, in Weil (Hg) Wehrwolf und Biene Maja. Der deutsche
Bcherschrank zwischen den Kriegen (Berlin, sthetik und Kommunikation,
1986), 540.
Wiechert, E. Der Wald (Berlin, Grote, 1936).
Jahre und Zeiten. Erinnerungen (Erlenbach-Zrich, Eugen Rentsch, 1949).
Wlder und Menschen. Eine Jugend (Mnchen, Langen-Mller, 1936).
Zimmermann, P. Der Bauernroman. Antifeudalismus Konservativismus Faschismus (Stuttgart, Metzler, 1975).
STEVE GILES
Limits of the Visible: Kracauers

Photographic Dystopia
Introduction
One of the most striking aspects of Thomas Levins recent translation
of Kracauers Weimar essays is its inclusion of photographic material
from the 1920s and early 1930s which typifies the new photography
associated with the neue Sachlichkeit movement.1 Kracauers 1927
essay on photography, published in the Frankfurter Zeitung some four
months after Das Ornament der Masse,2 is accompanied in Levins
edition by a technologically and aesthetically self-reflexive Sasha
Stone photograph, which depicts photographers ostensibly photographing the photographer/viewer (Kracauer, The Mass Ornament,
46). Given Kracauers considerable interest in the mass and popular
visual culture of the Weimar Republic, especially cinema, the reader
of his photography essay might expect to encounter a complex and
subtle disquisition on the new photography comparable to his
previous analysis of the mass ornament.3 This expectation would be
confirmed by the opening paragraph of the photography essay, where
Kracauer not only dissects the image of a film star in a contemporary
1
2
On the new photography, see Vierhuff and Mellor.

Kracauer, Die Photographie; cited as P. Unlike Das Ornament der Masse,
Die Photographie has generally not received detailed and sustained critical
attention, notwithstanding the major upsurge in Kracauer scholarship since his
centenary year of 1989. The only exception is Mlder (727, 96101), who
does not focus on the aesthetic assumptions that underpin Die Photographie.
Brief discussions may also be found in Barnouw (27, 2930, 602), Frisby
(127, 1535), Hansen (545), Levin (212), Mlder-Bach (3703), Rosenberg
(361, 363), and Schlpmann (1025).
See Giles, Cracking the Cultural Code.
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illustrated magazine but also compares her to a Tiller girl. But the
readers expectancy, so seductively aroused, is soon cruelly defeated.
Die Photographie does not present us with a systematic, dialectical
critique of the new photography and its functions in the culture of
distraction. This is particularly disappointing as Die Photographie is
Kracauers sole theoretical engagement with photography during the
Weimar years. Furthermore, Kracauer never reviews or comments on
any of the major publications associated with the new photography,
from Moholy-Nagys pioneering monograph of 1925 through to Franz
Rohs fototek volumes of 1930.4 Yet Kracauers response to the new
photography is disconcerting not only because it reminds us of
Sherlock Holmess dog that failed to bark; we might also wonder why
his analysis of the media image of a film star is framed by a bizarre
and seemingly misplaced quotation from Grimms Kinder- und
Hausmrchen about miraculous events in the land of Cockaigne. One
albeit enigmatic response to that query is suggested by Kracauers
review of Kafkas novel Das Schlo which, like its predecessor Der
Proze, Kracauer characterises as a stencil of a fairytale, die Matrize
eines Mrchens.5 A less esoteric and reprographic response will take
us into the realms of avant-garde aesthetics and recent photography
theory, as we attempt to explicate Kracauers idiosyncratic essay with
reference to its modernist discursive presuppositions. The discussion
that follows will first outline the state of play in photographic
aesthetics prior to the mid-1920s, before going on to analyse key
4
5
See Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Photographie Film and Sechzig Fotos;

Biermann, Sechzig Fotos.
Kracauer, Das Schlo, 390. Kracauer claims that fairytales mediate truth, in
that they constitute an anticipatory dream of truths successful invasion into the
world. This invasion involves defeating the blind forces of nature, the ultimate
meaning of fairytales being the abolition of mythology in favour of truth. As in
Das Ornament der Masse, this utopian dimension of fairytales is bound up
with the Enlightenment project, a point reinforced when Kracauer observes that
the fairytale explodes the seemingly irrevocable natural order of things in order
to put them in their right place which is not the one ordained by nature
(Kracauer, Das Schlo, 392). These notions recur in the photography essay,
not only in the reference to the land of Cockaigne which introduces the essay,
but also in his invocation towards the end of the essay of an authentic way of
representing contemporary realities (P, 967).
215
thematic constellations in Die Photographie. Finally, Die Photographie will be contextualised in terms of modernist aesthetics and
Marxist critiques of photographic representation.
Photography before Theory

Writing in 1980, some 150 years after the emergence of photography
in nineteenth-century France, Victor Burgin suggested that photography theory does not yet exist (Burgin, Introduction, 1). Even
though Burgins own perspective on photography theory is a very
particular one, emphasising its need to satisfy materialist and
semiological criteria, his point is well taken. Photography developed
at a time when aesthetic theory in Europe was dominated by two
major paradigms, Realism and Romanticism; as the nineteenth
century drew to a close, these mutated into Naturalism and
Symbolism. Photographic discourse for much of the nineteenth
century reflects the tension between the view that art should mirror
reality or be a window on the world, and the notion that art should
seek to embody the emotions or psychology of its creator (Burgin,
Introduction, 23, 10). At one extreme, we find Samuel Morses
insistence anticipating the radical Naturalism of Arno Holz that
photography represents nature so perfectly that artistic mediation falls
away; thus photographs cannot be called copies of nature, but
portions of nature itself.6 At the same time, this nave empiricist view
of photography, which apparently legitimises the latters claim to
objective, documentary status, also provoked the dismissal of
photographys artistic pretensions by such luminaries as Gautier,
Baudelaire and the Goncourt brothers (Sekula, 956). This, in turn,
precipitated attempts to establish photography as an art form by
invoking Romantic-Symbolist criteria, a tendency influentially
exemplified in the work of the major US photographer Alfred
Quoted in Sekula, 86.
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Stieglitz. Stieglitzs magazine Camera Work, which appeared between

1903 and 1917, self-consciously asserted the special status of artistic
photographs by foregrounding their status as precious and unique
artefacts, so as to distinguish them from the cheap, mass-produced
fare of contemporary journalistic media (Sekula, 923, 979).
In fact, it has been suggested that by the early 1920s in western
Europe and the USA, at any rate there had developed two clearly
articulated but polarised discourses on photography, namely the
documentary and the fetishistic, the scientific and the magical,7 which
clearly betray their roots in the aesthetic theories of the 1880s and
1890s. On the one hand, we have the photographer as witness,
producing images of reportage which ostensibly provide empirically
verified and verifiable information. On the other hand, we find the
photographer as seer, using imagination to transcend empirical reality
and express inner truths. Certain aspects of these artistic discourses
are particularly relevant to Kracauers photography essay. For much
of that essay, Kracauer characterises photography in Realist/
Naturalist terms, in such a way as to disqualify photography from
attaining artistic status. Similarly, his much-cited methodological
manifesto in Die Angestellten explicitly rejects photographic
reportage, in favour of a process of mosaic reconstruction of reality
that produces the latters image.8
Before we move on to analyse Kracauers photography essay in
detail, though, there is another strand in early twentieth century
aesthetic theory which must be attended to. It has been argued that
despite all the differences between them, Realist (Naturalist) and
Romantic (Symbolist) aesthetics have one crucial feature in common.
Both construe the image as a relay between the image whether it
be a painting or a photograph and a founding presence which is
said to generate and legitimate it (Burgin, Photographic Practice,
545). Cubism, however, demolishes this presupposition. In so doing,
Cubism inaugurates a radically new perception and practice of
painting, whereby the painterly surface is construed as a material
7
8
See Sekula, especially 935. On the rather different approaches to photography

in the Soviet Union, see Watney, especially 15766.
Kracauer, Die Angestellten, 1516.
217
entity in its own right (Burgin, Introduction, 10). This redefinition

of art is taken to its logical conclusion in the theoretical and practical
work of Russian Suprematism, and achieves canonical academic
status in the writings of Clement Greenberg.9 But the focus on the artwork as a totally autonomous material object, whose surface is its
content, cuts the ground from under both of the dominant discourses
that had hitherto established photography as an art form (Burgin,
Introduction, 11). If, however, art was to be neither resemblance nor
expression, neither document nor symbol, no longer embodying
empirical or intuitive truths, did this mean that photography was now
bereft of its much-sought-after artistic legitimacy? It is, perhaps, no
coincidence that from around the mid-1920s onwards, in Germany in
particular, new attempts are made to define photography in its own
terms.10 Let us now consider Kracauers contribution to that project.
Kracauer on Photography
Memory
One way of approaching Kracauers photography essay is to introduce
some seemingly irrelevant quotations from Samuel Becketts essay on
Proust, written in 1931, and juxtapose them with a series of
quotations from Die Photographie, written in 1927:
The man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not
forget anything. His memory is uniform, a creature of routine, at once a
condition and function of his impeccable habit, an instrument of reference
instead of an instrument of discovery. The paean of his memory: I remember as
well as I remember yesterday is also its epitaph, and gives the precise
expression of its value. He cannot remember yesterday any more than he can
9
10
On Suprematist aesthetics, see Bowlt, 11258, and Malewitsch. On Greenberg

and photographic aesthetics, see Burgin, Photography, Phantasy, Function,
2089.
See Vierhuff, 78, 1322.
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remember tomorrow. He can contemplate yesterday hung out to dry with the
wettest August bank holiday on record a little further down the clothes-line.
Because his memory is a clothes-line [...]. (Beckett, 2930)
The memory that is not memory, but the application of a concordance to the
Old Testament of the individual, he calls voluntary memory. This is the
uniform memory of intelligence; and it can be relied on to reproduce for our
gratified inspection those impressions of the past that were consciously and
intelligently formed []. It presents the past in monochrome []. Its action
has been compared by Proust to that of turning the leaves of an album of
photographs. (Beckett, 32)
Allusion has been made to his contempt for the literature that describes, for
the realists and naturalists worshipping the offal of experience, prostrate before
the epidermis and the swift epilepsy, and content to transcribe the surface, the
faade, behind which the Idea is prisoner. (Beckett, 789)
Das Gedchtnis bezieht weder die totale Raumerscheinung noch den totalen
zeitlichen Verlauf eines Tatbestandes ein. Im Vergleich mit der Photographie
sind seine Aufzeichnungen lckenhaft. [] Das Gedchtnis achtet der Daten
nicht, es berspringt die Jahre oder dehnt den zeitlichen Abstand. Die Auslese
der von ihm vereinten Zge mu dem Photographen willkrlich dnken.
(P, 856)
Umgekehrt wie die Photographie verhalten sich die Gedchtnisbilder, die sich
zu dem Monogramm des erinnerten Lebens vergrern. Die Photographie ist
der aus dem Monogramm herabgesunkene Bodensatz, und von Jahr zu Jahr
verringert sich ihr Zeichenwert. Der Wahrheitsgehalt des Originals bleibt in
seiner Geschichte zurck; die Photographie fat den Restbestand, den die
Geschichte abgeschieden hat. (P, 90)
Die Totalitt der Photographie ist als das Generalinventar der nicht weiter
reduzierbaren Natur aufzufassen, als der Sammelkatalog smtlicher im Raum
sich darbietenden Erscheinungen, insofern sie nicht von dem Monogramm des
Gegenstandes aus konstruiert sind, sondern aus einer natrlichen Perspektive
sich geben, die das Monogramm nicht trifft. Dem rumlichen Inventar
entspricht das zeitliche des Historismus. (P, 95)
Dem Bewutsein lge also ob, die Vorlufigkeit aller gegebenen Konfigurationen nachzuweisen, wenn gar nicht die Ahnung der richtigen Ordnung des
Naturbestandes zu erwecken. In den Werken Franz Kafkas entledigt sich das
freigesetzte Bewutsein dieser Verpflichtung; es zerschlgt die natrliche
Realitt und verstellt die Bruchstcke gegeneinander. (P, 97)
219
Rather than developing a systematic linear argument, Kracauers

essay could be seen as a montage of insights which compels the
reader to (re)construct an assemblage of contradictory dualisms:
history and historicism, fragment and totality, truth and garbage,
memory and photography. The most important of these oppositions is
memory and photography. At the same time, when Kracauer speaks of
Gedchtnis as being the inverse of photography, the memory he has in
mind is not Prousts voluntary memory, forever hanging out its dirty
linen on the clothes rack of the mind, but its involuntary counterpart,
which gives epiphanic access to the essence of the self and the past.11
The distinguishing features of Gedchtnis are clarified in relation to
photography. Gedchtnis has no pretensions to totality or completeness,
whether temporal or spatial; its principles of organisation are radically at
variance with photography, in that Gedchtnis focuses on the
identification of intended meaning (P, 856). Furthermore, just as
photography as we shall see later is the representational
counterpart of historicism, so Gedchtnis is essentially linked to
History as such. Whereas photographs merely record the detritus of
History, Memory images embody its truth-content and constitute a
space in which, ultimately, Historys decisive features converge (P,
87). Memory images and History are also implicated in Kracauers
notion of the monogram (which, as indicated in the quotations above,
is alien to photography). He suggests that a persons real or authentic
History may be found in their final Memory image, which excludes
all determinations not intrinsically related to that persons essence
(P, 86). What this means is that, strictly speaking, only fragments or
shards of the characteristics that ostensibly identify a person enter
into their History, but those that do condense into that persons
11
See Beckett, Proust, 314. Barnouw (29) notes that Die Photographie was
influenced by Proust without indicating how, and presumably bases her
comments on Mlders suggestion that Kracauers negative evaluation of
photography is based on Proust (Mlder, 745; Mlder-Bach, 3701). This
viewpoint seems to be influenced by Kracauers own discussion of Prousts
critique of photography in his Theory of Film (1417), written some 30 years
after Die Photographie. However, neither Barnouw nor Mlder relate the
aesthetic presuppositions implicit in Die Photographie to Prousts model of
memory.
220
Steve Giles
monogram. To use Kracauers example, Das Monogramm des Eckart

ist die Treue (P, 87). Crucially, though, Memory images are not the
only repositories of monograms: authentic fairy tales also contain
traces of monograms which have been set down by the imagination.
This, of course, is why Die Photographie is prefaced by a fantastically utopian passage from the brothers Grimm. Nevertheless, at this
point in our discussion the reader/listener could be forgiven for asking
the question But what has this got to do with photography in 1927?
The answer, at least in part, is to be found in the relationship between
Kracauers account of Memory and his comments on consciousness
and Art.
Art and consciousness
As we have already noted, Kracauer associates Memory images with
truth. But Kracauers conception of truth is as idiosyncratic as his
specification of Memory. He contends that truth may only be
discovered by a liberated consciousness, which he glosses as a form
of consciousness that is freed from subjection to basic drives and can
therefore grasp their demonic nature. As long as Memory images
remain in thrall to das unkontrollierte Triebleben (P, 86), they will
be opaque. But, as soon as knowledge clears away the jungle of the
soul and restricts the compulsions of nature, Memory images can
achieve transparency and embody truth.
It would be easy to dismiss Kracauers argument here as a
simplistic piece of Enlightened Freudianism. His account of liberated
consciousness should, however, be understood in the context of the
dialectic of human linguistic and semiological development outlined
towards the end of Die Photographie. Following Bachofen and
Marx, Kracauer proposes that as the original identity of human
beings and nature disappears, so too the symbolic order that seemed
to be imbued with natural meaning disintegrates. In other words, the
price that humanity pays for enhanced self-consciousness and selfawareness is a loss of intrinsic significance comparable to the
metaphysical homelessness delineated in Kracauers early writings.
Kracauer suggests in fact that the evaporation of transcendent or
221
innate meaningfulness has now reached the stage where nature is

irreducibly and irrevocably meaningless, or mute, so much so that
contemporary society must confront a fateful alternative. On the one
hand, a dystopian future, where humanity regresses to the condition of
being dominated by a nature which is inert or mute and eradicates
emancipated consciousness; or, on the other hand, a utopian era,
where liberated consciousness has the opportunity fully to realise
itself over and against mute nature (P, 956). But, because
photography appears to be deeply implicated in Kracauers dystopian
vision, human society has reached a critical turning-point: Die
Wendung zur Photographie ist das Vabanque-Spiel der Geschichte
(P, 96).
Even here though, as the roulette wheel is about to make its final
spin, all is not lost. Just as Memory is antithetical to photography, so
it is also intimately connected with another mode of human
representation, namely Art. Indeed, Kracauer indicates that great Art
approaches the transparency of the final Memory image discussed
earlier, in which History is condensed. Moreover, he continues, if
History is to be represented in Art, then the surface context associated
with photography must be destroyed: Kracauers conception of Art is,
in other words, radically anti-mimetic. He cites with approval
Goethes insistence pace Eckermann that Art transcends natural
necessity and works with its own laws (P, 87), and goes on to claim
that a portrait painter who subjected him/herself to natural necessity
would, at best, produce: photographs! And, even though Art since the
Renaissance is said to have entertained a close relationship with
nature, Kracauer contends nonetheless that Art has always sought to
achieve higher aims, by presenting knowledge in the medium of
colour and contour. As a result, Art is fundamentally antiphotographic. Art-works do not strive to resemble the objects they
depict, nor is their configuration governed by an objects spatial
appearance. Instead, Art grasps the significance of an object and
mediates that significance spatially, by conveying to us what Kracauer
terms the objects transparency, or Transparent. This rather obscure
notion is clarified to some degree when he compares the art-work to a
magic mirror that reflects us not as we appear, but as we wish to be or
intrinsically are. The transparency to which Kracauer refers also
222
Steve Giles
seems to be associated with the idea of an image on transparent

material, such as glass, which is lit from behind as with a Chinese
lantern; somewhat ironically, the term can also be used to refer to a
photographic slide.
In the contemporary world, however, Art too has reached a
turning-point. Kracauer notes that the epoch of nature-based Art
inaugurated by the Renaissance may be coming to an end, and he
refers in passing to three categories of contemporary Art that seek to
reject natural verisimilitude. First, he mentions modern painters
presumably Cubists, Constructivists or Dadaists who put their
pictures together from photographic fragments in order to underline
spatially the simultaneous coexistence of the reified appearances they
represent (P, 88). Secondly, the works of Franz Kafka are said to be
imbued by a liberated consciousness which has demolished natural
realities and has disarranged or displaced the resulting fragments
against one another (P, 97). Finally, film is credited with the capacity
to transcend normal or usual relationships between elements of
nature by assembling strange or alien configurations through cutting
and editing (P, 97). The implication would seem to be that in the
contemporary world, Art can only fulfil its epistemological role by
adopting the radically anti-Naturalistic representational techniques of
the modernist avant-garde.
At the same time, the pretensions of Art are being undermined by
contemporary media. In a brief discussion which pre-empts the core
argument of Benjamins Kunstwerk essay, Kracauer observes that
mass reproduction poses a major threat to Art as the original work
disappears behind the multiplicity of its copies.12 Furthermore, the
proliferation of illustrated newspapers and magazines threatens the
survival of veridical consciousness itself. Photographic images in
such publications are said to reflect and reproduce the world as it
appears to be, a travesty exacerbated by their being at the disposal of
the ruling social order. The ideological implications of mass-media
12
Benjamin quotes directly from Kracauers Die Photographie in his Kleine

Geschichte der Photographie (373), referring to that section of Die
Photographie where Kracauer discusses the implications of mass reproduction
(P, 934).
223
control are underscored when Kracauer describes the status quo as

eines der mchtigsten Streikmittel gegen die Erkenntnis (P, 93), and
he concludes that never before has a society known so little about
itself. Nevertheless, Kracauers critique of mass media owes at least
as much to modernist aesthetics as it does to a Marxist theory of
ideology, in that his critique is predicated on the formers distinction
between authentic and inauthentic ways of seeing: In den Illustrierten
sieht das Publikum die Welt, an deren Wahrnehmung es die Illustrierten
hindern (P, 93; my italics).
Historicism and representation
Illustrated magazines, with their bombardment of visual imagery,
could be seen as constituting the ne plus ultra of photography. As
well as aiming to present a complete reproduction of the world
accessible to the camera, Kracauer suggests, they register the people
and events of that world from every possible perspective. As such,
their procedure is analogous to that of the film newsreel, giving a sum
total of photographs. The illustrated magazines aspiration to
summation and completion is consonant with the impulse to totality
which Kracauer attributes to both photography and historicism. Just
as the totality sought by photography is an inventory of spatial
phenomena which fails to embody the monogram of the objects
depicted, so too historicism attempts to construct a temporal inventory
which is equally inauthentic (P, 96). In Kracauers view, historicism
is based on the assumption that a phenomenon can be explained
purely in terms of its genesis or origins, by reproducing a series of
events without any gaps (P, 85). But, Kracauer continues, historicism
is drastically misguided, and singularly fails to capture History. The
temporal interconnections between events valorised by historicism are
actually tangential to the authentic interconnections mediated by the
transparency or Transparent of History.
Moreover, in view of the close relationship being posited between
photography and historicism, it is rather ironic that photographic meaning
cannot be established according to historicist criteria. Kracauer observes
that the truth-claim of the sixty-year-old photograph of the grandmother
Steve Giles
224
cannot be validated with reference to an original which it resembles:

its veracity can only be established in the context of an oral tradition
whose attributions of identity are incomplete and uncertain (P, 83).
Similar problems of validation occur in the case of contemporary
photographs. The image of the film star discussed in the opening
paragraph of Die Photographie is taken by contemporaries to be a
direct representation of the film star herself. Kracauer, however, takes
this photograph to be an optical sign for the film star whose
referential status appears to be metonymic: she is signified by her
hairstyle, or the pose of her head (P, 89). Furthermore, the film stars
identity is confirmed with reference to an original which is itself an
image: the image seen by cinema-goers on the silver screen (P, 83,
89), so that unsere dmonische Diva appears to be little more than a
simulacrum. Having anticipated key elements of contemporary
semiological critiques of photography, Kracauer even foregrounds the
code of transmission generating the divas photograph:13 Wer durch
die Lupe blickte, erkennte den Raster, die Millionen von Pnktchen,
aus denen die Diva, die Wellen und das Hotel bestehen. Aber mit dem
Bild ist nicht das Punktnetz gemeint, sondern die lebendige Diva am
Lido (P, 83). At the same time, the materialist semiotic in nuce
which Kracauer tantalisingly invokes is not elaborated on elsewhere
in Die Photographie. Instead, as already indicated, he is more
concerned to locate photography in a discourse whose primary terms
of reference are grounded in modernist aesthetics, albeit with a
Marxist ambience. His modernist predilections and his concern to
preserve the category of Art constitute perhaps the key difference
between Kracauers approach to photography and those of Brecht and
Benjamin.
Kracauers initial statement of the parallels between historicism
and photography turns on the coincidental claim that both emerged at
around the same time in the early nineteenth century. As his argument
develops, however, the historical contextualisation of photography
becomes rather more robust and extensive. Kracauer construes
photography as the last historical stage in a series of pictorial
representations that began with the symbol in human prehistory. As
13
On photographic codes of recognition, see Eco, 325.
225
society develops, Kracauer argues, human beings become increasingly

self-aware, so much so that consciousness is gradually emancipated
from its encapsulation by nature. A linguistic and communicative
order grounded in natural symbolism gives way to a world of abstract
and figurative representations (P, 94). As human consciousness comes
to dominate nature, symbolic and mythological modes of thought are
supplanted by allegorical and conceptual thinking. Instead of being a
repository of meaning, nature ultimately becomes intrinsically meaningless, a process which can be traced in the development of European
painting since the Renaissance. Modern photography, Kracauer
contends, is fundamentally associated with the meaningless nature of
the contemporary world, which is a product of capitalism.
Indeed, the very mode of representation characteristic of photography is
intrinsically connected to contemporary capitalism:
Nicht anders als die frheren Darstellungsarten ist auch diese einer bestimmten
Entwicklungsstufe des praktisch-materiellen Lebens zugeordnet. Der kapitalistische
Produktionsproze hat sie aus sich herausgesetzt. Dieselbe bloe Natur, die auf der
Photographie erscheint, lebt sich in der Realitt der von ihm erzeugten Gesellschaft
aus. (P, 956)
Kracauers opposition of photography and Memory now becomes

somewhat clearer. Memory images seek to be repositories of meaning,
whereas photography presupposes a world from which meaning has
been evacuated. And, whilst Memory takes photographs to be
composed partly of detritus, from photographys point of view Memory
images are incomplete and fragmentary (P, 856). Similarly, whereas
Art and History are obliged to destroy the surfaces valorised by
photography in order to grasp and mediate a significance beyond visible
appearances, for photography the unmediated spatial appearance of an
object is its significance (P, 96). What is more, the radical disjunction
between photography and Art also undercuts the misguided enterprise of
artistic photography that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth
century. As far as Kracauer is concerned, artistic photography is a mere
imitation of Art, a hollow semblance like rhythmic gymnastics which
seeks to incorporate a substance of which it knows nothing; indeed,
artistic photography is not even authentic in strict photographic terms, in
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Steve Giles
that it wishes to tastefully disguise all traces of its technological nature (P,
88).
Thus far, Kracauers account of the photographic turn in
contemporary culture has been unremittingly negative, but given his
decided ambivalence towards that other key exemplar of contemporary
capitalist rationalisation, the mass ornament, it is not altogether
surprising that the final section of the photography essay should
suddenly change direction. He had already indicated that humanity has
reached a point of apocalyptic crisis, as History prepares to go for broke
and conjure up Die entscheidende Auseinandersetzung auf jedem
Gebiet (P, 96). Now he insinuates that even photography may be
redeemable in Artistic and Historical terms. He first reminds us that a
consciousness entrapped in nature is incapable of catching sight of its
own foundation the prerequisite for the emergence of liberated
consciousness. But he then produces the astonishing assertion that it is
the task of photography to display this as yet unexamined natural base:
astonishing because hitherto, photography had been seen as a mere
reflector of surface appearance, whereas now it is suddenly invested
with the power to make visible the as yet unseen. Kracauer justifies this
seemingly preposterous claim preposterous in terms of his
argumentation thus far, at any rate by drawing our attention to a more
spatially ambitious photographic genre:
Sie zeigt die Stdte in Flugbildern, holt die Krabben und Figuren von den
gotischen Kathedralen herunter; alle rumlichen Konfigurationen werden in
ungewohnten berschneidungen, die sie aus der menschlichen Nhe entfernen,
dem Hauptarchiv einverleibt. (P, 96)
This, surely, is the type of photography one associates with the avantgarde or experimental wing of neue Sachlichkeit, or even with
fotomontage after Dada. At the same time, though, photographic
representation is still informed by Kracauers broader sociocultural
agenda. This alternative mode of photography is preferred by Kracauer
because it supposedly enables us to see the world of objects in its
independence from human beings, and because it preserves images of
alienated nature. It is thanks to such images that, Kracauer believes,
human consciousness will be prompted to continue its confrontation
227
with nature, as photographic technology presents consciousness with

the reflection of the reality that has slipped away from consciousness
(P, 97). It is not entirely clear what this reality is supposed to be;
suffice it to say that Kracauer goes on to distinguish between a
correct order of natures inventory which does not yet exist, and the
provisionality of the contemporary order of things (P, 967).
Moreover, the disorder of the detritus reflected in photography is, he
suggests, best represented by suspending normal or usual relationships between the elements of nature. In other words, one might
conclude, the utopian dimension of avant-garde photography consists
in its ability to mirror the sheer negativity of contemporary life and
thereby intimate the blank herausgetriebene[n] Mechanik der
industrialisierten Gesellschaft (P, 97). And, whereas the muddle and
jumble of illustrated newspapers is merely chaotic, the defamiliarised
representation of natural elements and relationships is said to be
redolent of the confusion of daily residues in dreams: presumably
because like modernist Art, dream also zerschlgt die natrliche
Realitt und verstellt die Bruchstcke gegeneinander, a process which
dream verwirklicht berall dort, wo er Teile und Ausschnitte zu
fremden Gebilden assoziiert (P, 97). Clearly, Kracauer rejects that
tradition in photographic theory which legitimises photography in
mimetic or naturalistic terms, but although his positive alternative
has some affinity with the notion of the photographer as seer, the
key to his re-evaluation of the photographic lies ultimately in his
attempt to synthesise the aesthetics of making visible and making
strange, bringing together the insights of Futurism/Formalism and
Expressionism in the context of a general advocacy of modernist art
forms.
Kracauers critique of photography is grounded in a series of
presuppositions about aesthetics and modernity that can be traced
back to his earliest published essays on artistic themes from 1920 and
1921.14 His brilliantly succinct account of German Expressionism
commends the Expressionist artists rejection of Naturalism and
Impressionism in favour of an art form that dismisses the ontological
14
See, for example, Kracauer, Schicksalswende der Kunst and Georg von
Lukcs Romantheorie.
228
Steve Giles
claims of the actual world as it presents itself to us, in order instead to

express directly the worlds innermost being. Kracauer takes the view
that Expressionism shatters normality and proclaims its visions in
art forms which hardly refer to the world of the senses, suspending
familiar spatial relationships and embedding fragments of our
perceptions into a matrix of lines and shapes whose structure is
determined by the innermost needs of the artist. Even when
recognisable objects and people do seem to emerge, their external
configuration is but an empty mask that the artist removes in order to
reveal the true visage. Contemporary actuality turns out to be
shadowy and insubstantial, a chaos without soul or meaning, whose
absurdity can only be represented in a distorted image.
It should be evident even from this brief discussion that
Kracauers position is complex and possibly contradictory. His
representational requirements for contemporary art forms involve a
Futurist/Formalist emphasis on defamiliarisation of normal interconnections and relationships, which is to be achieved by adopting
distorted or distorting perspectives. At the same time, his critique of
mimetic depiction presupposes the categories of Expressionist
aesthetics, but the ontological presuppositions and artistic
prescriptions associated with Expressionism are ultimately at odds
with those of Futurism/Formalism.
Theory after Photography

Making visible, making strange
It was suggested earlier in this discussion that artistic discourses
on photography in the early years of the twentieth century were
dominated by Realism/Naturalism and Romanticism/Symbolism, but
that with the emergence of Cubism both of these positions were
undercut. Instead of being construed as a mediator of a prior or preexisting reality, whether external or internal, the visible surface of the
painting came to be seen as an autonomous entity in its own right. The
229
dispute between Realism/Naturalism and Romanticism/Symbolism,

which had turned on the nature of the truths that art should mediate,
was thereby transmuted into a more radical confrontation concerning
the very essence and possibility of representation as such. At one
extreme we find the fundamentalist Naturalism of Arno Holz,
according to which art has a tendency to revert to nature, wieder die
Natur zu sein (Holz, 174); at the other, the non-objective
Suprematism of Kasimir Malevich, whereby art must utterly abandon
subject matter and objects in favour of the sheer superficiality of
artefacts such as White on White.15
The HolzMalevich axis is, however, intersected by an alternative
modernist perspective, which certainly rejects the representational
ideology of Naturalism, yet also wishes to retain a determinate
relationship to nature, whether human or otherwise. Russian Futurist/
Formalist and German Expressionist aesthetics are fully aware of the
Holz/Malevich concern with the adequacy of artistic representations,
but they integrate that concern with more general reflections on a
crisis of consciousness (which itself, ironically, has Romantic/
Symbolist antecedents16). In order to illustrate this point, let us
consider some quotations from Viktor Shklovski and Kasimir
Edschmid17
Bei dieser algebraischen Methode des Denkens fat man die Dinge nach Zahl
und Raum, wir sehen sie nicht, sondern erkennen sie an ihren ersten
Merkmalen. Der Gegenstand geht gleichsam verpackt an uns vorbei. Nach dem
Platz, den er einnimmt, wissen wir, da er da ist, aber wir sehen nur seine
Oberflche. (Sklovskij, 13)
Und gerade, um das Empfinden des Lebens wiederherzustellen, um die Dinge
zu fhlen, um den Stein steinern zu machen, existiert das, was man Kunst
15
16
17.
Reproduced in Grey, 242; as the facing page in Grey suggests, the only answer
to White on White is Alexander Rodchenkos Black on Black (Grey, 243). For a
particularly illuminating recent discussion of Suprematism and early Soviet art,
see Clark, 22597.
See Watney, 1546.
On the Futurist antecedents of Formalism, see Erlich, 4657. The Futurist roots
of Shklovskis Formalism are clearly indicated by the fact that the conception
of language deployed in Kunst als Verfahren is first developed in his Futurist
essay of 1914, The Resurrection of the Word, 417.
Steve Giles
230
nennt. Ziel der Kunst ist es, ein Empfinden des Gegenstandes zu vermitteln, als
Sehen, und nicht als Wiedererkennen; das Verfahren der Kunst ist das
Verfahren der Verfremdung der Dinge und das Verfahren der erschwerten
Form, ein Verfahren, das die Schwierigkeit und Lnge der Wahrnehmung
steigert []. (Sklovskij, 15)
Das Verfahren der Verfremdung bei L. Tolstoi besteht darin, da er einen
Gegenstand nicht mit seinem Namen nennt, sondern ihn so beschreibt, als
werde er zum ersten Mal gesehen []. (Sklovskij, 17)
Es kamen die Knstler der neuen Bewegung. []
Sie sahen nicht.
Sie schauten.
Sie photographierten nicht.
Sie hatten Gesichte. (Edschmid, 56)
So wird der ganze Raum des expressionistischen Knstlers Vision. Er sieht
nicht, er schaut. Er schildert nicht, er erlebt. Er gibt nicht wieder, er gestaltet.
Er nimmt nicht, er sucht. Nun gibt es nicht mehr die Kette der Tatsachen:
Fabriken, Huser, Krankheit, Huren, Geschrei und Hunger. Nun gibt es ihre
Vision.
Die Tatsachen haben Bedeutung nur so weit, als, durch sie
hindurchgreifend, die Hand des Knstlers nach dem fat, was hinter ihnen
steht. (Edschmid, 57)
Shklovski and Edschmid both inhabit a world where everyday

perception has been deadened, and authentic seeing has been eroded,
if not rendered impossible. Like Kracauer, Shklovski implicitly
relates this loss of vision to a process of rationalisation and
disenchantment, in consequence of which we never see beyond the
surface of things. Also like Kracauer, Edschmid distinguishes
between the authentic visionary space of the Expressionist artist and
mere photography, bound up no doubt with the surface actualities of
social facts. But there are also crucial, if subtle differences between
Shklovski and Edschmid, and between Futurism/Formalism and
Expressionism. While Shklovski wants art to make things visible by
making them look strange, thereby reinstating Sehen at the expense of
Wiedererkennen, Edschmid suggests that art can achieve the same
strategic aim of restoring authentic vision by making visible essential
relationships which are otherwise inaccessible to everyday perception.
Edschmid therefore requires the artist to break through the surface of
231
actuality in order to grasp and mediate its otherwise non-visible

essence, whereas Shklovski advocates intensification of our perception
of objects by making them more palpable. Hence Shklovski wants the
stone to be more stony, whilst Edschmid wants the building to
transcend its stony objectivity: Ein Haus ist nicht mehr Gegenstand,
nicht mehr nur Stein, nur Anblick, nur ein Viereck mit Attributen des
Schn- oder Hlichseins. Es steigt darber hinaus (Edschmid, 58).
This basic discrepancy between intensification and transcendence
of perception is, I would suggest, the primary reason why Kracauers
attempt to bring together the aesthetics of Futurism/Formalism and
Expressionism is fraught with difficulties. Similarly, if we were to
apply these contradictory positions to photography, then two
contrasting representational practices would be implied: on the one
hand, the adoption of bizarre perspective and point of view associated
with the more radical exponents of neue Sachlichkeit, and on the other
the painting with light associated with, say, Christian Schad or Man
Ray. In both cases, the documentary and evidential force of
photography would appear to have been forsaken, and realist art
forms modelled on the traditional truth claims of photography would
appear to be hopelessly anachronistic and irredeemably flawed.
This presumption, paradoxical though it may seem, is also at the
core of Adornos reassertion of the possibility of realism after
modernism. In the course of his sociological and philosophical
reflections on the contemporary novel from 1954, Adorno presents a
critique of realistic representation whose argumentation is strangely
redolent of Kracauer: 18
Nicht nur, da alles Positive, Greifbare, auch die Faktizitt des Inwendigen von
Informationen und Wissenschaft beschlagnahmt ist, ntigt den Roman, [] der
Darstellung des Wesens oder Unwesens sich zu berantworten, sondern auch,
da, je dichter und lckenloser die Oberflche des gesellschaftlichen Lebens-
18
Interestingly, Adornos use of the term lckenlos to characterize the

impermeable nature of the inauthentic surface of social life is anticipated in
Die Photographie. There, Kracauer describes the photographic image of the
diva as eine lckenlose Erscheinung (P, 83) and contrasts photography with
the lckenhaft record of memory (P, 85). Both Kracauer and Adorno imply
that authentic artistic representation must be syncopated or fissured.
232
Steve Giles
prozesses sich fgt, um so hermetischer diese als Schleier das Wesen verhllt.
Will der Roman seinem realistischen Erbe treu bleiben und sagen, wie es
wirklich ist, so mu er auf einen Realismus verzichten, der, indem er die
Fassade reproduziert, nur dieser bei ihrem Tuschungsgeschfte hilft.
(Adorno, 64)
Adorno advocates a mode of novelistic composition whose fundamental

aim is realist and demystificatory, lifting the veil of reification so as to
reveal those essential societal relations that would otherwise remain
hidden from view. This aim is to be achieved by breaking through the
faade of surface deception in true Expressionist fashion; as Kracauer
himself might have written, In der sthetischen Transzendenz
reflektiert sich die Entzauberung der Welt (Adorno, 65). But if the
faade is not to be reproduced, how is the novels real object an
alienated social order to be represented? Edschmid, after all, insists
that the Expressionist should replace the brute facts of human misery
with their vision, liberating them von dem dumpfen Zwang der
falschen Wirklichkeit (Adorno, 58).
Kracauers famous answer, which applies as much to sociology
as it does to aesthetics, is encapsulated in his methodological remarks
in Die Angestellten:
Hundert Berichte aus einer Fabrik lassen sich nicht zur Wirklichkeit der Fabrik
addieren, sondern bleiben bis in alle Ewigkeit hundert Fabrikansichten. Die
Wirklichkeit ist eine Konstruktion. Gewiss muss das Leben beobachtet werden,
damit sie erstehe. Keineswegs jedoch ist sie in der mehr oder minder zuflligen
Beobachtungsfolge der Reportage enthalten, vielmehr steckt sie einzig und
allein in dem Mosaik, das aus den einzelnen Beobachtungen auf Grund der
Erkenntnis ihres Gehalts zusammengestiftet wird. Die Reportage photographiert
das Leben; ein solches Mosaik wre sein Bild. (Kracauer, Die Angestellten, 16)
Although he dismisses the faade of photographic reportage, Kracauer

insists on the need to construct from empirical impressions,
observations and reports a mosaic that will constitute a valid image
of socio-economic realities. Crucially, whilst Kracauer endorses the
modernist/Expressionist critique of Naturalistic representation, his
aesthetic and epistemological alternative to mere photography also
questions Expressionist transcendence. Even in 1920, Kracauer had
noted that although Expressionism was necessary, its mission had
233
been completed, and he concludes Schicksalswende der Kunst by

rejecting Expressionist abstraction. We might infer that, like Adorno,
Kracauer wishes to establish a mode of realism whose underlying
metaphysic draws on Expressionism, but whose representational
strategies owe more to Futurism/Formalism and avant-garde
montage.19 In that respect there are intriguing parallels with two other
Marxist aesthetic theorists who were exercised by problems of
photographic representation after modernism, namely Brecht and
Benjamin.
Marxism and Representation

Our discussion of Futurism/Formalism and Expressionism identified
subtly different understandings of making visible and its
relationship to the process of making strange, in theory and in
practice. As we have seen, the issues raised are relevant not only to
modernist aesthetics, but also to Marxist theories of artistic
representation, and even to sociological method. Kracauers critique
of photographic reportage as a basis for analysing industrial relations
uncannily anticipates Brechts contemporaneous musings on this topic
and those of his sociological mentor Fritz Sternberg, the locus
classicus in Brechts case being his critique of photographic realism
in Der Dreigroschenproze:
Die Lage wird dadurch so kompliziert, da weniger denn je eine einfache
Wiedergabe der Realitt etwas ber die Realitt aussagt. Eine Fotografie der
Kruppwerke oder der AEG ergibt beinahe nichts ber diese Institute. Die
eigentliche Realitt ist in die Funktionale gerutscht. Die Verdinglichung der
menschlichen Beziehungen, also etwa die Fabrik, gibt die letzteren nicht mehr
heraus. Es ist also tatschlich etwas aufzubauen, etwas Knstliches,
Gestelltes. Es ist also ebenso tatschlich Kunst ntig. Aber der alte Begriff der
Kunst, vom Erlebnis her, fllt eben aus. Denn auch wer von der Realitt nur das
19
On montage as a core aesthetic feature of avant-garde texts, see Brger, 97

108.
234
Steve Giles
von ihr Erlebbare gibt, gibt sie selbst nicht wieder. Sie ist lngst nicht mehr im
Totalen erlebbar. [] Aber wir reden, so redend, von einer Kunst mit ganz
anderer Funktion im gesellschaftlichen Leben, nmlich der, Wirklichkeit zu
geben []. (Brecht, Der Dreigroschenproze, 469)
Like Kracauer, Brecht suggests that the reality of a factory cannot be

conveyed by a merely photographic reproduction of the immediately
visible surfaces of social life. In Brechts view, this is because socioeconomic realities have become functional and human relationships
reified in such a way that they are not immediately given in experience,
visual or otherwise. Brecht, too, argues that a new type of art is needed,
which (re-)constructs fundamental societal relationships. His argumentation here, as he himself notes, was strongly influenced by his
discussions with the Marxist sociologist Fritz Sternberg.20 Sternberg
had suggested that there was a fundamental difference between the
late medieval/early modern era, and contemporary industrial society.
Whereas in the sixteenth century, key societal relationships were
visible to the naked eye (and thus amenable to photographic
representation), in the twentieth century such relationships have to be
rationally reconstructed, thus rendering their photographic representation inadequate or impossible.21
20
21
See, for example, this comment by Brecht from ca 1930: Die Fotografie ist die
Mglichkeit einer Wiedergabe, die den Zusammenhang wegschminkt. Der
Marxist Sternberg, in dessen Wertschtzung sie wohl mit mir bereinstimmen,
fhrt aus, da aus der (gewissenhaften) Fotografie einer Fordschen Fabrik
keinerlei Ansicht ber diese Fabrik gewonnen werden kann (Brecht, Durch
Fotografie keine Einsicht, Schriften 1, 4434).
See the following extracts from Sternberg, recording comments which he made in
conversations with Brecht in ca 19289: In der Zeit, als Shakespeare schrieb, []
hatten die Menschen einen bestimmten Standort in der Gesellschaft. [] Die
Gesellschaft war in ihrem soziologischen Charakter deutlich sichtbar. [] Man
konnte mit blossem Auge die soziologische Schichtung im wortwrtlichen Sinne
sehen und brauchte sie nicht erst vorher durch den Verstand zu analysieren. []
Heute, in der modernen Industriegesellschaft, kann man die verschiedenen
sozialen Schichten nicht einfach mit den Augen sehen. Gehen Sie einmal in
eine Fabrik, sehen sie, was die Unternehmer, was die Direktoren, was die
Angestellten, was die Arbeiter tun. Wenn Sie all dies gesehen haben, wissen Sie
gar nichts (1415).
235
This line of argument together with Marxs account of

commodity fetishism and Korschs critique of nave realism
underpins Brechts advocacy of a cognitive or abstract type of realism
from 1932 onwards.22 Nevertheless, Brecht also insists on the
importance of making societal realities visible, notably in the
inimitable phrase um das zu Sehende jedermann sichtbar zu machen
(Brecht, Der Dreigroschenproze , 449). This is a recurrent theme in
Der Dreigroschenproze, where the process of making visible is even
likened to producing a photographic print from a negative.23 At the
same time, Brechts dictum um das zu Sehende jedermann sichtbar
zu machen must be grasped in relation to the aesthetic coordinates
that frame Futurism/Formalism and Expressionism. At one level,
Brecht the post-Expressionist is committed to making visible
socio-economic structures and relationships which are not immediately given in sense perception. At another level, however,
Brecht the post-Formalist advocates an aesthetic of estrangement
that heightens our perception of aspects of social behaviour which are
literally embodied in the gestus. As he writes around 1940:
Es ist der Zweck des V-Effekts, den allen Vorgngen unterliegenden
gesellschaftlichen Gestus zu verfremden. Unter sozialem Gestus ist der
mimische und gestische Ausdruck der gesellschaftlichen Beziehungen zu
verstehen, in denen die Menschen einer bestimmten Epoche zueinander stehen.
(Brecht, Kurze Beschreibung einer neuen Technik der Schauspielkunst, 646)
On the one hand, making strange, as the V-Effekt seeks to

defamiliarise and thereby reveal the societal gestus that underlies
interactive processes; on the other, making visible, in that otherwise
abstract societal relations are to be displayed to the audience in the
palpable form of observable, physical behaviour. As Brecht observes
with reference to Shakespeares King Lear:
Wenn Knig Lear (1. Akt, 1. Szene), sein Reich unter die Tchter verteilend,
eine Landkarte zerreit, so wird der Teilungsakt verfremdet. Es wird so nicht
22
23
For further discussion, see Giles, Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory, 1757.
See Brecht, Der Dreigroschenproze, 460; Giles, Bertolt Brecht and Critical
Theory, 74.
236
Steve Giles
nur der Blick auf das Reich gelenkt, sondern, indem er das Reich so deutlich als
Privateigentum behandelt, wirft er einiges Licht auf die Grundlage der feudalen
Familienideologie. (Brecht, Kurze Beschreibung einer neuen Technik der
Schauspielkunst, 653)
Benjamins critique of photographic representation in his Kleine

