The Architecture of Modern Culture: Towards a Narrative Cultural Theory 9783110283051, 9783110282887

Table of contents :
Preface
Part 1. Culture and its Narratives
Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative: A Transdisciplinary Discourse Report
The Hidden Narratives: Latency, Repression, Common Sense
On the Narratology of Cultural and Collective Memory
Romanticism and Nationalism: The Heroic Narrative - Hermann and the Battle for Germany
Polyphem’s Children: (Post-) Colonial Aspects in Western Modernity and Literary Modernism
Murder and Monotheism: A Detective Story in Close Reading
Part 2. Space, Time and the Global
Space and Borders: Simmel, Waldenfels, Musil
Time in Modern Cultural Analysis
Walter Benjamin and the Translational Turn
The Arts and the Split of Time: On Kawara
Part 3. The Heritage of Classical Modernism: Broch, Canetti, Musil, Kafka
The Disappearing of Ruins: Thomas Glavinic’s The Work of the Night and an Imaginary Symposium with Benjamin, Simmel, Freud and Foucault
Fear in Culture: Hermann Broch’s Massenwahntheorie
Mass Hysteria and the Physics of the Crowd: Canetti and Broch -A Theoretical Divorce
Musil’s Version of Round Dance in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
From Early Modernism to the Late Avant-garde Movement: The Austrian Example
The Broken Mirror: The Construction of America in Lenau
Images of America, Made in Austria: After Lenau - Franz Kafka
Austrian Literature in a Trans-cultural Context
Bibliography and References
Original place of publication of single chapters

Citation preview

Wolfgang Müller-Funk The Architecture of Modern Culture

Culture & Conflict

Edited by Isabel Capeloa Gil and Catherine Nesci

Volume 3

Wolfgang Müller-Funk

The Architecture of Modern Culture

Towards a Narrative Cultural Theory

ISBN 978-3-11-028288-7 e-ISBN 978-3-11-028305-1 ISSN 2194-7104 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de Cover image: “Umbruch” from the “teheran series” (with many thanks to the Austrian embassy in Teheran). © 2011 by Sabine Müller-Funk. www.sabine.mueller-funk.com © 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: fidus Publikations-Service GmbH, Nördlingen Printing: Hubert & Co. Gmbh & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Dedicated to my Drosendorf seminar students

Preface These collected essays bring together important issues arising from my work over the last decade on cultural analysis and cultural studies and are presented here for the first time to an English-speaking audience. As in my German books Die Kultur und ihre Narrative (Culture and its Narratives) and Kulturtheorie (Theory of Culture), the first section of the volume contains essays in which narratology is understood and developed as a key concept of and a central approach to cultural analysis. This section includes texts on the relations between narrating and remembering and the function of narratives for the construction of individual and collective identity. It also contains an essay that further develops my concepts of hidden narratives. Looking at a more systematic issue in cultural theory that goes hand in hand with the so-called “turns” (the spatial turn, the performative turn), the book develops the idea of a narrative theory of culture that is no longer exclusively a narratology in the sense of a standard theory of literature. On the one hand, it can be shown that narratives have both a spatial and a performative aspect. The characters in a story all act in and on certain places and are, at the same time, actors. On the other hand, formulating a narrative cultural theory makes it possible to correct the lopsidedness of contemporary cultural theories that are based only on concepts of space or performance. For example, many traditional theories of memory, since Saint Augustine, are obsessed with the spatial aspect, corresponding with the idea of storing and places of memory. With a narrative theory of remembering (see chapter three) it is possible to develop the idea that remembering is a never-ending process that includes processes of re-narrating and changes of identities. Mikhail Bakhtin did not develop the idea of chronotopos in a systematic way, but used it rather in a metaphorical sense; nevertheless, I think that his idea of a time in space that integrates both elements into a new single element is still extraordinarily important for a narrative cultural theory, combining the spatial aspect (“globalisation”) with the temporal one (modernity, modernism). Narrative, like music, is based on time, and time remains a very important factor in the era of globalisation. It is the doubled and broken time of the narrative (the time of storytelling, the time of events that is expressed by the process of storytelling) that creates continuity and identity, a relative stability of symbolic order, and change in constancy (and vice versa). Certain features and structures are present in central elements of what we call culture (or Culture) narrative: for example in creating values, in remembering and recollecting, in constructing identity, and in constructing meaning. As opposed to (Foucauldian or nonFoucauldian) discourse, narrative always entails a reference to the Lebenswelt. It

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creates empathy and integrates our body into the process of constructing a symbolic world. Narrative is a very powerful– maybe even the most powerful – symbolic “weapon” in structuring a world that is always, in the end, a cultural one. Extending and deepening central theses from the book Die Kultur und ihre Narrative (Müller-Funk 2002/2008), I argue that such a narrative theory is not only broader than standard theories of literature because it also refers to film, visual arts and new media (including computer games), but is also an important part of cultural theory, because it analyses the function of narrative for the construction of the symbolic order we call culture. The second and the third parts of the book should be read as adaptations of the first, theoretical part. Part 2 (Space, Time and the Global) deals with important questions of contemporary cultural analysis such as translation, time and space, and globalisation. The central idea is the notion of an exemplary and, at the same time, fragmentary contribution to relevant aspects of modern culture from a narrative perspective. Part 3, The Heritage of Classical Modernism, is a collection of close readings of (Austrian) modernist authors such as Robert Musil, Hermann Broch and Elias Canetti, whose oeuvre can be read as cultural analysis in the medium and form of literature. What I am interested in is the question of how far the dialogue about modernity and modernism can be related to the mainstream discourse in contemporary cultural studies, which very often operates on a synchronic level. In a narrative theory of culture, a historical and temporal element automatically comes into play: the question of how to tell the story about modernism and its transfer in a globalised world. This is a topic that runs through each of the chapters of parts two and three, for example in the study of the work of the Japanese artist On Kawara. In contrast to philology, the works of these and other authors are analysed in contributions to cultural analysis. As in my book on “Essayism” (Müller-Funk 1995), I read The Man without Qualities as a cultural analysis in a literary form. The same can be said of Canetti’s ambitious essay on power and the crowd. In the essays on Lenau and Kafka, I connect theories of stereotype (the Aachen School, Homi Bhabha) with a narrative approach; clearly stereotypes are based on certain narratives in which symbolic positions are fixed. In this respect, the structure of the book works as a network. I hope that all the essays in this book can be linked to one another, as is the case in a network structure. This is a book written by a German native speaker, who has received professional support by English native speakers. Following Benjamin’s idea of translation, I did not want to extinguish the traces of German language and Austrian culture. These “strange” elements will be noticeable in the English text. What I have in mind is that this book should be part of a cultural transfer, in a double sense. Without my academic years in Birmingham (UK), I would never have

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written this book. So it represents a transfer from the English-speaking world to the German-speaking one. But at the same time it is a journey from Austria to the English-speaking “continents”. Among many others, I have to thank especially Chris Barber, Michael Böhringer, Malcolm Spencer and Joanna White for correcting individual texts. My colleague John Heath read the whole manuscript and also provided a great deal of help in giving the book a consistent style. My theory seminars with my academic PhD “team”  – Lena Brandauer, Daniel Bitouh, Daniela Finzi, Nicole Kandioler, Ursula Knoll, Gerald Lind, Emilija Mancic, Matthias Schmidt, Gottfried Schnödl, Eva Schörkhuber, Alexander Sprung and others – have always been a source of intellectual inspiration, as is the case with “companions” and colleagues such as Anna Babka, Marijan Bobinac, Milka Car, Michele Cometa, Pál Dereky, Heinz Fassmann, Isabel Gil, Endre Hars, Alfrun Kliems, Ingo Lauggas, Brigitta Pesti, Mauro Ponzi, Sonja Neef, Ansgar Nünning, Clemens Ruthner, Andrea Seidler, Antonio Sousa Ribeiro, Heidemarie Uhl and Birgit Wagner, the spokesperson for our working group, Cultural Studies/Kulturwissenschaften at the University of Vienna. This book has arisen out of many different places and environments: the Gießen Centre for the Study of Culture (GSCS), where I was senior scholar in 2009; my scholarship at GWZO (Leipzig University 2010) and at Trinity College in Dublin 2012; an academic residence in Lisbon and Coimbra; and a series of lectures in 2011, organised by the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York and Los Angeles. The last work on the book has been done during my research fellowship at the Trinity College in Dublin in September 2012. So, I would like to thank Jürgen Barkhoff, the director of Long Room Hub, including his kind and professional team, and Clemens Ruthner, the director of Research at the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies. Modern literary theory has taught us that authors are unable to control their readers and the reception of their books. Nevertheless, it is possible to hope that this book will be welcomed in foreign territory, i.e. that it will find interested readers in the English-speaking realm. Dublin, Vienna and Drosendorf, October 2012

Content Preface 

 VII

Part 1 Culture and its Narratives 

 1

Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative: A Transdisciplinary Discourse Report   3 The Hidden Narratives: Latency, Repression, Common Sense  On the Narratology of Cultural and Collective Memory 

 20

 42

Romanticism and Nationalism: The Heroic Narrative – Hermann and the  58 Battle for Germany  Polyphem’s Children: (Post-) Colonial Aspects in Western Modernity and  76 Literary Modernism  Murder and Monotheism: A Detective Story in Close Reading  Part 2 Space, Time and the Global 

 97

 109

Space and Borders: Simmel, Waldenfels, Musil  Time in Modern Cultural Analysis 

 111

 128

Walter Benjamin and the Translational Turn  The Arts and the Split of Time: On Kawara 

 135  147

Part 3 The Heritage of Classical Modernism: Broch, Canetti, Musil, Kafka 

 161

The Disappearing of Ruins: Thomas Glavinic’s The Work of the Night and an Imaginary Symposium with Benjamin, Simmel, Freud and Foucault   163 Fear in Culture: Hermann Broch’s Massenwahntheorie 

 173

Mass Hysteria and the Physics of the Crowd: Canetti and Broch –  187 A Theoretical Divorce  Musil’s Version of Round Dance in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften 

 204

From Early Modernism to the Late Avant-garde Movement: The Austrian  211 Example 

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The Broken Mirror: The Construction of America in Lenau 

 225

Images of America, Made in Austria: After Lenau – Franz Kafka   Austrian Literature in a Trans-cultural Context  Bibliography and References 

 248

 264

Original place of publication of single chapters 

 276

 239

Part 1 Culture and its Narratives

Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative A Transdisciplinary Discourse Report I. In Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, the Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal develops the idea that terminologies and concepts are not stable and fixed within a certain academic discipline, but are transferred from one academic field to another  – within but also beyond the humanities (Bal 2002a, Neumann/Tygstrup 2009; Müller-Funk 2010, 332–349). This suggests a dialogical relationship between various fields of research. Moreover, it becomes striking that the ‘same’ terminology has different meanings in different disciplines. This is true for key concepts and terms in cultural analysis such as discourse, space, and narrative, but also for identity. There are two reasons for these different meanings. Firstly, literary studies or art history have different references to and understandings of cultural and social reality than, for example, history or sociology, which concentrate on practice and actions. Secondly, they have a different focal point, or – in the terminology of literary narratology – another perspective, another focalisation. In other words, one can argue that the transdisciplinary field of cultural studies and cultural analysis is also a territory in which productive dispute and discussion can take place. This is extremely important with regard to our topic. Identity is a typical travelling concept; one can find discourse on identity in different schools of philosophy, in sociology and political science, in psychoanalysis, in British cultural studies and German Kulturwissenschaften (see: Straub 2004, 277–303), and in modern literature. For example, whereas phenomenology has discussed the problem of identity from an internal perspective, British empirical philosophy in the tradition of John Locke and David Hume has analysed it from an external focus. In the case of identity, this is decisive. From an internal perspective, Lucius, the hero transformed into a donkey in a novel by the Latin writer Apuleius, remains the same person whether he is a human being or a donkey (Bakhtin 1989, 38f). In contrast to this internal perspective, the donkey and the human being called Lucius are not identical as far as his social surroundings are concerned, because a donkey and a human being cannot be identical. Sociological functionalism and cultural constructivism also choose perspectives from outside, describing identity as an artificial and illusionary procedure that is constitutive and necessary for social action and for one’s place in a given

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symbolic space. In contrast to our internal experience of the uniqueness and authenticity of our identity, the social sciences and cultural studies make clear that this kind of self-experience is illusionary and imaginary. Here identity is either the result of a social procedure (identification) or the result of a symbolic process. Psychoanalysis as modern fiction offers an interesting in-between approach, since in this symbolic field the focus is itself the wandering between the inside of a patient and the outside of an emphatic person, namely the therapist (Erikson 1959/1973, 17f). And in literature, especially in modern novels, there is always the possibility of changing perspectives and therefore of the confrontation between inside and outside. Already on a structural level, identity can be seen here as a dynamic phenomenon that is based on the presence of an other, the ‘reality’ of an unavoidable Other, a difference, which at the same time is a structure. In contrast to Erikson, this has been interpreted in French structuralist and poststructuralist theory as the end of classical identity (Descombes 1979/1981, 93). Widening Bal’s concept, one can say that there are at least three levels of travelling concept with regard to “identity”: – Travelling within the humanities and social sciences. – Travelling between different national cultures which have different traditions of science and culture. – Travelling between the social sciences and humanities, and literature and the arts. As Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle have pointed out, an essential part of the vocabulary of identity (as a person, as a role, as a mask) comes from theatre and/ or literature (Marquard 1979, 11). As we will see, the concepts are forever changing during their travels and what distinguishes one discipline from another is the different use they make of seemingly identical terms. With regard to identity, one can differentiate at least three ‘journeys’ and shifts of concepts in general: – A journey from the social sciences to philosophy, as Odo Marquard has pointed out in his article Identität: Schwundtelos und Mini-Essenz. Bemerkungen zu einer Genealogie einer aktuellen Diskussion (Disappearing Telos and Mini-Essence – Remarks on the Genealogy of a Contemporary Discussion) in the volume Identität (Identity) in the series Poetik und Hermeneutik (Poetics and Hermeneutics). Referring to G.H. Mead and symbolic interactionism, Marquard alludes to the multiple importation of a sociology of identity from Anglo-Saxon into German speaking academic spaces (Marquard 1979, 349), but he also adds later that the term had previously migrated from philosophy (Marquard 1979, 353).

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A theoretical import from French post-war philosophy into Anglo-Saxon cultural studies and to contemporary cultural analysis und Kulturwissenschaften. At the centre of this transfer is the interest in the figure of the Other and its function for identity. A shift from modern psychology and sociology to literature (and from literature to psychology and sociology). This refers to a type of literature and artistic production that is used as the ‘medium’ of an experimental form of knowledge as is the case in Musil, Broch, Valéry, Borges, Joseph Roth, Proust, Frisch, Kundera, Marías and many others. Here literature is understood as a specific episteme or, to borrow from Schelling, as an intellectual view (“intellektuelle Anschauung”).

In the following sections I will discuss these different approaches in the field of German philosophy, Anglo-Saxon social sciences, French philosophy, in cultural studies and Kulturwissenschaften, and in classical modern and postmodern literature. I will look for the interdependences and breaks which have taken place in the in-between of these different forms of epistemai. The title of this essay implies the simple question whether there is any identity beyond culture. And how can one describe the relationship between identity and alterity? What is the function of the narrative aspect? I will begin with the German philosopher Odo Marquard and later discuss Paul Ricœur’s concept of two different forms of identity and his analysis of narrative identity. In a further step, I will read two European novels, one from a modernist author, Joseph Roth, the other from a postmodern writer, Javier Marías. Both novels have a programmatic reference to the topic itself. At the end of the essay I will try to perform the art of differentiation with regard to our topic: culture, identity and alterity.

II. Marquard states that the master-word identity is a topic that has a problem with identity. It was never a central concern of traditional philosophy; it was Schopenhauer who distinguished between personal identity, ownership and property, and representative identity (Marquard 1979, 348f). From the perspective of (German) philosophy, identity comes from the outside or at least from its margins. Identity always produces problems and splits. There is, for example, an official and an unofficial identity. Especially in contemporary social science and its focus on role distance, the accent is no longer on the true and hidden but on the hiding Self (Marquard 1979, 350). The philosopher Marquard agrees with the sociologist Niklas Luhmann that identity is an essential issue of cultural modernity: It

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is absolutely necessary, Luhmann argues, for self referential complex systems to find identity in their ‘environment’, “Umwelt” (Luhmann, in: Marquard 1979, 318). Identity is seen as an operation and as a functional element in modern societies. Identity always comes into play when it is threatened by change. It is interpreted as a substitute for traditional metaphysics, a vestige of such emotive terms as essence (essentia) or telos. The question of absolute beginning or origin is replaced by the problem of identity. There are two interesting distinctions in Marquard. Firstly he speaks about the old facets of identity as being religions, states, nations and classes, and the new issues of identity as being reflexive, communicative and concerned with a universal identity that undergoes permanent change (Marquard 1979, 352). I dare say that there is a mix of “old” and “new” identity in the contemporary discussion and discourse on culture. There are, on the one hand, suspicions regarding a universalistic concept of identity and a return to particularistic identity, yet on the other hand, there is an insistence on the fact that this particularity is constructed, meaning that it is part of a dynamic process, i.e. culture. Thus, identity is the result of the breakdown of traditional terms such as “essence” and “teleology” (Marquard 1979, 358f). Secondly, the German philosopher also contrasts an identity of generality with an identity of particularity. The first version has its roots in ancient Greek philosophy, which states that every being is identical with itself. Here, identity negates difference. In contrast, the Jewish idea of Jahwe (“I am, who I am” or “I am, who I will be”) lives from the indefinite qualitative difference, as Marquard points out by quoting from Kamlah’s theological work (Marquard 1979, 354). The first version of identity is beyond time (and space), the second has a strong historical aspect; it is in time and space. Or in other words, it is a constructed narrative identity. Or to put it yet another way, ‘cultural’ identity in particular is always an inscribed narrative matrix.

III. According to postmodern philosophy or post-structuralism, identity no longer can be seen as the authentic kernel of a nut. This idea was central e.g. to the classical autobiography and the Bildungsroman, especially in German literature, for example in Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit or Wilhelm Meister, or in a Romantic and ironic version in Eichendorff’s Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts. The corresponding narrative is based on the “chronotopos” (Bakhtin) that after a long period of wandering and straying, the homodiegetic narrator and protagonist finds his/her true calling. Elias Canetti’s autobiography in three volumes is also

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based on the idea of an identity that is found at the end, a typical adaptation of the Aristotelian idea of entelechia. It is a fixed kernel within yourself (Currie 1998, 2ff) that becomes visible at the end of the story. There is a strong deterministic aspect to this concept of identity. In the first chapter of his life story, Elias Canetti writes that all his later experiences had already happened earlier in Rustchuk (Canetti 1977, 9). Compared with the ‘classical’ Bildungsroman or autobiography, a new moment comes into play that has similarities with the idea of psychoanalysis (although Canetti, like Musil, was a harsh critic of Freud) – namely, the idea that it is the experiences in early childhood that prove formative for one’s later life. Canetti’s autobiography also includes the classical telos that he was predestined to become a writer. In all these literary examples, identity is understood more or less as a fixed and durable element, a reliable factor in one’s life, which is beyond time and space, constant and immobile as Aristotle’s unmoved mover. From a narrativistic perspective, this is itself a narrative construction of identity, a story about how a specific human being searched and found his/her true “self” at the end. There is another concept of identity in modernity, namely a social and sociological one, which describes how a person, a collective or a community finds his, her or its place in the world of modern society. Here, man or woman is not seen as a fixed being but is formed through the process of socialisation in institutions such as the family or school. Identity is seen as the result of identification. His/ her identity, personality and language are the result of that process, which is seen as integration into society and/or culture (Ruegg 1969, 229; Lohauß 1995, 129–161). Erikson’s theory of identity may be seen as a concept that bridges the gap between psychoanalysis and the social sciences. Here, identity is understood as the result of the drama of childhood but also as a complicated balancing of three key elements of personality: the Es, the Ich and the Über-Ich, or id, ego and superego. Identity is seen as a creative synthesis between our desires and the demands of a culture. The interesting point is that it is the figure of the father (and to some extent of the mother) who represents the dimension of the Other on two levels: on a personal level and a collective one. Through a complex process of identification, identity is generated on a personal and a collective level because the father represents the super-ego (Erikson 1959/1973, 11–54; Peter Lohauß 1995, 30f), the Lacanian symbolic order. In the theoretical framework of Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis, personal identity is also illusionary and imaginary. However, I would add that this does not mean that it does not represent a cultural ‘reality’. It is the oedipal triangle that proves to be the symbolic space where the process of identity building takes place. It entails a difficult process, which is seen as positive integration into society and its specific symbolic order (culture). Identity is the cornerstone of what is called socialisation: finding a place in

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society and culture. In contrast to Straub (Straub 2004), there is no real difference between personal and collective identity, for example an imagined community (Anderson 1991/1996). Identity is seen as the result of positive development. Moreover, identity is the precondition of psychological health. Similar to the concept of humanistic Bildung, identity has an extremely positive denotation and connotation. This affirmative moment is distinguished in post-structuralism but also in British cultural studies. Here, identity takes on a widely negative meaning. Identity is seen as an illusionary idea and – together with the double meaning of subject – a symptom of oppression by society (Straub 2004, 277f). In the eighth chapter of Robert Musil’s unfinished novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The man without qualities), the essayistic voice speaks about the strange, unreal and uncanny configuration of Kakanien, a country in which everybody distrusts each other. The author uses the German word Charakter in this context in an unspecific sense that is quite similar to identity. It is mentioned that every inhabitant of this multicultural empire has at least nine identities (or characters): profession, nationality, state, class, geography, gender, consciousness, unconsciousness, and privacy. The last Charakter is the most interesting one. On the one hand, it bands together all the other identities within itself; on the other, it is dispersed by all those others. This private identity or character is compared to a small and eroded hollow into which all the other characters drain and out of which they then come again to fill, together with other small rivulets, another hollow, which is defined as the passive fantasy of unfilled spaces (Musil 1978, 34). Thus, identity disappears in Musil’s novel into the imaginary. Ulrich is not so much a man without qualities, as the English translation suggests, but a man who lives in these unfilled spaces as a man without identity. There is no longer a strict relation to the sample of identities, rather there is a radical vacuum behind all the qualities and characters. In the interior of modern identity there lies: nothing. The plurality of identities undermines identity itself, it becomes an empty phenomenon, a ‘fader’ (S. Weber 1978, 85–97). To a certain extent, the diagnosis in Musil’s novel can be understood as a parallel analysis of society and culture in the decades between 1870 and 1930 with regard to disciplines such as sociology and psychology (Lepenies 1985, 239–401). But Musil also has something in common with post-structuralism, namely the idea that identity is a complex, fragmented and doubled phenomenon. As far as I can see, there is in Musil neither a focus on the symbolic aspect of the process of identity production, nor a specific interest in the dynamic between self and other, which goes hand in hand with this process. This is also true of modern sociology. Yet these two aspects of identity – alterity and the role of narrating – have become central to the humanities and social sciences in the wake of

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what have been called the new cultural turns in the Kulturwissenschaften (Bachmann-Medick 2006).

IV. In my view, Paul Ricœur’s contribution to this topic is remarkable, because he has presented a new perspective in his three-volume monograph Temps et récit (Ricœur 1983–1985/1988–1991) and a book about the relationship between selfness and otherness – Soi même comme un autre (Ricœur 1990/1996). The connection between both topics is striking, although the French philosopher elaborates on this relation in an explicit form in only one chapter of his later book, where he differentiates between personal and narrative identity (Ricœur 1990/1996, 144–206). In this book, the author discusses not only the complicated relations between the Self and the Other but also differentiates between two aspects of identity: Whereas identity in the sense of the Latin word idem (sameness) is connected with constancy in time (and space), identity in the sense of the Latin ipse (selfhood) does not imply the idea of an unchangeable kernel of a personality (Ricœur 1990/1996, 11). With regard to alterity, it follows that there are also two aspects to alterity: otherness and (cultural) alterity, which correspond to sameness and selfhood respectively. As in other concepts (for example the Lacanian dyad je and moi), there is a double fragmentation: On the one hand, identity has two sides that are connected and divided at the same time. On the other hand, the Self is always split because of the priority of the Other that is written into it. It is quite clear that the idem identity is very abstract and symbolically empty; in contrast, the ipse identity contains positive predicates. The two elements work as in mathematical logic: x(a), there is an x that is a. Or A=A (Marquard 1979, 360). The first identity is absolute, but like Musil’s it is hollow, tautological and deictic. In Pierce’s terminology it is indexical (Peirce 1991: 350). As the word I (Ich), it refers to a person but has no (explicit cultural) meaning itself. It becomes meaningful only by the addition of the predicate (woman, worker, Austrian etc.). Only the second, changeable aspect of identity refers to our topic: cultural identity, although one might argue that the other aspect of identity, the self-reference that is perceived by an internal focalisation, has also affected cultural change. It becomes important in post-traditional, modern, Western or non-Western cultures, in which every human being is required to work out this relationship to the Self (Straub 2004, 280). Narrative is not only a manner of speaking, a speech-act or a Sprachspiel (Wittgenstein), but is a central element with regard to identity. It is the narra-

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tive that integrates the two aspects of identity, the idem and the ipse, or in Marquard’s terminology, a general with a particular identity. Narrative generates a configuration of events. It suggests continuity and produces sense by transforming contingency into narrative necessity (Ricœur 1990/1996, 173–186). Narrative identity makes it possible to combine constancy with change. Through narrative, one can invent or imagine possible (ipse) identities and play with them, as it is the case in the famous Bob Seger song If I were a carpenter and you were a lady. Or one can tell the story about the young and enthusiastic communist one was in one’s youth. Narratives of emigration also have a similar structure. Here, in contrast to the main person  – the narrated I  – providing the stable element in the narrative, this is instead represented by the voice of the storyteller, since the narrated I is potentially undergoing permanent change. It is the narrative process itself that creates identity through a complex dialectic between sameness and selfhood, otherness and alterity. It represents continuity and therefore the aspect of the idem, the idea of the uniqueness of a certain person, and it contains all the metamorphoses, transformations and conversions of a person who is telling his or her life story. The frog and the prince, the ardent communist and the harsh conservative, Saul and Paul are connected in a paradoxical way, so that one is the other and at the same time is not. The narrative guarantees duration in change.

V. As I have shown in an earlier essay (Müller-Funk 2009b, 365–382; Müller-Funk, 2009a, 241–261), narrating not only means telling a story, but telling a story to someone. Sometimes this can be very abstract and not represented by the manner of speaking (as is the case in many classical modernist novels, which often avoid the gesture of having an empirical person narrate the story). Nevertheless, the other is written into the configuration of the narrative matrix. There is always a hidden I who speaks to an Other. There is always, as Mieke Bal has shown, a dialogical element which has the structure of an abstract letter (Bal: 2002b, 7–43; Müller-Funk 2010, 332–349). Therefore, it also entails an ethical aspect (Ricœur 1990/1996, 207–246). Narrating means an invitation to identification, a plea for recognition and especially the idea that my story is ‘true’ or, in the case of literary fictions, plausible or reliable. Identity needs confirmation by the Other, who is – from a cultural perspective – part of the symbolic field that is established not least by narratives. The narrative is the unavoidable medium of this cultural procedure. Therefore, only narratives are able to create collective identities, which are based on narrating communities, on groups of readers, who become storytellers at the same time. This kind of narrative always tells a story about who we are

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and who we are not. On an individual level, it creates a narrative unity of life. On a collective level, it suggests – in an act of abstraction and imagination – the ‘life’ of a nation, the history of a movement, a group etc. Identity establishes a clear order with a very often unconscious negative identity that is similar to the image of another we fear to be or to become. It is the image of a misused castrated body, an ethnic group or an exploited social minority (Erikson: 1959/1973, 28). Coming back to Musil’s novel, what does loss of identity mean? What kind of identity is it? These confusing and irritating cases of narrativity can be, as Ricœur argues, formulated anew in his terminology as the revelation of the ipse identity by the loss of the idem identity that is supporting it (Ricœur 1990/1996, 184). Following this argument, the hero is someone who can be characterised by interference between the two levels. In the case of anti-heroes such as Musil’s Ulrich or Max Frisch’s Stiller, this relation is broken. Nevertheless, those works contain a narrative that is the loss of identity and character, a master narrative of classical modernism, one the philosopher Günter Anders has given the title Man without world. It is the story of alienation (Anders 1984, XI). It is part of the modern cultural laboratory in which new forms of narrating are experienced.

VI. The idea that identity depends on the figure of the Other is, in many aspects, an astonishingly late one. It was to be picked out as a central theme in at least three symbolic fields: in French philosophy, in contemporary cultural analysis, but also in modern and postmodern literature. It is literature that is best able to present the paradoxes of identity under the circumstances of global modernity. Joseph Roth’s text Beichte eines Mörders erzählt in einer Nacht is a literary masterpiece and an object lesson for every narrative theory because it demonstrates several important aspects of narrative configuration, of the performance of narrating, the Sprechweise (manner of speech), but also of the function of narrative in creating and sustaining communities. This, in particular, points to the phenomenon that identity is always based on its opposite, alterity. The short novel (more a novella) is set in the late 1930s in Paris and also presents the (fictional) audience, the narrative community (Erzählgemeinschaft). This is a very specific narrative community, namely a diaspora, here Russian anti-communist exiles who meet each other night after night in a particular restaurant. Diasporas, which have become prominent in contemporary cultural studies (Appadurai 1996), are highly interesting narrative communities with regard to their (fragile) identity. Emigrants live in between the old and the new identity, between the

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symbolic space of their old national culture and of the culture of the immigration country. Thus there is a strong and permanent need for storytelling. In contrast to many other ‘classical’ modernist writers, Roth plays with the act of narrating itself by using a form of storytelling which seems to be very traditional in the sense of Benjamin’s famous essay (Benjamin 1977, 385–410), but proves to be post-traditional at the same time. Using Genette’s terminology, the novel is intradiegetic, i.e. it includes a narrative frame with two storytellers, the embedded narrator named Golubtschik, who, night after night, tells the visitors of Tari-Bari his fantastic life story, and a non-identifiable frame narrator, who represents the visitors in the restaurant, but is displaced for two reasons. He presents himself to the audience and to the embedded narrator as a German writer, a person who speaks many European languages, including Russian. Like the guests in the Russian restaurant, he is an emigrant, but he is not part of the diasporic, anti-communist Russian community. His identity is mysterious. The inside and outside perspectives do not fit together. Like many other protagonists in Roth’s œuvre, the frame narrator is the author’s double and also has a double in the text itself. He has something in common with the author (his Central European origins, his knowledge of foreign languages, his European attitudes, that he is a German native speaker, that he was in Russia in World War I and that he lives as a writer in exile in Paris). At the same time, he is also the mediator to the real audience outside the world of the text, which is important, because this small novel also refers to the problem of reliability. Through its figures, the novel presents three cultural spaces; Russia, France and Central Europe, which includes Germany, Austria and Hungary. It is also important to mention that time stands still in this exile restaurant, firstly because there is not a specific time to order as is usually the case in French restaurants, and secondly because the clock has stopped. Everyone (incidentally, there are no women in the Russian restaurant) is looking clandestinely at the wall clock, although they know that it no longer works (Roth 1984, 79). This is a rhetorical reference to a specific moment of storytelling: Narrating is an act in which the past is preserved and suddenly becomes contemporary. During Golubtschik’s narration, present time disappears. Everyone feels as if he had experienced Golubtschik’s life (Roth 1984, 47). During this night, Old Russia rises again. But there is also another interesting aspect of cultural alterity. As an expert of another culture, the frame narrator explains to the reader why Russian émigrés are so careless about time: it is because they have lost their cultural orientation in exile. They are out of time because they have lost their former identity. But they also neglect time because they want to demonstrate their cultural difference to French culture. They play “echte Russen” (“authentic Russians”), those people who do not have the same kind of calculating mentality as those in the West.

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This is a story about the insecurity of identity that is itself the result of wrong or false stories. Entering the world of the text, we get to know the private space of identity, a hollow filled with vacuum and fantasy, as it is described in Musil’s novel. This post-Romantic prose combines the topic of wrong or false stories with the motif of the double. There are a lot of mirroring effects: between Golubtschik and the frame narrator, between the frame narrator and the author, between Golubtschik and his ‘false’ brother Krapotkin, who proves to be a rival in love, and between Golubtschik and the demonic Hungarian devil Jenö Lakatos. But there is also a break in identity with regard to time. Golubtschik and his mistress Lutetia have lost their former selfhood. This becomes evident at the end when Golubtschik’s narration is caught up by time. The ugly woman who comes for Golubtschik is none other than the former beauty, the model Lutetia. Names and life stories are permanently changing in the novel (Roth: 1984, 123). This creates an atmosphere of uncanniness, which Freud described in his interpretation of Hoffmann’s piece Der Sandmann (The Sandman), which in turn played a key role in Julia Kristeva’s definition of the strange that irritates every form of identity (Kristeva: 1988/1990, 199–202). Speaking critically, Kristeva identifies the strange of the unconscious with the cultural strange in an undifferentiated way. In contrast to Hoffmann, in Roth the darkness of the narrative space is increased in so much as the embedded narrator, but also all embedded narrators within his own narration, are unreliable storytellers (Nünning: 1998, 3–39). According to the narration of old Golubtschik, the embedded narrator, the young Golubtschik is driven by the oedipal fantasy that ‘in reality’ he is not the son of a forest official, but – this is an oedipal narrative – is the illegitimate offspring of a mighty, fantastically rich prince. Influenced by the devil, the obscure Hungarian businessman and spy Jenö Lakatos, he tries to gain recognition as the son of this prince, called Krapotkin. He wants the name of ‘his’ father. He spends half his life on his obsession with becoming a Krapotkin instead of a Golubtschik. The Slavic name has a connotation with dove. So Golubtschik means he is a cock pigeon, a male dove. But this possibility of a metamorphosis from a small peaceful being into a powerful person is thwarted by the official son of Prince Krapotkin. Golubtschik’s insidious adviser Lakatos makes him believe that his rival is not the real son of the Russian aristocrat. In his view, he, and not Krapotkin junior, is the real son of the superior ‘father’. Golubtschik, the male dove, becomes a spy and a member of the Tsarist secret service, the Okhrana. This murky field is ideal for the disappearance of all fixed identities. He evolves to become a master at blackmail, control and betrayal. After a failed attack on his rival he has to leave the country and continue his job in Paris. Ironically, he now adopts the pseudonym Krapotkin.

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There is also an interesting female protagonist in the novel, called Lutetia – this is the Latin name for Paris. The misogynistic gender construction in the text is instructive. Lutetia, the model, the allegory of Paris, is an artificial creature, a mask, pure performance, the broad kat´ exochen. Woman, especially a French one, has no identity (Riviere: 1994, 40), only false names and stories, changing clothes, lingerie, gestures and perfumes. Lutetia is the mere ipse without any idem. Her restless lover, however, is also a man who failed to find an identity in another way. This is the kernel of the narration, of his life story, of his confession. The reliability of his story remains ambivalent. For example, he did not murder his rival and his faithless lover, although he tried to do so. At the end, he finds his rival again in Paris as part of the Russian community that has been expelled by the Communist regime after the civil war. The heinous Lutetia is also still alive. She has lost all her beauty. This is a form of revenge and, at the same time, it is a melancholic plot of perishability. But when she enters the restaurant on that very morning, she has a scar, a trace of the attack of her lover years ago. So this part of Golubtschik’s story might be true. She is the same and, at the same time, she is another. The abyss of time ruins identities that were connected by the chain of events in Golubtschik’s confession. This is an indication that Golubtschik’s story cannot be totally false. There is another uncanny effect in the text when, at the end of the story, Lakatos reappears as the frame narrator’s neighbour in the hotel. This ending signals the return of the same disaster for the narrator that was so characteristic of Golubtschik. The frame narrator has never seen Golubtschik and his narrative community again, but Lakatos remains in this demonic world. The story is perhaps also characteristic of the situation of a very specific cultural minority and its fragile identity. One could relate this private story to history, to the breakdown of patriarchal pre-modern Tsarist Russia in 1917. In this reading, the novel could be understood as a noteworthy piece of literature with a psychoanalytic background. It is located on the margins of space and time and describes the transformation of a peripheral cultural region under the conditions of a modern, non-transparent world. In this interpretation, Golubtschik’s confession is an integrative part of the symbolic reservoir of a narrative community. But it is also quite evident that Roth’s novel is part of the narrative complex of alienation or, to refer to Ricœur, a narrative version of the revelation of the ipse identity through the loss of the idem identity. This could be seen as the deep structure of so-called globalisation. In different ways, the protagonists in the novel are people without identity: Golubtschik, Lutetia and, especially, Lakatos. They still have a certain identity, as men or women, as French, Hungarian or Russian, but this identity is mere appearance and no longer has any supportive power.

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The opaque demimondes of the secret service, of fashion, but also of the diaspora (which in Roth’s novel is a bleak and comfortless symbolic space) are presented as a metaphor for the modern world. The covert ruler of this modern uncanny dystopia is, as in other texts by Joseph Roth, the globalised Hungarian, the entrepreneur Jenö Lakatos, who, like Lutetia, is only a surface, a squire and enchanter, a phenomenon of performance without any story – with the exception that he is marked as a Hungarian and that he jumps on one leg like the devil (Roth 1984, 31). Roth’s narrative version of modernity is extremely pessimistic, conservative and demonic and one could reduce the emplotment of Roth’s text to the statement that the symbolic overkill of narrative acts neutralises all serious forms of narration. Therefore, all forms of identity have become weak and eroded; firstly because all narrations prove to be lies, secondly because it seems that there is no longer any need for storytelling. When Golubtschik meets his rival again in Paris and tries to apologise for the attack years ago, Krapotik jun. answers that he should not speak about the past, but only about the present and future (Roth 1984, 127).

VII. There is a strong dialogical moment in Roth’s story about storytelling. The majority of the visitors in the restaurant already know the confession of the ‘murderer’. Confession itself has a dialogical structure: It needs an alter ego who is the addressee of the mysteries and shares one’s life. The Other is the instance which takes the position of a moral or juristic instance. S/he is the one who exculpates, acquits, pardons or forgives the person who confesses about a chain of events from his or her life to another person, either someone directly involved in the narrative or an outsider who is seen as neutral. The confession is a radical form of narration, but this aspect is hidden in all sorts of narrative processes. It marks the ethical dimension of storytelling. Again and again, the embedded narrator pauses in his story and there is time for the audience’s reflection, especially the frame narrator’s mediations on whether his story can be true (Roth 1984, 47, 123). A narrative always has an addressee who is not – under modern circumstances – a direct and explicit one, as is the case in Roth’s novel. Narrating means to narrate something to someone. This dialogical element, this presence of the other in the narrative matrix is also the precondition for what one may call cultural identity. Cultural identity presupposes that a group of people, a community, believes that a certain story or a narrative complex is true, realistic and reliable. The goal of all storytelling is that my counterpart believes in ‘my’ story. In contrast perhaps to the contempo-

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rary readers, the visitors of the Tari-Bari in Roth’s text have decided to believe in Golubtschik’s story in a weak sense, because even invented stories are true in at least one sense: They reveal the character of the narrator and are symptomatic of the situation of a cultural group. They want to believe the ‘murderer’s’ story. Up to a certain point, all cultural identity is based on the will to believe a story. Quite evidently, the criteria are not rational but entail psychological aspects. In Golubtschik’s case it is his body language which makes the audience believe him (Roth 1984, 123). The topic of credibility is prominent in Javier Marías’ novel Maňana en la batalla piensa en mí (1994) too. Here, the addressee of the narration is not a cultural minority as in Roth, but a single person, Luisa. She is the sister of a dead woman, Marta, who died half-naked immediately before the first sexual encounter with her new lover while her husband was absent abroad. The frustrated lover, Victor, is the homodiegetic narrator of the story, who reflects on the necessity of persuading his dead lover’s sister of the painful and implausible events of some weeks ago. As a potential narrator he comes under pressure. Whereas he has no identity within the surroundings of the dead woman (because he is unknown, has no name, no face, no story), he himself has a precarious identity. It becomes central to reveal this, or his, ‘true’ identity. As in Roth, there is an aspect of confession in the story. Victor has to tell Marta’s sister that he was with her before she died and left her young son alone with the dead woman. There is no doubt that he, as the possessor of a mystery, has power (Marías: 1994, 270f), but only narrating it enables him to reveal and neutralize the symbolic power of his narrative. It is a painful situation in which the listener, Luisa, the double of the dead sister, is assigned the role of moral authority or judge. So it becomes decisive to tell the painful story about the events of that night in such a way that his attractive vis à vis – the gender relations play an important role in the process of narrating – does not find him guilty. Through true storytelling he is able to establish a common narrative community à deux, which is based on the idea that only these two persons know the real story about what happened. They have a secret in common (Marías 1994, 278–295). His confessions evoke further confessions from other people, firstly Luisa’s, and secondly the confession of the dead wife’s husband. Like Roth’s text, Javier Marías’ novel is self-referential. It is a literary piece on the complex logic of narrating, otherness and a common symbolic space that is established by a type of narrative which has a mystery at its centre. Sameness and otherness, selfhood and alterity are intermingled in this story. As the representative of Victor’s conscience, Luisa functions as an abstract other, but she has her own story and her own personal and collective identity as a heterosexual woman – that is, her symbolic alterity to the man. The abstract process on

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the level of idem is overlapped by their reciprocal erotic attraction to each other. There is an interesting detail in the novel. Luisa refuses to allow Victor to tell his version of her sister’s last night alive in his own flat (Marías 1994, 278). The spaces of man and woman are separated in this case, because they have different positions within the symbolic field. So a neutral third space has to be found. This is the restaurant. After they have told each other their version of what happened, Luisa accepts Victor’s invitation to continue the talk at his flat. And in the end, she also accepts his offer to have a drink with him. Although there is some sort of cultural difference in this embedded process of narrating, I doubt that one can say that Victor and Luisa live in separate cultures. They may have different positions in one and the same cultural space, yet they share not only a common language (also metaphorically), but also a middleupper-class background and the values, attitudes and habitus of a Spanish postmodern individualistic culture. British Cultural Studies has taught us to understand culture with regard to the trinity of race, class and gender. Each of these three symbolic margins can be part of a specific national culture with all its subcultures. I would like to propose using the term cultural alterity only for those phenomena in which differences of language, religion, tradition and history, manners or mentalities play a central role. In all other cases (gender, sexual orientation, life-style, profession, milieu, generation), I would prefer the term symbolic alterity, because all these differences refer to implicit but varying and changing positions within one society. The person from another national culture, however, traditionally only has one possible position: the position as a figure at the edge, at the margin. It is true that globalisation suggests that this difference between inside and outside has been cancelled. Yet I am not sure if this is true. If Luisa and Marta were young women from the Middle East or from West Africa with a Muslim background, or if Victor were not a writer but a carpenter from South America, it would be a totally different novel. It is not certain whether, in these hypothetical cases, Victor’s confession could take place and, moreover, would lead to such a peaceful end as in Marías’ text. The narratives of new intimacy Luisa and Victor have in common are part of the same symbolic household of an enlightened, Western European, postmodern, national culture. They share these values, although they might have different opinions about the details because of symbolic alterity (gender, age or life style).

