These are some of the questions Alina Szapocznikow’s “Belly-Cushions” (polyurethane foam torsos) presently on display at MoMA’s “Mind and Matter: alternative abstractions, 1940s to now” provoke in me.

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There’s something immediately pleasurable and funny about these beautifully soft and round bellies, lounging about like lazy buddhas, thrown on the floor like pillows. Yet they make me uncomfortable — why are they there? And why have they been placed in a vitrine? A line from Freud’s essay “On Transience” comes to mind: What spoiled my enjoyment of beauty must have been a revolt against mourning.

The belly is the site where the body processes its encounters with the world — a space of digestion, transformation and evanescence as well as an object of curiosity: how do babies get in there?

In the belly mind and matter act out their issues. Anorexia, the mind’s victory over the belly, has been described as an ecstasy of emptiness; the euphoria stems from having found a way of rejecting symbolic impregnation by the phallus. Freud’s hysteric patients suffered from simulated pregnancies, attempting to give birth to the unspeakable.

The belly is the only part of our body with a fake opening. Evidence that something was cut off, the belly button is the trace of an event we can’t remember. Like no other body part, the belly reminds us of the necessary work of mourning. Necessary, but at times so revolting that it cannot be achieved.

Mourning over the loss of something we have loved or admired seems so natural to the layman that he regards it as self-evident. But to the psychologists mourning is a great riddle, one of those phenomena which cannot themselves be explained but to which other obscurities can be traced back. (Sigmund Freud, On Transience)

Alina Szapocznikow’s “Belly-Cushions” are auto-erotic folds, touching themselves and their likes. Closed, self-contained bellies; bellies that neither ingest nor digest; a space where working through is stopped, where durcharbeiten is no longer an option. Freud writes:

Mourning, as we know, however painful it may be comes to a spontaneous end. When it has renounced everything that has been lost, then it has consumed itself, and our libido is once more free (insofar as it is still young and active) to replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious. It is to be hoped that the same will be true of the losses caused by this war. When once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed and perhaps on firmer ground and more lasting than before.

Freud wrote “On Transience” in 1915, amidst a raging war whose brutality left no doubt that humans were capable of heretofore unimaginable destructiveness. After the horrors of the Holocaust Freud’s unwavering faith in the enduring “riches of civilization” is broken. Alina Szapocznikow, a survivor of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Terezin cannot have shared Freud’s optimism. In German concentration camps prisoners were starved until their bodies began to consume themselves. Humanity eradicated in a living being.

Szapocznikow’s “Belly-Cushions” tell about the obscurities of and resistances to mourning. For the answer to the question what has not been mourned I turn to my own belly.

IMAGE:  artmargins

read alternative abstractions 2 here and alternative abstractions 1 here

alternative abstractions 3 originally appeared on unguided tour on August 13, 2010.
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It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they have invented — that of plaiting and weaving. If that is so, we should be tempted to guess the unconscious motive for the achievement. Nature herself would seem to have given the model which this achievement imitates by causing the growth at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals. The step that remained to be taken lay in making the threads adhere to one another, while on the body they stick into the skin and are only matted together.
If you reject this idea as fantastic and regard my belief in the influence of lack of a penis on the configuration of femininity as an idèe fixe, I am of course defenceless.

Mona Hatoum has taken Freud up on his  defenceless fixation on the female genitals. Her “hair grid with knots 3”  — on view at MoMA’s current show Mind and Matter” — introduces a third party into the binary. What if plaiting & weaving had nothing at all to do with the penis? What if the grid, derived from the body, was a second skin, a cultural skin? I see it as protection as well as necessary mediation between I and you, an incognito space, a space of doubt and anxiety without which I would look at the other (you, the foreigner) and see myself.

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Hatoum’s hair grids remind me of mashrabiyya screens, this common feature in Arabic and Muslim architecture designed to enable the encounter between men and women, the private and the public, fantasy and reality. Most Europeans, used to the relentless exhibitionism and voyeurism we call freedom, see the mashrabiyya as an artful yet violent separating device created to keep woman the prisoner of man. Hatoum tells a different story. Her grids are most intimate, fragile, vulnerable, and unruly. They are defenceless without propagating une idée fixe. They tell of aging, of a life lived in the interstices between here and there, in and out, either or. They tell of the need to frame our bodies and our experiences. And they ask me to consider the frame, the pattern, the screen — because if I don’t, I might misread a woman for a man without a penis.

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IMAGES

Mona Hatoum, untitled (hair grid with knots 3), MoMa

alternative abstractions 2 originally appeared on unguided tour on August 10, 2010.
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“Mind and Matter: alternative abstractions” at MoMA is an excellent aide-mémoire. An effort to re-member, to re-collect, and to re-write who we think we are. On my first visit to the show I am drawn to Louise Bourgeois’ “Ode a L’oubli“.

A hand made cloth book whose pages are spread out on the gallery wall. A book like a cushion, a night gown, a handkerchief, a napkin; every page a unique piece of needlework made from the artist’s garments and linens. A dream book. A book with nothing written in it except for two phrases: “I had a flashback of something that never existed,” and “the return of the repressed.” A curious book: layers and no content, lines and no story, texture and no narrative, design and no sense.

A book that has forgotten that it is a book. A book of memories lost and found. They could be my memories, dreams I once dreamt. And why not? Don’t we all need a space to re-collect our dreams, to re-assemble our past? A space at once intimate and formal, like this delicious collection of a fabricated past.

In this “Ode to forgetfulness” the manifest is latent, obliviousness is one of the forms of remembrance.

Here’s why computers can’t dream: they are memory machines. They never forget anything.