Geschichte der Photographie takes as its starting point Brechts
commentary on Krupp and AEG,24 and cites both Brecht and
Kracauers photography essay in its account of contemporary
photographic theory and practice. By the time Benjamins essay
appeared in 1931, the new photography had fully established itself,
and his perspective on photography differs from Kracauers in two
main ways: he is prepared to concede a greater positive potential to
the new photography,25 and he is much more sceptical of the
aesthetic categories within which photography had traditionally been
located. In particular, following Brecht, Benjamin criticises the
auratic view of art adhered to by photographic theorists and pays
much more attention to issues of photographic technology. His
positive strategy and his more positive response to the new
photography involves assimilating Brechts critique of photographic
realism to the artistic practices of Surrealism and Constructivism.
Benjamin also rejects photographic reportage in favour of an aesthetic
of making strange: the camera has the potential to produce images
which shock the viewer and interrupt his/her mechanisms of
association, creating a space for the incorporation of photography into
what Brecht had referred to as the Literarisierung aller
Lebensverhltnisse (Benjamin, Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,
385).
This brings photography into that realm of complex seeing
which all three Kracauer, Brecht and Benjamin by the late 1920s
24
25
In some quarters this essay is best known for its Brechtian critique (deriving
directly from Der Dreigroschenproze) of the photography of neue Sachlichkeit
(Kleine Geschichte der Photographie, 3834), a critique which also plays a
crucial role in Benjamins theory of the avant-garde in Der Autor als
Produzent (11011). For further discussion of Benjamins indebtedness to
Brecht in this regard, see Giles, Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory, 1336.
See Benjamin, Kleine Geschichte der Photographie, 3823.
237
and early 1930s consider to be the way forward for a socially critical,
avant-garde aesthetic practice, whose prime exemplar is film.26 It is
far from self-evident, however, that simply adopting filmic modes of
representation can resolve the theoretical dilemmas that confronted
Brecht and Kracauer in particular, and the following crucial questions
remain open. How can the relative merits of two ostensibly
incompatible aesthetic strategies making visible and making strange
be combined in such a way as to take full account of the modernist/
Expressionist critique of nave realism as manifested in Naturalistic
representation, without losing sight of the need to make social realities
perceptible in a way that avoids the pitfalls of Expressionist abstraction
and transcendence? If social realities are to be made perceptible for a
mass audience, how can the new media of photography and film be
harnessed to that project or must they simply be dismissed as
irredeemably mystificatory or ideological? Is there, ultimately, a third way
between Adornos elitist but melancholic modernism and Lukcss fetish
for a pre-modernist realism?
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Schriften 5.2. Aufstze (19271931), Hg. I. Mlder-Bach (Frankfurt aM,
Suhrkamp, 1990).
Kracauer, S. Das Ornament der Masse, in Kracauer, Schriften 5.2, 5767.
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Das Schlo. Zu Franz Kafkas Nachlaroman, in Kracauer, Schriften 5.1, 390

3.
Der verbotene Blick. Beobachtungen Analysen Kritiken (Leipzig, Reclam,
1992).
Die Angestellten. Aus dem neuesten Deutschland (Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp,
1971; first published in book form 1930).
Die Photographie, in Kracauer, Schriften 5.2, 8398.
Georg von Lukcs Romantheorie, in Kracauer, Schriften 5.1, 11723.
Schicksalswende der Kunst, in Kracauer, Schriften 5.1, 728.
The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays, translated and edited by T.Y. Levin
(Harvard University Press, 1995).
Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton University Press,
1997; first published 1960).
Levin, T. Y. Introduction to Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 130.
Malewitsch, K. Suprematismus. Die gegenstandlose Welt, Hg. W. Haftmann (Kln,
Dumont, 1989).
Mellor, D. (ed) Germany The New Photography 192733 (Arts Council of Great
Britain, 1978).
Moholy-Nagy, L. Malerei Photographie Film (Mnchen, Bauhaus, 1925).
Sechzig Fotos, Fototek Band.1, Hg. F. Roh (Berlin, 1930).
Mlder, I. Siegfried Kracauer Grenzgnger zwischen Theorie und Literatur. Seine
frhen Schriften 19131933 (Stuttgart, Metzler, 1985).
Mlder-Bach, I. Der Umschlag der Negativitt. Zur Verschrnkung von
Phnomenologie, Geschichtsphilosophie und Filmsthetik in Siegfried
Kracauers Metaphorik der Oberflche, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fr
Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 61, 2 (1987), 35973.
Rosenberg, J. Nachwort, in Kracauer, Der verbotene Blick, 35665.
Schlpmann, S. Phenomenology of Film: On Siegfried Kracauers Writings of the
1920s, New German Critique, 40 (1987).
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Photography, 84109.
Shklovski, V. The Resurrection of the Word, in S. Bann, and J. Bowlt, (eds),
Russian Formalism (Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 417.
Sklovskij, V. Die Kunst als Verfahren, in Striedter, J. (Hg), Russischer
Formalismus. Texte zur allgemeinen Literaturtheorie und zur Theorie der
Prosa (Mnchen, Fink, 1981), 335.
Sternberg, F. Der Dichter und die Ratio. Erinnerungen an Bertolt Brecht
(Gttingen, Sachse und Pohl, 1963).
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Watney, S. Making Strange: The Shattered Mirror, in Burgin (ed), Thinking
Photography, 15476.
JEROME CARROLL
The Art of the Imperceptible: A Discussion of

the Aesthetics of Wolfgang Welsch
Inmitten der Kommunikation bleibt er allein zustndig fr das

Unvermittelte, den Einschlag, den unterbrochenen Kontakt, die
Dunkelphase, die Pause (Strau, 28 in Welsch, sthetisches Denken,
40). With this citation from Botho Straus Dankrede zum GeorgBchner-Preis, the contemporary German theorist, Wolfgang Welsch,
closes his discussion of what he sees as a new category and a neuer
Fokus (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 7) for the discipline of
aesthetics; the anaesthetic. This new focus must be understood in
terms of Welschs suggestion for revising the discipline as a whole
from its preoccupation with art to a broader concern with sensory
perception. In the essay sthetik und Ansthetik, published in the
collection sthetisches Denken in 1990, he characterises the
anaesthetic as a negation of sensory perception:
Ansthetik verwende ich als Gegenbegriff zu sthetik. Ansthetik meint
jeden Zustand, wo die Elementarbedingung des sthetischen die
Empfindungsfhigkeit aufgehoben ist. Whrend die sthetik das Empfinden
stark macht, thematisiert Ansthetik die Empfindungslosigkeit im Sinn eines
Verlusts, einer Unterbindung oder der Unmglichkeit von Sensibilitt, und auch
dies auf allen Niveaus: von der physischen Stumpfheit bis zur geistigen
Blindheit. Ansthetik hat es, kurz gesagt, mit der Kehrseite der sthetik zu tun.
(Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 10)
Beyond Welschs essay, theoretical interest in the anaesthetic as a

component of philosophical aesthetics has gathered pace in the last
fifteen years, and with each application, the concept of the anaesthetic
goes through a different permutation. For Donna Kerr, the anaesthetic
is an obstacle to aesthetic utopia, arising from either routines and
understandings which are psychologically too comfortable (Kerr, 13)
or abrasive environmental conditions conditions that can
242
Jerome Carroll
psychologically deafen and blind or psychologically numb or disable

(Kerr, 13). Guy Sircello and Neil Leach employ the concept of
anaesthetics with more polemic force. The object of Sircellos
invective is the negative (Sircello, 39) trend in the general discipline
of aesthetics away from objects and experience of beauty in particular,
and the aesthetic attitude (Sircello, 39) in general. This has been
supplanted by an anaesthetic (Sircello, 39) preoccupation with
philosophical issues and a consideration of the modulations of the arts
as an institution. Neil Leachs anaesthetic is the effect of the
intoxicating world of the image (Leach, viii), which he sees as
characterising contemporary architectural and general cultural
practice. This cultural veneer is seen, by Leach as well as by Welsch,
to erode critical awareness and to precipitate mindless consumption
and a protective indifference in the face of overstimulation. In
opposition to this involuntary response, Monica Sassatelli refers to the
anaesthetic as a strategy whereby art reacts against this banalization
of the aesthetic (Sassatelli).
This idea of the anaesthetic as a strategic deployment in art is
also central to Welschs work, but his application of the concept of the
anaesthetic contains elements of all of the above ideas. Contemporary
approaches to anaesthetics seem to invoke two main understandings of
the anaesthetic: firstly, as an involuntary response to the excess of
aestheticised experience or the inoculation of routine; secondly, as an
intentional and strategic response to or thematisation of this state of
affairs in art. This split is also evident in Welschs work, and my
central argument will be that this causes a problematic tension within
his formulations on the anaesthetic. I will begin by outlining Welschs
idea of aesthetics as a broader discipline, his conception of the
problem of widespread, everyday aestheticisation, and his multifaceted concept of the anaesthetic, and then proceed to trace how
Welsch returns from theorizing the aesthetic and anaesthetic in terms
of sense-perception to insert the anaesthetic in a more conventional,
and essentially Idealist, framework of aesthetics, which conceives of
art in the more complex terms of truth and fictionality and the
possibility of representation. I will argue that there are significant
ideological weaknesses in these conceptions of oppositional art if they
are to be conceived as resistance to aestheticisation, as well as that
different emphases in Welschs conception of the aesthetic give rise
The Art of the Imperceptible
243
to two arguably incompatible ideas of how art functions, each relying

on a distinct investment in the anaesthetic.
Aesthetics and Anaesthetics

Welschs application of the concept of the anaesthetic needs to be
understood in the context of his revision of the terms of the discipline
of aesthetics, which he returns, following Baumgarten, to its
etymological origins as a study of sensation and perception: Ich
mchte sthetik genereller als Aisthetik verstehen: als Thematisierung
von Wahrnehmung aller Art, sinnhaften ebenso wie geistigen,
alltglichen wie sublimen, lebensweltlichen wie knstlerischen
(Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 910). Aisthetik here refers to the
Greek term aisthesis, which means perception, suggesting a
conception of aesthetics that is broader than its modern focus on art.
As Welsch explains, this new aesthetics would still include art, but
would also encompass what Welsch refers to as the sthetische
Auffassung der Wirklichkeit (Welsch, Grenzgnge der sthetik,
148). But rather than simply involving a question of perception, this
conception of reality as sthetisch rather than realistisch is seen by
Welsch to indicate da Wirklichkeit nicht gegeben, sondern gemacht
ist (Welsch, sthetik im Widerstreit, 3). Significantly for my later
discussion, he also remarks that aestheticised reality is fictional, that
the Grundlagen dessen, was wir Wirklichkeit nennen, fiktionaler
Natur sind (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 7).
In Grenzgnge der sthetik, Welsch refers to this aestheticisation
of reality in various terms perhaps more plausibly connected with
questions of perception. These include the cosmetic effect of the
widespread faade-like renovation or Verschnerung (Welsch,
Grenzgnge der sthetik, 10) of the built environment, and the
mediation of reality by visual images (Welsch, Grenzgnge der
sthetik, 14) and marketing image (Welsch, Grenzgnge der
sthetik, 17). This latter is seen to foster the presentation of everyday
events such as shopping and eating as an Erlebnis (Welsch,
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Jerome Carroll
Grenzgnge der sthetik, 1011). Seemingly instances of Peter

Brgers falsche Aufhebung der Distanz zwischen Kunst und Leben
(Brger, Theorie der Avantgarde, 68), these phenomena underlie
Welschs claim as to the broader relevance for contemporary reality
of non-art aesthetics, which has become ein generelles Verstehensmedium fr Wirklichkeit (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 7).
The motivation for Welschs elaboration of anaesthetics lies in
this diagnosis of the state of contemporary aestheticisation. For
Welsch, aestheticisation results in an overstimulation of the senses,
which he traces back to Romantic-Idealist views on the human subject
and its need for sensory gratification and intellectual exercise:
Frher hatte solche Anregung kontemplationsfrdernden Zweck. Kant beispielweise schrieb, die Einbildungskraft werde beim Anblick vernderlicher
Gestalten eines Kaminfeuers, oder eines rieselnden Baches in ein freies
Spiel der Phantasie versetzt und zu autonomen Bildungen angeregt. (Welsch,
sthetisches Denken, 14)
But contemplation has been replaced by an empty euphoria and

subsequent apathy. What was once beautiful in an engaging way now
comes across as an empty perfection and veneer, exploited in a
widespread process of commodification. For Welsch, the anaesthetic
is both the necessary and the only effective response to this
phenomenon of aestheticisation.
In the same way that Welschs understanding of aestheticisation
is wide-ranging, his conception of the anaesthetic is also inclusive. In
his terms, the anaesthetic refers to jeden Zustand, wo die
Elementarbedingung des sthetischen die Empfindungsfhigkeit
aufgehoben ist (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 10; my italics). This
embraces various ideas of the anaesthetic, such as the anaesthetic as
an involuntary shutting off in the face of excess, as a cognitive
prerequisite of perception, as a cultural version of this precondition,
and as non-perception, both in everyday experience and in art. I will
present these in more detail, before highlighting the strengths and
weaknesses of Welschs formulations.
For Welsch, as for Donna Kerr, the sensory excess, veneer and
beautification which constitute everyday aestheticisation result in
anaesthesia, as we are de-sensitised by the over-designedness of
245
everything; aestheticisation [schlgt] in eine gigantische Ansthetisierung um (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 13), or sthetisierung
[] erfolgt als Ansthetisierung (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 14).
The excess or overload of aesthetic-sensory experience has the double
effect of a narcotic, which dulls our senses as it stimulates them. As
Welsch remarks, Je mehr sthetik desto mehr Ansthetik (Welsch,
sthetisches Denken, 16). At a significantly different categorical level,
for Welsch, any perception de facto demands non-perception: Das
bedeutet freilich, da dem Wahrnehmen selbst eine Art Ansthetik
eingeschrieben ist. [] Und diese interne Ansthetik ist eine
notwendige Bedingung der externen Effizienz des Wahrnehmens
(Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 34). This motivates Welschs
observation Kein aisthesis ohne anaisthesis (Welsch, sthetisches
Denken, 32). Of course, this idea of more or less complex
preconditions to perception and cognition is not new. The same idea is
at the heart of the dictum attributed to Spinoza; omnis determinatio
est negatio, as well as Friedrich Schlegels Lcke im Dasein, die
selbst unsichtbar dem Sichtbaren seine Bestimmtheit widerfahren
lasse (both in Frank, 47). It also inhabits Hans Georg Gadamers
rehabilitation of the idea of Vorurteil and his related critique of the
idea of interesseloses Anschauen at the heart of Kants Lehre von
der reinen Wahrnehmung (Gadamer, 273, 96).
For Welsch, this mechanism of exclusion by which we perceive
at all also has a cultural version, in which cultural norms, kulturelle
Grundbilder (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 34), inform our understanding of reality. Examples given by Welsch of this cultural
anaesthetic are the idealised images of man and woman. Of course,
these more complex, inhaltlich aufgeladene (Welsch, sthetisches
Denken, 34) ideals do not belong to the same category of sine qua non
precondition as the non-perception discussed above. Rather they seem
to mark the point at which Welschs theorisation moves from basic
perception to more complex issues of ideology. In what follows I will
argue that this complexity contradicts Welschs revision of the terms
of the aesthetic as sensory, and comes back to haunt Welschs ideas
on art-anaesthetics.
The anaesthetic refers not only to the latent preconditions of
cognitive and cultural perception, but also to those situations in which
sensory perception is specifically arrested. There seem to be two
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Jerome Carroll
aspects to this. Firstly, there simply are aspects of reality which are
beyond our naked perception, such as Welschs example of cancerinducing radiation (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 18). Writing in the
1960s, Robert Martin Adams identifies a similar preoccupation with
the imperceptible: Experiments which have captured the imagination
of the time deal with weightlessness, silence, interruption of the sensecontinuum (Adams, 3). It is with these phenomena in mind that
Welsch dismisses our sensory faculties as Agenten des Falschen
(Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 19). The second aspect of the
anaesthetic as imperceptible is the conscious strategy of problematising the possibility of perception in art.
As noted at the beginning, this idea of the anaesthetic in art as
intentional resistance is distinct from the ideas of the anaesthetic as
non-perception which is necessary for cognition and involuntary
shutting off of perception. It may be contextualised by Welschs
conception of two directions in art. On the one hand, there is the
idealistische und romantische Tradition which privileges the
sthetischwerden as Vollendung des Menschen und der Gesellschaft (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 20). This locates increasingly
aestheticised reality, in the sense of both beautification and sensory
overload, in what Welsch characterizes as a moderner Programm
sthetischer Akkumulation (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 38) and a
moderne Utopie einer total-sthetischen Kultur (Welsch,
sthetisches Denken, 38). On the other hand, art in twentieth century
has been characterized by a suspicion of the aesthetic, and has so
aimed to defy and cut through this accumulation of the aesthetic:
Am Ende ist eine ansthetische Grundhaltung gegen all die schnen und
etablierten Angebote des sthetischen die Methode der Wahl zur Aufdeckung
der Ansthetik alles sthetischen. Deshalb hat die Kunst dieses Jahrhunderts,
der das sthetische als solches suspekt geworden war und die den sthetischen
Gewohnheiten den alltglichen der Sinne wie den durch Kunsttradition
eingebten mitraute, radikale Schnitte gesetzt. (Welsch, sthetisches
Denken, 37)
Welschs account of the anaesthetic as a mode of art, as a consequence

of these multiple and intersecting conceptions of the aesthetic and
anaesthetic, seems to contain several distinct ideas of art, which I will
categorise in what follows as the sublime, cognitive and pragmatic
247
modes of the anaesthetic. Characterizing the contemporary accumulation of the aesthetic as sensory excess allows Welsch to
conceive of arts oppositional force in terms of an arrest of sensory
perception:
[Knstler] haben unsichtbare Objekte geschaffen, Werke der Unbemchtigbarkeit. Ich denke etwa an Walter de Marias Vertikalen Erdkilometer ein
exemplarisches Werk des Entzugs; oder an Werke der Minimal art an diese
Maxima von Ansthetik bei minimalem sthetischen Aufwand. (Welsch,
sthetisches Denken, 40)
This minimaler sthetischer Aufwand, which I have labelled the

sublime anaesthetic, suggests itself as a version of minimalist art
which has gone one step beyond the evacuation of meaning from
behind art leaving just a surface to the absence (or at least
problematisation) even of surface. Walter de Marias Vertical Earth
Kilometer is the only example Welsch gives, but other examples in
the sphere of sculpture might include Michelangelo Pistolettos
Cube (1966, Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera, 19621972 exhibition,
Tate Modern, London, 31 May19 August, 2001), whose composition
from six inward-facing mirrors makes the artwork at once infinite and
inaccessible, or Paul Ramirez Jonas Man on the Moon (1991, Speed
Visions of an Accelerated Age exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery,
London, 11 September22 November, 1998), in which the artist has
transferred a recording of the moon landing via phonograph onto a
number of wax cylinders. To attempt to access the sound from their
now three-dimensional physical and visual form would gouge an
obliterating groove into the wax. There has also been considerable
recent interest in questions of the representation of the invisible or
imperceptible, as exemplified by three exhibitions in the UK in Spring
2001.1 The imperceptible has also been deployed in the field of music,
as in John Cages infamous 4'33", which Cage saw, in a notable
parallel with Welschs idea of art as a resistance to everyday
aestheticisation, as a response to canned musak (Solomon). A
1
Signatures of the Invisible, Atlantis Gallery, London, 229 March 2001,

Exhibition to be Reconstructed in your Head, Custard Gallery, Birmingham,
April 2001, Nothing, Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sunderland, April
2001.
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Jerome Carroll
rendition of Cages even more extreme Organ 2/ASLSP, a 639-yearlong piece of music for the organ with spans of months and years
between chords, was begun in September 2001 in Halberstadt,
Germany, with the first note only to be heard after 18 months
(Connolly). A more recent silent piece is Ellipsis, by Matt
Rogalsky, in which he has collected the silences removed from radio
after new technology was introduced to strip out the silences between
presenters words, compacting talk time and leaving more space for ad
breaks (Poole). Reminiscent of Heinrich Blls Dr. Murke, the
common ground between this conception of silence as a refuge from
auditory excess and Welschs formulations on the anaesthetic is
apparent.
Secondly, the references to etablierte Angebote des sthetischen (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 37) and the processes of
Aufdeckung der Ansthetik alles sthetischen (Welsch, sthetisches
Denken, 37) indicate that Welsch is not just talking about an absence
of perception here, nor the surface effects of the sensory. Rather there
is a slippage to an understanding of the aesthetic as being somehow
latent and established. It is this latent cultural accumulation, which
coincides with what I have labelled the cultural anaesthetic above, that
certain examples of twentieth century art are understood to expose or
break open: Am ehesten wohl ber Bilderfahrung und Bildarbeit, die
sich daran macht, diese vorgngigen Prgungen zu exponieren und
ihre Ansthetik zu durchbrechen (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 35).
I have designated this concept of art the cognitive anaesthetic in view
of its capacity for exposing the hitherto unnoticed and uncognised
elements of perception. In this respect it is notable that John Cage,
whose 4'33" I have mentioned above as an instance of the sublime
anaesthetic, is not interested in silence per se, but precisely the
impossibility of silence; try as we may to make a silence, we cannot
(Cage, 8). Silence is always broken by ambient noise, such as a heart
beat or a cough, on which our attention is focussed (Cage, 223).2
Thus the defamiliarising effect of silence is apparent, as Cage says,
2
The parallel between Cages focus on ambient, ostensibly non-artistic, sounds

and Welschs intention of dismantling aesthetics exclusive focus on the
institution of art via the theme of perception is apparent. For Cage, as Revill
notes, the silent piece represents the ultimate elision of art and life (Revill,
165).
249
we had to conceive of silence in order to open our ears (in Revill,

164).
Thirdly, anaesthetic art seems to make a claim to truth. Welsch is
not explicit about this, but I have already noted the anaesthetics
particular suitability for conveying the essence of contemporary
technologically altered reality, characterised for Welsch by the
pervasive imperceptibility which has rendered our sensory faculties as
Agenten des Falschen (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 19). This
suggests that the imperceptible elements in art function as a
preparation for the real world, suggesting a pragmatic rather than
critical function for art. But, confusingly, the imperceptible reality
which this art replicates seems to be the opposite of the aestheticised
reality which Welsch identifies in the increasing beautification and
sensory overload which surrounds us. Indeed, Welsch highlights the
fiktionale Natur (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 7) of this
aestheticised aspect of reality. This fictionality of the aestheticised
aesthetic not only by virtue of its sensory appeal but also its
constructedness implies, by antithesis, a second truth-claim for
anaesthetic art. The unsichtbare Objekte (Welsch, sthetisches
Denken, 40) of Welschs sublime anaesthetic seem to promise a kind
of truth by virtue of their inaccessibility and their moment of
resistance to the veneer and excess of aestheticisation.
Critical Perspectives on Anaesthetics

Having multiple and varying ideas of how art functions is not
necessarily problematic, though the tension should be noted between
Welschs stated project of a broader discipline of aesthetics Ich
mchte sthetik genereller als Aisthetik verstehen: als Thematisierung
von Wahrnehmung aller Art (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 910)
and his return to a narrower focus on art. Perhaps the success of
Welschs project depends on the extent to which he is able to
articulate the interaction between everyday perception and his various
models of art as particular and distinct modes of perception. However,
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Jerome Carroll
my interrogation of Welschs formulations in what follows starts by

asking what might be lost by theorising art at the necessarily basic
level of perception. Moreover, returning to the question of Welschs
divergent ideas of the way art functions, my criticism of Welschs
anaesthetic is not that the sublime anaesthetic construed as sensory
withdrawal and respite is unconvincing in itself, but rather that it is
incompatible with Welschs alternative usage of the term anaesthetic
as referring to unthematised or unconscious that is to say, deeper
components of the cognitive process which accompanies perception.
This incompatibility is compounded by Welschs valorisation of an
alternative model of art where such latent elements of perception are
exposed. The slippage in Welschs sublime anaesthetic from the idea
of imperceptibility, and the issue of sense-perception, to the albeit
more complex but utterly philosophical issues of truth and
representation, raises the question as to whether the sublime
anaesthetic really constitutes an effective opposition to everyday
aestheticisation. Moreover, I will suggest that the version of truth in
Welschs sublime anaesthetic reverts to an early Romantic model of
the kind of truth that art can provide, its validity predicated on its
indeterminate and unfixable nature. Welschs philosophical investment in the anaesthetic will also be seen to unlearn the lessons of
Herbert Marcuses convincing exposition of the regressive ideology at
the heart of certain strands of Idealist aesthetics (Marcuse, 56ff.).
Nevertheless, I will make the case that the complexity of the cognitive
anaesthetic has the advantage of allowing a more sophisticated
conception of the anaesthetic which transcends a valorisation of sheer
imperceptibility.
As noted above, Welschs diagnosis of contemporary aestheticisation identifies several distinct but related features of contemporary reality, for example, the excess of sensory experience, the
mediation of reality by images, the predominance of veneer over
substance, and the thoroughgoing beautification of our environment.
The difficulty arises with Welschs suggestion that one type of
minimalist art can address all of these phenomena. Moreover, if one
allows that these phenomena of aestheticisation include an ideological
aspect, it is questionable whether Welschs anaesthetic, reduced to a
binary treatment of aesthetics as perception: on or perception: off,
is equipped to address the ideological complexity of what is really
251
occurring in processes of aestheticisation, for example commodification or the fetishization associated with Baudrillards concept
of sign value (Baudrillard, 77). If aestheticisation is what Mike
Featherstone refers to as an intensification of image production
(Featherstone, 65), as Welschs idea of a mediale Bildwelt (Welsch,
sthetisches Denken, 15) suggests, surely this image production is not
reducible to mere image, but must be conceived in more complex
terms of what is being represented and how. For example,
aestheticisation might be seen as manifest in what has in the last few
years been classified as lookism, namely hiring or promoting
someone on the basis of how they look (and the proximity of their
appearance to a preferred ideal), rather than because of their skills. But
art is only in a position to attack this activity if it can expose the
operation of such prejudice.
Of course, Welschs implication is that the silent or invisible
offers a space free from ideological imposition, a moment which
defies consumption. But the slippage from aesthetic questions (those
concerning perception) to epistemological questions (those concerning
truth and fictionality) brings with it its own ideological investment.
Specifically, I would argue that the value-system inherent in Welschs
sublime anaesthetic borrows from the ideology of early German
Romantic aesthetic theory. For the early Romantics, notably Novalis
and Schlegel, ultimate truth is essentially dynamic, its validity
predicated on its indeterminate and unfixable nature.3 I have already
cited Schlegels idea of the Lcke im Dasein which is selbst
unsichtbar, which might indicate that inexplicable and unconditioned
basis of being that F. H. Jacobi had called Grund (as distinct from
the explanatory Ursache).4 The role of art in Romantic theory was
precisely to intimate this unfixable truth or grund: the idea of a simple
correspondence between art and everyday reality is precisely what the
early Romantic notion of truth in art was militating against. This
refusal to (re)present seems also to be at the heart of much art that
could be classified as anaesthetic. In the case of John Cages music,
for example, ambient noise is valorised for its spontaneous and
3
4
For an excellent discussion of this intersection of philosophy and literary theory

in Romantic thought see Bowie, 6579.
See Bowie, 38.
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Jerome Carroll
unintentioned nature, as Cage himself says in one interview: The

essential meaning of silence is the giving up of intention
(Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 189).
But the essential inaccessibility of this indeterminate truth
exposes the sublime anaesthetic to Marcuses critique of Idealist
aesthetics, as elaborated in the essay ber den affirmativen Charakter
der Kultur. Whilst Welschs anaesthetic is conceived as repudiating
the function of the beautified world as pleasant veneer, its
inaccessibility suggests that in ideological terms it might actually
replace beauty as the guarantor of an ideal, that is to say
indeterminate, realm. John Cages suggestion that music is there to
prepare the mind for divine influence is grist to Marcuses mill.5 In
Marcuses terms this promise of revelation and respite, rather than
seeking to change material conditions, performs a regressive
consolatory function (Marcuse, 86), which ultimately serves to
affirm present conditions; Die Kultur bejaht und verdeckt die neuen
gesellschaftlichen Lebenbedingungen (Marcuse, 64).
The idea that the reception of anaesthetic artworks involve a
moment of contemplation does progress beyond a simple celebration of
their alleged imperceptibility, a certainly is supported by the general
philosophical questions about existence, perception and paradox that the
works noted above seem to raise. For example, the effect of
Michelangelo Pistolettos Cube, which comprises six mirrors facing
each other, is only achieved when we try to imagine what exists and
what is visible within the confines of the cube. Similarly, the theatre of
Robert Wilson, whose slowed-down and virtually wordless Deafman
Glance might be conceived as an instance of the sublime anaesthetic,
is designed to give the audience therapeutic time for interior
reflection.6 This conception of art as offering a moment for
contemplation is less contentious than the idea of sublime art as
containing a kernel of truth. Moreover, it suggests a plausible
mediation between the seemingly philosophical issues of the
perception of the infinite or paradoxical in art and more everyday
5
6
See Revill, 168.

Wilson, quoted in Innes, 202. The idea that Wilson is the theatrical equivalent
of Cage is supported by the formers KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia
Terrace, which was performed over seven days at the 1972 Shiraz festival. See
Innes, 202.
253
perception, supporting Welschs idea of art as a moment of

recuperation from the excesses of the everyday world. But
Marcuses critique of arts affirmative function is again pertinent here.
The idea of art as a meditation on such conceptually challenging
issues is precisely the object of his criticism of the Wrdigung alles
Schweren und Erhabenen that he associates with Idealism (Marcuse,
71). This is the stick to the carrot of arts consolatory function, for
Marcuse sees the preference for the conceptually difficult as a means
of ensuring a Disziplinierung des Individuum zum Sich-Fgen in eine
schlechte Ordnung (Marcuse, 100). That Marcuse likens this
Disziplinierung to Stoic philosophy has resonance for Welschs
formulations in view of the latters valorisation of the Stoic as the
perfekter Ansthet (Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 26). Marcuses
austere position is perhaps excessively pessimistic: it does not follow
necessarily that the conceptually difficult reinforces the ideology of a
schlechte Ordnung. But his remarks are a useful corrective to the
excessive claims of this kind of Idealist aesthetics, reminding us of the
limitations of art which functions as little more than a distraction.
Specifically with respect to Welschs formulations, Marcuses
comments indicate that imperceptible art might serve only to set up a
smokescreen in front of the suspect ideologies at work in
aestheticisation, combatting one dubious ideology with another.
In addition to the slippage from issues of perception to the
philosophical issues of truth and the distraction of the conceptually
difficult, there is the related shift of focus in Welschs formulations
from questions of perception to the idea of the anaesthetic as a
meditation on the issue of artistic representation. This is apparent in
Welschs distinction between the modern faith in art as total
representation and the modernist problematising of that function (see
Welsch, sthetisches Denken, 378). T. J. Clarke reads the increasing
abstraction of art in the twentieth century as a striving to break out of
the obligation of illusionist representation, and as a desire to attain a
certain immediacy (Clarke, 253). The idea of art as Nothing, the
evacuation of any trace of content, is the reductio ad absurdum of this
idea. Flaubert, for example, indicates in a letter written whilst writing
Madame Bovary the desire to write a book about nothing, a book
dependent on nothing external [] a book which would have almost
no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible,
254
Jerome Carroll
if such a thing is possible (Steegmuller, 131).7 More recently, John

Baldessaris piece, no ideas have entered this work (19668),
operates on the same principle. The inherent conceptuality of the work
gives the lie to the notice which occupies the blank canvas:
EVERYTHING IS PURGED FROM THIS PAINTING BUT ART, NO IDEAS
HAVE ENTERED THIS WORK. As such, the imperceptibility of these
instances of art appears as a by-product of the artists frustration at the
obligation of more or less realist representation.8
Construing the anaesthetic as a meditation on the mode and limits
of representation may be more convincing than conceptualising the
anaesthetic as a somehow imperceptible truth, but only at the expense
of its credibility as oppositional artform in the way that Welsch seems
to intend. Conceiving the anaesthetic as somehow refusing
representation seems to undermine Welschs claims that there is some
special dialectic between the anaesthetic and everyday aestheticisation. This dialectic is plausible if we take the anaesthetic to
denote the automatic switching off in the face of sensory excess, but
not as an account of arts turning against itself. It is questionable
whether Welschs sublime anaesthetic even occurs in the same arena
as aestheticisation, that is, the everyday, or whether it is only to be
experienced in the security of the art gallery or the modernist text.
Conceptual arts tendency of slipping into philosophical navel-gazing,
with a consequent Verharmlosung of its political edge, is particularly
problematic for Welschs terms, because the inoculation of aestheticisation is just what the anaesthetic is supposed to counter.
I want, however, to close on a more positive point regarding
Welschs ideas on aesthetics and the anaesthetic, by returning to his
usage of the term anaesthetic as denoting the latent and unthematised
preconditions to perception. The awareness of the sophisticated
processes of cognition which accompany perception inserts a
7
8
Cf. John Cages enigmatic comment: I have nothing to say and I am saying it
and that is poetry (Kostelanetz, John Cage, 1).
Of course, this attempt to relinquish the responsibility of representation gets
caught in a Catch22 situation, insofar as it appears as a meditation on
conventions of representation, a shadow of the order of representation which
abstract art cannot shake off. As Clarke remarks, paintings like Malevichs
suprematist pieces do not signify absolute blankness or emptiness [] they
really are paintings! (Clarke, 268).
255
complexity into this version of the anaesthetic, which I have called the
cognitive anaesthetic, anathematizing the idea of the sublime
anaesthetic as somehow sheerly imperceptible. As such, the cognitive
anaesthetic works in the opposite direction to the sublime anaesthetic.
Whereas in the sublime anaesthetic the anaesthetic is seen as the solution,
art which exposes latent preconditions conceives the anaesthetic as the
problem to be addressed. Similarly, whereas the sublime anaesthetic
suggests a mystifying function for art, by which I mean the function of
obstructing the cognitive processes of perception, the cognitive
anaesthetic suggests a demystifying function, whereby art exposes and
thematises the usually non-thematised elements of perception. That
said, this opposition could be more apparent than real: the obstruction
of perception could conceivably serve as a means to exposing the
latent and unseen. This is certainly how John Cage intends his silent
pieces to function, with silence bringing to the fore the normally
unheard ever present sounds that accompany life. But this raises the
question of precisely what phenomena such art aims to expose. In
spite of some references to art as Machtinszenierung and to feminist
art as an intervention in our psychosozialen Bilderhaushalt (Welsch,
sthetisches Denken, 36), the main object of Welschs breaking open
of cognitive patterns seems to be norms of artistic representation.
Clearly this is at some remove from the everyday effects of
aestheticisation, thereby forgoing an analysis of the unthematised
cultural or ideological assumptions and norms, beyond mere questions
of perception, that I have suggested underlie these phenomena. In
view of this it is particularly problematic that Welschs sublime
anaesthetic suggests a claim to truth without any concept of making
visible. Indeed, aside from the problem of art as distraction from real
possibilities for social change, the pragmatic sublime indicates that it
intends quite the opposite of making visible, namely preparation for
the invisible.
The question arises as to what is lost by annexing anaesthetics to
an aesthetics of defamiliarisation. The cognitive anaesthetic is after all
not conceived specifically with the problem of aestheticisation as
sensory excess in mind. But my point above is that the sublime
anaesthetic, as a meditation on issues of truth and representation, does
not convincingly do this either. The benefit of the cognitive
anaesthetic is that it might allow for a more ideologically capable
256
Jerome Carroll
description of how art exposes what is going on behind the veneer of

aestheticisation. Beyond the valorisation of a momentary withdrawal
and respite from aestheticisation, a more critical and durable exposure
of the process and implications of aestheticisation might be developed.
Works Cited
Adams, R. M. Nil: Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void during the Nineteenth
Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1966).
Baudrillard, J. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London, Sage
Publications, 1998).
Bowie, A. From Romanticism to Critical Theorie: The Philosophy of German
Literary Theory (London, Routledge, 1997).
Brger, P. Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, 1974).
Cage, J. Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, Connecticut,
Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
Clarke, T. J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New
Haven, Yale University Press, 2000).
Connolly, K. 639-year organ piece gets off to quiet start, The Guardian, 5 Sep 2001.
Featherstone, M. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London, Sage Publications,
1991).
Frank, M. Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare (Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, 1989).
Gadamer, H. G. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzge einer philosophischen
Hermeneutik (Tbingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1990).
Innes, C. Avant Garde Theatre 18921992 (London, Routledge, 1993).
Kerr, D. H. Aesthetic Policy, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2.1, (1978), 522.
Kostelanetz, R. (ed) John Cage (London, Allen Lane, 1971).
(ed) Conversing with Cage (New York, Limelight Editions, 1988).
Leach, N. The Anaesthetics of Architecture (Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1999).
Marcuse, H. Kultur und Gesellschaft I (Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, 1965).
Poole, S. Prick up your ears, The Guardian, 17 Nov. 2001. Review Section, 9.
Revill, D. The Roaring Silence John Cage: A Life (London, Bloomsbury, 1992).
Sassatelli, M. Aestheticised Life, An-aestheticised Art: The Case of Visual Artist
Mona Hatoumi, Arti Visive, Jun. 2000, 13 Feb 2001, http://www.unibo.it/
parol/files/sassatelli.htm.
Sircello, G. Towards a Critique of Contemporary Anaesthetics Philosophical
Exchange, 212 (1991), 3952.
Solomon, L. J. The Sounds of Silence: John Cage and 4'33" , Solomons Music
Theory & Composition Resources, 1998, 2 May 2001,
http://www.azstarnet.com/~solo/4min33se.htm.
257
Steegmuller, F. (ed and trans.) The Selected Letters of Gustav Flaubert (London,
Hamish Hamilton, 1954).
Strau, B. Der Aufstand gegen die sekundre Welt: Bemerkungen zu einer sthetik
der Anwesenheit (Mnchen, Carl Hanser Verlag, 1999).
Welsch, W. sthetisches Denken (Stuttgart, Reclam, 1990).
Grenzgnge der sthetik (Stuttgart, Reclam, 1996).
Vorwort. Welsch, W. and Pries, C. (Hg) sthetik im Widerstreit: Interventionen
zum Werk von Jean-Franois Lyotard. (Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 1991).
CARMEL FINNAN
The Challenges of Zrichs Autonomous

Youth Movement
The so-called youth disturbances, or, depending on ones point of

view, Jugendunruhe, Bewegung der Unzufriedenen or Jugendkravallen, in Switzerland between 1980 and 1982 were defined as
much by their international aspect as by their specifically Swiss
character. Similar to other major cities in neighbouring countries since
the 1960s, Switzerlands main urban centres also became focal points
for demonstrations against deteriorating living and working conditions
in developed capitalist societies and the growing alienation these
conditions produced. While this urban-based unrest had led to riotous
public demonstrations in adjacent countries on a regular basis, the
violent disturbances that spilled onto the streets of Zrich in the
summer of 1980 and quickly spread to other Swiss cities were
unprecedented by Swiss standards and sent waves of shock and
incredulity across the country.
Nieder mit dem Packeis!

Youth Protest in Zrich in the Early 1980s
The outrage these disturbances provoked throughout Switzerland was
itself symptomatic of the limitations and failure of the traditional
Swiss mode of responding to internal criticism and non-conformity.
From his chosen exile in Holland during the 1940s the Swiss writer
Ludwig Hohl examined the conventional Swiss method of
domesticating all potential conflict though its policy of voreilige
260
Carmel Finnan
Vershnung.1 According to Hohl this appeasement process actually

subdues all opposing viewpoints by quickly absorbing them into the
mainstream democratic process, allowing Switzerland to avoid any
serious encounter with dissent. In his 1970 essay Diskurs in der Enge
Paul Nizon also criticises the inability of Swiss society to engage with
nonconformity. According to Nizon, the Swiss manner of dealing with
any discordant discourse that emerges is to suppress it. This
specifically Swiss model of engaging with domestic conflict is also
reflected in the relative absence of an organised youth sub-culture in
Switzerland in the post-war period compared with its European
neighbours, perpetuating the stereotypical image of Swiss youth as
passive and over-conformist. The publication by the terminally ill
Fritz Zorn of his autobiography Mars in 1977 seemed to confirm this
image. According to Zorn the level of conformity demanded by Swiss
society and to which he had obediently adhered had been achieved by
totally repressing his anger and frustrations with Swiss social
convention. The human cost of creating and maintaining this
harmonious, social faade was being articulated in his adult life as a
malignant cancer.
However, on closer inspection the youth of Switzerland were not
so docile and content as such dominant images suggest. The first postwar youth demonstrations to challenge Swiss conventions date back to
1958/59.2 The shock caused by these youth protests led to the setting
up of a youth commission to examine youth issues in Switzerland in
the hope that the establishment of such a democratic structure would
neutralise any future dissent before it expressed itself in public protest.
Nonetheless, since 1958 young people have taken to the streets in
huge numbers almost every decade to confront the Swiss public with
their demands. When Swiss youth began to publicly articulate their
discontent in the late 1970s and early 1980s, their numerous critics
were quick to point out that Switzerland had weathered the worldwide economic crises of the 1970s much better than its neighbours,
and its youth had, therefore, nothing to complain about. Economically,
Switzerland did indeed seem to maintain its Sonderfall status in the
1
2
Hohl, 10. Hohl also termed this characteristic Swiss response to internal discord
eingebte Harmonisierung.
See in this context, Gros, Zeugin, Radeff, 28.
261
1980s, providing its youth with the benefits of a stable and prosperous
economy. Its youth, however, claimed that affluent Switzerland was
becoming an increasingly inflexible, consumer-oriented society, run
by the combined power of capitalism and state authority, both of
which increasingly controlled every aspect of life.3 Consequently, the
youth of Switzerland felt very much part of the no future generation
of their European contemporaries, a slogan popularised by the Punk
scene to encapsulate the desperation and cynicism of the younger
generation in the 1980s. In the case of the young people of
Switzerland, their future was blocked by the intransigence, alienating
power structures of a Packeis mentality that defined every aspect of
their lives. As many dissident voices claimed and numerous surveys
documented, many traditional features of modern Switzerland, such as
its high standard of living and low crime rate, actually hid very real
dissatisfaction and frustration beneath an idyllic veneer. The changing
behavioural patterns among young people clearly indicated their
growing discontent, e.g. low turnout at the polls, high rate of suicide,
high level of alcohol and cigarette consumption and the steady
increase in various forms of unconventional protests since the 1970s.
In fact, a survey carried out during the mid-1970s clearly
demonstrates that the level of protest potential among Swiss youth
was in fact well on a par with its European contemporaries.4 It would
seem that Fritz Zorns words before dying of cancer were about to be
transformed into action by the discontented youth of Switzerland in
the early 1980s: [I]ch habe noch nicht verloren, und, was das
Wichtigste ist, ich habe noch nicht kapituliert. Ich erklre mich als im
Zustand des totalen Krieges (Zorn, 225).
Similar to other youth movements across Europe in the early
1980s, Switzerlands youth directed their protests as much against the
dominant national culture as against the counter-culture movements of
3
The causes behind the eruption of protest in 1980 are summarised as an

elementarer Ausdruck des Unbehagens in einer technisierten und organisierten
Gesellschaft, die nicht allein vom Zwang der Staatsgewalt, sondern ebensosehr
vom Druck privater Gruppen und Machtzenren gelenkt und eingeengt wird.
Quoted in Lenzburg, 279.
Kriese, 180183. The results of a survey show that Switzerland was on a par
with Britain and Germany, ahead of Austria and behind the USA and the
Netherlands.
262
Carmel Finnan
their parents generation. The 1980s generation expressed its

separateness from its predecessors through the apolitical stance it
assumed and its open distrust and rejection of the left-wing ideology
that had informed the student protests of the late 1960s and early
1970s. In order to avoid repeating the failures of the 1968 and 1970s
revolts, particularly the compromises this generation made with the
authorities, the 1980s movements totally rejected any notion of
functioning as a long-term counter-culture movement that aspired to
reform existing norms. They established themselves primarily as anticulture movements, grounded in the concept of negating whatever
prevented them from realising their immediate aims. The apolitical
stance and lack of any ideologically-based theory that defined these
movements consequently contributed to their short-lived, discontinuous
and heterogeneous character.
As well as defining their different objectives, the 1980s anticulture movements also created their own distinctive protest style to
reflect their separateness from their revolutionary predecessors. The
chosen mode of documenting their difference and marginality was a
stylised form of provocation, so well personified in the international
Punk scene, an aggressive and cynical criticism of the culture
industry, which attracted young people of all classes. The main issues
that united these diverse movements throughout Europe related to
their vehement criticisms of contemporary urban living conditions,
ranging from the increasing mechanisation of working life to the
diminishing standard of affordable accommodation. In all cases the
protesters demanded immediate personal freedom, which they wanted
to realise in an independent, autonomous space. Such a space, they
claimed, could accommodate alternative life styles and living
arrangements in a society that was becoming more rigid and
technically controlled and one that clearly offered them no future.
A specifically Swiss feature of the growing tensions during the
late 1970s was that their protests were not grounded in economic
issues, such as unemployment or lack of career opportunities, as was
the case with their European neighbours. It was instead fuelled by
socio-cultural matters, which were in turn reflected in the background
of those who joined the protest. The most unifying factor of the
movement was age, not class. It consists mainly of young, welleducated people from diverse socio-economic classes, ranging in age
263
from late teens to mid twenties.5 Their protests focused mainly on the
growing accommodation crisis in the main cities, caused primarily by
increasing property speculation. For example, in Zrich the alternative
socio-cultural scene, which had settled in the inner urban districts
during the 1970s, was quickly being replaced by the expanding inner
city business and financial district. The smouldering anger of many
groups was finally transformed into direct confrontational action by
the continued preferential financial assistance afforded by the city of
Zrich to high art at the expense of various alternative cultural
projects.
Wir sind die Kulturleichen der Stadt:

Zrichs Autonomous Youth Movement
The disturbances that began on the streets of Zrich during the
summer of 1980 and lasted intermittently for two years surpassed all
other protests movements in post-war Switzerland both in the intensity
of the confrontations and in their far-reaching consequences. While
the citizens and civic authorities of Zrich were stunned by this
sudden eruption of anger and frustration by its youth and their
apparently intransigent demand for an Autonomes Jugendzentrum, the
struggle for such a centre already had a long history of successive
demands made by various groups and unfulfilled promises made by
the civic authorities. It began twelve years previously when protesting
Jimi Hendrix rock fans occupied the empty Globus commercial
building in Zrich, demanding that it be used as an Autonomous
Centre.6 The hard-line response of the city council polarised
negotiations, which eventually deteriorated into rioting scenes and
repressive police behaviour, since referred to as the Globuskravall.
During the 1970s numerous self-help groups and sub-culture
movements attempted to set up an autonomous centre that would
5
6
See Kriese (21217) for an overview of those who joined the movement.
For an overview of the struggle for an autonomous youth centre in Switzerland
since 1968 see Radeff, Gros, Zengin, 30.
264
Carmel Finnan
provide a much-needed independent meeting place and accommodate

alternative cultural events. All these attempts were thwarted by a lack
of resources or the unwillingness of the various municipal authorities
to support such projects. Even when the citizens of Zrich voted in
1977 to turn an unused factory building, Die Rote Fabrik, into a
culture centre, the lack of necessary funding for renovation work
meant that only very few rooms were available for alternative events.
In continued to function mainly as a storage room for citys theatre
and opera. In May 1980 the umbrella group composed of various
1970s counter-culture groups and more recently formed sub-culture
groups, formed Aktiongruppe Rote Fabrik (ARF) to further their
demand for the necessary funding to accommodate and maintain an
Autonomous Youth Centre.
When the city announced its intention in May 1980 to grant an
interest-free loan of 61 million Swiss Francs for renovation work to
the City Opera House, dependent of course on the outcome of a
census-based citizen decision, the ARF finally lost its patience.7 The
first phase of Zrichs youth disturbances began on 30 May 1980
when a group of about 200 demonstrators marched on a party being
held at the city Opera House to gain support for the forthcoming
referendum on the loan, chanting Wir sind die Kulturleichen dieser
Stadt. The protesters wished to confront the opera public with
alternative forms of art, such as rock music, street theatre, etc., which
were being continuously ignored by the Zrichs municipal
authorities. With the appearance of armed police, the peaceful protest
rapidly degenerated into egg throwing and finally into a physical
confrontation between protesters and police. The demonstrations,
termed the Opernhaus-Kravall, lasted the whole weekend and ended
after the authorities agreed to meet the protesters to discuss their
grievances. On the Sunday the ARF formulated its demands which
included the opening of the Rote Fabrik as an Autonomous Youth
Centre in the autumn of 1980 as well as the right to demonstrate
peacefully on the streets of Zrich without the threat of police
brutality.
For a breakdown on how the city of Zrich distributed its cultural grants to
various organisations in the city, see Hnny, 478.
265
The disturbances on this first weekend and the damage caused to

business property in Zrichs city centre caused outrage across
Switzerland. Nonetheless, the demonstrating youth of Switzerland
achieved in one month of open protest and rioting what years of
peaceful negotiation had failed to produce. On the 29 June 1980, an
unused building was made available to accommodate the opening of
an Autonomes Jugendzentrum (AJZ). Over the next few months the
centre demonstrated its ability to organise itself according to its own
democratic principles of personal freedom and self-government,
resisting the pressure to organise according to the hierarchical
structures that mirrored those of the Swiss state. During the months of
June and July the movement raised the money to renovate the centre,
setting up restaurants, a theatre, an independent radio station, and a
drug treatment centre, run by various working groups which were
successfully co-ordinated by the Vollversammlung.8
For the duration of the centres short existence its activities were
marked by a steady deterioration in the relationship between the
movement and its various detractors. Relations between the two sides
were characterised by violent clashes between protesters and police,
an increasingly aggressive and suspicious public climate that led to a
mounting defamation campaign in the Swiss media against the
movement and backlash responses from civic groups to the actions of
the militant splinter group. One of the more light-hearted
confrontations during the summer months and one that illustrates
the creative and provocative nature of the movements challenge
was the television show Telebhne on 15 July 1980, since referred
to as the infamous Mller-Show.9 In typical Swiss democratic fashion
the show set out to present a democratic, balanced discussion of recent
8
In the July issue of its own broadsheet Subito Nr Eins one of the movements
members summarises the symbolic importance the existence of the centre
represents: Mit dem inneren Freiraum meine ich das Gefhl, zu leben
berechtigt zu sein und all meine verschrobenen Ansichten und komischen
Gefhlen [] Ich kann wieder an mich glauben und mich selbst gern haben.
Nieder mit dem Packeis, die Isolation ist gebrochen. Der ussere Freiraum ist
fr mich das AJZ. Euses Hsli ist mir ebenso wichtig wie der eben genannte
innere Freiraum [] Zukunftsaussichten und Hoffnungen habe ich in Bezug
auf diesen Raum. Dass er wachsen mge. Quoted in Kriese, 41.
See Zri brnnt.
266
Carmel Finnan
events, particularly the use of teargas and rubber bullets by the police
to deter demonstrations. The hard-line views of the city authorities
were to be represented by the chief of police and Zrichs town
councillor, a more moderate view by the president of Zrichs Labour
Party, and the young couple Anna and Hans Mller would represent
the views of the movement. However, the Mllers did not provide
the expected balance to the discussion. Dressed in an exaggerated
conventional middle-class manner, they not only caricatured the dress
code of the opposition and those they represented, they also stole their
arguments by taking an extremely right-wing stance. For example,
they criticised the restraint shown by the police, demanding they
replace relatively safe teargas with lethal napalm gas and use bigger
and more destructive rubber bullets instead of the harmless ones they
had been using. The tactic worked at least on that evening. By
parodying the arguments of their critics, the Mllers turned a public
relations exercise in Swiss democracy into an entertaining TV-cabaret.
However, such a blatant undermining of Swiss democracy and the
trite exposure of middle-class social values as essentially fascist did
not amuse the Swiss public or the authorities. In the following weeks
the demands from conservative quarters to close the centre gathered
momentum, and eventually the city council willingly yielded to this
pressure. In the early hours of 4 September 1980 the police raided the
centre, claiming it was a haven for drug dealers and criminals. In fact
they found hardly any incriminating evidence in the raid and later had
to admit this.
The following months were marked by the demands of the
movement for the reopening of the centre and further violent clashes
with the police and the resulting damage to business properties in the
city centre. Once again the violent aspect of the movement achieved
the kind of attention and results that prolonged discussion in the past
had failed to do. Suddenly the worlds media focused their attention
on Zrich.10 The ensuing international debates on the grievances of the
movement questioned the prevalent image of Switzerland as a
peaceful, democratic country. Within Switzerland, media coverage of
the events fell victim to repressive censorship measures. The
10
Coverage in international media included Der Spiegel (22.12.1980) and Time

Magazine (30.3.1981).
267
movement responded by producing their own successful publications

and broadcasts.11 The centre was re-opened on 1 April 1981 and
remained in operation until the movement itself closed it down on 12
October 1981. It opened sporadically during the winter of 1981, but
was eventually razed to the ground in a police raid on 23 March 1982.
The End of the Movement

The destruction of the centre also marked the dramatic end to the
movement itself.12 The irony of its demise is that the centres biggest
successes, the use of violence and its innovative drugs policy, directly
contributed to its closure. Through the use of violent means of protest,
the centre managed to achieve its primary aim in a relatively short
space of time, i.e. the existence of an Autonomous Youth Centre.
Also, the brutality with which the police reacted to the demonstrators
gained sympathy and most importantly recognition for the aims of the
movement, initially at national level and eventually internationally.
Furthermore, the diversity of the many groups that constituted the
movement and their alternative organisational structure contributed in
no small way to its strengths in the early phase. However, when the
movement began to lose momentum and focus, the lack of internal
cohesion and increased inter-group confrontation enabled the small
group of militants to take control. These militants gradually focused
their escalating attacks on the movement itself, contributing to the
eventual internal disintegration of the centre.
The second, centre-related factor that led to the end of the
movement and, in its final stages, contributed to the escalating internal
violence, was the drug problem, particularly issues concerning the use
of heroin. As a result of the progressive and alternative approach to
drug addiction that the centres drug-care unit provided, the number of
11
12
Their own magazine Eisbrecher had sold 20,000 copies by its tenth and final
issue. It was replaced by a series of magazines until June 1991, including
Brchise, Damikaze, Hurrarie. See Kriese, 845.
For his detailed analysis of the demise of the centre, see Kriese, 12135.
268
Carmel Finnan
drug-related deaths in Zrich was drastically reduced (the numbers of

deaths rose dramatically after the centre was closed). However, its
policy of not exerting any controls on those using the centre attracted
more and more problem cases, such as alcoholics and petty criminals.
This huge influx of these diverse social outcasts quickly overstretched the financial resources of the centre and absorbed all its
other functions. The enormous escalation of the heroin problem during
1981 can be traced back to the divergent policies of the centre and the
police towards drugs. The provision of a supervised room at the
centre for fixing and dealing was introduced to restrict the use of
heroin in the centre to one designated space and to provide the addict
with a non-ghettoised space for fixing. It was intended that this fixer
room would de-stigmatise the habit, thereby assisting a recovery
programme for the addict. What actually happened was that the fixer
room eliminated the street pusher, allowing the big dealers to sell
directly to the addict which in turn reduced the price of heroin in
Zrich and increased its quality, subsequently attracting dealers and
addicts to the centre from all over Switzerland. The fact that the police
turned a blind eye to the conspicuous presence of major drug dealers
outside the centre, focusing their anti-drugs raids on minuscule hauls
inside the centre, only encouraged unrestricted heroine dealing in the
vicinity of the centre. By the time the centre was closed in March
1982 Zrich was rapidly becoming a major centre for heroin
trafficking in Europe.
However, while violence and drugs certainly played a major role
in the demise of the movement, other factors also contributed to its
eventual closure. After the initial demand of the movement for its own
autonomous centre had been granted in a surprisingly short time
the movement failed to organise effectively and formulate new
projects. Instead it got stuck on the issue of an amnesty for those
arrested and the repressive behaviour of its two identifiable enemies:
the police and city council. Over time the movement became
increasingly fixated on these two adversaries and the issue of
repression, restricting its scope to that of a purely reactive movement.
Also, even their most successful public events such as the Mller
Show, never developed beyond acts of creative provocation, negating
the arguments of the opposition without formulating their own
alternatives, thus failing to proceed from random acts of negation to
269
devising a sustained negative practice. Furthermore, the ambivalent

relationship that existed between the 1980s anti-culture movement and
their supporters and sympathisers in the 1970s alternative and subculture groups finally led to a complete break when the militants took
control. Even though the younger anti-culture groups were openly
distrustful of the older generation from the beginning and kept them at
a distance, the older counter-culture groups provided the necessary
support and grassroots infrastructure to mobilise various projects and
actions. When the movement lost the active support of the counterculture groups early in 1981 it also lost most of its strength. This split
also marked the beginning of the end of the centre and the movement.
While internal problems were certainly an important factor, a
major contributor to eventual demise of the movement was the
undemocratic behaviour of the citys municipal authorities and their
supporters. The mistakes made by the authorities during the first
weeks of the demonstrations characterised their reaction throughout
the two years of disturbances. They stubbornly refused to recognise
the representatives of the movement because of its alternative
organisational structure and identified the whole movement with a
small group of militants. This false perception defined their attitude
towards the movement as a whole and was responsible for the
numerous missed opportunities to end the violent protests peacefully
and democratically. Instead, by relying solely on the police and the
legal system as a means of engaging with the movement, the
uncompromising, rigid stance adopted by the municipal authorities
only contributed to the spiralling of violence and a radicalisation of
the movement. Their unyielding intent to close the centre at all costs
totally blinded them to the constructive and very useful functions it
provided, such as night shelters and progressive drug treatment,
Furthermore, it also contributed in no small way to dealing with the
serious heroin problem that developed in Zrich during the 1980s.
The many specifically Swiss aspects of these disturbances are
illustrated for example in the complete overreaction of the authorities
and citizens of Zrich and Switzerland to the violent behaviour of the
movement. In terms of the response to protesting youth within a
European context, one critic describes the exaggerated Swiss reaction
as follows: In der Schweiz wird ihr Protest nicht nur gewaltsam
unterdrckt, sondern trifft auch auf absolutes Unverstndnis seitens
270
Carmel Finnan
der Lokalbehrden, was gewisse Manifestanten veranlat, ihre Stadt mit

dem Packeis zu vergleichen (Gros, Zeugin and Radeff, 23). The violent
outbursts of the protesters were focused mainly on property. Not one
single life was lost and only a relatively small number of police
received minor injuries during these disturbances, despite the fact that
every male over the age of twenty in Switzerland has an army rifle
and ammunition at his disposal. Given the unprecedented brutality
used against them by the police, it seems remarkable that the rebelling
Swiss youth remained so peaceful. Even they showed a certain Swiss
restraint in stopping short of maligning Switzerlands most important
legend: its national army.
However, the behaviour of the authorities exposed the
hollowness of one of Switzerlands most enduring myths: its
unrivalled democratic system. Instead of seriously engaging with the
genuine issues raised by the peaceful demonstrators at the initial
stages of the protest, the authorities relied on a number of
undemocratic methods to silence the movement. These measures
included their refusal to acknowledge the genuine grievances raised
by the movement, claiming that the driving forces behind the protests
were non-Swiss Drahtzieher, whose sole aim was to attack
Switzerlands unique social system and economic prosperity. The
excessive brutality used against peaceful protestors revealed further
the failure of the political system to meet the challenges posed by the
movement. Furthermore, the refusal to recognise alternative
democratic models developed by the movement exposed the inability
and unwillingness of the renowned Swiss democracy to engage with a
system that could not be conveniently absorbed into their own
democratic system, thereby producing the traditional Swiss voreilige
Vershnung. The unwillingness of the authorities to engage in serious
negotiations with the movement highlighted their general disregard for
the issues raised by the youth movement. It also revealed the
limitations and complacency of Switzerlands census-based democracy and its reliance on non-democratic measures to protect itself,
measures which ultimately served the interests of a capitalist system
and not its citizens. The reasons for the failure of Zrichs
Autonomous Youth Movement mark, as Peter Bichsel claimed in
1982 (Bichsel, 8893), the end of Switzerlands innocence, or, as one
271
can say in hindsight, the beginning of the end of the perceived image
of Switzerland as an innocent democracy.
Despite the closure of the centre and the end of the movement,
the events surrounding its existence and its closure have left a lasting
impact on political and cultural issues in Switzerland. Numerous
attempts to establish an Autonomous Youth Centre in other cities in
Switzerland followed during the 1980s. The sudden and violent
eruption of youth issues on the streets of Switzerlands cities forced a
political change of tactic. At cantonal level the Commission for Youth
Issues set about examining the problems at the heart of the
disturbances in Zrich immediately. Since then youth issues are at
least taken seriously in the public political forum. Culturally, most
cities, cantons and businesses have come to realise the importance of
providing some form of resources for alternative cultural events,
ranging from financial assistance to infrastructure. The Rote Fabrik is
today a successful, well-resourced centre in Zrich. The changes in
political tactics and cultural politics were very much in evidence
during the disturbances surrounding the Autonomous Centre set up in
Wohlgroth in 1993. One of the primary reasons why there was no
escalation of violence comparable to that in 1980 was the willingness
of the authorities from the onset to engage in serious dialogue with
representatives of the centre as well as the existence of established
projects to support alternative cultural events.13 The appalling failure
by the Swiss authorities to control the hard drug problem in Zrich,
partly created by the repressive policies it used against alternative
culture, has also been recognised. In a referendum on 12 June 1999
Switzerland voted to introduce one of the most progressive herointreatment policies in Europe.14 One of the more fundamental changes
inaugurated by Zrichs youth movement of the early 1980s, and one
that has had lasting consequences for Switzerlands image inter13
14
See in this context Lenzburg, 279282.

The referendum, carried by a 54% Yes vote, introduced the use of heroin on
medical prescription as a legitimate form of drug therapy. The tolerant attitude
adopted by Swiss authorities towards soft drugs in recent years has led to a
huge increase in the native consumption and production of various soft drugs.
So much so, that on 8 September 2001 the Sddeutsche Zeitung queries the
rapidly changing image of Switzerland: Die brave Schweiz, eine vllig bekiffte
Nation?
272
Carmel Finnan
nationally, is that it proved that youth issues do not respect traditional

political borders. The momentum and intensity with which Zrichs
youth movement became part of a greater European protest wave
highlighted its international aspect and simultaneously undermined the
traditional isolationist role Switzerland had sought to preserve within
Europe. Since then internal and external events have repeatedly
exposed Switzerlands claim to be an Insel der Glckseligen as an
illusion.
Bibliography
Bichsel, P. Das Ende der Schweizer Unschuld, in Gruppe Olten (Hg), Die Zrcher
Unruhe 2. Analyse, Reportagen, Berichte, (Zrich, Orte-Verlag, 1983).
Gros, D., Zeugin, P., and Radeff, F. Jugendliche in der Schweiz. Wertvorstellungen
und Verhaltensweisen (Zrich, Pro Helvetia, 1991).
Hnny, R. Zrich, Anfang September (Frankfurt/aM., Suhrkamp, 1981).
Hohl, L. Die Notizen, oder von der Unvoreiligen Vershnung 19441954 (Frankfurt/aM.,
Suhrkamp, 1981).
Kriese, H. Die Zrcher Bewegung. Bilder, Interaktionen, Zusammenhnge (Frankfurt/aM.,
Campus 1984).
Lenzburg, S. (Hg) A Walk on the Wild Side. Jugendszenen der Schweiz von den 30er
Jahren bis heute (Zrich, Chronos, 1997).
Nizon, P. Diskurs in der Enge. Aufstze zur Schweizer Kunst (Bern, Kandelaber, 1970)
Zorn, F. Mars (Mnchen, Kindler 1977).
Zri brnnt. Das Buch zum Film (Zrich, Video Laden, 1981).
MATTHIAS UECKER
Aufrufe, Bekenntnisse, Analysen:

Zur Politisierung der westdeutschen Literatur
in den sechziger Jahren
Einleitung: Nonkonformismus und Gegenkultur

Da die westdeutsche Literatur der Adenauer-ra grundstzlich unpolitisch gewesen sei und den Problemen der Nachkriegsgesellschaft
keine Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt habe, kann man kaum behaupten. Zwar
entdeckte die Literaturkritik zu Beginn der sechziger Jahre auffllige
Lcken im Gesellschaftsbild der Literatur und bemngelte vor allem die
Aussparung der sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Aspekte der Industriegesellschaft (vgl. Trommler, 11), doch an oppositionellen Bekundungen
gegen die Politik der konservativen Regierung und die restaurativen
Tendenzen der bundesdeutschen Gesellschaft hatte es whrend der
fnfziger Jahre wahrlich nicht gemangelt.1
Tatschlich verstand ein Groteil der Autoren sich geradezu als
Fundamentalopposition gegen die Normalitt der Wirtschaftswundergesellschaft, die getreu dem Motto von Gnter Eich
Sand, nicht das l im Getriebe der Welt sein wollte (Eich, 88). Aus
der Sicht vieler Schriftsteller reprsentierte die Literatur eine Art
Gegenkultur, die sich den herrschenden Normen des Materialismus
und Opportunismus widersetzte und ihre Leser an grundlegende
moralische Werte erinnerte, die unterzugehen drohten. Der Literatur
an sich wurde ein subversives, Widerstand entfaltendes Potential
zugesprochen, das aber von der Kontaminierung mit praktischen
Zwecken freigehalten werden mute (vgl. Enzensberger, Einzelheiten
II, 11337). Die Position eines Hters von Wahrheit und Moral war
daher fast unlsbar verbunden mit einem Mitrauen gegenber jeder
1
Einen reprsentativen berblick gibt die Dokumentation von Wagenbach.
274
Matthias Uecker
Form von organisierter Politik und der Artikulation sozialer

Interessen, das der nonkonformistischen Gesellschaftskritik ein antipolitisches Flair verlieh, sie zugleich aber auch zu praktischer
Wirkungslosigkeit verurteilte. Opposition sollte sich in literarischer
und sthetischer Form uern und damit in deutlicher Distanz zum
politischen Diskurs. Die Romanfiguren, die den nonkonformistischen
Impuls verkrperten, waren denn auch regelmig isolierte, depressive
und von ihrer Umwelt unverstandene Einzelgnger, deren Protest sich auf
symbolische und hufig selbstzerstrerische Aktionen beschrnkte.
Diese Haltung provozierte freilich in den frhen sechziger Jahren
eine rasch um sich greifende literarische Selbstkritik, die in
Auseinandersetzung mit den gesellschaftlichen Realitten nach
wirkungsvollen Alternativen zum Nonkonformismus suchte. Whrend
sich schon aus demographischen Grnden das Ende der Adenauer-ra
abzeichnete und die konservativen Parteien begannen, sich ber die
Verteilung des Erbes zu zerstreiten, sah eine wachsende Anzahl von
Autoren die Chance gekommen, endlich Einflu auf die Entwicklung
zu gewinnen und den eigenen moralischen Protesten doch noch
Geltung zu verschaffen. Die Inkubationszeit des Studentenprotestes
(Trommler, 10) verlief parallel zu einer Umstrukturierung im
Selbstverstndnis und ffentlichen Auftreten eines Groteils der
westdeutschen Schriftsteller. Die vernderten Einstellungen und
Strategien dieser Autoren sollen in den folgenden berlegungen am
Beispiel einiger Publikationen aus der ersten Hlfte der sechziger
Jahre analysiert werden.
Auf der Suche nach Alternativen

Symptomatisch fr die Vernderungen im Selbstverstndnis der
bundesdeutschen Literaten ist die wachsende Bedeutung von aktuellen, zeitkritischen Stellungnahmen und Analysen des Gesellschaftszustandes, die in den frhen sechziger Jahren nicht nur als vereinzelte
Beitrge in diversen Feuilletons und Literaturzeitschriften erscheinen,
sondern bevorzugt in Anthologien, also in Buchform, als Reaktionen
Aufrufe, Bekenntnisse, Analysen
275
auf organisierte Rundfragen publiziert werden. Neben die literarischen

Aktivitten, die die ffentliche Rolle der Schriftsteller fundierten,
traten erstmals direkte und regelmige Interventionen in den
politischen Diskurs, die anfangs vor allem die Form von Aufrufen und
Bekenntnissen annahmen.
Die erste dieser Anthologien war der von Wolfgang Weyrauch
als List-Taschenbuch herausgegebene Band Ich lebe in der
Bundesrepublik mit Beitrgen von fnfzehn Autorinnen und Autoren.
Die Portrts der BRD, die in diesen Beitrgen skizziert werden,
knnen hier nicht im Detail nachgezeichnet werden es mu gengen,
summarisch festzuhalten, da mit groer Regelmigkeit Konformismus, Materialismus und Konsumorientierung, die Vergelichkeit gegenber der Vergangenheit und die Gefahr neuer Kriege und
Diktaturen in der nahen Zukunft als wesentliche Charakteristika der
westdeutschen Gesellschaft beschrieben werden. Interessanter ist in
unserem Zusammenhang, wie zumindest einzelne Autoren ihre eigene
Position und die der Literatur berhaupt in dieser Gesellschaft und
gegenber ihren Problemen definieren.
Weitgehende bereinstimmung besteht darber, da die Literatur in
der Wirtschaftswundergesellschaft der spten fnfziger und frhen
sechziger Jahre keinen zentralen Platz besetzt, sondern allenfalls der
Dekoration dient und nur fr eine kleine Minderheit noch von Bedeutung
ist. Die Mehrheit der Beitrge weist die Verantwortung fr diesen implizit
oder explizit beklagten Zustand einer Gesellschaft zu, die Angst vor der
Freiheit hat (Schallck, 105), sich nur frs Geldverdienen interessiert
(Beheim-Schwarzbach, 98) und ihre innere Leere (Richter, Zu spt?,
64) nicht durch geistige Programme, Ideen (Schallck, 105) stren
lassen will. Das ist im Prinzip die Position des Nonkonformismus, der die
Schriftsteller als Auenseiter und Strenfriede gegenber einer trgen,
bersttigten und geistlosen Gesellschaft ansieht, als Clowns und
Hofnarren, die auerhalb der Zeit stehen und zornig, aber in vollem
Bewutsein ihrer Wirkungslosigkeit an aufgegebenen Werten und
Idealen festhalten und mit trotzigem Stolz betonen, da sie keinem
Stammtisch angehre[n], keiner Partei (Schallck, 108).
In Frage gestellt wird diese Analyse in Weyrauchs Band von
zwei Autoren, die der Literatur und den Schriftstellern selbst
zumindest eine Mitverantwortung an der Situation zuschreiben: Auf
der einen Seite fhrt Joachim Gaitanides, ein ziemlich unbekannt
276
Matthias Uecker
gebliebener Autor zeitkritischer Schriften, die Ohnmacht unserer

Literatur darauf zurck, da sie eine undifferenzierte Pauschalverdammung der Gesellschaft vortrage und deren ansehnliches
Leistungskonto [...] hochmtig ignoriere (Gaitanides, 11 u. 13).
Die Literatur habe den Kontakt zur Gesellschaft verloren und
erhebe malose und unerfllbare Forderungen, die von der
Bevlkerung aus reiner Notwehr ignoriert wrden (Gaitanides, 17).
Eine Literatur, die Einflu ausben und wirken wolle, msse den
Hunger nach Leitbildern und Mastben befriedigen und von einer
Beunruhigungsliteratur zur Bindungsliteratur werden (Gaitanides,
202).
Unter deutlich anderen Vorzeichen vertritt im gleichen Band auch
Martin Walser die Auffassung, da die Schriftsteller selbst fr die
Ohnmacht der Literatur verantwortlich sind und sie trotz aller Klagen
ber ihre Bedeutungslosigkeit sogar genieen: Da wir ffentlich ohne
Wirkung sind, befreit ungeheuer. [...] Wir preisen uns, weil wir nicht
sind wie jene! Aber wir lassen alles geschehen (Walser, Skizze zu
einem Vorwurf, 110 u. 112). Gelegentliche Unterschriften unter
Protestresolutionen seien nichts weiter als Versuche, ein schlechtes
Gewissen zu besnftigen, damit die Autoren auch weiterhin beruhigt
ihre luxurise Auenseiterposition genieen und eine bedeutende
Figur machen knnten. In welche Verlegenheit brchten uns ein Staat,
eine Gesellschaft, die uns zur Mitarbeit einlden! (Walser, Skizze zu
einem Vorwurf, 114).
Diese Position in Weyrauchs Band noch die isolierte Stimme
eines der jngsten Beitrger wird in den folgenden Jahren zur
Grundlage einer Neubestimmung der gesellschaftlichen Rolle der
nonkonformistischen Literatur. Ihr Kernelement ist die Selbstkritik
der jngeren Autorengeneration, die die Wirkungslosigkeit der
nonkonformistischen Literatur zumindest partiell fr selbstverschuldet hlt und von den Schriftstellern verlangt, sich aus der
sicheren Beobachterposition herauszuwagen, um praktisch und
pragmatisch zu intervenieren. Wenn man auch vorerst keine
Einladungen zur Mitarbeit erwarten knne, so msse man zumindest
darauf hinarbeiten, die Voraussetzungen fr solche Mitarbeit herzustellen. Das erste Beispiel fr diese Anstrengung lieferte Walser nur
wenige Monate nach seinem Beitrag mit einer Anthologie, die er
pnktlich zum Wahlkampf im Herbst 1961 fr Rowohlts Taschen-
277
bcher zusammenstellte: Die Alternative oder Brauchen wir eine neue

Regierung?
Prsentiert wird der im August 1961 publizierte Band als
spontanes Resultat einer Zusammenkunft von Schriftstellern, denen
allein die Besorgnis ber den Bestand der Demokratie gemeinsam
sei (Klappentext in Walser, Die Alternative, 2). Aus dieser Sorge
heraus habe man sich verpflichtet gefhlt, ffentliche Antworten auf
eine Tagesfrage zu geben: Brauchen wir eine neue Regierung? Und
ohne weitere Verabredung seien die Autoren auf verschiedenen
Wegen und mit unterschiedlichem Temperament doch zur gleichen
Antwort auf diese Frage gekommen (Walser, Vorwort).
Die Versicherung, alle Autoren htten individuell und geradezu
spontan ihre Beitrge verfat, dient einerseits offensichtlich dem
Zweck, das lange etablierte Selbstbild der Intelligenz zu bekrftigen,
die Unabhngigkeit nur als organisationsfeindliche Individualitt
fassen konnte. Zugleich will man von vornherein den Verdacht
zerstreuen, das Buch sei von den Interessen einer organisierten
Gruppe oder gar einer Partei inspiriert. Tatschlich erweisen sich aber
bei der Durchsicht des Bandes Temperamente und Wege der
Autoren als ziemlich hnlich. Gemeinsam ist fast allen von ihnen nicht
nur, da sie die Titelfrage des Bandes zustimmend beantworten und
sich darber einig sind, wer diese neue Regierung stellen soll.
Vielleicht noch aufflliger ist die durchgehende Skepsis ber die
Fhigkeit der propagierten Alternativ-Regierung, ernsthafte Vernderungen durchzusetzen. Der SPD, deren Wahl von allen Autoren des
Bandes dringlich empfohlen wird, traut man nmlich allenfalls zu, als
kleineres bel das Schlimmste zu verhindern: Bei allen Skrupeln,
diversen Vorbehalten, Einwnden, Abstrichen, Gewissensbissen,
ngsten, bsen Vorausahnungen: SPD. Und wahrlich nicht begeistert.
Und sicher nicht imstande, Begeisterung zu wecken und
weiterzutragen (Rhmkorf, 49).
Die Distanzierungsgesten gegenber der SPD demonstrieren
nicht nur das anhaltende Bedrfnis der Autoren, ihre politische
Unabhngigkeit zu beweisen, sondern verweisen auf die grundlegenden Schwierigkeiten, die fast alle Beitrger mit dem Konzept
einer pragmatischen Wahlempfehlung und -entscheidung haben. Das
Godesberger Programm mit seiner Akzeptanz der zentralen Richtungsentscheidungen der Adenauer-Regierung fr ein kapitalistisches
278
Matthias Uecker
Gesellschaftssystem und die Wiederbewaffnung wird von den

Schriftstellern als opportunistisches Abrcken von einer prinzipiellen
Oppositionshaltung wahrgenommen. Das Lager der moralisch
legitimierten Gegenkultur scheint die SPD im Stich gelassen zu haben,
um in Zukunft nicht alles grundstzlich anders, sondern lediglich
besser zu machen. Dagegen bemhen sich die Schriftsteller, die
gegenkulturelle Oppositionshaltung der fnfziger Jahre bei
gleichzeitiger Empfehlung eines kleineren bels aufrecht zu
erhalten.2
Den Hintergrund fr diesen Kompromi bildet eine ausgesprochen alarmistische Perspektive auf die Zukunft. Ihre wenig
enthusiastischen Wahlempfehlungen fr die SPD geben die Autoren
nmlich in erster Linie deshalb ab, weil sie von einem erneuten
Wahlsieg der CDU/CSU unmittelbare Gefahren fr die Grundlagen
der ohnehin als instabil angesehenen westdeutschen Demokratie
befrchten. Totalitre Gruppierungen in den Regierungsparteien und
der mit ihnen verbndeten katholischen Kirche knnten durch
Verfassungsnderungen ihre Macht erweitern und durch die
Diffamierung kritischer Einwnde jede offene Diskussion abtten.
Vor allem an der Person des CSU-Politikers Franz-Josef Strau, des
vermeintlichen starken Mannes und voraussichtlichen Erben von
Kanzler Adenauer, machen sich solche ngste fest. Nicht wenige
Beitrge stellen deshalb die Alternative zwischen CDU und SPD als
grundstzliche Entscheidung um Leben und Tod dar:
Unser Stck Deutschland hat keine Alternative mehr, bis auf eine: total oder
nicht total, absolut oder nicht absolut, Endkampf oder nicht Endkampf, von der
Landkarte streichen und gestrichen werden oder nicht. Das ist die Wahl, die
einzige die uns bleibt, und vielleicht die letzte. (Enzensberger, Ich wnsche
nicht gefhrlich zu leben, 66)
Solche Zukunftsngste erklren wohl auch, woher pltzlich diese

Einmischung der Autoren kommt, dieser unverhohlene Umgang mit
Tagesfragen (Walser, Vorwort, 5). Wie ungewohnt solches Vorgehen
offenbar ist, deuten die Legitimations- und Rechtfertigungsgesten an,
die Martin Walsers Einleitung und einige andere Texte der Sammlung
2
Die Beziehungen der oppositionellen Autoren zur SPD dokumentiert

ausfhrlich Krueger.
279
prgen. Trotz der unverkennbaren Gemeinsamkeiten der Beitrge

betont der Herausgeber Unabhngigkeit und Individualitt aller
Autoren und distanziert sich vorsorglich von einzelnen Argumenten,
die jeder Beitrger allein zu verantworten habe. Zugleich wird darauf
hingewiesen, da intellektuelles Engagement in tagespolitischen
Fragen anderswo durchaus blich sei: Nur in Deutschland gelten
Intellektuelle immer noch als Auenseiter. In Frankreich, in Amerika
kennt man Gruppen unabhngiger Geister, die den Kurs der Nation
beratend mitbestimmen (Eggebrecht, 278).
Erneut also wird die Hoffnung auf eine einflureichere Rolle fr
die Schriftsteller und Intellektuellen artikuliert, die gesellschaftliche
Anerkennung als Gewissen der Nation (Klappentext in Walser, Die
Alternative, 2) und als unabhngige Ratgeber suchen. Um einem
solchen Status nherzukommen, haben sich die Beitrger nun dazu
durchgerungen, ihren Lesern einen simplen und einheitlichen
Ratschlag zur bevorstehenden Bundestagswahl zu geben. Sie verlassen damit die angestammte Position des prinzipiellen Auenseiters
und treten mit ihrer tagespolitischen Intervention in direkte
Konkurrenz zu den Hirtenbriefen der katholischen Bischfe und den
Leitartiklern der bundesdeutschen Presse. Allerdings schreiben sie nur
selten aus einer Position der Autoritt heraus, sondern ziehen es vor,
sich mit ihren Lesern auf eine Stufe zu stellen. Wir, das heit jeder
von uns, mu sich skeptisch und aufmerksam um den Wechsel der
Regierenden sorgen (Lenz, 132). Nicht als Dichter oder Literaten
schreiben sie, sondern als Brger.
Nur wenige Beitrger unternehmen den Versuch, eine solche
Position mit einer literarischen Schreibhaltung zu kombinieren, also
ihre spezifischen Fhigkeiten in die politische Stellungnahme
einzubringen. Der Groteil der Texte liest sich vielmehr wie die
Leitartikel, Kommentare und Leserbriefe der Tages- und Wochenzeitungen. Zwar fehle den Schriftstellern die bung in Sowohl-AlsAuch-Stzen (Walser, Vorwort, 5), doch die Fhigkeit zur
pragmatischen Abwgung begrenzter und allesamt wenig attraktiver
Handlungsmglichkeiten demonstrieren sie alle. Aus diesem Rahmen
fllt am deutlichsten der kurze Beitrag von Gnter Grass, der die
Wahlempfehlung fr die SPD mit einer selbstironischen
Infragestellung der Wirksamkeit solcher Texte kombiniert. Grass
mchte nmlich vor allem jene Whler erreichen, die das Rowohlt-
280
Matthias Uecker
Bndchen gar nicht kaufen werden, er mchte katholische Nonnen,

Ostvertriebene und sogar Konrad Adenauer zur Stimmabgabe fr die
SPD bewegen und kann realistisch nur einen Erfolg ausmachen:
Nicht, da ich sagen will, Oskar Matzerath whlt SPD, aber sein
Sohn und Halbbruder Kurt [...] hat mir versprochen, wieder fleiig zur
Kirche zu gehen und SPD zu whlen; ein Beweis mehr, wie
einflureich Schriftsteller sein knnen (Grass, Wer wird dieses
Bndchen kaufen?, 77).
Whrend das Ergebnis der Bundestagswahl solche Skepsis zu
sttzen scheint, knnten die ffentlichen Reaktionen auf die
Anthologie, der anscheinend weithin Signalwirkung zuerkannt wurde,
ein differenzierteres Urteil begrnden. Noch ber die Bundestagswahl
hinaus druckte der Rowohlt-Verlag den Band nach, der bis Februar
1962 eine Auflage von 75.000 Exemplaren erreichte. Was zunchst
ein isolierter, in aufflligen Farben gestalteter Sonderband der rororoTaschenbcher war, wurde im Nachhinein zum ersten Band der Reihe
rororo aktuell erklrt, dem in unregelmiger Folge hnliche
publizistische Interventionen ins bundesdeutsche Zeitgeschehen
folgten.3 Der Rowohlt-Verlag, der schon in den fnfziger Jahren in
seinem breit gefcherten Programm der kritischen Publizistik ein
ffentlichkeitswirksames Forum geboten hatte, wurde zur organisatorischen Plattform einer Bewegung, die die Literaten aus der nonkonformistischen Isolation heraus direkt ins Zentrum der aktuellen
politischen Debatten fhren wollte.
Allerdings demonstrierte der im Dezember 1961 verffentlichte
Folgeband der Reihe die Schwierigkeiten, die sich aus dem politischen
Engagement der Autoren ergeben konnten. Unmittelbar nach der
Verffentlichung des ersten Bandes war nmlich am 13. August 1961
die Berliner Mauer errichtet worden, und die vielfltigen
intellektuellen Reaktionen auf dieses Ereignis dokumentierte Hans
Werner Richter nun in dem Band Die Mauer oder Der 13. August.
Von dem Wahlkampf-Beitrag des Sommers unterscheidet diese
Sammlung sich nicht nur dadurch, da sie versucht, eine Vielzahl
3
Der erste offiziell unter dem Namen rororo aktuell firmierende Band erschien
im Februar 1962 (Tempel). In den Buchanzeigen am Ende dieses Bandes
werden die frher publizierten Sammlungen von Walser und Richter dann
ebenfalls der neuen Reihe zugeordnet; dort finden sich auch die Angaben zur
Auflagenhhe beider Bnde.
281
gegenstzlicher Positionen zu dokumentieren, statt zielgenau in das

Geschehen zu intervenieren. Symptomatisch ist vor allem ein Gefhl
der Ohnmacht und Verwirrung, das Hans Werner Richter am Ende des
Bandes zusammenfat: Ohnmacht und Unterordnung, Verbitterung
und Emprung, kleinliche Haarspalterei, Beschimpfungen,
Provokationen und Verdchtigungen spiegelten sich in fast allen
Texten der Sammlung. Als Ursache dieser Verwirrung identifiziert
Richter eine Ohnmacht, die aus der Unfhigkeit der Deutschen
resultiere, politisch zu denken und politisch zu handeln (Richter,
Nachwort, 181). Der Pragmatismus einer Entscheidung fr
realisierbare politische Optionen, der die Wahlempfehlung des
Sommers charakterisiert hatte, wurde angesichts des Mauerbaus
erneut durch moralische Grundsatzdebatten ersetzt. In der
dokumentierten Diskussion drckte diese Unfhigkeit zur Politik sich
vor allem darin aus, da aus der politischen Problematik der Mauer
binnen kurzem die abstrakte Frage nach dem Gewissen der
Schriftsteller geworden sei (Richter, Nachwort, 183).
Whrend Richters Diagnose auf die journalistische ffentlichkeit
der Bundesrepublik zielt, dokumentiert seine Textauswahl, da die
Schriftsteller selbst an dieser Verschiebung von praktischen auf
abstrakte Probleme beteiligt waren. Als Antwort auf die von Richter
als einzig sinnvolle Frage bezeichnete Aufgabenstellung Was
knnen wir tun? (Richter, Nachwort, 183) hatten nmlich Gnter
Grass und Wolfdietrich Schnurre wenige Tage nach dem Mauerbau
einen Offenen Brief an die Mitglieder des Deutschen Schriftstellerverbandes in der DDR geschickt, in dem sie diese aufforderten, das
Unrecht vom 13. August beim Namen zu nennen. Ausdrcklich
appellierten beide Autoren an ein spezifisches Berufsethos, das allen
Schriftstellern eine besondere Verantwortung auferlege:
Wer den Beruf des Schriftstellers whlt, mu zu Wort kommen, und sei es nur
durch ein lautes Verknden, er werde am Sprechen gehindert. [...] Wer
schweigt, wird schuldig. (Grass, Schnurre, 656)
Ich glaube, in Zeiten politischer Sprachverwirrung liegt die Pflicht zur
Wahrhaftigkeit strker auf ihm denn je. Ich glaube, einzig er hat die Kraft, der
zusammengeschlagenen Humanitt, und sei sie noch so verletzt, unter die
zitternden Arme zu greifen. (Schnurre, 119)
282
Matthias Uecker
Das Mittel des Offenen Briefes setzten kurz darauf auch Hans Werner
Richter in einem Appell an den sowjetischen Parteichef Chrustschow
und erstmals in dieser Form die Autoren der Gruppe 47 in einem
Brief an den UN-Generalsekretr ein, um die Weltffentlichkeit auf
die Berliner Vorgnge aufmerksam zu machen und Lsungen fr die
verfahrene Situation anzuregen.
Neben den wenig berraschenden Rechtfertigungen des Mauerbaus, mit denen eine Reihe der namentlich angesprochenen DDRAutoren auf den Brief von Grass und Schnurre antwortete,
provozierten die Briefe ein kontroverses, aber vorwiegend negatives
Echo in der westdeutschen Presse, wo man ihnen einerseits Naivitt
(Karsch, 105), Weltfremdheit (Jauch, 143) und Vorlautheit
(Sskind, 104), andererseits aber auch mangelndes moralisches
Engagement vorwarf (Ramseger, 1278). Dabei wird rasch deutlich,
da die Kritik nicht allein auf die Reaktionen auf den Mauerbau zielt,
sondern die grundstzliche politische Haltung der Nonkonformisten
meint. Emprte Zurckweisung ernten Grass und Schnurre vor allem
dafr, da sie den von den ostdeutschen Autoren geforderten Protest
vergleichen mit ihrer eigenen ffentlichen Kritik an der westdeutschen
Gesellschaft. Diese Parallelisierung zeige ebenso wie viele Beitrge
des Bandes Die Alternative, da die engagierten Autoren von der
Realitt keine Ahnung htten und von Zerrbildern und Illusionen
zehrten (Siedler, 112 u. 114). Whrend die Intellektuellen sich auf
franzsische und amerikanische Vorbilder berufen, hlt man ihnen in
der FAZ entgegen:
Sie machen sich mit ihren unbedarften Versuchen, die Weltachse zu schmieren,
innerhalb und auerhalb der deutschen Grenzen lcherlich. Etwas anderes wre
es, wenn der eine oder andere von ihnen bei Gelegenheit wieder einmal ein
schnes Buch schriebe. (Maetzke, 128)
Unbeabsichtigt bestrken solche Kommentare das Fazit, das Kurt

Hager zur gleichen Zeit in der DDR zieht: Die Position dieser
Schriftsteller ist doch auf die Dauer unhaltbar (Hager, 153). Zu einem
hnlichen Ergebnis kommt auch Gnther Rhle in seiner Analyse des
pltzlich so angestrengten Proze[sses], sich politisch zu engagieren. [...] Es hat
die Schriftsteller verdrossen, da die ffentlichkeit ber ihre Deklarationen
leichthndig und mit hochbrauigen Argumenten hinweggegangen ist. Die
283
Schriftsteller haben ihr dieses Verhalten leicht gemacht. [...] Wir sehen bei
ihnen unsere Republik nicht mit den Augen der Kritik, sondern mit denen des
Hasses betrachtet. (Rhle, 1701)
Die berwiegend jngeren Schriftsteller htten krampfhaft nach

Anlssen fr ihre Appelle gesucht, um aus solchen Publikationen
eine gesellschaftliche Autoritt zu gewinnen, die sich doch eigentlich
aus etablierter literarischer Autoritt ergeben mte. Die Einfalt
ihrer politischen Texte aber demonstriere, da man es allenfalls mit
literarischen Talenten zu tun hat, die sich ihre gesellschaftliche
Aufgabe erst ertasten (Rhle, 1723).
Einbung in den Pragmatismus

Whrend die bei Richter dokumentierten Antworten der Schriftsteller
auf solche Kritik vorwiegend beleidigte Abwehr und Unverstndnis
zum Ausdruck bringen, lt sich in den folgenden Jahren ein
Reflexions- und Lernproze beobachten, in dem die hier angesprochenen Intellektuellen sich bemhen, ihre gesellschaftliche
Aufgabe und vor allem die Bedingungen, unter denen sie Wirkungen
erzielen knnen, genauer zu definieren. Dabei wird vor allem der
Anspruch aufgegeben, aus der privilegierten Position des Gewissens
der Nation und Hters der Wahrheit zu schreiben. War der
moralische Appell an universal unterstellte Grundwerte in den frhen
sechziger Jahren Ausdruck eines fundamentalen, gegenkulturellen
Protestes gegen die politische Praxis, so adaptierten die Autoren Mitte
der sechziger Jahre den Gestus einer ideologiefreien, sachlichen
Kritik, die sich nicht mehr auf eine ohnehin nicht durchsetzbare
Autoritt der Intellektuellen berief, sondern auf die in der Praxis
geltenden Werte der Effizienz und Logik. Damit verbunden ist ein
leiserer Ton, der Verzicht auf Appelle und Aufrufe und eine
Differenzierung der uerungsformen.
Das beste Beispiel fr diese Vernderungen liefert der wieder
von Hans Werner Richter edierte und bei rororo aktuell publizierte
Band Pldoyer fr eine neue Regierung oder Keine Alternative, mit
284
Matthias Uecker
dem eine grere Gruppe von Schriftstellern 1965 erneut in den

Bundestagswahlkampf eingriff. Titel, Aufmachung und Autoren
scheinen die Sammlung auf den ersten Blick als unmittelbare
Fortsetzung des vier Jahre lteren Buchs zu identifizieren. Schon der
Blick ins Inhaltsverzeichnis signalisiert aber eine deutlich modifizierte
Konzeption, die Richter selbst als Ausdruck einer pragmatischeren
Haltung wertet. Alarmierte Warnungen vor dem Ende der Demokratie,
einer Wiederkehr des Faschismus oder dem Atomkrieg treten in den
Hintergrund. Ausdrcklich soll in dem Band kein Bekenntnis zu einer
Anschauung [...] oder zu einer Partei zum Ausdruck kommen,
sondern eine Anregung, die zur Meinungsbildung beitragen soll
(Richter, Die Alternative im Wechsel der Personen, 9). Um dem
Eindruck der Uniformitt zu begegnen, der von Die Alternative
ausging, hat der Herausgeber seinen Autoren offenbar statt einer
allgemeinen, von allen gleich zu beantwortenden Frage sehr
spezifische Arbeitsauftrge gestellt, so da die Beitrge sich
tatschlich gegenseitig ergnzen, statt sich blo zu wiederholen. Vor
allem aber charakterisiert viele Texte der Sammlung ein Gestus der
Recherche, Analyse und Infor-mationsvermittlung, hinter dem der
generelle Appell an den Leser zurcktritt.
Im Zentrum der Sammlung steht eine Gruppe von Beitrgen, in
denen mit Portrts fhrender Oppositionspolitiker fr eine Regierung
der Persnlichkeiten geworben wird. Aus Interviews und
biographischen Recherchen, teilweise unter Verwendung literarischer
Schreibweisen, entwickeln diese Texte eine Reihe unterschiedlicher
Persnlichkeitsprofile, in denen individuelle Haltungen, Sprechweisen
und biographische Lernprozesse im Vordergrund stehen gegenber
politischen Programmen. Begrndet wird diese Personalisierung des
Wahlkampfes damit, da Programme und Konzeptionen, die
traditionell die politische Auseinandersetzung bestimmt htten,
infolge der schnellen Entwicklung morgen schon veraltet sind, und
wer kann sich an solche Konzeptionen fr eine Politik von morgen
binden? (Richter, Die Alternative im Wechsel der Personen, 10).
Mit mehrjhriger Versptung scheinen die Autoren den Positionswechsel der SPD zur pragmatisch-postideologischen Partei
nachvollzogen zu haben. Wo sie vier Jahre frher noch Opportunismus und moralischen Ausverkauf witterten, sehen sie nun eine
erstrebenswerte Beweglichkeit und Geschmeidigkeit und propa-
285
gieren einen Pragmatismus, dem Wirkungen wichtiger sind als

moralische Reinheit. Beispielhaft sind die berlegungen, die Hubert
Fichte ber Carl Friedrich von Weizscker anstellt:
Ich glaube [...], da er gelegentlich die diplomatische Ausdrucksweise anwendet, um sich auch bei Diplomaten immer wieder Gehr zu verschaffen, da
er militaristische berlegungen anstellt, um das Militr von seinen eigenen
berlegungen berzeugen zu knnen und ist dies nicht umsichtiger gehandelt,
als wenn er sich zu einer Eindeutigkeit entschlsse, der man praktisch jede
Erwgung verweigert? (Fichte, 118)
Parallel zu den von Richter gesammelten Pldoyers westdeutscher