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VIII. On our journey with the travelling concept of identity, we started with the philosophical suspicion that identity is a symptom of that kind of a crisis that we call modernity. In different philosophies, identity exists twice; abstract and non-narrative, and particular and narrative. The discourse on identity in sociology and psychology tends to the statement that identity goes hand in hand with a process of integration. Modern cultural analysis, postmodern philosophy and (post-) modern literature offer two different figures of alterity – as the Other and as the stranger – figures that do not have a visible place in disciplines such as sociology, psychoanalysis and traditional philosophy. Thus, the constitutive aspect of the Other for creating identity is a basic and important contribution of contemporary narrative cultural analysis. I accept that all these differentiations I have proposed throughout my programmatic literary reading are not binary and exclusive oppositions, but overlapping phenomena, as is the case in Ricœur’s distinction between sameness and selfhood. It is the work of analysis to differentiate between otherness, symbolic and cultural alterity. It is the work of narrative to mingle and connect them in the chains of events, in the emplotment, in the characters of the figures, which construct identities. Narrating is the art of the impossible, connecting substance and process, timelessness and time, constancy and change, and transforming them into a new artificial unit. It is literature that makes it possible to overcome binary oppositions and shows how they are fitted together or broken in the narrative process itself. With regard to cultural alterity, one might argue that the narrative is the symbolic process in which a human being or a group finds his/her/its symbolic place by displacing others. Identity is a space that is empty and crammed at the same time, and the narrative is not only linked with all forms of identities but also links the tautological, non-narrative and empty aspect of identity with the symbolically filled one. The figure of the Other is inscribed at the empty and abstract level of identity, whereas heterogeneity (“hybridity”), the mixture of identities (e.g. in language, ‘race’ or gender) takes place in the “location of culture” (Bhaba 1994, 225f, 251). Identity is the result of an all-embracing and regulating system in which the identity of a subject is produced through the act of narrating, as Warning writes in his essay Forms of Narrative Construction of Identity in the Courtly Novel (Warning, in Marquard, 553). Identity is always a double. If narrating is also a form of creating personal and collective identity, of building symbolic spaces, then the development of post-traditional models of identity and alterity depends on innovative forms of narrative in which the Other in a double sense (the principal Other as the counterpart of the idem, and the cul-

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tural Other as the antipode of the ipse) is not automatically displaced, but gains a positive function in an open narrative structure.

The Hidden Narratives Latency, Repression, Common Sense Not all the symbolic material which is present and available in a culture (for example, in the field of schools, universities and the media) is in reality narrative; neither mathematical and scientific formulae (including those of the computer), nor the arsenal of manual and technical skills (which Hannah Arendt has analysed in her book Vita Activa) are narrative, neither is music nor a considerable part of the fine arts. These all constitute symbolic forms which are not contingent on space and time in that specific way which is characteristic of the narrative genre. Narration means finding oneself in a split time frame which cannot be made congruent: one is in the time which the narrative describes (erzählte Zeit), and also in the time in which the narrative is given (Erzählzeit). This distinction, which has been clearly formulated by Günther Müller, is not only valid for literary narration, but also for all forms of non-artistic narration – witness statements in court, re-constructions of life-stories in psychoanalysis, self-presentation in the media and the telling of stories in the family context.¹ All the other discrepancies arise from this particular one, which cannot be circumvented – the division of the person (identity) and that of space. In contrast to the infinite recurrence of numbers, narration has an emphatic beginning and a conclusive end. These mark out the act of narrative from all other systems of action. Narration highlights a clearly defined portion of our lives, which of course is different to the ‘novel’ because it has no beginning to which we can return, and no definitive end. Narration also means declaring a past action finished and so making it stand out against the horizon of our ‘lived’ life. Of course, such finality can be denied: for instance, by starting the narrative again and by ending in another way. The whole teleology of an imagined community, of a social group or of an individual can thus be changed. We constantly do this: for example the former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer with regard to his own student past, the Austrian nation since 1989, husbands and wives in therapy, and Shakespeare too, who was dissatisfied with the first version of Hamlet, where the character resembled his father rather too much, and who decided instead to create a modern archetype.²

1 Sports reporting is an exception here, because in a live transmission erzählte Zeit and Erzählzeit seem to coincide. But this a construction. 2 See for example Harold Bloom, Shakespeare. Die Erfindung des Menschlichen (2000, 559–632).

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To narrate – or to listen to a narrative – means in the end to place oneself in a world in which people act between a beginning and an end which form the two poles of a teleology into which the story is fitted; it means following a common thread and passing through sequential tension, which suddenly breaks off at the end. The completion of such narrated events always implies – in contradiction to the categorical imperative of the ‘pure’ text upheld by literary criticism – a completion of lived life, which we model and construct according to similar patterns. It can be shown that the mathematical world, without doubt a symbolic cosmos that is numerate but not narrative, is abstracted from space and time. That is also true nota bene for those natural sciences which use almost exclusively this body of rules, for example large parts of physics and chemistry.³ It would therefore be a mistake to draw the line which divides narrative and non-narrative symbolic systems between the natural sciences and the humanities: modern cosmic physics (the ‘Big Bang’ or chaos theories) is organised as a narrative, and so is the theory of biological evolution. All these theories meet the criteria of the narrative that have been given: the division of the temporal, the exclusive position of the narration and the teleology of the course of events. Indeed, because they are open towards the future, such theories employ a technique which is familiar to us from the short story: the open end. The many differing forms of life and of production are non-narrative, because they are very evidently iterative – that is, marked by repetition: cooking, the cultivation of wine, the art of love, horticulture, engineering skills and rhetoric are all essential components of culture in the sense of the Greek word τεχνη. They all contain human goal-directed behaviour, but not one which possesses the exclusive uniqueness produced by narrative. The non-verbal arts have however certain features in common with the genre of literary and non-literary narrative, although they are not for the most part in a concise sense of the word narratively shaped. Music is, certainly, an art placed in time, subject to the law of irreversibility as narration is; it also has because of its sequentality an arch of tension and definite beginnings and ends (which is why it is suited as a ‘background’ to the theatrical production of epic art – from the Indonesian gamelan orchestra and the musical settings for the theatre in the nineteenth century to the cinema, from the modest beginnings of the pianist who

3 Cf.: Markus Arnold/Roland Fischer (2000). Particular reference is made here to the essays of: Roland Fischer, ‘Mathematisierung als Materialisierung des Abstrakten, ibid., 50–58; Christa Koenne, ‘Die Chemie und ihr Einfluß in einer Entscheidungsgesellschaft, ibid., 67–76; Helga Stadler, ‘Kann mann/frau Physik verstehen?’ ibid., pp. 77–82 – further literature may be found there.

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accompanied the silent films right up to the sophisticated film music of today.) There is however no ‘temporal division’ here, nor an exclusive narrator, nor a world of action on which the sequences of sounds comment. But because the image, as well as the music, contains factors which are constituent parts of the narrative form, the image, music and text blend together in the manner of a Gesamtkunstwerk, in opera and film, and in the diverse genres which radio, television and the new media have created. The world of symbols in mathematics and science, the whole ensemble of techniques used in a community and the non-verbal arts  – all these represent without doubt an indispensable element. Is narrative therefore an important element in every culture just as those systems of symbols and bodies of rules just mentioned are (the fields of law and economics also belong of course to them), but only one part, not even a pars pro toto? But then narrative would lose the special place accorded to it by the title of this study. Only if it can be shown that narratives occupy a very strategic place in culture can their exclusive part in constituting cultures be justified. This exclusivity consists in the central contribution which narrative makes to the forming of every kind of cultural identity. It is certainly true that not all the symbolic material in a culture is of a narrative nature, but no culture can do without a narrative grounding. The deeper this foundation, the more symbolically rich the fabric of the cultural identity in question: it is ultimately this richness which distinguishes for example Vienna, the metropolis of a relatively small state, from Birmingham, the second city of a leading European power. Kaliningrad is symbolically less impressive than Königsberg, so it is no surprise that there have been attempts in Kaliningrad to incorporate the history of Königsberg. In order to be somebody, one must be able to tell a story. The state of innocence is that in which nothing has yet happened, no disaster, no crimen, no event, no departure, no escape. Rousseau’s fantasy of the natural state is the narrative vacuum of the individual and of the collective. On Whit Monday, 1828, a young man aged about 17 was found in Nuremberg. His origins were completely unknown, his past a mystery and his name – Caspar Hauser – was foisted upon him. In a surprising coincidence with Maurice Halbwachs’ theory, whereby an essential precondition of individual memory is always a social framework, the young man was unable to reconstruct his life-history from the darkness of his cave, the place of his imprisonment. The supposedly authentic, uncorrupted man, the ideal of late Romantic, post-Rousseau Europe and its cultural codes and narratives, is a being who according to a contemporary medical record

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‘… knows nothing of his own kind, does not eat, drink, feel, or speak as others do, who knows nothing of yesterday or tomorrow, who does not understand time nor is aware of his own self.’ (Wassermann 1983, 14)

This unknown person with the borrowed name that was not his own and who hid his past became famous. For anthropologists  – whose science was still at that time in its infancy  – it seemed like an opportunity to study closely homo sapiens as such, a human being without society or culture, man as he naturally is. What escaped this longing for objective essentiality and authentic objectivity was however the fact that a human being without the codes of symbolic systems and without a social context is in fact not human at all but an extreme phenomenon in any theory of culture. Friedrich Daumer, who was a fervent Rousseauist and a protagonist of idealistic theories and Romantic practices such as Mesmerism was convinced that natural man was to be encountered in the wilderness of his own culture – that is, man who has not been corrupted by society, as Rousseau had described in his educational treatise Emile. The man with the made-up name has at the same time a story made up for him, the story of a man who has sprung from a fairy tale, who comes from nowhere and is the first representative of a new and innocent humanity, a second Adam. Daumer makes this emphatic pronouncement in Jakob Wassermann’s novel: When one speaks about him, one can never exaggerate, because language has no words to express his being. It is an ancient legend, this appearance of a fairy-tale creature out of a dark void; nature’s pure voice suddenly speaks to us and a myth turns into reality. His soul resembles a precious jewel, as yet untouched by a covetous hand; yet a noble purpose justifies my wish to grasp it […]. (Wassermann, 1983, 4)

A person without the thread of an individual life history is a borderline phenomenon, just as is Chamisso’s man without a shadow, who as it happens also lives in narrative darkness. And just as it is impossible – to Daumer’s great disappointment – for him to remain a ‘natural’ man in his new environment, so he cannot remain a man without a history. All the activities that surround him consist of attempts to endow him with a history. In this way, the man with the zero-story, the creature with a narrative vacuum gives rise to a mass of fantastic rumours. This is, incidentally, to describe the way in which a mystery functions. Daumer the Romantic rejects any investigation into Hauser’s ‘true’ life-history, because this would undermine his Romantic narrative, which strategically preserves the mystery of the situation and presents the secret as a wonder. But at the same time, the others, who have chosen Hauser as the object of their research, start looking for the lost life-history of the young man with the pseudonym. In particular, President von Feuerbach, who functions as a detective in the novel, the detective being

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he who is able to throw some light on the mystery and illuminate the hitherto unknown narrative. With stubborn meticulousness, Feuerbach reconstructs the story behind the narrative vacuum. He does this in a detailed memoir showing him to be the abandoned crown prince of the House of Baden-Zähringen, thereby using mythic material just as Daumer does, not that of the ‘natural’ man without original sin, but the disowned son who is seen as a danger by his own family (Joseph, Oedipus). The nameless man without a life-history has exerted an enduring fascination, as the many literary adaptations from Wassermann to Handke prove, as well as attempts to use the methods of modern genetic engineering to examine this and other hypotheses. In contrast to Handke’s interpretation, in which the man without speech is manipulated and socialised through linguistic training, Hauser’s problem is that he ‘possesses’ no history. This border marks that threshold of the frightening, which makes the population react aggressively towards him. But before he has been given a life-history which he is required to put on like a set of symbolic clothes, he falls victim to an assassin. This act destroys the unprepossessing man with the immense aura of mystery, but not the question of his past. The dimension of fantasy in Feuerbach’s narrative corresponds with the intensity with which the narrative refuses to step out of the darkness. Because the narrative vacuum is so absolute, the imagination permits itself a ‘sovereign’ resolution of the story. The mystery becomes a condition of absolute inaccessibility and thus a place where an essentially uncontrolled imagination celebrates itself, one in which the impossible has become probable. It can be concluded ex negativo from this that the concept of an original humanity established by Rousseau’s discourse on individual ‘natural men’ as well as on the noble savage derives from a fantasy that is constructed as a narrative: it is the story of the fall of a humanity without time or history into a time which is the conditio sine qua non for the divided nature of man himself. But this story like all others is retrospectively constructed; it is a story which painfully marks the distance between the earlier presumed innocence of ‘childhood’ and the guilty present. (cf. Alefeld 1996) That the paths of Daumer and the foundling diverge is not least because the myth that Daumer establishes has no need of a tangible, if strange life-history. Increasingly disappointed by the ‘humanisation’ of his pupil, Daumer tries his utmost until the end to put a stop to the young man’s dreams of his mother in a fairy-tale castle, because this would endanger his own narrative plan. What makes the case of Caspar Hauser so attractive for a narrative-based theory of culture, over and beyond the exemplary reference to the inescapability of narrative, is the fact that one is situated here in a construct in which identity is produced. It is about a story in the story: how a man is symbolically brought into the world by giving him a mysterious life-history. What dis-

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tinguishes narrative from discourse is not so much the level of abstraction as the temporal and goal-directed dimension. It is science, law and literature (in the form of Wassermann’s novel) which produce, distribute and determine identity. Culture can be understood as the process which strives to silence that which is frightening and terrible. The deepest motivation of all those who think up stories about the young man with the false name is precisely this: if the story were to be found and with it the right name which symbolically marks the unique and individual role in the course of unknown, mysterious events, then the intolerably frightening could be removed or at least put to rest. A vacuum of this sort is just one example of a state of hidden presence and inevitability of narrative. Others are conceivable: the pre-supposed and the suppressed narrative or the self-evident narrative, which must not be expressed in order to be anticipated: in respect to culture, the most important narratives are probably those which are normally latent, and are only made into central themes (or make themselves central) under special circumstances. The cave paintings of Lascaux, which people of very differing provenance have intensively studied – for example artists and anthropologists – can only be reconstructed in a similarly ambiguous and fantastic way as the life-history of Caspar Hauser, because we do not know the narratives of the culture on which these paintings are based. But even the iconography of the Bismarck column in Essen from the year 1900 may pose some riddles for the non-specialist observer. A culture which has forgotten the basic content of the Christian narratives has difficulty decoding the stories represented in church windows and on altars. ‘Classical’ modern abstract painting constitutes a special case in this context; it abstains from any sort of visual representation and of course from any narrative component. But both Kasimir Malewitsch’s Black Square and Barnet Newmann’s Who’s afraid of Red Yellow and Blue are based on stories which one must know in order to understand the paintings in question. Those people who angrily attacked these ‘decadent’ paintings (not only in National Socialist Germany, but also in democratic America, as Danto reports) are not familiar with the narratives on which this art is based; in the case of Newmann that is, for example, the Jewish mystical Gnosis of the Kabbala, in Malewitsch’s case the ChristianOrthodox concept of the magic of the pictorial image. Their anger is not without foundation, but is rooted in the panicked fear of a bottomless adventure. On the whole, the uncomprehending in their helpless anger have in part not understood that all these paintings of classical modernity do not just represent an exegesis of the Kantian aesthetic questioning the conditions of the possibility of fine arts, but also with an aesthetic radicalism enforce the ban on images (as demanded by God in the Old Testament) against a background of an exploding flood of pic-

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tures. It should also not be forgotten that the art of classical modernity has been influenced by the modern ‘master stories’, in Danto’s sense. Even Andy Warhol’s postmodern Brillo Box or Duchamps’ Urinoir cannot be understood just from the objects themselves but reveal their enigmatic and provocative meaning through knowledge of the discourses, narratives and life histories on which they are based. They produce new, possibly inaccessible offers of identification. It can therefore be argued that cultural manifestations which are not in themselves structured in space and time as narratives do nonetheless form part of the narrative ensemble of a culture and presuppose certain stories. I would like to categorise such latent narratives as ‘presupposed’ because they are necessary for the decoding of ‘silent’ objects; unfamiliarity with them sets alternative narratives in motion: for example, the story of swindlers who take other people for fools, or of people who are simply unable to paint. (Cf. Danto 2000) Stories can be empty and this is the extreme case, which brings about the horror vacui; They can be ‘presupposed’ and they can also be suppressed. In connection with Sigmund Freud and Critical Theory, Mario Erdheim has discussed how the unconscious is not at all a work of nature, but is culturally produced. Erdheim interprets culture as a process carrying on above people bringing more and more individuals into interdependence. Freud’s concept of culture is, in Erdheim’s opinion, a dynamic one in which it is understood as a movement and a history and much less as a structure. Seen in this way, and not just in its authoritarian or totalitarian versions, culture is a global machine of censorship: In the service of the ruling power, the individual has to renounce the fulfillment of his wishes, not least in order to make room for the pressure of social wish-fulfillment. Instead of realising his wishes, he renders them unconscious (Erdheim 1984, 217).

Culture allows people to formulate symbolically their common interdependency; the forbidden stories I have identified correspond on the symbolic level to the renunciation of instincts on the psychological level. To extend the ideas of Freud and Erdheim, such stories do not need to be primarily sexual at all; they can also be of a political nature. Forbidden stories in the former Yugoslavia were, for example, the diverse national narratives of the Serbs, Croats and the Slovenes; other forbidden stories (narrating them constitutes in many countries a breach of law) are for instance all revisionist stories whose purpose is to show that the Shoah was an extraordinary fraud perpetrated by world Jewry. Other political narratives have emerged in the meantime in postmodern market societies – for instance, those which claim capitalism to be the final and unsurpassable histori-

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cal form of society. The misleading term of the ‘unconscious’ should admittedly be used here with caution. Even the way Freud speaks of the unconscious is misleading, for it is precisely those mental layers which can be brought back into a state of retrospective recollection through the cultural technique of psychoanalytic memory; they are not subject to the logic of radically forgetting what has been forgotten and are no longer or not wholly conscious. But what distinguishes this collectively produced unconscious is that it emerges under particular conditions – through paradoxical intervention, through crises but most of all through its continuing hidden influence. Although there is no public forum in which such stories can be told, they remain attractive for this reason and can rise to the surface from their secret hiding-places: neo-nationalism in the so-called reform or post-communist states has vividly demonstrated this process. A latent nationalism is directly connected with the cohesion of a culture and its narratives. Mario Erdheim expresses this laconically: Whatever threatens the stability of a culture must be made unconscious. With Freud, we can assume that this is primarily a question of libidinous and aggressive tendencies which society proscribes. There is a measure of variability here as regards not only methods of upbringing but also what is supposed to be made unconscious. But the unconscious is always used to keep forbidden instincts at a distance from society. As they are made conscious, they form an undercurrent which can take hold of other perceptions or fantasies, which might also call into question the stability of a culture. So these too must disappear into the unconscious. The social unconscious is thus a sort of container which has to receive everything which could alter a society against its will […] Whoever discovers new things which a culture does not accept also has to put up with all the fears, feelings of guilt and uncertainties which have arisen in the unconscious as a result of those connections. (Erdheim 1984, 221)

There is no reason not to extend this restricting role of culture beyond the area of sexuality and aggression into all those processes in which symbolic socialisation takes place and in which a community is constructed as narrative. From the perspective of this book, changing a society means bringing ‘new’ stories into circulation, for example stories which are proscribed or forbidden and which are granted no public forum. Literature is in this respect an expressive aesthetic medium with considerable potential for change. The Sorrows of Young Werther is not merely the story of a new, uncompromising form of autonomous love, which in contrast to bourgeois custom justifies itself. Goethe’s novel also challenges existing society in that it tells the story of a suicide without critical condemnation. Moreover, this story that ends with suicide is narrated by the man who takes his own life and Goethe does this in a form which symbolically expresses the right to individuality and the discourse of intimacy, shifting the balance in the course of the events in favour of the individual. This model was evidently so successful

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that in the 1970s an East German writer, Ulrich Plenzdorf, created a GDR Werther, who asserts his individual and unconditional wishes against society in a similar way and also comes to grief. To understand a text like Werther also means to know those consensual stories to which it is opposed and which at the same time it tacitly presupposes. Thus the hermeneutic activity does not so much refer to the story we have before us, but to the one it presupposes by being contrasted to it: the contemporary readers of both versions of Werther are familiar with the standard love-story from which both Werthers deviate. The reader who does not know it  – for example an Austrian or English student of the present-day – depends, like a cultural ‘foreigner’, on having it made explicit for him. Numerous examples of this sort can be given. Twentieth-century literature has produced a whole compendium of forbidden stories which have permanently changed our culture, even though it has fought long but in the end vainly against them: to these belong stories of the women’s movement, stories about homosexuality, critical deconstructions of stories about ideal families and – with a grain of salt – all the stories about sexuality which were hitherto forbidden from darkest Romanticism to pornography, from the ecstatic hymn to sexuality to Psychoanalysis, the last being an essentially modern narrative able to change culture. All these stories have effected lasting change on the state of our culture and differentiate it from other large cultures. In cultures in which such stories are permitted and comme il faut, the relationship of the individual and society has radically changed; this is perhaps because in sexuality the other person is at stake, and a constructed individuality emerges through the mixture of unbridgeable distance and extreme proximity, which then asserts its rights and does not understand (or misunderstands) culture as a given entity. It could thus be said that post-modern, ‘hot’ cultures differ from pre-modern, ‘cold’ cultures in the way that they create identity and unconsciousness. The unconscious, for which Erdheim found the interesting metaphor of a container (thereby moving close to Assmann’s concept of a memory store) forms for modern culture an inexhaustible reservoir for symbolic self-creation, whereas access to this ‘container’ in recent cultures is condemned as taboo. That does not however mean – and Erdheim is also far from any such grand narrative of liberation – that if unconsciousness were to disappear, society would become wholly transparent; that is just as true on the level of the individual as on that of cultures. At best it could be said that the entrance to the unconscious has become more accessible and that we are now conscious of the strange contradictoriness of our existence. Our knowledge of and our insights into the otherness of reason, and with it also the fantasies which are embedded in our narratives, are not capable of breaking its power over us.

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Erdheim’s analysis is limited to a special case of latent narratives, namely those in which repression and renunciation are under discussion – or more generally, the relationship of the individual to the social entity in question and with it also that between (incestuous) family and (‘excestuous’) culture. Pre-modern societies are characterised by stories (especially their genealogical myths) conceived as family histories; modern societies would be those which have a tendency to dissolve this analogy of culture and the family and to bring together both elements into a complex relation of tension. What is interesting about Erdheim’s analysis is that in it culture and society fuse together as macro-concepts, for the reason that he takes into account power and authority relationships in the production of unconsciousness. The result of power and authority is to produce unconsciousness, which then at the same time creates these. As a sceptical cultural anthropologist, Erdheim also knows that no culture can manage without unconsciousness, not even a utopian one in which power is no longer unevenly distributed. Every culture is based on a series of stories which are latent not necessarily because they are forbidden and forgotten or because they are secret or invalid. As long as certain stories in a culture are taken for granted or uncontested, then they can, indeed must, remain beyond discussion. One may tell little children that the earth rotates around the sun, but it would be somewhat strange if the weather report in the radio or on television were to announce this every day. Narratives of medium-range, for example those which construct nations, behave in a similar way. Narratives in cultures are thus often latent, that is, they can in principle be accessed but are not continuously present. A central situation in which stories become accessible is when a foreigner who does not know them enters the culture. I suggest calling these ‘common-sense’ stories. The fictitious situation becomes an absolute necessity if I am confronted by a representative of another culture who does not know this modern astronomical narrative. There is in principle no difference between the Plague Column in Drosendorf and Spaghetti Junction in Birmingham on the one hand, and highly complex knowledge and religious beliefs on the other. They are all embedded in a cultural context (which also means in a narratively structured system) and derive their specific meaning from this; they cannot be universally and naturally decoded, as common sense likes to suppose. The common symbolic and narrative content of a culture can be understood as that which ‘endows it with stability and makes it strong enough to ward off deviancy’. Common sense can thus be understood as a totality of the knowledge available in a culture which is not implicit and has become taken for granted. It is also a symbolic system in its own right that interacts with other such systems (science, religion) while following its own laws. This has been studied by the

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cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz with reference to both Alfred Schütz and modern ethnology. Common sense, it has been claimed, is the false consciousness of certain cultures which are unable to imagine any reasonable world of meaning outside their own. What is threatening in any cultural encounter is namely the loss of blissful, innocent evidence for one’s own pattern of interpretation. “The fact that every nation has its own kind of depth” is closely connected with the way in which all symbolic systems (natural sciences, ideology, religion, art and everyday knowledge) have their own individual cultural character. (Geertz 1983, 263) The saying according to which adultery brings bad luck in battle has the same stylistic character as the one which tells you to clean your teeth twice a day, or to avoid contact with other people when you have the flu. Belief in witches “formulates and defends” the “world’s claims to truth” (as in Godelier’s study of the culture of the Zande), because it renders anomaly, contradiction, misfortune and illness apparently uncontestable and plausible. “Intersexual” beings, that is, people born without a clearly established gender are, depending on the interpretative patterns of the particular culture, either “failed pots” (in other words, craftsmen’s mistakes in creation) or talented orphans. Or they may be monstrous beings who provoke horror. (Geertz 1983, 263) From its beginnings theory has established itself in opposition to common sense, as Geertz rightly indicates and indeed philosophy can be characterised through its hostility to it. The overturning of familiar everyday concepts is central to the crafty dialectic of the Platonic Socrates; the mutual enmity of philosophy and everyday knowledge is thus structural and not one which is due to specific personal, historical or cultural circumstances. This enmity may have contributed to the way in which the structure of meaning of the everyday world has only much later become a focus of attention – in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, the pragmatism of Dewey, and the analytical philosophy of Moore. Perhaps common sense is silly from a philosophical point of view, a more or less unrewarding subject. In contrast, it is, like religion, an inexhaustible field of analysis for anthropologists, ethnologists and researchers in cultural studies. Geertz has characterised the everyday world of unquestioned and unquestionable knowledge (which he distinguishes from the factual nature of exact knowledge) as a system of cultural interpretation which is weak in explanatory value but is effective precisely because of this: it is simple and powerful, because it can silence any sort of doubt. Common sense is the classic medium for an untroubled, undogmatic, self-assured expression of certainty. (cf. Likar and Riha 1998) It concerns a “representation of things, which claims to be the right one” (Geertz 1983, 275). There are five factors that make up the strength of this weak pattern of cultural interpretation:

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1. Naturalness 2. Emphatic reference to experience of life (“practicality”) 3. Simplicity (“economy”) 4. Inconsistency of method (“lack of method”) 5. Accessibility (Geertz, 277–286) In common sense what is natural and also practical is attributed to worldly objects and phenomena, while the third factor, simplicity, is based on a literal version of the world (the world speaks). The “pleasure in inconsistency” and “shameless and unreserved ad-hoc knowledge”, doing without stringent logic and accessibility for all is, as it were, the unshakeable social confirmation of culturally produced certainty, which sensus communis can also be seen as. It is evident that there is a need for neat forms of stories in this symbolic system. But Geertz’s critical study of the ‘primitive’ world of meaning of the self-evident is presumably distorted through logo-centrism. The ‘maturing’ symbolic systems of science, religion and art should possibly be considered common sense. But then everyday knowledge would not so much be a separate symbolic system, but a specific cultural, interdiscursive area where the narrative and argumentative background has been faded out and placed beyond attack. This everyday knowledge correlates with ‘lived’ culture, which T.S. Eliot contrasted with conscious culture, which possesses a specific knowledge of form and content. (Eliot 1948, 35) It is known that Geertz understands the ethnologist not so much as an involved observer, but as an interpreter who decodes culture in a hermeneutic way. However, appropriate knowledge of the unexpressed collective stock of narratives is of the highest significance for this decoding. Telling a story always comprises a decision not to tell another story, or to presuppose that this other is already known. Media and advertising are relevant examples for this kind of process, as the ‘myths’ which they carry are usually assumed to be familiar. On the 26th January 2001, there was a report in the foreign news section of The Times about the sexual harassment of women in Italy under a large headline declaring ‘Signoras told to turn the other cheek’. A second article entitled ‘Court that makes an ass of the law’ reported the Italian court’s verdict regarding sexual harassment. Given that English broadsheets only devote four pages to international news, it is in itself remarkable that the paper gave over almost a quarter of its space for international news to this event – including a historical sketch and the photograph of protesting women politicians, led by the granddaughter of the Duce, Alessandra Mussolini. It is certainly interesting that this story from another European country can claim so much attention. What is even more interesting is that

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the newspaper does this in very strong language. The headline, which refers in a political way to a celebrated episode in the New Testament (the proclamation to love one’s neighbour, which demands that the follower of Jesus should turn the left cheek if he is struck on the right), makes a sarcastic comment on the case described, which concerns delicate subjects such as harassment and assault and more generally, the gray area between sexual and professional ‘favours’. The second headline is ambiguous: it suggests that the court has made a fool of itself. The highly sexually charged word ‘ass’ sets off the more powerful association that the anally-minded court is messing around with the law by not punishing slaps on the posteriors of female employees. To make things worse, the court did not allow the charge of sexual harassment in an earlier case of a schoolgirl, because she was wearing blue jeans, which was said to have made direct sexual molestation impossible. Why and when are stories told? And why in particular does a deeply conservative paper turn itself into the advocate of causes which can be counted as more or less feminist? With this question we come to the photograph, which shows Alessandra Mussolini and three fellow women comrades-in-arms in their protest action wearing blue-jeans. Mussolini is an eloquent name, charged with narrative material – eloquent stories – and is at the same time ambivalent for English readers. The ‘innocent’ article thus mixes divergent stories which are presented on different levels: 1. The Christian story of love for one’s neighbour is replaced by the implicit demand for punishment, rendered profane here by its use in a case of sexual harassment. 2. The story of the ‘feminist’ post-fascist Signora Mussolini, which refers sarcastically to the slap George W. Bush gave his wife, and finally 3. The story about the employee and her boss, to which are added other apparently similar stories. In this way stories are interwoven which seem to mutually complement, comment on and explain each other. The fact that even the extreme Right objects to the Italian court’s verdict is incidentally very reassuring; if even the right-wing conservatives, the heirs to neo-fascism, object to this, then it is very clear that this is not about a left-wing cause but is a concern of an enlightened and civil world. It should at the outset be said that this kind of narrative, that is to say a commentary from and about another culture, follows here some very successful and ‘classical’ models: he who reports from abroad finds general approval at home. The classic topic of the shipwreck seen by a superior observer with Schadenfreude is very well known and it can serve excellently to reinforce national energies and at the same time renew self-evident stories. This collective meaning has exactly the structure

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which Geertz has attributed to it. It is natural, practical, directly illuminating, simplistic and comprehensible to all save those crazy Italian judges. The one-dimensionality of the way the story is given and the basic complicity between narrator and reader are part of this structure. The story from abroad has thus a legitimising function for the common symbolic bonds of a culture, hovering in a curious way between conscious and unconscious culture. In general, modern media of communication in their political form (and in contrast to those which in K. Ludwig Pfeiffer’s sense are best described as aesthetic and expressive) can be understood as gigantic machines for producing common sense in imaginary communities. Just as printing, novels and newspapers formed the necessary media preconditions for the rise of the modern nation-state (in other words Benedict Anderson’s thesis), so the switched-on multi-media communication machine represents the media preconditions for globalisation, cultural transfer and national self-affirmation. The global media, together with their narrative realism, imply that we already know what is happening everywhere in the world. Because all the media subscribe to an aesthetic realism that is from a literary critical point of view derivative, they effectively convey what the followers of Lacan call ‘the imaginary world’. The story about a foreign country thus contains a narrative complex about its own culture which does not require direct expression. The story’s moral is namely that this might happen to women everywhere where the iron law of political correctness is not in force. Self-legitimation and the reinforcement of one’s own cultural self-sufficiency are on the agenda, not the de-legitimation of foreigners. The advantage of the story’s moral is that its value as an argument is ‘thin’ but for that very reason is effective. The question of the differing place given to sexuality in other cultures remains unasked and is displaced in favour of a powerful feeling of collective self-worth which is nourished by images of an inferior civilisation (that is, a country where Catholic machismo rules). The world is imperfect – even in the United Kingdom there are cases of sexual harassment, possibly just as many as in Italy – but here, legislation and suitable regulations seem to have put an effective stop to improper assault. The idea of controlling problems through regulations has taken hold of English culture – more than in Germany. The incomprehension of the English reporter and of his public is not a pose. The agreement between author and reader has not been simulated but is entirely genuine. Both cannot understand that what is obvious for them has not been practised. Things like this do not happen. Not in Great Britain. We have not yet quite reached the end of our laconic analysis. For it is not yet so evident how this implicit call for sexual correctness has been built into a conservative narrative mode. As has been noted, this is partly a result of the reference to Italian neo-or post-fascist female protestors. The connection has, as we have seen, a delegitimising effect as regards the scandal in so far as it can be

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said that even the representatives of an authoritarian party – which the English perceive to be politically problematic – find this sort of behaviour unacceptable. The readers of the Times are thereby shown that the conservative half of Great Britain now regards correctness in sexual matters as part of the common beliefs of English culture. But on the other hand the paper fits this newly-minted common sense into a conservative scenario; it believes that any kind of sexual harassment of any sort of victim – usually a woman – can be proved and appropriately punished. This is where the second article comes in, which gets rather worked up about Italian legislation in matters sexual. A significant shift in the indignation such stories generate can be noted here: Story 1: The initial story: the slap which is administered and the relations which lie behind it (the combination of sexual desire and career ambition, assault and dependency). Story 2: The story of the schoolgirl in the blue jeans which has remained in the memory. Variation: it happens in a school, not an office, but the victim is a girl who is still a minor; the offence is not punished. Story 3: Condemnation (because of infidelity) of a woman in Ravenna who was said to have spent too much time with her lover (without going to bed with him). Variation: sexual infidelity; the woman is unjustly punished. Story 4: The kiss on the cheek (no more than the slap on the behind) is not rated as sexual harassment, because the Italians do not necessarily consider the cheek to be an erogenous zone. Variation of 1 & 2, without any reference to the situation of dependency. Story 5: A Sicilian woman who left her husband because she could not put up with her over-dominant mother-in-law any longer, was not considered to be the guilty party. This is an inversion of Stories 1, 2 & 4: the woman is guilty, but is not punished. Story 6: The sale of child pornography was not punished. Variation and inversion: sexual coercion, in this case of children; the guilty parties are not punished. Story 7: Sex in a car between a man and a transvestite was not prosecuted by law, because the ‘culprits’ had parked in a dark place. Inversion: no actual sexual coercion, the offence to common decency remained unpunished. Story 8: An Italian husband is forbidden from monitoring his wife’s telephone, even if he suspects that she is having an affair with another man. Inversion: a woman who is potentially guilty may not be kept under surveillance nor given the punishment she deserves. Story 9: Italian wives may commit adultery, if their husbands’ pride and honour is not thereby damaged. Inversion: the sexual misdemeanours of women (adultery) are no longer prosecuted in law.

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This narrative sample is instructive in several respects and makes clear to what extent shared cultural meaning in Geertz’s sense establishes itself. One single story is not sufficient to establish a narrative. For a narrative formation is based on something similar happening over and over again. Or expressed differently: It is one large theme, which includes a large number of similar stories. The author of the article, Richard Owen, takes these circumstances into account. In listing these stories he uses the ‘thinness’ described by Geertz. The stories differ from one another significantly; they are partly variations and partly inversions, especially towards the end. Their smallest common denominator is that they are all to do with sexuality. Stringing these stories together gets round such differences and contrasts and suggests instead their similarity. But the supposedly progressive political correctness of story 1 is integrated into a conservative context that is opposed to it, one in which sexual permissiveness, the decriminalisation of women’s adultery or the open indulgence of deviant sexuality is seen as scandalous. Thus sexual correctness is drawn into that self-evident context in which it operates anyway in the United Kingdom: into a prudish tradition which wants to banish sexuality from public life. It is also interesting as regards cultural differences that sexuality is understood in the widest possible sense, in order to be able to regulate it in public life. The Italians refrain from doing this for reasons of machismo, or from other motives which are unconnected with this. The article thus confirms in a most paradoxical way how the correctness of the ‘left’ can be combined with the traditional sexual morality of the ‘right’  – which is also in the muddled associations of common sense the correct morality, one in which sexual abstinence and restraint appear the best guarantee for carrying out correctness. A deeper narrative may possibly be suspected behind this article with its apparently feminist headline and conservative conclusion. It is one which crystallises all the ancient fears and prohibitions which Mario Erdheim is thinking of when he speaks of the production of unconsciousness. This is a narrative which reports what happens if the natural sexual order starts to waver when commandments and prohibitions are no longer obeyed, when men no longer respect women, when women become independent by no longer taking responsibility for the family or abnormal sexual practices are not stopped. In the Bible this is represented by the story of Sodom and Gomorrah: violation is followed by collapse and punishment. The image of decadence belongs to this field, ever since Gibbon’s reliable and powerful narrative The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a work in which modern western culture formulates and preserves all its selfdoubts about the social and cultural changes it has brought about. The man or woman reading the article may evoke such narrative connections; but if he or she

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does so, this will go beyond the intermediate zone of familiar concepts which can be exchanged with neighbours like the proverbial question about the weather. One can formulate the link between the production of the unconscious and the creation of common sense by saying that the factors which constitute the latter are absent from it: the aggressive warding-off of instinctual urges and the rejection of what is new. It produces the container, in which dangerous and disturbing elements in a culture are stored away: the narrative poison cabinet of a culture. When it is opened, reports such as those about the sexual incorrectness of the Italians can scarcely be avoided; the incorrectness becomes an index for how far the excesses and permissiveness have gone beyond what is legitimate and it must be checked if the decline of the West is to be halted. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is the conservative variant of a panic narrative, whereas the Apocalypse represents the direction of a ‘progressive’ narrative hysteria. I take my second example for hidden narratives from the world of advertising, which almost more than any other is characterised by a common-sense which is specific to a particular culture. Advertising is usually for this reason difficult to translate, less translatable than films and literature. It possesses all the features which Geertz asserted in everyday consciousness: naturalness, practicality, inconsistency, accessibility and simplicity. That does not necessarily mean that its rhetorical and aesthetic strategies have to be simplistic, quite the contrary. I shall avoid Roland Barthes’ concept of everyday myths, not only because he uses the concept of myth in his early writing in a quite unspecific way and merges it with that of ideology. Although Barthes does indicate the inadequacy that lies between the quasi-mythic power of these cultural artefacts and their everyday, banal use, he also underestimates the binding nature of advertising when he dismisses it as a petit bourgeois ideology and a false consciousness. It is also quite obvious that the rhetorical gestures of advertising have changed since the 1950s: instead of an excess of myth we now find aspects of figurative speech  – irony, humour and inventive ideas. I shall take an example of advertising which is narratively presupposed from Number 21/2000 of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, which features the business-oriented generation ‘me’ and confronts it with the generation of ‘68’ which was then in power – Schröder and Fischer. Indeed, one could fit the title story and the advertising in question into one big mega-story, which for reasons of brevity I would like to call capitalism as ideology; the story is all about how market capitalism, money and the new media allow us to link up the world in a peaceful global network. The advertisement’s title, which effectively plays with another title, vouches concisely for this: supply meets demand. The sheep/lamb and the pullover are metonyms for the economic agents of the producer and the consumer, who are

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linked by a dedicated website. The website is in an intimate metaphorical relationship with the wool producer and his product. The ‘web-flow scenarios’ form an interconnecting fabric for the economic agents. They move into the picture through the way it has been scanned – it has been conceived as a two-page computer image. Let us first of all look at the lamb, which here occupies the position of the peaceful economic agent. Influential narratives of western culture from the New Testament to William Blake have imagined it as a symbolic representation of innocence and a peaceful nature (let us omit here the image of the sacrificial victim). It may well be ‘a long way from the raw material to the end product’ but at least here the path from the shearing to the finished pullover is not cruel. This is important in a cultural context in which there is a good deal of sensitivity about animals as ‘raw material’ and where broad sections of the population in western, post-modern countries consider the killing of animals no longer morally legitimate. In the sense which Geertz ascribes to it, the sheep is a neighbour in nature, a domestic animal and a companion of human civilisation and domestication (Macho 1987), from Rousseau to Nietzsche the embodiment of a silent, perhaps restricted happiness.⁴ By standing in metonymically for the post-modern, market capitalist economic agent and metaphorically embodying the process of digital networking, it endows both these highly artificial and technical processes – the internet and the market – with a quasi-natural character. So the internet and the market are in the last resort natural and make use of processes at work in nature. The intangible becomes concrete and comprehensible and is integrated into the world of the everyday. Just by clicking a mouse. But it is an empowered nature, unlike that of the sheep  – a collaboration of purchase, sale and logistics. This goes beyond the possibilities open to an individual economic agent who, without the service on offer, remains rather like the sheep itself. It goes without saying in our beautiful new post-modern world that the sheep is an especially fine example, in terms of its species a sort of Claudia Schiffer. The dark beauty spot on its nose, its white muzzle and the pink upstanding ears contribute to this. The animal’s good looks are to be found next to the classy lambswool pullover, in itself a signifier of exclusivity. A specifically German narrative may be added: an ecological one. The lamb is a heraldic beast in this narrative arsenal, a bucolic creature that still lives naturally in the open air and which seems to satisfy human needs without any coercion. In a classically ‘thin’ way, this advertisement in a left-wing, liberal bourgeois magazine reconciles two differing narratives – the concerns of ecology with those of the free market and its

4 Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fürs Leben (248–334).