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MoMA — Mind and Matter: alternative abstractions, curated by Alexandra Schwartz & Sarah Suzuki, through August 16, 2010.

IMAGES

Peter Blum Gallery

alternative abstractions 1 originally appeared on unguided tour on August 8, 2010.
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Read my “An Argument for the Burqa” here

Another argument for the burqa originally appeared on unguided tour on July 13, 2010.
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Inside BP, there is a view that President Obama’s unflinching criticism of BP and its chief executive represents an unprecedented example of a chief of state interfering in the affairs of a corporation.

And while some officials inside the company recognize that the president faces severe political pressures, they resent that the company is being perceived as a villain when they say it is doing everything it can to contain the leak.

Unlike Shell, BP has no history of seashell trading. But that doesn’t mean BP executives aren’t shell lovers. To the contrary.

Shells are dead matter. They have no conscience, no sense of good and bad, they don’t know what’s right or wrong. Shells are great places to hide. Here’s a private company interfering in the gravest possible way in the affairs of the Gulf of Mexico, destroying its livelihood and that of the people and animals living at its shores for decades to come, and all they think of is protecting their reputation. Like snails, BP executives have withdrawn into their shells demanding to be left alone, perhaps even dreaming the dream of a life in solitude — a clean life, an innocent life, a lazy life, flabby.

“A creature that hides and withdraws into its shell is preparing its way out,” writes Gaston Bachelard. We have to make sure that BP executives, once they emerge from their shells, are tried for the crimes they committed. For villains it what they are:  greedy, unscrupulous, irresponsible, and  corrupt.

of shells and villains originally appeared on unguided tour on June 13, 2010.
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Perhaps men presume that a woman in labour possesses some kind of supernatural strength. Perhaps they believe a female convict in childbed dreams of adventure, action, revenge even. Perhaps this is the reason why in the West-German state of North Rhine-Westphalia female convicts are required to give birth with their wrists and ankles chained to the hospital bed, a male police officer or prison guard attending the delivery. Perhaps this is why the child is taken away from the mother immediately after birth.

Perhaps not.

Besides the obvious cruelty, and apart from the fact that this practice violates German law,  it is a way of saying: ‘This is not your baby, you are a vessel. The true progenitor of this child is the Law.’ As representative of the Law the prison guard observing the delivery may imagine himself as the baby’s father. The Frankfurter Rundschau, the German newspaper which covered the news, understood as much. The articled is accompanied by the photograph of a masculine hand inserting an oversized key into the lock of a barred gate. The caption reads: “Prison door.”

Why be so literal? Why deny the obvious? Handcuffs, uniforms (of doctors and the police), medical gadgets, they all add a touch of sadomasochistic theatre to the maternity ward. Women’s prisons have of course long been a repository of pornographic fantasies about female, often lesbian sexuality.  Films like the 1974 Frauengefängnis (Jesus Franco 1974, released in the U.S. as Barbed Wire Dolls),  Caged Heat,  1983 Chained Heat (released in Germany as “Das Frauenlager”, The Women’s Camp) and even the L Word have exploited this fantasy. But the treatment of female prisoners in German hospitals is something quite different.  This is the Law forcing a woman to be part of a perverse scenario in which giving birth is seen as an act of sexual submission, an opportunity for the mother to fulfill her desire for punishment. Belle de Jour in the delivery room — with a vengeance. Where Belle de Jour (the film) acknowledges the existence and importance of sexual fantasy, what happens on some maternity wards in Germany is real. It may be illegal to put women in chains during child birth, but it sure isn’t against the Law.

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Frankfurter Rundschau, April 27, 2010, Entbindung in Fesseln

Interview with Monika Lüke, General Secretary of  the German section of Amnesty International

On Giving Birth in Manacles originally appeared on unguided tour on May 29, 2010.
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Kappler: “Why can’t I die in my own country, revisiting the places that were dear to me and which have been constantly in my thoughts during all these years of prison ?”

Yes, why can’t he?

Rome, March 25, 1944. The city is occupied by German troops. In the late afternoon hours a killing squad of 74 SS + Gestapo officers start shooting 335 Italian civilians, all of them men, many of them Jewish, in a cave of the catacombs at Via Ardeatina. The killing is known as the Ardeatine cave massacre. It was ordered, led and organized by Herbert Kappler.

Kappler: “I calculated the number of minutes necessary for the killing of the 320. I had the arms and ammunition computed. I figured the total amount of time I had. I divided my men into small platoons, which would function alternately. I ordered that each man shoot only one shot. I specified that the bullet enter the victim’s brain from the cerebellum in order that there be no wasted firing and that death be effected instantaneously.” (Katz, The Battle for Rome)

Kappler also sees to it that a generous supply of cognac would be brought to the site — as fortification for the killing Germans.

Germany, March 12, 1976. The liberal weekly DIE ZEIT supports Kappler’s release in an article titled The Merciless Ones (Die Gnadenlosen):

“Those who mercilessly banish human beings for several decades behind the walls of dungeons, act in the same remorseless way as the murderers themselves.”

Rome August 15, 1977. Herbert Kappler is wheeled out of Celio Hospital hidden in a large suitcase. With the help of a Carabinieri his wife Anneliese Kappler loads the valise in the trunk of her red Fiat 132 and drives off. The next day the couple safely arrive in the West-German town of Soltau where Ms. Kappler has a home. Protected by German police guards and the government’s refusal to extradite Kappler to Italy or confine him in a military hospital, he dies in his own home on February 9, 1978. “The more they hate Herbert Kappler, the more I love him. He was only obeying orders,” Anneliese Kappler tells reporters upon her husband’s death.