Schriftsteller erschien in der Rowohlt-Reihe im Juni 1965 ein zweiter,
direkt auf den Bundestagswahlkampf bezogener Band. Unter dem
Titel Politik ohne Vernunft oder Die Folgen sind absehbar
analysierten zehn junge Gesellschaftswissenschaftler Rethorik und
Praxis der christdemokratischen Regierung in der Auen-, Sozial-,
Bildungs- und Wirtschaftspolitik. Von den Beitrgen zu Richters Band
unterschieden diese Texte sich einerseits in ihrer Konzentration auf
die Kritik der bisherigen Regierungspraxis, aus der eine Wahlempfehlung fr die SPD allenfalls implizit abgeleitet werden kann.
Daneben beanspruchen die Texte mit ihrem umfangreichen Anmerkungsapparat ausdrcklich eine wissenschaftliche Autoritt und
prsentieren sich als Stellungnahmen von Experten fr die jeweiligen
Sachgebiete. Der bemerkenswerteste Beitrag des Bandes ist allerdings
das Vorwort von Walter Jens, einem Autor der selbst in den beiden
von Richter herausgegebenen Anthologien vertreten ist, hier aber
seine intellektuelle Autoritt nicht nur zur Werbung fr die Beitrge
der Sozialwissenschaftler einsetzt, sondern sogar zur Abwertung
der frheren Intellektuellen-Initiativen gegenber der neuesten
Publikation:
Der Wandel ist bezeichnend und sehr zu begren: an die Stelle von ebenso
ehrenhaften wie vagen [...] Schriftstellerbekenntnissen ist eine faktenreichnchterne, von jungen Wissenschaftlern, Doktoranden und Assistenten
getragene Analyse der Ehrhardschen Regierungspraxis getreten. Statt einem
allgemeinen Unbehagen ber Bonn und die Bonner Politik Ausdruck zu geben,
hlt man sich lieber an die Statistik, operiert mit Zahlen und Daten, lt Fakten
fr sich selber sprechen und vertraut, auf Belege erpicht, dem Zitat. (Jens, 7)
286
Matthias Uecker
Was knnte bezeichnender fr die kulturelle Situation der mittleren

sechziger Jahre sein als die Selbstkritik eines literarischen Intellektuellen an den eigenen ebenso ehrenhaften wie vagen Initiativen
der vergangenen Jahre und die Zurcksetzung von schriftstellerischen
Wahrheits- und Moralansprchen zugunsten wissenschaftlicher
Empirie? Was wre charakteristischer als die Hoffnung auf eine[n]
betrchtliche[n] Teil der Studentenschaft (Jens, 10), als deren
Stellvertreter die Beitrger der Anthologie apostrophiert werden?
Und was drckte den neu entstehenden kulturellen Konsens der
politisch engagierten Schriftsteller besser aus, als Jens Votum fr
Fakten, Zitate, Zahlen und Daten? Die schleichende Vernderung der
Kommunikationsstrategien der Autoren im Zuge der politischen
Auseinandersetzungen hat zur Aufgabe einer spezifisch literarischen,
moralisch begrndeten Autoritt und zur Unterordnung unter die
Diskurse von Politik und Sozialwisenschaften gefhrt, an die Stelle
des gegenkulturellen Protestes ist die Aneignung des herrschenden
Diskurses getreten. In ironischer Form hatte Martin Walser
solches Verhalten 1960 in seinem Roman Halbzeit als Mimikry
beschrieben eine Camouflage, in der ein Fremdling oder
Auenseiter sich dem Erscheinungsbild der Mehrheit anpat, um nicht
aufzufallen und zugleich seinen sozialen Status zu verbessern (Walser,
Halbzeit, 9).
Die Widersprche, die sich aus einer solchen Haltung ergeben,
kennzeichnen fast alle Interventionen und Aktionen in dieser Periode
und gewinnen darber hinaus auch Einflu auf die literarischen
Aktivitten vieler Autoren. Aufschlureich ist in diesem Zusammenhang Jrgen Beckers Feststellung, da Schreiben die Wirklichkeit
konkret nicht verndert (Becker, 124): In seinem Text, dem
fiktionalen Portrt eines mglichen Politikers, erklrt diese Einsicht
die Entscheidung des portrtierten Intellektuellen, Politiker zu
werden. Der Autor selbst aber, wie die meisten seiner Kollegen,
schliet sich diesem Schritt nicht an, sondern versucht weiterhin, mit
seinem Schreiben die Wirklichkeit zu kommentieren, um sie zu
verndern.
Was sich dabei als erstes vernderte, waren die Formen des
Schreibens: Die moralischen Bekenntnisse und Aufrufe frherer Jahre
wurden zunehmend durch sachlichere Analysen mit informativem
Gestus ersetzt. Daneben erprobten einzelne Autoren auch Mglich-
287
keiten des direkten Engagement. Vor allem Gnter Grass verbrachte

einen Groteil des Wahljahres 1965 damit, den Wahlkampf der SPD
durch eine Whlerinitiative zu begleiten und zu untersttzen.4 Als
prominentestes Aushngeschild der Sozial-demokratischen Whlerinitiative trat Grass bei ber fnfzig Wahlkampfveranstaltungen als
Redner auf und publizierte parallel dazu fnf seiner Reden als
Broschren. Interessanter als seine Argumente zur Wahl der SPD und
seine Zustandsbeschreibung der Bundesrepublik ist in unserem
Zusammenhang die Tatsache, da Grass einen nicht unerheblichen
Teil seiner Redezeit darauf verwendete, seine Rolle als Wahlkmpfer
zu erklren und zu legitimieren. Grass spricht ausdrcklich nicht von
einer Position moralischer Autoritt und privilegierter Einsicht aus,
sondern als jemand mit einem verdchtigen Beruf, dessen
Kompetenz und Legitimierung zweifelhaft sind: Sollte er nicht bei
seinen Geschichten bleiben und den Politikern die Politik wie den
Hhnern das Eierlegen und den Brgern das Steuerzahlen
berlassen? (Grass, ber das Selbstverstndliche, 16). Gegen die
Tradition, den Dichter als Auenseiter zu stilisieren, dessen Arbeit
jenseits aller praktischen Zwecke angesiedelt ist, beharrt Grass jedoch
auf der elementaren Brgerpflicht der Teilnahme am politischen
Proze:
Denn der Ort des Schriftsteller ist inmitten der Gesellschaft und nicht ber oder
abseits der Gesellschaft. Darum fort mit allem geistigen Hochmut und
dnkelhaften Elitegeist! [...] Genie wohnt nicht mehr im holden Wahnsinn,
sondern in unserer nchternen Konsumgesellschaft. Die Heiligen sind
Pragmatiker geworden. (Grass, ber das Selbstverstndliche, 445)
Haben solche Passagen ebenso wie die Berufung auf Traditionen und
anerkannte Vorbilder whrend des Wahlkampfs die Funktion, die
Interventionen eines Schriftstellers zu legitimieren, so dominiert im
Rckblick auf die erneut verlorenen Wahlen der Vorwurf an die
Berufskollegen und Feuilleton-Ritter (Grass, ber das Selbstverstndliche, 76), da sie seinem Vorbild nicht gefolgt seien, sondern es
sich weiterhin in der Rolle des kompromilosen Gewissens der
Nation bequem gemacht htten:
4
Vgl. auch die Dokumente zum Wahlkontor deutscher Schriftsteller in

Wagenbach (2301).
288
Matthias Uecker
Wer wollte erwarten, da ein Bauer im Westerwald die demokratischen
Grundrechte richtig wahrnimmt, wenn es Professoren, Wissenschaftlern und
Schriftstellern an der Einsicht gebricht, da niemals der unverbindliche und
ber den Parteien schwebende Protest an die Wohlanstndigkeit diesem bel
abhelfen kann? (Grass, ber das Selbstverstndliche, 81)
Der Proze der Politisierung, den Grass Wahlreden dokumentieren,

geht also notwendig mit einer Neubestimmung der Rolle und
Aufgaben des Schriftstellers einher. Als unpolitisch und elitr
abgelehnt wird nicht nur die traditionelle Positionsbestimmung des
Dichters als auergesellschaftliches Wesen, sondern auch die Figur
des nonkonformistischen Gesellschafts und Kulturkritikers, die
keinesfalls als Gewissen und moralische Instanz der Gesellschaft
fungiere, sondern allein die Aufgabe habe, den Autoren selbst ein
gutes Gewissen zu bescheren.5 Im Unterschied allerdings zur
gnzlichen Verdrngung literarischer Qualitten und Fhigkeiten, die
zur gleichen Zeit von vielen seiner Berufskollegen befrwortet wird,
hlt Grass weiterhin daran fest, da die politischen Interventionen des
Schriftstellers von jenen besonderen Fhigkeiten Gebrauch machen
mssen, die er allein in die ffentlichkeit einbringen knne: Zwar
wei er nicht genug ber Arbeitsrecht und Rentenreform, aber er
kennt Seiten der Gesellschaft, von denen sich die Statistik nichts
trumen lt. Er kann den einzelnen, das Individuum, aus der Masse
lsen und benennen. (Grass, ber das Selbstverstndliche, 16) Als
Erzhler notfalls sogar als Erzhler von Mrchen und Fabeln
bettigt sich der Wahlredner, um nicht nur seine besonderen Talente
nutzbar zu machen, sondern daneben auch Bedrfnisse und
Wirklichkeitsaspekte zu artikulieren, die ansonsten aus der rsonnierenden ffentlichkeit verdrngt und ins Reservat der Kunst
gesperrt werden.
Als unpolitisch, d.h. beim eigenen Interesse verharrend kritisiert Grass die
Ohne-Mich-Bewegung der fnfziger Jahre, die das gesellschaftliche
Komplement zum Nonkonformismus der Schriftsteller bildete (Grass, ber das
Selbstverstndliche, 111).
289
Dialektik der Radikalisierung

Grass vertritt eine Kompromiposition zwischen der gegenkulturellen
Haltung der fnfziger Jahre, die einer auf Effektivitt und Konsum
fixierten Gesellschaft die Subversivitt des scheinbar Zwecklosen
entgegenhielt, und dem wissenschaftsbegeisterten Pragmatismus eines
Teils der jngeren Autoren und Studenten, die die Literatur fr
wirkungslos und den Kanon der tradierten kulturellen Werte allenfalls
fr ein Mittel zur Aufrechterhaltung des Status quo hielten. Aus ihrer
Sicht wirkte die nonkonformistische Gegenkultur der fnfziger Jahre
als willkommenes Beruhigungsmittel, mit dessen Hilfe ernsthafte
politische und soziale Konflikte auf das Feld der Kultur und Moral
umgeleitet und damit letztlich entschrft worden waren. Hans Magnus
Enzensberger, der sich an den Wahlkampfaktionen des Jahres 1965
schon nicht mehr beteiligt hatte, brachte zwei Jahre spter die Kritik
an derartigen Strategien auf eine prgnante Formel:
Je weniger an reale gesellschaftliche Vernderung, an die Umwlzung von
Macht- und Besitzverhltnissen zu denken war, desto unentbehrlicher wurde
der westdeutschen Gesellschaft ein Alibi im berbau. [...] Die Literatur sollte
eintreten fr das, was in der Bundesrepublik nicht vorhanden war, ein genuin
politisches Leben. [...] Und je mehr die westdeutsche Gesellschaft sich
stabilisierte, desto dringender verlangte sie nach Gesellschaftskritik in der
Literatur. (Enzensberger, Palaver, 445)
Enzensbergers Kritik an der nonkonformistischen Gegenkultur ist

ebenso pauschalisierend wie im Detail irrefhrend, sie artikuliert aber
die Umrisse eines neuen gegenkulturellen Projekts, das nach der
Bildung der Groen Koalition im Winter 1966 vorbergehend als
besonders zukunftstrchtig erschien und fr lngere Zeit zumindest in
seinen Schwundformen einen Groteil der westdeutschen Gegenkultur
dominieren sollte. Den ehemaligen Mitstreitern in der Gruppe 47 und den
Rowohlt-Publikationen der frhen sechziger Jahre warf Enzensberger
Selbsttuschungen, theorieblinden Optimismus und Reformismus
vor, die 1966 in einem vollstndigen Bankrott der linksliberalen
Intelligenz resultiert htten. (Enzensberger, Palaver, 1516, 435).
Hatten seine Kollegen noch selbstgewi an ihre Fhigkeit geglaubt,
Gesellschaft und Individuen zutreffend darstellen zu knnen, so
290
Matthias Uecker
applaudierte Enzensberger den Lachsalven, mit denen neuerdings

die Studenten auf die Evangelien der Autoren reagierten (Enzensberger, Palaver, 44). Schriftstellern, die mebare Wirkungen
erzielen wollten, riet er, sich an der politischen Publizistik eines
Ludwig Brne oder einer Rosa Luxemburg zu orientieren und die
dokumentarischen Strategien Gnter Wallraffs zu studieren
(Enzensberger, Palaver, 53). Seine Zeitschrift Kursbuch, die in ihren
ersten Nummern noch auf ein produktives Spannungsverhltnis von
Literatur und Realien gesetzt hatte, verzichtete seit 1967 fast
vollstndig auf den Abdruck literarischer Texte und konzentrierte sich
statt dessen darauf, gesellschaftliche Verhltnisse in journalistischen
Dossiers zu dokumentieren. Vielleicht noch wichtiger war aber, da
das Kursbuch geradezu demonstrativ darauf verzichtete, literarische
Autoritt etwa durch den Einsatz berhmter Namen auszuspielen.
Die Zeitschrift wurde vielmehr in zunehmendem Mae zum Forum
jngerer, noch unbekannter Autoren, und selbst Enzensberger trat
hufiger als Materialsammler und Redakteur von Dossiers, denn als
Autor im eigenen Namen auf. Autoritt und Legitimitt sollten aus
deren Realittsgehalt einerseits, andererseits aus der Verbindung zur
organisierten Studentenbewegung entstehen.
Enzensbergers Interventionen signalisieren in mehrfacher Hinsicht
das Ende jener kurzen Inkubationsperiode, in der die Rowohlt-Kultur
als Plattform einer Politisierung der westdeutschen Schriftsteller
fungierte. Einerseits bekrftigt Enzensberger die Unterlegenheit der
Literaten gegenber Publizisten und Sozialwissenschaftlern auf dem Feld
wirksamer politischer Interventionen. Fehlen den Autoren zur ernsthaften
politischen Analyse die notwendigen Spezialkenntnisse, so wirken ihre
Bekenntnisse und Aufrufe gegenber den Dossiers, die im Zentrum
von Enzensbergers Kursbuch stehen, sinn- und wirkungslos. Erscheint
diese Position zunchst als die logische Konsequenz aus den
pragmatischen Bekenntnissen der frhen sechziger Jahre, so rckt
Enzensberger aber gleichzeitig von diesem gerade erst mehrheitsfhig
gewordenen Pragmatismus der Whlerinitiativen ab. Zwar wendet er
sich gegen die Rckkehr zu moralischen Argumentationen, doch
gegen die Mimikry an dominante Formen des politischen Diskurses
setzt er einen neuen Radikalismus, der seine Attraktivitt gleichermaen aus der Bereitschaft zum Tabubruch wie aus seiner
Anschliebarkeit an den Aktionismus der neuen Protestbewegungen
291
gewinnt. Und schlielich luten Enzensbergers publizistische Aktivitten auch das Ende der Sonderstellung ein, die der Rowohlt-Verlag in
den frhen sechziger Jahren fr die gesellschaftskritische Intelligenz
eingenommen hatte. Aus einer neuen Kombination von radikaler
Gesellschaftstheorie, dokumentarischer Literatur und politischer
Publizistik entsteht vielmehr eine zentrale Facette jener SuhrkampKultur, die im kommenden Jahrzehnt das gegenkulturelle Milieu der
BRD reprsentieren sollte.
Damit nehmen die Autoren-Initiativen der frhen sechziger Jahre
einen spezifischen Platz in der Transformation der westdeutschen
Gegenkultur vom Nonkonformismus zum antiautoritren Protest ein.
Aus dem Versuch, Vereinzelung und Isolation durch die bernahme
pragmatischer Argumente und Kommunikationsformen zu berwinden, resultiert schlielich der Anschlu an eine neue auerparlamentarische Gegenkultur, in der eben dieser Pragmatismus eine
widersprchliche Allianz mit radikaler Systemkritik eingeht.
Ermglicht wird dieser bergang einerseits durch die Formierung der
Studentenbewegung, an der zumindest ein Teil der Intellektuellen sich
nach der Bildung der Groen Koalition orientieren. Vielleicht noch
wichtiger aber ist eine ideologische Kontinuitt: die Abgrenzung vom
moralisch begrndeten Protest der fnfziger Jahre und das Mitrauen
der literarischen Intelligenz gegenber den eigenen, literarischen
Kommunikationsformen.
Zitierte Werk
Becker, J. Modell eines mglichen Politikers, in Richter (Hg), Die Mauer, 1215.
Beheim-Schwarzbach, M. Lieber Freund, in Weyrauch (Hg), Ich lebe in der
Bundesrepublik, 98100.
Eggebrecht, A., Soll die ra der Heuchelei andauern?, in Walser (Hg), Die
Alternative, 2535.
Eich, G. Fnfzehn Hrspiele (Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, 1975).
Enzensberger, H. M. Einzelheiten II (Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, 1964).
Ich wnsche nicht gefhrlich zu leben, in: Walser (Hg) Die Alternative, 616.
Palaver. Politische berlegungen (19671973) (Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp,
1974).
292
Matthias Uecker
Fichte, H. Gewitztheit oder moralischer Mut in Richter (Hg) Pldoyer fr eine neue
Regierung, 11220.
Gaitanides, J. Von der Ohnmacht unserer Literatur, in Weyrauch (Hg) Ich lebe in
der Bundesrepublik, 1021.
Grass, G. Schnurre, W. Offener Brief an die Mitglieder des Deutschen Schriftstellerverbandes in Ost-Berlin, in Richter (Hg) Die Mauer, 656.
Grass, G. Wer wir dieses Bndchen kaufen?, in Walser (Hg) Die Alternative, 7680.
ber das Selbstverstndliche. Politische Schriften (Mnchen, DTV, 1969).
Hager, K. Intelligenz und Arbeiter-und-Bauern-Macht, in Richter (Hg) Die Mauer,
14555.
Jauch, E. A. Bloch und Schnurre, in Richter (Hg) Die Mauer, 1435.
Jens, W. Vorwort, in Nedelmann, C, Schfer, G. (Hg) Politik ohne Vernunft, 711.
Karsch, W. Der 13. August und die deutschen Intellektuellen, in Richter (Hg) Die
Mauer, 1059.
Krueger, M. C. Authors and the Opposition: West German Writers and the Social
Democratic Party from 1945 to 1969 (Stuttgart, Akademischer Verlag HansDieter Heinz, 1982).
Lenz, S. Die Politik der Entmutigung, in Walser (Hg), Die Alternative, 1317.
Maetzke, E. O. berraschung fr Mongi Slim, in Richter (Hg), Die Mauer, 128.
Nedelmann, C. Schfer, G. (Hg) Politik ohne Vernunft oder Die Folgen sind
absehbar. Zehn streitbare Thesen (Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1965).
Ramseger, G. 300.000 Mark, in Richter (Hg), Die Mauer, 1268.
Richter, H. W. Die Alternative im Wechsel der Personen, in Richter (Hg.), Pldoyer
fr eine neue Regierung, 914.
(Hg), Die Mauer oder Der 13. August (Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1961).
Nachwort, in Richter (Hg) Die Mauer, 181184.
(Hg), Pldoyer fr eine neue Regierung oder Keine Alternative (Reinbek,
Rowohlt, 1965).
Zu spt?, in Weyrauch (Hg) Ich lebe in der Bundesrepublik, 606.
Rhle, G. Viele Briefe gingen kreuz und quer, in Richter (Hg) Die Mauer, 16873.
Rhmkorf, P. Passionseinheit, in Walser (Hg) Die Alternative, 4450.
Schallck, P. Zwlf Fragen, in Weyrauch (Hg) Ich lebe in der Bundesrepublik,
1019.
Schnurre, W. Von der Mitverantwortlichkeit des Schriftstellers, in Richter (Hg) Die
Mauer, 11619.
Siedler, W. J. Die Linke stirbt, doch sie ergibt sich nicht, in Richter (Hg) Die Mauer,
11015.
Sskind, W. E. [ohne Titel], in Richter (Hg) Die Mauer, 1045.
Tempel, G. Deutschland? Aber wo liegt es? Wiederbegegnung mit einem Vaterland
(Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1962).
Trommler, F. Die nachgeholte Resistance. Politik und Gruppenethos im historischen
Zusammenhang, in Fetscher, J. Lmmert, E. Schutte. J. (Hg) Die Gruppe 47 in
der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Wrzburg, Knigshausen & Neumann,
1991), 922.
Wagenbach, K. Stephan, W. Krger, M. (Hg) Vaterland, Muttersprache. Deutsche
Schriftsteller und ihr Staat von 1945 bis heute (Berlin, Wagenbach, 1979).
293
Walser, M. (Hg.) Die Alternative oder Brauchen wir eine neue Regierung? (Reinbek,
Rowohlt, 1961).
Halbzeit (Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, 1960).
Skizze zu einem Vorwurf, in Weyrauch, W. (Hg.), Ich lebe in der
Bundesrepublik, 11014.
Vorwort, in Walser, (Hg) Die Alternative, 56.
Weyrauch, W. (Hg) Ich lebe in der Bundesrepublik. Fnfzehn Deutsche ber
Deutschland (Mnchen, List, 1961).
INGO CORNILS
Writing the Revolution: the Literary

Representation of the German Student
Movement as Counter-Culture
1968, the period of global cultural revolution, came into focus once
more at the beginning of 2001. The German Foreign Secretary,
Joschka Fischer, openly declared his previous incarnation as a militant
Sponti, and gave the new Germany tantalising glimpses of an
idealistic world-view almost incomprehensible to anyone below the
age of forty. The conservative opposition, predictably, homed in on
the strange relationship between the political and the personal, which
Fischer and his comrade Daniel Cohn-Bendit had the audacity to
maintain still existed. The attack culminated in demands by the leader
of the Conservative Party, Angela Merkel, that the 68ers should once
and for all renounce their revolutionary past and swear allegiance to
the materialistic, opportunistic and expediency-driven present.
Predictably, too, the media uproar caused by the revelations
about the violent sixties gave us little insight into what exactly the
German Student Movement was about. The political, social and
cultural context in which todays pillars of society committed their
Jugendsnden remained open to dramatisation and imagination, but,
without any agreement in the media on what this past really was, this
dritte Vergangenheitsbewltigung petered out unsatisfactorily. Not
that we are short of accounts or documentary evidence of this countercultural movement: Flaschenposten und kein Ende des Endes is the
heartfelt title of one of dozens of books that have attempted to shed
light on the era, assess its significance, and, unsuccessfully so far, put
it to rest.
The literature that has reflected, romanticised and glorified the
German Student Movement has undoubtedly played a part in keeping
the experience (if not the ideas) of the revolt alive, yet, paradoxically,
Ingo Cornils
296
there has been no mention of it in the recent debate. It is almost as if

these texts had no impact outside academic discourse and literary
reviews. And yet, as I aim to show, it is exactly in the many literary
representations of the German Student Movement that we can find
answers to questions about the period that a purely historical or
sociological approach simply cannot yield: What was it like then?
What did people really feel? Why were they so angry that they
demonstrated so violently in the streets? Why were they so elated that
we can still feel the afterglow thirty-five years on? What was it about
1968 that it still fuels the public imagination?
The Impertinent Grasp of Historicisation

In his book 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zsur, Wolfgang Kraushaar
asks the question how we can actually approach the period without
distorting it. He suggests that the period has become so complex in
our collective memory that only the aesthetic sensibility of an artist
can make sense of it:
Vielleicht besitzt nur ein Schriftsteller oder Knstler die Freiheit, die notwendig
ist, seine Erinnerungen, in denen die Imagination offenbar lebendig geblieben
ist, vor dem immer aufdringlicher werdenden Zugriff der Historisierung zu
schtzen. (Kraushaar, 52; my emphasis)
From this historians point of view, the question of the narrators role
and stance is vital. Much depends on whether the narrator is able to
convey the events he describes in a convincing way,1 but this is
exactly the problem for the literary representation of the German
Student Movement: in the brief period between 1967 and 1969, we
1
Beim Thema 1968 wird, wie bei jedem anderen historischen Ereignis auch,
die Frage nach der Erzhlerrolle, ihrer Angemessenheit oder auch Unangemessenheit, aufgeworfen. Geschichte schreiben heit, ungeachtet aller legitimen
Kritik an der blo narrativ ausgerichteten Optik vieler Historiker, vor allem zu
erzhlen. Insofern besteht die vorentscheidende Frage darin, welche Rolle ein
Autor als Erzhler einnimmt und welche Qualitt ihr im Hinblick auf die
Erzhlkunst beigemessen werden kann (Kraushaar, 12).
Writing the Revolution
297
have a myriad of causes and events that vie for attention, determine
each other and are at the same time ephemeral or highly individual.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger noted that in such a situation remembering 1968 could only take on one form: that of a collage.
(Enzensberger, 6)
The impertinent grasp of historicisation is real and concrete. It
draws the lifeblood out of the movement, makes it, literally, a
Chiffre that may stand for everything and nothing. The body of texts
reflecting the German Student Movement attempts to counter this
danger, to keep alive what was important about the moment. It is part
of an ongoing memory project that has exercised German writers over
the last three decades, contributing to a cultural memory battling
against a relegation of the movement to the scrap heap of history.
Moreover, the texts depicting the German Student Movement are
part of an ongoing political discourse: the literary arm of the
movement can be interpreted as continuing the debate the students
started in seminars and on the streets thirty-five years ago. In a
relatively mild polemic, the German sociologist Jrgen Habermas
recently summed up the model of a society that he believes we are
moving towards, a move imposed on us by the forces of the global
economy. This society is determined by four elements: by the
anthropological image of man as a rationally acting entrepreneur who
exploits his own labour; by the social and moral image of a postegalitarian society that has accepted marginalisation and exclusion; by
the economic image of a democracy that reduces citizens to the status
of members of a market society, and redefines the state as a service
provider for clients and customers; and finally by the notion that there
is no better form of politics than one that does away with itself.
Apart from the specific issues of the day (e.g. the Vietnam war,
the emergency laws), these are the very developments that the
students were talking about, and that continue to be addressed in the
literary representation of the German Student Movement!
Ingo Cornils
298
Taking Stock
The family of texts that has grown up around the German Student
Movement covers three decades, and can boast some illustrious
names: Peter Schneider, Uwe Timm, F. C. Delius and many others
have used their aesthetic sensibility to show how the Movement
influenced our lives and altered our perceptions. All in all, there are
more than forty books that are set in these tumultuous times (see
below). Yet it isnt merely as a historical background that the events
and experiences of the Movement serve the Movement itself has
become the centre of literary effort, as a protagonist in its own right,
in reflection and fictionalisation.
Even though the German Student Movement only lasted for two
years, it holds a lifetime of magic moments for the individuals who
were part of it. It is portrayed as an era imbued with a unique hope and
a common counter-cultural agenda: the dream of what might be
possible if a whole generation were to refuse to accept traditions and
refuse to replicate their parents values. Holding individual experiences and ephemeral events together are a set of nexus points,
either formative events or collective experiences of the period. In no
particular order, we are likely to encounter many of the following in
the literary representations of the Movement:
the interrelation between the private and the political (evoked, for
example, in the play Eine Linke Geschichte by the Grips Theater,
and perhaps best explored in the figures of Viktor and Lena in
Schfers Ein Frhling irrer Hoffnung);
an alienating university experience (memorably described in
Timms Heier Sommer when his protagonist Ulrich Krause is
unable to produce his term paper on Hlderlin because of his
intimidating professor);
the feeling that democratic freedom is not a political reality in the
Federal Republic of the late 1960s (an almost generic point, but
made most emphatically in the books published by the
AutorenEdition, e.g. Fuchs Beringer und die lange Wut or
Geisslers Das Brot mit der Feile);
299
sexual experiences (in the context of the Movement die

natrlichste Sache der Welt and yet fraught with endless
difficulties because ideology and emotion dont seem to fit
together. These liberating experiences are treated with humour
by Darius in Die sieben Leben der Katharina Blasberg, whilst F.
C. Delius gives an excruciatingly honest account of his
protagonists frustrations in Amerikahaus und der Tanz um die
Frauen);
inability to communicate with one another (the fashion for
amateur psychoanalysis and the insatiable desire of the 68ers to
discuss everything without ever reaching an understanding
makes a regular appearance: a well-observed political debate can
be found in Kluges Neue Geschichten, while the personal angle
is expertly dissected in Schfers Ein Frhling irrer Hoffnung;
the experience of living together in Wohngemeinschaften
(portrayed with all attendant rituals, i.e. the washing-up rota and
the removal of internal doors, in Roland Langs Ein Hai in der
Suppe oder Das Glck des Philipp Ronge);
authoritarian parents (painfully explored in Plessens Mitteilung
an den Adel and Vespers Die Reise);
Germanys Nazi past and the students response (memorably
evoked in Schlinks Der Vorleser);
the grand coalition of CDU and SPD from 1966 to 1969 (the
background threat of a supposed police state is powerfully
drawn in Viebahns Das Haus Che oder Jahre des Aufruhrs);
the experience of the first demo and clashes with the police
(this collective experience is described in expressionist style in
Scholzs Rosenfest and, in closely observed detail and from
various viewpoints, in Schfers Ein Frhling irrer Hoffnung);
the experience of the unity of Denken, Handeln und Fhlen
(memorably evoked in its absence after the demise of the
Movement in Peter Schneiders Lenz);
the death of Benno Ohnesorg (this event normally changes the
course of personal lives of the protagonists, e.g. in Timms
Heier Sommer or Langs Ein Hai in der Suppe. In the case of
Scholzs Rosenfest, the event no longer follows historical facts
but is fitted according to the requirements of the fiction);
300
Ingo Cornils
the Vietnam Congress in February 68 (a central event that

symbolizes the international aspect of the German Student
Movement, it is usually woven into the narrative in some form
or other. In Schfers Ein Frhling irrer Hoffnung, two of his
protagonists become friends there and, as a by-product, allow us
a glimpse of Rudi Dutschke on the podium);
reference to contemporary music and its impact: Bob Dylan, The
Rolling Stones, The Doors (beautifully recreated in Offenbachs
Sonja. Eine Melancholie fr Fortgeschrittene, where the two
protagonists produce an eternal tape in the knowledge that
music of this intensity and integrity will never be made like this
again);
reference to hallucinogenic drugs and their impact (another
standard theme, countering the process of Bewutwerdung in
Timms Heier Sommer, followed to its disastrous conclusion in
Vespers Die Reise);
the attempted assassination of Rudi Dutschke (arguably the
central and most significant experience of the German Student
Movement, and therefore a standard in most narratives.) The
most laconic description of the impact can be found in Langs
Ein Hai in der Suppe;
the emergency laws debate (this complex political issue is
difficult to integrate into a narrative. It features in Langs Ein Hai
in der Suppe and provides the background for the actors strike at
the Munich Kammerspiele in Schfers Ein Frhling irrer
Hoffnung);
the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops (as
historical background/Erlebnishorizont, very much in the same
way that May 68 in France is mentioned as an inspiration to an
increasingly disillusioned German Movement);
the impact of Critical Theory, especially Herbert Marcuse
(evoked in Kluges Neue Geschichten and Rosenstrauchs Die
Grazie der Intellektuellen);
Springer and the Bild Zeitung (as a wider background present in
almost all narratives, the problem of manipulation is discussed in
Fuchs Beringer und die lange Wut, while the blockades of the
printing houses in Munich and Hamburg feature in both
301
Schrders Ein Frhling irrer Hoffnung and Uwe Timms Heier

Sommer);
Marxist ideology and attempts to make it fit with existing
socialism (this theme features prominently in Peter Schneiders
Lenz and Schimmangs Der schne Vogel Phnix).
The sheer breadth of the social impact of the Movement on German

literature can be illustrated by looking at the social background of
writers and that of their intended target groups. We have accounts
from the perspective of the aristocracy (Plessen), working class
(Geissler, Lang), academics (Jaeggi, Kinder), feminists (Buhmann),
poets (Fried and F.C. Delius), pupils (Sonner), professional and
experimental writers (Grass, Fichte, Chotjewitz), of course students
(Timm, Schimmang), gays and lesbians (Offenbach), the legal
profession (Schlink), and so on.
In terms of target groups, we have the average man in the street,
who, according to the programmatic statements of the authors in the
AutorenEdition, deserved an easy-to-read narrative providing him
with a realistic portrayal of the world he knew together with
suggestions on how to change it. The target group of authors like
Vesper, Zahl and Viebahn, on the other hand, is the scene, i.e. the
counter-culture in all its various guises from alternative lifestyle
proponents to dropouts. Offenbach and Buhmann clearly write for
women in the first instance, while readers of Jaeggi and Kinder will be
found in academic circles. With the more recent publications, the
targeted readership has opened up. While the 68ers as an age group
that may want to see itself reflected in literature may be the main
focus, other groups keen to find out about the era are implicitly invited
by authors like Timm, Henle, Blasberg or Scholz.
Various regional settings create verisimilitude and connect
seemingly ephemeral events into a whole Movement we have
narratives set in West Berlin (Peter Schneider, Schimmang, Zahl),
Hamburg (Timm), Mnchen (Sonner, Schfer), Karlsruhe (Lang),
Frankfurt (Kluge), and so on. A second aspect is that most
protagonists originally come from the cultural backwaters of the
Federal Republic and are only drawn to the centres of the revolt as it
hots up. Hence Schimmangs hero originally hails from Ostfriesland,
Timms hero visits his parents in Braunschweig before heading for
302
Ingo Cornils
Hamburg, and the Grips Theaters Eine linke Geschichte contains a

scene where the prodigal daughter, parka-clad lover in tow, visits her
parents in their petit-bourgois flat and confronts their out-moded
thinking and way of life. The message is that the Movement
permeated all of society, and was, contrary to individual experience, a
phenomenon that had an impact even where, according to the histories
of the Movement, nothing had changed.
In terms of stylistic variety, the literary representations of the
German Student Movement cover the whole range of modern
literature: from simple stories (Kluge, Grass) via diaries
(Brinkmann) and letters (Siekmann) to multiple points of view
(Schfer) and stream of consciousness (Viebahn); from realism (F. C.
Delius) to surrealism (Rosenstrauch); from party-political correctness
(Fuchs) to irreverent fun (Darius); from gently ironic satire (Henle) to
farce (Zahl) and cabaret (Grips Theater). We have texts written during
LSD trips (Vesper), and texts set in the future (Viebahn); we have the
traditional Bildungsroman (Timm, Lang), a travel novel (Peter
Schneider), a road movie script (Scholz) and a tragedy-cum-thriller
(Siekmann). We have elegies (Schimmang) and any number of love
stories. And there is no shortage of sex.
Interpretations
Critics have, as a rule, had little time for the literary representation of
the German Student Movement. Admittedly, it is a complex terrain,
particularly when political and literary interpretations intertwine. But,
given that the historical and sociological aspects of the Movement
have attracted many researchers in the last ten years, it is surprising
that there have not been any full-length studies of this family of texts,
as attempted for the corresponding French literature by Ingrid
Eichelberg in Germany and Margaret Atack in the UK. Atacks book
is of particular interest, focussing as it does on the importance of the
interplay of real and imaginary in the text(s) and the emphasis placed
upon the problematic of writing and interpretation (Atack, 2).
303
Obviously, the field is not completely empty. Keith Bullivant

includes the early texts in the Death of Literature debate. Andrew
Plowman discusses five books as autobiographical writing, and
Ingeborg Gerlach another five as an expression of New Subjectivity in
her study Abschied von der Revolte. We also have volumes on Peter
Schneider (edited by Colin Riordan) and Uwe Timm (edited by David
Basker), which contain valuable insights into their early books on the
Student Movement. But all these studies look at selections that
support the points their respective authors wish to make. Only Ralf
Schnell has attempted to interpret a wider range of texts. In his
Geschichte der deutschen Literatur nach 1945, he argues that these
thematically linked texts ought to be seen as ein Pldoyer fr die
Literatur als sthetisches Medium zur Verarbeitung gesellschaftlicher
Mangelerfahrung in einem sehr traditionellen Sinn (Schnell, 421).
His reading is largely psychological, namely, that the literary
representations of the German Student Movement are acts of
imaginary wish-fulfilment in the face of an unsatisfactory reality.
This sort of interpretation, under the label of romantic relapse, has
plagued the discussion of these texts since the 1970s. (See Ingo Cornils,
Romantic Relapse?) It is reflected in the neat labels critics have given
them over the years: Erfahrungsliteratur, Erinnerungsliteratur, Besinnungsliteratur, Veteranenprosa (Piwitt), Verstndigungstexte, literarische Verarbeitung der Studentenbewegung, literarisierte Revolte
(Schnell), Literatur des Abschieds von der Revolte (Gerlach), epische
Aufhebung der Studentenbewegung (Kiesel), and, most condescending,
Literatur zum Wohlfhlen.
The reason for the reluctance of many critics to seriously engage
with or look at the whole breadth of the literary representation of the
German Student Movement may be that the texts span so many styles
and issues. Furthermore, with texts ranging from the subversive to the
melancholy, from the traditional to the experimental, there seems to
be little chance of finding a common denominator.
In her study Abschied von der Revolte, Ingeborg Gerlach suggests
that we should distinguish two strands: the Literatur des Abschieds
von der Studentenbewegung and Politisierungsliteratur. Focusing
on the former, and using mainly texts from the 1970s, she interprets
the Abschied as a reluctant return to normality:
304
Ingo Cornils
Die Erfahrung, da nichts mehr war wie vorher, stellte sich erst allmhlich ein:
Da eine neue, kologisch orientierte Moderne eingesetzt hatte, da alte
Groprojekte durch kleine, berschaubare ersetzt wurden, da der private
Bereich einen gnzlich anderen Stellenwert gewann, breitet sich nur langsam in
den Kpfen gerade der traditionell fortschrittlich Gesinnten aus. (Gerlach, 13)
The resulting sense of loss necessarily leads to disillusionment and

apathy: der Rckzug des an der Hrte der Welt gescheiterten
Protagonisten endet im Zerbrechen des seines Zieles beraubten
einzelnen (Gerlach, 26). This begs the question as to what to make of
the other strand, which offers texts that convey a more optimistic
outlook. Particularly the books published in the AutorenEdition
(Fuchs, Geissler, Lang, Timm) assert that the German Student
Movement has led to a lasting politicisation of many of the 68
generation. Characteristically, the protagonists in these books
overcome their sense of loss and continue on the long march, often
join the DKP (German Communist Party) as the authors listed
themselves did, and find new hope in political co-operation between
intellectuals and workers. Critics have been particularly scathing and
dismissive of these texts, arguing that they improve history and
memory to such an extent that the result is a myth that has lost all
reference to reality.
It is interesting to note that the proponents of this type of
aesthetic reflection, particularly Schfer (one of the founders of the
Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt) and Timm (one of the founders
of the AutorenEdition), have not given up on their quests both
Schfer and Timm have published substantial new novels on the
German Student Movement in 2001. While Schfers book received
relatively little attention outside the traditional left-wing reading
groups, Timms novel Rot was very well received nationwide, was
feted at the Frankfurt Book Fair and may even have been instrumental
in bringing the history of the 68ers to a modern readership.
However, if the current sceptical view of the merits of the German
Student Movement prevails, these books will be seen as just another
proof of the anhaltende Wirklichkeitsverlust, of which critics accuse
68ers as a matter of course. Gerd Koenen, a prominent former
member of the Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschland, who now
denounces his radical past as narzisstische Selbstinszenierung,
305
believes we should have nothing but pity for treuherzige Historienmalereien: die Epope des roten Jahrzehnts lt sich [...] nur
aus einer Position der Anteil nehmenden Ironie noch erzhlen
(Koenen, 500).
Problems of Representation
In their recent book on representation in literature and history, Mary
Fulbrook and Martin Swales rightly point out that representation as a
concept was itself changed by the student unrest in the 60s, with the
post-war, modern approach of New Criticism yielding to a
dialectical approach. This means that our perception of the texts
discussed in this article is twice refracted: the process of copying the
extra-literary world, and making an aesthetic artefact from it, no
longer suffices. Instead, the novelists of the German Student
Movement approach representation by integrating the changing
interpretation of the events and our receding memories into their texts
(see my discussion of Timms Rot below). The question whether it is
therefore pointless to discuss whether a historical account is false or
not may have become irrelevant (compare Scholzs programmatic
statement in Rosenfest). Fulbrook and Swales argue, though, that even
without historical truth, such texts can still create meaning:
communication can lead to significant changes in perception, new insights and
understandings. It may not, in principle, be possible to know the past as it
really was, in all its lost entirety; but it is entirely possible to engage in
genuinely meaningful, intersubjective communication about what is really
significant in the past in the present and to do this without abandoning some
notion of at least good faith or commitment to honesty, if not, perhaps, a more
elusive, indefinable and absolute notion of historical truth. (Fulbrook/Swales,
16)
I would add that what is created is not only a representation but also a
re-invention: a re-invention of the past in order to make it
understandable, meaningful for the present and useful for the future.
In doing so, the literary representation of the German Student
306
Ingo Cornils
Movement display many similarities with the approach of the

Romantics, who looked back not to the classics but to the, as they saw
it, counter-cultural middle ages which represented a different kind of
social order and discourse. Like the Romantic Movement, the German
Student Movement had distinct phases, and it can be argued that the
literature representing it can be divided into phases as well, such as
revolutionary enthusiasm; exploration of new freedoms; resignation;
reflection; historicisation; mythologisation; and finally re-organisation
in new movements.
There is a certain irony in the fact that the very counter-cultural
act of the great refusal which freed the West German students from
their parents generation, with their authoritarian practices, taboos and
guilt, has led to a breaking of traditions, including the tradition to
maintain a continuity from one generation to the next. Conservative
writers like Joachim Fest or Dietrich Schwanitz believe that by cutting
the ties with the past the 68ers not only refused to communicate with
their parents generation, but left their own utopian dream marooned
on an island of time. Once the chain is broken, there is no need to
continue any tradition, be it even the tradition of a utopian-led
counter-cultural revolt. Hence, one could argue, the demise of the
Green party (which saw increasing numbers of obituaries in the
serious press after its decision to back the deployment of German
soldiers in Afghanistan in November 2001, see Schmidt), hence also
the rearguard action by ageing 68ers to demonstrate that they still
matter and have a message for the next generation, and hence, finally,
the continuing need to write about the Movement and its historical
project to create a moral and just society.
According to Cornelia Klinger, the impulse to hold on to the
elation of a revolutionary experience by romanticizing it need not be
such a bad thing. The sentimental look backward may be seen as
part of the experience of ever faster change, particularly in the context
of Marxist ideology which, as she reminds her readers, simultaneously
looks back and forward to an ideal state. Romanticizing the
Movement, our texts thus aim to create intimacy in a world perceived
to have ignored the students original message. The question for the
critic is to determine whether the union of literary form and political
content as an aesthetic whole actually works, and what it can achieve.
307
Function(s)
Twenty-five years ago, Hermann Peter Piwitt, himself an active
participant within the wider extra-parliamentary opposition of the late
1960s, asked the question: Was leisten Romanciers der Studentenbewegung, wenn sie sich damit begngen, den Veteranen von einst
das Gemeinsame, nmlich die vorentschiedene Realitt im Kopf, zu
kostmieren? (Piwitt, 37). The question is still valid today: what is
the motivation behind these novels, what do they hope to achieve?
What can these texts offer that we havent already heard, that we
arent already agreed on? What is the point of writing ever more
accounts?
I would argue that the increasing distance to the German Student
Movement obliges writers to re-create a sense of collectively
experienced past, a sense of shared identity that has been under attack
from the very start. Ten years after the revolt, perceptive former
activists had already realised that without remembrance, hard-won
advances are doomed to oblivion:
Da die Revolte vorbei sei, ist eine Zwecklge und zugleich real; verleugnet
lebt sie in lcherlichen Latzhosen totalitren Zuschnitts, obskuren Heilslehren,
Trdel, in schbigen Kneipen mit betubender Musik. Zwecklge: sie macht
uns zu Rckwrtsgewandten, die am Vergangenen festhalten wollten, vernichtet
fortwhrende Gltigkeit und akute Not eines modernen Freiheitskampfes, der
ohne ein wrdiges Gedchtnis nicht leben kann, schlielich macht sie blind
gegen die Schwchen und die Gre der weltweiten Rebellion vor zehn Jahren.
(Wolff/Windaus; my emphasis)
The fact that the impact and historical achievement of the German
Student Movement is still hotly debated in Germany2 indicates that
there is by no means a vorentschiedene Realitt for everyone, that
reality is created backwards by historians and writers to allow readers
to enter this world, to recognize themselves and their desires. This
2
For example at the Erlanger Poetenfest in September 2001, where Wolfgang

Kraushaar, Barbara Sichtermann, Leander Scholz and Uwe Timm discussed the
continuing relevance of 1968 with W. Martin Ldke, himself editor of two
volumes on the link between literature and the German Student Movement.
308
Ingo Cornils
process, which cultural theorists like Jan and Aleida Assmann and
Harald Welzer would situate halfway between communicative memory
and cultural memory, is multi-dimensional and highly complex. Whilst
the political merits and the impact of the Movement are still under
debate, while the media develops a shorthand language which is
employed when anniversaries and unexpected scandals require an
immediate response, whilst historians create and then explore vast
archives of the revolt and sociologists attempt to fit the Movement
into a general theory of counter-cultural social movements, only the
writers of the revolution seem to hold on to the essence of what the
Movement was really about.
Further complications arise, though, when one considers the fact
that these writers, if they were part of the Movement, may themselves
have axes to grind, or put forward their particular political viewpoint
and version of events. Curiously, those who were witnesses of the
time but held dissenting views have as much to say about the
Movement as its eulogizers. Even professional and much celebrated
writers like Gnter Grass can have a blind spot when it comes to the
68ers: his detached portrayals in rtlich betubt and Aus dem
Tagebuch einer Schnecke, and the devastating verdict in Mein
Jahrhundert, cannot detract from the fact that for him the Movement,
for better or worse, was the significant phenomenon of the era.
Finally, younger writers may be attracted to the topic simply because
the demand is there and an increasingly geriatric reading public with
spending power is only too happy to have its illusions upheld.3
However, with time passing, all these considerations have
become irrelevant bar one: the question as to whether the literary
representation has sufficient quality to allow the reader to enter that
world. It is here that recently published books have the advantage over
older accounts, which were literally written in anger. The books that
came out in 2001 still build on the experience of the confrontation
with the system, but they also rely on emphatic imagination and a
mellowing that allows the writer to question motives and look at
himself as part of the equation. The gulf of time creates a sense of
honesty and intimacy, which was perhaps lacking in earlier attempts.
3
The plethora of coffee-table picture books, novels, and stories about die kalte
Heimat Ostpreuen springs to mind.
309
The collage that emerges from a synoptic reading of the whole

family of texts, from the early angry and melancholic ones to the
recent ones, which dare to be honest and also laugh at themselves,
requires an aesthetic theory on the critics part that is capable of
seeing beyond the faithful representation of historical events. It needs
to explain why, despite the abject failure of the Movement, and the
tangible sense of loss, writers stubbornly continue to re-create and reinvent the Movement.
Its Not Dark Yet