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new favourite medium, the internet. It shortens the tedious and long path from raw material to end product and above all, from production to sale. In the flick of a digital wrist the transformed raw material is delivered to the home. Of course, the advertisement is marketing a specific product  – in this case, an internet service, but above that advertising, like all other symbolic narrative forms (literature, myth and history), is always self-referential, that is, it advocates a world in which everything can be turned into supply and demand and everything, even the most precious item, is for sale in a fast, go-getting way. Advertisements are in this respect the devotional objects of the religion of market capitalism.⁵ Those times when supply and demand did not match now belong to the past, thanks to ‘software dedicated to the product’ and the ‘linking of the individual workplace, the global market and innovative web-flow scenarios’. It could be said that advertising is directed to the system as a whole, in which it occupies a quite specific place. It is therefore often underestimated as a medium for producing constantly evolving everyday knowledge – in this case, the perception that our existing capitalist world is the most natural and best world there is, and that it is historically unsurpassable. From the sheep is heard the great narrative of the end of history, given most eloquent expression by Francis Fukuyama. I shall take my last example for the thesis that the stories which are possibly most effective are those which are unspoken, as taken for granted, from an essay by the American literary theoretician Ihab Hassan, Pragmatism, Postmodernism and Beyond. His text, based on a lecture, begins with a postmodern joke, a sort of rhetorical star guest: … an American businessman is lecturing in Japan. He has employed a Japanese interpreter in a simultaneous translation facility. The lecture begins, and the lecturer says to his audience: “American speaker now begins with what they call ‘joke’. We do not know why they do this in America, but we must be polite. When the time comes, I will give you a signal and we must all laugh and applaud together.” The punchline comes, the Japanese interpreter says: “Now”. The audience bursts out laughing and clapping. The American, pleased as Punch, says: “Thank you. This is the first time an audience has appreciated my joke so fully.” (Hassan 1993, 11–30)⁶

Hassan uses this story in order to demonstrate the new nature of cultural encounters and the inevitable misunderstandings which ensue, which then go on to have

5 The contemporary relevance of Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk is to be found in the way he treats capitalism not exclusively as an economic system, but as a far-reaching cultural phenomenon. 6 Cf. Wolfgang Mueller-Funk, Kulturwissenschaft(en) – eine europäische Chance für Österreich (1997).

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a culture-generating effect in themselves. The joke is ‘post-modern’ because it is presented in a self-referential form. The joke about the American businessman in Japan told here reflects in an alienating way on Hassan’s own situation in the unfamiliar context of German culture. Culture only moves into our field of vision in one perspective, only when there is a privileged observer from another culture. But in postmodern light, he gets entangled in his own story, becoming its tragicomic hero like the American businessman. He is operating in those intermediate spaces which Homi K. Bhaba associates with a stairwell: The staircase as a place of thresholds between definitions of identity becomes a process of symbolic interaction, a connecting structure, which constructs the differences between above and below, black and white. (Bhabha 1994, 5)

Why did the Japanese audience understand and misunderstand the American speaker? Quite evidently, because figurative language as a form of discourse that has a meaning different to what is said is highly conditioned by culture, as indeed are all pragmatic features of speech acts, such as gestures and gesticulations. Laughter in England and America is different from laughter in Germany and Japan. Not many Germans find Monty Python really funny. But there is something else which the Japanese presumably do not understand, namely why the Americans begin their lectures with a mini-lecture. It is, by the way, a technique practised since antiquity: captatio benevolentiae. It is about winning the audience over. The speaker does this by bringing those laughing onto his side, because laughter establishes a sense of community. The laughter establishes a symbolic bond between speaker and audience which raises the level of attentiveness and makes it easier for the speaker to get his message across. In our culture, it is good to be a witty and therefore sociable person. The Japanese interpreter in this obviously rather too well-invented story does indeed know the language, but he is not familiar with the common sense of the culture in which the language is expressed. All he knows is that you have to laugh approvingly and affirmatively at the start of a lecture. But why this artificial exercise? Probably, because the joke is a tried and tested way of creating that common sense which lies at the heart of Anglo-American common sense. In German-speaking cultures, indicating the average, the common meaning and the quotidian tends to have a negative connotation, and not just in intellectual discourse. In contrast to this, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, their inclusion enjoys a high symbolic status. It forms part of the common stories of the culture. In a certain way, community-building is not just a more or less contemporary theoretical and political project in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but also part of a cultural reality: it is important to prove oneself as a social and communica-

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tive being and to represent and create a sense of community, as an antidote to the conformist individualism that proceeds from capitalism. The other side of the coin is that whoever does not laugh, who cannot laugh because s/he perhaps has nothing to laugh about, quickly becomes an outsider. There is perhaps a close connection between the high valuation of Anglo-American culture and its distrust of a culture which is always minority or avant-garde. Common sense is thus included in the success story of a pragmatism which is first and foremost untheoretical and whose strength resides in the brilliant and entertaining way the story of its collective meaning confirms itself. The story offers information about creating community spirit in concreto: by telling a story which makes others laugh. The joke is the story which common sense tells best about itself. That the story does not have to be about social reality but is here a question of an ideal self-image does not change matters. The Japanese interpreter does not know this story which common sense tells about it. He therefore reacts with the traditional non-aggressive mode which cultures have learnt from contact with foreigners: politeness. Politeness is the creation of a sense of community which is aware of the difference, here of cultural alterity. There is thus an element of successful translation in the misunderstanding. The translator has understood the speaker’s intention without being aware of it: to come into contact with his audience. In this he is clearly brilliantly successful. This is obviously connected to the fact that the Japanese version of politeness has a role comparable to that of humour in America – it successfully creates a form of social behaviour which is essential for coexistence in society. Jokes are, as Freud knew, a system in which the unexpressed makes room for itself; they belong to the production of unconsciousness which Erdheim sees as central in the phenomenon of culture at the grass roots. They address what cannot be expressed. Jokes are connected in two ways with common sense: to understand them it is necessary to know the basic narrative structure of a culture which is normally left unstated. They are also an ideal narrative genre in the given cultural context, because they contain those five qualities which in Geertz’s view characterise latent, symbolic everyday knowledge. They work through evidence (naturalness) – the hero is comic, because a practical case with self-evident rules is given, they are not methodologically concise and “thin”. But above all, they have to be accessible to the other person. A joke that nobody understands is a contradictio in adjecto. The comic protagonist is often the butt of humour; he is the one who stumbles because unlike the narrator of the joke he does not understand the joke of the other’s common sense. If it is not a language joke, then it is always the absent other which gives rise to laughter in a narrated joke. Jokes belong to that large family of embarrassing stories which establish identity by making fun of people whom they exclude. In this construction of the foreigner,

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jokes bring the aggression under control which laughter and figures of speech have made conscious; or one makes oneself into the object of the joke, which is what Hassan’s postmodern suggestion amounts to. If one wishes to see postmodernism positively, then one could say that all its ‘humane’ content resides in the interrelated merriment and irony it displays towards itself.

On the Narratology of Cultural and Collective Memory The past […] cannot be recalled; but it behoves us to think the future: perhaps you may again see the object you regret. William Beckford, Vathek

This essay connects two discourses that have not always been linked, especially in the German-speaking context: narratology (Müller-Funk 2002/2008) and the concept of cultural memory. It argues that all forms of memory are explicitly or implicitly based on retrospective narratives that seek to cross the unbridgeable gap between the time of narrating and the time of the events that will be narrated. If memory and remembering are key issues for understanding the concept of the self, every identity produces the impossible: bridging the gap between the act of remembering and the remembered events, feelings and impressions. So, all traditional concepts of memory and remembering try to forget this principal difference in remembering. In contrast to political questions susceptible to rational decision-making, we do not have the choice between remembering and forgetting. Both are parts of one and the same process (Weinrich 1997). Traditional cultures prefer the idea of the eternity of symbols and signs, whereas intellectual avant-gardes in modern societies (and modern and post-modern subjectivity as a whole) prefer to extinguish signs and symbols and start at a virtual zeropoint (Lachmann 1993, XVII–XXVII). The traditional concept of monumentalized memory, however, denies the open and uncertain process of remembering/recollecting that no longer includes the permanent storage of fixed items as happens in a library or a mega-computer or God, none of whom ever forget. These metaphors can be understood as protection from the uncanny, from Freud’s notion of the Unheimliche. They suggest a solid and fixed existence for a remembering subject that may feel its identity to be safe and secure across time. The concept of a more or less perfect memory and the idea of a constant, reliable and complete subject who is his or her own master presuppose each other. If one gives up the concept of memory as storage in which nothing gets lost, you also have to relinquish the idea of a strong and stable subject. The uncanny is the clear effect of that process and modern people have tried, at least since the times of Goya and Hoffmann, to confront themselves with their broken identities and the monstrous features which are the companions of modern subjectivity. Thus, the constructive character and the discontinuity that is written into the structure of remembering are the strongest arguments in favor of the idea of a fragmented subject. In her critique of Assmann’s concept of cultural memory, Vittoria Borsó (following Derrida’s concept of differance) has defined the medium of memory as a space of possibility, which

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is actualized only by some form of remembering (Borsó 2002, 23–53). So, time is always inscribed in the medium of cultural memory, which can be described as a constant, but non-continual process of actualization. It always starts from the moment of narrating and re-narrating. Narration and remembering are two aspects of one and the same complex: culture. Media can be understood as forms which do not simply represent the content of the narratives but indeed construct them in different ways. The difference between Libeskind’s museum and Eisenman’s traditional monument creates a different rhetorical structure of reception and a different idea of remembering. Culture, the realm of identity- and difference-making, can be described as a dynamic cluster of more or less hierarchical, manifest or latent narratives which have not only a retrospective but also a prospective or teleological aspect. Narratives describe the way of building a world of “symbolic forms” (Cassirer 1994 [1953]). Giambattista Vico has already described these symbolic forms of culture on two levels, a diachronical and a synchronical one: the former is exemplified by the symbolic ritutalization of funerals and the latter by the symbolic reutilization of marriages (Vico 2000 [1774]; Kittler 2000, 19–43). Every culture can be interpreted as a symbolic and narrative community that includes the dead, for diachronic unity, and symbolizes human relationships in recurrent forms with long-lasting effect, guaranteeing synchronic unity. The differences between cultures and the changes within cultures go hand in hand with the shift of those symbolic and narrative forms. The point is not that there is no “reality” – pain, death, war, hunger, exploitation – but that this reality can only be understood through the specific narratives and their occurrence in specific media and genres. So, aesthetic judgement can be reintegrated as part of a critical theory of culture that accepts that there is a gap between the commemorated event or “thing” and the general cultural design of commemoration, between history and aesthetic judgement. A “culturalistic” approach which dissolves politics and nature into culture (Eagleton) fails because of two aspects. On the one hand it dissolves “reality” into culture (there is nothing else other than culture).¹ On the other hand it extinguishes the category of political reflection which has always been an unavoidable presupposition of Critical Theory and also of the “reflective turn”. Different cultures develop different ways and concepts of self-description, self-reflection, and different symbolic patterns and clusters.

1 Terry Eagleton (2000, 131): “Culture is not only what we live by. It is also, in great measure, what we live for. […] We have seen how culture has assumed a new political importance. But it has grown at the same time immodest and overweening. It is time, while acknowledging its importance, to put it back in its place.”

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Thus, in the case of the Shoah, dissolving reality and removing the necessity of political reflection are particularly unattractive options, especially for critical thinking in the German-speaking countries. The discussion of how to recollect and to represent the Shoah is based on the very existence of the Nazis’ concentration camps. Every study of one’s own culture can be read as such a form of self-description, because the description is part of what is described. In contrast to the traditional analysis of society and politics, this type of “cultural studies” is based on a critical view of one’s “own” culture, its attitudes, its types of narratives. The view preferred is that of a virtual foreigner, e.g. a tourist, a member of the Diaspora culture, an ethnologist. When he wrote that the man who discovered Columbus did a bad job, the essayist and poet of the German late Enlightenment Georg Christoph Lichtenberg announced this change of perspective (Müller-Funk 1995, 104–135; Lichtenberg 1968, ff, g 183, Vol. II, 168). I dare say that most of the essays and books written in the context of English Cultural Studies and post-colonialism are written from this semi-detached viewpoint. But unlike Lichtenberg’s West Indian, his heirs meanwhile are now able to tell stories about the connection between cultural difference, power and domination. The ouvres of Homi K. Bhabha (1994), Stuart Hall and Edward Said (1979) are examples of this kind of critical “Western” narration from an outsider’s perspective. In contrast to political assertions that old Austria was the archetype of multiethnic empire, or that globalisation started from the port of Lisbon (as the Portuguese president pointed out proudly during the Portuguese presidency of the EU) or that Great Britain brought modern civilisation to India, there is an intellectual (academic and non-academic) standard which claims that only a self-critical type of ethnological observation is an adequate medium for research in Cultural Studies. Thus, with regard to methodology, every type of cultural studies needs the alterity of culture for its own self-description. If there were only one culture then Cultural Studies would cease to exist as a discipline. The hypothetical encounter between Europe and Non-Europe which Lichtenberg describes in his paradoxical aphorism has never been the main theme of Germany’s inter-cultural experience. The Germans’ attempts to establish a colonial empire failed. It remained a brief episode in German history. The Germans and the German-Austrians (Deutschösterreicher) have never been Meerschäumer [“seafroth-people”, i.e. people open to the sea], but Landtreter [“land-stepping people”, i.e. land-locked people] (Schmitt 1997). Nevertheless like all the other Europeans, in their fascination with the ambivalent images of exoticism, their colonialism has more or less been (with the exception of Wilhelminian era) an inner-continental one based on traditional concepts of domination and colonisation, especially of the “less civilised” Slavic peoples.

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The end of the Second World War marks the irreversible end of that system of political and cultural hegemony. But it was the uniqueness of the Shoah, the technologically driven killing of six million Jewish people during Hitler’s war for Weltherrschaft [world domination] that has voluntarily and involuntarily characterized the cultural code of the Germans and the other German-speaking peoples. It is not the result of a collective unconscious in a Freudian sense but the effect of a fundamental fixation which characterises the narrative itself. It works like a continual matrix: all political events are to be transferred and to be interpreted with regard to the dark side of the German past. The outside observer position upon which Cultural Studies depends is now that of the survivor of the Shoah. This may be an over-simplification, but it is a very helpful one. By comparison, English and American Cultural Studies started as a critical debate about colonialism and post-colonialism: “the determining condition of what we refer to as post-colonial studies is the historical phenomenon of colonialism, with its range of material practices and effects, such as transportation, slavery, displacement, emigration, and racial and cultural discrimination” (Ashcroft, Griffith, Tiffin 1995, 7). In contrast, German intellectual discussion was conducted beneath the shadow of the Shoah: as a political, theoretical, and above all a moral challenge. German Cultural Studies are thus based on one central post-war narrative: the Shoah. But German post-national-socialist culture is interesting as a topic for Cultural Studies because it also shows the radical change in collective remembrance of a political collective. Moreover, it shows how the Germans have integrated a specific Jewish remembrance in their own culture, incorporating alterity, as it were. This does not only mean that, in some aspects, the history and the fate of European Jews is a part of collective memory that is remarkable; rather, this incorporation undermines the traditional form of the collective memory of a nation state, which generally includes a story of success and constructs a sharp difference between inside and outside. Moreover, this integration is not only one of painful and shameful events in the collective memory in German lands, but also an integration of the form and the structure of a distinctively Jewish collective memory. The structure of traditional Jewish memory, however, is mythical: it implies the ability of the virtual community (and of each of its members), the Diaspora, to recall the very beginning and the central events of their history in every moment. There is not any present point that is not embedded in the collective memory (Yerushalmi 1989). The collective memory of the Shoah, therefore, produces an irreconcilable relationship of tensions between tradition and modernity, between myth and enlightenment. Political progressiveness in German-speaking countries is based on a concept of memory defined by the categorical imperative of remembering; this concept of memory is thus pre-modern. The pathos of the pseudo-mythical

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collective memory of the nineteenth-century nation state is thus substituted by a mythical one, which is pathetic in regard to the fate of the Jewish people. This fate is unique, on the one hand, but a paradigm on the other: it reminds us of violence, suppression, domination and suffering in history in general. It implies a critical perspective on history and entails a messianic motive, which Benjamin has conjured up in Klee’s picture of the Angelus Novus (W. Benjamin 1977, 255): his face is directed to the past. In contrast to historians, who recall history only as a series of events, this angel is confronted with one single catastrophe. He would like to bring the dead victims of history back to life and to fit together the destroyed parts. But there is a storm blowing from paradise which moves him to the future. This storm is, as Benjamin points out sarcastically, what we call progress. In his critique of mainstream concepts of history and progress Benjamin has elaborated, years before the Endlösung [final solution] a concept of remembering which returns to myth in a very specific way. The reference to Klee is programmatic. It suggests that it is art and aesthetic modernism which is able to reconcile myth and modernity by giving the myth a critical meaning and transforming it into a medium for objecting to history. “Classical” aesthetic modernism in the style of Kafka and Klee may be described as “work on myth” (Blumenberg 1979) under modern circumstances, in a post-mythical world. But even a post-mythical world will have its myths. The Shoah, indeed, has been interpreted by the leading German intellectuals as the most important offspring of their country. The Shoah is a negative myth of Germany. If you want to tell the story of contemporary Germany, you have to begin with the Shoah. This can be demonstrated by Berlin’s post-1989 monuments, which contrast dramatically with the imperial monuments of 1871. The sophisticated ‘Benjaministic’ Jewish Museum of Daniel Libeskind (Schneider 1999; A. Benjamin 1997, 103–118) and the Holocaust Monument near the Reichstag, which itself has been ironically deconstructed by Norman Foster, are the only relevant monuments of post-modern cultural memory in Germany. Berlin itself is, as a result, visibly and invisibly a ruin of an empire based on the narratives of progress, victory and success. Its monuments, the Reichstag or the Brandenburger Tor or the Gloriette, have changed their meaning completely. They are no longer manifestations of power, but remains of a future that has gone. They have not changed their material outfit (beside Foster’s adaptation of the Reichstag), but they have changed their meaning. They can now be read as fragments in the sense of Romantic irony: parts that oppose the whole; which is to agree with Adorno, like Benjamin an heir of German Early Romanticism that these structures are monuments to the untrue. Libeskind’s museum uses Benjamin’s messianic narrative, which is beyond the dichotomy between a transcendental and a secular history, as a starting point. In contrast to the concepts of traditional monuments, which allegorize events,

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here there is nothing to see. The Shoah, the greatest possible horror of history until today, remains invisible. So there is nothing to recognize. You are in a labyrinth, in an underworld, in the world of Benjamin, Kafka and Dante but without any pictures upon which to impose meaning. At the same time the structure of the building refers to reality, it is like a map, depicting the places, streets and areas where the murdered and disappeared Jewish people of Berlin lived before the Shoah. In Libeskind’s advanced and hermetic architecture the categorical imperative of permanent remembering is modified, because this is a subjective and active remembering which differs from the traditional concept of praising dead men and women. Eisenman’s Holocaust monument project, next to the Reichstag, however, is much more traditional. Maybe the difference between the term Shoah [disappearing] and Holocaust [sacrifice, burnt offering] is important here, because the terms presuppose different narratives and concepts. ‘Shoah’ suggests the possibility of a transnational remembering of a horror which is inexpressible and subjective. Holocaust suggests a more national collective memory (a negative nationalism in regard to the Germans) which is complete and objective. Eisenman’s key idea is to list all the names of the murdered Jewish people. His project is monumental in its form but also because of its size, a huge field of collective memory, some sort of a cemetery in the center of Berlin. It is not pure chance that the Holocaust monument project, and not Libeskind’s sublime museum, has provoked political and intellectual discussions of how to remember Germany’s past and to what extent the Shoah is part of the collective memory in Germany. It is the controversial nature of the Shoah narrative, and especially the debate on the Berlin Holocaust Mahnmal, which led to the intervention of the German writer Martin Walser, who fiercely criticized the idea of permanent symbols of remembrance, using the term “negative nationalism” (Schirrmacher 1999). Meanwhile, Walser has become a type of author who sees his function as undermining the common sense of political correctness in German cultural memory. His novel Tod eines Kritikers (Death of a Critic), a roman à clef about the Jewish critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, develops a double speak. Officially it denies using anti-Semitic symbolic material but refers to the traditional and now hidden narrative of the ugly Jew (Walser, 2002). He is right in his critique of traditional monument-making, but he is not capable of working out this critique without resentment of the victims and their successors. This is what I would call Walser’s trap. These monuments are fragmented phenomena in a post-modern society, which is based on cursoriness, forgetting, speed and leisure, all symbolized in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz by the post-modern, neo-historic shopping and leisure architecture of Mercedes and Sony not far away from the proposed location for the Holocaust monument. These are places of the temporary, places also of for-

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getting. Here another categorical imperative rules: This is the happiness of the present. Happiness is based on forgetting. So, the structurally pathetic culture of official remembrance of the Shoah (“Do remember!”) contrasts in an obvious way with the “unbearable lightness of being” (Kundera) of the surrounding cultural landscape. The topography of the new and fragmented city center of Berlin demonstrates the sharp contradiction of two categorical imperatives that in principle are incompatible, but in actuality are irrefutable. Or in other words, the alternative between forgetting and remembering is wrong in any case. We have no choice. We may insist on the necessity of remembering, but on the other hand, the young people strolling through the new city center have the right to start their life free of an overshadowing past, which is no longer their own experienced past. The ‘negative nationalism’ of this culture of remembrance entails a very specific narrative: based on the crimes of their own nationalism, the “macro-subject” Germany tries to compensate for them by the most perfect and well-articulated public gestures. It is clear that Germany’s preoccupation with the Shoah differs from that of its neighbours. Until now the Germans and the Austrians have lived under the threat of being disqualified as the heirs of Hitler. There is a double bind in this predicament: the negative nationalism of permanent remembrance as well as the “positive” nationalism that is in favour of a certain forgetting of the legacy of the Shoah both confirm the critical judgements of Germany’s and Austria’s European neighbours. It remains an open political and cultural question whether dialectical and relaxed relations between remembering and forgetting (there is no remembering without forgetting, and no forgetting without remembering) can be realized in the case of the collective memory in Germany and Austria. Perhaps both countries have to go on with the cynicism and hypocrisy of official remembrance, which has less to do with the general level of reflexivity. It is hard to decide what is politically more dangerous, official forgetting or official remembrance. Both options tend to nullify the past either by excluding it or by attempting to predetermine and control how it enters cultural life. Under certain circumstances an international Court of Justice, for example, could be an institution with the perspective of Klee’s angel. Although attentive to the crimes of the past, it is not fixated on the past, but looks to the future, a better form of remembering than monumental architecture. Every culture is based on acts of common remembrance and forgetting. However, this forgetting does not cause an irreversible deletion from memory, but produces a latent memory that can in principle be reactivated. So it is not very surprising that discourse about memory, remembering and forgetting plays an enormous role in German Kulturwissenschaften, although it does not concentrate exclusively on the Shoah, but also on every aspect of remembrance. It is

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no coincidence that it was an Egyptologist, Jan Assmann, who initiated research projects on collective and cultural memory and remembrance (A. Assmann 2000; J. Assmann 1992). For Egypt is, in contrast to the Jewish culture of memory, a harmless, but a fruitful topic of research. Undoubtedly, ancient Egypt with its unbroken line of rulers and its monumental architecture can serve as a case study for the mechanism of collective memory and further as an excellent example of a “cold culture” (Levi-Strauss) which is based on writing. This culture is cold because it has a surplus of collective memory that works like myth as an implicit barrier against change. The Assmann school developed its concept of remembrance in critical discussion with the ideas of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. In contrast to Bergson, Blondel and Proust, Halbwachs studies the social conditions of memory, arguing that the social is the transcendent presupposition of memory in general (in analogy to Kant’s argument that time and space are the transcendent presuppositions for the human mind). Therefore  – this is the key to the argument  – a social memory does not exist beside a private one, but all personal remembrance is located within a social framework that Halbwachs called the collective memory, a memory of contemporaries, based mainly on orality, a memory that comes to an end when its proponents, the generation of contemporaries, die. This short-term memory at best exists for about eighty years. Consequently, Halbwachs tries to make a clear difference between memory and history (Halbwachs 1997[1950]; Nora 1996). The concept of cultural memory Assmann and others developed differs from Halbwachs’ by introducing the idea of culture-based common memory with a long-term durability. In contrast to Halbwachs’ collective memory, the latter is ritualised in texts, rites, monuments and other objective manifestations of culture that endure beyond the generations of their creations. It is quite evident that Halbwachs emphasises something closer to the memories people actually experience, in German the Erinnerung, whereas Assmann emphasises the memories that culture can attempt to engineer for subjects to establish culture as a durable entity, in German the Gedächtnis. Both concepts do not refer to the narrative structure of remembering and recollecting, but it is quite evident that Halbwachs’ concept of collective memory is based on a framework of common narratives which are able to actualise the ‘authentic’ remembering of the individual who is a member of his or her generation. The substantial medium is oral story telling. In contrast, Jan Assmann has developed his concept in his own field of research: Egyptology. Cultural memory in Assmann is created by the medium of writing and based on non-personal stocks of events. It is the specific form of the medium and the material of stone which creates a specific type of narrative and memory: myth. It suggests the idea of timelessness and eternity. It deletes continuity of discontinuity in time. The myth is a narrative without a

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reference to the time of narrating and is never self-referential to it. It erases the active and the aspect of remembering just in time. This cultural memory is quite evidently weaker in its phenomenological importance than the personal, but socially embedded “Erinnerung.” In the sense that Halbwachs makes use of the mechanisms of personal remembering, his collective memory is connected to a collective imagination; thus we can conceive of the remembering community as a mega-subject of which we are a part. This is the way to make historical experiences personal experiences. It is very evident that the German debate about memory, which has been a major impetus for German Cultural Studies, started just at that moment when Halbwachs’ “collective memory” of the contemporaries came to an end, because the victims and the culprits of the Shoah, and with them, their person-based memories, began to disappear due to death. One could argue that Assmann’s cultural memory will take the place of the contemporaries’ remembrance. In some aspects this can, on the one hand, work: one can monumentalize the experiences of the dead contemporaries of the Shoah in different media of remembrance. But on the other hand, this effort is in vain, because there remains a certain border that cannot be crossed. In some respects remembrance gets a metaphorical meaning: ritualized remembrance, in the sense of Assmann’s cultural memory, serves to remind me of events which are not part of my uncertain but nevertheless personal memory. It postulates remembering things I cannot refer to personally. In this regard, Halbwachs’ clear differentiation between a person-based and socially established collective memory is more sensitive to the differences between personal remembrance and a monumentalised memory which is unable to rescue the experiences of dead contemporaries. It is not easy to clarify the differences in the German language between Erinnerung and Gedächtnis. But it is quite evident that Erinnerung means the spontaneous, involuntary non-rational recall of personal events, painful and shameful matters, whereas Gedächtnis means the rational voluntary effort to employ all our mental capacities including knowledge, information and cultural techniques. Every one of us knows the painful moment when we fail to remember some detail of an event, a name of a person, the name of a place where we have been. Undoubtedly for me, born after the Second World War, the history of the Third Reich is part of my “cultural memory” but not a part of my unreliable but personal memory (A. Assmann 2000, 31). The difference, then, between Halbwachs’ collective memory and Assmann’s cultural memory is a very deep one. One can compare it with the relation between memorised life and myth in a pre-modern community. Myth begins where memorised life ends. The function of myths and specific dominant narratives in a given culture, are enormous. Myths make it possible for a community to survive as a

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social-cultural entity by guaranteeing the more or less peaceful continuity of generations. Mythological communities are societies that structurally conceal the difference between the two kinds of memory. All your life experiences will be related to the grand narratives of the myths. In contrast, in modern, non-traditional societies the difference between the two memories and the shift between the generations becomes manifest: there is struggle to control the design of the common non-personal memory from generation to generation. There are some interesting structural similarities between monumentalised cultural memory and myth. Both suggest length, duration, frozen time, the idea that there is one and only one understanding of the grand monumentalised narrative. The kulturelle Gedächtnis in the Western world has always been expressed and imagined in metaphors of space: as a library (St. Augustine), as an amphitheater (as in the Renaissance) or, as one says in German, as a Speicher [store] – the memory of the computer. Space is also a symbol of continued existence, of survival. All is saved and rescued, nothing will disappear. (Yates 1966, ch. 2 and 6) Both traditional myth and modern national and nationalistic narratives are based on a central abstraction and analogy. They construct communities as a virtual body, because only our body guarantees personal experience, feeling, and identity. The imaginary body advanced to the status of a macro-subject bears with it special relationships to my personal distinctive micro-body: I imagine the whole of the culture-based nation as a body, my body, in which the virtual body of the nation is incorporated. Only this close intrinsic connection, which the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century gave physical form, make the non-rational identification with “my” country understandable, an identification that goes far beyond membership in a civil society. Cultural memory is the effect of the same abstraction, relating to human beings’ capacity to construct identity in narrative structures. But there is a problem with monumentalisation and media representation. Whereas contemporaries can decode their specific media of memorising (photos, monuments, autobiographies), later generations cannot do so without the existence of commentaries and interpretation. Without these explications, the “cultural memory” remains as silent as the gravestones of other families I pass when I walk to the graves of my own family. So the idea of objectivity is deceptive, an illusion, as is the concept of fixed time which is enclosed in the monument (A. Assmann 2000, 55–62). In contrast to traditional concepts of memory, modern scientific research as well as post-modern philosophy shows memory to be in a permanent state of change. Personal memory changes, and with it the pictures and views, the tableaux of memory and the narratives on which memory is established. So it

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becomes clear that memory and remembrance are not phenomena of space but of time. Perhaps this marks the difference between the Jewish concept of remembering, which involves the idea of memorising as an indefinite text, and the traditional western idea of saving and rescuing memory in a fixed space. Memory is, as Renate Lachmann has pointed out, not a “passive store or a reservoir, but a complex mechanism for the production of texts” (Lachmann 1993, XVI ff.). I would argue, in addition to Lachmann’s semiotic approach, that these texts in the final analysis have a narrative component. Because of its dynamic qualities the relationship between remembering and forgetting is not static. Without forgetting there is no remembering. Forgetting namely produces a latent, inactive memory that can be reactivated by a process which Lachmann calls “re-semiotification of cultural signs.” There is a tendency, especially in the German post-Shoah culture, to stigmatise forgetting as a form of morally unacceptable Verdrängung [removal, repression] of the past. But forgetting is also part of a productive process of functional differentiation: there is, on the one hand, an informative memory and on the other a very creative memory with new aesthetic and ethical outputs that generate remembering as a dynamic process which is far different from traditional concepts of monuments, which, ironically, very soon themselves become part of the informal non-active part of cultural memory. Lachmann describes two extreme versions of cultural remembrance. The traditional one is in favour of the inexstinguishability and insolubility (Unlöschbarkeit) of signs, the other progressive, avant-garde version is in favour of extinguishability and erasure (Löschbarkeit). Thus the political opposition between the Left and the Right in German-speaking countries includes a remarkable contradiction. Usually the Left argues against a traditional concept of remembrance; however, the majority of them who work in the media plead, especially in the case of the Shoah, for a traditional concept of remembrance. On the other hand, there is a right wing tendency in German culture (representing, perhaps, the silent majority) that favours the idea of the neutralisation of the Shoah, “storing” it in the inactive “area” of cultural memory. It seems to me that both positions are theoretically unsatisfactory and politically problematic, because both undermine the indissoluble link between remembering and forgetting under the circumstances of a post-traditional society. No culture lives without a self-reference, built upon a foundation of common memory; nor can you any longer conserve a culture by a monumentalised collective memory. What happens in postmodern societies is that memory itself, for a long time a guarantor of constancy, becomes dynamic. We cannot control how coming generations will remember the Shoah. What I propose therefore is a narratological turn that mitigates these contradictions of political intent and problematic form.

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Such a narratological turn in Cultural Studies would not automatically mean a complete forgetting. Instead, the Shoah – far from being the only framework for German culture – would become an increasingly latent narrative. As such, it becomes part of a general common sense, and thus a resource for ethical and creative remembering, but no longer the main focus of German culture and politics. Here it might be helpful to come back to Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. It marks just such a tertium datur between the two extreme memory policies of the traditional left and right. It imagines memory as a space, but as a labyrinth that provokes associations, commentaries, interpretations and makes no sense as a traditional monument. It refers to Benjamin and Celan but also to E.T.A. Hoffmann: to Benjamin as we have seen as the protagonist of Jewish-German messianic remembering of the victims of history, but also to E.T.A. Hoffmann as the author of the uncanny and to Celan as a proponent of classical modernism (Badiou 1997). Benjamin, Hoffmann and Celan serve as companions through the hell of remembering, but also as references. There is a place for a non-Jewish writer (Hoffmann), to whom we owe literary masterpieces about the inner turmoil of the subject and the non-rational as such. Reading the Shoah with Hoffmann as a companion, through the journey of remembering in the labyrinthine hell of the Shoah, may change the way we interpretate it. We will be confronted with the idea that the unfathomable imaginary can be manifested as a terrible historical power and not only in a world of fiction. Celan, the author of the famous Todesfuge, which can be seen as an illustrative example of how to do the impossible: remembering the Shoah, is Libeskind’s Virgil, encouraging the philosophising architect to work on the Shoah with architecture as he has done before him with the paradoxical use of words in his poems, which never describe mimetically their events but refer to the elementary horror that transcends our capability of understanding. In one important point, Libeskind’s museum stands in sharp contrast to at least some variants of postmodernism. It denies the contrast between the ethical and the aesthetic. The starting point of the Shoah is without any doubt an ethical issue. To follow and fulfill this ethical request, the cry of the millions of murdered people, out of respect for the dead, it is necessary to work out an ambitious aesthetic which is potentially adequate to the ethical goal. In this ethical aesthetic, form rises to the surface as a key to the ethical issues and further to the understanding of an event that exceeds our common-sensual ideas (in the sense of Kant’s sensus communus). The museum is also, following Andrew Benjamin’s argument, “architecture of hope” (A. Benjamin 1997, 103–118), although it is not possible to integrate the Shoah in a traditional affirmative narrative. It goes beyond every type of traditional political narrative of nationhood. One cannot argue, for example, using Hegel’s tricky narrative of Die List der Vernunft [the

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cunning art of reason]², a variation of the grand narrative in the sense of Lyotard (1979): how reason smoothes its way through history by using wrecked and cruel passions of human beings. That was Hegel’s interpretation of the grand terreur during the French Revolution making place for the Weltgeist, whom Hegel saw at Jena in the figure of Napoleon (Blumenberg 1979, 122). I return to the beginning in reaching a conclusion: the German transformation of cultural memory, perhaps unique at least in modern European history, shows us the dynamic aspect of remembering and remembrance, the possibility of narrative change, the shift of identity. But the danger of this radical moral and cultural experiment in regard to Germany’s collective remembrance is increased by the problem that the Shoah is an overwhelming event. In contrast to Adorno I would assert that it is possible to write poems after Auschwitz (as Celan did), because lyric poetry is situated in the empty space between language and experience. For modern poetry, in particular, this is a phenomenon on the borderline, at the edge of aesthetics and morality; there are also some narratives about Auschwitz, maybe grand récits, but it is impossible to reconcile the narrative of the Shoah, which implies a denial of automatic cultural progress, with traditional national and ethnic narratives, which have always been organised as successful stories – that is, with a clear if mythological beginning, troubles in the middle and a happy ending. Such stories concern rogues, but produce a lot of heroes; they are stories of emancipation, of moral improvement, stories with clear oppositions, showing who is inside, who is out. Thus German identity, compared with its European neighbours, is in some respects peculiar, extravagant. It is the luck of the lack. That means the Germans are lucky not to possess a single traditional national narrative and not be possessed by it, although the price of this lack is inestimable. It is clear that, for example, in the field of literature (from Lorca to Gombrowicz) these naive quasi-mythological narratives have come to an end. And yet we know that no form of enlightenment is powerful enough to make things disappear. So Germany’s peculiarity entails a chance and a risk. In contrast to the unconsidered and often repeated claim that right-wing populism, for example in Austria, which undoubtedly includes traces of the national-socialist past within it, is the result of Verdrängung [removal, repression] and neglecting the Shoah in school education, I propose that such right-wing populism is an obstreperous and contrary answer to the “unreasonable demand” that the Austrians should be saddled with Auschwitz forever. It expresses a longing to leave the supposed pariah status and to become a “normal” nation

2 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (1970, vol. 12, 49f).

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again. So this kind of paradoxical forgetting is embedded in a strategy of normalisation. It seems to be promising, because the subjects of the Halbwachsian collective memory will unavoidably, for purely biological reasons, come to an end. On the other hand, this populism profits from well-intentioned collective memoryengineering that misunderstood the complexities of narrative forms of memory and used the Shoah for superficial political ends. Can we reconcile a reckoning with the Shoah with a memory policy that is experienced as an uncomfortable imposition, and is thus self-cancelling? There is a strong desire to abandon the discourse of shame and guilt, because it seems to be unbearably painful. The mingling of shame and collective guilt has often been criticized but is an effect of the construction of nationhood as a common body, as a macro-subject which has fixed borders like our own body. In Austria there is a desire for normal nationhood: to be (either in contrast to the Germans or in accordance with them) a quite normal European nation like all the others. In an interview with Die Zeit the former leader of the Freedom Party declared: However, the permanent preoccupation with yesterday which constantly revolves around the same subject is typical of the Germans. The Austrian has a different mentality […] The Austrian comes to a point where he says: the subject has been discussed sufficiently. It would be a good thing if the country began to get to grips with the future. (Perger 2000)

This passage provokes a commentary. It differs from other remarks only through its unconcealed aggressive tone. It suggests that the Austrians are themselves victims, a popular version of a non-official narrative that is widespread within right-wing extremism and populism. It confirms that we live in times in which everybody likes to be a victim, even racists and revisionists. Paradoxically, this inverted argument is connected with a narrative that has usually been connected with leftist modernism, a narrative defined by the pathos that the future is much more important than the past, since the Enlightenment a reactionary place to be abandoned. In some aspects, one might argue this is a simulated argument, but this is a half-truth at best. Today, conservative parties and right-wing populism have taken the place that in former times was occupied by the Left. Haider’s proposal of dealing with contemporary problems and looking to the future without the disturbing look back of Klee’s angel seems to be structurally more “modern” than the Libeskind museum. The latter resembles an island in a postmodern world that is backed by the hinc et nunc and has converted any sentimentality about the past to being about the future. So the debate about the collective memory takes place in a context which – aside from postmodern right-wing populism – is not in favour of the differentiated treatment of forgetting and remembering suggested

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by the Libeskind project, one of the rare and convincing attempts to deal with the complexities of remembering. The right-wing demand for “normalisation” in 2000 but also now makes clear that there is reciprocity between culture and politics, between remembrance and identity-creation. Germany, and in this case Austria, are excellent fields of research for understanding the mechanisms of remembrance and remembering. The point is that there is no necessity to declare the specific narrative background on which politics is established. I would go so far as to suggest that the most influential narratives are always latent ones. They become manifest when there is a struggle about forgetting and remembrance – a struggle that has never ceased in the German-speaking countries, perhaps also in other European ones. The cultural memory in regard to the Shoah is still active and there is no prospect of the Shoah becoming a forgotten part of a universal remembrance. If common sense means that you are not required to make the Shoah narrative explicit on any particular occasion, then such “normalisation” needs to be neither aggressively proposed nor excessively mourned. Latent memories do not disappear, nor lose force, in comparison to compulsory remembering and forgetting. However, the hot-tempered debates about the Shoah make clear that the German speaking countries are far away from that situation. They are indicators of a fight for meanings, very often concentrating on the fruitless alternative between forgetting and remembering. The concentration on remembering as such, on the content, the supposed “thing” remembered, is typical of the public discourse of collective memory. Both political sides are, roughly speaking, awkward, obsessed by the thing remembered, unable to establish a relation to it beyond illusionary alternatives: either to fix the past by permanent remembering (in the name of justice) or to escape from it (in the name of “freedom”). But neither the first nor the second project can work. The first is counterproductive with regard to its goal, because it produces in the long run memorial surfeit and the longing for forgetting. The second is counterproductive too: as the request to be spontaneous produces its opposite, the demand for forgetting produces a painful remembering that creates – in the case of Austrian right-wing nationalism – a specific form of aggresion. Forwarding a real attentiveness to the form of narrative remembrance could generate a more adequate relationship to the remembered “thing”, a relationship which could open up the realm of the future and would no longer be dominated by the “fury of disappearing” (Hegel) and the nightmares of the past. Such a relationship, which also overcomes traditional concepts of national identity, concentrates on the form of memory. Aesthetic modernism has established a setting of new forms. Maybe it has lost its pathetic self-understanding as a project that can change the world, but it is art (literature, architecture, film) which enables us to imagine a

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sort of freedom also from the remembered “thing”. While the “reflective turn” might most quickly be grasped in matters of purely aesthetic interpretation, the implications for such a turn resonate far, even toward one of the most vexed and vexing intersections of culture and politics in Europe today. Freud’s approach, whose term of “Verdrängung” has been misused for moralistic purposes, could also prove to be helpful, at least as an intellectual experiment. It is not the event as such that is decisive but the ability of the subject to develop narrative strategies to refer to it: to start a new life that does not deny the past.