Munich 2010. Thirty-three years after Kappler’s escape and the German government’s refusal to take legal measures against him, Germany has undergone a change of mind. As shows the ongoing trial of bedridden 90-year-old John (Iwan) Demjanjuk, charged with assisting the murder of 27,000 Jews at Sobibor, German courts have not only learned to distinguish between perpetrators and victims — even if the perpetrator is a victim too — they have also learned that there is no such thing as a man’s right to die at home.

Judging from a recent photograph of Demjanjuk the trial seems to have a rejuvenating effect. With his sunglasses he reminds me of a Jack Nicholson character ready to get up and…

On A Man’s Right to Die at Home originally appeared on unguided tour on May 25, 2010.
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On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags the remains of yesterday’s Leonia await the garbage truck. Squeezed out tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services.

Bulimia,  child of consumerism: the passion for expelling, discarding, cleansing; the ecstasy of emptiness in a saturated  culture.

New Yorkers like their food fat free. Stores offer skimmed dairy products — milk, yogurt, and cheese.  And the fat? Where does it go? It has to be somewhere.

There’s a fat belt girding New York City like the Sierra Nevada girds the city of Granada. The overweight + obese have taken it upon them to to consume the fat the skinny people refuse. What if they go on strike?

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Manhattan 5 (fat free) originally appeared on unguided tour on April 26, 2010.
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“Is this film meant as an apology?” an elderly lady wants to know.

“I hope not. The criticism is there. I’m presenting different perspectives.  You have to read between the lines,” Sánchez Lansch explains. “The facts and the people speak for themselves.”

“If anything,” another member of the audience jumps in, “the Berlin Philharmonic is a case of benign Nazism. Compared to the Vienna Philharmonic, where everyone was a party member, the Berliners are harmless. Furtwängler [the orchestra's chief conductor] loved music — and he loved women. That’s all.”

Let’s read between the lines then.

The facts. In 1933 the renowned Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, then a private GmbH not a state sponsored organization, agreed to work under the direction of the Ministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda led by Joseph Goebbels. Between 1933 and 1945 the Reichsorchester celebrated National Socialism and dedicated itself to Führer worship. Its members were exempt from military duty and enjoyed considerable material and physical privileges. Until the end of the Third Reich the orchestra’s loyalty to the Führer never wavered. Every year on April 21, the Reichsorchester officially honored Hitler’s birthday with a rendition of Beethoven’s Symphony No. Nine (Ode to Joy!). The orchestra played at the opening of the 1936 Olympics and at important party events. Outside of Germany it served as ambassador of National Socialism.  The Reichsorchester, the friendly face of the Holocaust — except that the reality of the Holocaust is absent from this documentary.

Sánchez Lansch has unearthed heretofore unseen and unheard archival footage of the orchestra’s performances, he has conducted long interviews with the two surviving members of the Reichsorchester as well as with family of deceased musicians, and he has created a narrative in which word and image complement one another — which makes it hard to read between the lines.

The people.  Two elderly, soft-spoken gentlemen, former members of the Berlin Philharmonic, talk about their memories of the Reichsorchester. In the comfort of their homes the Nazi era is cast into a mild light. They don’t deny that for twelve years they served National Socialism, represented Nazi Germany abroad, enjoyed many privileges that ordinary Germans did not have access to – and yet, neither sees himself as a Nazi. They had no choice, they say; they had to follow orders. “With one leg one always stood in prison,” one of them explains.  They see themselves as victims,  resistance fighters even, because after all they did not become party members, or so they say. (It is a well known fact of German post-war amnesia that only very few were able to remember that they did join the NSDAP.) Most importantly, they were musicians, not politicians.  Is that why in 1933 they willingly provide proof of their ‘Aryan’ descent? Is that why they do not protest when their Jewish colleagues were forced to leave — first the orchestra and then the country? Is that why they give their best when they play in honor of the Führer? What was it like to play the Ode to Joy every year at Hitler’s birthday while at the same time six million Jews were gassed, shot or worked to death in concentration camps? How could they continue practicing their art after the war when it had been put to such murderous aims? Perhaps they would have liked to speak about all of this. They are not to blame that the film maker decided not to ask.

Those in the audience who have little knowledge of what life was like under Nazism  — the enforcement of racial laws, the daily violence against Jews and other “un-Germanic’ people, the dispossession of their property, the deportations, the Holocaust  — will remain ignorant. Those who have chosen to forget will not be reminded. It is here that the film maker’s supposedly impartial perspective reveals itself as complicit with the lie Germans have told themselves and the world since the end of the Third Reich: I didn’t see anything, hear anything, know anything. I was just following orders. I am a victim myself.

If there are people in the audience who ‘read between the lines,’ they do it not because of Sánchez Lansch’s film but despite of it. There is no such thing as impartiality. Anyone who maintains that a documentary is just presenting ‘the facts’ is being disingenuous.

Both formally and thematically “Das Reichsorchester” is similar to another recent documentary from Germany: Felix Moeller’s “Harlan: Im Schatten von Jud Süß” (Harlan: in the shadow of Jew Suess), a film about Nazi film maker Veit Harlan, director of the infamous “Jew Suess,” and one of the most important Nazi film makers, who after the war continued his career in West-Germany.  Shown at Film Forum in March, “Harlan” is by far the superior film precisely because the film maker examines the presence of the past instead of treating the past as history, finished, shut off from the present. Moeller is preoccupied with the question what it meant for Veit Harlan to continue making films after the Third Reich, after having collaborated with a murderous regime by making a film that legitimized anti-Semitism and justified the Holocaust. Moeller raises the question of moral accountability. Even if Veit Harlan believed that a film maker was just an artist and not a politician, is it justifiable to hold on on to this opinion after  he learned that his films were instrumental in executing genocidal politics? Moeller doesn’t offer Harlan’s children an easy way out. He insist on one question: What does it mean to have a father who helped in the execution of the Holocaust? Moeller does not provide answers, he achieves something far more important, he keeps the past alive.