Their motivation, in the end, is the enduring belief that their analysis
of the world was indeed the right one, that the long march they
embarked on isnt over yet, and that the dream they bought into is
still, against all odds, worth fighting for. But the initial impulse to
rescue the essence of the Movement through the ice age so that it
can be revived sometime in the future (an interpretation that W.
Martin Ldke and Ralf Schnell put forward in the 1970s and 1980s)
has been modified in recent years.
The vocal exponents of the 68ers were, and still are, portrayed
as ewige Rechthaber. This impression is reinforced in most literary
representations: they are characterized by their Gefhl, recht zu
haben (Lang, Ein Hai in der Suppe), they are die mit den festen
Meinungen (F. C. Delius, Amerikahaus und der Tanz um die Frauen).
Daniel Cohn-Bendit recently declared both triumphantly and
defensively: Wir werden die Welt verndern!
The 68ers claimed, and still claim, the interpretative high
ground, and insist that they have something that needs to be said and
understood. However, with representatives of their generation in
government (as a visible part of the dominant culture), after unification
and the collapse of communism, we have a constellation that has utterly
undermined the values, attitudes and message of their generation. Uwe
Timms protagonist in his latest novel accepts the charges of selfrighteousness laid at their feet:
310
Ingo Cornils
Es ist auch schwer, dagegen zu argumentieren, wenn man einmal eine
Gesellschaftsordnung zerlegen wollte, um eine neue, bessere wieder aufzubauen. Die bestehende Gesellschaft ist nicht die beste, die ihr entgegengesetzte
auch nicht, und die gute zuknftige hat sich nie beweisen mssen. (Timm,
Rot, 333)
The 68ers are getting old, their narratives are now pervaded by the
memory of dreams unfulfilled, of hope denied: Das kann doch nicht
alles sein! Any current events that smack of their golden age, for
example the anti-globalisation protests in Genoa, are eagerly
embraced as signs that their Maulwurfsarbeit has borne fruit, but the
voices supporting such notions are fewer and fewer. What matters to
the 68ers now, and this is born out by the recent publications, is to
be honest with themselves, to ensure that their legacy is not
completely forgotten, and to make contact with a new generation.
Following the old slogan Geschlagen gehen wir nach Haus, die Enkel
fechtens besser aus, recent novels about 1968 attempt to establish a
dialogue with the younger generation, to preserve the identity and the
dreams of a generation in a cultural memory project that in contrast
to the failed political project of a Red and Green coalition has a
chance of succeeding.
Judging from the tenacity with which the era has been revisited in
recent years, one could argue that the ultimate novel about 68 has
become the Holy Grail of German literature. If that is the case, we might
even be able to speak of this family of texts as a distinct genre. I believe
that Schfers Ein Frhling irrer Hoffnung and Timms Rot should enter
the shortlist for recognition as new representative novel of the
German Student Movement, taking over from the two contenders
from the 1970s, Peter Schneiders Lenz and Timms Heier Sommer.
Both Schfer and Timm have risen to the challenge, to describe not
only the experience, but also the utopian dream, without making it
sound trite. They present us with a powerful literary account of their
dreams, and what has become of them. They know they are beaten,
but, true to the words of their former leader Rudi Dutschke, they
believe that the struggle goes on.
While Schfer offers Zeitgeschichte in its own light, Timm
connects a bygone era with our present world. He confronts the reader
with the utopian dream of the German Student Movement and yet
311
allows for the fundamental shift in political consciousness, emotional

maturity, even cynicism,4 which was itself a by-product of the
Movement (or a reaction to its demise). Thus the obituary that his
protagonist weaves for his erstwhile comrade rehearses the utopian
dream in all its infinite desirability whilst anticipating that in our
current, fallen state, such a dream may cause nothing but derision:
es sollte anders sein, nicht nur etwas, hhere Lhne, niedrige Steuern, es sollte
ein anderes Leben sein, selbstbestimmt, frei, eigensinnig, erfahrungsreich, nicht
nur dem rechnenden kalkulierenden Verstand unterworfen, der Mut sich zu
ffnen, Stolz auf die Schwchen, auch auf das Leiden, das eigene, eine andere
Welt, keine laue, gleichgltige, nicht Leid und Glck nebeneinander dulden, die
Welt neu aufbauen, klein schlagen und neu aufbauen, alles prfen, nicht nur in
Diskussionen, nicht nur reden, sondern die Lust in der Tat. Diese Gesellschaft,
die auf einer Vernichtungslogik basiert, Vernichtung von Menschen, Tieren,
Ressourcen, durch eine andere, friedliche, gerechtere zu ersetzen. Woran liegt
es, da das alles so hohl klingt? Jetzt, heute? Warum lachen Sie? (Timm, Rot,
7980)
But Timm, free of the shackles of Realpolitik in the realm of the

imagination, goes beyond the fashionability or expediency of this
world-view. If the principles that the young 68ers fought for were
morally and politically valid, then one potential conclusion must be to
insist that these principles are still valid today. The point, then and
now, is not to interpret the world in different ways, but to change it:
Aber, liebe Trauergemeinde, knnte es sein, einmal ganz hypothetisch, also
knnte es sein, da einer von dem blutigen Rigorismus seiner Jugend im Alter,
und mit Mitte Fnfzig drfen wir von Alter reden, wieder erfat wird, sich an
die Strenge des Urteilens erinnert, sich der Unbedingtheit des einmal Erkannten
wieder verschreibt, keine Abschwchungen und kein bequemes EinerseitsAndererseits duldet, das jede zur Tat zwingende Entscheidung im vornhinein
zersetzt? Sentimental, sagen Sie. Vielleicht. (Timm, Rot, 379)
Kme es heute zur Revolution, die Leute wrden denken, es sei eine
Werbeveranstaltung (Timm, Rot, 310).
312
Ingo Cornils
A Selection of Literary Texts dealing with 68

(in chronological order)
Fichte, H. Die Palette (Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1968)
Chotjewitz, P. O. Die Insel. Erzhlungen auf dem Brenauge, (Reinbek, Rowohlt,
1968).
Grass, G. rtlich betubt (Berlin, 1969).
Brinkmann, R. D. Erkundungen fr die Przisierung des Gefhls fr einen Aufstand
(Tagebuch 1971; Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1987).
Grass, G. Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (Darmstadt, 1972).
Struck, K. Klassenliebe (Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, 1973).
Viebahn, F. Das Haus Che oder Jahre des Aufruhrs (Hamburg, Merlin, 1973).
Fuchs, G. Beringer und die lange Wut (Mnchen, AutorenEdition, 1973).
Schneider, Peter. Lenz. Eine Erzhlung (Berlin, Rotbuch, 1973).
Geissler, C. Das Brot mit der Feile (Mnchen, AutorenEdition, 1973).
Timm, U. Heier Sommer (Mnchen, AutorenEdition, 1974).
Lang, R. Ein Hai in der Suppe oder Das Glck des Philipp Ronge (Mnchen,
AutorenEdition, 1975).
Plessen, E. Mitteilung an den Adel (Zrich, Benziger, 1976).
Kinder, H. Der Schleiftrog (Zrich, Diogenes, 1977).
Vesper, B. Die Reise (Berlin, Mrz, 1977).
Kluge, A. Neue Geschichten, Hefte 118, Unheimlichkeit der Zeit (Frankfurt,
Suhrkamp, 1977).
Buhmann, I. Ich hab mir eine Geschichte geschrieben (Mnchen, Trikont, 1977).
Jaeggi, U. Brandeis (1978) (Hamburg, Rotbuch, Verlag, 1998).
Schimmang, J. Der schne Vogel Phnix. Erinnerungen eines Dreiigjhrigen
(Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, 1979).
Zahl, Peter-Paul. Die Glcklichen. Ein Schelmenroman (Berlin, Rotbuch, 1979).
Grips Theater Eine linke Geschichte (Textbuch) (Berlin, 1980).
Offenbach, J. Sonja. Eine Melancholie fr Fortgeschrittene (Frankfurt aM. Suhrkamp,
1980).
Fauser, J. Rohstoff (Frankfurt aM, Ullstein, 1984).
Zeller, M. Follens Erben. Eine deutsche Geschichte (Bad Homburg, Oberon, 1986).
Ortheil, H.-J. Schwerenter (Mnchen, Piper, 1987).
Nadolny, S. Selim oder Die Gabe der Rede (Mnchen, Piper, 1990).
Woelk, U. Rckspiel (Frankfurt aM, Fischer, 1993).
Schlink, B. Der Vorleser (Zrich, Diogenes, 1995).
Siekmann, A. Nchtlicher Abschied (Winsen, Hans Boldt, 1995).
Rosenstrauch, H. Die Grazie der Intellektuellen. Natascha und der Factor S.
(Mannheim, Persona, 1995).
Wahl, M. 1968. Ein Heimatroman (Graz, Styria, 1996).
Sonner, F.-M. Als die Beatles Rudi Dutschke erschossen (Mnchen, Kunstmann,
1996).
Darius, B. Die sieben Leben der Katharina Blasberg (Kln, K&W, 1997).
313
Delius, F. C. Amerikahaus und der Tanz um die Frauen (Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1997).
zdamar, E. S. Die Brcke vom Goldenen Horn (Kln, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998).
Henle, I. Lebensansichten eines alten APO-Katers (Mnster, Principal, 1998).
Grass, G. Mein Jahrhundert (Gttingen, Steidl, 1999).
Scholz, L. Rosenfest (Mnchen, Hanser, 2001).
Schfer, E. Ein Frhling irrer Hoffnung. Die Kinder des Sisyfos (Kln, Dittrich,
2001).
Timm, U. Rot (Kln, K&W, 2001).
Works Cited
Assmann, A. Erinnerungsrume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen
Gedchtnisses (Mnchen, Beck, 1999).
Assmann, J. Das kulturelle Gedchtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitt in
frhen Hochkulturen (Mnchen, Beck, 2000).
Atack, M. May 68 in French Fiction and Film. Rethinking Society, Rethinking
Representation (Oxford, OUP, 1999).
Basker, D. (ed) Uwe Timm (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1999).
Briegleb, K. 1968. Literatur in der antiautoritren Bewegung (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp,
1993).
Bullivant, K. Realism Today (Oxford, Berg, 1987).
Cornils, I. Romantic Relapse? The Literary Representation of the German Student
Movement, in C. Hall/D. Rock (eds), German Studies Towards the Millenium
(Bern, Peter Lang, 2000), 10723.
Eichelberg, I. Mai 68 in der Literatur. Die Suche nach menschlichem Glck in einer
besseren Gesellschaft (Marburg, Hitzeroth, 1987).
Enzensberger, H. M. Erinnerungen an einen Tumult Zu einem Tagebuch aus dem
Jahre 1968, Text und Kritik (March 1985), 68.
Fulbrook, M./Swales, M. (eds) Representing the German Nation. History and Identity
in Twentieth-Century Germany (Manchester, MUP, 2000).
Gerlach, I. Abschied von der Revolte. Studien zur deutschsprachigen Literatur der
siebziger Jahre (Wrzburg, K&N, 1994).
Habermas, J. Warum braucht Europa eine Verfassung?, in Die Zeit, 27/2001,
http://www.zeit.de/2001/27/Politik/200127_verfassung_lang.html
Klinger, C. Flucht, Trost, Revolte. Die Moderne und ihre sthetischen Gegenwelten
(Mnchen, Hanser, 1995).
Koenen, G. Das rote Jahrzehnt. Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution 19671977
(Kln, K&W, 2001).
Komfort-Hein, S. Flaschenposten und kein Ende des Endes. 1968: Kritische
Korrespondenzen um den Nullpunkt von Geschichte und Literatur (Freiburg im
Breisgau, Rombach, 2001).
314
Ingo Cornils
Kraushaar, W. 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zsur (Hamburg, Hamburger Edition,
2000).
Lwenthal, R. Der romantische Rckfall (Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1970).
Ldke, W. M. (Hg) Literatur und Studentenbewegung. Eine Zwischenbilanz
(Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1977).
Piwitt, H. P. Rckblick auf heie Tage. Die Studentenrevolte in der Literatur, in H.
C. Buch, (Hg), Literaturmagazin 4: Die Literatur nach dem Tod der Literatur.
Bilanz der Politisierung (Reinbeck, Rowohlt, 1975), 3546.
Plowman, A. The Radical Subject. Social Change and the Self in Recent German
Autobiography (Bern, Lang, 1998).
Riordan, C. (ed) Peter Schneider (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1995).
Schmidt, T. E. Abschied von Rot-Grn. Ein Nachruf, in Die Zeit, 48/2001,
http://www.zeit.de/2001/48/Kultur/200148_rotgruen.html
Schnell, R., Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur seit 1945 (Stuttgart, Metzler,
1993).
Welzer, H. (Hg) Das soziale Gedchtnis. Geschichte, Erinnerung, Tradierung
(Hamburg, Hamburger Edition, 2001).
Wolff, F./Windaus, E. Was ist von der Studentenbewegung noch briggeblieben?,
in: Frankfurter Rundschau, 22. Januar 1977.
JAMIE TRNKA
The West German Red Army Faction

and its Appropriation of Latin American
Urban Guerilla Struggles
The West German Red Army Faction emerged in the context of

international protest movements around 1968. While its members
were critical of the West German student movements, they shared
with them a common concern for the revolutionary texts and struggles
of the day, drawing heavily in their own theoretical production on
texts by the Black Panthers, Mao Zedong, and Latin American urban
guerilla groups. Their reliance on and citation of texts that lie at least
superficially outside of the West German context raises important
theoretical questions for students of political theory and cultural
studies alike, touching on ideologies of physicality, practices of
communication in political movements, and violence and the
discursive articulation of violence around other(ed) political subjects.
By tracing a theoretical shift around the 68 movement from a
political concern for Third World liberation struggles to the radical
identifications with the Third World performed by the RAF and other
armed groups in the seventies, it is possible to identify what Arlene
Teraoka has described as the Third World of German cultural
fantasies: not a geographical space or political reality, but a selfreferential German discourse in which Third World conceits are the
stuff of which post-war leftist identities are made (Adelson, 608).
Teraoka argues convincingly for the need to investigate how and why
particular discourses on the Third World are employed, the
imaginative uses they serve, the cultural and political needs they meet
(Teraoka, 5). The elaborate process through which Latin America and
other parts of the Third World are discursively made should be
understood in the context of discussions of the role of the (German)
intellectual in post-war political-cultural processes more generally,
316
Jamie Trnka
and in this respect it is useful to situate the RAF within larger

intellectual debates of the time which attempt to locate an
emancipatory German (and European) self (Adelson, 608) in the
imagined space of the Third World.
The development of this discursive making in the context of the
protest movements around 1968 in West Germany proceeds first
through the articulation of analogy between the political situation in
Third World countries and in the Federal Republic, and then on to
more affective identifications with Third World struggles and
revolutionary leaders. In what follows, I will trace this shift from
articulation to analogy to identification and appropriation of Third
World liberation struggles with an emphasis on Latin America
through specific examples taken from the later years of the student
popular movement, early armed groups such as the Tupamaros West
Berlin, and, finally, the Red Army Faction.
In his historical account of student protest movements in the US
and West Germany, Ingo Juchler has already pointed to the relative
lack of attention on the part of historians to the reception of Third
World liberation texts in the student popular movements in West
Germany especially texts produced in Latin America and in the
Black Power Movement in the US (Juchler, 19). This failure to attend
to theoretical production from the Third World within what is already
a relatively small body of literature on these movements is, on the one
hand, unsurprising: it may be read as symptomatic of larger,
institutional failures to incorporate Third World discourses into our
analyses of history, culture, and politics. On the other hand, it is
indeed surprising insofar as the movements begin and end with
reference to the Third World in so many ways: the December 1964
anti-Tschomb demonstration in Berlin is widely considered to be the
first large-scale event of the movement. (Tschomb became a
particularly controversial figure around 1961, as a suspect in the
murder of opposition leader Patrice Lumumba of the Mouvement
National Congolais and first Prime Minister of the Independent
Republic of Congo.) The dissolution of the Sozialistischer Deutscher
Studentenbund (and with it the movement leadership) in 1970 was, at
least in part, prompted by a series of intense internal debates sparked
by differing levels of identification with Third World struggles and
317
models for social change, as evidenced by protocols of SDS delegate

conferences as early as 1967 (see Juchler, 2428).
The shift from student popular to urban guerrilla movements
hinges on the mobilization of radical sectors of the movement around
identifications with the Third World.1 Different sets of identifications
are deployed to different ends within what is too often treated as a
more or less monolithic student protest movement that moves
seamlessly into violent terrorism, masking the tensions within and
between the movement and the various armed groups active in West
Germany around this time. In the context of this series of
developments, I will argue that the failure of the RAF and other urban
guerrilla groups to engage with the full complexity of their
identifications with Latin American groups is not an isolated
phenomenon so much as it is an extreme case. The consequences of
this failure are substantial: material, political struggles in the Third
World are subordinated to the discursive construction of a Third
World space of resistance in which the German revolutionary subject
is central to the struggles successful resolution. While such
identifications with can be traced throughout the Third World
Movement in Germany, from the 1950s concern with the Korean war
and Algeria at least through the 1980s solidarity with Nicaragua and
El Salvador;2 what emerges as distinct in the case of West German
urban guerrilla groups is a radical physical identification in struggle
that supersedes moral or political identifications. This ideology of
physicality shaped rhetorical and communicative strategies, and
privileged an analysis of the social-symbolic dimensions of material
violence over the implications of violence as such.
From the beginning of the West German student movement,
Latin America played a particularly important role in theoretical and
symbolic terms. The significance of the Cuban revolution and of US
1
The concern for specifically Latin American figures and organizations in this
mobilization is by no means self-evident; much research has yet to be done as
to why Latin America figures so prominently in the radical student movement
and in the Third World Movement in Germany more generally. Unfortunately, I
am not able to address the widespread East German concern with Latin
America here.
For a general history of the Third World Movement in West Germany, see
Balsen and Rssel.
318
Jamie Trnka
foreign policy toward Cuba for the formation of a student New Left
can hardly be overstated, particularly given the tendency to focus on
protests against US activity in Vietnam to the exclusion of other
international catalysts in the movement. Assigned utopian status in
segments of the student movement, Cuba served as a space for the
imagination of radical social change, shifting the focus of revolutionary
activity to the creation of subjective conditions for revolution and the
creation of Ches new man as revolutionary agent. As Juchler puts it:
[D]ie junge Revolution in dem Drittenweltland Kuba [diente] den westlichen
Studenten wie Intellektuellen dazu, ihre eigenen gesellschaftspolitischen
Vorstellungen und Wnsche auf das fremde, von der eigenen Lebens- und
Erfahrungswelt weit entfernte Land zu projizieren (Juchler 46; see also 203,
205).3
The rejection of the dominant social orders in both the socialist East
and capitalist West in favor of the Cuban model and a Third World,
anti-imperialist perspective shaped much of the theoretical and
practical development that was to follow (see Juchler, 79).
Even those committees established in solidarity with groups
outside Latin America remained connected to it in key ways. Press
statements released at the SDS-organized Vietnam conference in
Frankfurt in May 1966 suggested that Vietnam could serve as an
example for Latin American and other Third World struggles. Many
of West Germanys Black Panther solidarity committees also actively
discussed Latin American texts and politics, influenced by the
Panthers own strong connections to Cuba. As a focal point of
internationalism and host to a series of significant international
cultural and political events, Cuba was an important locus of the West
German Lefts interest in Latin America.4 With German translations
3
Susan Buck-Morss recent work interrogating the relationship of the Haitian

revolution and Hegels philosophy does well to point out how long a trend such
selective dis- and relocations of Latin American experiences and ideas may in
fact be in German intellectual history.
The most notable of these were the 1968 Havana Cultural Conference, the 1966
Tricontinental Conference (organized in the interest of providing a forum in
which to address some of the common concerns of leaders from Africa, Asia,
and Latin America), and the Latin American Solidarity Organization (OLAS)
conference. The 1967 OLAS conference motto was adopted by the SDS-
319
of Che Guevaras writings, reception of his work and interest in Cuba

increased still further in SDS and other leftist circles.5 Following the
death of student protester Benno Ohnesorg in June 1967, the
increasingly radical anti-authoritarian segment of the SDS looked to
Guevaras texts with the intention of putting his ideas into practice in
West Germany. The organizational model in question, Guevara and
Debrays focus strategy, advocated the development of small,
revolutionary cells in the rural areas of underdeveloped countries in
the Americas. These cells would be capable of defeating institutional
military forces with the support of the people. Further, the cells would
develop revolutionary agents and cultivate the subjective conditions
for revolution as catalysts in the revolutionary struggle and, later, in
the formation of the new society.6 It was the Brazilian leader Carlos
Marighellas adaptation of the focus strategy to the urban centers of
Latin America that later served as a model for West German armed
groups.7
5
6
organized International Vietnam Conference of the following year: Die Pflicht

jedes Revolutionrs ist es, die Revolution zu machen. As Juchler points out,
the alliance of international movements represented at the Tricontinental
conference and in particular the OLAS strengthened still further the already im
Verlauf des Jahres 1967 verstrkt vollzogene Identifikation mit den Kmpfen
der Befreiungsbewegungen in der Dritten Welt. In particular, die proklamierte
Allianz der Guerrillabewegungen Lateinamerikas und der durch [Stokely]
Carmichael vertretenen militanten Afro-Amerikaner auf der OLAS-Konferenz,
erweckte bei den radikalisierten Studenten den Eindruck einer sich
formierenden neuer Internationale der Dritten Welt (Juchler, 392).
In August 1966 it was the SDS publication Fazit that first published German
translations of Ches Socialism and the New Man in Cuba and Guerrilla
Warfare: A Method.
See Debray. The educative/formative work of the cells was theorized in detail
by Guevara in a number of different texts, most importantly Socialism and the
New Man in Cuba, which seeks to counter the notion that socialism destroys
the individual in favor of the social by outlining the actualization of individual
potential in service of society. Following Guevaras death in Bolivia in October
1967 during an attempt to put the rural guerilla strategy into practice, Carlos
Marighella developed the urban guerilla strategy, adapting the organizational
principles of Guevara and Debray to the urban centers of Latin America and, in
1968, launching an urban guerilla organization in Brazil.
Dutschke and Krahl pick up this language explicitly as early as 1967. One
example: Die Propaganda der Schsse (Che) in der Dritten Welt mu
durch die Propaganda der Tat in den Metropolen vervollstndigt werden,
welche eine Urbanisierung ruraler Guerilla-Ttigkeit geschichtlich mglich
320
Jamie Trnka
Increasingly, movement leaders like Rudi Dutschke emphasized

the importance of sinnliche Erfahrung8 of revolutionary agitation in
the metropoles. This experience was contrasted to what they regarded
as theoretical socialisms without significant practical elements. The
concept of armed propaganda so central to Latin American models
provided one possible means of such an active, sensual experience of
revolutionary activity, and was discussed at length within the SDS.
The shift from a theoretical linking of the Third World and the
metropoles in political and economic terms to an identification with
the Third World and Third World figures themselves proceeds
through this perceived need for sensual experience and fetishization
of physical bodies engaged in struggle.
Terms of embodiment are prominent in attempts to relate
struggles in Latin America to the experiences of students in the West.
Student leader Hans-Jrgen Krahls position provides a concise
example: Der Kampf der Guerilleros dort lehrt die revoltierenden
Studenten hier eine politische Moral der Kompromilosigkeit, deren
Verkrperung nicht zuletzt Che Guevara darstellte, (Krahl, in Juchler,
273). Embodied political ideals serve as a vehicle for the simplification of
theoretical models advanced within the movement even as they
complicate the question of identification; the difference is that of
positioning oneself in solidarity with urban guerrillas and the
insistence on being urban guerrilla leaders, aspiring to re-center the
revolutionary struggle in the metropoles. This desire to identify with
oppressed groups is in keeping with larger post-war German
discourses explored in the work of critics like Sieg, Teraoka, and
Zantop. Cultural memories of fascism worked in tandem with an
increasing sense of internationalism to move the student-popular
movement to question West German complicity in oppression of
Other peoples in an attempt to repudiate their own sense of guilt and
macht. Der stdtische Guerrillero ist der Organisator schlechthinniger

Irregularitt als Dekonstruktion des Systems der repressiven Institutionen
(cited in Juchler, 242).
This phrase occurs in Dutschke and Krahls 1967 Organisationsreferat (see
Juchler, 242). Contacts were made with Latin American student groups, and
some German students in fact traveled to Latin America to participate in
revolutionary cells (see Juchler, 247, no 383).
321
shame through forms of active resistance against contemporary social

problems and to position themselves as oppressed.9
After 1969, the tendency to form urban guerrilla groups based on
the Latin American model became more pronounced in West
Germany, particularly within the anti-authoritarian faction of the SDS.
A more serious attempt to form urban guerrilla groups and to generate
armed propaganda was consistent not only with shifting identifications
with Latin America and Latin American guerrilla leaders, but also
with a strong concern for the dissemination of alternative information
and the media critique that had shaped the student popular movement
from its inception, culminating in the 1968 anti-Springer campaign.
The critique of popular media is significant for opposition
movements not least because media concentration limits the
vocabulary available for the discussion, description, and dissemination
of social movements and their ideals. (The RAF and other armed
groups also had a well-developed media critique, expressed in many
of their communiqus and position papers.) In light of the
concentration of popular communicative structures in a conservative
media network, the development of alternative modes of communication itself became a site of contestation. In this context, I read
the move in West Germany first to mobilize around and later to
identify with foreign struggles not just as symptomatic of the
internationalism and anti-imperialist agenda of the 68 movements
more generally, but as an attempt to recuperate a vocabulary of
resistance from different social and political struggles located in some
way outside (or untainted by) the German tradition. Privileging this
communicative element enables us to trace a parallel shift within the
student movement from the use of political analogy to Latin American
urban guerrilla struggles and a preference for more traditional
communication in the form of public speeches, leaflets, protests, and
happenings, to an identification with the Third World and adoption of
extreme forms of highly mediated material communication, particularly the armed propaganda of the terrorist act, modeled on the
urban guerrilla concept. The communicative-critical element of the
9
The relation of the 1968 movement to fascism has been explored in a number of
popular and academic accounts. For a particularly interesting example, see
Wirth.
322
Jamie Trnka
terrorist act is central: the disruption of public spectacle by means of

political violence is not aimed exclusively at the object of a particular
attack, but at the people watching.10
The relation of communication to the body in extreme, material
communication suggests a series of questions about the invocation of
Latin American revolutionary figures by armed groups. The alienation
of many leftist groups from more traditional forms of communication with the increasingly sensationalistic media coverage of
the movement and subculture scene, as well as the increasing police
violence toward demonstrators, is key to the radicalization of
identifications with the Third World in West Germany of the late
sixties. Ralf Reinders, a member of the Umschweifende Haschrebellen
and later Bewegung 2. Juni, reflects that the experience of police
violence solidified identifications with victims of violence in the Third
World and the Black Power movement in the US: Da haben die Leute
begriffen, was Rassismus ist, als sie selbst was auf den Kopf bekamen.
Vom Gefhl her begriffen: Du kriegst was auf den Kopf, weil du
anders aussiehst. Vollkommen egal, was du machst (Fritsch and
Reinders, 17). This physical element of identification wir kriegen
alle was auf den Kopf in tandem with already pronounced
conceptual identifications Che as embodiment of a revolutionary
struggle that is also our struggle culminated in the mobilization of
urban guerrilla groups in West Germany around Latin American
figures not exactly as embodied difference, but as a kind of embodied
sameness: different from all that is unjust in Germany past and
present, the same as the struggling West German guerillas. What
remained of difference was to be overcome precisely through physical
participation in armed struggle: Der Kampf selbst proletarisiert die
Kmpfer was a common thread in written statements of West German
armed groups, most likely picking up on the elaboration of
proletarianization in Guevaras writings.
To what extent did armed groups attempt to use the bodies of
Latin American heroes like Che in place of other possible
10
For example, the bombing of a department store in protest against consumer

terror does not have as its aim the destruction of consumer goods, but the
disruption of normative patterns of consumption, socio-economic transactions,
and those publicly enacted social relations that take place in a department store
on a day-to-day basis.
323
expressions of the critical concepts they wished to articulate? Is the

recourse to the corporeal, to the embodiment of particular experiences
another attempt among so many in their written and enacted
propaganda texts to exceed the theory of the theory-practice dialectic?
How is Ches body, the bodies produced in the creation of the new
man, the bodies implicated in the creation of one, two, many
Vietnams played out in the very physical communication of ideas
through terrorist propaganda and its logic of the disruption of public
spectacle? The privileging of bodies engaged in struggle enabled the
completion of a radical identification with Latin America and the
inauguration of the urban guerrilla in West Germany; arguably, laying
claim to the experience of Latin American guerrillas and invoking the
Panther slogan trust your experience involved claiming the lived
experiences of others uncritically as their own and inadvertently
performing the isolation and cooptation of resistance movements
against which the groups claimed to fight.
The recourse to the Third World as the site of the
sensual/corporeal, as the object of analysis of first world language and
theory, but never itself the site of theoretical production, is
problematic to say the least, obscuring real Third World agency and
reproducing the terms of colonialist scholarship critiqued by
postcolonial theorists.11 The theorization of urban guerrilla struggle,
the social and political analysis that underlies it in Latin America, is
largely obscured in the process of the West German appropriation of
these organizational structures and experiences, as is apparent in the
case of the Tupamaros West Berlin.
The Tupamaros West Berlin took their name from the Uruguayan
guerrilla group MLN-Tupamaros, themselves named for the historical
indigenous resistance leader Tupac Amaru. The first and best-known
act of the Tupamaros West Berlin was a failed bombing of a Jewish
community house in 1969 on the thirty-first anniversary of the
Reichskristallnacht, accompanied by a communiqu titled Schalom
und Napalm in which the group condemned West German
philosemitism as preventing serious critique of Israeli aggression
against Palestine, and suggested that reparations paid by Germany to
the Israeli government served only to support the military conflict in
11
For a particularly detailed example, see Mignolo.
324
Jamie Trnka
the Middle East. The group concluded that a true anti-fascism could
only consist in solidarity with Palestine: Unsere Solidaritt wird sich
nicht mehr mit verbal-abstrakten Aufklrungsmethoden a l Vietnam
zufriedengeben, sondern die enge Verflechtung des zionistischen
Israel mit der faschistischen BRD durch konkrete Aktionen schonungslos
bekmpfen (reprinted in Baumann, 77). Not surprisingly, the attack met
with strong criticism from across the political spectrum. The group
wished to move away from what they designate as the verbal/abstract,
to the concrete/active. They assert their wahren Antifaschismus as
Tupamaros intervening physically in the political context of
Germany to effect change in the Middle East conflict. This confused
overlaying of diverse international situations and ideological
affiliations expressed in Schalom und Napalm is common among the
early armed groups that emerged out of the Berlin subculture. The
practical intervention of the group is predicated on both an active
identification with the Tupamaros as well as a political analogy to the
Middle East: their disidentification with fascist Germans proceeds
through their self-positioning in opposition to legacies of imperialism
and fascism as Tupamaros. In their violent intervention into the
Middle East conflict, they suggest that the Tupamaros West Berlin are
to Germany what Palestinian terrorists are to Israel, and their position
as Tupamaros is reinforced by their physical participation in armed
struggle, as already suggested above.
Interestingly, it was over a year after this event that the
Tupamaros West Berlin achieved the height of their publicity,
launching the first of many public debates on the role of the press in
covering terrorist activities. Monitor, a WDR television program,
broadcast what was supposedly an interview with a core member of
the Tupamaros West Berlin, who claimed responsibility for the failed
bombing in addition to several bank robberies. The press condemned
Monitor,12 and commentary on the Tupamaros West Berlin was
confined for the most part to moments of pseudo-righteous concern
for the authentic Tupamaros in Uruguay, apparently launched more
in the interest of obscuring the agenda however problematic of the
West Berlin underground than in any genuine solidarity with their
12
The Mnchner Merkur went so far as to describe the broadcast as an

anarchistischer Mummenschanz auf deutschen Bildschirmen (Kersten).
325
Latin American namesakes. Introduced by such dramatic lines as:

Tupamaros das sind in Lateinamerika Rebellen gegen das Regime
der Diktatoren und die Unterdrckung durch die Besitzenden.
Tupamaros das sind in der Bunderrepublik gewaltttige Wirrkpfe
(Tupamaros), the public response to the group failed to engage with
the situations in either Uruguay or the Federal Republic. As it would
happen, the Monitor Tupamaro was a fake, but after a week of
editorializing, only a handful of papers even bothered to devote
significant space to the discovery.13
Similarly, the RAF identifies itself as participating within an
urban guerrilla struggle from its inception, but does not rely on such
direct appropriations as the Tupamaros West Berlin/Munich, whose
very names perform an identificatory appropriation and calls for
recognition as other.14 This difference is key to the wider public
understanding of the relationship of West German urban guerrillas to
the Third World, particularly since the RAF and this can be argued
in terms of sheer volume of media coverage and state response, as
well as of various attempts retrospectively to represent and negotiate
the experience of the RAF of the 1970s has had a more lasting and
profound impact on (West) German culture and politics than have
other armed groups. In its invocation of the theoretical production and
historical experience of Third World liberation struggles, the RAF
13
14
The discovery was first publicized by the Berliner Extradienst, an extraparliamentary oppositional paper. For the popular media, the Tupamaros
remained nothing more than criminals, psychopaths, whose political
perversion had no place in public discourse.
Organizationally, the RAFs more traditional Leninist model with a
conspiratorial underground diverged significantly from Marighellas model, and
they tended to isolate themselves from other radical groups rather than moving
fluidly in and out of the underground as did the Tupamaros West Berlin or even
the Bewegung 2. Juni, both of which had a much more direct connection to
Latin America at least in terms of their organizational structures. On this
organizational difference, see Juchler, 376. Stefan Wisniewski, a former RAF
member, reflects: Ein Konsens gab es innerhalb der Bewegung, dem, was von
68 briggeblieben war: da eine Revolution, soweit sie hier stattfinden kann,
einen antiimperialistischen Charakter haben mu. Da sie auch hier nur eine
Chance hat zu bestehen, wenn sie die Bewegungen in der Dritten Welt
bercksichtigt. Ohne Vietnam, ohne die Entwicklung in der Dritten Welt, wre
die RAF nicht geworden, was sie dann geworden ist. Unsere Hoffnungstrger
waren die Tupamaros und die Black Panther (Wisniewski, 21).
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Jamie Trnka
stylized the Third World as a space of revolutionary violence. In

addition to identifying itself with these struggles in a more general
sense, the group invoked specific historical examples of Third World
struggles in the written elaboration of its positions, often decontextualizing and isolating these examples from their origins in the
material realities of Third World countries and peoples, and used them
to their own immediate ends to discuss the possibility of revolution
and the constitution of the revolutionary subject in the context of the
metropoles.
While acknowledging the practical and theoretical origins of the
urban guerrilla concept in Latin America, the RAF insisted that it
could be applied to revolutionary activity in the metropoles with the
same effect: Das Konzept Stadtguerilla stammt aus Lateinamerika. Es
ist dort, was es auch hier nur sein kann: die revolutionre
Interventionsmethode von insgesamt schwachen revolutionren
Krften (RAF, Konzept Stadtguerilla, 41). The RAF not only
equates the revolutionary potential of the Third World and West
Germany, but, in so doing, assumes that the material manifestations of
social contradictions, which lead ultimately to the development of
revolutionary consciousness, are equally felt in the first and Third
Worlds. By rooting the plausibility of armed struggle in West
Germany in an internationalist conceptualization of revolutionary
struggle in general, the RAF likewise underestimates the investment
of citizens of the metropoles in maintaining systems designed to
uphold social privilege in the global order, even as what the RAF
identifies as the domestic Third World suffers under and resists social
oppression in the domestic context. Citing the work of the Italian
communist group Il Manifesto,15 the RAF maintained that imperialism
could not be overthrown without revolution in the West; only through
unified international struggle could the force of imperialism be
fragmented and, in this fragmented state, destroyed (RAF, Konzept,
334). In this manner, the RAF re-located the revolutionary subject to
the metropoles and minimized practical differences between urban
guerrilla initiatives in the first and Third Worlds.
15
Il Manifesto was an Italian Leftist group that was shut out of the Italian
Communist Party in 1969. The RAF drew extensively on their 200 Theses,
published in 1971.
327
Against this background of theoretical appropriation, the RAF

failed to sustain positive aspects of their anti-imperialist critique or to
see themselves implicated in the social relationships which enable the
(re)production of imperialism. Yet even as many of the First
Generation RAFs theoretical and practical interventions were rooted
in particular forms of appropriation of the Third World, I believe that
it is likewise important to point out that many aspects of their critique
undertake the important work of illustrating the relationship of West
Germany to larger global processes. In particular, the group criticized
West Germanys support of US foreign military interventions and
West German firms lucrative military production.16 Highly critical of
the situation of the working poor in general, they drew attention as
well to the poor working conditions for foreign workers in Germany,
and criticized the Auslndergesetz as enabling ghettoization and
surveillance of foreign workers (RAF, Dem Volk, 12731). By
focusing their attentions on a more sustained analysis of these and
other groups, which they identified as marginalized in the domestic
context, and on the concrete connections thereof to Third World
struggles, the group might have been more successful in conveying to
a broader public its critique of political and economic systems
globally; the insistence on a radical identification with the Third
World detracted from this project as it were, and contributed to their
own marginalization from the West German public.
Already in its first written statement published, significantly,
with the Black Panther symbol the RAF distances itself from the
West German Left, arguing that the only groups to whom they were
accountable were those already marginalized in West Germany who
according to the RAF gain nothing from the exploitation of the
Third World and have no reason to identify themselves with the
hegemonic classes: Die knnen das kapieren, da das, was hier jetzt
losgeht, in Vietnam, Palstina, Guatamala, in Oakland und Watts, in
Kuba und China, in Angola und New York schon losgegangen ist
(RAF, Rote Armee aufbauen, 26). The unproblematized analogy
with such diverse political struggles is a typical gesture in the RAFs
written statements. Rhetorically, the group accomplishes a dramatic,
16
This critique of domestic policies and structures is particularly strong in Dem

Volk dienen.
328
Jamie Trnka
internationalist framing of their own practical interventions through its

recourse to this kind of listing; the weight of repetition and example in
its texts creates an imposing effect. While it could be argued that the
function of political propaganda is not carefully to explicate a political
program so much as to provoke an affective response and mobilize
broad social groups, my point here is that the unquestioned discursive
insertion of armed struggle in West Germany into the context of
struggles internationally, as if its valence were identical, distracts from
their very real critiques of West German complicity in upholding
systems of oppression domestically and internationally.
This makes all the more striking the fact that the first full-length
position paper written by the RAF, Konzept Stadtguerilla, begins
with a critique of the appropriation of Third World liberation struggles
by the extra-parliamentary opposition in general and the student
movement in particular. They explain: Gewiss war das Pathos
bertrieben, mit dem sich die Studenten, die ihrer psychischen
Verelendung in den Wissenschaftfabriken bewut geworden waren,
mit den ausgebeuteten Vlkern Lateinamerikas, Afrikas und Asiens
identifizierten (RAF, Konzept, 34). Further, the RAF identifies
simplifications of conflicts within the Third World and in the
international context as ignorant and counterproductive for the
revolutionary project (RAF, Konzept, 34).17 Given the RAFs own
rhetorical (if not more broadly theoretical) simplifications of precisely
such conflicts, this critique functions not just as critique, but as a
means of discursively positioning themselves outside of a by then
waning and splintered movement and claiming to be part of a more
authentic, physical struggle. Theirs was not simply psychische
Verelendung and theoretical identification, but physical engagement
in the guerrilla struggle; the suggestion is that they no longer need to
identify with an outside struggle, because they have themselves
assumed the struggle, are themselves embodiments of the politische
Moral der Kompromilosigkeit (Krahl, cited in Juchler, 242) that the
movement had so long attributed to figures like Che. In this way, an
17
One example of this simplification given by the RAF was the comparison of
mass distribution of Bild Zeitung to bombings in Vietnam. (RAF, Konzept,
34.)
329
RAF practice built on theoretical identifications moves discursively to

suggest that it exceeds those identifications.
Konzept Stadtguerilla explicitly cites the Latin American urban
guerrilla as its precedent:
Das Groe Geschrei, das ber uns angestimmt worden ist, verdanken wir mehr
den lateinamerikanischen Genossen-aufgrund des klaren Trennungsstrichs
zwischen sich und dem Feind, den sie schon gezogen haben-, so da die
Herrschenden hier uns wegen des Verdachts von ein Paar Bankberfllen so
energisch entgegentreten, als gbe es schon was aufzubauen wir angefangen
haben: die Stadtguerilla der Roten Armee Fraktion. (RAF, Konzept, 44)
Their later position paper Dem Volk dienen rejects criticisms that
urban guerrilla formations have no place in the metropoles, writing:
Das Argument, die Bundesrepublik sei nicht Lateinamerika,
verschleiert die hiesigen Verhltnisse mehr, als da es sie aufdeckt
(RAF, Dem Volk, 128). Elsewhere they explain: BZ Mai 1970:
Berlin ist nicht Sdamerika. Berlin ist ein Vorposten des amerikanischen Imperialismus. Unser Feind und der Feind Sdamerikas.18
The Bild Zeitung headline to which the RAF responds here recalls
the kind of rhetoric employed earlier in the wake of the Monitor
scandal; the RAF response operates around a more subtle structure of
political analogy to Latin America, recognizing and rejecting media
efforts to dismiss their message as purely affective identification. The
question of Berlin in particular proves interesting in light of its
symbolic and geopolitical significance: one need only recall
Khrushchevs statement to the US following their invasion of Cuba
that if you take Cuba, well take Berlin (Fritzsch and Reinders, 157).
One might also suggest that certain Latin American figures in fact
invited precisely this form of political analogy: Guevara rhetorically
valorized struggle in the metropoles, stating that the struggle of
students there in the belly of the beast was the most important
struggle of all.
By inserting themselves into the narrative of Third World
resistance, the RAF and other urban guerrilla groups participated in
broader West German moves to construct an emancipatory German
18
Die Rote Armee aufbauen! Agit 883, 2. Curiously, this passage does not
appear in the anthologized version of the text.
330
Jamie Trnka
subject, relying heavily on cultural fantasies of the Third World as a

site of hope and resistance.19 Tracing the shifting identifications with
and appropriations of Latin American and other Third World
liberation struggles that emerged in West Germany in the early years
of the student popular movement, and which seem to reach their
climax in the recourse to extreme, physical communication through
armed propaganda, can help us to complicate existing understandings
of protest around 1968 and thereafter. Undeservedly popular accounts
of terrorism like Jillian Beckers Hitlers Children, which privilege
more strictly generational models of conflict, cannot adequately
account for explicitly Latin American models of struggle and
resistance. Further, re-centering the importance of Third World
theoretical production is key to countering notions of the Third World
as the site of the physical, the object of Western theoretical analyses
rather than a space of active production and innovation in its own
right. The failure seriously to interrogate the role of opposition
movements reception of Third World texts and experiences limits our
understanding of the role such appropriations played in countercultural formations of the day, from the Berlin subculture scene out of
which many armed groups emerged, to later attempts to envision
alternative social orders. Wolfgang Pohrt has argued that the process
through which terrorist groups come to reflect images projected on
them by state and media agents is in fact a reflection of the social
constitution of the society in which a given group is active (910).
What the experiences of the RAF and other radical groups can tell us
19
What stands out perhaps more than anything else in the RAFs invocations of
the Third World is a sense of urgency that is much more pronounced than that
expressed in their analysis of West German examples. The firm conviction that
a turn away from urban guerrilla struggle wre der Selbstmord aus Angst vor
dem Tode, and the recurrence of phrases such as Es bleibt uns nur noch wenig
Zeit! and Einen anderen Weg gibt es nicht (the latter is a Che Guevara
slogan) clearly reflect what Karl Heinz Roth has identified as an eschatological
mood in the RAFs textual production, which both emerged out of and
contributed to the broader social mood of the time. Roth has noted that in this
sense the accessibility of RAF concepts was located not strictly in their written
formulations of revolutionary theory, but in their practical deployment of those
concepts. Referring to the appeal of the moral integrity of the RAF as a group
that practiced the struggle it advocated, he explains that their insistence upon
victory or death was in fact particularly salient for marginalized groups in West
Germany. (See Roth, 1913.)
331
about the social constitution of West Germany is, in this sense, a much
more far-reaching question than popular representations of the period
would suggest.
For the RAF, the Third World was recognized as a space of
active theoretical production and innovation in its own right, but this
recognition was incomplete and ultimately undermined by the
identificatory politics of the RAF as guerillas. This is important not
only to understanding the RAF, but implicates the West German New
Left more broadly as paradoxically participating in the limiting
epistemologies they are at such pains to critique. Engaging seriously
with the challenges posed by armed groups in West Germany in order
better to understand their political motivations, we might hope to
sharpen our own, working toward a politics not of identity or
authenticity but of social location. Such a politics would leave space
open for the self-definition of Third World and other oppositional
movements without precluding the informed articulation of interests
and ideals in alliances and coalitions among various social and
political groups in both the Third and First Worlds.
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die RAF und die Fischer Debatte (Gieen, Psychosozial-Verlag, 2001).
Zantop, S. Colonial Fantasies. Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial
Germany, 17701870 (Durham, Duke University Press, 1997).
GERRIT-JAN BERENDSE
Aesthetics of (Self-)Destruction:
Melvilles Moby Dick,
Brechts The Measures Taken
and the Red Army Faction*
What place had literature in the world of left-wing terrorism, the most
radical West German counter-culture in the 1970s? And who was
afraid of literature? Certainly, the German government was, since
officials were convinced that the terrorists were capable of
transforming the contents of books into lethal weapons. The concern
that aesthetic radicalism transported by fictional narratives could be
directly translated into violent events seems to be based on an
irrational concept of primeval fear. Nevertheless, this concept has
been taken very seriously, and became a legal issue as early as 1967
when the infamous leaflet Burn Warehouse Burn by the Berlinbased Kommune I was taken to court. Most of the testimonies in
favour of the accused emphasised the satirical subtext of the printed
matter, and argued the pamphlet is a piece of art, i.e. a product of
surrealism. Yet, the state considered its contents an act of terrorism.1
In the 1980s, some academics tackled the complex matter of the
relationship between terror and the arts from a different perspective,
and recycled the idea that fiction must have had a negative effect on
Germanys young people, since the writings of so-called sympathisers
undoubtedly nurtured new waves of counter-cultural upheaval.2 The
*
1
2
I would like to thank the British Academy for awarding a grant that generously
met my travel costs for attending the Counter-Cultures conference at the
University of Nottingham.
On the legal dispute regarding the link between the fun-guerrilla of the
Kommune I and political violence, see Briegleb (6271), Koenen (15461),
and Kraushaar (6670).
Two examples of this condemnation effort are Holthusen and Ulsamer.
334
Gerrit-Jan Berendse
mechanisms of condemnation display an intriguing cultural historical

parallel to the warnings of Hauptpastor Johann Melchior Goeze after
the success of Goethes Werther in 1774. (See Mattenklott, 94, 96.)
However, the history of the years of turmoil during the so-called
red decade from 1967 till 1977 fails to indicate any fascination of
literature and the arts on the part of the agents of violence. Members
of the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, RAF) and the
Bewegung 2. Juni (Second June Movement), for example, frequently
stated their mistrust in bourgeois liberals, as they used to classify
established Western European artists and writers. Even after Jean-Paul
Sartre, Heinrich Bll and Gnter Grass testified their sympathy with
the cause, they were treated with utmost contempt. One has to keep in
mind that, although the terrorists produced hundreds of pages to
justify the actions prescribed in their urban guerrilla war, they granted
only secondary status to the word. The language they habitually used
in written communication was abstract, often indigestible.3 Their
preferred mode of communication was action. Talkers were
condemned as mere idle word-spillers, and the terrorists held the
view that language, because of its slippery nature, was easily misused
by the system and therefore not to be trusted. Although the interdiscursive cluster in which terrorism and the arts conjoin has a long,
well-established and international tradition4, the liaison seems to be
dominated by the writers agenda of representing violence and
counter-violence in a fictional context. On the other hand, some older
literary texts played a major role in the mental life and action
programme of the first generation of the RAF, especially Bertolt
Brechts didactic play Die Manahme (The Measures Taken, 19301)
and, perhaps more surprisingly, the German translation of Herman
Melvilles 1851 novel, Moby Dick. (See Aust, 494, and Koenen, 381
3, 405.) These texts were found in the cells of Stammheim prison after
the death of the hard core of the Baader-Meinhof Group in October
1977, and were confiscated by Germanys Federal Criminal Agency
(Bundeskriminalamt).
3
4
Enzensberger, Die Leere im Zentrum des Terrors (2459). On the terrorist

rhetorics, see Leeman and Miller.
See Widdowson, Scanlan and Berendse/Williams.
Aesthetics of (Self-)Destruction
335
Brecht and Melville were valued by the terrorists not because

they added words to the cause, but because they provided imagery that
supported their philosophy of the deed. This imagery was derived
from a preoccupation in both works with corporeal appearance and
sensation, which also characterised the terrorists hostile actions. The
dramatic atmosphere in which these actions were carried out in public
(encouraged by a deliberate exaggeration of facial gesture reminiscent
of the gothic and expressionist tendencies long established in German
art and literature) has been characterised by Rutschky as the politics
of the body. Moreover, the terrorists became fascinated by the
curious interest in both works, especially Melvilles, in the symbolism
of the colour whiteness, which was found to have a bearing on their
own situation and their options.
The terrorists reception of literature was based on its political
utility: Brecht and Melville were read as guides for correct
revolutionary behaviour within the RAF. They found in their works
images and preoccupations which corresponded to their own situation.
Both Die Manahme and Moby Dick displayed an intense
concentration on bodily experience, including pain. Both were
concerned with the dynamics of group belonging, with leadership,
loyalty and exclusion. Likewise, the focus on bodily experience in
Melville and Brecht applies to the rules of conduct the terrorists
elaborated while in prison, rules which resulted in a vicious mechanics
of physical violence, including mutilation. Stammheim had turned
their lives upside-down: in contrast to their underground existence
outside the prison walls, incarceration rendered the terrorists
themselves the objects of terror. In spite of regarding this terror as
issuing from the prison authorities and their old enemy the state, the
terrorists had themselves invented a new species of terror. A new
concept of collective suffering of the victimised corpus terrorismus
initiated by the collective and modelled in part on literary tropes,
emerged from the experience of the group in prison. Evidence of this
new situation was consciously presented to the outside world as a
source of examples for future counter-cultural actions by next
generations of the RAF.
336
Gerrit-Jan Berendse
Literature and Terrorism