Romanticism and Nationalism The Heroic Narrative – Hermann and the Battle for Germany If a field of research is endless, as is evident in the case of nationalism, an attempt at orientation might be helpful. One can apply at least two different principles: selection and discrimination on the one hand, typology on the other. It may thus be possible to reduce to only a few prototypes those thousands of publications about nationhood and nationalism, which for some time have been viewed as some sort of historical burden, an awkward hangover from the nineteenth century. In this case, I shall not refer to the formal instrument of narrative structural analysis. What is important to concentrate on is the different disciplinary and trans-disciplinary focus of perspective and observation. One may dare say that the typological framework proposed here goes hand in hand with the differentiation between the humanities, social sciences and cultural analysis. In the paradigm of the humanities, nationalism is, as in Isaiah Berlin, located in the field of the history of ideas, for example as a contrast between the West and the East in Europe, between civil society and Eastern community (Gemeinschaft), locked in a permanent discussion between Montesquieu and Herder. David Miller has described the dilemma of that humanistic preoccupation quite impressively in his review of the various attempts at differentiation in the field of nationalism: Berlin’s characterization […] does […] bring out what it is about the idea of nationalism that makes many people shy away and look for some other term to express their commitment to nationality. “Nationalism” conjures up the idea of nations as organic wholes, whose constituent parts may properly be made to subordinate their aims to common purposes, and the idea there are no ethical limits to what nations may do in pursuit of their aims, that in particular they are justified to use force to promote national interests at the expense of other peoples. Nationalism then appears both an illiberal and a belligerent doctrine, and people of liberal and pacifistic disposition who nevertheless attach value to national allegiances will search for some other term to describe what they believe in. Not everyone has taken this way out. An alternative is to draw a distinction between different kinds of nationalism, and then to argue that one of these is defensible while the other or the others are not. In the vein of thought it is common to contrast a desirable “Western” form of nationalism with an undesirable “Eastern” form, although different writers make the distinction in different ways, and draw the line between East and West in different places. (Miller 1995, 8)

One problem of those concepts which are based on the history of ideas is that they keep no real distance from their topic. To some extent, they more or less continue the unreflected discourse they describe. This perspective is dominant in the dis-

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course of politics and in that of the history of ideas – from Renan to Plessner.¹ The events between 1933 and 1945 have resolved the theoretical tussle between Montesquieu and Herder in favour of the French Enlightenment. However, the postcolonial discourse (as is characteristic in and for cultural studies) makes it clear that the concept of a peaceful and democratic nationalism of the West can be fragile too. Under certain circumstances, this universalist nationalism can be used as an instrument to legitimize repression, discrimination and violence, which is deployed by the ‘civilised’ to make the ‘less civilised’ see reason. Furthermore, there are also incorporated in Western notions of nationalism some organic and fantasmatic ideas of the special mission of the white man or the grande nation, ideas which are rarely compatible with the Western nations’ self image as proponents of rationality and enlightenment. (Bhabha 1994, 63–88) The second type of theoretical approach is sociological and functional. It can be characterised by the widely discussed work of Ernest Gellner. In an implicit and ironic reply to Marx, he interprets nationalism as the decisive instrument of social modernisation after the breakdown of the ancien regime and the death of God. Quite evidently, nationalism appears as an ideologically backward mental formation which nevertheless, as in Hegel’s concept of die List der Vernunft serves a progressive goal. Nationalism produces the standardisation of modern administration, a general education and school system, and a terrain for a common public opinion (through newspapers and other media). It therefore makes the triumph of modern capitalism much easier in helping to overcome the particularities of the pre-modern world. However, Gellner’s argumentation does not explain why modernity needed such an archaic, quasi-mythical and pseudo-religious cluster of ideas as is quite evidently represented by nationalism. The third strand in my typology I would call cultural. It is characterised by concentration on symbolic forms and media. In contrast to sociological functionalism, it takes the nature of the nationalistic narrative seriously, which, because of its interesting combination of variety and stereotyping, has some structural similarities with Propp’s fairy tales. (cf. Reichmann 2000). The cultural analysis of nationalism is focussed on medial and symbolic characteristics, but also on its specific location in culture. Such cultural analysis, based on media theory and cultural anthropology, posits the question why modern societies constitute themselves as imagined communities by way of national narratives. Anderson and Girard can be seen as such paradigmatic authors who from their different perspectives describe the logic of symbolic social integration. Anderson analyses

1 Ernest Renan, Was ist eine Nation? und andere politische Schriften (1996); Helmut Plessner, Die verspätete Nation.Über die politische Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes (1959).

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the medial preconditions of the modern national narrative; in contrast to this, Girard makes it possible to understand the survival and the continued effect of mythical logic in modern societies in the form of the sacrifice. The analysis of the king’s two bodies, divine and human, which in different ways have been presented by Marc Bloch and Ernst Kantorowicz², proves to be a further starting point for understanding the transformation from medieval to modern society. There is an important point where cultural analysis differs from the conceptual framework of the humanities and social sciences. In contrast to the latter it poses the question about social integration on a general level, that is as a problem as relevant to a small ethnic group like the 10 000 Hopi Indians as it is to the 150 million Russians. This is the problem of how to construct cultural identity and establish a common symbolic continuum in space and time. The cultural approach differs from others in another important respect. It does not understand nationalism exclusively and especially as an ideological phenomenon of the nineteenth century but regards it as the result of a much longer development. In the case of Anderson’s analysis, it is the letterpress and book printing which at the beginning of the modern age make it possible to create symbolic realms no longer restricted to those capable of understanding Latin. Newspapers and the novel are the two modern genres which address and produce modern masses by anonymous communication and thus effect their symbolic social integration. I shall now discuss a specific German variation of the nationalistic narrative, the story of Arminius. The later transformation of the Latin name into the German ‘Hermann’ signifies the mutation of this figure into the first German. I chose this German narrative because Germany has frequently been seen as the birthplace of European nationalism, especially in the humanities and in political science. While the humanities and social sciences remain helpful, we cannot but query some of their common assumptions, for example the idea that Romanticism is the debut of German Nationalism as reaction and answer to the French Revolution. In particular, the widespread concept that German (and later European) nationalism (with the exception of England and France) was purely a reaction to the French Revolution is historically untenable and must be at least modified. It was presented by Isaiah Berlin in a very convincing way. His argumentation is based on two considerations: The French Revolution took place in the name of universal and cosmopolitan ideas. Germany as a late-comer nation could not

2 Ernst Kantorowicz, Die zwei Körper des Königs (1990)/The King’s Two Bodies (1966); Marc Bloch, Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (1924).

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refer to these ideas to constitute itself in the process of state-making, because this code was occupied by the French for their national self characterisation as the grande nation, the nation of liberty. Therefore, the German clercs had to look for a particularistic code to create and invent their nation: the Volksgeist. It was the terreur of the Jacobeans which made this concept attractive for legitimating the making of Germany and creating a modern nation-state on the territory of the Holy Roman Empire. But there are some problems with this argumentation: firstly, there were growing nationalistic moments especially after the radicalisation of the Revolution in France itself. But more importantly, one can show that the nationalistic code in Germany, which used historical myths for ‘arguments’, was already established in Germany in the middle of the eighteenth century, decades before the French Revolution and the terreur. Heinrich von Kleist’s drama Die Hermannsschlacht (Hermann’s battle), which has often been seen as the first of a new type of a nationalistic narrative, does not mark the beginning of this type of ‘classical’ nationalistic story about the German David and the French-Roman Goliath, but to some extent presents its climax and the provisional finale. The identification of German Romanticism with nationalism is quite familiar, but there remains an obvious contrast to the programmatic self-understanding of historical Romanticism. By its inherent logic, Romanticism – not merely in the early period of Frühromantik – represents the only non-nationalistic and universalist modern movement in Germany. At the same time its mental divorce from imminent modern political, economic and technological developments is remarkable. Here, at first time the contrast between modernism in the arts and modernism in society becomes visible. In this context, one needs to mention Tieck’s and Schlegel’s concept of a global and universal literature (Weltliteratur), which were developed in Goethe’s shadow. But there is also the explicit Romantic universalism. The critique of Protestantism and its anti-nationalistic implications are part of that context. The self-description of the new movement  – Romanticism  – refers programmatically to an imagined Other  – a foreigner or stranger within the stayed German environment – and implies a multi-lingual and polyethnic understanding of literature and the world. There is still another ethnically more specific association: “romantisch” is also connected with the Romance languages and literature, with the literature not written in Latin but in its popular derivatives: Italian, French and Spanish. At least in the German-Protestant context, modern nationalism is a product of the age of Enlightenment, a result of that intellectual cluster of events in which the Christian order of things was to be queried quite seriously. The nationalistic narrative advances to become the successor of the medieval political construction Ernst Kantorowicz has described as the king’s two bodies. As Benedict

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Anderson has pointed out, the eighteenth century not only marks the dawn of the age of Enlightenment in Western Europe but also the twilight of religious modes of thought (Özkırımlı 2000, 143–156). However, the century of Enlightenment implies its own modern darkness. The decline of religiosity did not abolish harm and misfortune, which religion had integrated into a symbolic order. The demise of paradise makes death arbitrary. The idea of salvation becomes absurd. There is a need to transform the unavoidable into continuity, contingency into meaning. Anderson insists that the idea of nation was successful because it was the perfect symbolic machinery to give meaning to the meaningless.³ Although one has to understand European nation states as “new” and “historical”, the nations which give them political expression and symbolic design always seem rooted in an archaic past and, more importantly, march on into a boundless future. Nationalism cannot be understood simply as a series of intentionally connected ideologies, but is rather anchored in the cultural macro-systems which have gone ahead. Hence nationalism is both the result of a new cultural constellation and a reaction to an older cultural system (Anderson 1997, 33f). In contrast to much received scholarly opinion, the connection between nationalism and Romanticism must be described in a different way. Romanticism opens up perspectives to understand modern nationalism as a symptom of crisis of the polity as a whole. The Neue Mythologie (New Mythology) Schlegel and others depicted before 1800 can be seen as a synthetic, meta-political and aesthetic pattern of thought intended to bridge the gap between tradition and revolution, between the ancien regime and the national and nationalistic levėe en masse. In hindsight one may argue that it was historically excluded and impossible, a pattern of thought which came too early. After 1800 a ‘discursive coalition’ between a secondary type of Romanticism and a new updated and radicalised German nationalism becomes evident which had latently developed earlier. This intellectual constellation has a precise symbolic place, the vacuum, the utopia of the New Mythology. From a historical perspective, one can say that German nationalism occupies this vacuum in a very successful and disastrous way. Especially since 1806, since the defeat of Prussia in the battle of Jena and Auerstedt, it reverts to the older discursive ‘equipment’ and constitutes itself as a European prototype in mythical garb.⁴ The irony of nationalism, at least at first glance, is its universal symbolical design. But one should not reduce nationalism to the level of tribal battles or

3 Cf. Theodor Lessing, Die Sinngebung des Sinnlosen (1919). 4 Cf. Christoph Jamme, ‘Gott an hat ein Gewand’ (1991); Karl Heinz Bohrer (ed.) Mythos und Moderne (1983).

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simply identify it as a producer of collectively effective enemy images. Modern nationalism has specific historical and cultural ‘roots’. It differs from tribal warfare and the pilloring of symbolic enemies because of two specific historical conditions. Nationalism as a political form of discourse and as a literary narrative becomes effective against the background of a specific Christian holy order and a modern universalism which is grounded in an early capitalist society. Modern nationalism, which negates universalism at all levels, proves to be more universal than any other universalism to which it polemically refers. The similarity between the rhetorically effective but theoretically poor nationalisms and their symbolic configurations is striking and astounding: Raise your eyes, comrades: Look at your wretched situation, at your desecrated temples, at your daughters who are left to the lust of the barbarians, at your plundered houses, at your devastated fields, at yourselves as unfortunate slaves! Is it not time to throw off the yoke of slavery? Give up all that is un-Greek, wave your banners, make the sign of the cross – and you will triumph and save your fatherland and the religion from the slandering of the godless. Is there anyone amongst you who does not wish to free the fatherland from its bonds?⁵

Of course, variations are possible within the structure of nataionalistic narratives (for example with regard to religion), but the fiery appeal of the Greek nobleman who served the Russian crown, Alexander Ypsilanti, can be generalised. A Czech or an Italian nationalist of the nineteenth century or also a German nationalist in the age of Enlightenment would have spoken in a similar way. The addressees and the enemies, to whom the nationalist declares war symbolically and really, may change, while the rhetorical structure grosso modo remains the same. In other words, there is something like a general narrative and specific tropology (White 1983) of nationalism, even if the cultural contexts of modern nationalisms differ. What is of interest here is not the possibility of a critical stocktaking of those ideological phenomena, which implies a clever outside perspective but at the same time produces a painful lack of argumentation with regard to the question of why nationalism, despite its intellectual poverty, has been the most successful ideology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I also do not want to refer to the

5 “Erhebet nur eure Blicke, Kameraden! Sehet an euren erbarmenswerten Zustand, eure entheiligten Tempel, eure Töchter der Wollust von Barbaren preisgegeben, eure geplünderten Häuser, eure verwüsteten Felder, euch selbst als unselige Sklaven! Wäre es nicht endlich Zeit, das unerträgliche Joch abzuschütteln, das Vaterland zu befreien? Legt alles Ungriechische ab, schwingt die Fahnen, schlagt das Kreuz, und ihr werdet überall siegen und das Vaterland und die Religion von der Beschimpfung der Gottlosen retten. Wer von Euch, edle Griechen, wird das Vaterland nicht freudig von seinen Banden befreien wollen?”

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differentiation which is used in politics and history, the difference between an unhealthy and exaggerated nationalism and ‘normal’, legitimate national consciousness. There is no doubt that the blazing appeals of Greek, Polish or Italian national revolutionaries could reckon with intellectual sympathy throughout the whole of Europe. But as Isaiah Berlin has pointed out, nationalism, which was never seen as a historical power and as a relevant grande récit (Berlin 1991, 6–9), has been seen only as a passing phenomenon especially by those political movements which acted as protagonists of the project of progress and development, for example Marx’s (Marx 1848, 59–87). From a non-national perspective one can perhaps discuss the question whether certain revolts and revolutions which were backed by a national or nationalistic narrative have not had their moral and political legitimacy. There are many, but in contrast, there are other national uprisings which brought about the contrary, not least by oppressing other ethnical groups. But the point is that all these nationalisms, which as their starting point have a re-actualised foundation myth, possess a common structure. It may sound scandalous: but between the National Socialism of an ugly SA man or a Tschetnik on the one side and the noble nationalism of a hero of the risorgimento on the other may be a moral difference, but no difference in the logic of their discourse. What makes a difference between Ypsilanti and Karadzic is the distance of time, the distance of 175 years. When the Greek partisans freed their fatherland, all the mosques and bazaars went up in flames (I dare say not only the buildings burnt). But there was nobody who protested against those excesses. There is no European narrative recollecting the story of the victims of Greek emancipation. Today such a pathos of national liberation has to reckon with protest because nationalism, which has left a trail of blood in European history, is now measured against the programmatic and institutionalised concepts of civil society and human rights. But as a simple event like the plebiscite in Bozen ten years ago shows, nationalism has not yet disappeared from the mental map, not even in the developed democracies in the West. In the capital of South Tyrol or the Alto Adige the Italian majority voted in favour of maintaining the name of the main square of the city as ‘Square of Victory’ instead of ‘Square of Peace’. Returning to the blazing appeal of Ypsilanti’s unsuspicious risorgimento, the narrative of modern nationalism entails the following six characteristics which are fundamental for its coherence: 1. It contains an understanding of freedom and of the lack of freedom, which is curiously vague. Neither the narrative of nationalism has formulated a positive and explicit ‘ideological’ goal of social politics (emancipation, inflection of ruling power and violence, civil society) nor has it developed an ambitious and critical theory which legitimates the ethnic struggle for

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the freedom it propagates. Freedom is defined as freedom and autonomy from the ethnic Other who is principally a threat to nationalistic identity politics. It is the binary nature of the narrative that constructs this ethnic Other in an action of symbolic exclusion of and opposition to the ‘them’ who are sharply distinguished from the ‘us’. Because of its logical structure this ‘radical’ political position implies the message that a dictatorship within one’s own ethnic group is to be preferred to any foreign rule, even if democratic. Generally, the lack of compromise of the national discourse, which is an integral part of the formal structure of the national narrative, stands in contrast to the liberal ideas of balance and provisional agreement. The problem of political rule is thematised only in a reduced form. It becomes the focus of attention merely with regard to the ruling power executed by groups of people who are coded as strangers. As soon as the strangers – the Turks, the Frenchmen, the Römlinge (the ugly Romans), the Habsburgian jailers of peoples, the Jews – have been expelled, there is no longer a problem with political rule. In this discourse the problem of power seems to be always extra-territorial, produced by the strangers out there. At its very centre, nationalism imagines a society which is a non-alienated community in a double sense: a community without aliens and a community which is not abstract and anonymous, a community without media, technology and capitalist market relations. This demands a factor which is structurally important also in other fields of society, a regress, a return, a movement backwards to the believed origins, a re-volution in the direction of the early times, to the archaic beginnings, when there was no foreign and alienated rule. The national revolution is a revolution which imagines a wonderful return to the earliest origins, before we were so rudely interrupted. It is because of this fantasy of a communal non-alienated social formation there is a symbolic and imaginary place for nationalism and socialism within modernity. The nationalistic rhetoric of self-defence and urgency is part of the logic of national mobilisation. In the national narrative this rhetoric goes hand in hand with the counter-images of total slavery, brutal rape, plundered houses, devastated fields. The images which, for example, the Slavic nationalisms produced after 1866 with regard to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy correspond to this type. One should mention that these nationalistic fantasies of believed national extinction do not accord with the historical situation. Without being sentimental and nostalgic about the ancien regimes in Europe, one can easily see that the situation for example of the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire was quite privileged, although they were excluded from top political positions. The practising of their religion was guaran-

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teed as well as that of political power on a regional level. The increasing clout of social groups which executed important influence in trade and in the economy was not least recruited from the Greek-Orthodox population. (Alter 1985, 30) The dramatic and programmatic image of oppression which modern nationalism depicts with regard to foreign rule does not necessarily coincide with historical events. But this obvious difference between the rhetoric and the facts does not produce irritation. It does not weaken the historical dynamism of the nationalistic narrative, but strengthens it. 4. Quite evidently, the nation is imagined as feminine. The innocent and defenceless Volkskörper, which is maltreated and ravaged, is a female body. The “daughters” who are exposed to the lewdness and lasciviousness of the strangers encapsulate the efficient collective imagination of nationalistic politics. In its centre one finds the phantasma, that it is the lusty and potent stranger who is able to take the body of one’s own woman and rape it: fear of castration and sexual deprivation. The centre of the nationalistic complex is genuinely sexual; the construction of the modern community as a female body which is to be protected and preserved as pure also explains the mighty affirmative energies set in motion by nationalism. The national desire is a psycho-dynamic phenomenon. The male body is placed – a long time before Fascism and National Socialism – at the frontier of the female body: as its wall. Nationalism also means the renaissance of the victorious hero. (Theweleit 1986) 5. The stranger is the person who occupies one’s own body: the woman, the earth, the fertile territory. This kind of occupation by the stranger, the foreigner is itself to be seen as a barbaric act. But there is a problem: How to explain this situation in the nationalistic narrative? Whatever the reasons for the evident superiority of the stranger/foreigner, the attribution to him of the barbaric, which is illustrated by Ypsilanti’s rhetoric, has a powerful appeal. It promises the consolation that the stranger attacking one’s own women is culturally and morally primitive. Hence it is believed to be the fact of his underdeveloped and non-civilised state that makes him superior for a while. But there is another variant of the image of the stranger, as is the case in the German national narrative. Here, the dangerous stranger is superior in terms of civilisation; but this quality is converted against him: he is lusty, decadent, without ideals and true religiosity, artificial, luxuryloving, depraved and cynical. He is a man of civilisation, not of real culture. (Elias 1978, 1–10) In this case, too, the military and political superiority of the power which is marked as foreign becomes an index of the moral weakness of that power. It is true that the stranger benefits from his superiority in terms of civilisation for some time, but à la longue this advantage swings

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to the other extreme, because his military capacity is undermined by his decadent softness. In an act of self-reference, it proves to be necessary to reactivate the patriotic narrative once more since it was silenced by the enemy; to re-establish its position and push it through. The necessary appeal to the masses is always tautological: It is the appeal of the narrative that is establishing the nationalistic symbolic order and the theatre of cultural and collective memory. (Bhaba 1994, 1–7)⁶ The appeal comes from the past and is directed to the present and to the future: it is the voice of the paternal ancestor which appeals to the living people of the national community. It is the work of collective recollection which guarantees duration after the successful risorgimento: Hermann, now listen and realise with care Why your father has brought thee to this grove, Son, where heat and courage lead thee to noble deeds. So let thy duty be told thee by these pictures Be great and rise amongst the heroes’ number. Here, Thuiskon’s picture is resplendent, here Mannu’s monument, In these, German courage has been fired first. Through these magnanimity, faith and calm have come to us. The urge which flees from all superficiality and dislikes soft manners, Which does not know laws but exercises virtue. The ambition to be free and never to be sold to others Is implanted in our breasts by these images.⁷

This version of a German nationalistic narrative dates from 1740. His author is a well-known proponent of the early German Enlightenment: Johann Elias Schlegel.

6 With regard to the performative aspect see also: Wolfgang Müller-Funk/Franz Schuh (eds.), Nationalismus und Romantik (2000), Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Anatomie des Helden (2005, 3–13). 7 “Nun, Hermann, höre zu und merke mit Bedacht, Warum dein Vater dich in diesen Hain gebracht. So laß dir deine Pflicht von diesen Bildern sagen Sey groß und hebe dich in dieser Helden Zahl Hier prangt Thuiskons Bild, hier Mannus Ehrenmal In diesen ist zuerst der deutsche Muth entglommen; Durch sie sind Großmuth, Treu und Ruh auf uns gekommen. Der Trieb, der Flachheit flieht, nicht weiche Sitten liebt, Nichts von Gesetz weis, und doch die Tugend übt; Der Ehrgeiz, frey zu seyn, und nie verkauft zu leben, Ist uns von ihnen her, in unsre Brust gegeben.” Johann Elias Schlegel (1771, 313)

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The text is instructive for several reasons. There is first an early indication of this anti-French and anti-universal pattern of thinking. Moreover, the author presupposes that his audience is familiar with the subject, the story of the first ‘German’ who triumphs over his ‘Roman’-French enemy and establishes his own German order which is characterised by the exercise of virtue and not by any legalistic compliance with the law. Johann Elias Schlegel himself attached great importance to this play within his œuvre because it reflects his own intentions. Long before the German Romantics, the author of this play, who was in confrontation with Martin Opitz, the protagonist and guardian of German language wanted to establish German national literature in analogy with all the other European cultures. Hermann. Ein Trauerspiel is the decisive exposition of this programme. The project of a modern German literature (including a canon) and the foundation of a national narrative coincide in Hermann. (Herrmann, Blitz, Moßmann 1996) This early Hermann contains mythical moments on both levels: content and form. However, the author insists that his subject is historical. So, history becomes the function of an argument. Like Möser and Klopstock later, he refers to the Roman-Latin sources about Arminius and interprets him in an act of retrospective adaptation as the first German hero who had the courage to revolt against foreign power and against anything alien as such. In one fell swoop (Benjamin preferred to say in a tiger’s leap) a Germanic governor in Roman service is transformed into a German, into the first noble nationalist. He becomes German because he eliminates everything that is foreign, un-German, everything smacking of ‘Roman’ manners and habits. In this early version of the Arminius subject which, according to Hans Blumenberg (1979) is the first more or less uncritical work on a German central myth, all those moments are present which appear in the manifesto of the Greek nobleman Ypsilanti a hundred years later: the unspecific understanding of freedom, the identification of power with foreign power, the rhetoric of urgency, the female attribution of the common and at the same time heroically contested body, represented by Thusnelda, the wife of the rebel who has wrested her from her father Segest, a friend of the Romans and hence a traitor. (The helpless female body is always in danger of falling into the hands of the enemy.) Last but not least, Hermann works like a ritual initiation into the national narrative, “this subject which is so important for the Fatherland” (J. E. Schlegel 1771, 285), because this play was as representative in its political as in its aesthetic message on the stage. To enter the altar of national pseudo-religion, it was necessary to forget Christianity. The beginning of the play I have quoted from is instructive: Hermann’s fight for Germany starts with a quasi-religious initiation in front of exemplary Germanic, that is non-Christian, gods, whose altar is not in church but organi-

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cally embedded into a grove, a landscape which is imagined as free territory. As in religious rites of initiation, the pictures of the altar in the wooded landscape enter Hermann’s recollection and remind him of his duties. In these pictures, the collective imaginary is crystallised. It is part of a redoubled aesthetic strategy to bring the audience into the play. As Hermann has incorporated the narrative of the lawless bold gods, so the contemporary recipient is to integrate this national Weihespiel (religious play) and to exercise its rituals. Because the religious is grounded in theatre, the nationalistic narrative needs the dramatic.⁸ The nationalistic tendency was to increase further still in subsequent versions of the subject, from Justus Möser’s relatively unimportant play, which had its premiere in Vienna in 1751, to Klopstock’s orgiastic and bloody scenic drama Hermanns Schlacht.⁹ For Schlegel, the proponent of the early enlightenment, the dominance of Roman civilisation was a painful and theoretically delicate fact; this may be the reason why Segest, Hermann’s involuntary father-in-law, is not only a national traitor but for a long time in the play an equal counterpart. Segest is in favour of a legally regulated life of the Germans within the framework of the Roman administration of justice and Roman civilisation. He pleads for peaceful ethnic coexistence. With Segest, a dramatically quite powerful counter-position gets a chance to speak in contestation of the national narrative in the play. But there cannot be any doubt that his plea for cultural hybridity and peaceful living together is rejected also in the play of 1770. In Möser, a respectable writer in the age of enlightenment, and in Klopstock’s martial piece, Hermann’s relatives, who are loyal to Rome, are reduced to bogeys. In the binary code of the nationalistic narrative, they have only the function of ugly traitors who must be eliminated by the national community to re-install the logic of a society which is based on sacrifice. Klopstock’s Hermanns Schlacht, characterised by the author as a Bardiet, a bard-canto for the stage, was conceptualised as a national Weihespiel, a ritual religious play, from the very beginning. The scene of the action is a sublime druidic place of sacrifice. There are the priests, at the top Benno, the Druid, bards, who spur on the heroes to fight, young male victims and Siegmar, Hermann’s old father, who is not a dynastic ruler. The sacrificial altar which lies above the battlefield and characterises the sublime

8 René Girard, Das Heilige und die Gewalt (1987, 134); Christian Meier, Die Entstehung des Politischen bei den Griechen 1980, 156). 9 Klopstock, Gesammelte Werke (n.d., 33). Klopstock’s title put the accent on the extraordinary qualities of the violent founder of Germany. In contrast, Kleist concentrates on the collective aspect of the revolt.

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happening on the hill is the scene of the play, the place from which the figures are able to see and report ‘live’ (to use a modern media term) on the events of the cruel war, which itself remains invisible during the whole play. The altar also represents the internal point of reference, the inner centre of a play which despite the bloodbath and slaughter internally and externally remains a very unexciting piece. What is interesting is that it interprets the events of war as a quasi-religious plot. The fact that the “beautiful blood of the battle” (especially the blood of the strangers, but also their own blood) must be soaked up by – strangely enough – “the mothers and the women”¹⁰ demonstrates that the imagined national religion is based on the logic of sacrifice: its victims are strangers but also members of the community. Mana, Thuiskon and Wodan, the modern gods of the Germanic Germans, claim their toll of lives. A reward for the toll is offered to the victims of group: inscription into the national theatre of memory, the Walhalla. The enthusiastic acceptance of death by pure and chaste German men who “prefer to die rather than to live” corresponds to the pathetic scenery. This is the reason why the old and weak Siegmar, Hermann’s father, goes to the battlefield: mortally wounded, he returns to the altar which is the real battlefield. And vice versa: the battlefield is the altar. But at the same time, the blood of the strangers and their banner, the Roman eagle, is the greatest sacrificial gift for the Old German gods. Consequently it is Benno, the highest priest and the representative of these gods, who claims the toll of lives most imperiously, as when there is a discussion about the execution of the ‘traitors’ – that is, those Germans who have fought on the side of the Romans. The national narrative is of a type that affirms and re-actualises the violent origin of power that liberal concepts try to ban. (Bourdieu 1997, 118–164) The bloody battle is the kernel of ritual worship. It is not the result of a concrete situation of self-defence, it is the mythical constitution of a community through the shedding of blood, it is the very conditio sine qua non, the price which is demanded by the national gods. It is a lawless community forged by blood and ascetic exercise, a militarised society with one leader and a group of warrior equals. The art of the bards, of poetry and song, is the mirror image of the play, guaranteeing the emotional cohesion of the Volkskörper, which – as I have mentioned – is imagined as feminine. Thus, Klopstock’s play represents an effective literary confirmation of – in the terms of René Girard – foundational violence. (Girard 1987, 9–61) The narrative of nationalism is binary: there is only room for friend and foe, compatriots and aliens. Everyone who tries to break this logic must be seen as a

10 Klopstock, Gesammelte Werke (n.d., 43): “Sauget, Mütter und Weiber, das schöne Blut der Schlacht!”

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traitor, to be eliminated or expelled from the community built by blood and war. As in Klopstock’s predecessor, Johann Elias Schlegel, the enemy tends to be decadent, a weakling, bestial and lascivious. In Klopstock’s play, the choirs sing in the second scene that Romulus’s grandsons are entartet, degenerate. When they go to their “meals of desire” (Wollustmahle), they resemble animals, meaning they are not only cruel but also excessive (Klopstock, 49). It is important to save the collective female Volkskörper from those degenerate people. Hence the fight for its integrity goes hand in hand with the exclusion of sexuality, which is a symptom of voluptuousness. This rejection of sensuality generates a moral surplus, an elation which multiplies the wish for extermination. The specific German aspect of the universal nationalistic narrative may be seen in the connection between Protestant outer-world asceticism and the innerworld nationalistic impulse of aggression. One can see quite clearly that the construction of the image of the enemy is encoded in a multiple way. The enemy: that is the whole Roman complex, but also the ‘degenerated’ Ludovician France of the second part of the eighteenth century. But the enemy of the German bourgeois is the aristocrat, and he is linked with France. Already in this discourse, long before Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, civilisation and decadence coincide. And at any rate, one must not forget that the national enthusiasm in those days was strong enough to burn Wieland’s books in the otherwise enlightened bourgeois town of Göttingen because this author was seen as a Französling, a friend of French style and manners. From a cultural perspective, this is an alarming anticipation of things that were to come. In this construction of the political, the universalism of the Empire and the feudal system are rejected implicitly, yet categorically, although the author of Hermanns Schlacht felt the necessity to place a eulogy to the Roman-German emperor at the front of his anti-Roman work. Maybe this was tactics and calculation; at any rate it is quite ironic, for if there is anything the play denies it is the symbolic order of the crowned head of Christianity, who represents sacral and secular elements in the dual nature of his body. Klopstock’s play also puts an end to the genuinely Christian idea that with the death of Jesus as a victim the logic of sacrifice, the functional and institutionalised role of violence in the organisation of society has become problematic in principle. This at least is the claim of Christian belief, although the reality may be different. It must be remembered that we are dealing with an author who in his youth wrote Der Messias (as thanks to the Danish king, who was his sponsor) and who nevertheless with his poem Sie und nicht wir! later became a fellow traveller of the French revolution. Here this aspect of foundational violence, the need for sacrifice and victims, is sadly obvious.

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A truly radical political interpretation of Christianity as subverting state violence was never realised in Protestant theology after Luther. Quite evidently, the message of Christianity was regarded to be inappropriate for the construction of the political after the end of the ancien regime – that is, after the symbolic and later the real death of the sacred king with his two bodies. The historical project of nationalism can be seen as the last attempt in history to make sacrifice the concealed but basic instrument of statehood and to give it a physical foundation that is no longer grounded in the corpus Christi. This is the precarious aspect of enlightened heathenism. Thus, the modern attempt of political community-foundation necessarily comes into conflict with concepts of human rights in a political enlightenment which one could describe as a universalism after the death of God. These concepts were originally derived from the cultural and religious framework of political society, although that cultural background of politics is rarely acknowledged. It is not surprising that the nationalistic narrative has no place in any modern utopia. Within our analysis of the nationalistic narrative we inevitably come to the point where we to have a look at the political theology of Romanticism: Novalis’ famous fragment about Christianity and his other early political aphorisms. With reference to Renė Girard and Ernst Kanotorowicz these texts can be read as symptomatic and as analytical documents about the crisis of the political after the death of a universal God and his political substitute on earth: “A collapsing throne is like a falling mountain which shatters the plain and leaves a dead sea where before there was fertile land and a merry place for the living.” (Novalis 1981, 355; own translation) This aphorism encapsulated the experience of existential shock of a whole generation: the collapse of the throne and a crowned head cut off, the end of the traditional order now bereft of that sanctity which once legitimized the symbolic order of the community. For Novalis, this event is only the final point in a longterm process in which the erosion of a common uniform order had taken place. He parades its internal history before his reader in a form which is similar to the fairy tale, as a history which was never real. It is not the Emperor, but the Pope and his ‘guild’ who are the heavenly representatives on earth and at the same time the guarantors of a peaceful universal world. Novalis’ fragment, which was written some years before the official end of the Holy Roman Empire, is a retrospective utopia and an idealised ‘Romantic’ reconstruction of the self-image of the old holy Christian order. It develops its utopian qualities against the background of the contemporary historical situation that is characterised by crisis, war, the escalation of violence and the loss of political legitimacy. Protestantism, the sciences and the Enlightenment are seen by the author as the historical

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powers responsible for the decline of the old order, for modern religious conflicts and – as a consequence of this – for national wars. Novalis pleads for a new postenlightened order, which is able to establish and guarantee Kant’s idea of eternal peace, bringing all external and internal violence of society to an end. Hence his ideas attempt to give classical universalism a new cultural and historical foundation. He places Kant within the symbolic earth and heaven of an idealised Catholicism. “How our cosmopolitans would be astonished if eternal peace appeared to them and they could see the highest educated people in a moral form?” (Novalis 1981, 356f.; own translation) What is central in this Christianity fragment is the idea of a post-enlightened and – to some extent – a post-Christian universalism which recollects the mystical body of Christianity and is at the same time committed to the secular project of eternal peace. In this way, it differs from St. Augustine’s concept of the two kingdoms radically. In the reception of the text, the final part has often been neglected. It is true that one can criticise the first part of the text as a uncritical idealisation of the papacy, of the holy orders, the monks and especially the Jesuits, if one (mis)understands it as some sort of romantic historiography; but the final part, which is not quoted very often, makes it clear that Novalis neither saw any chance of a return to the old holy order nor would he consider that desirable. At the time of his text’s drafting it was not clear if there was going be any further pope after the Napoleonic intervention. For Novalis, Rome is  – for the second time – a ruin, a fragment of memory. What Novalis has in mind is quite evidently the version of a New Mythology infused with Christian elements of thought. It is a narrative after the death of the divine king who is replaced by an artist-king shaping society like an English garden or a poem. As a result of Romanticism, the meaning of Christianity has radically changed. Historical Catholicism with its adoration of the Christ child, his mother and the saints is only one example of the religious. There is now a general rejoicing about every form of religion and the symbolical and medial qualities of Christianity are stressed, for they make the earthly into the symbol of the heavenly and eternal. As with all other versions of the New Mythology arising from Idealism and Romanticism, there is a primary concern with synthesis, a very specific kind of synthesis which from the very beginning is conceptualised as aesthetic and creative, the work of a modern poetically transcendental subject. It is supposed that this new holy order, which is at once religious and enlightened, can be established only by the Germans. Religion is linked with science, monarchy and republic are brought into intimate relation. Because it takes place against the background of a renewed and re-interpreted Christianity, the new Romantic political community in a peaceful Europe remains the corpus Christi. In contrast to the traditional order, it is not the physical, but the mystical and spiritual body

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of God. The people are now this mystical sovereign and the king its symbolic substitute: “Does not the mystical sovereign, like every idea, need a symbol, and what symbol could be more dignified and more adequate than a charming human being?” (Novalis 1981, 374; own translation) Whereas all citizens in this strange early socialistic statehood are treated as public servants of a tolerant pan-(en)theistic community, the king has an exceptional position, because he incorporates and represents the other mystical aspect of human society. The fact that (s)he stands outside as the personification of an ideal also has another meaning: (S)he figures as the example of a mankind that is orientated towards self-perfection, pointing to the coming God and the coming human being. Novalis’ construction of the political, which at first glance looks quite naive and idealistic, is in some aspects surprisingly sophisticated. Indeed, one can describe modern representative democracy as a synthesis between ‘monarchy’ and ‘republic’. In modern democracies there is always a symbolic monarch, a constitutional king of a historical dynasty or a temporary elected king (president) which represents the mystical sovereign, the people. Furthermore, modern democracy is a balanced system which connects permanence with movement. There are a lot of things one can vote for, but there are some things that cannot be voted for, only interpreted in a different way, like human rights. Hence elections in a democracy, which Novalis interpreted as permanent movement within a more or less fix system of values, are mutually dependent. Also his thesis that the modern state balances particular interests in a highly artistic way by using them for its own purposes, seems very contemporary. However, the concept that the representative of the mystical sovereign is not only a moral example but should act at the same time as an artist of social synthesis has not proved viable and indeed could be seen to have been disastrous. This model of the royal artist, which Peter Handke (1997) has given a scarcely convincing remake in his play Zurüstungen für die Ewigkeit. Ein Königsdrama, denies the category of the political (and its autonomy) and turns politics into aesthetics. Politics becomes a problem of aesthetic construction. The uncomfortable political compromise is simply replaced by the breathtaking beauty of synthesis. Whenever politics have become reduced to aesthetic design they have quickly revealed their totalitarian tendency. Aesthetic policy is the core of every New Mythology. According to this way of thinking the old mythology was able to deliver a symbolic framework with quasi-natural borders, within which the arts as well as the art of statesmanship could develop. The New Mythology is confronted with a paradox however: it has to create itself with the help of the Romantic imagination – that means through modern art, for which it is at the same time trying to forge a new foundational

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framework. It was not very probable that this New Mythology was ever going to be able to work. In reality, there existed a new candidate for the New Mythology which could take the place of the old, sacred order after the death of God and after the execution of his substitutes: the narrative of nationalism. Johann Elias Schlegel, Justus Möser and Klopstock (mis)understood their own work on Hermann as a contribution to history. Transformed into a new mythology, nationalism found its adequate but precarious structure. True, the nation became the framework of modern statehood, civil society and democracy. But the historical balance could disastrously tilt the other way. This is shown by the millions of victims produced by a particular kind of identity politics which re-actualised the idea of sacrifice, as was the case, not exclusively but spectacularly, in mid twentieth-century German culture. It is no accident that Thomas Mann in his famous speech on the German Republic (1923) quoted Novalis, because his spiritual concept of democracy had not forgotten the heritage of Christianity. It signalled the ambition that after Jesus modern societies have a chance to constitute themselves beyond the structural logic of sacrifice. Hence if there is a choice we should opt for the framework of politics proposed by Novalis and not for that promoted by Klopstock and Kleist. But we should also cast our vote against Wagner and his political followers who radicalised the idea of the politics as a synthesis of the arts. Nationalism¹¹ has never been a simple function or the result of the history of ideas. There is a surplus produced by cultural practice. Nationhood, nationalism and nation imply concepts deeply rooted in culture. It is cultural analysis which can best explain the non-rational and dysfunctional aspects of modern nationalism.

11 Manfred Frank, Der kommende Gott. Vorlesungen über die Neue Mythologie (1982); Manfred Frank, Gott im Exil. Vorlesungen über die Neue Mythologie (1988).

Polyphem’s Children (Post-) Colonial Aspects in Western Modernity and Literary Modernism I. Preface Moderne (to use the German word) in one of its aspects is a historical state (modernity) and contains a cluster of grand récits (Lyotard 1979, chapter 9) and metaphors (Blumenberg).¹ Modernity can be described as a process of secularisation, as the outbreak and escape from Kant’s “self-inflicted immaturity” (“selbstverschuldete Unmündigkeit”, a term Blumenberg has defined as “self-satisfaction jumping to conclusions”, Blumenberg 1989, 549), as a process of growing rationality and self-reflection or as a disenchantment (Entzauberung) of the world, in other words: as a process of de-legitimisation of mythical, magical and religious attitudes, beliefs and ideas. So, modernity includes the promise of an end to the illusions resulting from the manipulation and deceptions of any kind of priesthood. From the perspective of Enlightenment the return to the darkness of Plato’s cave would signify the way of the enemy of mankind. (Blumenberg 1989, 515) But the German term Moderne has a further meaning: literary and artistic modernism. At first glance, one could argue that modernism is in unbridgeable contrast to this type of rationality which we identify with modernity, with rationality in politics, economics and sciences. Since romanticism, literary and artistic modernism can be described as a protest against modern rationality, as an attempt to establish a program of re-enchantment and to create a new mythology, or in other words as a return to the darkness of Plato’s cave. There are many programmatic issues of those new mythologies from Romanticism to the modern avant-gardes in the twentieth century which more or less imply the idea of going back to the roots of imagination, to the world of myth and fairy tales, or mixing modern technique with archaic mythology. Thus, one could argue that there is a strong contrast between modernity and the programmatic modernism in literature and in the arts. Octavio Paz has described this recourse to myth as the other time of poetry.²

1 Hans Blumenberg is the philosopher who reconstructs the history of modernity and modernism in terms of “Umbesetzungen” (substitutions”) of metaphors. Cf. for exmple: Hans Blumenberg, Höhlenausgänge (1989). 2 Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo. German: Die andere Zeit der Dichtung (1989, 11–57; ch. 1 and 2).

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But this is only one side of the coin. As the term suggests, modernism is programmatically modern and revolutionary, not traditional and conservative. It is the adequate way to refer critically to modern times. Although the time of poetry is in contrast to modern progress imagined as an other time, as the time of myth, the aesthetic structure of post-Romantic poetry is genuinely modern. The modernists  – Novalis, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Pound  – are people who have left the dark cave and have seen the light of day of Enlightenment and modern rationality, but have decided programmatically to return to Plato’s dark but imaginative underworld to establish a new kind of poetry. There is a big difference between never leaving the cave and returning to it because light of day was disappointing. I would not go so far as Cornelia Klinger and define Romanticism and postRomanticism as a form of aesthetic and expressive rationality (Klinger 1995, 61), but it is quite evident that the poetry of modernism is to some extent the consequence of a rational strategy and composition. Novalis’ definition of romantic aesthetics as a mathematical method and Edgar Alan Poe’s self-interpretation of his famous poem “The Raven” are illustrative examples of this hyper-rationality, of a method of creating re-enchantment and re-invention of myth in the medium of poetry. But this reference to the world of myth was never based solely on an aesthetic program but also implied a general critique of modern times. The Jewish East European author Joseph Roth and the South-American writer Gabriel García Marquez can be seen as two different examples of that kind of critical reference to Western modernity. Using motifs and elements of Romantic poetry, Marquez and Roth develop a specific post-colonial poetic discourse. In their imaginary world myth is linked to the ‘underdeveloped’ periphery. This virtual point of view makes it possible to interpret Western modernity as a hidden and uncanny mythical project. Thus, the technique of aesthetic re-enchantment goes hand in hand with a subversive aesthetic and political strategy I would describe as disenchantment of disenchantment. It entails a powerful critique of Western modernity which makes clear that the problem of modernity is not its overwhelming rationality but its lack of it. It is the connection between Romanticism and periphery which creates this critical ‘post-colonial” point of view and presents a counter-world to modern capitalism which can be saved only in poetry.