No such concerns are raised in “Das Reichsorchester”. There’s not one sequence, not a single scene in which the film contests the implicit propaganda that in order to qualify as a Nazi one had to have killed at least one Jew with one’s own hands. Germany a country of innocents, the Berlin Philharmonic, an orchestra of resistance fighters. A convenient myth — or shall we call it a lie?

If the Berlin Philharmonic’s involvement with the Nazis can be regarded a case of benign Nazism, it because “Das Reichsorchester” makes us see it that way.

Was Hitler a Nazi?

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Kino! 2010. New films from Germany at Moma, April 24 through April 30.

Das Reichsorchester (Enrique Sánchez Lansch, Germany 2007, 102 min)

Harlan: in the shadow of ‘Jud Süss‘ (Felix Moeller, Germany 2008, 99 min)

Benign Nazism originally appeared on unguided tour on April 25, 2010.
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Today, when women and men from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, who for decades have suffered the consequences of relentless U.S. economic and military imperialism, find a way to come to America, they are likely to be sent back. Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona has just signed a law that encourages racial profiling which among other things “requires the police ‘when practicable’ to detain people they reasonably suspect are in the country without authorization and verify their status with federal officials.” (The New York Times reports).

As a Permanent Resident of the U.S., and a German citizen, I urge the Democratic Party to make the liberal reform of immigration laws one of their priorities — now.

Who is an Illegal Immigrant? originally appeared on unguided tour on April 23, 2010.
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While 90-year-old John (Ivan) Demjanjuk was flown in from the U.S. to face trial in Munich, 95-year-old Erich Steidtman, another Nazi war criminal, lives in the German town of Hannover — unchallenged and undisturbed. But things could change. Please see Christoph Cadenbach’s and Bastian Obermayer’s excellent  Der lange Schatten der Schuld, an article in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung on Steidtmann, former SS-Hauptsturmführer, involved in the killings at the Warszaw Ghetto, and head of a company belonging to the infamous Hamburger Polizeibatallion 101 responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of Polish Jews in Lublin on November 3 and 4, 1943.

Thanks to the article in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung the prosecutor’s office will re-open investigation into his case. Bravo Christoph Cadenbach and Bastian Obermayer!

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Here’s an article published yesterday in the New York Times.

The rest is silence? — On Demjanjuk 3 originally appeared on unguided tour on April 23, 2010.
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Everyone understands the pain that accompanies death,

but genuine pain doesn’t live in the spirit,

nor in the air, nor in our lives,

nor on these terraces of billowing smoke.

the genuine pain that keeps everything awake

is a tiny, infinite burn

on the innocent eyes of other systems.

Todos comprenden el dolor que se relaciona con la muerte,

pero el verdadero dolor no está presente en el espíritu.

No está en el aire, ni en nuestra vida,

ni en estas terrazas llenas de humo.

El verdadero dolor que mantiene despiertas las cosas

es una pequeña quemadura infinita

en los ojos inocentes de los otros sistemas.

(FGarciaLorca, Panorama ciego de Nueva York / Blind Panorama of New York, in: Poeta en Nueva York)

Manhattan 4 (panorama ciego) originally appeared on unguided tour on April 19, 2010.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

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Manhattan 3 (Staple St) originally appeared on unguided tour on April 18, 2010.
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At a recent lunch the service was relaxed and attentive — none of the inconsequential and annoying  “How is everything?” — although everything was just excellent and for a very short moment I felt deprived of an opportunity to say it. For a café, Kinski doesn’t leave anything to be desired. But every expat has a dream — here’s mine: I  wish they had a Wiener Schnitzel on the menu and a Grüner Veltliner to go with it — I would eat there every day.

For those too busy to eat out, consider ordering in!

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Manhattan 2 (Heimat) originally appeared on unguided tour on April 7, 2010.
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Like all clichés, this one too turns a complex and ambiguous reality into something manageable. It is true, Manhattan looks to the future. Most New Yorkers do not live in the past the way Europeans do.

But that does not mean the city denies its past. I would propose the opposite, Manhattan is obsessed with its history — albeit in ways relatively foreign to Europeans who are accustomed to a form of national (collective) memory largely centered on the preservation and reconstruction of their cities’ architectural ‘heritage’ (often medieval or 19th century). For Europeans collective memory resides in architecture. To tear down a historic building is synonymous with destroying the past, erasing history. From this perspective, Manhattan with its ever changing cityscape seems especially averse to memory.

As is often the case (and Cixous is of course aware of this), the European gaze is blind on one eye. Looking towards the other but not at themselves, Europeans are often unable to recognize their own reflection in the other. If they did they would see trauma. Trauma caused by two world wars and the devastation they brought to their cities. For many years after both wars, European cities bore the marks of fighting and air raids: neighborhoods in ruins, streets filled with rubble, national symbols such as churches, monuments, museums destroyed or severely damaged. Each nation in their own way experienced the destruction of their cities as an attack on the nation’s memory. For the victims of war time aggression reconstruction was an act of both mourning and remembering. For Germany, the instigator of both world wars, urban planning was determined by the impulse to forget the crimes of the immediate Nazi past and to remember German victimhood.

The close link between architecture and memory raises an important question: if architecture preserves layers of history (which it undeniably does) how much of that history is legible and to whom? How much of the past is protected by the restoration of a historic church? What kind of memory is kept alive by the reconstruction of a destroyed palace? Buildings don’t speak. Buildings preserve traces. They are in need of a narrative, a story to make them speak to us. In this respect buildings are like photographs — which is exactly where the memory and recent history of Manhattan are preserved.