Despite the condemnation of the mainstream literary scene in the late
1970s, the literary ambitions of the German terrorists were caught up
in their actions in a very early stage: Peter-Paul Zahl, for example,
was not only an active member of the so-called hash-rebels of the
Bewegung 2. Juni, but also a writer. In the late 1960s he was the
managing editor of the counter-cultural magazine agit 883, which
featured the first pamphlets written by Ulrike Meinhof and Horst
Mahler, accompanied by lyric poetry by, for example, Brecht, F. C.
Delius and Zahl. After Zahl was arrested and convicted of shooting a
police officer, he continued to write poems and short stories in prison.
In the 1970s his idiosyncratic writing style, mixing prison blues and a
rigid attack on West Germanys system of political injustice, found a
young and eager readership seeking to find a way to combine the
search for an authentic inner self with political indictment. (See
Schnell). After the hard core of the Baader-Meinhof Group had been
put behind bars, the second generation of the RAF was supervised by
another author, Peter-Jrgen Boock, who tried to establish himself
as a poet, novelist and essayist during his imprisonment. (See
Boock/Schneider.)
Probably the best-known literary artefact produced by the
German terrorist scene is the play Bambule by Ulrike Meinhof, which
was commissioned by West German television. Meinhofs feature
film deals with a riot in an institution for maladjusted girls in Berlin,
foreshadowing a violent, revolutionary attitude she harnessed herself
with against a Federal Republic she perceived as a prison, thus the
producer of institutionalised violence. (See Meinhof, Bambule and
Teraoka, 20924.) The play was never broadcast because Meinhof
was engaged in another venture in the year in which it was completed:
the spectacular act of freeing Andreas Baader in May 1970. This
action is the first example of the theatrical staging of a terrorist action
in West Germany, and is considered the starting signal for the
formation of the RAF.
The link between terrorism and the performing arts has
frequently been scrutinised. In his essay Our Theater of Cruelty,
337
Jean Baudrillard claims that terrorism as a global spectacle also

reflects the specific society in which it occurs. Baudrillard
characterises terrorist actions as a [s]trange mixture of the symbolic
and the spectacular, of challenge and simulation. This paradoxical
configuration is the only original form of our time, and subversive
because insoluble (Baudrillard, 11415). On numerous occasions the
Baader-Meinhof terrorists staged their actions as a combination of
carnivalesque (almost hedonistic) happenings and didactic drama.
When Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Shnlein and Thorwald
Proll set fire to two Frankfurt department stores in April 1968, they
acted partly in accordance with the ideas of Dada, which were
reinstated by the so-called fun-guerrillas of the Berlin-based
Kommune I, whose purpose was to confront the West German
population with the suffering of people in the Third World, especially
the Vietnamese. The pain inflicted by these Parallelaktionen was
designed to expose the common tendency of people in the Western
world to distance themselves from war and genocide and to delegate
responsibility to others. For the terrorists, every German was involved
in, and guilty of, the killings in Indo-China, and none could claim to
be a mere spectator.5 As the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg
later argued, in Shipwreck with Spectator, in a catastrophe there are no
bystanders.
The performances were repeated during the trials against the arsonists in
November 1968. A text was written by Shnlein (then leader of the legendary
action-theatre group in Munich), read out aloud and performed by the accused
and sympathisers who were present in the courtroom. The text was published
by the former fiance of Gudrun Ensslin, the writer Bernward Vesper, in his
series Voltaire Flugschrift 27 (1968). The trial in Stammheim (19757) can also
be interpreted as staged. This time it was a play about visibility and
invisibility since those who stood trial made a habit out of provoking the West
German juridical system by appearing in and disappearing from the courtroom.
Gerrit-Jan Berendse
338
The Body as Weapon

Violence, inflicted by West German terrorists in the early 1970s, was
based on the instructions in the pamphlet Mini-Manual of the Urban
Guerrilla (1970) by the Brazilian Carlos Marighella, and mainly
consisted of bank robberies and bombings. Assuming they were the
new breed of European guerrilla warriors, the actions of the BaaderMeinhof Group had frightening effects: chaos and uncertainty forced
the state to reveal the true face that was hiding behind its humanitarian
mask. In the words of the monomaniac Captain Ahab in Melvilles
Moby Dick, If man will strike, strike through the mask.6 Revealing
the true face of capitalism required a bodily approach, by presenting
kidnapped or killed enemies to the public as mere pieces of flesh, for
example a strategy later refined by the second generation of the
RAF, and again, although not comparable in ideological terms,
demonstrated by the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001.7
The body plays a central role in political resistance. However,
the terrorists themselves are physically untouchable.8 In the 1970s
the active members of the RAF, for all their determination as the
vanguard of the revolutionary struggle to unmask imperialism, found
themselves increasingly caught up in a contradiction, for they were
also masked, concealing themselves behind the communiqus which
they sent to press agencies after the deed. Their staged spectacles did
not conform to Brechts radical conception of politically active drama:
for Brecht, audience, protagonist and antagonist were all involved in
the didactic purpose of the play. Even the teacher needed a lesson. The
terrorists, however, leaving the stage right after the bloody deed,
perceived themselves as the unconquerable agents of violence,
6
7
8
Melville (167); cited henceforth in main text as MD.

See Tolmein and Enzensberger, Die Wiederkehr des Menschenopfers.
Berendse/Williams (224) and Scholz (216): Obwohl der Krper im politischen
Widerstand eine entscheidende Rolle spielt, sind die Terroristen immer krperlos,
vor allem Andreas Baader und Gudrun Ensslin.
339
contained in the unemotional, invincible body of true guerrilla

warriors.9
A number of vicious attacks directed at the micro-physics of
power, as Michel Foucault had labelled the various representatives of
the states power structures, had little effect on the status quo in
Germany, and only a negative impact on mass opinion. These actions
turned public opinion against the freedom fighters and prompted the
security services to increase their efficiency by way of new
recruitment and the deployment of computer-based search-methods.
Moreover, since, as Foucault has demonstrated, modern regimes do
not operate at the command of central agencies of power, the terrorists
were confronted with an impossible task in seeking to eliminate all the
representatives of a dispersed system of power (Foucault, 26). The
liquidation of structural power was acknowledged as a desperate, even
an impossible endeavour, especially after the core members were
imprisoned at a very early stage of the terrorists programme.
The Baader-Meinhof Group its individual members having
been incarcerated set about reviewing its concept of the body. The
groups function was transformed to accommodate the new situation:
instead of the stress on the individual body as a tool of destruction,
itself indestructible, a new concept appeared of a collective, more
vulnerable, and therefore human image. Only as a reflection of the
new collective corporeal self did the terrorist feel capable of striking
back. The new politics of the body was mainly propagated through the
distribution of photographs of starving bodies, which they made with
sub-miniature photographic equipment that was smuggled into the
high-security wing of Stammheim. The visualisation of the body in
pain during the time of solitary confinement proved to be a more
creative, and therefore persuasive and effective message, than the
abstract written reflections in the various leaflets and communiqus on
the destruction of the political status quo. As Elaine Scarry argues, the
body in pain is the ultimate locus of terror, which carries the sufferer
back behind the forms of social life constructed around language:
This image of the cool killer has become a major obstacle for those who
sympathised with the terrorists goals, i.e. to establish an anti-fascist, antiimperialist and, therefore, civilised Germany.
340
Gerrit-Jan Berendse
Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing
about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and
cries a human being makes before language is learned. (Scarry, 4)
The individual bodies were to speak for themselves, that is with one
voice. Therefore all inmates were forced into a collective bond. Only
as the newly established collective corporeal self did the terrorists feel
capable to strike back. Or, as Gudrun Ensslin interpreted the executive
decision of the Stammheim prisoners: the body, the sole weapon, is
the collective, is unity, nothing else (Bakker-Schut, 169; see also
Berendse, 3203).
Supposedly, the outside world, including those who did not
support or sympathise with the ideology of the RAF, would be able
relate to the visualisation of the sorrows of the young inmates.
However, the purpose of representing the new corporeal imagery went
beyond seeking to elicit sympathy: the physical appearance of the
isolated body, reflecting human suffering, was intended to set an
example for those inside and outside the prison walls. The new bodily
imagery, displaying an isolated Super-Body (ber-Leib), was
designed also to encourage aggressive impulses among terrorists and
their sympathisers; the viewer should feel motivated to fight back
against the perpetrators of the visualised distress. The fomenting of
fighting instincts would strengthen the collective bond of the RAF
(Bilz, 15778). For this anthropologic strategy, which set about
upgrading the terrorists politics of the body, the two texts by Brecht
and Melville played a major role, that is as basis for the newly
designed concept of revolution.
The imprisoned terrorists obsession with their physical appearances took a variety of forms, from meticulous descriptions of
starvation during their numerous hunger strikes to photo-sessions in
Stammheim (Adelmann/Nohr, 7783). The photographs of the terrorists
faces before, during and after their arrests provide a condensed visual
narrative of West Germanys decade of political violence. Before their
imprisonment, the terrorists were stigmatised as common criminals,
their images displayed to the public on wanted posters issued by the
police. To make the public aware that the urban guerrilla was more
than the glamorised image of the loveable outsider Bonnie and
Clyde figures at odds with the ordinary world of contemporary West
341
Germany it became common practice for members of the RAF to

contort their faces when being arrested, thus rejecting their visual
representation and drawing attention to the ideas behind the actors of
the paramilitary campaigns. The importance of ideology was not to be
compromised through a bourgeois focus on physical appearance.
The turning point in their photographic tactics occurred directly
after their arrests. Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin
and Holger Meins, now incarcerated, decided to revise their
physiognomy by taking each others pictures with a small Minox
camera. The new facelift was later presented in a Swedish publication,
texte: der raf.10 The relatively healthy-looking portraits of the
prisoners were part of a strategy to provide for the outside world a
stark visual contrast, by means of the body in pain images taken
during their numerous hunger strikes, thus accusing the state of
torturing its citizens. The terrorists articulated a radical message to the
outside world by way of corporeal images; this strategy was designed
to turn the body into the ultimate lethal weapon. The tortured bodies
were to be read as manuals of terrorist behaviour in a system that
isolated deviant members of society. The texts by Brecht and Melville
proved to be the models in this aesthetics of (self-)destruction.
White Terror in the 1970s

Scholars of Herman Melvilles life and letters have read and studied
Moby Dick in the light of the writers political views on the
revolutionary upheaval in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. However,
the same scholars admit that full appreciation of the novel did not
occur until European literary Modernism was at its peak. (See
Niemeyer, 22139, and Friedman, 178211.) Like the avant-garde
publications of the early twentieth century, the novel became popular
because of its innovative fragmented style and its artistic radicalism.
The world had entered a new stage in the revolutionary conditions of
10
A similar obsession with physical appearance was found among members of the
Japanese Red Army Faction. See also Steinhoff (83045).
342
Gerrit-Jan Berendse
modernity, nurtured by political violence. This combination of

political violence and literature also fascinated Bertolt Brecht in the
late 1920s, and half a century later, the members of the BaaderMeinhof Group.
After the hard core of the Baader-Meinhof Group had been
arrested, Melvilles powerful epic of the chase of the great white
whale became a major influence on the thought of the terrorists and a
source of terrorist action. The prisoners were particularly drawn to the
hierarchical structure that governed life on Captain Ahabs ship, the
Pequod (MD, 11523). Gudrun Ensslin used the crew list to create
and distribute code names for the secret correspondence between the
fellow inmates. Not surprisingly, Andreas Baader was crowned Ahab,
the monomaniac ungodly God. (See Aust, 287 and Koenen, 381.)
The terrorists correspondence reveals another strange preoccupation with Moby Dick: the obsession with the colour white.
Moby Dicks variously interpreted whiteness found a new signifier in
the white terror practised by the German state. The concrete
expression of this terror was the uniformly white and sound-proofed
walls of the blocks of cells in Kln-Ossendorf, in which some RAF
members were held in custody before their transfer to the highsecurity wing of Stammheim in 1975. (See Werber.) The whiteness
and soundlessness of this institution symbolised the terror with which
the state threatened its enemies. Robespieres term white terror,
coined to define the terror conducted by the Jacobins after the French
Revolution, was thus reinstated to signal the inherent antagonism
between revolutionary humanity and state-sponsored inhumanity
under contemporary conditions in Europe. In letters to her children,
Ulrike Meinhof sees herself as being captured like a wild animal in a
cage by a system that has revealed its sadistic side (Meinhof, Briefe
aus dem Toten Trakt, 558).
While Meinhof was suffering under the hostile conditions of
solitary confinement and contemplated her tortured individuality, most
of the other Stammheim inmates were applying the procedures of
sadism towards their own kind; the RAF collective was entering the
masochist zone, thus denying any concept of authenticity. If an
individual inmate failed to integrate into the collective, it was the
groups responsibility to liquidate the deviant in order to safeguard the
newly constructed terrorist self. Vicious acts of expulsion became
343
common practice on the seventh floor in Stammheim and were

scrupulously documented by the agents of self-inflicted pain.11
Melville devotes an entire chapter to the whiteness of the whale
(chapter 42). The great white whale concentrates in its being what
Ahab sees as a metaphysical malice operative in the universe. But this
is merely one of the various, sometimes contradictory discourses and
allusions, that converge in the figure of Moby Dick: divinity,
emptiness, uncertainty, and a certain nameless terror (MD, 195).
Terror is identified, however, not only with the great white whale
which has dismembered Ahab, hunting the symbol of terror, but also
with the hunter himself. In the person of the captain, terrorist and
terrorised have become indistinguishable, just as human and animal
attributes have become interchangeable in his mutilated body. Of
Ahabs barbaric white leg, the narrator Ishmael notes: It had []
come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the
polished bone of the sperm whales jaw (MD, 125). In the cells at
Stammheim, isolated yet connected by subterranean forms of
communication, the members of the Baader-Meinhof Group were also
finding that terror was shifting from hunter to hunted, while the
terrorist body was forming a hybrid image in which two sources of
terror repressive and revolutionary were being fused.
At the same time, the symbolism of the colour white was
throwing up associations both disturbing and exhilaratingly apposite
to their situation. Although all whales in the eye of Ahab are the
manifestation of terror, Moby Dick because of his whiteness achieves
representative status as the concentration and visible sign of terror at
work in the world. Yet as the novels loquacious narrator, Ishmael,
observes, whiteness is, in fact, not so much a color as the visible
absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors (MD,
199). The whales whiteness, then, offers the illusion of oneness, of
the merger of contradictions. For the crew of the Pequod, enthralled
by their captains monomaniac grudge, the only adequate reaction is
to transform their individual suffering into a collective weapon. On
the second day of their final chase of the great white whale, the crew
of the Pequod is described thus:
11
It has been argued that Ulrike Meinhof committed suicide to avoid further
bullying, especially by Gudrun Ensslin. See Aust (2617).
344
Gerrit-Jan Berendse
They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it
was put together of all contrasting things oak, and maple, and pine wood;
iron, and pitch, and hemp yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete
hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel;
even so, all the individuals of the crew, this mans valor, that mans fear; guilt
and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to
that fatal goal which Ahab their one Lord and keel did point to. (MD, 564)
The individual Stammheim prisoners developed a similar notion of

oneness. Rather than continuing to complain about being the victims
of white terror, the terrorists transformed the notion of whiteness
into a weapon a sign of the powerful collective body they were
determined to forge. Despite, or perhaps because of the fact, that the
prisoners were isolated from each other, they repeatedly claimed that
their several lives constituted one coherent Super-Body. If one
member, one hand or just one string of hair, were to function
differently, the oneness of this body would be endangered. (See
Theweleit, 54.) Any deviation had to be strictly avoided.
In the role of Captain Ahab on the sinking ship of Stammheim,
Andreas Baader often made remarks about the mechanism of
integration and disintegration, finally ordering every inmate to deny
their individuality in favour of the collective identity. In one of the
letters sent to the comrades, by way of the complicated but effective
system of communication (das info), he wrote in his distinctive idiom:
hey you, listen to what im saying. the thing is, if somebody of us (i mean us
as in THE GROUP) writes to you, and i mean anybody who feels like it, i order
you to answer, like we would do []. if you are not capable of answering, it
seems to me you have a wrong notion of the situation, i.e. you dont want to
respond []. (2.5.1976; my translation)
Disobedience was punished with the utmost severity possible in their

imprisonment: by the coldness of isolation from the warm body,
called THE GROUP.
345
Furchtbar ist es, zu tten

This dictatorial determination to create one body out of different
individual bodies resembles Brechts motif in The Measures Taken
where unity is defined as the only way of regaining sovereignty over a
world of conflicting images. The preoccupying problem of the play is
precisely that faced by the German terrorists in Stammheim: in
Elizabeth Wrights words, the play debates the problem of the
individual within a collective, not that of the individual versus the
collective, as so often argued (Wright, 125). Written with the help of
his friends and colleagues Hanns Eisler and Slatan Dudow, Brechts
play reflects on the avant-garde position of the communist party in the
Soviet Union in the 1920s. The plot is quite simple: four Soviet
comrades infiltrate China to educate the proletariat by teaching the
classics of Marx and Lenin. The crux of the play is the disappearance
of the body of a young Soviet activist who has been murdered by his
three older and more experienced comrades. These accuse the young
man of having been a deviant who has betrayed the revolution by not
listening to the voice of the collective.
The Measures Taken is far more problematic than this plotsummary suggests. Presented as the retrospective account of a murder
case by three individuals reporting to the Communist Party
(represented by the chorus), the play indicates a complicity by the
murdered party in the event, i.e. his own death. This agreement
(Einverstndnis) between executioner and victim is one of the most
important concepts in Brechts didactic plays. This concept not only
emphasises the responsibility of the individual to sacrifice him- or
herself in order to save the collective but, according to Rainer Ngele,
settles the characters arrangement with death as well (Ngele, 311).
The four agitators, comprising the three subjects and the one object of
terror, frequently speak in one voice:
DIE DREI AGITATOREN:
Wir beschlossen:
Dann mu er verschwinden, und zwar ganz.
Denn wir knnen ihn nicht mitnehmen und nicht da lassen
Gerrit-Jan Berendse
346
Also mssen wir ihn erschieen und in die Kalkgrube werfen, denn
Der Kalk verbrennt ihn.
DER KONTROLLCHOR: Fandet ihr keinen Ausweg?
DIE VIER AGITATOREN:
Bei der Krze der Zeit fanden wir keinen Ausweg.
Wie das Tier dem Tiere hilft
Wnschten auch wir uns, ihm zu helfen, der
Mit uns gekmpft fr unsere Sache.
[]
Also beschlossen wir: jetzt
Abzuschneiden den eigenen Fu vom Krper
Furchtbar ist es, zu tten. (Brecht, Die Manahme, 7981)
The disappearance of one individual body in the whiteness of the lime

strengthens the collective body. On the textual level Brecht has
already managed to let the young comrade vanish in the white of the
pages, since he is not able to present himself, but instead is
represented by his executioners. Thus, his body becomes a transparent
artefact, an amorphous commodity, which dissolves into the
collective.12
Holger Meins, one of the incarcerated Baader-Meinhof members
and first victim of the hunger strikes, reflected on the collective body
in a similar way in das info in 1974:
the human body merely consists of matter, like everything else in the world. the
whole human being, his body and mind, is the realisation of matter, and what
constitutes a human, the way he is, his freedom, is that his mind controls matter,
i.e. the SELF and nature that surrounds him. []. guerrilla is matter: that is our
revolutionary struggle that is the battle we fight till death follows, and we
fight as a collective. (1.11.1974; my translation)
The negation and destruction of the individual body was deemed a

necessary step (a decision or measure) to guarantee the life of the
collective. Viewed as one organic unit, the collective body became
what La Mettrie calls lhomme machine, capable of committing
partial suicide by excising a dysfunctional limb. During the various
hunger strikes the Stammheim inmates demonstrated the power of the
12
See Lethen, 30020, and Ngele, 315: Das [] beschriebene Blatt wird
ausgelscht mit den andern, damit sie leere Bltter werden, auf welche die
Revolution ihre Anweisungen schreibt.
347
terrorist body by forcing individual comrades to serve the group at the

expense of their own flesh.
Artistic and Political Radicalism

Both The Measures Taken and Moby Dick displayed an intense
concentration on bodily experience, particularly that of pain. This
corporeality extended the terrorists politics of the body, and applied
to the rules of conduct the terrorists elaborated while in prison.
Between 1972 and 1977 these literary texts aided the translation of the
custodial situation of the RAF prisoners into symbolic terms which
established parameters for their dealings with each other, with the
authorities, and with the audience of the German public they were still
determined to address. The juxtaposition of radical forms of
corporeality and acts of violence, both in their writings and on West
Germanys streets, was embedded in the artistic radicalism that found
its peak in the mid-1970s and featured categories such as body
cultism, subjectivity, authenticity, and a similar dose of morbid (self-)
destruction.13 The immense destructive elements displayed by the
RAF for the sake of political propaganda coincided with the revival of
Dionysian rituals performed on West Germanys alternative, mainly
apolitical stages during the red decade, in for example, the Orgies
Mystical Theatre of Hermann Nitsch.14 By tearing and disembowelling corpses of dead animals on stage in an environment of
blood and gore, Nitsch intended to reconstruct an ancient or primitive
sensibility of oneness with nature within a modern civilisation, from
which many of the actors/spectators were in the process of distancing
themselves. The speechless alternative, which promised to strengthen
the collective consciousness, and to gain a new understanding of the
totality of human experience and knowledge (Dirke, 81), found its
13
14
See Dirke (67103). The British punk movement displayed similar examples of
havoc and self-mutilation in its cultural products of the late 1970s.
The extreme corporeal sensation as an alternative cultural discourse in the
1970s, with special attention to Nitschs so-called OMT, is discussed in
McEvilley (6583).
348
Gerrit-Jan Berendse
counterpart during the strange happenings in Stammheim. The focus

on bodily experiences by the imprisoned terrorists, however,
obviously denied any care for the individual subject and its selfesteem. Their vicious mechanics of physical violence reached its
climax on 18 October 1977, during the so-called death-night, or
what has become known as the collective suicide action.15
The eerie dialogue between radical artistic and political
narratives places the first generation of the RAF well in the tradition
of previous European counter-cultures, in which literary-cultural
forces seemed to have helped shaping political identity and developed
new perspectives for the rebellious programmes of action. (See
Roseman, 42.) And in the decades that followed the German Autumn
the ghost of Stammheim became a popular leitmotif in the works of
many contemporary artists and writers who pursued the difficult task
of representing the RAF and its obscure but unique corporeal
sensation. However, the final act of the remaining commanding
officers of the Baader-Meinhof Group in Stammheim may have been
merely an act of desperation and not a manifestation of the art of
terror.16
15
16
This term was used in the article Suicide Action in Der Spiegel 50 (1990), 62
6. On the controversy surrounding the deaths in Stammheim, see, for example,
Nagel and Ensslin.
Koenen observes the irony of a counter-culture such as the RAF that
dogmatically declared war against everything related to Nazi-Germany but
seems to copy its leaders Koenen points out the gruesome similarities between
both suicides in Stammheim in October 1977 and the Berlin bunker in April
1945 after both terror organisations faced the fiasco of their Endsieg.
(Koenen, 390).
349
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UWE SCHTTE
Heilige, die im Dunkel leuchten:

Der Mythos der RAF im Spiegel der Literatur
nachgeborener Autoren
Und als die Bundesanwaltschaft in Tateinheit mit Mordversuchen, Polizei und

allen Richtern die Nationalhymne, die Hosen runter, Hand aufs Herz, zu singen
angefangen hatte, hoben die Unterdrckten revolutionr die linke Faust und
votierten derart stumm, ohne hier die Internationale anzustimmen, fr ein Leben
vor dem Tod fr alle.
(Rainald Goetz, Kontrolliert)
Der literarische Brandstifter unter den Biedermnnern seiner Generation

will nicht rechtfertigen, was geschehen ist, sondern sthetisch fortsetzen,
was einmal politisch beabsichtigt war: Feuer legen, die Welt auf den
Kopf stellen. Der Schriftsteller, von dem hier die Rede der Kritikerin
Iris Radisch ist, heit Leander Scholz. 2001 verffentlichte er seinen
Debutroman Das Rosenfest, in dem die Geschichte der RAF als
Liebesgeschichte zwischen Andreas Baader und Gudrun Ensslin
nacherzhlt wird. In der Kritik stie das Buch durchweg auf
Ablehnung. Man attestierte ihm fehlende literarische Qualitt und eine
oberflchliche Reflektion des Themas. Interessanterweise konzediert
auch Iris Radisch in ihrer enthusiastischen Rezension die sthetischen
Mngel des Textes. Scholz, so schreibt sie, ergehe es literarisch nicht
besser als der RAF: Von vier gelegten Bomben will hchstens eine
explodieren. Nichtsdestotrotz hlt sie seinen Roman fr eine
Provokation, weil darin natrlich rein poetisch und dank eines
Literaturstipendiums, die Lebenslgen der Republik mitsamt ihren
miefigen Kaufhusern abgefackelt werden.
Mit anderen Worten: Nicht sthetische, textimmanente Faktoren
definieren den literarischen Wert des Textes, sondern seine Referenz
auf reale zeitgeschichtliche Vorkommnisse. Man wird zum Provokateur, zum Brandstifter, ja fast sogar zum Revolutionr, trotz
354
Uwe Schtte
oder eigentlich: gerade durch ein Literaturstipendium und aufgrund

der Wahl des richtigen Themas. Das allgemein bekannte Faktum des
RAF-Terrorismus, die Toten auf beiden Seiten der erbarmungslosen
Auseinandersetzung zwischen Staat und Guerilla, strahlt aus auf den
Text, infiziert ihn mit Extremismus. Fast scheint es sogar, als ob der
Roman seine Radikalitt gerade dem Umstand verdankt, rein
poetisch zu sein, also per se gar keine Intervention im Bereich der
gesellschaftlichen Realitt anzustreben.
Es ist dies freilich eine etwas verquere Logik. Dennoch hat
derartiges Denken seit dem Ende des bewaffneten Aufstandes der 6
gegen 60 Millionen in vielen Bereichen eine erstaunliche Konjunktur
erfahren. Die RAF ist zu einem Pop-Phnomen geworden, in der
Literatur wie in der Musik. Bereits 1977 verffentlichte Brian Eno
einen Track namens RAF, der Samples von aufgezeichneten
Telefonanrufen der Terroristen enthielt. Die Sheffielder IndustrialBand Cabaret Voltaire lie 1980 den Track Baader-Meinhof
nachfolgen. Deutsche Punkbands traten mit musikalisch eher mediokren Stcken hervor, die deutliche Anspielungen auf die RAF und die
Vorgnge des Deutschen Herbst enthalten.1 1996 erschien die bisher
umfangreichste popmusikalische Auseinandersetzung mit der RAF in
Form des bemerkenswerten Konzeptalbums Baader-Meinhof von
Luke Haines.2 Im selben Jahr erschien ebenfalls die Tontrgeroper
Deutsche Krieger von Andreas Ammer und FM Einheit. Sie besteht
aus drei Akten, die Kaiser Wilhelm Overdrive, Adolf Hitler
Enterprise und Ulrike Meinhof Paradise betitelt sind. Die CD mischt
dokumentarisches Tonmaterial aus dem Ersten Weltkrieg, dem
Zweiten Weltkrieg und dem Deutschen Herbst mit atmosphrischen
Electronica-Klngen. Dadurch ermglicht das Werk dem Zuhrer,
historische Entwicklungslinien von Militarismus ber Nazismus zum
Terrorismus zu ziehen, bzw. Parallelen und Unterschiede zwischen
den drei Epochen deutscher Geschichte zu erkennen. (Vgl. Brauners1
2
Vgl. z.B. S.Y.P.H. Klammheimlich (1979), Male Haftbefehl & Kontrollabschnitt

(1979), Die goldenen Zitronen Alles was ich will (Nur die Regierung strzen) (1990)
& 6 gegen 60 Millionen (1994), Terrorgruppe 1977.
Die Plattenfirma Virgin lie am Vorabend der Verffentlichung weite Teile
Nordlondons mit Nachdrucken der BKA-Fahndungsposter plakatieren, verzichtet aber in Selbstzensur bis heute auf eine Verffentlichung des Albums in
Deutschland.
Heilige, die im Dunkel leuchten
355
reuther/Maida). Mit ihrem musikalisch wie intellektuell berzeugenden Deutungsversuch setzen Ammer & Einheit den Mastab,
an dem popkulturelle Reflektionen der RAF bis heute zu messen
sind.
Auch durch die Mode geistert das RAF-Gespenst. Das
Designer-Label Professor Head benutzt das Foto der Pistole von
Andreas Baader fr eine Werbekampagne und die Illustrierte Tussi
Deluxe druckte Fotos, in denen Kleidungsstcke mit nachgestellten
Szenen aus der Geschichte der RAF beworben werden.3
Die Idee des bewaffneten Kampfes, so Rupert Weinzierl, wird als letztmgliche
groe berschreitung, als letztmglicher Tabubruch, letztmgliche sthetische
Sensation & letztmgliches Dissidenz-Reservoir gefeiert. [] Diese Verkultung des
Stadtguerilla-Pathos erscheint im Feld Pop umso kurioser, als die RAF als Gruppe
dogmatischer MarxistInnen-LeninIstinnen mit Popkultur nichts zu tun haben
wollte. (Weinzierl, 58)
Subversion, Rebellion und Revolution sind im Pop von Anbeginn an

gelufige Topoi, denn, wie Weinzierl weiter ausfhrt, revolutionrer
Gestus und terroristische Militanz [haben] mit ihrem politisch eher
unklar-theologischen Charakter hohe Popkompatibilitt (Weinziel,
60).4 Das ursprnglich dissidente Potential der Popkultur jedoch
wurde sptestens seit den achtziger Jahren durch die Kulturindustrie
fast gnzlich assimiliert und umgepolt. Der Mainstream integrierte die
subversiven Subkulturen, um sie zu zhmen und in den eigenen Dienst
zu stellen. Eine Art umgekehrter Marsch durch die Institutionen
gewissermaen. Das erklrt die Notwendigkeit und Rolle revolutionrer Symbolik im Pop. Die RAF mute als mythisierbares Gespenst
3
4
Vgl. dazu Mohr. Wer sich die durch radical chic veredelte Mode nicht leisten
kann, bekommt auf Londoner Straenmrkten billige T-Shirts mit dem
Aufdruck des RAF-Logos.
Vgl. auch die Interviewuerungen von Inga Humpe (D F/2-Raum-Wohnung):
Die einzigen, die fr mich so einen Popstarappeal hatten, das waren die Leute
von der RAF. Da war ich Fan. Fr mich waren das Helden. Das waren die
einzigen, denen ich zugetraut habe, da sie wirklich etwas ndern wollen (in
Teipel, 69), aber auch Gabi Delgado (DAF): Ich hatte immer eine Affinitt zu
Menschen, die gewaltbereit sind. Mir haben auch die Uniformen der Polizisten
besser gefallen als die der Demonstranten. Vom Styling her haben mir die
Bullen imponiert. [] Ich fand es viel besser, denen, die da sitzen, auf den
Kopf zu hauen. Nur so von der sthetik her (Teipel, 74).
356
Uwe Schtte
wiederauferstehen, um auf symbolischer Ebene die Leerstelle zu fllen,

die die Neutralisierung der dissidenten Komponente des Pop geschaffen
hat.5 Mit der falschen Pose des Revolutionren maskiert die Kulturindustrie ihren auf Profit und Konsumenten-Konformismus gerichteten Charakter.
Diese kulturindustrielle Ineinssetzung von Pop und Revolution,
folgt man Gerhard Pretting, hat entscheidende Konsequenzen. Pretting
behauptet, da
jede revolutionre Idee heute nur noch Pop ist. Die Subversion ist auerhalb
eines konomischen Verwertungszusammenhangs, der den Code des Widersprchlichen sofort wieder in den Wirtschaftskreislauf integriert, nicht mehr
vorstellbar. [] Nachdem man dem Volk so lang die Illusion der Partizipation,
des IHR seid das Volk eingeredet hatte, war jeder Anschlag auf Reprsentanten des Staates ein symbolischer Anschlag auf jeden einzelnen. Minimales
Ereignis maximale Wirkung. Und genau deswegen ist der Terror heute nur
noch als symbolisches Pop-Produkt vorhanden, als radical chic. [] Nur wer
mit terroristischen Mitteln handelt (minimaler symbolischer Aufwand maximale reale Wirkung, maximale mediale Prsenz, Verkrzung der Inhalte etc.)
hat noch Erfolg. Alles andere interessiert niemanden mehr. Es gibt keinen
politischen Terror mehr, weil die Gesellschaft selbst durch und durch
terroristisch ist. (Pretting, 8)
Was hat das mit der Literatur zu tun? Texte, die sich mit der RAF
beschftigen, sind vor diesem Hintergrund darauf zu befragen, wie sie
sich zu dem Kooptierungsbestreben der Kulturindustrie verhalten.
Sind sie, wie etwa der Roman von Scholz, Teil der surrogathaften
Inszenierung von Revolution? Einer konsequenzlos bleibenden Feier
des Widerstndischen, die politische Vernderungsvorstellungen in
sthetisches Wohlgefallen transformiert? Oder enthalten die Texte zur
RAF Momente, die sich dem Neutralisierungsprojekt widersetzen? Ist
es in der Literatur vielleicht sogar mglich, einen autonomen Raum zu
Tom Holert und Mark Terkessidis argumentieren, Pop sei mittlerweile die
reprsentative Lge einer Gesellschaft, die in ihrer scheinbaren Diversifizierung
die ungeheuerlichste Kapitalkonzentration erlebt, und die in ihrer scheinbaren
Freiheit die scheulichsten Formen von Ausbeutung und Ausschlu einfhrt.
Die einzelnen Pop-Produkte dienen ebenso wie Architektur, Kunst etc.
der sthetischen Selbstdefinition der Kontrollgesellschaft (Holert/Terkessidis,
1718).
357
schaffen, der den politischen Radikalismus der RAF in einer

adquaten literarischer Form zu spiegeln vermag?
Aus dem mittlerweile umfangreichen Korpus von literarischen
Texten, die die RAF explizit behandeln bzw. ihr thematisch nahestehen, will ich mich nun im wesentlichen auf im Laufe der neunziger
Jahre erschienene Prosawerke beschrnken.6 Dies nicht allein aus
pragmatischen Grnden, sondern auch weil die Texte der im weitesten
Sinn Nachgeborenen sich unterscheiden von denen der Ersten
Generation von Schriftstellern, die sich mit der RAF beschftigten.
Damit gemeint sind so unterschiedliche Autoren wie Heinrich Bll,
Erich Fried, Bernward Vesper, Christian Geissler, Peter O.
Chotjewitz, Peter Schneider, Peter-Paul Zahl oder Peter-Jrgen
Boock, da sie in mehr oder weniger enger Verbindung zum
Personenkreis der extremen Linke standen, und ihre Texte daher oft in
unmittelbarer Reaktion auf (tages)politische Ereignisse verfaten.
(Vgl. Dombrowa/Knebel)
Anders hingegen Autoren wie Michael Wildenhain, Friedrich
Christian Delius, Elfriede Jelinek oder Rainald Goetz, von denen im
weiteren die Rede sein wird. Wenn sie ber die RAF schreiben, so
geschieht dies immer aus Distanz, lebenszeitlicher oder geografischer.7 Bezeichnenderweise ist die literarische Auseinandersetzung
mit der RAF ab 1987 (aber auch schon vorher) fast ausschlielich auf
den Personenkreis der Ersten Generation und die Ereignisse im
6
Den eigentlichen Wendepunkt wird dabei das Jahr 1987, also gleichsam der 10.
Jahrestag des Deutschen Herbstes bilden. Es gehrt zu den Charakteristika der
kulturellen Auseinandersetzung mit der RAF im weitesten Sinne, da diese sich
um die Jubilen 1987 und 1997 intensivieren.
Sie schreiben ber ein Kollektiv, da lngst zu einem Phantom geworden war,
nachdem durch den Zusammenbruch der DDR fast die gesamte Zweite
Generation der RAF in Haft geriet. Zwar setzte sich die Geschichte der RAF in
Form der sogenannten Dritten Generation bis in die neunziger Jahre nominell fort,
doch sind Zweifel angebracht, inwieweit man angesichts geheimdienstlicher
Infiltrierung des linksterroristischen Umfelds ab Mitte der achtziger Jahre
berhaupt noch von einer RAF sprechen kann. Vgl. dazu Wiesnewski et al.
Die darin vorgetragenen Thesen sind zum Teil heftig angegriffen worden und
bedrfen in der Tat gewisser Vorsicht, was Details betrifft, die generelle
Richtigkeit ihres Arguments ist angesichts der groen Zahl von Indizien kaum
von der Hand zu weisen. In Kellmann, Der Staat lt morden wird anhand
faktischer Beweise die Involvierung des CIA in die Brigate Rosse und seine
Rolle bei der Ermordung von Aldo Moro demonstriert.
358
Uwe Schtte
Umfeld des Deutschen Herbstes beschrnkt. Worber die

nachgeborenen Autoren schreiben, ist nicht die aktive RAF, wie sie
die Schriftsteller der Ersten Generation erlebten, sondern das ber
die Medien, sowie Fotografien8 und Kunstwerke (Gillen, 406435)
vermittelte Bild der Terrorgruppe. Sie schreiben, kurzgesagt, ber den
Mythos der RAF.
Klaus Theweleit hat kritisiert, da die berwiegende Mehrheit
der Kunstwerke aller Sparten, in denen die RAF zum Gegenstand der
Darstellung gemacht wird, von einem abstrakten Radikalismus
geprgt ist. Damit, so Theweleit, wiederholt sich in der Kunst ein
Phnomen, das seinen strukturellen Ursprung im konkreten linkspolitischen Umfeld Anfang der Siebziger besitzt. Als Folge des
Verfalls der Studentenrevolte trat ein Radikalismus auf,
der sich auf Gesten, auf Ansprche, auf Forderungen beschrnkt, revolutionre
Haltungen verbreitet in Stzen, Parolen, dabei Analysen kaum mehr durchfhrt.
Der Anspruch einer gewissen Realitts-Kompatibilitt verschwand komplett.
Zu stimmen hatte etwas nur noch in einem abstrakten Sinn. Das Konkrete
wanderte aus aus der linksradikalen Politik. (Theweleit, 35)
Gerhard Richters Zyklus 18. Oktober 1977 wird von Theweleit als
Beispiel fr solch einen pseudoradikalen Umgang mit der RAF
angefhrt:
Die Angst [] mit der eigenen Produktion in Belanglosigkeiten zu verfallen
nimmt sich einen Komplex wie die RAF zum Sujet nicht wegen einer
bereinstimmung mit ihren Zielen oder Ideen, sondern aus einer abstrakten
Identifikation mit deren exzeptioneller Lage. (Theweleit, 68)
Als ein anderes Motiv fr die Anrufung der RAF sieht Theweleit das
Bedrfnis der Abgrenzung, sich nicht gemein zu machen mit der
staatlichen Verfolgung und dem herrschenden hetzenden Kleingeist
(Theweleit, 71).9 Um eine Form von Identifikation also, die ihren
eigentlichen Kern nicht in einer tatschlichen Solidaritt mit den
8
9
Proll, Hans und Grete versammelt die emblematischsten Fotografien zur

Geschichte der RAF.
Als Beispiele nennt er u.a. Claus Peymanns Anti-Distanzierungs-Zettel am
Schwarzen Brett der Kantine des Stuttgarter Staatstheaters und Vlado Kristls
Gemlde Die Verhaftung der Ulrike Meinhof.
359
RAF-Kadern besitzt, sondern einen Akt der Selbstilisierung darstellt.