II. The disenchantment of the disenchantment The Enlightenment is the one pillar of Moderne; Romanticism understood as the avant-garde before the avant-gardes following it is the other. Romanticism, as Blumenberg has pointed out, protests against the idea that all phenomena that

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cannot be controlled by reason are pure deception. In Novalis’ novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen the cave is “a privileged place of wisdom which cannot be achieved by any contemplation of nature and is at the same time the place of memory, recollection and history.” (Blumenberg 1989, 551) The way back to darkness is therefore not only the way of anti-humanism, but also a path towards self-reflection with regard to the blind spot of the Enlightenment. This darkness – cave or jungle – is the counterpart of the light in time or in space, the other time of historical progress. It is the darkness of the centuries before, for example, the dark Middle Ages or the darkness of other cultures. Romanticism is quite ambivalent about progress, but in its ‘progressive’ aspect it is the attempt to find a real or a virtual observer of modernity. With its search for another time, romanticism is a candidate for this function inside our own culture: It reflects itself in the mirror of the strange other. This poetic intention is a constant structure in modernism, restoring dignity to all cultures and sub-cultures which have been regarded as dark and primitive ever since the narrative of progress, enlightenment and freedom. The gypsy and the Kabbala, Buddha and the world of the Eastern European Jews, the old Catholicism and the West Indian are not Romantic as such, they become Romantic as an effect of Romantic imagination. Projections of our longings, they are at the same time virtual observers and counterparts of modern occidental culture. The stranger is the figure that makes it possible to make our ‘own’ world ‘strange’. Aesthetic alienation (Verfremdung) and self-reflection of one’s own culture can be seen as two sides of the same process which makes modernity self-reflexive. Modernism is the way to fully understanding what it means to live under the conditions of modernity. In this way, Romanticism constitutes a counter-movement against the historical Enlightenment, but at the same time is an essential part of modernism. In rehabilitating fantasy and imagination, romanticism (and romantic reenchantment) transforms and “secularises” religion and myth (Paz 1989, ch. 3). So, Romanticism can therefore be regarded as an enlightenment via other and paradoxical  – poetic  – means, a Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) which rehabilitates certain dimensions of human existence that were marginalized in the Enlightenment: in the medium of the arts: the unconscious; the uncanny; sexuality and otherness. Modernism can be described as a dynamic process in which the impulses of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism play antagonistic, but mutually stimulating parts. It is part of the logic of ‘disenchantment’ that in this process modernism will itself be disenchanted. This process can be observed in the oeuvre of Freud, Nietzsche and later in French post-structuralism. Modernity will be criticised as a clandestine system of logo-centric metaphysics with a self-centred subject, which underlies the illusion of being one’s own master. This is also the case with this

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type of classical modernism which also emphasises the idea of an independent transcendental subject. Both, the Enlightenment and the Romantic movements accelerate the process of secularisation – that is, the process of rational adaptation of elements from religion, myth and magic. So it is evident that the pathos in the modern arts which is linked with religious heritage begins to fade too, because they were also caught by the process of secularisation. We are created creators of our symbolic forms. There is no longer a world outside of ourselves. We are kept in symbolic spider’s webs we have woven ourselves (Geertz 1983, preface). Extreme theories like constructivism try to demonstrate that our rational concepts of the world are also only constructs and inventions. If this is true, the differentiation between reality and illusion and the pathos of truth become problematic. Modernism and modernity therefore meet the same fate as the traditional symbolic systems in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This process also undermines the legitimacy of the foundation of modernity and produces a great deal of “post-modern” uncertainty, which is not the contrary to modernity but its consequence. It includes a sort of disappointment which means the loss of certain truths and historical hopes. Disappointment means on the one hand the farewell to high expectations (which has been formulated by the grand récits of modernity) but on the other hand the end of illusions in regard to modernity itself. The scepticism of modernity has repercussions for itself. But from this perspective it will become possible to reflect on the roots, the development and the disenchantment of modernism. From this perspective, it is not important to decide whether this process is the consequence of an inherent dynamic of modernity and its self-reflexive counterpart (modernism) or one of a break with modern conditions in cultural life. Post-modern phenomena are the results of modernity, which by definition can be characterised by its self-understanding as a permanent state of change. Marx’s definition of proletarian revolution as a permanent process,³ the Futurists’ definition of the avant-garde as an

3 Karl Marx, Der 18. Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (1852, 37): “Proletarische Revolutionen […] kritisieren beständig sich selbst, unterbrechen sich fortwährend in ihrem eigenen Lauf, kommen auf das scheinbar Vollbrachte zurück, um es wieder von neuem anzufangen, verhöhnen grausam-gründlich die Halbwahrheiten, Schwächen und Erbärmlichkeiten ihrer ersten Versuche, scheinen ihren Gegner nur niederzuwerfen, damit er neue Kräfte aus der Erde sauge und sich riesenhaft ihnen gegenüber wieder aufrichte, schrecken stets von neuem zurück vor der unbestimmten Ungeheuerlichkeit ihrer eigenen Zwecke, bis die Situation geschaffen ist, die jede Umkehr unmöglich macht, und die Verhältnisse selbst rufen: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze.”

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unlimited issue⁴ and the self-description of modern sciences as a journey without a destination may be seen as examples of the self-description of modernity as a movement which has movement as its only meaning.⁵ The expression “disenchantment of the disenchantment” can mean at least two completely different things: either a continuing process of rational selfreflection or a revision of the idea that modernity has brought us – in contrast to the illusions of religion and myth – into reality, combined with the suspicion that we live now in a symbolic world that is less transparent than any other ever before, a world which, as Horkheimer and Adorno put it, is mythical and magical in contrast to its rational self description (Horkheimer/Adorno 1971, 3). However, the critical and self-referential story about the “Dialectic of Enlightenment” and the dark sides of modernity must be told from outside. This double perspective needs some observer who can invent the contrastive narrative from an external point of view in a plausible way, the (real or believed) victim of modernity who is subjugated to its rules which he/she has neither invented nor realised. Such victims, whom one can find in Romantic and post-Romantic literature, can be part of modern western society – the child, the woman, marginalized groups such as the Sinti and Roma, the representatives of ‘dying’ cultures, pre-modern classes or colonised people inside and outside of Europe. In any case, terms such as “culture” and “civilisation” are not free of value judgement. In their inherent structural logic they always split human beings into two human species: the one, who is civilised and the other, who is uncivilised. Thus, modernity means living in a civilised way. On the other hand, all the others are considered to live in a state of selbstverschuldete Unmündigkeit. They tend to be uncivilised and underdeveloped. They are like children that must be brought up to the standards of modern civilisation. Western modernity does not only marginalize their own traditional forms of symbolism, values and powers, but all the other non-occidental cultures automatically receive the stigma of primitivism and underdevelopment. The grands récits of progress and the conflict between the west and the “rest” are different aspects of one and the same drama of modernity. One could argue that the development of modern Western societies is unthinkable without its other: the dark and primitive in space and time. The “heart of darkness” is the contrast

4 Hansgeorg Schmidt-Bergmann, Futurismus. Geschichte, Ästhetik, Dokumente (1993, 52–91). Wolfgang Asholt/Walter Fähnders (eds.), Manifeste und Proklamationen der europäischen Avanatgarde (1995, 3). Birgit Wagner, Technik und Literatur im Zeitalter der Avantgarden (1996, 46–52). 5 Cornelia Klinger, Flucht, Trost, Revolte (1995, 94–105). Klinger interprets Marxism also as a cultural movement and refers it to the romantic “project”.

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to the process of enlightenment which has the ambition of bringing light into any darkness. And the dark is everywhere, not only in Africa but also in the dark sides of us, as Captain Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) explains: I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion. (Conrad 1994, 33)

Captain Marlow, who is the story teller of his own story, interprets this journey in the jungle as a process of archaic recollection, a deep irritation of modern consciousness: The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign – and no memories. The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there – there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. … No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it – this suspicion of their not being inhuman. (Conrad 1994, 51)

This journey contains all the important irritations in regard to modern rationality which have become part of it: loss of orientation and memory, the return of archaic elements, the fear of going mad, the encounter with the real or believed inhuman which is not conquered but free and powerful. All the well-known tools of modern thinking become useless, and it seems that it has produced monsters which endanger the world of the civilised. There is a deep self-doubt as to whether the work of modern enlightenment will be strong enough to banish the dark sides of wilderness. The project of modern enlightenment could fail: this would be one meaning of the “disenchantment of the disenchantment”. The unavoidable consequence of this process would be the return of myth, the re-enchantment. It becomes visible at the peripheries of the modern world where the triumph of modern civilisation goes hand in hand with the crisis of its own culture. The periphery of capitalism is the place where the disenchantment of the disenchantment becomes visible. In those peripheries the break between the traditional and the modern enables a specific version of literary modernism which works out the experience to be subjected to the process of modernity, to capitalist rationality and to cultural colonialism.

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If, in a second meaning, the disenchantment of the disenchantment refers to a critical and self-critical approach, then this perspective will be changed and reversed. In this way the narrative of progress and civilisation will be reported by the civilised and colonised. Rousseau’s and Montaigne’s doubts and critical remarks regarding Western culture need the figure of the authentic and natural savage who lives in harmony and in nature. The man who discovered Columbus made a really bad discovery, wrote Lichtenberg, the representative of German Spätaufklärung and the admirer of Captain Cook, in his Sudelbücher (Rough books). With this ironic comment Lichtenberg describes the narrative plot and pattern behind all modernist and “romantic” criticism on modernity which can be described with the formula of “disenchantment of disenchantment” and which goes hand in hand with the de-legitimatisation of all different forms of power created by cultural difference. It is quite striking that Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, two classical representatives of critical thinking and literary modernism, who in their Dialektik der Aufklärung also developed and established a critical reading of an enlightenment which reveals itself as a myth, use in their narrative the character of the colonised. Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s book interprets Odysseus as a pre-cursor and archetype of modern bourgeois rationality. He is not only seen as a capitalist whose cunning transforms human beings as things into tools which he can use for his own profit and benefit, but he acts also as a representative of a cultural ruling power which outwits the representative of a natural and mythical culture: the giant Polyphem, the barbarian who does not know the rules of hospitality and the technique of modern identity construction. The giant, who is imagined as a primitive cannibal and a permanent threat to the civilised pre-modern Greeks, will be blinded at the end. The blinding in Homer’s epic poem has a double aspect: on the one hand it means the castration of a recent culture by a superior and more ‘civilised’ one, but on the other it suggests that this blinding also includes a radical deception. This kind of enlightenment, which has promised clarity and transparency makes its opponents blind. But this act reproduces the logic of sacrifice. Both the colonisers and the colonised no longer know where they are because they do not understand what has happened to them. Polyphem’s “blinding”, a symbol of defeat and confirmation of the superiority of the stranger, is the pre-condition of the acknowledgement that the representatives of the modern world are the masters and the others are the servants; or in another discourse, the one are the parents and the others are the children who have to be educated and formed.(Horkheimer/Adorno 1971, 42–73) Thus, Polyphem’s blinding, which can also be seen as an act of disenchantment of a mythical power, is the beginning of “civilising subjects” (Catherine Hall). As Hall has shown in her empirical study on nineteenth-century colonialism in Jamaica, it becomes more and more decisive if

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the non-modern others are seen as completely different human beings with monstrous aspects (this was the argument of the white plantation owners) or as black brothers and sisters who need help in order to live under human conditions (this was the argument of the Baptist missionaries). To become equal means to adapt to certain forms of modern civilisation, here Christianity, white middle-class life, a standard of hygiene, school education, and a standard repertoire of knowledge. The second death of Polyphem: from this point of view modernity always means banning the bloody and cruel world of myth, especially that of the Other, and substituting it with Christian or post-Christian values: Emancipation gave men and women their political, social and economic freedom. But only conversion gave them a new life in Christ, the possibility to be born anew, to be new black subjects, washed clean of old ways – new black men and women. (Hall 2002, 124)

This is not the end of the story. In a second turn of emancipation the Western liberal and Christian values become the subject of critique. The postcolonial critique of Western modernity and the internal critique of modern rationality in modern literature and philosophy depend on each other. The victim of modern Western politics and economy is imagined as a secondary observer in an inneroccidental discourse, whereas the intelligentsia on the peripheries of modernity refers to the intellectual and aesthetic experiences of modernism to create its own fragile identity and to formulate a postcolonial critique of Western rationality, without a clear alternative.

III. The strange culture: Artificial pearls and corals. The alchemy of telematic machinery Telling the story and stories of modernity from the perspective of the colonised always means describing it as a mysterious and enigmatic event. Modern rationality – science, economy, political construction – is not the result of the dynamic developments in those particular cultures. They have only in common the fact that they are not generated by the culture which brings out and produces all these modern issues of life; modernity here also must appear as strange itself, as a phenomenon from outside, from another world. It is this “strange” aspect of modern inventions which transforms them in another cultural context blinded by Western colonisation. And blind to it. They become mysterious because there is at the beginning no available discourse to bring them into symbolic forms other than the mythical one. This discourse is also mythical because from this perspective the story of modernity can, will or must be told in terms of fate, undoing, or –

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more positively – of miracles. It is the fact that modernity comes from outside that automatically makes it a mythical event. In his critical essays on German National Socialism Leon Trotsky once commented that the Germans build motorways but write with a Gothic runic alphabet.⁶ From the viewpoint of cultural analysis, German National Socialism can be interpreted as an aggressive reaction to the Western capitalist culture and as a perverse version of the “modern” critique of modernity within European culture. A non-western culture must for the sake of its own survival describe modernity with its specific non-European “runic alphabet”. The stranger comes and brings things which are contrary to common sense in the “native” culture. So the figure of the stranger, the person from outside, the wanderer from far away, arouses the fantasy of the native, the settler from here. With this epic introduction, the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez starts his most famous novel Cien años de soledad (1967). Macondo is a tiny imaginary village far away from the centres of civilisation, surrounded by the jungle in the northern part of South America. The novel creates a modern foundation myth. Macondo is the work of the young patriarch José Arcadio Buendía, who has led his own and some other families into the wilderness, a very strange version of the Promised Land. It is not the first act of the colonial narrative in which the colonisers from Europe meet the indigenous peoples. Although the novel is based on a foundation myth, the world of Macondo is a cosmos in which natives and white immigrants have mingled. From its very beginning, Macondo is their common world, although it is quite clear that there is a ranking of races. Macondo is new virgin territory beside and against civilisation. It is the place which is not controlled by the iron grid of modern bureaucracy; it is archaic including a patriarchal and matriarchal system represented by Buendía and his wife Ursula (Bachofen 1984, 98). It is an anti-bourgeois world in which the sexual elan vital mirrors the rank growth of nature. It is a world before culture and civilisation in which incest, promiscuity and sexual relations are not under the control of monogamy and marriage. It is explicitly mentioned that this village has from the very beginning no dead, only living people. Hence Macondo represents the place without the symbolic elements that Giambattista Vico identified with “Culture”:

6 Leo Trotzki, Wie wird der Nationalsozialismus geschlagen? (1971, 298): “Die Beibehaltung der gotischen Schrift im Gegensatz zur lateinischen ist eine symbolische Vergeltung für das Joch des Weltmarkts. Die Abhängigkeit von den internationalen – darunter auch jüdischen – Bankiers ist nicht um ein Jota gemildert, dafür ist es verboten, Tiere nach dem Talmudritual zu schlachten. Ist der Weg zur Hölle mit guten Vorsätzen gepflastert, so sind die Straßen des Dritten Reiches mit Symbolen ausgelegt.”

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marriage as a symbolic order which regulates the relations between the sexes and controls the use of sexuality, a burial rite which includes a system of memory and establishes culture as a community of dead and living persons, and a system of law which co-ordinates a secure life inside the community. (Vico 1744, 51) Wilderness, the radicalism of nature, is imagined as the territory where culture is out of use, has no meaning and importance. Thus one could say that the people of Macondo have left the world of culture and civilisation. But at the end, the isolated and secluded place, a topos which connects the charm of left-wing anarchism with a crude form of archaic fantasy, is caught up by this civilisation in the form of government officials, a parish priest and soldiers. It is interesting that the novel does not start with the story of the strange “hybrid” colony, but with the hero’s recollection of a firing squad he survived and with the visit of a group of gypsies from Macedonia, a European periphery in a half-colonised area. Melchíades, whose name corresponds with the name of one of the three kings from the Orient (in the New Testament) is the messenger from the world. On his first visit, he astonishes his audience in Macondo with the phenomenon of magnetism, which makes the founder of Macondo believe that it might be possible to use this eighth wonder of the world to snatch gold from the earth. When the group comes back later, Melchiades presents the natives with a telescope, a forerunner of the media and which suggests the idea that mankind will be able to see all things in the world without moving. It is the story we also know from many Italian films of the Neorealismo: it is the marvel of the world coming to a tiny province. Macondo is in a very ironical sense a global village or better: the globalised village which becomes part of the world. As a result, the founder builds a laboratory, which is out of place in the world of Macondo. This laboratory of modernity is imagined as a magic chamber in which Aureliano, the son, will spend the end of his life after his retirement from military adventures. It is a male reserve in a genealogical story which is a version of the eternal return of the same. But at the same time it becomes evident that the triumph of Western civilisation becomes more and more unavoidable, so Melchiades’ laboratory transforms itself into a symbolic exile. The hundred years of loneliness mean a double exile: the male’s solitude as a warrior and as an esoteric and alchemist. A lot of the males in the novel are dreamers who have lost all contact with the real historical world. So the world of science, in the context of Macondo, does not result in the establishment of a modern world of economy, politics or technology. The interpretation of modern sciences as fairy tale miracles and mythical events is aesthetically productive. As a community, the imaginary world of Macondo remains hostile to modern times and their representatives. It obstinately refuses to become modern, a state to which it objects. Thus, the hundred years of solitude are a tragedy because of their failures and

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obsessions. They produce a world of misunderstanding between the sexes and a cycle of violence: civil wars which will never end. But it is also a counter-world against the modernity of capitalism and science. So this is a typical left-wing narrative. Its hidden melancholy makes clear that as early as 1967 the left (and there can be no doubt that the Colombian author is one of the prominent postcolonial left-wingers of his generation) has lost its belief in the possibility of overtaking western Modernism and establishing a world as yet unclear. At the end, Macondo transforms itself into a world which is pre-modern and postmodern at once. Melancholy is, as Wolf Lepenies has pointed out, a reflex of a situation where an ambitious group of people sees itself cut off from influence and power. (Lepenies 1969, 47– 52, 197–201) The melancholy in Cien años de soledad can be seen as a result of the impossibility of confronting successful Western modernity with an alternative model from the so-called Third World, which is at the same time the postcolonial world of the former colonised peoples. Melancholy is also a feature of the epic fairy tale-world of the Jewish-Austrian novelist Joseph Roth. Roth, born in the Galician provincial town of Brody, began his career as a left-wing journalist and writer in Vienna and Berlin. From the middle of the twenties he discovered his own “roots”: the Habsburg Empire and  – as in one of his best stories, The Leviathan  – the East-European Jewish world, a typical turn of intellectuals to the periphery: from the edge to the centre and then back to the edge. Roth’s ambition is to give “his” compatriots at the periphery a voice: the voice of literature to understand their historical situation but also the state of affairs in the centres of modernity where Roth himself spent his life: Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt and Paris. Compared with the jungle world of Macondo, the cosmos of Progrody in Roth’s story is quite different, not a wilderness of desires and fantasies. The people are restrained and concentrated on the possession of corals. It does not seem to be a place to stay in but one which produces a longing to leave or to dream about a world far away from modern civilisation and from the restrictions of the traditional mundus. Progrody and similar places (as in Das falsche Gewicht, in Hiob or Hotel Savoy) refers to a world beyond bourgeois order with smugglers, drinkers, seamen, soldiers and Jewish people: merchants, Torah teachers. A colourful multi-ethnic world dominated by lonesome drinking men, far away from modern civilization; a terribly fascinating world full of male melancholy, irritating for any version of enlightened consciousness. His version of the heart of darkness combines a world out of order with a very traditional world of symbolic order: the Jewish one. Progrody is, by the way, an imaginary place like Macondo, a Jewish settlement at the border and maybe a borderline place: “lontano da dove”, far away from where, as Claudio Magris (1974) has pointed out. In any case, it is a place

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beyond modernity, and some of its forgotten places can sometimes allow a stranger to enter. Melchíades could really be a figure in Roth’s epic cosmos but he isn’t. Instead of him, we get to know other persons: the Jewish coral merchant Piczenik and his Hungarian counterpart Jenö Lakatos from Budapest, who is part of Roth’s epic ensemble. He is the messenger from a threatening world. In Roth’s story there is no foundation myth, but an initial myth which is linked to Jewish mythology and represents a pre-modern world. The Begehren (desire) will be increased by the corals – but it is also fixed and controlled. The longing for the indefinite far away from the well known is – as in an act of magic – held in a spell in the corals and has so its place in a traditional order. Symbolic forms and forms of power go hand in hand. Piczenik, who has no sexual desire for his wife, is obsessed by its magical substitutes. The corals which evoke it come as a desire from far away, from the depths of the ocean. They are imagined as shy organic living beings which hide their true existence, and it is self-evident that their specific qualities refer to the mentality of the Jewish population, which lives under permanent threat of pogroms, attacks or at least of humiliation. It is the Jewish fish god Leviathan, who has received the instruction from God to be the master of this part of the specific part of the world until the end of time. Piczenik is the narrator of this initial myth, the story-teller in his Stetl. The economic crisis is paralleled by the symbolic one. In this story, as in his essay “Juden auf Wanderschaft” (1927; Wandering Jews), Roth tells the narrative of the decline of East-European Jews before the Shoah. The longing to leave the Stetl corresponds with the arrival of modern businessmen from Northern America, as in Hotel Savoy, or with the arrival of a businessman in The Leviathan. The executor of modernity has a name and an elegant Hungarian outfit. Lakatos is a demon and moreover, a devil, a stranger: someone who disturbs the traditional order of things, in the relations between the sexes (Triumph of Beauty) as well as with regard to the economy. In the traditional Western voyage of discovery, the stranger always has a monstrous dimension. But in Roth it is the civilised stranger, cunning like Horkheimer/Adorno’s Odysseus, who will be imagined as a demon from nowhere-land. When he starts his business in the neighbouring town with false, synthetically produced corals, he not only ruins his Jewish competitor economically but also symbolically. In terms of Marx’s analysis worked out in Capital⁷, Leviathan’s

7 Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1971, 86): “Das Geheimnisvolle der Warenform besteht also einfach darin, daß sie den Menschen die gesellschaftlichen Charaktere ihrer eignen Arbeit als gegenständliche Charaktere der Arbeitsprodukte selbst, als gesellschaftliche Natureigenschaften dieser Dinge zurückspiegelt, daher auch

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story-teller represents a pre-capitalistic way of business and transfer, where affiliation to the goods is extremely important. In contrast, Lakatos demonstrates the modern type of capitalistic subject, for whom the specific article is completely secondary. His story is non-mysterious and mysterious at once. He simply produces artificial corals made from celluloid. His business has an English name “Lowncastle” (the name implies the idea that he is a beautiful nouveau riche, who, like his products, is a fake) and a New York address. There is no difference between the original and the copy, between the fake and the authentic item. Modernity is the permanent triumph of globalisation – with some acts of revenge. Roth’s stories always look somewhat over-simplified. The same is true with his use of metaphors and symbols whose meanings are quite often obvious in contrast to Kafka’s. But this simplicity itself is to some extent false. Modernity is understood in mythological terms; in contrast, myth is used as a medium to understand the paradoxes of modern reality. Piczenik, completely ruined, burns all the false corals and buys a ticket to the new continent. He enters the ship with the ironic name “Phoenix”, which sinks during the journey. But death is the saviour of the myth: Piczenik finds his end at his place of longing, in the depths of the ocean, where he lies until the end of days.⁸ This is, indeed, a very sarcastic and melancholy end, but one which is symptomatic of modernity, an end which has not only a high price but also its own victims. It seemed to be that the economic and the symbolic ruin would go hand in hand. But at the end it becomes evident that only the “Arbeit am Mythos” – the work of and with myth⁹ – is an adequate way of undestanding the dark sides of blinding modernity. Literature gives Polyphem, the people from Macondo and the Leviathan’s prophet a voice –

das gesellschaftliche Verhältnis der Produzenten zur Gesamtarbeit als ein außer ihnen existierendes gesellschaftliches Verhältnis von Gegenständen.” 8 Joseph Roth, Der Leviathan (1975, 147): “[…] ich habe Nissen Piczenik gekannt, und ich bürger dafür, daß er zu den Korallen gehört hat und daß der Grund des Ozeans seine einzige Heimat war. Möge er dort in Frieden ruhn neben dem Leviathan bis zur Ankunft des Messias.” See also: Carl Schmitt, Land und Meer. Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung (1981, 17): “Die Kabbalisten sagen nun, der Behemoth bemühe sich, den Leviathan mit den Hörnern oder Zähnen zu zerreißen, der Leviathan dagegen halte mit seinen Fischflossen dem Landtier Maul und Nase zu, daß es nicht essen und nicht atmen kann. Das ist, so anschaulich wie es eben nur ein mythisches Bild vermag, die Schilderung der Blockade einer Landmacht durch eine Seemacht, die dem Land die Zufuhren abschneidet, um es auszuhungern. So töten sich die beiden Mächte gegenseitig. Die Juden aber, sagen diese Kabbalisten weiter, feiern dann das festliche tausendjährige ‘Gastmahl des Leviathan’, von dem Heinrich Heine in einem berühmten Gedicht erzählt.” 9 Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (1984, 291–326). For the German discussion see also: Karl Heinz Bohrer (ed.), Mythos und Moderne (1983).

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stories which are not part of modern self-appearance. Such stories are able to understand the irrational aspects of modern rationalism but they are not powerful enough to give history another direction or to overcome modernity in a nonregressive way. Although neither Marquez nor Roth are radical modernists, their novels describing Western modernity from an outside, periphery perspective point to the aesthetic experiences of classical modernism: The reference to the world of myth, magic and fairy tale is never a simple connection with their contents, but also with their formal aspects. Roth and Marquez use archaic clusters for a specific kind of writing which transcends the classical European rational realism of the nineteenth century. They refer to the formal elements of myths in an ironic and “surrealistic” fashion in order to use them as aesthetic tools for the analysis of modernity. We need the myth to understand the fantastic aspects of modern times.

IV. Selbstverschuldete Unmündigkeit – Herr und Knecht Enlightenment means the project of bringing light into the heart of the darkness; Romanticism is the symbolic order in which modern Western cultures work out their experiences with the counterpart of rationality. Modernity can be seen as a complex and paradoxical unity. Romanticism in a general way is the outdoing and at the same time the revision of enlightenment. The background of Western Romanticism is irritation of the modern consciousness and the attempt to integrate the dark and oppressed side. It is the experience of dominating Western cultures with its other – inside and outside. Modernity implies that there are a lot of cultures which only have one thing in common: that they are not modern in their political, economic and aesthetic structures. They persistently refuse to overcome their immaturity and their backwardness. Kant’s expression of “selbstverschuldete Unmündigkeit” describes exactly this plot of the grand récit. The state of pre-modern primitivism is the result of the inability to make use of human rationality and freedom. In this argumentation, human beings are responsible for their state of life. “Unmündigkeit” (the German word is derived from the word Mund, mouth) describes the lack of the ability to speak for oneself. The non-modern person has no own voice of his own. Thus, the power-relation is inscribed in the relation between the modern culture(s) and all the other cultures whose voices do not really count. Moreover, because you do not have your own voice, you need a speaker. This was part of the abolitionists’ project: to give the poor ‘uncivilized’ black people a voice, their voice.

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The conflict between the missionaries and the natives of the Caribbean became unavoidable just at the moment when the natives began to insist on their own capacity to speak for themselves. This dialectic can also be seen in the innerEuropean context. The Austrian Empire is such a field of different cultures. Also here, modernity creates a cultural ranking between the civilised and the uncivilised, the masters and their servants, as one can see in the stories of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. Her male or female protagonists have attitudes and habits which are comparable to those of English abolitionists. The liberal aristocrats are Deutschösterreicher, whereas the servants are Czechs. In one of her most wellknown stories, Er läßt die Hand küssen (He would like to kiss her hand), which is set in Southern Moravia, an old countess and her neighbour discuss their servants, whom the former sees as her proteges. It would be better, she insists, for these naïve, credulous yet also mistrustful people not to have the opportunity to choose their own masters. The countess refers to the old times, when her servants accepted the strokes of the cane and went voluntarily to the “Amt”, to the office to be punished. It is an act of faith to interpret the strokes as a just punishment, to become a human being and see the master as the real guide. In EbnerEschenbach’s critical story this manorial punishment ends fatally and lethally.¹⁰ This subjugation only works as long as the subordinate accepts his/her inferiority and his/her need to become civilised – sometimes also with Draconian measures and procedures which were usual in the Jamaican plantation system. This is the reason why the countess also mentions not only the gullibility but also the mistrust of her protégés, who have become the “victims” of the wrong guides after the abolishment of the manorial system, which is quite evidently feudalistic but here becomes an intermediate station on the way to modern civilisation. As in non-European colonies, the emancipation starts with the right to choose one’s own masters, with the right to “gullibility” and “distrust”, with the clash of civilisations and subjugation of other cultures, a process which has a

10 Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Er laßt die Hand küssen (1953, 122f): “Die Gräfin richtete die hohe Gestalt empor und holte tief Atem. ‘Gestehen Sie, daß es für diese Leute, die so töricht vertrauen und mißtrauen, besser wäre, wenn ihnen die Wahl ihrer Ratgeber nicht freistände.’ ‘Besser wär’s natürlich! Ein bestellter Ratgeber und – auch bestellt – der Glaube(!) an ihn.’ ‘Torheit!’ zürnte die Gräfin. ‘Wieso? Sie meinen vielleicht, der Glaube lasse sich nicht bestellen? … Ich sage Ihnen, wenn ich vor vierzig Jahren meinem Diener eine Anweisung auf ein Dutzend Stockprügel gab und dann den Rat aufs Amt zu gehen, um sie einzukassieren, nicht einmal im Rausch wäre es ihm eingefallen, daß er etwas Besseres tun könnte, als diesen meinen Rat zu befolgen.’” See also: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern speak? (1995).

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long history. What is new in regard to modernity is the fact that subjugation has become a specific and universalistic legitimacy. Modern culture is the unique one, serving as a model for all the other cultures. Modernity becomes the benchmark of cultural ranking, which puts the different ethnic groups in their place, as in the British Empire or in the Habsburg Monarchy. In the case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire it is quite evident that Galicia is more uncivilised and underdeveloped than German-speaking Austria, Bosnia or the Vojvodina less so than Slovenia and Croatia: This benchmarking of modern culture has European roots, but concentrates on some cultures: English, French and Protestant German. The difference and distance to those types of modern cultures is decisive for positions in the cultural ranking. It is important that this ranking is accepted by both sides, by the “civilised” and by the “uncivilised”, which has to make efforts to become part of the Champions League of modernity. So, modernity is characterised by adult and non-adult cultures. Or as a variation of the classical discourse of enlightenment and modernism, it can be interpreted as a conflict between winning and losing cultures. With regard to the topic of power and rule, Hegel’s chapter from his Phenomenology of Mind, Master and Servant, is still the relevant philosophical narrative. Hegel tells a typical mythical story of origins, how the master became a master, the servant a servant. Hegel places this narrative in the context of the adventures of self-consciousness. This episode of the autobiography of the absolute mind, which has its modest offspring in the sensorial evidence, has been central to the Marxist narrative of the dialectic of history and for the analysis of classes and economic rule. Hegel’s analysis of self-consciousness can also be combined with cultural materialism. The acknowledgement of the Other has social and cultural dimensions. The key point is that the “Selbstbewußstein”, self-consciousness, which is “an und für sich”, can only be established if it is accepted as it is by the other. (Hegel 1970, 145–155) Hegel’s concept discusses this episode on a maximum level of abstraction. In his discussion of the fight of “self-consciousness” all concrete, symbolically realised differences are ignored. In this contest for acknowledgement (to achieve self-consciousness) the antagonists meet on an abstract universal level. Here it is irrelevant which symbolic concepts, labels and stereotypes both rivals, the future master and the future servant, have from each other. What is important is the extent to which they achieve self-consciousness. In the case of the servant it is a tremendous lack of self-consciousness, although the servant is able to compensate this lack by work that is by real access to the world. If the servant wants to change his poor situation, (s) he is confronted with the dialectic of emancipation, which is rooted in the grand récits of modernity. The representative of modernity is accepted by the “uncivilised”, who agrees at the

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same time with the evaluation that (s) he cannot be equal at least until now. He must leave the “Balkans” or the “Orient”, the symbolic places of non-modernity. The only way to be acknowledged is to become modern. Thus, the anti-colonial struggle is deeply formed by the narratives of modernism and modernity. In contrast, anti-modernism, which has been influential at least since the eighteenth century, may compensate for humiliation and the rage of the underdog, but generally it is not the way to become accepted as an example of modern selfconsciousness. Culture can be understood as the setting of phenomena which produce difference, exclusion and ranking and which establish a system with clear frontiers and borders. Cultural analysis, which transcends the traditional single disciplines in the humanities, no longer interprets culture as a mere superstructure but as an energetic moment, which appears in the constitution of rule and power. Hegel’s concept of the Self and the Other is, as I have mentioned, philosophical and universal. In regard to the master and the servant it does not consider the differences of sex, race, gender, language and religion. But this does not undermine the value of the analysis, but requires a modification. It becomes evident that rule and power depend on which cultural differences are at work. Culture is the place where nations, regional and sub-cultural groups are invented, all of which claim sovereignty. The revival of culturalism, which includes the possibility of new xenophobic particularism and the option of cultural diversity, is, as with “globalisation”, a symptom of one and the same modernity in which it becomes more and more necessary to assert oneself. The slogan of the avant-garde since Mallarmé, to be absolutely modern is meanwhile the hidden categorical imperative in post-modern times, in times in which modernity is a simple but still working narrative structure. The disenchantment means that we have become sceptical about whether the grand récits of modernity are really true, but nevertheless they are quite powerful, at the symbolic as well as at the “real” level. Modernity remains the rule and the ruler for cultural evaluation, although it may be true that the criteria of modernity have changed and are no longer totally clear. The modernity of the United States, Western Europe and Japan may differ but the necessity of modernity has never changed.

V. Kakanien revisited Culture, modernity and rule are connected in a complex triangle. Modernity is the criterion for cultural ranking, whereas the symbolic forms of culture correspond with the forms of rule and power (and vice versa). Colonialism can be seen as a

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radical asymmetry within this triangle. Jenny Sharpe has defined the “colonial subject” as follows: I use ‘colonial subject’ specifically for the Western educated native in order to emphasize 1) the subject status that class of natives acquires by acceding to the authority of Western knowledge 2) the restriction of sovereignty to the colonizers alone and 3) the denial of subject status to natives belonging to the subordinate or subaltern class. (Ashcroft/Griffiths/ Tiffin 1995, 102)

The question arises to what extent the power relations in the inner-European context can be interpreted as quasi-colonial. Can the Austrian Empire be seen as an inner-continental empire in analogy to the intercontinental European empires? I would say that the similarities are striking. Meanwhile, British cultural studies discusses the inner relationship between England on the one hand and Wales, Scotland and Ireland on the other in terms of colonial and postcolonial theories. There is a restriction of power and there is an acceptance of inferiority. But it is quite evident that this subordination takes place within Western cultures itself, although the cultural element in language, religion and ethnic differences may be important: Thus, partly because each nationalism were engaged in the struggle for the conversion of culturally ambiguous peasants with neighbouring rival nationalism, the self image and self-presentation of the new nation-states was in terms of the model of a closed, localised culture: idiosyncratic and glorying in its idiosyncrasy, and promising emotional and aesthetic fulfilment and satisfaction to its members. […] The struggle in which each nationalism was engaged had two enemies: rival nationalisms and rootless cosmopolitianism, whether it be the cosmopolitianism of a non-ethnic Empire claiming apostolic but not ethnic vindication or the cosmopolitianism of an international socialism of liberalism. (Gellner 1998, 37)

So, non-European colonialism and inner-European colonisation, for example of the eastern part of Europe, are two different types of subordination, of an asymmetry of collective self-consciousness. The concept of cultural ranking which depends on the criterion of modernity makes it possible to work out specific differences of rule and power in the name of civilisation. Also in the culture of colonialism and ethnic oppression or real (or supposed) disadvantage, there are not only the masters and the servants, but a lot of intermediate figures: administrators, civil servants, overseers and supervisors, colonists from the ‘superior’ ethnicity, whose social and cultural position depends on the concrete context. The Irish civil servant or the Indian administrator for example, is, under the colonial regime, subordinated to the white British, but is a master to the black African.

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The cultural ranking is linked with the narrative of progress. Having a low rank in the ethnic hierarchy means at the same time that you are far behind in the dramatic game of civilisation and progress. The project of modernity is faced with the presence of different cultures. It evaluates these cultures with regard to their compatibility to its own cultural tradition and the ability to transform itself into modernity. The differences between different cultures suggest different tasks of the coloniser: modern infrastructures, schools and modern bureaucracy for some, mission and general education for the others. In his cultural and narrative topology Land und Meer, Carl Schmitt has pointed out a very important difference between the maritime and the continental empires. The territorial type of ruling power represents the traditional form, whereas the maritime adventure refers to a new type of political dominance. Schmitt, the national-socialist fellow traveller and prominent adviser of the Hitler regime, interprets world history after 1945 as a fight between maritime and land power. So, he implicitly suggests that Hitler’s total defeat symbolises the irreversible decline of land power in its fight with Anglo-American sea power. From the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a fundamental shift to the sea takes place, which  – one could argue  – culminates in the triumph of the new continent which was founded by a species of people fascinated by the ocean: pirates, corsairs, adventurers dealing with maritime trade, whalers, circumnavigators and colonists: America (Schmitt 1981, ch. 7, 40). The historical triumph of God’s own country is the victory of the seafarers over the old continental form of rule and power. The departure from the secure harbour into the uncertainty of the open sea is the radical metaphor for modernity, also in the eyes of the European. Cultural ranking therefore does not cease to apply in the inner-European context. The Austrian Empire, heir of the old Universalistic Christian-Roman Empire will be seen by Schmitt as a “katechon”, a power which slows down the speed of historical progress. So Austrian culture in Central Europe is less modern and developed compared with the West (the British Empire, Prussia and United States of America) but it is advanced and more civilised than the East of Europe and the imaginary “Balkans”. Political and cultural inequality is not founded on the contrast between Europe and Non-Europe. It has its own and accepted parameters of discrimination, which are meaningful also in the encounter between European and non-European cultures: – the difference between maritime and land powers – the contrast between Protestantism and the Catholic world (and also between Western Christianity and the Orthodox church, and between Christianity and Islam) – the contrast between German and non-German

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the standards of industrial and political development, which becomes essential for the discrimination between civilised and uncivilised

This cultural asymmetry will be acknowledged because progress and modernity are fundamental for modern belief that is for the belief in modernity and progress. So, the only way to overcome the painful position of the underdog is to change yourself. It is quite clear that modernity has its own self-dynamic, but the malicious connection between culture, modernity and rule creates a competition between cultures which accelerates the process of modernity. The process itself is one of the main characteristics of modernity and modernism. This is true for all relevant systems in modern life: politics, economy, technology, media, and arts. This is still the framework of post-nationalism and post-colonialism. The struggle for self consciousness means being accepted as modern in the time of post-modern disenchantment, which is established at first in the centres and puts the less civilised, less modern under permanent pressure to go further in this progress: without the old belief in the strong narrative that modernity is the way forward for your own good. Joseph Roth’s hero ends at the bottom of the ocean and GarcíaMarquez’s Aureliano Buendia dies before he has decoded the alchemist writings. The death of the pre-modern cultures is thus inscribed into the structure of the modern world. It modifies our modernity, but there is no chance of return, only one of recollection and reflection. Modern rationality has its counter-part in Romanticism and its longing for darkness that cannot be controlled. That the non-European culture is the dark kat’ exochen, may be a romantic obsession. But it is evident that the colonised and post-colonised other, which for a long time was in different versions and evaluations the object and subject of subjugation, humiliation and oppression, marks a position of otherness which remains important for Western civilisation and its universalistic ambitions. The darkness and the colonised, symptomatically the colonised black, have in common that they were the victim of a type of modernity which defines progress as a progress of control and self-control. This link between enlightenment and control demonstrates the obsession of Western modernity with rule and power, as Homi K. Bhabha postulates: An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness. Fixity is the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. (Bhabha 1994, 66)

This is the core of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s argument: that the control of the master, which always includes self-control, oppresses not only the other,

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Polyphem, but the Polyphem in us, which is automatically demonised in the light of modern rationality (Cf. Kristeva 1988). So the Western mind owes a lot to Lichtenberg’s observer, the man who discovered Columbus. It overturns the voyeurism which has been so characteristic of the colonising subject (Bhabha 1994, 76). Lichtenberg’s line can be read as the starting point of a modernism which needs the perspective of the stranger to establish self-reflection in Western modernity, whereas the periphery is in favour of literary and artist modernism, which lends it the idea of being absolutely modern and at the same time makes it possible to react to the painful situation of being subjugated to a process which has been created from outside. It maintains its actuality because the process of so-called globalisation is based on the idea that the triumph of Western capitalistic modernity must go on. It provokes automatically the production of cultural differences to modern universalism.