Thanks to pioneers like Berenice Abbott, who photographed the changing New York in the 1930s and 1950s, and the Byron Company images of the city’s architecture are abundant — and they are treasured. The shelves of Strand Bookstore, the city’s unofficial archive, are filled with books about Manhattan architecture. The Museum of the City of New York, the New York Historical Society, The New York Public Library, The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation are homes to fine collections of historic photographs of the city’s streets and architecture. As holdings are digitized and made available online for everyone to look at who has an internet connection, Manhattan’s past returns to the present — whether it’s always on time is a different question.

image:

Berenice Abbott, 1 5th Ave/Washington Square Park,

Oct. 21, 1936 (Changing New York)

copyright: Museum of the City of New York

Manhattan 1 (prehistory) originally appeared on unguided tour on April 1, 2010.
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1.

One cannot demarcate oneself from biologism, from naturalism, from racism in its genetic form, one cannot be opposed to them except by reinscribing spirit in an oppositional determination, by once again making it a unilaterality of subjectivity, even if in its voluntarist form. The constraint of this program remains very strong; it reigns over the majority discourses which, today, and for a long time to come, state their opposition to racism, to totalitarianism, to nazism, to fascism, etc., and do this in the name of spirit, and even of freedom of spirit; in the name of an axiomatic — for example, that of democracy or “human rights” — which directly or not  comes back to this metaphysics of subjectivity. All the pitfalls of this strategy of establishing demarcations belong to this program, whatever place one occupies in it. The only choice is the choice between the terrifying contaminations it assigns. Even if all forms of complicity are not equivalent, they are irreducible. (Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit)

2.

Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he (or she) could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue a poise  of Lawrence, if he (or she) could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow? All great writing springs from le dur désir de durer, the harsh contrivance of spirit against death. The hope to overreach time by force of creation.

Who would choose to be a literary critic if he (or she) could set verse to sing, or compose, out of his (her) own mortal being , a vital fiction. A character that will endure?

The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, the play must be given to her or him; criticism exists by the grace of other (wo)men’s genius. … It is not criticism that makes the language live. These are simple truths (and the honest critic says them to himself in the gray of morning). But we are in danger of forgetting them because the present time is peculiarly charged with autonomous critical energy and prestige. Critical journals pour out a deluge of commentary or exegesis; in America there are schools of criticism. The critic exists as a persona in his own right; his persuasions and quarrels have a public role. Critics write about critics, and the bright young man (or woman), instead of regarding criticism as defeat, as gradual, bleak coming to terms with the ash and grit of one’s limited talent, thinks of it as a career of high note. This would merely be funny; but it has a corrosive effect. (George Steiner, Humane Literacy)

Humane Literacy originally appeared on unguided tour on March 16, 2010.
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Während Männer, die ein politisches Amt innehaben,  Korruption, Steuerhinterziehung, Psychoterror gegenüber Untergebenen beinahe mühelos überstehen (und sich mit der Bildzeitung bestens verstehen),  fühlt siche eine Frau nach einem Verstoß gegen die Straßenverkehrsordnung, bei dem niemand zu Schaden gekommen ist und der nicht das Geringste mit ihrem Amt zu tun hat, zum Rücktritt gedrängt. Dagegen sieht  der hessische Ministerpräsident und CDU Vorsitzende Roland Koch — um einen bekannten kriminellen Politiker beim Namen zu nennen — seine Glaubwürdigkeit durch die jahrelang von ihm selbst aktiv unterstützte Verschleierung illegaler Parteispenden an die CDU (Stichwort: “jüdische Vermächtnisse), mit der die Partei sich im Wahlkampf Vorteile verschaffte,  eher bestätigt als beschädigt.

Wenn wir schon in Hessen sind: Manchmal bedarf es nicht einmal eines Gesetzesverstoßes. Als Andrea Ypsilanti 2009 ankündigte, ihr ambitioniertes Programm für mehr soziale Gerechtigkeit entgegen ihrer Aussagen im Wahlkampf mit den Stimmen der Linkspartei zu realisieren, bekam sie ein “Glaubwürdigkeitsproblem” und sah sich kurze Zeit später zum Rücktritt gezwungen. Auch hier hat die Bildzeitung kräftig nachgeholfen.

Wann hat die Bildzeitung jemals gegen Roland Koch und seine korrupte Ministerriege “Aufklärung” betrieben? In einem Land in dem  Alkohol am Steuer bei einer Frau moralisch schwerer wiegt als die Anstachelung zu Rassismus (Stichwort: “Wo kann man hier gegen Ausländer unterschreiben?”) und das Eintreiben illegaler Parteispenden im großen Stil sind die Werte  falsch justiert. Alexander Schwabes Kommentar in DIE ZEIT legt den Finger auf die Wunde — eine Wunde, die mit Margot Käßmanns Rücktritt nur fürs erste und scheinbar geschlossen ist.

“Wie mündig und erwachsen sind wir eigentlich, dass es noch Bischöfen und Bischöfinnen bedarf, vorzuleben, was und wie etwas richtig ist? Ist nicht frei nach Luther jeder aus sich heraus verantwortlich dafür, was er glaubt und was er tut? Eine Gesellschaft wäre reifer, wenn sie keine makellosen Helden an ihrer Spitze bräuchte. Wenn es genügte, dass das Führungspersonal einfach nur den Job gut macht. Der Ruf nach lupenreinen Vorbildern ist allzu sehr Ausdruck einer infantilen Sehnsucht.”