Grundlegendes Merkmal des abstrakten Radikalismus ist also ein
immanenter, auf die eigene Person oder Kunstproduktion gerichteter
bertragungsproze, in dem einseitig das Symbolreservoir RAF
identifikatorisch angezapft wird, der vampiristische Knstler als
brgerliche Person aber bewut im Kontext der staatlichen Rechtsordnung verbleibt.
Rosenfest von Leander Scholz darf so verstanden als ein Exempel
fr das von Theweleit beschriebene Phnomen gelten. Michael
Wildenhain hingegen benutzt in seinem 1997 erschienenen Roman
Erste Liebe Deutscher Herbst die Vorgnge des Jahres 1977 lediglich
als Hintergrundfolie. Der gerade volljhrig gewordene Ich-Erzhler
des Romans hat als Bester seines Jahrgangs Abitur gemacht und steht
vor der Entscheidung, was er mit seinem Leben anfangen soll. Die
Ereignisse des Deutschen Herbstes nimmt er zwar bewut wahr, doch
bleiben sie zunchst ohne konkrete Auswirkungen auf sein Leben. Im
Gegensatz zum Protagonisten beteiligen sich die drei weiteren Hauptfiguren des Romans an dem politischen Auseinandersetzungen: seine
Freundin Barbara radikalisiert sich und wird bald verhaftet, die
Lehrerin Manon zieht sich unter dem Druck eines Berufsverbotes aus
dem politischen Engagement zurck und der Mitschler Schpps
entwickelt ausgefeilte Umsturzplne, verfgt aber nicht ber die
Willenskraft, seine Vorhaben in die Praxis umzusetzen. Der Fokus des
Romans liegt jedoch nicht auf dem Politischen, sondern dem Privaten,
also der Darstellung der Liebeswirren und der rites de passages ins
Erwachsenenleben. Anders als bei Scholz erscheint die RAF und das
Projekt des revolutionrem Umsturzes in einem eher negativen Licht.
Protagonist wie Erzhler bleiben distanziert, wenn etwa Schpp seine
Geschichtsphilosophie dozierend darlegt:
Groe Persnlichkeiten htten in der Geschichte immer wieder als Katalysatoren gewirkt. Danach erwhnte Schpp die Rote Armee Fraktion. Ja, sagte
ich, und nickte. In ihr, der Stadtguerilla, sei verwirklicht, was notwendig wre:
Handlungen msse man aus Axiomen ableiten knnen. Ja, sagte ich, und nickte.
(Wildenhain, 171)
Steht Schpps fr den intellektuellen, sich in abstrakten, neoleninistischen Gedankenspielen verlierenden Zugang zur RAF, so
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Uwe Schtte
verkrpert Barbara die sinnliche, krperbetonte Assoziation mit

Linksradikalismus, der fr sie ein Mittel zur Flucht aus einem
repressiven Elternhaus wird. In einer Szene liest sie dem Protagonisten
erst aus den Aufzeichnungen eines zwangsernhrten RAF-Hftlings
vor und fordert ihren Freund dann auf: Komm her, [...] Und tu mir
weh (Wildenhain, 124). Als sie spter in der Haftanstalt vom IchErzhler besucht wird, treibt sie sich mit Absicht einen Holzsplitter in den
Finger: Unter Barbaras Nagel am Zeigefinger quoll ein Tropfen Blut
hervor. Siehst du, sagte Barbara, wir sind noch da (Wildenhain,
173).
Die wirklichkeitsfremde Theoretisiererei von Schpps und der
selbstzerstrerische Masochismus von Barbara lassen sich als Kritik
an Theorie und Praxis der RAF deuten, deren kollektives Scheitern
von Wildenhain im individuellen Scheitern seiner alltglichen Figuren
vorgefhrt wird. Ohne massiv auf das Symbolreservoir RAF zurckzugreifen, gelingt ihm auf subtile Weise gerade aufgrund der
kritischen Distanz ein durchaus zutreffender Kommentar der
Terroristengruppe. Doch dabei bleibt es. Wildenhain leistet keine
irgendwie geartete Analyse der RAF. Vielmehr bleibt die Stadtguerilla
aufgrund der klaren Unterordnung unter die Ebene des Entwicklungsromans ein fast schon beliebiges Versatzstck, da der Roman, mit
minimalen nderungen, auch im Jahre 1968 htte spielen knnen.
Ist also die Marginalisierung der RAF der Preis, den man
zahlen mu, um die stilisierende Vereinnahmung revolutionrer
Symbolik zu vermeiden? Eine Antwort darauf gibt Friedrich Christian
Delius.
Delius ist einer der wenigen Gegenwartsautoren, die sich
wiederholt und ber einen lngeren Zeitraum mit der RAF
auseinandergesetzt haben. Seine aus den Romanen Ein Held der
inneren Sicherheit (1981), Mogadischu, Fensterplatz (1987) und
Himmelfahrt eines Staatsfeindes (1992) bestehende Trilogie
unternimmt eine stilistisch wie perspektivisch variable Darstellung des
Deutschen Herbstes. Ich mchte hier ausschlielich den letzten Roman
besprechen, nicht nur weil er aufgrund seines Erscheinungsjahres zu
den RAF-Texten der Neunziger gehrt, sondern vor allem, weil Delius
darin eine durchaus einmalige Form der Darstellung whlt. Franz
Futterknecht beurteilt die Himmelfahrt eines Staatsfeindes als eine[n]
der ambitisesten Romane von Delius. Dem entspricht eine komplexe
361
Erzhlstruktur, die eine Vielzahl von narrativen Perspektiven vernetzt,

die sich wechselseitig komplementieren, kommentieren, relativieren
und dekonstruieren (Futterknecht, 78). Himmelfahrt eines Staatsfeindes
liefert eine zwischen Groteske, Satire und Tragdie changierende
Schilderung des Begrbnisses der Stammheimer Selbstmrder. Die
Beisetzungen jedoch finden nicht, wie in Wirklichkeit, auf dem
Stuttgarter Waldfriedhof statt, sondern als ein feierliches Staatsbegrbnis in der BKA-Stadt Wiesbaden. Begleitet von einem
Polizeiorchester werden die geschmckten Srge der Terroristen zu
den Ehrengrbern geleitet, ein volksfestartiges Ereignis, das per TV
live in alle Haushalte Deutschlands bertragen wird. Der Regierungssprecher erklrt dem Korrespondenten des Daily Mirror dazu:
Unsere Politik ist bestimmt vom Gedanken der Vershnung und des Abbaus
von Gewalt, bestimmt von der Absage an den unchristlichen Geist der Rache.
[...] Wer tot ist, ist tot, und damit ist die Vergangenheit erloschen. Und sie
drfen es gern als Zeichen fr die politische Reife der jungen deutschen
Demokratie werten, wie schnell ein Satz wie Im Tod hrt alle Feindschaft auf
sich verbreitete, ja binnen weniger Tage eine allgemeine Bekehrung auslste.
[...] Wer je an der Vershnungsbereitschaft unseres Volkes zweifelte, ist in
diesen Tagen eines Besseren belehrt worden. Darum haben auch Politiker von
Regierung und Opposition, hchste Polizeibeamte und Juristen nicht gezgert,
dem Ha ein Ende zu machen und die harte Linie mit einer groen Geste der
Milde zu krnen, mit diesem feierlichen Begrbnis. (Delius, 4556)
Kommentiert werden die wahrlich gespenstischen Vorgnge vom

Geist des untoten Andreas Baader, der im Roman Sigurd Nagel heit
und fr ein paar Sekundenstunden (Delius, 442) als Wiedergnger
eine Schonfrist zwischen Himmel und Hlle geniet. Delius hat in
einem Interview erklrt, er habe sich bewut vom Realismus
abgewandt, [u]m durch das Verfremden dieses Dokumentarischen,
durch die groe Umkehrung mehr von der Wahrheit hervorzukitzeln
als das, was bisher in den ganz fleiigen Sachbchern berall stand
(Zrcher, 13). So wird bei Delius die fast schon symbiotische
Beziehung zwischen Baader und Herold, welche Dorothea Hauser
ausfhrlich in ihrer 1997 erschienenen Doppelbiografie dokumentiert
hat, in berspitzter Form durch eine Szene vorgefhrt, in der die
beiden Kontrahenten sich in einer so symbolischen wie erotischen
Begegnung durch einen Zungenku vereinigen. (Vgl. Delius, 630.)
362
Uwe Schtte
Das provokative Potential des Romans resultiert aus der Bezugnahme nicht auf das Symbolreservoir der RAF, sondern des
Christentums. Delius erweist sich als einer der wenigen Autoren, die
den messianischen Aspekt der RAF erkannt haben. Der Opfertod macht
die Terroristen zu Katalysatoren eines geradezu heilsgeschichtlichen
Prozesses. Die Grablegung der Toten wird zum Auferstehungstag der
BRD als einer in jeder Hinsicht geluterten, lebendigen Demokratie.
Delius schafft dergestalt ein aus komplex verschachtelten Ironien
bestehendes Szenario, denn der Suizid der Terroristen lste in der Tat
eine beachtliche Folgereaktion aus, wenngleich es kaum der von den
Stammheimern intendierte revolutionre Volksaufstand war. Die BRD
wiederum zeigt am Ende des Guerillakampfes nicht ihr wahrhaft
faschistisches Gesicht, wie von den Terroristen erhofft, sondern
entpuppt sich vielmehr als die von freiheitlichen Idealen geprgte
Staatsform einer wahrhaft gerechten Gesellschaft, fr die die BaaderMeinhof-Gruppe einst selbst in den Kampf zog und von der in
feierlichen Bundestagsansprachen gerne die Rede ist.
Es gehrt jedoch zu den Qualitten des Romans von Delius, da
das hier kurz skizzierte Bild von anderen Erzhlebenen wieder
relativiert wird. Neben dem vom redseligen Geist Baaders dominierten Erzhlstrang lt Delius in Form eines Tonbandprotokolls
auch eine aussteigebereite Terroristin zu Wort kommen, die in einem
Versteck in Luxemburg ihre Verhaftung erwartet. Ihr Monolog
entblt die autoritren Strukturen innerhalb der Gruppe und
dokumentiert den unbarmherzigen Rigorismus im Denken der
Stadtguerilla. Dieser deutlichen Kritik der RAF an die Seite stellt
Delius zwei weitere Erzhlebenen, die zeigen wie ein auslndisches
Mitglied der Untersuchungskommission zum Tod von Gudrun Ensslin
von den deutschen Behrden gezielt behindert wird, sowie einen
Strang, der anhand der Person des obersten Terroristenverfolgers
vorfhrt, da die Trauerfeierlichkeiten in Wirklichkeit nur ein
geschickt inszeniertes staatliches Tuschungsmanver sind, um bisher
ungefate Terroristen anzulocken und verhaften zu knnen.
Delius Roman beeindruckt nicht nur durch seine komplexe
Struktur und die Polyphonie unterschiedlicher Sprachebenen, sondern
vornehmlich durch den aufklrerischen Gestus des Autors, der als
Intellektueller versucht, den autonomen Spielraum der Literatur als
Experimentierfeld zur Unterminierung des gesellschaftlichen Kon-
363
senses zu nutzen. Operativ fr dieses Unterfangen ist bezeichnenderweise die Figur des italienischen Literaturwissenschaftlers Serratta.
Neben seiner (behrdlich vereitelten) Ttigkeit als Sachverstndiger
der Ensslin-Untersuchungskommission, arbeitet er an einer Fragment
bleibenden Skizze, die den Titel trgt: Verbrecher, die gegen
Verbrecher kmpfen. In deren Zentrum steht die Schleyer-Entfhrung
als emblematisches Ereignis fr die widerstreitende, ein eindeutiges
Urteil verunmglichende Konstellation der Auseinandersetzung zwischen der RAF und ihren Gegnern: Die einen, die, wie man zu ihren
Gunsten annehmen darf, in bester Absicht kriminelle Nazis wurden,
treffen auf Gegner, die vor allem kriminell wurden, weil sie, wie man
zu ihren Gunsten annehmen darf, in bester Absicht keine Nazis
werden wollen (Delius, 578).
Vermittelt durch die Figur des italienischen Germanisten gibt
Delius etwa zu bedenken, da Jrgen Ponto zwei Tage nach seiner
Ermordung einen Antrittsbesuch bei der grten kriminellen
Vereinigung der siebziger Jahre, der Regierung Chiles, machen
wollte, die das Tausendfache an Morden und Verbrechen begangen
hat wie die kleine Rebellenarmee (Delius, 5812). Schleyer, der im
Roman Bttinger heit, wird wiederholt als Verbrecher apostrophiert,
wie auch dem Krisenstab um Helmut Schmidt attestiert wird nicht
gegen die Nazis gekmpft [zu haben], einige waren als Soldaten an
soldatischen Morden und anderen Verbrechen beteiligt (Delius, 580).
Serratta deutet die harte Linie der Regierung daher als eine Form des
Exorzismus von historischer Last:
Gerade indem [die Regierung] das ehemalige Mitglied der alten kriminellen
Vereinigung den Mitgliedern der neuen Vereinigung [...] berlt, macht sie die
Propaganda der Entfhrer lcherlich. Eine bessere Gelegenheit, einige der
faschistischen Wurzeln des Staates und ebenso das schlechte Gewissen ber
dieses Erbe loszuwerden, gibt es nicht. So wird unter Berufung auf die
Prinzipien des Rechtsstaates, der Staat zum Komplizen. (Delius, 581)
Delius versucht einen Beitrag zur politischen Bildung zu leisten, nicht

eine Stilisierung des Autors als radikales Subjekt zu inszenieren. Trotz
eines deutlichen Bemhens um eine differenzierte, vorurteilsfreie
Annherung an den RAF-Komplex bleibt eine kritische Distanz,
welche die Validitt der intendierten Aussagen beglaubigt und Delius
in einem intellektuellen Feld verortet, das beiden Fraktionen kritisch
364
Uwe Schtte
gegenbersteht. Seine sthetische Grundlage jedoch verbleibt ganz im

konventionellen Ansatz Brechtscher Manier, da die literarische
Verfremdung der Schlssel zu einem besseren Verstndnis der
politischen Realitt sein kann.
Elfriede Jelinek hingegen hat 1990 mit Wolken. Heim. einen Text
von weitaus radikalerer sthetik und einer zugleich beachtlichen
Provokationskraft vorgelegt.10 Bereits die Gattungszuordnung wirft
gewisse Probleme auf. Zwar handelt es sich bei dem Text um ein
(wiederholt aufgefhrtes) Theaterstck, doch reicht der von einem
chorartigen Wir gesprochene Monolog auf Grund seiner Musikalitt
und versepischen Form formal in die Lyrik hinein. In einer das
verwendete Zitatmaterial fast durchweg adaptierenden Montage
vermischt Jelinek Textpassagen aus den Hymnen und Oden von
Hlderlin, aus Dramen Kleists, aus Fichtes Reden an die deutsche
Nation, aus Hegels Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Geschichte,
sowie aus Heideggers berchtigter Rektoratsrede, den Tagebchern
Goebbels und den Briefen der RAF aus den Jahren 1973 bis 1977.
Diese Amalgamierung von Texten der letzten 200 Jahre, aus
heterogenen Diskursen und mit gegenstzlicher politischer Ausrichtung, resultiert in einem eigentmlichen Stck Literatur, das
vielstimming und monolithisch zugleich ist. Indem Jelinek der
Sprache anderer Gewalt antut, entsteht ein sprachgewaltiges Gebilde
ber die Sprache der Gewalt. Es stellt nicht nur die Rezipienten vor
Probleme, sondern zeigt mit seiner inkommensurablen Komponente
auch die Grenzen der Applizierbarkeit von Theweleits Konzept des
abstrakten Radikalismus fr die Literatur auf. Und dies, interessanterweise, indem der Text den Terminus von Theweleit gewissermaen wrtlich nimmt.
Indem nmlich die Mehrzahl der von Jelinek verwendeten
Hypotexte dem Diskurs der Philosophie, genauer gesagt: der Tradition
des deutschen Idealismus angehren, unternimmt die Autorin einen
radikalen Umgang mit abstrakten Texten. Fernab jeglicher Identifizierung
mit den grands recits der Philosophiegeschichte exponiert sie deren
chauvinistische, rassistische und nationalistische Zge. Dergestalt
wird eine Entwicklungslinie gezogen, die ihren Ursprung in den
10
Vgl. die Darstellung der fast durchweg negativen Rezeption in der Tageskritik
in: Polt-Heinzle (44).
365
philosophischen Begrndungen des Deutschtums besitzt, etwa

Fichtes Darlegung des Authentischen der deutschen Sprache
gegenber den Sprachen der Auslnder, oder Hegels mit rassistischem Vokabular begrndete Minderwertigkeit der Neger. Heideggers Rechtfertigung des Nationalsozialismus fhrt die Konsequenzen
der Verfhrbarkeit Intellektueller vor. Die RAF schlielich entpuppt
sich als Endpunkt der von Jelinek skizzierten Entwicklung. Sie
verstand sich als Reaktion auf die unmenschlichen Verbrechen der
Nazis, fhrte deren totalitren Geist aber in ihrer eigenen inhumanen
Sprache und rigidem Denken, wie auch ihren mrderischen
Methoden fort.
Radikal abstrakt ist Wolken. Heim. des weiteren, weil darin nicht
nur der literarische Realismus verabschiedet wird, sondern auch keine
Namen oder identifizierbare Personen auftauchen. Statt dessen
herrscht lediglich das polyphone Murmeln sich berlagernder
Diskurse. Der Text bedarf also keines vampirischen Zugriffs auf ein
Symbolreservoir, vielmehr impliziert er, da nicht Personen, sondern
Ideen das Agens der Geschichte sind. Diese These fortfhrend liee
sich argumentieren, da das wahrhaftig Radikale nicht in actiones
directes, sondern im Denken, bzw. dessen Kommunizierung in Form
von Sprache/Schrift beheimatet ist.11 Wie auch in anderen Texten
Jelineks dient Hlderlin als zentrale Quelle an Zitatmaterial. (Vgl.
Burdorf.) Dessen Anwesenheit im vielstimmigen Chor der Sprechenden
stellt die Interpreten von Wolken. Heim. oft vor Deutungsprobleme, die
gelst werden, indem man, wie Marlies Janz, dem kollektiven,
chauvinistisch-nationalistischen Wir der Deutschen eine solche
Assimilationskraft zuschreibt, da es smtliche Diskurse, selbst den
linksradikalen der RAF und den poetisch autonomen eines Hlderlin,
problemlos zu absorbieren vermag (Janz, 1234).
Dem gegenber soll jetzt kurz eine Lesart von Wolken. Heim. als
RAF-Text vorschlagen werden, die den vermeintlich marginalen
linksradikalen Diskurs ins Zentrum rckt. Das anonyme Wir mte
so als das Ensemble der verstorbenen Stammheimer identifiziert
werden. Jelineks Verfahren der reduzierenden, z. T. auch bereitwillig
entstellenden Zitierweise, die etwa Hegel als virulenten Rassisten
11
Insofern stellt sich Jelinek natrlich selbst in gewisser Weise in die idealistische
Tradition.
366
Uwe Schtte
erscheinen lt, entspricht dabei der einseitigen Weltsicht der

Stadtguerilla. Nimmt man eine diskursive Dominanz der RAF in
Wolken. Heim. an, so wird auch der wiederholte Rekurs auf den
Jakobiner Hlderlin und das emanzipatorische Potential seiner
Dichtung durchaus widerspruchslos. Indem Hlderlin derartig mit der
RAF kurzgeschlossen wird, legt der Text eine quivalenz, wenngleich
keine Kongruenz, zwischen Wort und Tat, Geistigem und Krperlichem, dem berdauernden und dem Augenblicklichen nahe. Das liest
sich dann so:
Komm, ins Offne, Freund, komm in die Erde! Sei bei uns! La dich
festschnallen und Nahrung durch den Schlauch flieen! Nur herunter zu uns,
und eng schlieet der Himmel uns ein. Trb ist es heut, es schlummern die
Gng und die Gassen, und fast will mir scheinen, es sei, als in der bleiernen
Zeit. (Jelinek, 401)
Wolken. Heim. von der RAF her zu lesen, macht nicht zuletzt auch
deshalb Sinn, weil sie chronologisch der Gegenwart am nchsten
steht. Die Terroristen haben im Suizid das Scheitern ihres Kampfes
erfahren und blicken gleich dem im Text kurz aufgerufenen
Benjaminschen Engel der Geschichte auf die, in diesem Fall,
geistesgeschichtliche Katastrophe der Deutschen zurck. Doch der
vernichterische Sturm der Historie blst auch fr die irrlichternden
RAF-Toten unaufhrlich weiter: Auf der Erde kommen wir nicht zur
Ruh, noch als Begrabene bleiben wir gegenwrtig, und wir kommen
wieder, wir kommen wieder! Der Boden ist unser bergang, hinber
ans Ende der Zeiten. Das Ende der Geschichte ist uns milungen
(Jelinek, 24). Dieses Scheitern lt sich primr verstehen als
Milingen der Zielsetzungen der RAF, nicht zuletzt aber auch als
Absage an das optimistische Geschichtsprojekt des deutschen
Idealismus.
Gegen den allgemein als unvermeidbar akzeptierten oder
politisch verbrmten Destruktionsproze der Geschichte, der auf den
Ersten Weltkrieg den Zweiten Weltkrieg folgen lie, und auf diese die
Kriege in Korea und Vietnam, und so weiter, wollte sich die RAF in
einem Akt individueller Selbstbehauptung zur Wehr setzen, denn, mit
Kleist: Nicht jeden Schlag ertragen soll der Mensch, und welchen
Gott fat, denk ich, der darf sinken (Jelinek, 26). Kmpfen, fr ein
367
besseres Deutschland, eine bessere Welt. Das Mao-Motto Dem Volke

dienen! setzte die RAF daher einer ihrer frhen Programmschriften
voran. In Wolken. Heim. liest sich das, mit Hlderlin, so: O nehmt
uns, nehmt uns mit in die Reihen auf, damit wir einst nicht sterben
gemeinen Tods! Umsonst zu sterben, lieben wir nicht, doch lieben
wir, zu fallen am Opferhgel frs Vaterland, zu bluten des Herzens
Blut frs Vaterland (Jelinek, 267). Was die RAF dabei aber nicht
realisierte, war, da sie selber durch ihren Kampf an der unglckseligen
chauvinistischen Tradition ihres Vaterlandes teilhatte, da sie nicht
befreite, sondern nur grere Unfreiheit und Tod stiftete.
Wolken. Heim. erkennt die zentrale und in ihrer Symbolhaltigkeit
berdauernde Relevanz der RAF, weil sie sich nicht nur in die
Populrkultur, sondern auch unauslschlich in die deutsche Geistesgeschichte eingeschrieben hat. So zumindest deute ich die Stze, mit
denen der Text beginnt: Da glauben wir immer, wir wren ganz
auerhalb. Und dann stehen wir pltzlich in der Mitte. Heilige, die im
Dunkel leuchten (Jelinek, 9).
Rainald Goetz gilt sptestens seit seinem spektakulren Schnitt in
die Stirn als so etwas wie ein Experte fr das Radikale in der Literatur.
Sein Roman Kontrolliert aus dem Jahr 1988 ist das wohl komplexeste
Erzhlwerk, das bisher zur RAF erschienen ist und erfordert eine
zweifellos eingehendere Analyse, als die folgenden Hinweise
darstellen, welche im Kontext des bisher Errterten lediglich einige
stichpunktartige Schlaglichter auf den Text werfen sollen.
Goetz hat wie kein anderer Schriftsteller die Verwandtschaft
zwischen den Diskursen der Popmusik und des Terrorismus erkannt.
Mit Live is life und You gotta fight for your right to party als Motti
zitiert Goetz zwei Chart-Erfolge, die in ihrer Oberflchlichkeit den
trivialisierend-entfremdeten Umgang mit der RAF spiegeln. Der
Abschnitt ber ein Konzert der britischen Avantgardeband Spacemen
3 hingegen erffnet in der Beschreibung der kreischenden Feedbackklnge die Mglichkeit von authentischem Ausdruck in der Popmusik:
Ha und Kraft gehen der Musik nicht aus, die Nummern dauern, bis die
Schnheit klar ist (Goetz, 267). Nicht mehr der bewaffnete Kampf,
sondern Popmusik wie die von Spacemen 3 wird zur befreienden Formel
fr ein Leben vor dem Tod fr alle (Goetz, 186). In den
Popzusammenhang gehrt auch die gezielte Verwendung von RAFSymbolik. Das Buchcover ziert ein miniaturisiertes Foto von Goetz
368
Uwe Schtte
vor dem Kalaschnikow-Symbol der RAF. Die Anspielung auf die

Bilder des entfhrten Schleyer konstatiert und parodiert zugleich die
Mythologisierung der RAF durch mediale Symbole. Indem Goetz sich
auf geschmacklose Weise den selbstilisierenden Techniken des
abstrakten Radikalismus bedient, ironisiert und berwindet er sie.
Auch im Roman von Goetz werden diverseste Diskurse, einschlielich Zitaten aus RAF-Schriften (Goetz, 247) amalgamiert,
jedoch nicht in einer Jelinek vergleichbaren Form der Montage. Der
entscheidende Unterschied zu anderen Texten liegt darin, da Goetz
durch seinen aus klaustrophobischen Schachtelstzen, obskuren
Neologismen und sprachlichen Idiosynkrasien bestehenden Stil die
Textverfahren der RAF emuliert, anstatt die Sprache der Terroristen
zu simulieren. Formal entsteht dadurch kein Abklatsch des RAFDiskurses. hnlich wie bei Jelinek wird die Sprache der RAF
erkennbar, und doch poetisch aufgehoben in einen anderen
Sprachraum, den der Literatur, nahtlos integriert. Der Verschmelzung
von Radikalem und Literarischem auf formaler Ebene korrespondiert
auch inhaltlich eine enge Verbindung zwischen den Feldern der Kunst
und der Politik. Goetz schpft den Autonomieraum der Literatur aus,
um auf radikale Weise ber die Bundesrepublik und den Deutschen
Herbst nachzudenken. Schleyer wird als Arbeiterausbeuter und
Mrder bezeichnet, die Regierung ist sozialdemokratischer Dreck
(Goetz, 247), fhrende Gangster der Wirtschaft lassen sich von
Brauchitsch vertreten (Goetz, 250), die Isolationshaft der Gefangenen
bedeutet Folter (Goetz, 256). All das wird nicht erklrt oder
gerechtfertigt, sondern als selbstverstndlich vorausgesetzt. [E]gal
wie mrderisch der Staat als Mrder dasteht, trotzdem passiert nichts,
keine Revolution bricht aus, kein konsequenter Terror brennt den
Staat endgltig kaputt (Goetz, 256), beklagt der Erzhler. Zugleich
werden die absurden Theorien der RAF hart angegriffen, der Ensslinschwachsinn, ihre Volksschullehrerinnenkleinschrift, die sprachlich
eine Lcherlichkeit ist, keine Revolution (Goetz, 93). Die Morde an
unschuldigen Fahrern und Polizisten, sowie an Schleyer werden
unmiverstndlich als falsch und verbrecherisch verurteilt.
Der promovierte Psychiater Goetz ist aufgrund seiner medizinischen
Qualifikation gleichsam prdestiniert, die antagonistischen Vorstellungen
von Staat und RAF in ihrer paranoiden Verzerrung der Wirklichkeit als
pathologische Wahnsysteme zu erkennen. Darber hinaus vermag er als
369
schreibender Mediziner sich der diesen Beruf eigenen Haltung zu

bedienen, eines unbestechlich-mitfhlenden Blicks, der gesellschaftliche
Krankheitserscheinungen wie den Deutschen Herbst sezierend genau
erfat. Durch diese Spannung unterscheidet sich Kontrolliert von allen
anderen RAF-Texten. Problembereiche wie das staatliche Gewaltmonopol, die Grenzen des Rechtsstaates oder ganz allgemein der
Definition von Demokratie knnen so gnzlich anders als in der
gewohnten Weise durchdacht werden. Der Roman stellt provozierende
Fragen, anstatt staatstragende Antworten zu liefern.
Kontrolliert ist nicht zuletzt ein Roman ber Literatur. Durch
intertextuelle Verwebungen sprechen literarische Texte Shakespeares
Hamlet, Frischs Stiller, Zorns Mars, etc. Doch Goetz geht weiter, er will
wissen, ob es eine konkrete Verbindung zwischen Literatur und Terror
geben kann. Er findet sie im Tod, genauer: dem Akt des Suizids, der
RAF und Literaten verbindet. Mit Bezug auf Uwe Johnson heit es
einmal: Man kann sich aber auch im Alkohol ertrnken, anstatt sich
an den Strick zu hngen (Goetz, 76). Der Wannseeselbstmrder
(Goetz, 280) Kleist, macht Goetz aufmerksam, wurde am 18. Oktober
1777 geboren. Auf den Tag genau 200 Jahre spter ging in
Stammheim der Tod um. Ein bloer Zufall, aber zugleich eine
faszinierende Kongruenz. In der radikalsten aller Erfahrungen, dem
sich selbst oder anderen zugefgten Tod, knnen Idee und Tat,
Abstraktion und Wirklichkeit, Denken und Handeln (Goetz, 263)
miteinander in Beziehung treten:
Das Wort Mord ist etwas ganz schn anderes, als die tatschliche Mordtat
bekanntlich, und die Wirklichkeit ist nicht von der wrtlichen Bezeichnung,
sondern vom wirklichen geschehenen echten politischen Mord fasziniert.
Faszinierend ist die Drohung, da diese zwei getrennten Dinge, Mord und
Mordwort, gerade weil sie getrennt sind, auch nicht getrennt sein knnten.
Diese Faszination zu leugnen, ist Lge, sich ihrer nicht zu bedienen, ein Fehler.
(Goetz, 263)
Ein Fehler, den Goetz in Kontrolliert nicht begeht. Sein Roman

zeichnet sich wie kein anderer Text nachgeborener Autoren durch
eine Fusion der gemeinhin als gegenstzlich verstandenen Bereiche
von Politik und Literatur aus, die dem politischen Radikalismus der
RAF einen literarischen Radikalismus an die Seite stellt. Entgegen den
quasi-zensorischen Dichotomisierungen, die den ffentlichen Diskurs
370
Uwe Schtte
ber die RAF bestimmten (und im Zeitalter des Kriegs gegen den
Terrorismus wieder in machtstrategischer Manier global aufleben),
entwirft der Roman von Goetz ein verstndniserweiterndes Netz der
verbrecherischen Verkettungen von Staat und Guerilla, versteht sich aber
deswegen zugleich als Aufforderung, den politischen Mythologisierungen, medialen Verflschungen und ideologischen Selbsttuschungen ber das Vorhaben eines emanzipierenden Kampfes
individualistisch entgegenzutreten. Wie Kontrolliert sowohl diskutiert als
auch am eigenen Beispiel vorfhrt, hat das Scheitern des
revolutionren Programms der RAF das extremistische Vorhaben
einer Reformierung des status quo mit allen mglichen Mitteln
durchaus nicht desavouiert. Vielmehr lt sich feststellen, da sich das
Projekt Gegenkultur hnlich wie die Aufklrung der ihm inhrenten
Dialektik bewut werden mu, wenn es sein utopisches Ziel erreichen
will.
Goetz Roman macht dazu ansatzweise Lsungsmglichkeiten
sichtbar. In Anlehnung an Walter Benjamin verweist er auf den
Bereich der populren Massenkultur als ein Feld, in dem Strategien
zur Infragestellung des gesellschaftlichen Konsenses ausgebildet und
erprobt werden knnen. Es gilt eine alle subversive Gegenkultur zu
entwickeln, die nicht wie die RAF den Weg der offenen Konfrontation
whlt, sondern die Kulturindustrie gleich einem Bazillus infiziert und
in ihrem Dissidenz neutralisierenden Potential schwcht. Nicht zuletzt
da die Verlagslandschaft in allen Lndern mittlerweile weitgehend in
den Griff multinationaler Unterhaltungskonzerne geraten ist, knnte
die Literatur dabei an der Vorfront stehen. In seiner Rede Der Autor
als Produzent hat Benjamin am Beispiel Brechts dargelegt, da der
gesellschaftliche Nutzen (und damit die Berechtigung) von Literatur
in der Solidaritt mit der Gruppe liegt, die frher das Proletariat
hie. An der Lage der sozial Benachteiligten aber, wie Benjamin
konzediert, ndert gutgemeinte Tendenzliteratur wenig, da der
brgerliche Produktions- und Publikationsapparat erstaunliche Mengen
von revolutionren Themen assimilieren, ja propagieren, ohne damit
seinen eigenen Bestand und den Bestand der ihn besitzenden Klasse
ernstlich in Frage zu stellen (Benjamin, 109). Tatschlichen sozialen
Fortschritt vermag nur solche Literatur zu erzeugen, die ihre Tendenz
in erster Linie auf den Bereich der Literatur und nicht der Politik
richtet:
371
Ein Autor, der die Schriftsteller nichts lehrt, lehrt niemanden. Also ist
magebend der Modellcharakter der Produktion, der andere Produzenten
erstens durch Produktion anzuleiten, zweitens einen verbesserten Apparat ihnen
zur Verfgung zu stellen vermag. Und zwar ist dieser Apparat umso besser, je
mehr er Konsumenten der Produktion zufhrt, kurz aus Lesern oder Zuschauern
Mitwirkende zu machen imstande ist. (Benjamin, 114)
Benjamin nennt als Beispiel fr eine solche modellhafte Literaturform

das epische Theater Brechts. Fr den Bereich der deutschsprachigen
Literatur, die sich mit dem Komplex der Roten Armee Fraktion
beschftigt, hat Rainald Goetz mit Kontrolliert ein nicht zu
unterschtzendes Vorbild geliefert. Sein Text ist Teil eines Projekts
Gegenkultur, das freilich nur allzu fragmentarisch besteht und dessen
Erfolgsaussichten denkbar gering sind. Doch es gehrt zu den Kennzeichen der Literatur, da in ihr die Utopie wie nirgends sonst in der
Kunst ein Obdach gefunden hat.
Bibliografie
Benjamin, W. Der Antor als Prodzeut, in Benjamin, Versuche ber Brecht
(Frankfurt aM., Suhrkamp, 1978), 10119.
Braunersreuther, C., Maida, M. Vom Sein oder Nichtsein deutscher Macht und Ehre.
ber das Hrspiel Deutsche Krieger in Bsser, M. (Hg.) Testcard 9 (Mainz,
Ventil, 2000), 907.
Burdorf, D. Wohl gehn wir tglich, doch bleiben wir hier. Zur Funktion von
Hlderlin-Zitaten in Texten Elfriede Jelineks, Sprache und Literatur in
Wissenschaft und Unterricht 21 (1990), 29-36.
Delius, F. C. Deutscher Herbst. Drei Romane (Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1977).
Dombrowa, B., Knebel, M. (Hg.) GeRAFtes. Analysen zur Darstellung der RAF und
des Linksterrorismus in der deutschen Literatur (Bamberg, Edition Isele, 1994).
Futterknecht, F. Die Inszenierung des Politischen. Delius Romane zum Deutschen
Herbst, in Durzak, M./Seinecke, H. (Hg) F.C. Delius. Studien ber sein
literarisches Werk (Tbingen, Stauffenberg, 1997), 77103.
Gillen, E. (Hg) Deutschlandbilder. Kunst aus einem geteilten Land (Kln, DuMont,
1997).
Goetz, R. Kontrolliert (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1988).
Holert, T., Terkessidis, M. Einfhrung in den Mainstream der Minderheiten, in
Holert, T., Terkessidis, M. (Hg) Mainstream der Minderheiten. Pop in der
Kontrollgesellschaft (Berlin, ID, 1996, 1718).
372
Uwe Schtte
Janz, M. Elfriede Jelinek (Stuttgart, Metzler, 1995).

Jelinek, E. Wolken. Heim. (Gttingen, Steidl, 1990).
Kellmann, K. Der Staat lt morden. Politik und Terrorismus heimliche Verbndete
(Berlin, Henschel, 1999).
Mohr, R. Die Prada-Meinhof-Bande, Spiegel Online v. 27.2.2002.
Pretting, G. Maschinenmusik. Vom Feind zum Freund, Skug, 32 (1992) 424.
Polt-Heinzl, E. Nachwort in Jelinek, E. Wolken. Heim.
Proll, A. Hans und Grete. Die RAF 19671977 (Gttingen, Steidl, 1998).
Radisch, I. Rote-Helden-Fraktion. Die sthetik der Schreckschupistole: Leander
Scholz und die poetische Verklrung der RAF, Die Zeit, v. 15.2.2001.
Teipel, J. Verschwende Deine Jugend (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2001).
Theweleit, K. Ghosts. Drei leicht inkorrekte Vortrge (Frankfurt, Stroemfeld, 1998).
Weinzierl, R. Fight the Power! Eine Geheimgeschichte der Popkultur & die Formierung
neuer Substreams (Wien, Passagen, 2000).
Wiesnewski, G., Landgraeber, W., Sieker, E. Das RAF-Phantom. Wozu Politik
und Wirtschaft Terroristen brauchen (Mnchen, Knaur, 1997).
Wildenhain, M. Erste Liebe Deutscher Herbst (Frankfurt, Fischer, 1997).
Zrcher, G. Friedrich Christian Delius, in Arnold, H. L. (Hg) Kritisches Lexikon der
deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur.
MORAY MCGOWAN
Ulrike Meinhof im Deutschen Drama der

Neunziger Jahre: Drei Beispiele*
Lngst sind die Toten von Stammheim Teil einer bundesdeutschen

Nationalmythologie geworden, die im nebligen Begriff des Deutschen Herbstes beziehungsreichen Ausdruck gefunden hat. So Gerd
Koenen 2001 in Das rote Jahrzehnt. Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution 19671977 (Koenen, 363). Der unter der Bezeichnung
Deutscher Herbst zusammengeknulte Themenkomplex des Terrorismus und der Reaktion von Staat, Medien und Bevlkerung hat
zweifelsohne vielseitige und anhaltende Wirkungen auf die politischen
Mentalitten der Bundesrepublik gehabt. So unterschiedliche Kommentatoren wie der damalige Bundeskanzler Helmut Schmidt und der
Schriftsteller F. C. Delius haben die Bedeutung des Deutschen Herbstes,
und auch seine Stabilisierungsfunktion, fr die nationale Identittsbildung
der Bundesrepublik erkannt (Schmidt, Delius). Diese Bedeutung hielt
ber die deutsche Wiedervereinigung von 1990 hinaus an, ja mit dem
zeitlich bedingten Abbau mancher Berhrungsngste wuchs geradezu
die quantitative und qualitative Beschftigung mit dem Thema. Dies
war vor allem zum zwanzigsten Jahrestag des Deutschen Herbstes
1997 zu beobachten.1
Der Terrorismus, seine Prsenz im nationalen Gedchtnis und
seine Darstellung in der Geschichtsschreibung, in der Literatur, im
Film, weist Zge eines kollektiven Psychodramas auf. Der Terrorismus sucht auch geradezu das inszenierte Spektakel, und der
jeweiligen Tat folgt fast immer der Kampf um die Deutungen:
Deutungen durch die Tter, durch den betroffenen Staat, durch die
*
1
Ich danke Anja Flender fr ihre sprachliche und inhaltliche Kritik.

Neben der zahlreichen Buch-, Zeitschriften- und Zeitungsbeitrgen ist vor allem
Heinrich Breloers Juni 1997 ausgestrahlte Fernsehserie Todesspiel zu
erwhnen.
374
Moray McGowan
Medien, usw. Dramen ber den Terrorismus sind also unter anderem
auch Dramen ber Reprsentationsprozesse. Das wird an der Figur der
Ulrike Meinhof besonders deutlich. Gewisse Motive treten dabei
wiederholt auf, werden aber sehr unterschiedlich dargestellt und
gedeutet: ihr rigoroser Moralismus; die analytische Qualitt und
Prsenz ihrer geschriebenen und gesprochenen Stimme in den Medien
der sechziger Jahre; damit auch die Fallhhe ihrer Entscheidung, diese
etablierte Position aufzugeben und in den Untergrund zu gehen; ihr
Leiden im Gefngnis; die auch und gerade in linken Kreisen
verbreitete Tendenz, sie von den anderen fhrenden Figuren der ersten
RAF-Generation abzusondern also den Terrorismus und die
Terroristen zu verdammen, Meinhof dabei aber zu verklren.
Hier werden drei Bhnenwerke der 1990er Jahre betrachtet, die
Meinhof-Figuren auf die Bhne brachten: Johann Kresniks
Tanztheaterstck Ulrike Meinhof (1990), und zwei Sprechtheaterstcke, Dea Lohers Leviathan (1993), und John von Dffels
Rinderwahnsinn (1999). An den dramaturgischen Bildern und Figuren
lassen sich Verwandlungen in den kollektivpsychologischen Deutungen der Roten Armee Fraktion und der Ulrike Meinhof-Figur
beobachten. Ulrike Meinhof wurde als ein in Wut und Frustration
entstandener, verzweifelt zu plakativen Mitteln greifender Gegenentwurf zum 1990 scheinbar historisch siegenden Modell Deutschland2
inszeniert. Leviathan dagegen nimmt keinen direkten Bezug auf die
neunziger Jahre, sondern erprobt in einem Entscheidungsdrama um
Ulrike Meinhofs Schritt in den Untergrund eine Rckbesinnung auf
das Trauerspiel fehlgeleiteter moralischer und politischer Prinzipien.
Bis zur Urauffhrung von Rinderwahnsinn 1999 schlielich haben die
Verwandlungsprozesse in der neuen Bundesrepublik, vor denen die
Mauer bis zu ihrem Fall tatschlich auch das westdeutsche Bewutsein teilweise geschtzt zu haben scheint, viele bislang konservierte
Positionen in einen schnellen Verfallsproze gestrzt. Eine breite
Anzahl von Themen, vom linken moralischen Rigorismus bis hin zu
den deutsch-deutschen Befindlichkeiten, sind bei von Dffel nur noch
leere Grotesken. Aber sein Stck erschpft sich nicht in Kalauer2
Wahlslogan der SPD 1976. Die staats- und regierungsfestigende Wirkung des
Deutschen Herbstes lt sich durchaus als Bewhrung des Modells
Deutschland auch und gerade gegen seine Kritiker von links verstehen.
Ulrike Meinhof im Deutschen Drama der Neunziger Jahre
375
technik, billigen Zoten oder farcenhaftem Lcherlichmachen der

Terrorismus- und RAF-Thematik, sondern unterhhlt mit gerade
diesen Mitteln festgefahrene Diskurse und Verhaltensweisen. Wie im
folgenden zu zeigen ist, verkrpern diese drei Stcke ein Spektrum
der formalen Mglichkeiten des Dramas in den neunziger Jahren. Sie
nehmen dabei Positionen innerhalb dieses Spektrums ein, die
zumindest teilweise den politischen Positionen widersprechen, die sie
zu vertreten scheinen.
Johann Kresniks choreographisches Theaterstck (so Kresniks
eigene Bezeichnung fr sein politisches Tanztheater) Ulrike Meinhof,
1990 in Bremen uraufgefhrt, verwebt eine bittere Trauerzeremonie
fr den tragischen Krper der deutschen Linken mit einem wtenden
Angriff auf die nationale Triumphstimmung und die Konsumhaltung
der Wendezeit.3 Seine Wut artikuliert sich in aufgebrochenen und
angehuften Bildern, die sich wie andere Kresnik-Stcke von Sylvia
Plath (1985) ber Frieda Kahlo (1992) bis zu Rosa Luxemburg (1993)
konventioneller Muster weiblicher Opferidentitt bedienen.
Meinhof wird von drei verschiedenen Tnzerinnen getanzt, die
oft gleichzeitig auf der Bhne stehen. Zu dieser Aufhebung der
traditionellen Einheit der Person kommt die Aufhebung der
chronologischen und rumlichen Einheit hinzu. Es gibt Sprnge,
Brche, berschneidungen, Simultanszenen, Vermischungen von Fakt
und Fiktion und kaleidoskopartige zeitgeschichtliche Anspielungen.
So kehrt im ersten Abschnitt des Stcks die tote Ulrike Meinhof als
nunmehr fast 60-jhrige Journalistin im Trenchcoat in das sich gerade
wiedervereinigende Deutschland von 1990 zurck. Hier ekelt sie sich
ber die Kuflichkeit des neuen deutschen Volks, der gleiche Ekel,
den die geschichtliche Meinhof ber die Konsumhaltung der
Adenauerjahre empfunden hat.4 Dieser Ekel kommt in der Wut zum
Ausdruck, mit der eine zweite, ber der Bhne auf einer Galerie
3
4
Als Tanzwerk liegt Ulrike Meinhof nicht gedruckt vor. Die folgende Analyse
bezieht sich auf die am 14.7.1991 im 1. Programm (ARD) ausgestrahlte
Fernsehaufnahme dieser Inszenierung.
Ein hnliches Motiv findet sich in Volker Brauns Simplex Deutsch (1978/9).
Als Kragler, der fett und selbstzufrieden gewordene Kleinbrger aus Brechts
Trommeln in der Nacht, Fernsehbilder ber US-Bombenangriffen in Vietnam
betrachtet und dabei Leber it, bergibt sich seine Tochter Ulrike und greift
nach seinem Maschinengewehr.
376
Moray McGowan
sitzende, Meinhof-Figur ihre Schriften auf die Bhne und ins

Publikum schmettert.
Entstaltende Figuration nennt Hans-Thies Lehmanns
Postdramatisches Theater solche Techniken der Auflsung der
Erzhl- und Figurenintegritt durch szenische Anhufung von heterogenen Zeichen (Lehmann, 154). Doch solchen formalen Dezentrierungsmitteln wird durch Kresniks eindeutige Auslegung der
Meinhof-Geschichte widersprochen. Die Verwischung der Zeitebenen
zwischen Nationalsozialismus, Adenauerzeit, Atomwaffen- und Notstandsgesetzprotesten, Deutschem Herbst und Vereinigungsgegenwart
weist weniger auf postmoderne Antilinearitt denn auf eine aggressiv
behauptete geschichtliche Kontinuittsthese hin.
Kresniks Ansatz ist traditionell gesellschaftskritisch und
inhaltsbezogen, fr Jonathan Kalb sogar painfully sincere und
irresponsibly simplistic (Kalb, 38). 1985 verkndete er in einem
Interview: Ich mchte auf der Bhne weiterkmpfen, weiterarbeiten,
gesellschaftskritisch und politisch, und menschliche Probleme
aufzeigen, Menschen darstellen, die mit unserem System gar nicht
fertig werden. [...] Es mu nur grundstzlich so sein, da das ganze
Stck am Schlu eine Aussage hat (Kresnik, 16 und 12). Kresniks
politischer Ansatz deckt sich in vielem mit dem der politischen
Journalistin Meinhof, deckt ihn aber mit seinen sie auf ihren Krper
reduzierenden Bildern zu. So wird sein Projekt, sie aus der
Verstummung und der Verflschung zu retten, trotz seiner
choreographischen Brillianz und seiner Sensibilitt fr menschliche
Verletzbarkeit weitgehend unterlaufen. Denn Kresnik zeigt Meinhof
beinahe ausschlielich als Opfer der deutschen Verhltnisse wie
Klaus Wagenbach sie 1976 in seiner Grabrede bezeichnete (Brckner,
197200). Kresniks Meinhof erscheint trotz ihrer dreifachen Rollenaufteilung immer wieder als Krper, der immer wieder mibraucht
wird: durch ihren Ehemann Klaus-Rainer Rhl, durch die deutsche
ffentlichkeit, durch die Vertreter des Staates, durch Andreas Baader
und die anderen RAF-Mitglieder.5
Kresniks Betonung der Opferrolle ist die zentrale Kritik von Wildenhain
(Braun, 21112).
377
Meinhofs politische Texte6 sind im Stck prsent, jedoch nicht

als diskursive Auseinandersetzung, nicht als Stimme, sondern als
Requisiten: Text wird zu Papier, das aggressiv weggeschleudert,
zerrissen oder zwischen die Finger, Zehen und Lippen des
mibrauchten Krpers der Meinhof in ihrem grauen Gefngniskleid
gesteckt wird, whrend sie hilflos ber die Bhne zappelt. Text wirkt
hier nicht mehr als Waffe des schreibenden Subjekts, sondern als
entfremdeter Gegenstand, als Waffe gegen das Subjekt. Meinhofs
Schreibmaschine Berufszeichen und Mittel zur Durchsetzung ihres
Einflusses in der bundesdeutschen Mediengesellschaft7 bleibt das
Stck hindurch prsent. Ihr wtendes Rattern ist schon vor
Spielbeginn bei geschlossenem Vorhang zu hren und wird spter auf
Maschinengewehr-Lautstrke verstrkt: das Wort nicht nur bildlich
gesprochen als Waffe, sondern wie eine Vorwegnahme der
Gefngnistexte der RAF als Gewaltmittel. Gegen Ende des Stcks
verzichtet die in der Galerie sitzende Journalistin Meinhof auf ihre
Schreibmaschine. Die Schreibmaschine wird auf die Bhne, in die
Zelle der Gefangenen Meinhof geholt, die nun ihre Texte zerknllt
und aufit, und schlielich das Farbband aus der Maschine reit und
als Fessel um ihren Krper wickelt. Kresnik fhrt hier eine
mehrstufige Entmndigung vor. Mit der Aufgabe der zwar begrenzten,
vielleicht widersprchlichen aber immerhin realen Subjektposition in
der journalistischen ffentlichkeit wird das Wort nicht nur gegen
passives Schweigen ausgetauscht, sondern als Mittel der Zhmung
und Fesselung gegen den eigenen Krper gerichtet.
Zuvor malt sich die Meinhof-Figur mit Schreibmaschinentinte
zwei Kindergesichter auf die nackten Brste. Dieses Bild von
Meinhofs Zerrissenheit zwischen der Mutter- und der Terroristinrolle
ist bezeichnend fr eine Problematik des ganzen Stcks, die Meinhofs
politische Stimme hinter ihrem Mrtyrerinkrper verschwinden lt,
einem Krper, der als Objekt der Macht und des Machtblicks
dargestellt wird. Meinhof wird bei Kresnik als deutsche Ikone, als
6
7
Zum groen Teil zunchst zwischen 1959 und 1969 in der Zeitschrift konkret
erschienen und in Meinhof, Die Wrde des Menschen und Meinhof,
Deutschland nachgedruckt.
Ab 1964 etwa schreibt sie nicht nur fr konkret, sondern verfat auch
Rundfunkreportagen und dreht einige Filmbeitrge fr die Fernsehserie
Panorama; vgl. Brckner, 204.
378
Moray McGowan
linke Germania am Marterpfahl dargestellt (vgl. Mario Krebs, in