Murder and Monotheism A Detective Story in Close Reading I. Introduction The following text differs from the broad discussion about this essay, with the “rebirth of interest” (Schäfer 2006, 21) that began with the important study by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1991). It is an ambivalent answer to what extent Freud’s provocative essay and its plot, the killing of Moses, an Egyptian, by the Israelites, can be integrated into a specific form of Jewish tradition. On the one hand, Yerushalmi denies Freud’s central arguments. For example, he denies the idea that the murder could have been supressed or forgotten, but on the other hand, Freud’s critical text was interpreted as part of a Jewish tradition, which can be characterised by a strong will of self-criticism. Although Richard Bernstein’s book (Bernstein, 1998/2003) is embedded in the same discourse of psychoanalysis and Jewish identity, and although his point of view is somewhat more positive with regard to Freud’s concept of supressing as a form of unconscious remembering, Berstein, who refers to Derrida’s comment on Yerushalmi, sees as a central element of “tradition” (Bernstein 1998/2003, ch. 3; Derrida 1995/1996). Jan Assmann’s influential study is also concerned with the topic of cultural memory. For the prominent Egyptologist Freud’s concept reinforces his own concept of memory and culture. Moreover, he interprets Freud’s provocative text – in contrast to Yerushalmi – not as a complex affirmation of Jewish monotheism but as an exemplary form of deconstruction of classical monotheism in the tradition of Western enlightenment, which includes John Spencer, Friedrich Schiller and others (Assmann 1997/1998, 213–242). The topic of this essay is more modest. In the following, I will concentrate my interest on the narrative strategies in this late but central text. I will pose the question to what extent the procedures Freud has developed in this ‘fantastic’ text are characteristic for his whole oeuvre. In this respect, my approach has a meta-level. It asks by which narratives and interpretative procedures psychoanalysis is constructed. I am also interested in Freud’s deep ambivalence with regard to his topic and moreover to his own position as a founder of a symbolic architecture that is certainly not a religion but much more than a simple theory, since it refers to all aspects of life. Jan Assmann points out that Ikhnaton’s monotheism was a counter-religion, a radical rupture with tradition (Assmann 1998, 49). So one may ask, if this is not also true for Freud’s psychoanalysis. Maybe this was the reason why Freud was so intensively touched by the figure of Moses, the tension

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between the rational and the a-rational, between monotheism and polytheism. Thus, his narratives about Moses can be read as self-narratives, hidden narratives of psychoanalysis.

II. Preliminary remarks Before discussing Freud’s relation to religion in general and to monotheism in particular, it is necessary to realize that religion is not a simple phenomenon, but a complex that consists, as Whitehead has shown (Whitehead 1926/1954), of at least four elements: feeling and experience (1), rites (2), myth (3) and dogma (4)  – and I would add institution and power (5). In his preoccupation with Moses and the historical drama of monotheism, Freud is concerned especially with element 3 (myth) and element 4 (dogma), but to some degree on element 5 (power relation). Quite clearly, Freud is interested in the phenomenon of rites, as his essay Zwangshandlungen und Religionsübungen (1907) shows; in the essay on Moses, the tradition of circumcision plays a certain role in the article, but it is not central. What Freud does not discuss in this text is element 1, the mystical aspect of religion, which since the early Schleiermacher seems to be the common bond between all religions and the elementary offspring of religion as such. Freud has discussed this topic in Die Zukunft einer Illusion and in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur as a certain form of regression to the statue of the absolute unconscious, to the Es (Id). In this sense, religion, the oceanic feeling, is not seen as a phenomenon eo ipso but as an illusionary reaction, a refusal to become an adult person. In the preliminary remarks from June 1938, Freud says with a short glance at his book “Totem and Taboo” (1912): Since that time I have no longer been in any doubt that religious phenomena can only be understood by using the model of such familiar neurotic symptoms of the individual, can only be understood as recurrences of long forgotten, meaningful events in the prehistory of the human family; I am convinced that in fact they owe their compulsive nature to that source, so that it is by virtue of their content of historical truth that they effect human beings. (Freud MM, 221)¹

1 “Ich habe seit damals nicht mehr bezweifelt, daß die religiösen Phänomene nur nach dem Muster der uns vertrauten neurotischen Symptome des Individuums zu verstehen sind, als Wiederkehren von längst vergessenen, bedeutsamen Vorgängen in der Urgeschichte der menschlichen Familie, daß sie ihren zwanghaften Charakter eben diesem Ursprung verdanken und also kraft ihres Gehalts an historischer Wahrheit auf die Menschen wirken.” (Freud MM, 68).

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The narrative structures of the individual human being and those of human communities are principally identical. But in the late essay on Moses it is quite clear that Freud also reflects on a complete different aspect, namely on the contribution of monotheism to establish a stable symbolic order of the father, or to use Freudian terminology in German, of the Über-Ich. One might say that religion in a Freudian sense is in the tension between two poles, the Es and the Über-Ich, the imaginary and the symbolic order of the father. Freud’s text on Moses and monotheism is not religious itself. Moreover, it does not belong to the discourse on religion in an internal sense. It is a story which centres on a tricky hidden murder and which implies a difficult burden and leaves a problematic heritage for modern culture.

Detective reading As Jacques Rancière (Rancière, 2009) has shown, Freud has developed a certain type of text analysis that is similar to the method of a detective who, by following clues, tries to find out what really happened and who the murderer was. In contrast to the mainstream psychology of his but also of our time, many of his articles make use of literature and the arts to develop and work out his own theory. His first preoccupation with Moses (1914) is mediated by a famous piece of art, Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses. Here too, he makes use of his detective’s method in discovering that Michelangelo’s Moses is just about to leap up and smash the tablets with the Ten Commandments, but has overcome his violent temper and is able to overcome this affect and to control his rage. In contrast to other interpretations, Freud is convinced that it is Michelangelo who has revised the original biblical narrative, in which Moses is really outraged and acts angrily. Michelangelo is seen as an artist who has created a new Moses, who may coincide with Freud’s idea of rationalisation and sublimation. There can be no doubt that Michelangelo’s Moses is seen as a positive figure. The focus lies particularly with modern literature, what Rancière calls the aesthetic unconscious (Rancière, 2009). Freud’s methodology works thus: he reads literary documents (or sculpture as is the case in his early analysis of Michelangelo’s Moses) in the position of a secondary author, who, in contrast to the primary writer or artist, is able to link the aesthetic surface with the psychoanalytical unconscious. So, two elements are central: firstly that Freud is operating on a meta-level and secondly that his procedure is based on a close re-reading of a given text, which anticipates to some extent deconstructive hermeneutic practices. “It is […] a method such as ours  – taking from material what strikes

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us as useful, rejecting what does not suite us, and assembling the elements in accordance with their psychological plausibility.” (Freud MM, 268)² There is an interesting ambivalence with regard to the texts subject to Freud’s specific close reading. On the one hand, it seems that only literature and the arts are able to represent the unconscious, the hidden, the repressed, but on the other hand there is a deep distrust of the authors of the texts, especially regarding their own interpretations. They resemble those people in a criminal discourse who try to deny what ‘really’ happened. Freud’s text analysis follows the logical structure of examination in a trial, in which circumstantial evidence is decisive. There is, however, a difference. In contrast to the suspected in legal proceedings, the suspected author of a certain text or work of art does not deny deliberately. He or she may work out the unconscious e.g. in a narrative form, but is not able to read his own text in a proper way. From this perspective, he needs the psychoanalyst as the adequate reader and secondary author, as a symbolic assistant. Thus, psychoanalysis needs myth, literature and the arts and all these symbolic forms need psychoanalysis’s detective method. Quite clearly, Freud is an heir of enlightenment, the representative of a second and secondary enlightenment. The figure of the private investigator is a good metaphor for this theoretical energy. But it also refers to the experiences of modern literature since Romanticism, which constructs in a very paradoxical way phenomena we sum up in terms like the “unconscious” and the “uncanny”. In contrast to Rancière, I would argue that Freud’s detective method is not restricted to modern literature (Hoffmann’s Sandmann, Jensen’s Gradiva) or Renaissance arts (da Vinci, Michelangelo), but extends to works especially in the field of myth and mythology. The category of Ent-Stellung, disfiguration or distortion, is central for the detective reading. Like the “Unheimliche”, the German term “Entstellung” has a potentially paradoxical double meaning: disfiguration, displacement, distortion, unconscious falsification but also restitution of the original. It is, as Freud writes in the essay, a form of dislocation: The corruption of a text is not unlike a murder. The problem lies not in doing the deed but in removing the traces of it. It would be good to give the Entstellung the double meaning to which it is entitled, although nowadays it makes no use of the alternative. The word should mean not only ‘to alter the appearance’ but also ‘to move to a different place, to shift elsewhere’. It follows that in many cases of textual corruption we can expect to find that what

2 “[…] ein Verfahren, wie das unsrige, vom überlieferten Stoff anzunehmen, was uns brauchbar scheint, zu verwerfen, was uns nicht taugt, und die einzelnen Stücke nach der psychologischen Wahrscheinlichkeit zusammenzusetzen” (Freud MM, 107).

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has been suppressed and what has been denied is still there, hidden somewhere, albeit altered in appearance and wrenched out of context. (Freud, MM 202)³

The distrust of psychoanalysis has to do with its discontent with fantasy. It is fantasy that makes things to come to light, but it is the same fantasy that distorts them. Therefore fantasy and corruption (“Entstellung”) refer to each other. So the goal of the reader, who is at the same time a writer, is to find the true story behind the wrong one. But the wrong one is not wrong in a simple way, but entails hidden signs which refer to the “true” story. And when Freud compares himself with an investigator in a detective story, then this may be understood as a metaphor. But, in contrast, the psychoanalytical narrative can be characterised by the fact that there is always a murder in the hidden true story which is disfigured by the literary text or the myth. What Freud’s reading program creates is a new narrative, a translation from the unconscious to the conscious. At the centre, there is a real or symbolic murder, trauma and shame. In contrast to the narratives of the first enlightenment with its vector into the future, in Psychoanalysis there is a tragic narrative which always relates all contemporary occurrences to the past. All relevant events have taken place in the past and we are in the uncomfortable situation of having to deal with them. The present is seen as the shadow of the past. The reader of the psychoanalytical narrative behind the literary narrative is to some extent the heir of the collective murder and of the shame and guilt that are included in those events. There is no future in this narrative besides the idea of levelling the burden of the individual and collective history and its trauma.

Distortion and configuration Freud’s examination, which incidentally has forgotten his initial interest with Moses by analysing Michelangelo’s famous sculpture, starts with the idea that the protagonist in the biblical story has the wrong name. That means that his name is not Hebraic, but Egyptian. There must have been symbolic trouble, so that the reminder of the Egyptian element was deleted.

3 “Es ist bei der Entstellung eines Textes ähnlich wie bei einem Mord. Die Schwierigkeit liegt nicht in der Ausführung der Tat, sondern in der Beseitigung ihrer Spuren. Man möchte dem Worte ‘Entstellung’ den Doppelsinn verleihen, auf den es Anspruch hat, obwohl es heute keinen Gebrauch davon macht. Es sollte nicht nur bedeuten: in seiner Erscheinung verändern, sondern auch: an eine andere Stelle bringen, anderswohin verschieben. Somit dürfen wir in vielen Fällen von Textentstellung darauf rechnen, das Unterdrückte und Verleugnete doch irgendwo versteckt zu finden, wenn auch abgeändert und aus dem Zusammenhang gerissen […].” (Freud MM, 55f).

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In a next step, which anticipates structuralism, the story about Moses is interpreted as a part of a general heroic, mythical narrative matrix, as his former pupil Otto Rank, then still under the influence of the master, worked out in his book “Der Mythos von der Geburt des Helden” (1909, The Myth about the Birth of the Hero). Beginning with Sargon of Agade, Rank analyses a group of heroes who have more or less the same birth story, which is at the same time a family-narrative. They are supposed to be murdered at birth, they survive in a displaced situation (mostly with a poor family), and they come from below to reach the status of a hero. Ranks mentions, for example, Karna, Paris, Herakles, Gilgamesch, and Ödipus. Quite clearly, Moses belongs to this kind of heroes. Following Rank’s early book, in Freud a hero is someonewho has revolted against his father successfully and has ultimately triumphed over him. The two families, the royal one from which the hero comes originally, and the subaltern one in which he grows up, are interpreted as the fantastic narrative version of the drama of (male) childhood. In the mythical narration, there are two families, a difference between the lower and the upper one. In the psychoanalytical re-narration, the two families are identical. But especially with regard to this narrative element, there is – this is the next hypothesis of the psychoanalytical investigator – a deviation from the norm of the narrative matrix of the hero’s birth. Usually, this narrative follows the scheme that the hero is displaced from the beginning of his earthly life and is given to a poor family. But here, the infant is found by an Egyptian princess. Thus, he starts his career as a royal son and ends as the leader of a new people. So for the investigating reader it becomes quite clear that Moses was an Egyptian aristocrat who has been distorted as a Jew. And by distorting the distorted, Freud starts with the first part of his own narrative: In contrast to the hero, who, step by step, rises self above his lowly beginnings, Freud’s Moses begins his heroic life by descending from high up, lowering himself to the level of the children of Israel. Starting with the wrong name of the hero, the story of monotheism has to be told in a new narration, as a transfer from Egypt to Israel. Following the Egyptology of his time, he identifies this early monotheism with the religion of Ikhnaton. But this attempt to establish monotheism for the first time in human history fails; in this deconstructive reading, Moses is seen as one of the noblemen from the monotheistic camp, which flees after the restitution of the old Egyptian polytheism. In this situation, he chooses a new people for the religion of monotheistic Aton: the people of Israel, which has a regional volcanic god, Jahwe. But like every free storytelling Freud’s narrating process too becomes self-dynamic. This is not the end of the new narrative on Moses. By also dislocating scientific texts, Freud, a fascinating narrator, suggests that Moses has been murdered by the

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Jews, and that centuries later, the Jewish people have reinstalled Moses’ monotheism in an act of painful shame. I am not going to intervene in the discourse on that subject (it would also be interesting to refer for example to Jan Assmann’s interpretation) and I do not intend to discuss the plausibility of Freud’s narrative construction, his detective story, which finds the probable version behind all the disfigurations and mythical manipulation of the narrative. I am only interested in Freud’s ambivalent perspective on monotheism. It is quite evident that Freud is never interested in religion, monotheism or polytheism as such. There are three aspects in his essay that come from cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis and political theology. One could argue that psychoanalysis is much more than a therapy but a cardinal discipline which connects cultural theory with political theology (this is what I called the fifth aspect of the religious “complex”). Freud describes the religion of king Amenhotep as an episode in the long history of Ancient Egypt, but emphasises the fact that this monotheism was strict and severe. It is a system constructed by orders and control.The king, who gave himself the name Ikhnaton is the representative of the new god and his ideal (maat = justice). Freud also mentions another political function of this kind of monotheism: that the expanding Egyptian imperialism was not symbolically formatted in and legitimated by universalism and monotheism. Monotheism is unbearable, and this was the reason why the Egyptians smashed the new religion of Aton and the people of Israel killed Moses: Moses’ Jewish people were no more capable of tolerating so cerebral a religion, of finding in what it had to offer any satisfaction of their needs, than the eighteenth-dynasty Egyptians had been. The same thing happened in both instances. Those who were being treated like children and placed under constraint rebelled and threw off the burden of the religion that had been forced on them. But whereas the docile Egyptians waited until fate had removed the divine figure of the pharaoh, the wild Semites took fate into their own hands and got rid of the tyrant themselves.” (Freud MM, 205)⁴

As many other stories in the biblic narrative, the story about the golden calve, which is at the centre of Schönberg’s opera, is true and false at once, a de-figuring

4 “Das Judenvolk des Moses war ebensowenig imstande, eine so hoch vergeistigte Religion zu ertragen, in ihren Darbietungen eine Befriedigung ihrer Bedürfnisse zu finden, wie die Ägypter der 18. Dynastie. In beiden Fällen geschah dasselbe, die Bevormundeten und Verkürzten erhoben sich und warfen die Last der ihnen auferlegten Religion ab. Aber während die zaghaften Ägypter damit warteten, bis das Schicksal die geheiligte Person des Pharao beseitigt hatten, nahmen die wilden Semiten das Schicksal in ihre Hand und räumten den Tyrannen aus dem Wege.” (Freud MM, 59).

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narrative which hides the true killing story but entails a trace, an index to the true story. It was not Moses who was angry, but his new people, because he created a form of religion which was too much for it. So, it is not only the despotic exclusiveness but also the demanding aspect that lead to the abolition of monotheism in history. Speaking in Hayden White’s terminology a tragic plot comes into play: Monotheism is interpreted as an historical effort to bring mankind forwards by challenging its faculties of abstract thought, sublimation and overcoming the terror of the regional context (tribalism): Freud mentions the refusal of magic and mystique the stimulation of progress in mind, the requests for sublimation, the respect for the intellectual and the focalisation on ethics. Monotheism is regarded by Freud, the representative of a second form of enlightenment, as an impressive project in the long run; the restitution of the Great Father, which goes hand in hand with monotheism, is seen as huge progress in human history. But to some extent this progress is unbearable; it entails too many reductions and unrealisable demands with regard to the structure of our drives and desires. So the murder of Moses’ heirs might also be possible in the future. The eternal return of the same, a cyclic moment, is inscribed into the narrative matrix of Psychoanalysis.

Two narrative schemes in psychoanalysis Why is Freud’s method of detective re-reading so successful, at least from the perspective of the de-figuring active reader? Because there are some basic narratives in psychoanalysis to which all narratives in texts, sculptures (or films) can refer to. The Freudian secondary author, the de-figuring reader, has a clear understanding of the motive behind the murder and a lot of experience with the logic of unconscious denial, which produces falsifications he is able to correct. The murder of Moses by a people which in Freud’s words was accustomed to a regionally unimportant volcanic god is not the end of Freud’s own story. There remains still a latent reminder of this crime and this collective memory leads, centuries later, to the reconstruction of Jewish monotheism. The difference in time and also between the protagonists has been deleted in the biblical narrative, as has the feeling of guilt. In this disfiguration, the murder has disappeared. But this is only true on the rational level. It is inscribed in the collective “unconscious” collective memory. Thus, the events that are narrated in the biblical text version are based on another narrative which follows the logic of one central psychoanalytical narrative: the traumatic narrative. It starts with a collective crime which leads to a

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trauma that remains in the statue of unconsciousness (here the Jewish people is traumatised because it is in the position of the culprit). The next and final narrative element is the urge for repetition, which here has a positive aspect, the re-introduction of monotheism in an act of shame. The malicious and racist statement that psychoanalysis is a Jewish invention becomes a positive element here; insofar as monotheism is interpreted as a remarkable effort and a positive tradition, psychoanalysis is part of it. Psychoanalysis can also be seen as a return of the repressed. If there is any positive reference to Judaism, then it is the secular confession of monotheism that historically is centred in Judaism. Psychoanalysis is based on stable and limited narrative matrices, which produces endless variations and representations. To illustrate this, I would like to present the scheme once again in a more abstract version – it is a more or less linear narrative with a strong determinist element and a weak teleology which entails a moment of redemption, the redemption from the compulsion to repeat: Narrative scheme 1: Early trauma  – defence  – latency  – outbreak of neurotic disorder  – partial recurrence of what have been repressed. (Freud MM, 243)⁵

But there is also another great narrative matrix in Freud’s theory, the murder narrative of Totem and Taboo (1912), to which he returns in the last central essay of his oeuvre: It is the story of the great father of the horde who is the owner of all its female members and who is ultimately killed by his sons. As Freud points out, he hesitates to pronounce that humans have always known […] that they once had a first father and that they struck him dead. (Freud MM, 263) Explicitly, the author of Man Moses is in favour of the idea of regarding monotheism as the return of the murdered father. So he establishes a direct connection between the two narratives: Moses was the man who re-installed the symbolic order of the father and circumcision is the visible trace of that act. In this way, the most progressive and the most archaic elements fit together in the figure of the father. Reason and progress, intellectuality and abstraction appear in the dark light of a dictatorial regime. “Moses met the fate that awaits enlightened despots” (Freud MM, 205). The question is to what extent both elements, despotism and enlightenment, fit together.

5 “Frühes Trauma – Abwehr – Latenz – Ausbruch der neurotischen Erkrankung – partielle Wiederkehr des Verdrängten.” (Freud MM, 87).

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Christianity is seen in an interesting way firstly as the return of the Ammon priests who smashed the religion of Aton, the first monotheism, in Freud’s view. But there is also a remark in Freud that interprets Jesus as a second Moses, but a second Moses, who – in contrast to the first Moses – has dislocated and substituted the Godfather. Later, it is seen as progress, because of the universalistic impulse and, moreover, because it is a milder regime that has reduced the enormous price of monotheism. But this is a double-edged compliment. For Freud, especially Catholicism as a synthesis between monotheism and polytheism is far away from being a progressive power. It is the relentless enemy of free thinking, of progress and of the realisation of truth. This is the very reason why Christians and Jews became the object of hatred in what Freud calls “Germany’s National Socíalist revolution” (Freud MM, 254). At least in his last years, Freud is in favour of monotheism not for religious reasons – he, the heir of historic enlightenment, has not changed his suspicion that religion is a childish and stupid illusion; he is not critical of it because of its dictatorial gesture – that there is only one god, which has been criticised by liberal-conservative post-modern philosophers as Odo Marquard (1981, 91–116). There is a paradox: undoubtedly psychoanalysis has also proved to be a subversive project against the symbolic command of the fathers (including the Jewish ones), but on the other hand its founder remains forever anxious about the future of the symbolic order and its representative: the real and metaphorical father, who represents values which are non-negotiable, as is the case with the Ten Commandments. What is in the background is a tragic history of an imaginary subject called reason, which acts as a dictator to the people.

A political ending There are two interesting preliminary remarks in the third part of the essay, which Freud published later. One remark is from March, the other from June 1938. Both short texts are remarkable because they make clear that Freud was a political thinker sui generis. Freud reflects on whether he is disloyal to his people in publishing a text which denies that its hero was a stranger, accuses him of being its murderer and claims that Christianity to some extent implies progress in history. But one cannot accuse Freud of being a hidden Jewish anti-Semite. He is critical of Jewish religion as he is critical of all forms of religion; he is also critical of Jews because he is sceptical with regard to human beings – individuals and collectives – as such. He meditates on the phantasm of the chosen people, which has been adapted by he deadly enemy of the Jewish people, the German Nazis. He is astonished by the fact that the conservatives, including the Catholics, have

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seemed to become, as he says, the guardians of progress (a statement he has to revise after the Anschluß). The preliminary remarks operate with the liberal and leftist simple binary opposition barbarity-progress. And it is not quite clear to what extent this binary opposition fits together with other one, the opposition between monotheism and polytheism. Freud does not make the connection to his essay explicit, but it is quite clear that the monotheism represents the progressive and civil aspect. But what do the new dictatorships in Russia, Italy and Germany (and now also in annexed Austria) represent? Not a traditional pre-modern system, especially not in Italy and Soviet Russia. Freud is politically and intellectually irritated by Stalin and Mussolini: We are living in particularly remarkable times. We find to our surprise that progress has forged an alliance with barbarism. Soviet Russia has embarked on an attempt to raise some hundred million oppressed people to superior forms of existence. In a bold move they have been deprived by the ‘opiate’ of religion and in a wise one given a sensible measure of sexual freedom, but in the process they have been subjected to the cruellest coercion and robbed of any chance of freedom of though. With similar violence the Italians are being trained up to orderliness and a sense of duty. It comes as something of a relief from an oppressive anxiety to see that is the case of the German people the relapse into almost prehistoric barbarism is able to proceed even without recourse to any forward-looking idea.” (Freud MM, 217)⁶

I think Freud is wrong with regard to German National Socialism, which also fused ‘progressive’ and archaic elements. Here we have to end our close reading, but it is necessary to formulate the suspicion that those binary oppositions such as barbarity and progress, polytheism and monotheism are no longer sufficient instruments for cultural and historical analysis. For different reasons, we have to give up theses simple alternatives. The aspect in Horkheimer/Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment” still relevant today can be expressed in the plot that barbarity and progress can change their places and mingle. And the opposition between rational monotheism and non-

6 “Wir leben in einer besonders merkwürdigen Zeit. Wir finden mit Erstaunen, dass der Fortschritt ein Bündnis mit der Barbarei geschlossen hat. In Sowjetrussland hat man es unternommen, etwa 100 Millionen in der Unterdrückung festgehaltener Menschen zu besseren Lebensformen zu erheben. Man war verwegen, ihnen das ‘Rauschgift’ der Religion zu entziehen, und so weise, ihnen ein verständiges Maß von sexueller Freiheit zu geben, aber dabei unterwarf man sie dem grausamsten Zwang und raubte ihnen jedwede Möglichkeit der Denkfreiheit. Mit ähnlicher Gewalttätigkeit wird das italienische Volk zu Ordnung und Pflichtgefühl erzogen. Man empfindet es als Erleichterung von der bedrückenden Sorge, wenn man im Fall des deutschen Volkes sieht, dass der Rückfall in nahezu vorgeschichtliche Barbarei auch ohne Anlehnung an irgendeine fortschrittliche Idee vor sich gehen kann.”

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rational polytheism is also to some extent crucial. Polytheism can understood as a hetero-stereotype of so-called monotheism. And it is not certain – I am not an expert in this field – that polytheism is such a stable phenomenon. As the Catholic example demonstrates, there are transitions, third spaces and syncretisms. There are angels in monotheistic religions and there is a clear hierarchy of Gods in ancient Egypt and Greece (so that one God is at the top), and the divinities in the religion of the Vedanta can be seen as allegories which represent different aspects of the divine. Behind the binary opposition between monotheism and polytheism, there lurks another opposition, the conflict between myth and logos. It was Schelling who in his Philosophy of mythology identified the triumph of Judaism and later Christianity with the decline of the myth (Schelling 1842, vol. 6, 7–143). Monotheism, as the triumph of an abstract reason that needs neither visual images nor narratives any longer, is also understood as a principle break in the cultural history of mankind. In contrast, some, though not all critics of “logocentrism” tend to rehabilitate polytheism as a polyphonic symbolic space which enables pluralism and political liberty – pars pro toto I mention the German philosopher Odo Marquard (Marquard 1981, 4–22). But this praise for diversity misses the fact that “polytheism” does not represent different beliefs and divinities on the same political, social and economic level, but expresses, as Klaus Heinrich has shown, social and cultural hierarchy (1986, 53ff). Not all myths, narratives and divinities are equal, some are more equal than others. With regard to the monotheism of the psychoanalytical movement, I would like to resist the temptation to refer to psychoanalysis as a secular monotheistic religion or to equate Freud with Moses, the authoritarian structures of the psychoanalytical institution with the monotheistic despotism Freud himself mentions. But it is quite evident that the monotheism of Freud needs an element that is so constitutive for any so-called polytheism: narratives, narrating, and narration. PS: When Freud interpreted Michelangelo’s Moses, the man who gave the people of Israel God’s Ten Commandments, as a man who is able to calm his own rage, he could have had the idea of a monotheism without rage, a monotheism of or with calmness, an auto-image of psychoanalysis. So, one could say that the basic narrative of psychoanalysis in Freud has a tragic plot (monotheism goes hand in hand with its key figures – Moses, Jesus and, murdering, in 1938 certainly of great relevance to Jewish people). Freud’s Psychoanalysis has an underlying mechanistic deep structure of argumentation, with metonymy as the key rhetorical figure, but, in contrast to White’s terminology, the radical ideology which goes usually hand in hand with that type of narrative is broken in a strange way, as is the case with Moses’s rage in Michelangelo. It goes hand in hand with a hidden narrative.

Part 2 Space, Time and the Global

Space and Borders Simmel, Waldenfels, Musil I. Prologue This article was originally given as a lecture in Tromsø, Norway. Giving a lecture in another language than in one’s mother tongue is always a journey, a movement into a specific space or to another unknown space outside (cf. Chambers, 35). There are – real and symbolical – borders I exceed, the border of/to another European culture (the Norwegian) and the border of another language (English). Thus I feel that in times of globalisation, too, there remain borders. My first symbolic hindrance is that it is not possible to transfer all meanings from one language to another, as in the example of the German word Grenze (there is a similar word in Norwegian), which is a broader concept than the English word “border”, including the idea of limit, limitation or also of frontier. I have to say that I also had some problems in translating some ofWaldenfels’ and Simmel’s terms into international conference English. But as a colleague in Birmingham once pointed out, reading a conference paper of mine: It is not our English. Your English is okay. It is your English. But where is the space for this English? Is it a non-place? And where are the borders of that use of a foreign language? Is it a language of Bhabha’s third space? So, we are in the middle of the topic, even before I have begun to explain what’s happening with borders and spaces.¹ In this essay, I shall present three different approaches to the topic. They differ in intellectual temperament in the choice of genre, discipline and focalisation. Between Simmel’s analysis and this essay there is a distance of time of about one hundred years. Georg Simmel, Max Weber’s counterpart, analyses space from a point of view that is concentrated on society and has some similarities with the neutral Olympian narrator of the modern novel. In contrast, Waldenfels, the most well-known phenomenologist in Germany, refers to the single, individual body (Leib), which makes possible very specific experiences with space and border. Musil, who for Waldenfels acts as a Vergil through the complex labyrinth of modern space, uses the modern novel in Bakhtin’s sense of as a medium for

1 I have to thank Edit Kiraly and Usha Reber, who have organised a very intensive workshop on the topic within the framework of our common research project “Zentren und Peripherien in der Habsburger Monarchie 1867–1918” (2004–2006).

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intellectual reflection and as a symbolic machinery for experimental adventures (for example the overcoming of traditional symbolic spaces and borders). I do not refer to all these three thinkers in order to show respect to heterogeneity as an ideal, though one might argue that hyper-complex phenomena such as space and borders quite evidently need a multi-perspective approach. And I also do not refer to this triad because it has something in common; for example the tendency to an essayistic attitude (in Musil’s spirit) that has often been seen as a borderline phenomenon. I refer to them for different reasons. I discuss Simmel because he was one of the first to differentiate between various kinds and levels of space, and to argue that space is not a mere territorial phenomenon, but a relation. I comment on Waldenfels’ ideas because phenomenology insists on the idea that space and borders are “real” phenomena, not just constructions. When I use the words “real space”, I do not mean the mathematical and measurable space that is already the work of symbolic abstraction and construction, but a psychophysical experience and relation, which is linked to my body (Leib). The challenge for human beings under the conditions of hypermodernity (Bauman) is to be able to integrate all these different spaces, which do not constitute one and the same space any longer. With regard to Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) I follow Waldenfels’ interpretation that this novel describes and analyses the radical change of symbolic spaces and borders within the framework of the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire. To some extent, Musil’s novel bridges the gap between Simmel’s social analysis and Waldenfel’s philosophyof the body.

II. Simmel It is evident that there is an intrinsic relation between Raum and Grenze, between space and border. Both terms have come to prominence with the cultural turn in the humanities. Thus, it might be useful to start with this relation. It also makes sense to begin with an author who was in a Foucauldian sense the initiator and founder of a specific discourse. Simmel developed his ideas on space in one of his major works Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Sociology: Investigations into the Forms of Socialisation; see especially 687–790), which analyses systematically the forms and not only the contents of socialisation. His concentration on the formal aspect of this kind of analysis makes this study especially relevant for cultural analysis today. Following Kant, Simmel interprets space not as productive in itself, but as a formal condition of the possibility of socialisation, and – I add – of cultural con-

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struction. Space is no longer a natural, objective essence, but a subjective human capacity and activity. To some extent, Simmel has anticipated the idea that space is not just a territorial phenomenon. There is  – to use Lacanian terminology  – something like a real, a symbolic and imaginary space and in consequence a real, a symbolic and an imaginary border. Traditional cultures and their self-representations (myths) can be defined by the effort to bring these different levels together and integrate them in systems of correspondences. With regard to space, Simmel differentiates between three relevant sociological aspects: 1. The phenomenon of extension, which refers to psychical energies and powers in space. 2. The phenomenon of nearness/distance (that is, the relation between neighbourhood and strangeness). 3. The phenomenon of the spatial order of the social and the cultural, which involves the internal and external structure, organisation and integration of parts of a given socio-cultural entity. As an example of social and cultural compactness, in effect natural socialisation, Simmel discusses the case of early-modern towns in Flanders. These have: 1. A certain territorial space, defined by walls and moats that unify homes and unify the population. 2. A common jurisdiction which unifies the community as a legal person. 3. An ecclesiastic bonding which unifies people in a parish. These three elements exist independently of each other but they confirm and strengthen the sense of social solidity. They coincide insofar as they refer to the constriction of one and the same number of persons inside the same piece of territory, enabling them to live together almost free of social interference. Simmel points out, but does not give preference to the wall as a form of socialisation. One also has to add that in the case of early modern European towns there is never a hundred percent identity between real and symbolic space. Not all partial social and cultural systems inside the town, spaces such as monasteries or Jewish communities, are parts of the symbolic space of the town, as defined by the town wall. Moreover, the influence of a social phenomenon like a town always transcends its territory. In particular, the (Christian) church is a phenomenon with no real relationship to space. The symbolic space of the church is everywhere. In contrast, the modern nationstate is founded on its solidarity with a space (Simmel, Soziologie 688). There is then a deep and reciprocal connection between space und socialisation. It is with regard to this link that Simmel develops his concept of Raumerfül-

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lung (space-filling). The word has a double meaning. It means that a space is filled with people. But that is not enough; it is only a precondition. What is important is that there is a common social and cultural interactive use of the space. Thus an unerfüllter (unfilled) Raum is not simply a place without human beings, but a place of isolated and unconnected people side by side. In the moment people start interacting, the unerfüllte Raum is transformed into an erfüllter (filled) Raum. Within this space, everybody takes his/her own place, differentiates him/herself from the other and constructs an invisible spatial border. So, one can say that space is much more than a physical space. It is also a between in two senses of the word: an internal psychic movement and an external physical and spatial act. Space opens the possibility of a being-together, but Simmel emphasises also the possibility of association and unification in virtual spaces, that is in mental and symbolical spaces. Modern and especially hypermodern societies (cf. Bauman 110–153) of our own time can be characterised by forms of socialisation which are no longer exclusively connected with “real” territorial spaces. However, even under such cultural circumstances, we are unable to escape from real spaces, because we are beings with real bodies. Thus space advances to the status of a general metaphor for all those “spaces” which are no longer based on territorial principles of Grund und Boden (ground and soil).For example, we call a certain “place” on a website which we have occupied and paid for a “domain”. For the understanding of the virtual spaces and borders of our days one cannot avoid discussing the fundamental characteristics of traditional space. Simmel has summed up these qualities on three different levels (Simmel, Soziologie 690–698, 702–722): 1 The exclusivity of space. 2 Fixation in and through space. 3 Limitation (Begrenzung) and dissection of space. Ad 1: Every space exists only once and every space is a unique element without analogue. There are no two identical local places, although the social imagination has created places such as New Orleans, New Amsterdam and those other places with old European names and the “New” in front of the old name. It is possible for there to be more than one identical object, but they will always differ from each other with regard to place. Because of these qualities of space, landed property has played an enormous role in human culture. The idea of the nationstate is also based on the idea of territory. So the question is whether the genesis of modern and hypermodern virtual spaces, constructed by media as a form of digitalised money, has made the nation state anachronistic.

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Ad 2: Fixation can be seen as the central function of traditional spaces. Spatial fixation – by houses, places or official buildings – creates centres of social interaction. The number of houses emphasises the incompatibility of places. Or in other words: large social and cultural entities and organisations need a centre for important and common activities. What is fixed is the content of the social and cultural entity, the social order and the human being in that order. Such a fixation can take the form of prohibition, control and/or restriction of mobility. There are also mechanisms of exclusion and sanction. Simmel mentions the example of you losing your right to vote in the case of absence from “your” space. There are some other more dramatic restrictions: the prohibition for farmers in Eastern Europe until the Nineteenth Century against moving away from their places of birth, controlled as they were by the nobility; and the restriction on women from leaving the house, the traditional space of the family (which was and is the case in many cultures – not only in fundamentalist Islamic states). Institutional spaces such as the prison, the hospital or even the school can be defined by their restriction of the mobility of people inside. Ad 3: With regard to the phenomenon of the border, limitation and dissection is most important. For the meaning of the Grenze, which, as I mentioned before, does not only include the meaning of the English word “border”, but also entails elements of frontier, limit and edge. A space is characterised by its border. If there is no real, symbolic or virtual border, it is nearly impossible to identify something within a specific space. It is even hard for human reason to understand and realise an expanding space without borders – indeed, this is the way in which modern astronomy has constructed “our” universe.² Simmel does not discuss the border only, but also the frame. Both phenomena coincide in the fact that neither the frame nor the border has a real “meaning” and content, but both do have very important social or cultural functions. The frame of a traditional painting marks the fictional world of art, which differs from its surroundings (Der Bildrahmen 101–108).³ The frame is a specific variation of the border. It represents the division between everyday life and the arts, between inside and outside. In Simmel’s interpretation, arts and aesthetics become a social and cultural dimension. Constructing borders is an aesthetic and social act. The artwork marks the outer border of the social existence which is both inside and outside. Its central social and/

2 Cf. Lefebvre on the importance of modern physics for the discourse on space (1991, 2). 3 It is the frame that makes the work of art by transforming it into a unity of particularities, into a separate social and cultural world. Avant-garde movements since German Early Romanticism can be defined by the heroic attempt to “break” the frame between art and everyday life.

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or cultural meaning is that inside the framework there is a symbolic world subordinated to its own values and rules. Thus the phenomenon of the border can be understood as a framework for social existence. There is a strong connection between the extension of the space and the intensity of the social relationships, but the intensity of the social entity does not depend on natural space. Every border is non-natural, contingent and arbitrary. Simmel concedes a relative meaning to so-called natural borders connected with such natural phenomena as mountains, rivers and islands. It is a specific cultural interpretation that makes them into borders or frames. There is not such a thing as natural frontiers. Simmel mentions the example of the ocean which has no “natural” frontiers, but has been occupied as if it was a territory. The same can be said for air space or for the virtual spaces (web-spaces) of our contemporary world. It is the border which makes clear that spaces are cultural, social and aesthetic constructions. To fulfil their function, borders do not belong to any of the spaces they create. Thus they are to some extent a virtual and an invisible entity in between – without any spatial extension. One could say that borders make clear that space is a cultural construction. This includes the real territorial space in which our life is embedded, because we are Ptolemaists that is three-dimensional beings living in and with a body (cf. Sloterdijk 1987). All sorts of borders are elementary for human beings, because they give the connection between space and social order a deeper meaning. The meaning of borders transcends not only the spatial, but also sociology. Simmel gives the reader some examples of non-spatial Grenzen: The Grenzen der Macht (limits of power), or the Grenzen der Intelligenz (limitation of intelligence). These two examples make clear that there are Grenzen, which do not divide space into two territories. Here, no territory borders on another. Thus borders refer to the construction of spaces by dissection, but also to the social order inside the given social and cultural space. In this way, the internal, social and physical limitations of human beings correspond to the external. Thus one could argue that there is a good and a bad message. The bad message is that frontiers are restrictive for both sides, for the people inside as well as outside; the good message is that they enable us to organise ourselves – on all levels, from our private life in the family and other types of private relationship to the civil society which still is at work (against the prophecy of its “death”) within the framework of the nation-state. Or in Simmel’s terms, the border generates and brings about a closed sphere for the individual, as well as for the collective. It is a sociological fact that builds itself spatially. The construction and shaping of space imply a certain formation of borders and vice versa. In this combination, the central function of constructed space becomes evident. So, what we could and should do is not to discuss borders as such, but the way in which we want to organise borders; whether our borders should have the density of the his-

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torical walls mentioned earlier and whether and how we organise the entrances and the exits of our human, that is, our social, political and cultural spaces. As Simmel stresses, it is important to realise that every intimate living together is based on the fact that everybody knows – through psychological hypothesis – more of the other than s/he is willingly communicating, implicitly or directly. There are deep structures in our culture that mark for example the limits of what is allowed and what not. There is also an idea of “border” with regard to very personal spheres, especially the sphere of our gendered bodies. Phenomena such as the fear that makes us shake, or the blush, which mounts to our cheeks from a feeling of shame correspond subjectively to social borders. The social phenomena of limitation are given a certain stability through spatialisation. Every Grenze includes a psychic occurrence and – to an even greater degree – a sociological occurrence. And such an occurrence implies a Grenze. In parenthesis, Simmel dared to say that the possibility and the right to transcend or to overcome borders were better in recent and pre-modern communities than in modern developed societies. I do not think we can follow such a hypothesis any longer, especially not in the generalised way Simmel makes it. In contrast, the borders and limits in traditional social formations (guild, corporation, the patriarchal family, the pre-capitalistic social order as such) were and are more restrictive than in the Western cultures of our time. As we have seen, Simmel postulates a very close connection between border and space. It is the spatial framework which delivers a form to a cultural and social group. But physical space is not determining in itself. For example, whether a border is open or closed, whether it is permeable and penetrable or not, whether a framework is narrow or wide, does not depend on the size of the space. It depends on cultural self-understanding and the political and economic situation, as interpreted by culture. The limiting function of frames and borders can be realised especially ex negativo. Simmel gives three examples: There is the social phenomenon of the crowd that is the result of Entgrenzung (de-bordering, de-limitation). There is the existential feeling of Entgrenzung in air space (as in the German song by Reinhard Mey: “Above the clouds freedom must be boundless”), but also darkness reduces social space, because the fantastic, non-visible space it constitutes is out of control. The reasons for de-bordering and de-limitation may be different: they disappear because the space is too large or is darkened. Alternatively, people can also act in masses, destroying any limitation. To some extent, a crowd implies the triumph of time over space. But the consequences are very similar. Entgrenzung has a double meaning and implies a double evaluation. Marked by the German prefix ent- (de-), it means the more or less sudden disappearance of any inner and

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outer limitation. On the one hand, it evokes an ecstatic feeling of freedom, but on the other hand, it produces a lack or loss of orientation. So, ecstasy and panic go hand in hand. One could argue that this space is – metaphorically speaking – the space of the imaginary as conceptualized by Lacan and Kristeva.⁴ Thus, space can be understood as a phenomenon that has borders both inside and outside. It is a phenomenon in which nearness and distance play enormous roles. Touching another body (of an individual, but also metaphorically of a group or a community) is just such an experiment with borders. In the case of the body of the other, the border is not the skin, but an invisible nowhere-land outside. There exists also a space (or a field) of vision between two people coming into temporary contact. This visual field is reciprocal, reflexive and interactive. Shame is quite clearly a phenomenon of borders and limits. As Simmel points out, casting down ones eyes is not a manifestation of us not wanting to look at somebody, but a way of saying that we do not want to have that somebody looking at us. It is extremely impolite to stare at unknown and strange people. There are other invisible borders and limits: the space of hearing, the space of smell and aroma etc. Except in intimate situations, it is impolite and boorish to come too close to some-body. It belongs to the correctness of our times to respect the intimate space of the other. It was Elias Canetti who developed a theory of crowds and power, which begins with the description that human beings fear being touched by one another (Canetti, MM 13). Intimate space with its specific borders and limits/limitations is one extreme; abstract space, which no longer has a concrete physical equivalent, is the other. Simmel differentiates between those spaces and borders which include emotional, personal and physical aspects, and those which are based on impersonal, unphysical and objective factors. Institutions such as churches have no need for geographical nearness; they are, as Simmel stresses, schools of abstraction. If the conditions of emotion and interest are on the same level, the spatial capacity for tension in a form of socialisation depends on the degree of our ability for abstraction. Intimate relations always depend on spatial nearness. Thus spatial and local nearness have always sensual and emotional qualities. For this reason, one might argue that the private house or the home is the place and the school of intimacy, while spatial distance always has an intellectual quality. A high degree of education and a modern metropolitan lifestyle will constitute an intellectual space in which the stimulus of touch is reduced, and indifference with regard to the other

4 In La révolution du language poétique (1974), Kristeva understands literature as the dark “place” that is not under the control of paternal symbolism.