Was Schwabe nicht erwähnt, ist die Tatsache, dass es vornehmlich Frauen sind, die sich mit dieser infantilen Sehnsucht nach lupenreinen Vorbildern auseinandersetzen müssen. Männliche Politiker werden mit anderen, scheinbar erwachseneren Sehnsüchten belegt. Von ihnen erwartet man nicht mütterliche Geborgenheit (eine Form von “Lupenreinheit”), sondern väterliche Autorität. Laut, populistisch, unduldsam.

Margot Käßmanns Mut, eben diesen Autoritätsdiskurs in Frage zu stellen, sich gegen die herrschende Meinung für Geschlechtergerechtigkeit, sexuelle Selbstbestimmung, Armutsbekämpfung, und Frieden in Afghanistan ohne Waffen auszusprechen und sich dabei auch von als politisches Argument getarnten Verleumdungen (siehe Ralf Fücks) nicht einschüchtern zu lassen, ist vorbildlich, ohne dabei infantile Sehnsüchte zu befriedigen.

Liebe Margot Käßmann, ihre Stimme wird auch im Ausland gehört!

„Alle Leute, die ich kenne, lesen die ZEITUNG!“ — zu Margot Käßmanns Rücktritt originally appeared on unguided tour on February 26, 2010.
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On June 20, 2009 Neda Soltani, a lecturer of English literature at Teheran’s Islamic Azad University, is in her office revising a book manuscript. She does not join the protesters on their march. It doesn’t matter that Neda Soltani does not know Neda Agha-Soltan, the identities of the two women are about to merge.

Western media, hungry for images, need a face to go with the story — they find it on Neda Soltani’s facebook page. To our disinterested ears the names sound close enough. Why double check the spelling? It is the icon we’re interested in, who cares about the identity of the individual woman? CNN, BBC, CBS, ARD, ZDF, major newspapers — they all use Neda Soltani’s portrait. Sometimes her name is given with Neda Agha-Soltan’s image. For several weeks — until the government breaks down the opposition — Neda Soltani’s portrait can be seen on banners and posters mourning the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan.

Neda Soltani tries everything to reclaim her image. She calls TV stations and news channels, she writes follow-up emails and letters explaining the mix-up, demanding that her image be removed, stating over and over again that she is neither dead nor Neda Agha-Soltan. It’s too late, her image has become the face of a brutally crushed struggle for freedom.

Neda Soltani’s photograph has been circulating in the mass media and on social networking sites for over a week when the Iranian government pressures her to denounce the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan as a hoax instigated by the student protesters in conjunction with Western media. Frightened she flees the country for Germany where she seeks political asylum. Since her arrival in July Ms Soltani has been confined to a dismal refugee detention center waiting to be granted refugee status. No one has apologized to her.

To be robbed of one’s image can destroy a life. Neda Agha-Soltan’s publicized death and Neda Soltani’s loss of control over her image demonstrate how difficult it is for women to protect themselves from the intrusion + manipulation of Western media and their shameless consumers? We condemn the burkha as symbol and instrument of female oppression, we advocate the forced unveiling of Muslim women, we assume we alone know the truth. When will we explain to them we consider their naked faces our property?

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links

The New York Times reports on June 22, 2009 getting the facts right;

The Guardian reports on June 22, 2009 the death of Neda Soltani using Neda Agha-Soltan’s photograph;

An article in the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung tells Neda Soltani’s story of how the ‘false’ image destroyed her life;

A Wikipedia entry on Neda Agha-Soltan’s death.

An argument for the burqa originally appeared on unguided tour on February 8, 2010.
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If anything, the ghastly presence of John Demjanjuk — charged with murder of more than twenty-seven thousand Jewish prisoners at Sobibor — in a German courtroom proves that regarding the Holocaust the law has little power over the conscience of perpetrators. No judge, no lawyer will make them break their silence. They didn’t speak much of their crimes in Nuremberg and they remained mostly silent in Frankfurt, and so far we haven’t heard a word from Demjanjuk in Munich either. Deeds without doers. Genocide without perpetrators. A German way of life.

The law may fail to make the perpetrators admit their crimes, perhaps because it doesn’t always need their collaboration. In all likelihood, Demjanjuk will be convicted based on circumstantial evidence. But there are ways to end the silence. Why did it never occur to anyone to travel to Ohio where Demjanjuk lived for decades? Not to interrogate. Just to talk, to ask a few questions, to begin a conversation. Isn’t that what civilized people do?

The question is a rhetorical one, of course. For more than six decades Germans have been more than reluctant to talk with former Nazis — and who of my grandparents’ generation wasn’t one? — about their deeds and motives outside of the tightly regulated discourse defined by the law. What is true for the Holocaust is also true for the infamous State Security (Stasi) of East-Germany — which, by the way, had several thousand West-Germans on their payroll. While other countries emerging from a dictatorship have installed Truth Commissions to help resolve conflicts between victims and perpetrators, Germany  has sponsored memorials.

Freedom means the right to remain silent. Silence can be therapeutic, purifying. But silence is also a form of aggression — directed at oneself and at the other. Often silence provokes aggression: the desire to hurt, to crush, to elicit a reaction through the infliction of pain.

In the 1970s Germany defeated the terror of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). Why should Germans change their minds now?  Because very soon, when the last perpetrator will has passed away, the silence will be that of a graveyard. And then what?

Der Rest ist Schweigen?

The rest is silence — On Demjanjuk 2 originally appeared on unguided tour on January 23, 2010.
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The victims who remember fall into the void.

And the descendants of the perpetrators? — We’ve become tourists in everyone else’s past.

Could it be otherwise?