Ackermann, 145). Dabei werden die Opfer der Terroristen flchtig
und fast nebenbei bedacht. Meinhof wird ferner auf eine fr ihre
Ikonisierung typische Weise von den anderen Mitgliedern der ersten
RAF-Generation abgegrenzt. Das Programmheft betitelt die letzte
Szene zwar als Tod und Verklrung: eine Szene in der die eine
Meinhof-Tnzerin als Trophe zwischen Plexiglas-Scheiben gequetscht und zur Schau gestellt wird, nachdem sich eine zweite
Meinhof verzweifelt die eigene Zunge amputiert hat. Aber das Stck
stellt nicht nur Verklrungsprozesse dar, es verklrt.
Nun liee sich einwenden, ein Tanzstck knne nichts anderes
tun als der Krperlichkeit den Vorrang vor der Schriftlichkeit geben,
ja in der Mglichkeit einer alternativen Sicht zum Logos lgen die
emanzipativen Chancen des Tanzes. Heiner Mller behauptet: Ein
Krper ist unverstndlich. Ein Krper lt sich nicht analysieren [...]
man nimmt ihn wahr. Man braucht ihn nicht zu bersetzen (Mller,
43). Das erweist sich aber am Beispiel von Kresniks Ulrike Meinhof
als Wunschbild. Die rasch aufeinanderfolgenden, ineinanderflieenden Bilder sorgen zunchst fr Verwirrung, sind aber in den
allermeisten Fllen in ihrer Figuren- oder Handlungszeichnung
eindeutig. Auch ohne Dialog suggeriert das Stck eine deutliche
Erzhlung, nicht zuletzt weil Kresnik weitgehend unkritisch das
Meinhof-Bild ihres ersten Biographen, Mario Krebs, bernimmt, der
Kresnik bei der Dramaturgie assistierte, und der die Wagenbachsche
These von Meinhof als Opfer der deutschen Verhltnisse vertritt.
Kresniks Stck und seine Erstinszenierung sind mit ihrer
Entstehungszeit eng verbunden. Im Februar 1990 bahnte sich schon
die mit den Wahlen vom 18. Mrz besiegelte Vereinigung
Deutschlands auf westlich-marktwirtschaftlicher Basis an. Kresnik
inszeniert Ulrike Meinhof gegen den Einheitsrausch und den
bundesdeutschen berlegenheitsdnkel und pocht gerade in diesem
Kontext auf die unbequemen geschichtlichen Kontinuitten. Hitler
und Stalin, in eine Lederhose gezwngt, laufen wie ein groteskes
vierbeiniges, vierarmiges Aufziehtierchen herum. Zu den beiden
Wrtern, die die gefangene Meinhof mit langen sthlernen
Greifzangen traktieren, gehrt ein SS-Mann. In einer PltzenseeAnspielung werden die Leichen der Stammheim-Toten mit Fleischerhaken von der Bhne gezerrt. In der Schluszene, in der die von ihrer
379
Selbstverstmmelung blutbeschmierte Meinhof die zwischen den

Glasscheiben ausgestellte Meinhof anstarrt, deren Gesicht wie auf
einem polizeilichen Erkennungsfoto dem Publikum verzerrt zugewendet ist, lt Kresnik das 1989 von Heino gerade neu
aufgenommene Deutschlandlied abspielen.8 Dieser Kontrast wirkt aus
der zeitlichen Distanz allzu billig und plakativ. Damals jedoch
entstand die Inszenierung im Zeichen machtloser linker Wut ber die
Richtung, die die Wende unbersehbar anstrebte. Wenig spter, im
Jahr 1993, hat Kresnik den Titel einer Erzhlung von Gnter Gaus,
Wendewut, fr ein gleichnamiges Tanzstck verwendet, das viele der
Motive aus Ulrike Meinhof in nur leicht abgewandelter Form
aufgreift.
Das Programmheft zur Urauffhrung im Februar 1990 im Bremer
Theater enthielt neben der Grabrede Wagenbachs einige zornige
Meinhof-Essays aus den 1960er Jahren und Ausschnitte aus ihren
erschtternden Briefen aus dem sogenannten Toten Trakt, aus der
Isolationshaft. So hat das Programmheft, das wie fast immer im
deutschen Theater als Teil des dramaturgischen Gesamtkonzepts zu
verstehen ist, die Textlosigkeit von Kresniks tanzend sprachlosen
Meinhof-Figuren ausgeglichen. Das gleiche Programmheft enthlt
jedoch Werbung: fr einen Grundstcksmakler, fr Edel-Klaviere,
Perserteppiche, Schmuck, Pelze und das Bremer Spielcasino. Es wird
fr Objekte geworben, die die Angriffsziele von Meinhofs Konsumund Brgerha waren und in der Inszenierung ihre bildliche
Entsprechung finden (etwa als der Chor als pelzumhlllte Hamburger
Schickeria auftritt). Wie Ulrike Meinhof selbst kmpft Kresniks
Theater gegen eine Welt, in die es heillos und hilflos verstrickt ist.
Sein Kampf, wie der ihrige, ist schon verloren. Das Problem einer
kritischen Kunst in einer alles verschluckenden Warenwelt wird also
im Programmheft plastisch vor Augen gefhrt, jedoch in der
Inszenierung selber nicht reflektiert.
Das zweite Beispiel einer Meinhof-Darstellung im deutschen
Drama der 1990er Jahre ist Dea Lohers Leviathan (1993 in Hannover
uraufgefhrt; vgl. Schulz). Das gleichnamige Werk des englischen
Philosophen Thomas Hobbes von 1651 wird im Vorspann der
8
1999 neuaufgelegt: Heino singt die schnsten Jahrhundertlieder (Ariola

54835).
380
Moray McGowan
Buchfassung zitiert: Der groe Leviathan (so nennen wir den Staat)
ist ein Kunstwerk oder ein knstlicher Mensch obgleich an Umfang
und Kraft weit grer als der natrliche Mensch, welcher dadurch
geschtzt und glcklich gemacht werden soll (Loher, 145). Bei
Hobbes hat der Mensch nur eine Alternative: zwischen dem
atavistischen Urzustand und der restlosen Unterwerfung unter die
staatliche Ordnung. In Lohers Leviathan treten Figuren oder Organe
des Staates zwar nicht auf, aber gerade im Kampf gegen den
Leviathan BRD-Staat wird von den RAF-Mitgliedern eine
bedingungslose Unterwerfung unter die Gruppenbedingungen
verlangt: Lohers Terroristenfiguren bevorzugen in der RAF beliebte
Absolutheiten wie Schwein oder Mensch oder ein Teil des
Problems oder ein Teil der Lsung (Loher, 224, 225). Im Kampf
gegen das vermeintliche Monstrum Staat wird die RAF selbst zum
Monstrum.
Lohers Titel bezieht sich aber auch auf einen anderen
literarischen Text ber eine Gestalt gewordene kollektive Obsession:
Hobbes Leviathan wird auch von Hermann Melville in Moby Dick
(1851) als Sinnbild fr den weien Wal, das Monster, das von der
Besatzung des Pequod bis zu ihrer Selbstzerstrung gejagt wird,
zitiert. Karl, die Andreas-Baader-Figur in Lohers Stck, zielt auf den
bundesdeutschen Staat: Ja/Wir werden ihn jagen/herausfordern/nicht
mde werden/ihm so viele Widerhaken ins Fleisch treiben/bis er sich
an ihnen verblutet (Loher, 210). Melvilles Moby Dick war eine
beliebte Gefngnislektre der Gudrun Ensslin, die ihre Mitgefangenen
mit Namen aus dem Roman versah: Baader etwa war Kapitn Ahab,
Holger Meins wurde Starbuck genannt (Aust, 2747, Conradt, 261). 9
Das Stck zeigt jedoch nicht die RAF beim obsessiven Kreuzund-Quer-Segeln durch den Staatsozean, nicht die Zeit der Illegalitt
und des bewaffneten Kampfes. Es bietet stattdessen ein psychologisches Entscheidungsdrama ber Meinhofs Aufgabe ihrer
diskursiven Einfluposition als Journalistin zugunsten des bewaffneten Kampfs und des Aufgehens der individuellen Stimme im
9
Zu der Bedeutung von Melvilles Moby Dick und Brechts Manahme fr die
historische RAF vgl. den Beitrag von Gerrit-Jan Berendse in diesem Band, vor
allem Berendses material- und aufschlureiche Untersuchung der Symbolik der
(Nicht)Farbe Wei und der Vorstellungen der RAF-Gefangenen zum
kollektivierten Krper.
381
Kollektiv. Whrend Kresnik ein geschichtliches und gesellschaftliches

Panorama auf der Bhne darstellt und etwa in der Ausstattung des
Sicherheitspersonals mit schwerer Schutzbekleidung und Helmen von
Hochofenarbeitern den dahinterstehenden Staat durchaus als unheimlicher Moloch impliziert, konzentriert sich Lohers Leviathan auf den
engen Zeitraum der wenigen Wochen der RAF-Grndung um 1970
und auf einen Wendepunkt, eine Entscheidungsschwelle im Leben
ihrer Hauptfigur Marie.
Das Stck kreist um die Entscheidung Maries, nicht nur ihr
brgerliches Leben, sondern die Legalitt und damit ihre Kinder und
ihre journalistische Karriere zugunsten der Sache, des bewaffneten
Kampfes, aufzugeben. Diese Entscheidung wird als zentraler
politischer Wendepunkt anerkannt, denn wie ihre Schwester Christine
beschreibt, wird sie damit ihre hart erkmpfte Stimme im ffentlichen
Diskurs opfern:
Sie werden deine Stimme einfacher noch
zu einer ungehrten machen
indem sie deine Worte eingehen lassen
ohne Widerspruch in die Archive
dort bleiben sie folgenlos zitierfhig
knnen deine Hellsicht deinen Scharfsinn
ohne weiteres belegen
die du nun aber unverzeihlich vergeuden willst
es folgt ihr Aufschrei
Aktion Befreiung Wie konntest du das tun
geheuchelte Emprung
hinter der sich die Erleichterung versteckt
sie knnen sich nun sicher fhlen
vor dem Stachel deiner Worte
Gegen eine die sie Terroristin nennen
brauchen sie keine Argumente. (Loher, 176)
In diesem Drama, das im Vergleich zu Kresniks Tanzstck der

Meinhof-Figur durchaus eine Stimme gibt, geht es um den Augenblick, wo sie die Stimme aufopfert zugunsten der radikalen Aktion,
beziehungsweise die Stimme der radikalen Aktion, in der und mit der
sie fortan sprechen wird, wird nicht mehr die ihre sein.
Die dramaturgische Zentrierung auf Maries Entscheidungskrise
macht das Stck zu einem individuellen Drama, das fr die Hauptfigur
Moray McGowan
382
glaubwrdige moralische Entscheidungs- und Handlungsfhigkeit

voraussetzt. Der dafr erforderliche psychologische Realismus der
Hauptszenen wird aber durch Verspartien in den dazwischenstehenden
Chor-Szenen aufgebrochen. Die durch diese Chorszenen geschaffene
Distanz erschwert eine unkritische Identifikation mit der Entscheidungsagonie der Marie und damit eine Fortfhrung ihrer Verklrung.
Zugleich erzeugen die Chor-Einlagen, die die Stimmen und Texte der
Meinhof und anderer aus der RAF durch formalisierte Rezitationsrhythmen und Wiederholungen entnaturalisieren, eine Stimmenvielfalt, die die Individualstimme Meinhofs nicht nur verfremdet
sondern zu verschlucken droht.
Nicht nur die Chor-Szenen, auch die Handlung greift auf die
griechische Antike zurck, insbesondere auf Sophokles Antigone. In
der Auseinandersetzung zwischen der zum illegalen Handeln aus
moralischem Rigorismus drngenden Marie und ihrer auch aus
ethischen und menschlichen Grnden zur Vorsicht mahnenden
Schwester Christine, nimmt jene die Antigone-Rolle, diese die
Ismene-Rolle ein. Ebenso taucht Brechts Manahme, ein Lieblingstext
der ersten RAF-Generation, in einem Szenentitel auf (Loher, 218).
Rigorose Selbstaufgabe zugunsten der Sache wird auch in Maries
Entscheidung zur Hrte gegenber sich selber und ihrer eigenen
bisherigen humanistischen Ethik sichtbar. Die historische Ulrike
Meinhof hat folgende Stelle aus Brechts Manahme mehrfach zitiert:
Welche Niedrigkeit begingst du nicht um
Die Niedrigkeit auszutilgen?
Knntest du die Welt endlich verndern, wofr
Wrest du dir zu gut? (vgl. Koenen, 405)
Der Zweck heiligt nicht nur die Mittel, er fordert geradezu Mittel
heraus, die dem Zweck widersprechen und seine Verwirklichung
immer ferner rcken lassen. Lohers Leviathan konstruiert damit fr
seine Meinhof-Figur Marie eine tragische Fallhhe, die zu Kresniks
Grundthese von Meinhofs geraubter Wrde gehren knnte, aber in
seinem Stck nicht zur Sprache, auch kaum zur getanzten Sprache,
kommt.
Das dritte in diesem Kapitel betrachtete Werk lt Figuren und
Motive aus der RAF-Welt fern jeder Tragdie nur noch als Elemente
383
einer Farce auftreten. John von Dffels 1999 in Schwerin

uraufgefhrtes Stck Rinderwahnsinn reflektiert nicht blo die
Kommodifizierung der Revolte, sondern die Folgen eines tiefgehenden politischen und kulturellen Bewutseinswandels im Laufe
des Nach-Wende-Jahrzehnts. Dabei verwendet von Dffel im
Gegensatz zu Kresnik und Loher viele Mittel des Well-Made Play
Einheiten des Ortes, der Zeit, der Handlung und der Figurenrede um
innerhalb dieser bersichtlichen Form ein Wechselbad von Umkehrungen, Verwirrungen, Widersprchen und berraschungseffekten hervorzurufen.
John von Dffels ironische Erklrung der Schreibmotivation fr
Rinderwahnsinn sollte uns hellhrig machen fr den Spielcharakter
des Stckes. Ich wollte meinen Vater umbringen [...] da ich ihn
eigentlich sehr mag, habe ich gedacht, ich mache das ber ein
Theaterstck. Und weil seine Eltern, so behauptet er, wie Gudrun
Ensslin und Andreas Baader aussahen (Sie wurden bei jeder
Polizeikontrolle angehalten10), rcht sich das 1966 geborene Kind
von Dffel durch eine radikale Abrechnung mit smtlichen linken
Klischees. Bei Kresniks Ulrike Meinhof setzt sich die eindeutige
ideologische Erzhlhaltung den anti-illusionistischen Formelementen
entgegen und ldt zur Identifikation mit Meinhof und mit Kresniks
Entsetzen ber ihre Behandlung im Gefngnis ein. Ebendiese linke
Verklrungstendenz hat Maxim Biller zum bitterbse sarkastischen
Aufsatz Kommando Ulrike Meinhof provoziert, indem er die baldige
Benennung bundesdeutscher Straen und Schulen nach Ulrike
Meinhof prophezeit. Bei von Dffel dagegen sind die Grundstze der
radikalen Linken und die Verklrungen durch manche Nachfolger
nicht nur verdchtig sondern lcherlich geworden. Diese Linke,
einschlielich des von ihr gepflegten Meinhof-Mythos, siecht in
Rinderwahnsinn als groteske Selbsttravestie dahin.
Rinderwahnsinn stellt sich dem dezidiert postmodernen Kontext
der unaufhaltsamen Kommodifizierung von Zeichen: die Rote Armee
Fraktion als Prada-Meinhof-Bande, wie ein Spiegel-Bericht zu
10
Zit. nach Krieger, Murx dem Marx. Von Dffels Monolog Born in the RAF
kehrt diese Erfahrung satirisch um: Aus Protest gegen die anarchistische
Laxheit seiner Terroristen-Eltern entwickelt der Erzhler deutsche Tugenden
wie Ordnungssinn und Effizienz.
384
Moray McGowan
diesem Phnomen sarkastisch betitelt wurde (Mohr, Prada-Meinhof,

202). In dieser Welt bringt etwa die Rock-Gruppe Chumbawumba
Platten wie Ulrike oder Meinhof auf den Markt.11 Das Caf
Baader, eine Kneipe in der Mnchner Baader-Strae, bietet im
Internet ein Lied vom Meinhof-Caf-Orchester an.12 Die Rote
Gourmet Fraktion von Ole Plogstedt und Jrg Raufeisen bekocht
tourende Bands mit bizarren Speisen (Schallenberg). In diesem
Kontext haben Fotobnde ber die RAF-Geschichte wie Astrid Prolls
Hans und Grete oder der von Gerd Conradt herausgegebene HolgerMeins-Gedenkband Starbuck einen ambivalenten Status zwischen der
Zurckgewinnung der Bilder aus dem Medienmonopol einerseits und
eben deren Wiederauferstehung als Waren andererseits. Prolls Titel
wird von Leander Scholz Roman Rosenfest aufgegriffen, indem er die
Beziehung von Baader und Ensslin unter voller Ausnutzung ihres
Kitschpotentials als Hnsel-und-Gretel-Mrchen erzhlt.
Das vollkommene Scheitern der RAF beim Versuch, die Prozesse
aufzuhalten, gegen die sie gekmpft haben, wird gerade hier besonders
ironisch sichtbar, wo die RAF als Markenzeichen in der Warenwelt
weitergeistert. Fr die Zeitgenossen, die beim Wort Starbuck
zunchst nicht an Melvilles Steuermann und nur noch vage an Holger
Meins, sondern am ehesten an die Caf-Kette Starbucks denken (die
2002 die ersten zwei von 180 in Deutschland geplanten Filialen
erffnete13), ist die RAF, wie Reinhard Mohr 1999 schrieb: allenfalls
ein fernes Zeitgeist-Label [...] abgesunken in die Untiefen des
historischen Bewutseins (Mohr, Niemals).
Von Dffels Stck setzt sich aber auch satirisch mit einer
Tendenz auseinander, in manchen neueren Schriften zur RAF ihre
teilweise recht banale Geschichte gerade mit Begriffen wie Untiefe
zu kollektivpsychoanalytischen Gtterdmmerungsmetaphern hoch11
12
13
Zu finden auf der CD Slap, 1990; cf. Brian Eno und Snatch, RAF, 1978; Luke
Haines, Baader-Meinhof, 1996. FM-Einheits sthetisch und inhaltlich ambitionierte Suite Deutsche Krieger (1997), die authentische Texte von Wilhelm
II., Hitler und Meinhof zu einem Panorama des 20. Jahrhunderts mischt,
verdiente eine eingehende Analyse.
vgl. http://www.peppermind.de/baader/fr_eingang.html
Vgl. Khl, Die Coffeemaschine. Unmittelbar neben diesem Starbucks-Bericht
in der Lifestyle-Sektion der Zeit (Leben) steht eine Kolumne von John von
Dffel; die Ironie wird diesem zeitgeistsensiblen Autor nicht entgangen sein.
385
zustilisieren. Klaus Theweleits Bemerkungen zum RAF-Gespenst

(1998) deuten die Vorgnge im Stammheimer Gefngnis als eine
Reinigung im Opferritual (Theweleit, 45f). Mariam Lau betitelt
ihren Aufsatz 1997 in Merkur Der deutsche Herbst als Exorzismus.
Gerd Koenens Das rote Jahrzehnt nennt sein Terrorismus-Kapitel in
einer Celan-Anspielung Schwarze Milch des Terrors. Bewaffneter
Kampf als deutsche Selbstbefreiung, und will Stammheim als
beinahe wagnerisch klingenden Namen verstanden wissen (Koenen,
359414). Theweleit, Lau und Koenen versuchen mit Recht den
komplexen Zusammenhang des Terrorismus mit anderen in die
Gegenwart reichenden Traumata der jngeren deutschen Geschichte,
dem Nationalsozialismus und dem Holocaust, zu beleuchten. Aber
diese Arbeiten beteiligen sich dabei gleichzeitig an einer problematischen Mythisierung.
Von Dffel ist sich der einmaligen Bedeutung des Phnomens
Terrorismus in der bundesdeutschen Geschichte und auch dieser
Mythisierungstendenz bewut. In einem Interview im Jahr 2000 sagte
er: Aber wie die RAF-Leute mit dem ganzen Leben fr seine
Gesinnung einzustehen, das hat auch etwas Groes, Unbedingtes,
Absolutes. Also Mythisches. Wie im Kino [...] Das Land zu RAFZeiten war der letzte groe Abenteuerspielplatz der deutschen
Geschichte (Grefe). Er sieht die sechziger und siebziger Jahre als
geprgt von einer Mischung aus zwei nicht mehr mglichen
Haltungen: Idealismus und Unschuld. Seine Art jedoch, das Thema
entsprechend ernst zu nehmen, ist, es nicht ernstzunehmen, sondern
ihm durch Umkehrungen und subversive berraschungseffekte bis hin
zum billigsten Kalauer seine Bedeutungsschwere zu nehmen.
Sieht man Stammheim wie Dorothea Hauser in Baader und
Herold: Beschreibung eines Kampfes als Monument der Sprachlosigkeit zwischen zwei Generationen, die in der Tatsache ihren
Hhepunkt fand, da der Stammheim-Proze in seiner letzten Phase
fast nur in Abwesenheit der Angeklagten gefhrt wurde (Hauser, 212),
dann kann man Rinderwahnsinn als sptes Angebot zur Entkrampfung
dieser erstarrten Struktur verstehen. Denn das Stck zeigt sich
zunchst als Familiendrama, wobei die sprechenden Namen einen
psychologischen Realismus vom Anfang an verhindern, allegorische
Erwartungen wecken und sogar Interpretationshilfen zu bieten
scheinen, die immer wieder durchkreuzt werden.
386
Moray McGowan
Muttermeinhof und Karlmarx haben zwei Kinder, Faustersterteil

und Hnselundgretel: eine statistisch zwar nicht mehr normale
Normalfamilie. Ulrike Meinhof galt 1981 in Claire Sterlings The
Terror Network noch als the Queen of West Germanys radical chic,
die some quality of intellectual quest, or revolutionary conscience, or
moral scruple, or even a touch of glamour aufwies (Sterling, 24). In
Rinderwahnsinn ist die Meinhof-Figur auf die Funktion eines
autoritren Familienoberhauptes geschrumpft. Trotz der grotesken
Verzerrung bleibt von Dffel in diesem Punkt dem aus den engeren
RAF-Kreisen berlieferten Meinhof-Bild nher als es Kresnik mit
seiner Opfer-Verklrung tut. Margrit Schiller etwa schreibt: Ulrike
war streng, bestimmt und ungeduldig (Schiller, 61). Revolutionre
Ungeduld und das Primat der Praxis prgen Muttermeinhofs Haltung
den anderen Familienmitgliedern gegenber, die sehr schnell in
Gewalt bergeht. So bekommt der Sohn Faustersterteil wegen seiner
ideologischen Abweichungen Stockhiebe und mu 100 Mal Der
Kampf geht weiter schreiben. Bei der Figur Muttermeinhof
verwendet von Dffel jedoch auch jhe Brche der ideologischen
Haltung, um diese drastisch in Frage zu stellen. Revolutionre
Gewaltsprche vermischen sich mit brgerlichem Stolz: Man soll blo
keine Fettflecken auf die RAF-Bekennerschreiben tropfen lassen.
Nach einem Bank-Besuch erzhlt sie mit Sachbegeisterung von
komplexen Geldanlage-Diskussionen, aber auch da sie die Finanzmisere
der Familie durch das Mitgehenlassen der Spendenkasse des
Muttergenesungswerks gelst hat (von Dffel, Rinderwahnsinn, 39).
Ihr Mann Karlmarx ist ein Parodie-Altachtundsechziger, brtig
und beleibt, der hinter verblaten radikalen Parolen, vulgrmarxistisch
verdrehten Theorien und antiautoritren Erziehungsprinzipien ein
ruhiges und Konflikt umgehendes Leben sucht. Der Sohn
Faustersterteil, ein promovierter Skinhead, will diesen von seinem
Vater vertretenen, alles in Watte packenden sozialliberalen Konsens
gewaltsam aufbrechen. Er trgt damit Zge der intellektuellen Neuen
Rechten der neunziger Jahre. Er redet von Ttung und von der
Euthanasiewrdigkeit seiner trotteligen Schwester (von Dffel,
Rinderwahnsinn, 10), zitiert halbverdaute Ideen von Nietzsche bis
Bataille und frchtet sich vor seiner Mutter.
Statt soziales Gewissen fordert Faustersterteil in fernem Anklang
an de Sade in Peter Weiss Marat/Sade die Geilheit als absolute
387
Wahrheit und Handlungsleitung (von Dffel, Rinderwahnsinn, 45). Er

will seinen Vater aus Enttuschung ber das untaugliche Weltbild
umbringen, sowie aus Frustration darber, da die liberale Erziehung
ihm nie die Mglichkeit zur Affektentladung gibt. Aber es wird kein
expressionistisches Vatermordsstck, denn auch den Vatermordwunsch versteht und untersttzt Karlmarx sofort: wir waren uns nie
so nahe, mein Sohn (von Dffel, Rinderwahnsinn, 22). Das nimmt
dem Sohn wieder die Kraft zum Mord. Die aus Stcken wie Martin
Walsers Schwarzer Schwan in den sechziger Jahren bekannte HamletThematik, die Unfhigkeit zur Austragung der deutschen Variante des
Vater-Sohn-Konfliktes, die in verwandelter Form in den spten
siebziger Jahre unmittelbar nach dem Deutschen Herbst in der
sogenannten Vter-Literatur noch einmal auflebte, wiederholt sich
hier in einem grotesken und kmmerlichen Zerrbild: Was Vater und
Sohn ber den Ri zwischen den Generationen und Ideologien
verbindet, ist die Handlungsunfhigkeit.
Hnselundgretel ist ein ungebildetes, pubertres Mdchen, dessen
nicht zu bndigender Geschlechtstrieb sich fetischistisch auf Fantasien
ber den unter seinen saloppen weiten Hemden nie sichtbaren Bauch
ihres Vaters Karlmarx fixiert hat. Sie trumt von einem fetten Vater
und einem fetten Ehemann. Aus dem weien Leviathan, dem aus
Melvilles Moby Dick bekannten Bild der verabsolutierten Obsession ist
bei Hnselundgretel nur der fantasierte weie Schlabberbauch ihres
Vaters geblieben: ein weier Wal von ungeahntem Ausma/ber den,
hinter vorgehaltener Hand/Die unglaublichsten Geschichten erzhlt
wurden (von Dffel, Rinderwahnsinn, 47). Zum einen sieht man hier,
da so wie Faustersterteil die marxistische Gesell-schaftslehre
miverstanden hat bei Hnselundgretel das eigentliche Ergebnis der
angeblich emanzipierten Sexualerziehung eine absurd verschobene
Penis-Fantasie ist. Anschlieend fllt sie ber den unerwarteten Gast
her, den Vetter aus Dingsda, und blht sich am Ende des Stckes zu
einer grotesken Version einer expressionistischen Allegorie der mit dem
neuen Deutschland Schwangeren auf. Zum anderen: Nicht nur die
Moby-Dick-Selbststilisierungen der RAF-Gefangenen werden hier der
Lcherlichkeit preisgegeben, sondern auch ihre psychoanalytische und
kulturwissenschaftliche Deutung in der feuilletonischen und akademischen Begleitliteratur zum Phnomen Deutscher Herbst.
388
Moray McGowan
Das Ergebnis ist eine groteske Farce des vergeblichen Bemhens,

eine dysfunktionale Familie zum Funktioneren zu zwingen. Das
Scheitern des Projekts der Achtundsechziger und die krampfhafte
Mythologisierung der RAF und ihrer zeitgeschichtlichen Bedeutung
werden ins Lcherliche verzerrt. Die Handlung wird durch das
unerwartete Auftauchen des Vetters aus Dingsda auf ihren Hhepunkt
getrieben, eines Verwandten aus der DDR, der nach dem Fall der Mauer
herberkommt. Er will blo die Toilette benutzen, doch wird sein
Besuch von Muttermeinhof sofort als konspirativer Kontaktaufnahmeversuch verstanden. Aus Meinhofs akribischem Blick fr
gesellschaftliche Mistnde ist nur noch fehlgeleitete Glubigkeit
geblieben. In einer fr die Farce charakteristischen Kette von
Miverstndnissen und Zufllen schwngert der Vetter die Tochter
Hnselundgretel und erschiet unabsichtlich den Vater Karlmarx. Die
zum impotenten Greis verkmmerte linke Tradition erhlt durch den
zum Abtritt gewordenen Beitritt der DDR den Gnadenschu. Die
Namensgebung unterstreicht die Vertreibung des Pathos durch die
Lcherlichkeit: Faustersterteil, Hnselundgretel, der Vetter aus Dingsda,
also von Goethe ber Grimm/Humperdinck zu Eduard Knneke, von
der Tragdie ber den Nationalmythos als Mrchen zur Operette, von
den Hhen des Kunstanspruchs in die seichte Unterhaltung.14
Das Stck bringt die Unzufriedenheit der RAF-KinderGeneration zum Ausdruck, denen das alt-neulinke Gerede ihrer Eltern
und LehrerInnen suspekt, lcherlich, wirklichkeitsfern und lebenshinderlich vorkommen kann. Es zeigt aber auch den schon seit den
Anfngen der RAF prsente Aspekt des Gespielten und Inszenierten.15
Ort: Bhne steht als einzige Szenenanweisung, das Knstliche des
Darzustellenden betonend (von Dffel, Rinderwahnsinn, 5). Immer
wieder kehren Schlsselmotive aus der mythischen Geschichte der
RAF in grotesker Verzerrung wieder: Das symbolische Urinieren in
das ehemalige Ehebett von Ulrike Meinhof und Klaus-Rainer Rhl
gehrt zu den Grndungsmythen der RAF (vgl. Vesper, 200). Bei von
14
15
In Eduard Knneckes Operette Der Vetter aus Dingsda (1921) geht es ebenfalls
um die Verwechslung eines ahnungslos Ankommenden mit einem Erwarteten.
Ich danke Carl Weber fr diesen Hinweis.
Zum Inszenierten des Terrorismus, vgl. Orr und Klaic. Zum Zusammenhang
zwischen RAF-Terrorismus und Performance-Kunst, vgl. Pedersen, RAF auf
der Bhne.
389
Dffels Vetter aus Dingsda geht es dagegen um keine symbolische

Verhhnung des Brgerlichen, sondern nur um eine gemeine Notdurft.
Die Zwangsernhrung, eines der emotions-geladensten Themen der
Haftbedingungskontroversen, wird im frhlich-verbissenen Fttern
des Karlmarx durch seine Tochter trivialisiert. Blankobekennerschreiben dienen als Unterlagen fr Strafexerzitien. Der Vatermord
geschieht als absurder Zufall. Die Selbstzerfleischung der radikalen
Linken wiederholt sich als Farce. Die Urauffhrungsinszenierung
durch Dieter Kla 1999 in Schwerin unterstrich dieses Farcenhafte
durch eine konsequente gegen-geschlechtliche Besetzung.
Die Darstellung der Guerrilla-Gruppe als Familie dient nicht nur
der Entrmpelung verstaubter Bewutseinsreste der neunziger Jahre,
sondern berhrt auch in ihrer satirischen berhhung reale Strukturen.
Im Untergrund wie im Gefngnis entwickelten oder verstrkten sich in
vielen Terrorgruppen teilweise infantile Machtstrukturen, die denen einer
Familie glichen (vgl. dazu Theweleit, 52f., Preusser). Von Charles
Manson zu den Revolutionren Zellen, einer Parallelorganisation zur
RAF in den siebziger Jahren, haben Gruppenmitglieder selber dies
explizit anerkannt (Koenen, 37980). Die Selbstbezogenheit der RAF im
Untergrund es ging bald nur mehr um Geldbeschaffung und
Gefangenenbefreiung verschttete gerade die greren politischen
Fragestellungen, die sie beabsichtigte. In gleicher Weise erschpfen sich
die Auenkontake der von Dffelschen Kleinfamilie in Muttermeinhofs
Ausflgen zur Bank und im mideuteten Besuch des Vetters.
Eine Farce zieht hufig ihre Wirkung daraus, da die Werte und
Vorstellungen, aufgrund derer die Bhnenfiguren in der zwanghaften
Handlung der Farce verstrickt werden, im Publikum berholt sind,
berwunden sein mten und dennoch weiter wirken. Daraus
schpfen viele gesellschaftskritische Farcen ihre Doppelbdigkeit als
unterhaltsame Verunsicherung, als kollektive psychische Entsorgung.
Rinderwahnsinn bietet ein von anachronistischen Zgen verzerrtes, ins
absurde hochgedrehtes Psychodrama, von dem sich die deutsche
Linke noch befreien mu, um sich voll seiner Zukunft im
einundzwanzigsten Jahrhundert zu stellen. Aber nicht nur die Linke:
Das farcenhafte Motiv des Vetters aus Dingsda gibt jene
berbewertung der RAF-Stasi-Verbindung der Lcherlichkeit preis,
die den westdeutschen anarchistischen und den ostdeutschen staatlichen Terror zu einer Einheit verschmilzt, Stammheim und der
390
Moray McGowan
Deutsche Herbst nicht als Infragestellung der Demokratie sondern als

deren Verteidigung und quasi als Vorposten der Wende versteht.16
Fast nebenbei erzhlt der Vetter aus Dingsda vom vermeintlichen
Rinderwahn, der die Khe seines Schwagers heimgesucht hat:
Eines Tages fangen die Biester an durchzudrehen
Rennen im Kreis, springen ins Wasser, gehen
Die Wnde hoch
Mein Schwager meint gleich, Rinderwahnsinn
Schiet ein Tier nach dem anderen tot, bald
Den ganzen Bestand
Beim Abdecker fallen ihm die Hufe auf
Gespickt mit Angelhaken
Sein Sohn war tags zuvor fischen gewesen. (von Dffel, Rinderwahnsinn, 67)
Das liee sich analog zu Drrenmatt als die absurde Zuflligkeit

verstehen, die unsere Welt trotz aller politischen Strategien so schwer
regierbar macht. Es warnt aber auch vor berschnelle Fehldeutungen.
Der Rinderwahnsinn bezieht sich im deutschen Kulturzusammenhang
auf eine durch die Medien und durch die bertriebenen Reaktionen
des Staates hochgeputschte Volkspanik ber den Terrorismus. In
Stammheim vergessen. Deutschlands Aufbruch und die RAF beschreibt Oliver Tolmein die RAF-Nachfolgegruppen der neunziger
Jahre als Farce und sieht in der sturen Weigerung der Behrden, auf
die Deeskalierungsangebote und -bestrebungen der RAF-Restgruppen
zu reagieren, das ungebrochene Geltungsbedrfnis des deutschen
Staates (Tolmein, 7). Der Buchdeckel von Rinderwahnsinn geht
satirisch auf diese bertriebenen Reaktionen ein, indem er das
inzwischen kommodifizierte Markenzeichen des roten RAF-Sterns mit
schwarzer Kalaschnikov verwendet, um den Leser absichtlich
irrezuleiten und ihn dazu zu bewegen ber diesen Proze der
Irreleitung zu reflektieren.17
16
17
Eine von Oliver Tolmein besonderes energisch angegriffene Tendenz:

Stammheim vergessen, 54.
Noch am 30. Mai 2001 brachte die Dsseldorfer Ausgabe der Bildzeitung neben
einem Bild eines durch eine Rakete aufgerissenen Geldtransporters die
Schlagzeile Die Handschrift des Terrorprchens? und das ihrer Leserschaft
wie eine Warenmarke sofort bekannte Abbild des RAF-Sterns.
391
Der Rinderwahn hat eine schrittweise Auflsung des Viehgehirns

zur Folge. Die RAF war schon in ihren Anfangsstadien ein Irrweg
trotzdem sind ihm vernnftige Menschen jahrelang gefolgt. Die
bertriebene Reaktion des Staates, der Medien und der ffentlichkeit
auch der kritischen, linken auf diesen Irrweg war selber eine Art
Gehirnerweichung, ein Verlust der von Vernunft geleiteten
gesellschaftlichen Einschtzungsfhigkeit.18
Kresniks Ulrike Meinhof zeigt trotz seiner postmodernen Mittel
eher tradierte linke Zusammenhnge zwischen NS-Zeit, Wirtschaftswunder, Konsumhaltung und Populrkultur la Heino und verdrngt
dabei Meinhofs Texte zugunsten ihres zerschundenen Krpers. Dea
Lohers Leviathan verleiht ihrer Meinhof-Figur im Sinne einer
feministischen Kritik der linken patriarchalischen Bevormundung eine
starke Stimme, tut dies aber in einem Stck, dessen formale
Brechungen durch Chorszenen eine grundstzlich traditionelle
Figuren- und Handlungsstruktur nicht verbergen knnen: ein
Schillersches Entscheidungsdrama um die Gewissenskonflikte einer
Zentralfigur. John von Dffels Rinderwahnsinn widerstrebt postmodern den Ernsthaftigkeiten der linken Moderne und den Gegenreaktionen des Staates, der Medien, der Bevlkerung. Dabei luft
die Handlung trotz absurder Grundkonstellationen geschlossen wie in
einer Gesellschaftsfarce ab. Es mu allerdings zweifelhaft bleiben, ob
mit diesem Satyrspiel die Behandlung des Themas Deutscher Herbst
als Trauerspiel der Deutschen tatschlich ad acta gelegt werden kann.
Works Cited
Ackermann, I. (ed) Johann Kresnik und sein choreographisches Theater (Berlin,
Henschel, 1999).
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Biller, M. Kommando Ulrike Meinhof, in Biller, M. Deutschbuch (Munich: dtv,
2001), 17981.
18
Ein Werk wie Wolfgang Kraushaars 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zsur, die
dem Phantomschmerz RAF nur knappe 8 Seiten aus 350 widmet, bildet hier
eine relativ seltene Ausnahme.
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Moray McGowan
Braun, V. Simplex Deutsch, in Braun, V. Stcke 2 (Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, 1981),

173222.
Brckner, P. Ulrike Meinhof und die deutschen Verhltnisse (Berlin, Wagenbach,
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2001), 197200.
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PROP 7, 1990).
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Eno, B. and Snatch RAF (Polydor 2001762, 1978).
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Gaus, G. Wendewut (Hamburg, Hoffmann und Campe, 1990).
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1997).
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Munich]
Kalb, J. Free Admissions (New York, Limelight, 1993).
(Cologne, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001).
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2000).
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der Stadt Heidelberg, 1985), 1219.
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Lau, M. Der deutsche Herbst als Exorzismus, Merkur 51 (1997), 12, 108192.
Lehmann, H.-T. Postdramatisches Theater (Frankfurt aM, Verlag der Autoren, 1999).
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aM, Verlag der Autoren, 1994).
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2001): http://www.inst.at/trans/9Nr/pedersen9.htm.
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der RAF (Munich, Piper, 2001).
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Schmidt, H. Ex-Terroristen die Hand reichen? Nein!, Die Zeit, 4.7.1997.

Delius, F.C. Die Dialektik des deutschen Herbstes, Die Zeit, 25.7.1997.
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Theater heute (Velber, Friedrich, 1990), 801.
Gerrit-Jan Berendse is Professor of European Studies at Cardiff

University, Wales. He recently edited, with Mark Williams, Terror
and Text. Representing Political Violence in Literature and the Visual
Arts (2002).
Stefan Busch is currently Lecturer at Queens College, Oxford. He is
the author of Und gestern, da hrte uns Deutschland. NS-Autoren in
der Bundesrepublik (1998). A book on the motif of blasphemous
laughter in modern (predominantly German) literature is in preparation.
Jerome Carroll is a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham,
working on the aesthetic theory of Wolfgang Welsch. He has
published on Welsch and contemporary German drama.
Ingo Cornils is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Leeds.
His research focuses on romantic, utopian and fantastic thought, and
he has published widely on the German Student Movement and
German Science Fiction.
Sabine Egger is Lecturer at Mary Immaculate College, University
of Limerick and presently completing her doctorate on the poetry of
J. Bobrowski and P. Huchel at the Humboldt University, Berlin. She
has published on collective memory and identity in post-war German
literature and on intercultural communication.
Carmel Finnan is Lecturer in German at Mary Immaculate College,
University of Limerick.
Gustav Frank is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in German Studies at the
University of Nottingham. He has published widely on nineteenth-
396
century German literature, and is currently working on National

Socialist film.
Steve Giles is Reader in German Studies and Critical Theory at the
University of Nottingham. His recent publications include Bertolt
Brecht and Critical Theory. Marxism, Modernity and the Threepenny Lawsuit (Peter Lang, 1997; 1998) and, co-edited with Rodney
Livingstone, Bertolt Brecht: Centenary Essays (Rodopi, 1998).
Malcolm Humble lectures in German at the University of St
Andrews. He has published numerous articles, and (with Raymond
Furness) A Companion to Twentieth-Century German Literature
(1991; 1997) and Introduction to German Literature 18711900
(1994).
Margarete Kohlenbach is Lecturer in German and European Studies
at the University of Sussex, Brighton. She has published on Goethe,
German Romanticism, Georg Bchner, twentieth-century German and
Austrian literature, and critical theory.
Moray McGowan is Professor of German at Trinity College Dublin.
He has published widely on post-war German literature and society.
David Midgley is a University Senior Lecturer in German and Fellow
of St John's College, Cambridge University. He is the author of many
articles on literary modernism, and of Writing Weimar. Critical
Realism in German Literature 19181933 (2000).
Maike Oergel is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of
Nottingham. Her publications include The Return of King Arthur and
the Nibelungen. National Myth in 19th-century England and Germany
(1998) and articles and chapters on the construction of modern
national identities, Romantic literary theory, Richard Wagner and
Alfred Tennyson.
Colin Riordan is Professor of German at Newcastle University.
397
Nicholas Saul is Professor of German at the University of Liverpool.

He is the author of Poetry and History in Novalis and the German
Enlightenment (1984) and Prediger aus der neuen romantischen
Clique. Zur Interaktion von Romantik und Homiletik um 1800 (1999).
He has also edited volumes on literature and science, threshold
metaphors, and the body in German literature.
Susan Tebbutt is Head of German Studies at Mary Immaculate
College, University of Limerick. She is the editor of Sinti and Roma
(1998) and has published numerous articles on the Romanies. She is
presently completing a monograph on Gypsies and Genocide.
Uwe Schtte is a Lecturer in German Studies at the University of
Aston, Birmingham. His research interests include twentieth-century
Austrian literature, contemporary German fiction, popular culture, and
the history of socialism.
Jamie Trnka is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at
Cornell University. Her work focuses on representations of violence in
Germany, Central America, and Mexico.
Matthias Uecker is Senior Lecturer in German at The Queens
University of Belfast. He has published extensively on twentiethcentury German literature and media, including Anti-Fernsehen?
Alexander Kluges Fernsehproduktionen (2000). He is the co-editor of
BerlinWienPrag. Moderne, Minderheiten und Migration in der
Zwischenkriegszeit (2001).
Carl Weber is Professor of Directing and Dramaturgy at Stanford
University. He has published numerous essays on Brecht, and edited
and translated several volumes of works by Heiner Mller, most
recently A Heiner Mller Reader (Johns Hopkins, 2001).

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COUNTER-CULTURES

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STEVE GILES & MAIKE OERGEL

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek

Cover design: Thomas Jaberg, Peter Lang AG

Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, Bern 2003

Introduction: Culture as Counter-Culture

Sturm und Drang: Towards a New Logic of Passion

NICHOLAS SAUL AND SUSAN TEBBUTT

Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern

Performing Counter-Culture in the Vorstadt: Nestroys

Das Reich der Erfllung: A Theme in

Los von Berlin! Anti-Urbanism as Counter-Culture in

Walter Benjamin, Gustav Wyneken and

The Green Alternative in Germany 19001930

The Roots of the East German Green

Bluthochzeit mit Mutter Erde: Repression und Regression

Limits of the Visible: Kracauers Photographic Dystopia

The Art of the Imperceptible: A Discussion of the

The Challenges of Zrichs Autonomous Youth Movement

Aufrufe, Bekenntnisse, Analysen: Zur Politisierung der

Writing the Revolution: the Literary Representation of the

The West German Red Army Faction and its Appropriation

Aesthetics of (Self-)Destruction: Melvilles Moby Dick,

Heilige, die im Dunkel leuchten: Der Mythos der RAF

Ulrike Meinhof im Deutschen Drama

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We wish to express our gratitude to the British Academy for

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Introduction: Culture as Counter-Culture

On 15 March 1920, two days after the Kapp Putsch, a painting by

processes meat. What is needed, they conclude, is the development of

On the international dimension of these movements, see Caute. The West

Introduction: Culture as Counter-Culture

on culture and hegemony, the investigation of counter-culture

other words, the underlying dynamic of endogenous cultural

Finally, I shall give a brief overview of the essays compiled in this

Introduction: Culture as Counter-Culture

may also be employed in a more comprehensive manner to designate

She therefore implies not only that counter-cultures are either

See in particular the excellent compilation of primary materials in

conception is perhaps too stark to be able to take proper account of

Cultural revolution is located in this third framework, and Jameson

Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 17102; my discussion is based primarily

Introduction: Culture as Counter-Culture

See Adorno, Vermittlung; Jamesons account of mediation is discussed in

virtually automatic. He observes that any dynamic system necessarily

Introduction: Culture as Counter-Culture

ethics, and vice-versa. Crucially, aesthetic norms share a key property

he attempted to transcend and supersede the supposed limitations of

Introduction: Culture as Counter-Culture

of oppositional and hierarchical normative structures in evidence at a

On Russian Formalism and late modernism, see my essay on Kracauer in this

strictly historical basis, so that inappropriate or anachronistic

In the closing session of the Nottingham Counter-Cultures

Introduction: Culture as Counter-Culture

them rather more concretely. Chronologically, they cover aspects of

Sturm und Drang: Towards a New Logic of Passion

between counter-movement and prior culture which arises from the

Enlightenment vs Sturm und Drang

Sturm und Drang: Towards a New Logic of Passion

Enlightenment. Quite to the contrary, Kants purpose is to set limits

Their evaluation of Kants philosophy is naturally quite different from