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is an informal rule. One can thus claim that Simmel analysed phenomena of the concrete body before French phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty). Space also relates to movement in interesting ways. Movement, which is part of Bakhtin’s chronotope, combines time and space in a certain way. In includes the possibility of self-organising, realising and changing space. One could argue that spaces with many and restrictive internal and external borders are static, whereas spaces with low and minimal borders are spaces in movement. Simmel explains this difference using the cultural contrast between nomadic and stationary cultures. Undoubtedly, there are tendencies of nomadic existence in hypermodern western style cultures. Already Simmel suggests that the modern culture of market capitalism has a tendency to de-border and the abolish of limits, along with an inclination to acceleration. Thus, fast movement and de-bordering are two sides of the same coin.

III. Waldenfels One can understand the logic of spaces, realms, places and fields only if one keeps in mind that they have internal and external borders/limits. In the case of the universe, modern physics confirms that there are also other universes. But probably this space is not a space in the common sense of the term, but a spatialtemporal mix. Already in Simmel’s interpretation of space and border, there is a temporal dimension, because every (stable or instable) relation is based on a form of action which is quite evidently an issue of time. Waldenfels’ book, which is related to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception, analyses this relation from the perspective of the individual, who is embedded in(to) his/her body. The body works as a medium between the individual and space. This is true for all spatial levels: “real”, symbolic and imaginary. The rooms in which we live have borders and limits. These do not, as we have seen, consist of just geometric lines, but “define” the quality of spaces. There is for example the problem of who has admittance to a specific space. All of us know places marked by the words “No admittance” or “Admittance only for staff”. Kafka’s doorkeeper – Kafka is a master of closed spaces – is such a person at the border. Zygmunt Bauman has described a town-quarter in Cape Town, which has been planned by the architect George Hazeldon, a place for the happy few nouveau riche (white); South-Africans, watched by paramilitary guards all day and night (Bauman 110). Spaces are only spaces if people in various ways use them. Spaces can be characterised by the fact that people have a place in them and can stay in it. Temporary spaces  – theatres, parking places  – are spaces which only allow a

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short stay (cf. Augé). One can also differentiate spaces in other ways, for example by asking whether they are homogeneous or heterogeneous, whether strangers or foreigners, children, women or men, rich or poor people have admittance to them, whether you need a membership card or a passport. Spaces differ from one another with regard to what is allowed in them and what is not, whether there are implicit or explicit rules which fix the order of a specific space. It is important whether change and transformation are strictly forbidden, tolerated or welcomed. Thus, there are Grenzen (borders) of admittance and Grenzen (limits) of allowance. Everybody in a given society knows these Grenzen, the internal list of prohibitions. Here are some examples: – Eating a pizza in a public library. – Crossing a road when the light is red. – Making changes to paintings in a gallery. – Creating extreme attention in public spaces by intimate actions (sexual intercourse, nudity) or by producing noise. – Entering a football-field or a stage as part of the audience. – Entering an Arabic hamam as a man. – Camping in a toilet. Limitations are a much-discussed topic also in the arts. Nowadays smoking in nearly all European countries is banned from public places and areas, or there are discussions about whether dogs should no longer be allowed to defecate in parks or in streets without their owners cleaning up after them. Some of these limits are based on strict prohibitions; others are more informal. You may not be punished directly or expelled from the specific area, but exclusion is possible. In Robert Musil’s novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities) there is a chapter where the participants of a committee-meeting discuss very seriously the content of a jubilee celebration for Emperor Franz Joseph’s reign. In this situation Ulrich, the secretary of the so-called “parallel action”, makes a proposal suggesting the creation of a general secretary for the exact measurement of the human soul. This proposal is evidently unpractical and unreal, because a practical and concrete idea is needed for such a representative political and patriotic demonstration as the 70th anniversary of the emperor’s governance. Ulrich’s proposal is an ironic and subversive act that annihilates and undermines the pathetic goals of the political project. What it does create, is irritation and reflection (Musil, chapter 116, 2:583–600). Modern literature and arts, especially the avant-garde, can be defined by the tendency to irritate. Modern art in modern and hypermodern societies has the function of putting existing social and cultural spaces into question. They pose implicit or explicit proposals to change spaces (and their internal and exter-

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nal borders) by crossing and neglecting borders, limits and limitations, including those I have mentioned above. Modern art is full of such provocative action (Duchamp’s Fountain, Valie Export, Dadaism, the avant-garde groups in Vienna after WW II). It is in response to such questions that the German phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels has in Der Stachel des Fremden (The Thorn of the Strange/r) developed a concept of borders that is based on the existential conditions of human beings. He differentiates between two types of borders: 1. The borders that one has or has acquired. These are borders of a certain field, the field of action, of language and speech and the visual field of seeing. Such borders can be enlarged, displaced or reduced, but can in no way be abolished or transcended. To explain the transgression of borders Waldenfels gives us the example of the horizon as a border. Our modes or – more poetically and philosophically – our doors of perceptions are the borders and limits of our world. This is the space of personal and collective possibilities. This Ausgrenzung (exclusion) corresponds with the spatial differentiation between here and there, and the temporal now and once later. 2. The borders which one exceeds upon entering into another order, another space. Waldenfels calls these Schwellen (thresholds). That which is attractive and scary is no longer part of a play with our own possibilities, but constitutes a challenge to our freedom and liberty, a challenge of the strange and unfamiliar, which cannot find any place in the existing order. The threshold is the border between the known and the unknown. Waldenfels illustrates this kind of transition using familiar examples: farewells and greetings, falling asleep and awakening, getting ill and getting healthy. One falls asleep and also in love. We move or – better – we are moved into another world, into another space, into another state of being. This expansion, this transgressing movement, implies that the world, which is symbolised by the space beyond the threshold, becomes strange and unfamiliar. In contrast to the topographical metaphors, our symbolic world as a whole is not so much a divided country, interspersed and permeated with the unknown and the unavailable, but is the result of exclusion of the familiar and inclusion of unfamiliar. The Ausland (“foreign country”) expands into the inside (Waldenfels 1990, 32ff). Topographical and symbolical spaces do no coincide here. The “real” expansion into the other space goes hand in hand with the expansion of the Ausland into our inside. These spaces are not congruent in all cases, although topographical places – from ancient rhetoric to the poetics of spaces in modern literature and film – have always served as metaphors for virtual symbolic and imaginary ones. The “subjective” perspective of human beings living in their bodies regu-

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lates the different aspects of space (inside vs. outside) and time (past/future vs. present). There is no such a thing as an indifferent God-like view from above and from outside. We are always inside, being and moving in space and time (Waldenfels 34), just now and just here. The relation between inside and outside is the consequence of inclusion and exclusion; or in other words, the result of the setting of borders and limits. This kind of setting can be real or symbolical, or both. The relationship between inside and outside is always asymmetrical (Waldenfels 33). The outside is conceptualised from inside. The same is true for the past and the future, the once and the later, which are realised from present time; from the now. Otherwise, as Waldenfels points out, we would live in a mental time and a mental space – maybe interesting possibilities for modern literature. The invisible and neutral narrator in many modern novels is such an instance. Only such a space, inside and outside, past and present would be in the state of equivalence and symmetry. But this mere mental space would mean a form of bodiless existence, in other words a non-existence. The same is true for such states as health and illness, being awake and sleeping/dreaming, feudal and bourgeois society. These fields are not brought together like two rooms, separated by a wall. That would imply that there is a subject that is in both rooms. Such a subject would be inside and outside, here and there. But for such a subject, the threshold would not exist any longer (Waldenfels 33). There must be a (human) being moving only in one of the rooms. This is the precondition for all divisions of space itself into two, into interior and exterior spaces. But something new is created by such a division. The relationship looses its one-sidedness. The reciprocal relationship removes the one-sided relationship between inside and outside. It is connected with the possibility of exceeding the threshold that leads to the strange/r. It can be associated with the feature and figure of the third (34, 38–40).

IV. Musil There exists a certain suspicion that past, traditional, modern and hypermodern societies⁵ handle borders in different ways; or more specifically, they differ in

5 I refer to Zygmunt Bauman’s (2003) definition of hypermodernity. He describes hypermodernity as a light and unheroic version of capitalistic modernity. In contrast to postmodernism, it is, as the phenomenon of “globalisation” may demonstrate, quite expansive and aggressive. It is the return of unlimited capitalistic accumulation with a light version of legitimation.

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the way they use borders and limits, and draw the lines of borders. The Western hypermodern and globalised societies of our time seem to show a tendency to displace borders. This is at least the positive self-image of cultural globalisation. (The reality, however, is quite different: we can see how the European Union builds internal borders through rigid control in the name of the war against terror and at the same time builds external borders against foreigners from other continents.) But since early modernity there has also been a deeper tendency to displace borders. There is a strange and heroic will and ambition to enter areas which are not human spaces at all, the moon, the Antarctic, the North Pole, the highest mountains of our planet and the open sea. From the very beginning entering such a hostile, non-human area is such a kind of adventure with a narrative “dialectic” plot: the expansion into the strange space is connected with the invasion of this foreign space into man’s inside – in the traditional order of the sexes, it is an adventure sui generis of the male Waldenfels makes clear that men who have transgressed such thresholds of danger successfully become heroes. As an Austrian researcher giving a lecture in Norway, I have cited for good reason an Austrian example that has become famous because Christoph Ransmayr wrote a novel about it: the Payer-Weyprecht-expedition of 1872–1874, which started out from the harbour of Tromsø, where this lecture was given. It came about as the result of national prestige and the ambition of a handful of men. What counted, was to win unknown land outside Europe for the old Austrian Empire and to demonstrate that the monarchy was not behind the times; and it was a personal ambition to be the first. The crew survived (with one exception, if one does not count the dead dogs and cats) two years of living in the solitude of the ice. They brought back names and drawings. Thus it was the symbolic format that transformed the area into a space. Later, Payer studies painting to demonstrate that there “really” was a new space and an adventure which could only come about by human beings entering this space. He still believed in the mimetic magic of mimesis. But there remained some doubts as to the veracity of his reports. So it was photography, used later by Amundsen, Shackleton and Scott, which appeared to verify that new spaces had been won and new frontiers transgressed. With regard to our topic, this is a very important point: one can show that reference to reality depends quite evidently on the structural logic of different media. It was photography that delivered new concepts of reality, for example the idea of “objective” documentation (cf. Car 2006). Photography suggests (and this is quite problematic until our days) that all that has happened is “canned” in a reliable and durable way; that is, saved and stored in a media. Painting, which was the traditional medium of presentation, has not the same reference: it does not deliver proof that the painter him- or herself was present at the strange and

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foreign space (s)he painted and, moreover, that this place does exist at all. Thus Payer was the victim of an era of media change, in which painting was still used as a medium referring to historical events; but at the same time, it became antiquated, because a new concept of reality already existed that was grounded in a new media: photography. It is not coincidental that later discoverers – Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton – made use of the new technique of image-production to make their expansion into unknown spaces, their project of displacing borders, visible and evident. This is one side of a modern longing for the creation of new spaces and for displacing borders. There is also an internal dynamic process by which traditional spaces and borders/limits/frontiers are overcome. This brings us back to Waldenfels’ study Der Stachel des Fremden and his reading of Musil’s epoch-making novel. Already the title of Musil’s book, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, signals the experience with the unknown and strange, a specific border which is on the inside. The self becomes unavailable and strange. So, in modernity, there is an exclusion of the familiar and an inclusion of the unfamiliar – with all the paradoxes that are characteristic of this process. On the one hand this is a loss, but on the other, a gain, because it creates new possibilities – and impossibilities – of changing a specific space by changing its borders/limits. In this context, the Möglichkeitssinn (sense of and for possibility) and the experimental way of life led by Musil’s protagonist Ulrich is striking. The imaginary “space” of the novel itself proves to be a laboratory, a space for new adventures of life; the central adventure that of organizing life as a novel, concentrated only on intensive, essential and important issues. This is a life with high risks, a life beyond the usual symbolic spaces. Incest, insanity, crime and other modes of existence, for example mysticism (“anderer Zustand”) are part of this kind of other life. Privately, Ulrich and his sister are always placed at the threshold that leads to another unknown forbidden space beyond the familiar one. Entering those spaces, new possibilities of a radical other realisation of life are opened. At the same time – and this is important for Waldenfels’ interpretation – the traditional order becomes relative, it is only one of several possible worlds. The existing order is put into the state of contingency (Waldenfels 21). This Möglichkeitssinn may be contrasted to common sense (of and for reality), which denies that our world – the symbolic space – could be different from the existing one. What Ulrich proposes, is –paradoxically – the impossible, at least from the view-point of common sense. The concept of internal other is subversive because it undermines the traditional self-understanding of space and order. It makes the traditional order and its realm of symbolic spaces contingent. The first and only categorical imperative is: All could be totally different. In Waldenfels’

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interpretation (Waldenfels, 16), the implosion of traditional structures of order is at the very centre of Musil’s novel. He refers to a famous aphorism in the novel, in which the neutral narrator declares programmatically that probably also God would like to speak in the conjunctivus potentialis and that God creates the world thinking at the same time it could be done in another way (Musil 1979, 19). Waldenfels differentiates between three basic models for the treatment of otherness and alterity: The first traditional model is a model of inclusion; everything finds its place within a given order, the order of reason. Its opposite is chaos. It is the whole that transcends all borders. The second modern model works within existing and somehow arising spaces. It accepts fragmentation, change, and reduction. It makes limits and borders flexible and movable. It accepts fundamental innovations (Waldenfels, 19). This experience of fragmentation is critically inscribed in the work of authors as Kafka, Joyce, Proust and others. In an affirmative version it is a model of modest and contingent self-organisation by exclusion. Contingency is here seen as a threat by Waldenfels, because it has the tendency to undermine order as a principle of organising symbolic spaces as such. The third model is the most complicated one. It can be described as a dynamic and oscillating process within a field of tension between the familiar and the strange. Waldenfels defines this model as a form of responsive rationality (Waldenfels 1990, 27). Only in model 3 there is a need and a desire for the figure of the Other. Only in this model, the other – stranger, unfamiliar, unknown – becomes a thorn, not only creating a dynamic, but penetrating the self. The strange can be the most familiar and wellknown, for example the family, as in Freud’s interpretation of Hoffmann’s Sandmann (Sandman). The appearance of the uncanny is the other side of the fact that the very familiar has lost its self-evidence. Undoubtedly, Musil has worked out this third model through the medium of the novel. His philosophical reader, Waldenfels, develops a system of categories to describe the paradoxical position which is the result of a new situation. There is no longer a system of binding norms and explanations with which to legitimate existing orders, spaces and borders. On the one hand, the traditional type of order is given, fixed, repetitive and all-inclusive. Its real and symbolic spaces are indiscussable and self-evident. On the other, the modern type of order is in flux, restricted by time and space, innovative and flexible within its borders. This new type goes hand in hand with the suspicion that the traditional order, which has been interpreted as all-inclusive and eternal, is only one of several possibilities. As a consequence, it leads to a mobilisation and pluralisation of order, but also to a dramatic loss of orientation, because contingency decomposes orders, spaces and borders. In this situation, modern societies have developed different types of Kontingenzbewältigung (mastering contingency):

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1.

Conservative forms of substitution (holistic movements, modern ideologies). Such proposals that we find in Musil’s novel, Waldenfels calls illusionary. 2. Formalisation of Kontingenzbewältigung (mastering contingency). The order that is the ensemble of spaces and borders/limits works. It is there. It is available. In this way, the bureaucracy in Musil’s novel works. Following the arguments in the novel, Waldenfels thinks that this form is insufficient. 3. Recycling of the past. The traditions are there and we can use them. This strategy makes the contingency of ones own cultural space into a privilege. Therefore, Waldenfels makes the judgement that this position is regressive and pre-critical. 4. Positivism and Functionalism. Order is necessary, human beings urge for order, for borders and limits, and they need spaces for acting. This position is decisionistic and arbitrary. Quite evidently, strategies 1 and 3 on the one hand, and strategies 2 and 4 coincide with each other. But also other combinations are thinkable. It is remarkable that Waldenfels does not work out an alternative to these four strategies. It seems that he believes that Musil’s work is strong enough to deconstruct the traditional use of spaces and borders, but is not powerful enough to reconstruct a new program for the cultural use of new and old spaces and its rules, its internal and external borders. Also in the novel, it remains unclear to what extent Ulrich’s proposal is a way out of the cultural crisis. The end of the novel – Ulrich’s leaves his sister Agathe and becomes a soldier in WW I  – proves to be an experiment that has failed, as Musil has conceded before ending the actual writing of the novel itself. One should not forget that also the intimate experience, the real or metaphorical incest that is also a specific trans-bordering has failed. This was, by the way, a typical transgression of a traditional limit in order to create a new intimate space, a space of mystic love. Musil, as also Broch, was deeply pessimistic about the possibility of living in the spaces of cultures without an obligatory stem of values with which to legitimate order, that is the ensemble of spaces and borders/limits within a society and within culture. In principle, we act in one of the four strategies Waldenfels has described and we use Musil’s Möglichkeitssinn for moving between these four theoretic realms.

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V. Conclusions Under the conditions of modernity and/or hypermodernity, space in human culture has lost all its self-evidence. It seems to be no longer “natural”. Thus borders necessarily become fragile; but, as we can see with regard to European immigration policy, territorial borders do not disappear. They prove to be quite stable; maybe they work as a compensation for the loss of strict orientation in symbolic spaces. The discussion how to deal with borders, the question, how transparent or transitory they shall be, proves to be an enormous challenge for Western civil societies. They have to decide what kind of borders have to be eliminated and which new spaces have to be created. Borders and spaces seem to be phenomena that combine aesthetical and ethical dimensions. The question of building spaces and acting within them is on the one hand an ethical issue, but on the other hand it includes cultural techniques that are based on an aesthetic level. Orientation in space is an aesthetic challenge, not in a traditional but in a more radical sense. It is linked to our creativity and our ability of perception. To vary a book title by Hans Blumenberg (Work on Myth, Arbeit am Mythos), arts and literature can be seen as work on borders and spaces. They make borders and spaces explicit and “visible”. I agree with the key point of Phenomenology, that there are real borders in the Lebenswelt. They are defined by the existence of our body, which cannot be substituted at all. It is the perspective of the inside looking out. Thus all radical change finds its limits with regard to our bodies. I think that Christoph Ransmayr has worked out this interdependency of borders in his book (and later in his novel Der fliegende Berg/The flying Mountain) quite clearly, as an experience at the border of our existence. In the novel, the movement into a new space is connected with a media-space (map, painting, diary) and goes hand in hand with a radical individual experience of a real border: death, disease, hunger, fear, ennui, loneliness – time and being in a Heideggerian way, although nobody of them has any philosophical idea of limits and borders. For those who have these philosophical insights, this novel can be read as an interesting example of an experiment in time and space, with borders inside and outside.

Time in Modern Cultural Analysis Time is on my side (The Rolling Stones)

This paper aims to discuss to relevant concepts of time and space in cultural theory (Cassirer, Assmann/Assmann, Benjamin and others). It questions to what extent time is relevant for the understanding of culture/Culture in a broader sense (T.S. Eliot 1948, Eagleton 2000) and deals with the question of which understanding of time is relevant for traditional and for (hyper)modern cultures. In his theory of the heterotopos, Michel Foucault argues that the nineteenth century was obsessed with the idea of accumulating the past (Foucault 1994, 931– 942). He argues that it was the century of time. Foucault uses drastic metaphors to explain the obsession with history and time in the 1800s. Its discourse was characterised by topics such as development and standstill, crisis and circulation, the accumulation of the past, the dominance of death and the threatening cooling down of the earth formulated in the second principle of thermodynamics. Generally, Foucault repeats a critique which was formulated by Marx and Nietzsche long ago. It was Marx who formulated the suspicion that the nightmare of the past haunts human beings, whereas Nietzsche criticised Historicism in his famous essay Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fürs Leben (Nietzsche KSA 1, 243–334). As Foucault points out, the twentieth century, at least in its second half, is/ was – in contrast to the nineteenth – an age of space, that is, an epoque of the juxtaposition of the near and the far. He interprets structuralism as the adequate and relevant theoretical outcome of this epistemological and – one has to add – cultural change in modern times. As a consequence, time appears only as one of the possible distributions between the elements in space. The postmodernism of the 1980s also implies a farewell of history and time. At this point, one could argue, there is a real link between (post-) structuralism and post-histoire. In the social scienes but also in cultural analysis and in the field of cultural studies, space has become a dominant factor. Important theoretics in this field until today are Georg Simmel, Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja or Michel Certeau (cf. Dünne/Günzel 2006). It is impossible to discuss the different implications of all these philosophers and theoreticians within this paper, but it is quite evident that they concur mostly in the opinion that in modern world ‘real space’ and symbolical space have drifted apart. Furthermore, the importance of symbolic spaces, which do not have a territorial correspondence, has expanded enormously. It is interesting that Foucault’s not particularly consistent concept of heterotopos is quite traditional; he very often thinks of territorial places – for example the move of the cemetery from the centre to the periphery.

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Disciplines such as sociology, linguistics and ethnology have contributed to what Sigrid Weigel and other cultural theoreticians have called the “topographical turn” (Weigel 2002). It must not be confused with the return to the traditional pre-modern topography; but here is a concentration on non-territorial realms which are for example represented by modern media. The linguistic turn is important insofar as it has privileged the synchronic aspect and marginalised the classical diachronic approach which was so important for and characteristic of historical linguistics. Undoubtedly, this turn is immediately connected with Saussure’s idea that the linguistic sign is conventional and arbitrary although it is not the result of an act of personal free will. From that point of view it makes no sense to discover the archaic and original significance of a linguistic item and of a linguistic system as language is as such. In modern linguistics, history is not more than a discontinuity in time represented in space. So one could say that the concept of Sprachspiele Wittgenstein develops in his later years is a concept which is primarily a synchronical one not only because these ‘games’ work without any historical legitimisation but also because of their automatic functioning. They work because they were used by the people. They are implicitly ‘valid’ in a certain territorial and symbolical space. Modern cultural analysis, especially Cultural Studies, to this day prefer this synchronic and spatial perspective, which tends to exclude any historical dimension. It represents a globalised culture in a Foucauldian or Deleuzian way as a network of points without any centre, as a world of mere differences, as a system of relations (instead of substances), as a multiple complex of heterogeneous elements – this is similar to Simmel and Cassirer. Its main figure is the hybrid, which integrates different traditions and is a man not only without qualities but also without a fixed identity. Traditionally and in contrast to such concepts, culture has been be defined by the idea that it accumulates time. However, storing time also means that it disappears. Culture entails the promise of stable identity, of preventing change: nothing disappears, but all is saved by the technique of storing. There are media of storing (writing, printing etc.) and there are techniques of decoding (techniques of remembering for example). In traditional concepts of culture, but also in pre-modern cultures, the mode of time is long durée: duration, continuance, permanence or – to use a spatial metaphor – length. Traditionally, culture has the self-image of a community of the dead and the living. Catholic ritual also includes the souls of the deceased as part of the Christian community. With regard to culture, the type of media  – stone, papyrus, printing, film, digital media – is striking, with regard to the material as well as to the functional aspect. All media have a dimension of space and a dimension of time. Media can be seen as a variety of instruments which make it possible to control either space

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or time. Or even both. Writings, pictograms or images in stone, ceramic, glass and other phsyical material can be seen as the expression of controlling time by using a stable substance which is resistant against the work of time. In contrast, printing has made it possible to control space. As Benedict Anderson has argued in his book Imagined Communities, there is an intrinsic connection between the invention of technical printing since the Renaissance and the development of a more or less homogenised cultural space: the nation state. Hypermodern societies with their high speed media have the power to establish global virtual spaces, but storing information by using hypermodern digital systems is very uncertain. In order to store archives of letters or images for a longer time, it is necessary to copy it again and again and transfer it to another more tenable media. The fact that our computers usually incorporate a printer makes the importance of this differentiation visible. Thus, one could say that modern media have a tendency to use high speed to overcome spatial distance. But at the same time they have only a reduced capacity for storage. As some conservative observers point out, it could be possible that our hypermodern era will not transfer many messages to later generations, not only because of the short-lived nature of the material of modern media and the problems of technical reproduction and decoding but also because of the high speed of hypermodern cultures itself. In these societies all information, discourses and narratives have the tendency to become historical at once. They produce the necessity of a permanent hermeneutic process, or in other words a new con-textualisation and a semiotic recycling. Harold A. Innis, a Canadian historian of economics and a forerunner of Marshall Mc Luhan, has described the difference between time-keeping and spacekeeping media. One may also explain this difference by using the terminology of synchronicity and diachronicity. High speed media such as the computer or radio and TV are quite clearly space-keeping media with the tendency to globalise that space. In contrast, traditional media as we know them from museums, from sacred places or from cemeteries can be understood as time-keeping media because they express the ambition of a community to save ‘messages’ for future generations. Unlike computers they do not have a key enabling the deletion of all information, discourses or narratives and their symbolic formations. The traditional monument includes the idea and the wish to fix and save the symbolic forms of a community for a long time. The reality may differ from the idea and self-imagination of those communities, since in so-called cold cultures there is a tendency of new decoding and new contextualisation. It is also important to say that printing and its material – paper – is in a grey area, in a middle position. Compared to stone, it is a space-keeping media with a relatively small capacity for storage (and as the development of modern bureau-

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cracy shows a large ability to control for example the territory of a state), but compared to modern analogue and hypermodern digital media (and its ‘material’) the storing capacity of printing is quite large. Maybe this middle position of printing can guarantee its survival even in a culture, which has the tendency to overcome or to transform the values, contents and the symbolic material formatted in older media. Quite clearly, the traditional myth, the symbolic kernel of pre-modern societies, is related to time-keeping media. It constructs and represents the structure of traditional memory. It is a narrative matrix which provides and constitutes the stability of a community against time and against forgetting. All the relevant symbolical material is saved by the myth which is ritualised in the calendar of the year and often formatted in a stable media. It is an archive before the archive. In tradional concepts, cultures, which are represented by their respective myths and mythologies will be constructed as a homogeneous one. Nationalism as an ensemble of symbolic forms of nation building has re-established a mythical structure of culture. It has created in modern societies post-mythic pseudo-sacred places in what are no longer mythical Gemeinschaften (communities). So, one may argue that traditional cultural theory, which has described cultures as historically grown homogenous entities has uncritically followed mythical concepts. Cultural theories since Vico and Herder that are influential to this day have very often neglected the difference between the claim and the ambition of traditional cultures on the one hand and the socio-cultural reality on the other. One could say that traditional cultural theories are based on writing and on traditional material, such as stone and books. It was writing that has produced the opportunity to perceive culture as a fixed, more or less unchangeable entity which delivers a fixed identity. Therefore, the aspect which dominates in traditional cultures and concepts of culture is duration (Dauer), fixed time. Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Philosophy of Symbolic Forms) is the only relevant theory of culture with a strong philosophical ambition and a clear post-Kantian structure. It culminates in the idea that philosophy itself is embedded into culture, that is, in the ensemble of symbolic forms. Therefore, philosophy becomes a part of philosophy of culture which at the same time is a theory of knowledge and an epistemology. But as his analysis of myth demonstrates, Cassirer neglects the narratological aspect of myths, the mere fact that myths are narratives with a certain and specific structure. He analyses myth only with regard to its rationality, to its logical structure and its truth, as a symbolic construction of reality parallel to sciences, language and arts. In his modification of Kant’s philosophy, Cassirer differentiates between the qualities (such as time, space, causality) and modalities (“Modalitäten”) of the symbolic forms which are seen as the Bedingungen der Möglichkeit von Erkennt-

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nis, but they are not systematically related to each other. Cassirer cannot develop a consistent theory of media which is necessary to develop a coherent theory of culture that is, quite clearly, a phenomenon in space and time. Semiotics and media theory have developed methodological tools which are more exact than Cassirer’s concept of symbolic forms (which is a theory before the linguistic turn) in which two levels are mixed: the semiotic aspect (the difference between writing and icon/picture), and the relationship between systems of knowledge (myth and science). It is astonishing that Cassirer’s philosophy also omits analysis of the new phenomena in the modern culture of his time, such as film, electronic transmission of images (television) and language/music (radio) or indeed the combination of semiotic systems. As one can show, all those new cultural and communicative media have a structure in which time is not only relevant but constitutive. However, it is one of the advantages of Cassirer’s theory that he has posed the question as to what extent traditional philosophy has to be embedded in a cultural context. The challenge of his theory is the idea of how to transform philosophy into a cultural theory which interprets philosophy and the sciences as one symbolic form, as one mental access to reality which is not privileged compared to others (such as arts and myth). Modernity and hyper-modernity can be seen as an age in which the traditional concept of culture does not disappear at all but is overlapped by new cultural mechanisms: the individual and subjective down-loading, the recycling of the archive and the invention of the future by recollecting elements of the past and of present times, the importance of immediate time (“just in time”). The past is available but no longer as a dreadful threat as it was for Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault. That leads to the conclusion that time neither disappears nor becomes a phenomenon of second range, rather it has changed radically; and is still changing. In modern culture as in the cultural analysis of our day, the temporal aspect becomes more and more relevant. In contrast to Foucault, one could say that the dominance of time in the nineteenth century has not been substituted by the dominance of space; the relation between space and time, however, has dramatically changed, especially since the appearance of digital machineries in our cultures. As the discourse of memory and remembering and of concepts of narratology indicates (Bal (2002), Borso and Görling (2004), Müller-Funk (2000, 2002/2008), time has become an unavoidable key term in cultural analysis. There is no such thing as cultural memory without some kind of remembering that has a narrative structure. In contrast to the phantasm of immutability, memory passes in a process of discontinuity and re-contextualisation. In analogy to literary theory, it is important to differentiate between Erzählzeit (i.e.the time the story-telling takes) and erzählter Zeit (i.e. the time of the events which will be told). It was Paul

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Ricœur who has shown that the structural analysis of narratives fails in a decisive aspect. This aspect is time. In his analysis of time and narrating, the French philosopher connects the famous analysis of time in Saint Augustine’s Confessions, which were extraordinarily important for Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Time and Being), with Aristotle’s analysis of myth. Thus, he can show that time is the key term for the understanding of the narrative structure. But one may also argue that time in its qualitative moments is structured by story-telling. But what is striking is that narrating is a conditio sine qua non for the downloading of a specific kind of memory which is bound up with subjective reminiscence and identity. So, identity will always be constructed and reconstructed in an act of narrating and renarrating. Culture is – to use a word from ecological discourse – a form of recycling that entails a form of adaptation. It would be controversial at the very least to go so far as to emphasise that Culture is only a sample and an ensemble of narratives. But with with regard to any form of identity, it is vital for the construction of cultures. Narratives implicate the fact that we are human beings acting in the world, they interpret our acting as they model and form it. Narrative identity is to some extent a pleonasm, because identity depends on the narrative complex, which is more of a phenomenon in time than one in space. Ricœur’s analysis makes it clear that time is the weak point, especially of structuralist narratology. It neglects the temporal aspect of every decoding but also the temporal aspect which is inscribed into each narrative cluster. Identity in its two aspects – idem and ipse – may have changed dramatically but it is still a central point in culture (Ricœur). The fact that identity is constructed does not mean that it does not exist. By way of comparison, we never would argue that architecture does not exist because it is a construction. Identity does not mean that we stay invariable; rather it refers to a certain form of existence in time. No culture, no society, neither politics nor economics, can work without that construction of identity which allows acting in a longer distance of time and makes living in culture possible  – and human living is unthinkable without a symbolic realm called culture. Maybe this aspect of identity which the French philosopher calls ‘ipseity’ is symbolically empty, a fader (to use a Lacanian term), but it is central for ethical aspects and indeed for the mere functioning of culture. It is the great disadvantage of all structural theories that they cannot explain what practice, action and doing is. The structures do not go into the streets, as the structruralists argued in 1968. It is the human being. The ipse, which is fragmented (because it is the self of an Other), is in its very abstract structure a phenomenon in time because it is a reliable person. And this reliability contains two aspects: promise and character  – personal or institutional. Both have in common that they are phenomena of time. Here, it is interesting

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that Ricœur does not mention recollecting and remembering; they are, after all, preconditions, especially, for the promise. So, one might say that all post-structuralist approaches bring back the aspect of time to the field of Cultural Analysis and Cultural Studies. In contrast to traditional concepts of cultural history, the focus of theoretical interest moves from length to movement, from product to process, from stable identity to dynamic diversity, from linearity to discontinuity. It becomes evident that the idea of the spatial turn that implies the disappearance or at least the marginalisation of – historical – time is far too simple. Maybe it is more adequate to say that both dimensions have dramatically changed in modern times. So the change of time and the change of space coincide. Both changes depend on each other. There is time beyond the dominance of linearity, which for example Benjamin has compared with the leap of a tiger. And there is a territorial space which is empty of meaning. The French ethnologist Marc Augé has called it a non-place. And there are symbolic spaces that no longer correspond with the traditional geographic ones but depend on decoding and renarrating. Vico’s idea of the three symbolic bonds of culture he developed in his Nuove science may be out of date in many theoretical and methodological aspects, but his idea of interpreting cultural synchronical as diachronical has taken on strong contemporary relevance since the “spatial turn”. Vico differentiates between the diachronical bond, the bond between the dead and the living, and the synchornical bond, the bond of marriage (the bond between groups and families) and finally, as a combination of the two, the bond of law and property. If Vico’s traditional differentiation is used in a broader and more metaphorical sense, then it delivers us a key to understanding culture as a combination of elements which is characteristic for the macro-phenomenon called “culture”. (Müller-Funk 2006/2010) It is not at least the temporary aspect that makes cultures different from the functionalism of “societies”. It refers to the fact that culture may dramatically change but will on its long journey survive every individual human being. We have no chance to start completely anew. What is responsible for the impossibility of a tabula rasa (which was favoured by many historical avant-garde movements in the twentieth century) is that culture is a phenomenon in which time is always inscribed. Time is always on the side of culture.

Walter Benjamin and the Translational Turn In her influential book on the new cultural turns, the German literary and cultural theorist Doris Bachmann-Medick has proposed understanding the theory of translation and translating as a central focus in cultural theory (BachmannMedick 2006). Culture can be understood as a permanent process of translating in the sense of another new paradigm, that means the in the sense of a spatial turn. Translation can be regarded as a proocess of cultural transfer and contextualisatuion. The German word Über-Setzen is, by the way, ambigous. In a non-metaphorical sense, it means transporting oneself from one place to another, e.g. from a continent to an island and vice versa. In a metaphorical sense, with a different intonation (Übersétzen), it refers to the problem of translation from one language to another. It is important to point out that, especially in Homi K. Bhabha, the difference between a literary translation and cultural transfer is more or less erased. This is to some extent problematic, since not every form of cultural transfer goes hand in hand with literary translation. But it is possible to say that literary translation is part of a process of cultural transfer, which also includes the transfer of cultural practices, music, film, painting, everyday culture etc. from one symbolic space to another and, especially, within one cultural space. So, translation and transfer describe processes that are inherent for culture in general. Translation, as Anselm Haverkamp has formulated, is an agency of difference (Haverkamp 1997, 7). It is quite evident that translating is a central activity in culture, especially under the conditions of globalisation and also European integration. It is also significant that translating is not relevant in the same way for all national and regional cultures. The very phenomenon of translating emphasises the fact that language remains central, even irreductible for collective identities, differences and the necessity of translation  – despite the function and meaning of other cultural phenomena such as everyday life, food, media and popular culture. Translating remains reprensentative even though modern concepts of culture no longer focus on the idea of a homogeneous language community. If we use terms as trans- or postnational, we think of overlapping and ‘hybrid’ language maps we find in premodern everyday culture. From this point of view, all manifestations and artefacts of a specific culture have, as Roland Barthes pointed out in his famous Mythologies, a secondary ‘mythical’ meaning, a connotation. And especially these connotations are crucial, very often resisting translation from one to the other symbolic space. Translation is nearly automatically but not exclusively occupied with translat-

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ing texts from one language to another, there is an open door for all disciplines that are concerned with texts to re-understand themselves as a sort of scientific discipline, which overcome the traditional undertanding of text in a philological sense. Texts have in common with other artefacts and products that they can only be read, to quote Bachmann-Medick, by means of “interpretation of strange cultural rituals, concepts of emotions and habits”. Following the perspective of Kulturwissenschaften, translation – the German word is nothing other than a metaphorical translation of the Latin words transferre and tra translatum – can be understood as a migration of words and symbolic systems, as a dynamic process as is the case with the transport of material goods, transmittance (in the case of media) or temporary or stationary migration of men and women from one geographical and symbolic space to another. And it is striking that this transfer will change all: texts, people, goods, media messages, the culture from which we depart and the cultures in which we arrive. Here, it is really of importance whether and, if so, to what extent all theses migrations leave their mark, both in the old original culture and the new culture in which we arrive. One of the central questions with regard to globalisation is to what extent all these crossing processes will change and modify the symbolic program and the cultural reality of tranditional nation-state based cultures if they become more hetereogeneous or syncretistic, or, to use a term originally coined by Michail Bachtin, hybrid. This is the discourse context of my close reading of Walter Benjamin’s essay Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers (The Task of the Translator), a text which plays an enormous role in concepts of literature and culture I would describe as deconstructionist. To some extent, this is a critical and deconstructionist reading. In a further step, I will go beyond Benjamin and Derrida and ask for the location of translating following an approach which is based on cultural analysis (a term I prefer to the slippery term Kulturwissenschaften). Here, I shall also ask for cultural asymmetry and the contextualisation of language. One of the most fascinating aspects in Benjamin’s text that has been praised as a precursor of a modern understanding of an open work of art and a new understanding of translating is its extreme fragility and inconsistency. Apparently, Benjamin pays homage to the idealistic aesthetics of a closed literary work of art. Benjamin writes: Nowhere does the reward to the recipient prove to be so productive for the understanding of a work or a genre of art (Benjamin IV, 9). But as Benjamin will show immediately after this statement, it is the translator who will change the original. And the translator is nothing other than a specific recipient. In this way, Benjamin’s text negates the traditional perspective and concept that insists on the eternal meaning of a text.

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From the very beginning, Benjamin’s essay is based on an understanding of poetry that is part of what I would call classical modernism (Cf. Derrida 1997). For Benjamin poetry is characterised by the fact that it has no manifest message. Today we would formulate this quality a little bit more cautiously. Probably we would say that arts and media can be differentiated in their cultural function in this way, that media are based and concentrate on explicit and clear messages, whereas literature is a more or less self-referential system, in which the aesthetical and semiotic aspect is inscribed. Literary texts display self-reference especially on the formal level; they speak also about themselves, they are ambiguous; they push the envelope, the boundary of language, they are linked to the unspeakable. Benjamins calls it the Unfassbare, the “Incomprehensible”. It is similar to Wittgenstein’s defintion of the mystical in his early work. The mystical is what makes you silent. Between Mallarmé’s absolute poetry on the one hand and modern media and communication on the other there are, evidently, a lot of mixtures and variations. There are literary genres of realistic literature that work with similar methods and rhetoric to historical or journalistic documentation and there is also journalism that is ambitious with regard to the use of literary and essayistic forms. We want to follow Benjamin’s argument: Literary works of art do not communicate but refer to a general boundary that cannot be overcome. This boundary is not identical with cultural or ethnic differences, but has to do with general and media sensitivities as such. They are characterised by the term das Unfassbare, the incomprehensible. It is defined negatively. The Incomprehensible is that which cannot be marked by any symbolic form (writing, language, painting etc.). In contrast to text for communicative everyday use, the translation of poetry does not transfer a concrete message or information, but something that Benjamin decribes as the “poetical”. This is what he is interested in as a translator of Baudelaire and Proust. For Benjamin, the question of whether and to what extent texts are translatable is crucial. It is really a double question; firstly it is a question of the ability of the translator, and secondly it is a question with regard to the literary work. But now it becomes evident that the function of the reader comes into play, because Benjamin poses the question whether there is at least one reader in the audience who can be seen as an adequate and able translator. There is a nobilitation of the translator. The classical translator is a reader, as is the case for a ‘media’ translator, who transfers an ‘original’ into another medium, a novel or a drama into a theatre performance, a movie or a radio drama. Being a reader first and foremost, he is in a totally different situation to the author. The adequate translator can be characterised as a border crosser, an expert with regard to the impossible frontier crossing – Benjamin refers to “das Unsagbare”, the unspeakable.