The Silence originally appeared on unguided tour on January 17, 2010.
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1
I’ve been many things to many people: the most beautiful woman in the world, the icy blonde, “the face that launch’d a thousand ships;” a myth, a phantom, a star; the daughter of Zeus; abused, exploited, exposed; a whore, a victim, a virgin; the torch that burns men’s desire, the shining moon; the primal scene of female beauty. Yet no one can say where I come from and no one knows who I am. Despite the tireless efforts of generations of linguists, my name is an enigma still. Did you know that I have the gift of ubiquity, the ability to be in more than one place at once? Here and not here; there and not there; good and bad; possible or impossible. Paris thought that I was his, although I never was — an idle fancy! To Troy I never went; that was a phantom, an image endowed with life … made … out of the breath of heaven. You think you know me but you shouldn’t always believe what you hear or see.

Suppose I was the wife of an ambitious, if somewhat clueless, professor. I refer to him as “my husband,” he calls me “Darling.” We’re like night and day: he speaks English, I speak French. We’re getting along because I haven’t told him that what he sees in me isn’t who I am.  He doesn’t take criticism very well and he can’t stand it when he’s proven wrong. He’s obsessed with finding evidence that Shakespeare was a Spanish Jew, not English at all. I don’t care for his research (I think it is self-involved), but agree to accompany him to the archive. It’s about time he learns to look for the past in the present, to see first and then, maybe, explain. I’m done with playing the part of the perfect wife  — today I want the masquerade to be over. You know the words.

Enough. I come together with my Lord, ship borne,
And now his city must I seek, his harbinger.
But what intent his heart has, that I may not guess.
Is it as wife I come? And come I as a queen?
Or am I here a victim of my prince’s pangs,
And of the evil fates long suffered by the Greeks?
I am conquered; whether captive too I may not know!

Enough, indeed. Neither conquered nor captive I’m coming home! As befits a queen, I expect a formal reception. I ask that you look at me; listen to me, follow me — but don’t search for evidence, and don’t reach for conclusions. Trust me, there’s merit in suspending your sense of orientation (if only for the twenty-two minutes it takes to read this essay). Je me sens si loin, et cependant si près. Et j’aime à me dire: Me voilà, là.

At your service, Madame.

2
He has abandoned the delights of imagination (he calls it fantasy) and the pleasures of the senses. A committed historian he trades in facts. In search for Truth he doesn’t always see what’s right in front of him. (His wife for instance.) When he looks at a woman, he sees a virgin. A secret admirer of Swiss watches (when he was a young boy, he wanted to be a watchmaker) he has read somewhere that time is a mechanical movement with two degrees of complication. He has been taught that it is impossible to be in two places at once.

He is a manufacturer of sense — although these are not the words he would use to describe what he does. He wants to be remembered as the discoverer of Shakespeare’s true identity. “He wants to be immortalized,” says his wife who knows him far better than he knows himself. His supremely ambitious project demands patience and precision. He always knows what time it is. Is that why he lives entirely in the past? Most people when they meet him for the first time find him awkward, out of place, absent-minded. It’s hard to surprise him, he sees what he wants to see. His questions are short and precise: Is this the way into the monastery? Why did you bring me here? Why do you read me Goethe’s Faust now? Did you miss me? (Does he know that some people refer to his life as a tragedy in two parts?)

He is an experienced traveler who does his homework. Always ahead of himself, always looking for something, he’s a tourist in everyone else’s past. An empty cave is an empty cave only until he arrives and fills it with meaning — with the story of Hildebrandt, for instance, the 13th century merchant who was miraculously saved from shipwreck by a shining light on the hill above the cave. And then this: a voided room, a chapel stripped bare. “Look! Nothing, no signs,” the guide proclaims triumphantly. He is shaken momentarily. Voids make him feel uncomfortable. Is that why he spends most of his time in the archive? Is that why the ticking of the clock doesn’t bother him? He prefers things to be fixed, he can’t endure the sight of decay. Frozen time is his preferred element; terra firma his favorite country. He doesn’t trust the sea and he is suspicious of the moon — although he would never admit that, of course not.

Lately he hasn’t slept so well. Lately he’s been doing strange things at night, in his dreams. The other morning he came to in the corridor after a dream that was painful at first and then became pure pleasure. A crack in the wall, a change of light, a faintly familiar voice like a memory from the future. Listen.

Bei euch, ihr Herrn, kann man das Wesen
Gewöhnlich aus dem Namen lesen…
And that’s plainly what we mean when we call you God’s enemies, seducers, liars.
…
Faust: Who are you?

Mephistopheles says: Part of that force which sometimes encourages evil, and sometimes acts for the good.

Faust says: What is this mystery?

Mephisto says: I am the spirit that always denies and rightly so, for everything is worthy of destruction. It would be better if nothing existed. So everything you call sin, destruction, everything, in short, which is considered evil, that is my element.

Faust says: You say you are a part, but I see you standing whole before me.

Mephisto says: I have told you my modest truth. If man, that tiny universe of folly, usually considers himself to be whole, I know I’m part of that part which existed at the beginning of everything, a part of that darkness which gave birth to proud light which now quarrels with the night that mothered it.

An experiment: neither hear nor see nor speak. To change your mind, to ignore the ticking of the clock, to find questions that don’t need answers: Who can tell dusk from dawn? Who can tell beginning from end? Who knows the difference between the past and the future?

He is anxious all of a sudden. But not anxious enough to return to the archive. The sudden urge to go to Paris. If this is an abduction, he surrenders willingly, with pleasure.

3
Magical, mystical, otherworldly — to describe THE CONVENT means to eschew the surgical vocabulary of academic film criticism, to let go of the urge to isolate an idea and explain the meaning behind what is there on the screen. There is no behind. There’s magic — and there’s Catherine Deneuve who, strange to say, seems to be directing THE CONVENT. Commanding the gaze, prompting camera movement, seeing everything, being everywhere at once, combining what we tend to think of as unconnected. Deneuve plays Deneuve plays Hélène plays Helen of Troy. Goddess and diva, idol and star, archetype and stereotype: she incorporates the most powerful afterimages of Western culture’s imaginary. Deneuve’s performance is of a stunning directness — confrontational and susceptive at the same time. ‘Don’t look for hidden motivations,’ she intimates, ‘pay attention to the ongoing moment.’ Sigmund Freud would not enjoy THE CONVENT. Or would he?

Everything in THE CONVENT is apparent. Image, word, and music are what they are: appearances. And yet nothing in THE CONVENT is transparent: no right angles, no progress, no closure. Repetition, perhaps even compulsion. When the lights go on in the movie theatre, the film continues in my head. I can’t imagine Freud wouldn’t be intrigued.

4
Watching THE CONVENT I feel reassured once more that some things will never be resolved: the argument between fact and fantasy, the disagreement between image and word, the controversy between seeing and believing. I like that ongoing struggle. It gives me the freedom to enjoy insignificant questions. What if the past was in the future? What if Helena abducted Paris? What if there was no before to an afterimage? What if there were no insignificant questions?

Don’t expect answers, be prepared for performance. The meaning of THE CONVENT is THE CONVENT. The actors act for the camera. They deliver their lines like priests reciting passages of sacred scripture: diligently, committed, reserved.

THE CONVENT is a celebration of the irreducible obliqueness of the world we live in. A refusal to be anything else but a film. An invitation to experience the untranslatable immediacy of music, images, and — yes, indeed — words. –

Faust says: “Be silent, then, for danger is in words.”

Is this the way into the monastery?

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THE CONVENT, written & directed by Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France 1994, 95 min., with Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich, Luís Miguel Cintra, Leonore Silveira.

quotes:

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust 2.

Margaret Atwood, Helen of Troy does Countertop Dancing

“The Convent” (Manoel de Oliveira, 1994) originally appeared on unguided tour on January 8, 2010.
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This photograph of John (Iwan) Demjanjuk being wheeled into a German courtroom in Munich reminds me of my grandfather shortly before he died: an old man, ill and barely conscious; an old Nazi who lived a full life, had children, grandchildren, a nice house in the suburbs; a perpetrator who saw himself as victim; a typical “Mitläufer” who for fear of his and his family’s life joined the NSDAP,  avoided resistance,  hung a photograph of Hitler in his living room, and somehow forgot to take it down when the Nazis no longer officially ruled Germany — that’s how I remember my grandfather.

My grandfather died in 1983. He is not affected by the proceedings in the German courtroom, he doesn’t care about the outcome of the trial. To my grandfather the trial of John Demjanjuk doesn’t mean a thing. To me it means a lot.

If Iwan Demjanjuk the perpetrator may no longer hide behind John Demjanjuk the victim, I can no longer hide my grandfather the perpetrator behind the invented figure of the innocent “Mitläufer.” I look at the photograph of Demjanjuk and I see my grandfather. I look the photograph of my grandfather and I see a perpetrator. I look in the mirror — I’m glad I resemble my grandmother.

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++ Heinrich Wefing writes in DIE ZEIT on Germany’s reluctance to put non-German Nazi criminals to trial (in German)

++http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/01/nazi-death-camp-accused-trial

++http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/01/john-demjanjuk-trial-sobibor

++http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/world/europe/01trial.html?ref=world

++http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2009/12/01/demjanjuk-survivant-de-l-holocauste-plaide-l-avocat_1274501_3214.html#ens_id=1273811

Of Victims and Perpetrators — Demjanjuk 1 originally appeared on unguided tour on December 1, 2009.
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Monuments are sites of symbolic exchange.

Last week Granada’s monument to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder + leader of the anti-republican, fascist Falange party, was decorated with a laurel crown, the symbol of victory and invincibility. Thus decorated the monument speaks about the future (rather than the past or the present) for Primo de Rivera was neither victorious nor invincible — found guilty of anti-republican conspiracy and insurrection he was sentenced to death and executed on Nov. 20, 1936.

Today someone left a reply.

"Granada será la tumba del fascismo," (Granada will be the grave of fascism), monument to Josè Antonio Primo de Rivera, Nov. 26, 2009

Granada 19 (the grave of fascism) originally appeared on unguided tour on November 26, 2009.
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I’m reading a love poem from Al-Andalus in a language twice removed from the original Arabic. My English version is based on a Spanish translation.  As I have no Arabic, I don’t feel bound by gendered pronouns. He-his-him doesn’t speak to me, it is you I care about:

When the wine you drank
put you to sleep and the eyes
of the watchmen closed also

I approached you timidly
like one who seeks to come close,
but on the sly, pretending not to.

I crept towards you, imperceptible
as a dream, moved myself close
to you, softly as a breath.

I kissed your throat, a white jewel,
drank the vivid red of your mouth
and so passed my night with you
deliciously, until the darkness smiled,
showing the white teeth of dawn.

Adapted from AFTER THE REVELS by Ibn Shuhayd, 992 – 1034, Córdoba,
translated into English by Cola Franzen.

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Granada 18 (pronouns) originally appeared on unguided tour on November 13, 2009.
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My eyes free what the page imprisons:
the white the white and the black the black.

(Ibn ‘Ammar, d. 1086)

Granada 17 (Reading) originally appeared on unguided tour on November 10, 2009.
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