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The second question, the question to what extent the work itself allows translation is discussed in the essays much more broadly. Benjamin makes clear that translation is never mimesis, but a form in its own right. When translatability is a quality of the literary work, then it is a quality of and in the work itself. Moreover, it is a form. Therefore, it is the act of translating that brings to light a specific meaning of a literary work – especially its ambiguity. The American theorist Barbara Johnson has examined this specific problem. As an English speaker, one must decide how to translate the word “verleumden” in the first sentence of Kafka’s famous novel Der Prozess “Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben […]” (Incidentally, one has also to decide how to translate the German word “Prozeß”, which means the dynamic process as well as a court case). One American standard translation has chosen the English word traduce. By doing that, it has referred to the problem of “traducing” itself, because the Latin word has nearly the same meaning as transfer. To some extent, every translation could be seen as a traduction. Even in this bad and wooly translation we can see what Johnson calls the “defiguration of the mother tongue”. Involuntarily, the theoretical praise for a bad translation provokes the question whether such a bad translation does not imply a traduction. With regard to our topic, every cultural transfer could be interpreted as a cultural assault. From that perspective, it is nearly impossible to find a criterion for a good or a bad, an adequate or inadequate, a hegemonial or a respectful translation. At this point, there appears to be a tension between two positions that can barely be bridged: between deconstruction and traditional philology. One can describe the problematic translation of Kafka’s first sentence in Der Prozess as an interesting form of contextualisation. In a more traditional approach, the problem of an adequate understanding of the text (and also the quality of the translation) remains central. But this not only a question of philology and tradional evaluation, it is also a question with regard to the quality of tbe intercultural relationship. Like every relationship, intercultural encounters are full of the rhetoric of misunderstanding. We know that from our relationships with our partners. We are in permanent stress with regard to whether we might have understood our vis à vis wrongly. Benjamin establishes an internal and intimate correspondence between the original and the translation. Translations result from what Benjamins calls the living-on, the survival, of a work. The translation, at the beginning an act of reading, renders the reader a secondary author. It creates a posteriori of the work. And, although he has accentuated elsewhere in his text that even the best translation is meaningless for the “original”– this is the classical and idealistic perspective on the literary work – he revises this position in the further argumentation when he argues that the translation brings a certain meaning to light a posteriori that was or had been hidden before.

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To use a term of the early György Lukács, one could say that the translation is the product and producer of speaking in the terminology of cultural analysis, translation always implies an act of contextualisation. To some extent it may be a form of representation of the strange, but as the strange it is a functional element in the symbolic systems of its own culture. It is a cultural transfer from one culture to another. Classical translation from one language to the other is a specific case that is illustrative and visible. Film adaptations for example touch the problem of “translation” on the axis of different media. In contrast, classical translations can be seen as a model and a standard version of an intertextual hybrid situation that can be described as a third space. Already in Benjamin, there is the idea of an inversion of the relationship between original and translation: If it is translation that guarantees the survival of the literary work – a strong hypothesis – then there is a turn-around of the relations between both. With regard to a deconstructivist reading, one might argue that translation anticipates the original in a specific sense, because it is translation that makes the original itself. Benjamin speaks quite cautiously when he use the term “Nachreifen” (ripening after) to illustrate the process of creating a new meaning of a work through translation. This Nachreifen changes the meaning of meaning but also the understanding of the status of poetry per se. The original and the translation are related to each other in a complex dependency. This specific relationship is inscribed into the experience of translating. Translation has a specific language gesture. Benjamin insists that translation and original are completely different and to some extent incompatible. At the end, translation proves to be functional for the expression of the innermost realtionship of langauages themselves. It really cannot reveal the hidden relationship itself, it cannot produce it. But what translation is able to do is to represent this relationship in a seed, in a nucleus, in a fragment. With regard to the relationship between these two unequal poetries, Benjamin denies that there are in a mimetic relationship. It is not a relation of analogy and of a resemblance that only could be defined vaguely or superficially. Following linguistic theories since and Saussure, one could say that here is no resemblance on the level of the significants, because language is a contingent and arbitrary semiotic system. It is striking that Benjamin, in line with neo-Kantian epistemology, explicitly refers to the critique of Abbildtheorien (reproduction theories). Languages are similar to each other only with regard to their structure. Translation is based on this deeper and more decisive affinity. In this way, translation comes close to what Benjamin calls the pure or – better – absolute language, close to the point at which the nothingness of language becomes the language of nothingness, to borrow Edmond Jabé’s paradoxical formulation. Translation makes this dimension of language that was inscribed in the original

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visible, which at the same time refers to the poetic intention kat´ exochen; this is the idea of the absolute, “pure” language. From that perspective, Benjamin comes to another conclusion with regard to the task of translating. All translating is to some degree a provisional way of dealing with the strangeness that is so characteristic for the semiotic system of written or spoken language, as Ernst Cassirer recognised in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. In this work, which has certain similarities with Saussure’s ideas, Cassirer mentions the artificial symbolism of arbitrary signs, in which the content itself takes on a new character for the consciousness, since it receives a new certainty (Cassirer, 1953/1994, 17). The mysteriousness and strangeness of language marks a principal boundary of understanding. Therefore, every translation is a provisional arrangement, because the solution of the strangeness, an instantaneous and definite solution, is unachievable for human beings (Benjamin IV, 14). To use a paradoxical formulation again: Understanding can be defined only with regard to the principle strangeness of language; can only rest upon an act of non-understanding. The affinity of languages becomes ‘real’ not because of their vage similarities, but with reference to the idea of the lost, pure and absolute language. Translation is a manifestation of longing for an absolute language in the sense of Mallarmé’s absolute poetry. The more definite realm of language is the pure language, the language of truth. This kind of language does exist and does not exist. It has its representation in languages of this world. Vice versa, it has the function of integrating all languages. Thus, translation means translating something with reference to this incompatible third that cannot be translated and is utopic in all languages, a “Schein” in the sense of Ernst Bloch. There is a double and principal difference between original and translation. 1. The original is transferable and translatable in a paradoxical way, because it entails a non-translatable remainder. Content and language build a noncallable unity. In contrast, the translation is not transferable. Its content develops by itself and remains inadequate, strange and violent to the original. It implies and represents a higher language than the original itself. 2. The original is, similar to Schiller’s differentiation between naive and sentimentalist, naive, ‘erstlich’ (initial), concrete. The translation, however, is sentimalist, ‘letztlich’ (ultimate) and full of ideas and reflections. Compared with the early essay on language, which argued with the narrative of the Tower of Babel and insisted on the idea of a lost original language, Benjamin has withdrawn this Romantic figure in his later essay. Nevertheless, this idea remains an important dimension in his thinking as a border phenomon. There is no possibility of returning to a language that has never existed, but it is seen as a

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common point of reference, a tertium comparationis linking the original with the translation which proves to be necessary. This language only appears in translation. So, one could say that this is the remainder of a metaphysics of language in which there is a priori a reliable universal point of reference. This is important with regard to our topic of lingual and cultural difference. The pure or absolute language remains unaccessible; it is represented only in fragments: “Fragments of a vessel in order to be articulated together must follow one other in the smallest details although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of making itself similar to the meaning of the original, must lovingly and with attention to detail form itself according ot the manner of meaning of the original, to make them both recognisable as the broken fragments of the greater language, just as fragments are the broken part of a vessel.”¹

This quotation, which plays a central role in Homi K. Bhabha’s Location of Culture (Bhabha 1994, 170) can be better understood with a short glance to the discourses on which Benjamin’s vision is based: German Romanticism and Kabbala. The quotation, which implies a clear reference to the idea of the fragment in early German Romanticism, connects two religious narrative clusters that ultimately fit together implicitly. The first one we know from German Idealism and Romanticism, while the second can be found in the Platonic Kababalism of early modern Europe, in the Renaissance. Especially in the Kabbalistic version of Messianism, in Luria, there is a narrative plot, which begins with the Zim-Zum, with the point of absolute self-concentration. This is followed by (Schebira), the status of broken jars, and finally leads to (Tikkun), the restitution of the broken jars to a new unity. The breaking of the jars, writes Gershom Scholem, Benjamin’s companion and sometimes his opponent, “is the decisive crisis of all divine and human being […]. And therefore, all being since the primary act is a being in exile, longing for return and salvation. The breaking of the jars is continued on all levels of emanation and creation. All is broken, all is full of mistakes, all is unfinished and imperfect.“ (Scholem 1973, 150f.; own transl.)

1 “Wie nämlich Scherben eines Gefäßes, um sich zusammenfügen zu lassen, in den kleinsten Einzelheiten einander zu folgen, doch nicht zu gleichen haben, so muß anstatt dem Sinn des Originals sich ähnlich zu machen, die Übersetzung liebend vielmehr und bis ins Einzelne hinein dieser Art des Meinens in der eigenen Sprache sich umbilden, um so beide wie Scherben als Bruchstück eines Gefäßes, als Bruchstück einer größeren Sprache erkennbar zu machen.” (Benjamin IV, 18).

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Benjamin transfers this Jewish version of alienation and splitting to the level of language. The diversity, the result of the breaking of the jars, corresponds to the plurality of languages. In Benjamin, this Messianism has an open structure: what has been promised will never happen. Thus, hope remains. This is the very reason why melancholy and grievance (the subjective attitudes of a narrative of alienation and diremption in German Idealism and especially in the early writings of Marx) are to some grade annihilitated and neutralised. Entfremdung (alienation) can be seen as the best thing in the world, because being a stranger in this world and being a stranger to ourselves is a central characteristic of human existence, especially under the circumstances of modernity. It opens up the possibility of bringing the strange in the self and the self in the strange into an intellectually concrete view. This is what language makes so central. Language, which is the precondition of the possibility of translating, represents fragments of a whole, which exists only as a regulative moment, as a horizon. It is not contingent that the quotation from Benjamin’s essay plays, as I have mentioned ealier, a strategic role in Homi Bhabha’s cultural theory. With this remark we have already entered the contemporary debates in this field, in which translating is considered as a third heterogeneous space; this is also Bhabha’s own position. In this sense one also can read Benjamin’s final description of a free and at once adequate translation. As Benjamin points it out, the goal of an adequate translation can never culminate in the idea of germanising the English, the Indian and the Greek text or making the German English, Indian or Greek. The translation accentuates the strange in one’s own Self, the act of translating creates traces and represents the strange, the specifically strange, but especially the strangeness of language per se. With regard to the relation between poetry and mass culture, it might be necessary to modify Benjamin’s theory, which focuses exclusively on high literature, although it ultimately transcends classical philology and traditional literary theory. It sounds quite simple, but it is essential to mention that the overwhelming majority of texts in a globalised world are not poetic artefacts. The translation of ‘high literature’, a great topic of classical modernism, represents, in terms of quantity, only a tiny segment of world culture. But as Benjamin has demonstrated in his essay, all the definitons of translating  – representation of the strange in its various manifestations, the incomprehensible moment in language, self reference – are only adaptable for the translation of poetry, not for everyday texts. If that is true, the so-called third space can be realised only in the process of translating poetic texts in all their aspects. Only here does the strangeness of language become apparent, a strangeness which has almost nothing to do with a speific cultural difference, but is constitutive of our specific existence in this

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world, which is always interceded by semiotic systems. This aspect becomes visible at the boundaries and thresholds connecting and separating all human languages (if I have correctly understood Antonio Sousa Ribeiro’s proposal to determine Literary and Cultural Studies from the boundary.) This boundary appears in the sense of a cultural periphery, but must be located in a metaphorical sense. Ultimately this boundary can be located only at the boundary of our languages (in the sense of Wittgenstein). Language is primarily not an ethnic marked line of partition; it refers to the boundary of language per se. This seems to me to be Benjamin’s legacy. In contrast to Benjamin, one could risk the argument that many texts of our times, even literary ones in a global world, are written from the very beginning for translation, that is, globalisation is inscribed in these texts that have a multiple contextualisation. This holds true not only for authors of small langages, but also for very successful writers. This is also true of the hybrid oeuvre of Salman Rushdie or – to mention an author from Austrian literature, Dimitré Dinev’s novel Engelszungen (Angels’ tongues), a novel with a double symbolic space, communist and post-communist Bulgaria and Vienna, the West. In my view, the force of contextualisation can only be underestimated. In contrast to Benjamin, translation can be analysed as the integration and neutralisation of a specific strangeness. This brings me to a central point. I doubt it is possible to formulate a cultural theory of transfer and translation only from the perspective of the border-crossing subject, the translator. I think there is an important difference between translating and translation. I think it is important to reflect on the function of the translation itself. Like many others, Benjamin starts his phenomenology of translating from the perspective of the translator. In contrast to the primary assumption of a close literary work, it analyses this process as a paradoxical act of reception, which emerges as a second, a secondary and non-secondary work of art, a second text in another language, maybe in another media, and, I would add, in another culture. This is a double which at the same time is one. Translation is always, as Benjamin already seems to suggest, an act of adaptation, of symbolic annexation, a transfer from one culture into the other, in the aspect of time and/or space, a provisional, never absolute closure, in which the strange is integrated, adopted, becoming a part of ‘another’ culture. The cultural stranger is a representation always in our culture. The third space is therefore – this is well illustrated by the example of translating – highly provisional, fragile and limited in time. It appears in the encounters of different cultures. And such a virtual encounter is translating itself. Nevertheless, contextualisation means that the work from another culture exists especially in our culture. The hypothetical people from Sirius B, as Georg

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Simmel has pointed out, are not strangers, they have no function in our culture. Polemically speaking, the stranger is domesticated in a culture which was strange and incompatible to it at the very beginning. There is another critical point with regard to transfer research and theories of translating. I would call it the power question, which seems to have no place in literary studies. Can power and empowerment be a category of textual theories? In my view, the dark shadows of power are relevant for the understanding of transfer processes (already for translational phenomena), in which the inequality of power, wealth, respect, acknowledgement and esteem become visibile. Doris Bachmann-Medick does mention the importance of postcolonial theory in her informative introduction on the contemporary mainstreams in Cultural Studies and Cultural Theory, but at the same time, she seems to suggest that asymmetries are only exceptions from the rule. With reference to political and economic parameters, such a proposition seems to me problematic, because one can show that there are enormous asymmetries in the power position of a specific culture in political, economic and cultural terms. Especially the difference of culture demonstrates the terrible inequality of transfer processes, which can be formulated in Foucauldian questions: Who is translating? Who is translated? What is translated? What is allowed to be translated? And especially: What is not translated? For example, the multi-lingual continental represents a culture of translating. This will be supported and financed by the European Union. If you enter a German or Austrian book shop, you will find about forty percent of the publications on offer are translated books (as a rough approximation). If you go into an English or American book shop, you will find a lot of books from other countries, as long as they are English-speaking countries. All the other authors, sometimes even Noble Prize winners, are very rare; one must carefully look for them and order their books from tiny book-houses. Few large publishing houses are remotely interested in publishing authors from other languages. The small interest in non-English literature in a country with a long multi-ethnic tradition is interesting in many aspects. It has to do with the fact that cultural difference is, in contrast to Europe, not based on language. There is also an economic aspect of this kind of cultural politics: translating books is more expensive and entails a cultural risk. But this self-suffiency or ignorance is also to do with two power aspects: that the United States is still the most powerful country and that a lot of people in the world speak English. This hegemony goes hand in hand with the assertion that all relevant literature is available in the English language. What does not exist in English does not exist at all really, is periphery. Small countries very often translate many texts or their people are able to speak foreign languages. A Spanish colleague with Basque roots is planing a trans-

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lation of Thomas Bernhard’s Der Untergeher into Basque. I dare say even the title of the book will present a lot of difficulties, because the word does not really exist in German or Austrian German. It is derived from the word “Untergang” (demise, decline), but Bernhard’s neologism has a lot of other connotations (underdog; going). In contrast, some other countries, such as in the Middle East, refuse to translate Western books, especially modernist literature. They do not want to establish third spaces. They revolt against the global culture and its universal language: American English. The third language to which all is referred in a globalised world is not the mythical absolute language of poetry, not the language Benjamin and Mallarmé had in common, it is, under the circumstances of a globalised mass culture, American English, which is in some aspects the product of immigrant cultures, a good example that a culture can be hybrid and closed at the same time. I think that the hegemony of American English will have dramatic effects in the long run. Most of the larger high level languages will be pressed down to the status of regional languages that will be used in certain everyday situations, but no longer refer to the whole Lebenswelt, not to mention the fields of science, technology, computers, media, law and economy. They are no longer able to construct these fields in their own symbolic way. In contrast to a cosmopolitan vision of Weltliteratur in the sense of Goethe, most of the literature of this world is regional literature. The strange appears especially in those works in which the topic of translatability, the symbolic syncretism and migration play a remarkable role. It is no longer the figure of the cultural stranger, but the border-crossing migrant who is at the centre of our phantasies and symbolic obsessions. Benjamin’s parameter was: There is no comparative and explicit third which could work as a divine transfer agency, there was a dimension of a meta-language, but this language, to which all poetry refers, is dark, closed, not transparent, like the seven seals of Saint John on Patmos. If one leaves this assumption of a lost mythical and mystical language, then contextualisation (and that includes a certain way of assimilation) becomes a key word in cultural theory. It is a modification and moderation between different cultures and languages under asymmetric conditions. It is quite similar with stereotypification. It nearly becomes impossible to differentiate between understanding and missunderstanding. A striking example would be teaching Adorno to English graduate students using English. Incidentally, only the German-speaking teacher can be located in the socalled third space, because the majority of the students cannot read the German philosopher. It is I, who can compare the English with the German Adorno. The English Adorno is quite strange for me, he writes philosophy in an English way. Nevertheless my students had problems understanding even this English Adorno, because

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they did not konw the German context, the dialectic figure of thinking, the great narratives of German Idealism and the hidden and silent religious background, which are faded out in the translation. In contrast to Benjamin, one could argue that most texts we read from other cultures are adaptated to our cultural habits and attitudes just like Chinese food, or the the wisdom of Buddha. The misunderstanding of another culture under the presupposition of cultural asymmetry is probably the precondition for our understanding of it within our own cultural horizon. The heterogeneity which appears in the process of translating and also in the text, which itself has the character of a translation is never stable. Cultures are not only open, but have a tendency of closing themselves. In this way, they produce homogeneity, which may be illusionary, but is effective at the same time. The idea that culture is only liquid, in process and hybrid, this utopia which is formulated against the old essential conception of culturalism, is problematic in itself. It is based on the idea of a permanent revolution of culture. It includes an unspoken utopia in some versions of contemporary Kulturwissenschaften and Fine Arts. To come back to my central point: It makes a great difference if one decribes or analyses the process of translating and cultural transfer from the perspective of the actors, the translaters and transport people or if one also considers the majority of people who only read and receive the translated text, the strangeness of which is neutralised, not as a result of ill will, but as part of the logic of transfer and translation itself. It is now presentable in another culture. Surely, translating is a process of opening to the strange and to strangeness as such; but it has the result of this translation process is that the strange disappears altogether. Only if we are able to act as translators, we are in the position, Benjamin has analysed. In this respect, the half-hearted insistance on multilingualism as proposed by the EU has a positive aspect. Perhaps it has a symbolic benefit in the sense of Benjamin’s insight: the insight into the strangeness of language, into the contingency of our own specific culture, or habits, ambitions and attitudes. The real strange is far away from the ethnic strange. As Husserl’s Phenomenology and Freud’s Psychoanalysis has taught us, this real strange is beyond linguistic, ethnic, religiuous and sexual differences. We must cross these borders to attain to the strangeness of language which is the topic of poetry, or more cautiously of a certain type of poetry: the incomprehensible, which becomes visible when language comes to a principal boundary: in poetry.

The Arts and the Split of Time On Kawara I. From the Churchfather to the mysticism of a motorbike St. Augustine was a man ahead of his contemporaries. As such, Augustine exists twice: firstly as the canonised Church Father, and, secondly, as an early modern subject. Augustine’s modernity is due to the radical way in which he experienced time, in particular the split in and of time. Whereas he was programmatically more or less a traditional theorist of memory who interpreted it as a static space, a storage room, as a library (Augustinus 1987, 505ff; Yates 1966, ch. 2), he became a theorist of time who got entangled in a web of paradoxes. He felt uncomfortable with the sudden, uncanny closeness of his own youth. The child and the young man he has been were near and far away at once. This split in time went hand in hand with a break in his identity producing a feeling of unreality. He found it hard to believe and to imagine that one has been this young human being. And that the converted Christian Augustine lived in another symbolic order than the young Gnostic and successful classical rhetorician he had been years ago. The Eleventh book of Augustine’s Confessions is justly famous. Here, the Churchfather formulated all the experiences that later became fundamental in modernist thought, literature and the arts. The split of time produces a lot of paradoxes, among other things tha we seem to know what time is, as long as we do not contemplate it. The being of time can be characterised by the postulate that time is not. Time responds to the classical philosophical question of its existence ambiguously. Its being is defined by the fact that it denies the question of its existence. We never are really just in time. The present is never present and available, and when it is presented, it is no longer present. The past, however, is not, because it is no longer present, but the result of a construction of a present which in itself is fleeting. For Augustine, time dissolves in an unstable, fluid state of recollecting, presenting and foreseeing. With regard to this experience of presence and recalling, we always come too late. (Augustinus 1987, 601–701; Corradini 1997) This unchangeable dynamic of difference, as Augustine has described it, has become central for Heidegger’s philosophy and also for Derrida’s concept of differance. (Derrida 1967) Modern arts can be seen as the heroic attempt to bridge the split of time. In literature and in the arts, what is impossible in life, seems possible: to generate an accord between the event and the act of presence and presentation. It becomes the decisive intention of many artists to fix this impos-

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sible moment and thus bridge the existential abyss of time. This moment, which proves to be an act of spontaneity in the Lebenswelt, in which time is experienced as a moment, lies as much at the core of the desire displayed by Ulrich, Musil’s hero in the Man without Qualities, to grasp the mysticism of a motorbike as it also is present Futurisms programmatic obsession with time. Here, speed was not only mimetically captured in pictures; In the acceleration the split of time seems to have been minimised in a way that made the epiphany of the moment possible. Kandinsky’s abstract brushstroke represents mimetically this experience of a now which seemed to be without a beginning. The off-spring is radical presence in which the split of time seemed to be suspended. Similarly, the overthrow of traditional patterns of storytelling in moderist literature can be related to artist’s work on the split of time. That overthrow tied in with a deeply felt longing for being just in time. It refannounced the experiment of running and moving around with a video camera all day that records everything; the contingent issues in pure presence or the novel in real time which makes possible what is impossible in real life: to fix the inner stream of un/consciousness in an act of automatic writing. James Joyce was obsessed as were the French Surrealists. Their streams of un/consciousness and writing nestled against the continuity of time. In a process of depicting and presenting a dynamic mimetic act, the stream generated the design of modern subjectivity and provided it with evidence. It left behind the old-fashioned, unhurried construction of time in traditional narratives wherein the story of life starts from a hidden retrospective time of story telling and ends in the harbour of a happy ending in which the hero finds his or her identity. In so doing, modernist literature also parted ways with Augustine. The linear and retrospective concept of organising time and identity had provided Saint Augustine with the solution to his problem of integrating the irritating past. It embedded the irritating experience of discontinuity in time and person into a calming narrative which dissolved the disturbances of his life story: a story of misdemeanour and transgression, error and conversion and growing religious education. The single moments were connected like the elements of a chain. Retrospectively, time seems to be calming and continuous. With it came a teleology that connected the single episodes of life in life as whole. This is the traditional aspect in Augustine’s writing. His self-description based on making a difference between the time of events and the time of storytelling, then became a prototype of occidental identity construction, which would not be possible without the idea of a duration of time constructed by a traditional narrative. Rousseau’s Confessions might well be in contrast to Augustine’s, inasmuch as Rousseau favoured the idea of an essentially innocent childhood and human nature over the concept of original sin. Augustine dissolved and confirmed the alienation between the

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adult storyteller and his being as child in his life story when he insisted that the crying egotistic brat he once was had always already lived under the curse of original sin. In this respect, Rousseau is the Anti-Augustine. In his autobiographical narrative, innocent childhood proved to be the vanishing point of his critique of society. However, the matrix of his narrative with its linear structure of leitmotif (teleology and progression) had not changed. In the end, the truth was still revealed, the truth about the individual in the sense of an Aristotelian entelechia, with an inner kernel that had been dormant, coming to the fore only against the repressive structure of society. This mode of symbolic self-assurance was denied in the modernist and postmodernist arts. Partly, their pathos has to do with the programmatic belief that it wass impossible to mend the split of time by using a retrospective concept of continuity and linearity. What they create instead is evidence: I feel myself just in this moment, therefore so I am, fragmented and punctual, created by the moment. The dissolving of continuity in time and the deconstruction of a substantial subject were the two sides of the same coin. The was the message of Mach and Bergson, the most famous philosophers besides Nietzsche at the end of the 19th century: The I is hopelessly lost, because the traditional narrative construction of time has been cancelled. Nietzsche’s critique of the historical human being and his praise of the timeless moment have anticipated these ideas. As the modernist fine arts dissolved the Euclidean realm, the literature of the avant-garde destroyed the continuity of time and the classical strategies of storytelling. Nevertheless, this work of dissolution and emancipation from tradition remained linked with the continuing aesthetic desire to overcome the abyss between life and the arts. This, of course, had earlier been the pivotal point in early German Romanticism. The fascination with life and the élan vital had to do with the aim of suspending in modern aesthetic experience, in the act of production as well as in the act of perception. The aim was a form of presence which is radically absent-minded and in which present did not become part of present recalling and recollecting, a state of forgetting: the present and/or the past, until presence alone remained. Something similar happened in modernist literature when and where the present totally disappeared and were eclipsed by an obsession for recollecting. As one can show in Proust and Benjamin (Berliner Kindheit), the construction of time in modernism also changed wth the act of remembering. It their work we no longer encounter the calm, relaxed and confident retrospective from a fixed position in which the distance between once and today remains clear and dominant. Instead, recollecting here becomes radically subjective, an effect of the desire, to recall the past radically. The difference in time disappears in the act of recalling the past into presence and and every other dimension of time disappears. What is

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recollected is to be immediately and authentically present: in this moment, now. The theatre of the past is broadcast as if it were live: as an event just now. This is the profane side of modern mysticism. Marcel Proust’s magnum opus is not only a search for the lost time, a gigantic symbolic machinery of remembering, but also a text which heads for presence. It starts with the radical recalling of childhood that becomes present as a result of a tiger-leap (Benjamin). It represents a form of recollecting that does not primarily refer to events and episodes but to the construction and the emotional background of those events themselves. The present, lost time is constructed in a way that aims to evoke the subjective experience of the past in the here and now: by the smell of madeleine at the aunt’s, in the pain at being sent to bed without the mother’s goodnight kiss, in the iconography of the church, in the journey into the summer holidays etc. This attempt to remember the past presupposes a forgetting of the present as the time of storytelling. To imagine oneself as a child, it is necessary to forget that one is an adult. In addition, this construction requires the horizon of being an adult, because childhood, simultaneously, is but a construction of adults. Benjamin, for example, excessively used the constructed glance of the astonished child that feels that the world is strange, and this is not only in recollection of his own childhood in Berlin about 1900 – from the Anhalt railway station (whose name the young Benjamin associated with anhalten, to stop) to the ornaments of the fin de siècle, but also in his famous and unfinished Passagenwerk. The glance of the child is the simulated perspective of a secondary observer who is unfamiliar with the self-evidence of a culture created by grownups. Benjamin’s concept tries to deny a procedure Theodor Lessing, a philosopher of German Expressionism, has called the “sense-making of the senseless”, the transformation of previous events by the following ones (Lessing 1919, 15). The smell of cookies in Proust or the scent of mother’s womb in Musil’s early novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß have no meaning in a strong and determining sense: both are to some extent contingent and at once formative because of their emotional density. When the time of recollecting and the perspective of the adult (which is linked to it) are deleted, literature is no longer obliged to construct a fix identity and meaning, and can only referres to the pathos of presented experiences, which becomes the only grounds for making of modern existence selfevident. Contingency and surplus of meaning, thus, were implied and intended. To live truely, meant to display a systematic distrust of the idea and attempt to cover up the split of time by using traditional narrative constructions. Yet at the same time, one could only carry on writing and storytelling. Looking at the West with a non-occidental background, the post-1945 Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara was soon to show that there are still other, far more radical ways to reflect on modern time.

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II. Diarising and the empty homogenous time or Monks from Saint Gall and a Japanese artist after 1945 Jonathan Watkins remarks in his books about On Kawara that the “production of a Date Painting is a diarising activity” (Watkins 2002, 54). Kawara’s, then, can be understood as a kind of diary, the diary of a painter, a diary consisting of paintings and montages. But it is not the diary of a painter who paints and writes a diary as a commentary on his oeuvre. Instead, his oeuvre itself is the diary with Date paintings (literally, paintings depicting dates, see figure) and similar works and series on the axis of time: registrations of getting-up, registers of person, daily telegrams. The result is a sort of ego-document, an ego-document with a very specific and unique experimental background. It is a subjective, personal and intimate manifestation which voiceses – this is at least the rough idea – the artist’s individual utopia of living in the presence of global time. A diary contains a number of entries (reflections, reports, observations) that might be interesting for remembering in the future. It establishes a symbolic realm for a later time. At the same time it marks the artist’s own time but not a posteriori, from a later point of view, but from present time. There is pathos of objective documentation of life in the concept of a diarising activity, although it is – against the phantasma of the total documentation of ones own life – impossible to depict all aspects of our whole live, seventy or eighty years, in the way James Joyce’s novel depicts the internal life of Leopold Blum over twenty-four hours. One always selectively selects events, public and private. Lichtenberg did so in his Sudelbüchern, or Bert Brecht in his Arbeitsjournal (working journal), where he also integrated journalistic material. So does On Kawara in his Date paintings. In addition, there is a further restriction of this objectivity: One cannot influence how the (synchronic) entry on a specific day will be recollected afterwards. Although we look at Kawara’s date painting from 28th December 1972, created in Sweden, the painting (that is, the interpretative avenues and approaches available today) has irrevocably changed because of the time gap of thirty years. When Kawara made his entries about the war in Vietnam or about the flight to the moon (lunar mission), he did so against a contemporary horizon or a narrative matrix from a synchronous perspective. Today, however, three decades on, we may well link them to our own situation today: the war in Iraq and its consquences, the mission to Mars. It is the entry of the date that makes it possible afterwards to recollect not only the events  – the common spaghetti-meal with the children or the moon landing  – but also how they were experienced at that time. In other words, Kawara’s entries to an extent can be understood as historical sources, as keys opening a door onto how people experienced the world 1972. Thus we gain a unique access to the symbolic meaning of eating spaghetti (which might well have been very different from

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today) or what Kawara and his contemporaries like the Austrian Philosopher Günther Anders who dealt with the same topics as Kawara – Hiroshima, Vietnam, moon-landing  – thought about the dramatic view offered from the Moon onto the Blue Planet. Hence, Kawara’s quote of a Russian astrophysicist: “Time is thin around the cause and dense around the effect” (Watkins 2002, 79). This sentence may also be true for Kawara’s own project. Diaries, chronicles, notebooks, collections of fragments, commentaries and aphorisms form a family of texts, a genre. Common to them all is that they depict neither the subject nor the world as such, but rather the relationship between the subject and his or her world. By focussing on this relationship, it becomes evident that subject and world are not  – as in the traditional philosophical epistemology – independent entities which one can unproblematically link to each other. Both exist only in relation to each other. A subject is a subject only when related to the world, whereas the world only exists when it is symbolised by subjects. So, all forms of what I would term the essayistic genre (including diaries, chronicles, notebooks, collections of fragments) are subjective documents of modern worldparticipation. Time, as a cultural construct, is an essential aspect of being in the world, thin in the cause, yet dense in the effect. Essayistic forms, by consequence, tend to refer to time because they reflect the condition of life and experiences in modern times. (Müller-Funk 1995, 21–39) The diary is a very specific kind of text and genre (Dusini 2005, 43–77). It is the only type of text, in which the entry in the notebook, this symbolic machinery for future recollection, is linked with a specific date. But as the history of time shows, time is not a natural pre-condition of thinking; it is not a natural phenomenon at all. The firmament above us, sun and moon, sunrise and sunset, seasons and natural cycles, all those phenomena were relevant for the invention of time, but they achieve this relevance only with regard to human beings observing and measuring the regularities of change and motion. Here, it is important not only that different cultures have different dates, calendars, years and days. Yet it is equally important, that modern Western culture has created a project of radical time-making and temporalisation (transformation of occurrences into time-coded events). What is more, its principle unit of accounting lies at the heart of every diary – written or painted –: the day. Only as a result of occidental temporalisation, the day has become the important and relevant unit of events that is occurences, which take place in a certain precise unit of time. The author/s of the famous Annals of Saint Gall for instance, still fixed events in the unit of the year. In contrast with our time, there is not even an entry for every year, because  – that is the standard interpretation  – of a lack of events worth wile recording:

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709. Hard winter. Duke Gottfried died. 710. Hard Year and deficient in crops 711. 712. Flood everywhere 713. 714. Pippin, mayor of the palace died. (White 1987, 6) As a result of temporalisation, the day subsequently became increasingly relevant as the unit of counting time, because it can be cut in exact pieces of hours by using new methods of time organisation and time measurement. Historians dare say that it was the institution of the monastery that first developed a time regime and thus made it possible to organise the day in a way that entries such as the following became possible: 3 January 1970: “A large tropical bird, the casquet hornbill, that eluded nets and tranquilizer in New York, was netted on a penthouse ledge at 710 Park Avenue, near 70th Street, about 3.40 p.m. today.” (Watkins 2002, 89) The event can be fixed to a singular moment in time, to a precise date. And only because of this, it becomes an event in the strong sense of the word. The monks, by contrast, lived with a completely different way of thinking and accounting for time which Benedict Anderson following Erich Auerbach has called an overtime simultaneity. (Anderson [1983] 1996, 33) Everything that has happened is part of and the same eternity at every time. By contrast, the (post-) modernist artist lives in a symbolic world in which time is empty and homogenous. Their time is linear and measurable, exactly –, with terrible exactitude. The medium is the message: the medium of the monks in St. Gallen was a chronicle which was based on a closed time circuit in which there could be no difference between cosmos, the bible and history. Kawara’s medium is the newspaper, a medium, which allows synchronicity of events which have no real relation to each other. Thus, Kawara’s way of differs from the annals of Saint Gall in many ways, but coincides with the latter in a single way: In the seemingly objective, indifferent gesture of the contemporary observer there is an evident lack of subjectivity. Yet whereas the pre-modern chronicler (who had no idea or programmatic concept about individuality and the emptiness of modern times) was unable to note personal interests in a personal commentary trying to understand and reflect upon the events, the post-modern Date-painter can, but in so doing he depicts and constructs a life in a labyrinth of contingent events that do not seem which do, nevertheless, not seem to show any obvious link to his person a life after the humanistic concept of individuality. His aesthetic experience thereby succeeds that of classical modernism and classical essayism, from Valéry to

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Adorno. Every diary needs – at least as a dimension of its reception, reflection or symbolisation – a reference to a reality outside, which transcends the subject as such. Both the entries in the annals and the Date paintings are related to those events. To the author/s in St. Gall, the world outside was self-evident including his or their subjectivity which only have been embedded in a unified cosmos; for the post-modern Date-painter there is no self-evidence neither with regard to the world nor to the subject. Here, subjectivity is reduced to the act of painting itself. In this sense Kawara is the heir of that particular type of classical modernism. Whereas the monk had no idea on essayism, because he did not know that the world was in a complex way his own construction, the Date painter deconstructs the idea of essayism, and thus cancels the idea of classical participation, nevertheless maintaining the idea of living experimentally and artificially. He organises his life according to modern time organisation and intends at least virtually to be subject to the modern time regime as much as the monk in the monastery was subject of the strict order of time kept in the his convent. In contrast, Kawara’s aesthetic experiment of painting time is an effort to meditate on the indifference of modern time. The medium Kawara prefers in his Date paintings is the newspaper which structurally does not know a first and a last day. The newspaper, German Die Zeitung (etymologically derived from Zeit, time) as a cultural invention has two preconditions that went hand in hand: printing and time management. The first newspapers were not daily newspapers but published every fortnight or every month. The daily newspaper was the first modern medium that delivered the events in the unit of one and the same day. Structurally, it promoted its readers to commentators of the newspaper on the day, and this is what Kawara, too, came to realise to the full, it seems, especially in his Date paintings between 1966 and 1972. Time makes two things measurable: it gives every reported event a fixed date and makes it possible to reduce individuals’ lives to an enormous sum of days, as Jonathan Watkins has pointed out: On Kawara has painted over two thousand Date Paintings since he began the Today Series on 4 January 1966. He calculates that he has spent more than three years actually in the process of making these painted canvases, deliberately, not incidentally, marking the time required. There are not only the artist’s journals recording the annual production of the Date paintings, but also a 100 Year Calendar with coloured dots indicating the days on which Date paintings were made. […] In the case of the Calendar, we are also made aware of the number of days that have passed since the artist was born – dotted yellow – approximately 25,000 at the time of this books’ publication, and so these are being enumerated too. (Watkins 2002, 55)

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This phantasm of exact self-documentation leads to some strange issues. Taken to the limits of its possibilities it informs the reader of Lichtenberg’s note books on how often the author had sex. In the case of Schnitzler’s diaries, the reader is informed about the (enormous) number of sex partners. A certain amount of statistics is inevitable, at it is written into the logic of diarising, of diary-accounting. Kawara’s idea of counting his paintings as he did with the days of his life is a late response to that idea of accounting. But here, the accounting is reduced to the numeric unity, the times of day since his birth, the time of the begin of his diary of paintings. Perhaps because his work is less informed by the Christian tradition, his practice does not involve confession, but simply points to the phantasm of documentation. Concentration on the pure numbers of days suggests that Kawara’s Date Painting version of essayism is based on the experience of contingency. The same is true of the immense mass of events that are written into his project. A game of Monopoly and the elections in India are connected only by the symbolically empty order of time. Developments in the construction of time measuring and the modern economy historically go hand in hand. I do not refer to the simple but historically very important aspect that it becomes decisive to have money at the right moment to be able to start economic or other projects. The whole system of loan and interest is based on the connection between time and money, on the possibility of earning money because of the differences of or in time: days, years, months. What I find more important, however, is how economic and religious motifs became inextricably linked and intertwined. The diaries are conceptualised in analogy to accounts. At the same time these books as for example Lichtenberg Sudelbücher (literally “rough books” or “scratch pads”) represent a specific form of accounting. The diarist is a person obsessed with the idea of creating a balance sheet of his or her life. So he or she is forced to continue with the never ending job of life-accounting. The limit is only reached only when life would be transformed into pure life-accounting, into date-writing or date-painting, and life and the arts would subsequently be reduced to an act of sheer self-referencing. In occidental culture, this kind of modern subjectivity is a secularised version of the Christian God, who knows and sees all, but has nothing to do after the creation of his toyworld. There is no escape from this man. Ego-documents like diaries or notebooks in the Lichtenbergian style can be seen as modern forms of confessions. The diary, this letter which usually has no explicit or personal addressee – although there may be an implicit one as in Augustine (God), in Montaigne (the dead friend) or in Lichtenberg (his mother; Müller-Funk 1995)  –, obeys a very specific order of time. Whereas all forms of autobiography and memoir reconstruct the lost time of life, maintaining it in a retrospective narrative, the diary suggests the idea of simultaneity. As I have argued, a date is given by man. Time

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is a construct, not reality in a natural sense, but a construction as Novalis, one of the most radical essayists, already pointed out in Fragments and Studies until 1797 (one of his collections which was written day by day): “We cannot think away time, because time is really the condition of a thinking being – time only ends with thinking. Thinking out of time is nonsense.” (Novalis 1981, 312, own translation) Thus, the I am still alive telegrams (or the I got up postcards) which Kawara sent to his friends since 1970 in addition to the processing work of Date-painting are an ironic response to Descartes (and nearly all aesthetic modernism is a response to Descartes’ philosophical rationalism)) (Kusina 2005), but self-reflection is at the same time a necessary cornerstone for the paradoxes of his project. Awareness of being in the world. The self-reflection of being in the world and in time generates inter-subjectivity. The idea of self-reflection depends on the presence of the Other as the third instance. This Other must not be a personal addressee, although Kawara uses some friends as addressees for his telegrams, these forerunners of fax and e-mail. The Other is the one who lives just in time with the writer, the artist, because s/he uses the same medium. S/he confirms the existence of the time we culturally share with others through culture. It is the newspaper or any other possible modern medium that represents this Other, who lives in the same uniform and homogenized symbolic world. S/he is the profane version of the transcendental Other who was imagined to know everything beyond time and space. The newspaper is, as Hegel already pointed out, the Morning Prayer of modern times. It is the centre of a mass ceremony which is exercised privately in the lion’s den of the head (Eisenstein). Thus, artists like Kawara are related to the medium and to the modern community of this secular Morning Prayer as commentators who make explicit what is usually implicit and self-evident: the modern world of media, the regime of time and dates. Significantly, it would appear that each letter, including the one which arrives hours or years after the writer’s death, includes the message of being alive. I dare say, that in Kawara it is linked with the traumatic event of Hiroshima: The plot of his artwork is really the monotonous sentence of one who survived: I am still alive. There were of course modernist authors (like Kafka, Beckett, Thomas Bernhard and Jabés) who wrote to live and survive. So, the very message of the telegrams might be – despite their sarcastic and ironic monotony – quite humorous when he looks into the abyss of time, as in his 1999 One million years. Past and future from 998031 BC to 1969 AD, and from 1993 AD to 1000192 AD (Kawara 2002). But there is another old utopia from the very beginning of the avant-garde whose late heir Kawara undoubtedly has become: the idea of uniting life and the arts.

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III. Romanticism and hope: Beyond utopia In a very laconic way, essayism can be defined as a form of thinking in time not within the framework of traditional academic philosophy but rather in the medium of literature and the arts. Essayism is the impossible third between traditional philosophy and traditional arts. But it is not only a way of thinking but also a way of living. In Musil’s famous Novel Man without Qualities the protagonist proposes to his cousin Diotima living as if in a novel, that means living only the important and essential, transforming life into art. (Musil 1979, 573) The German Romantic Friedrich Schlegel depicted this proto-avant-garde idea in his famous 116th Athenäum-Fragment, when he characterised the new Romantic movement as follows: Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. Its goal and destination is not merely to unify all the separated genres of poetry and to bring poetry in contact with philosophy and rhetoric. It will also and shall once mingle or once melt together poetry and prose, genius and critique, poetry of the arts and poetry of nature. It will and shall make poetry living and social and life and society poetic. (Friedrich Schlegel 1972, 37, own translation)

This is a concept of reciprocal emotional charging: it implies an emotional charging of the arts, which become élan vital by integrating life and the charging of life which becomes important through its being constructed like a work of art. But the result of Romanticism, avant-garde and trans-avant-garde is not authentic life, but new forms of fine art now further differentiated as a system in modern society The idea of an aesthetically grounded life especially in the postmodern western world has become quite influential, even though it is reduced to the idea of simple design and the right style of self-presentation. The concept of melting life and the arts also creates a new bohemian and, later, a moderate form of post-bohemian lifestyle in the arts itself, at least a lifestyle for the artists and their surroundings. Undoubtedly, Kawara can be seen as an ascetic successor of Schlegel’s project. His experimental work is a part of that project which further includes the ready-made. There is a mixture of reflection and philosophy: existentialism, a bit of esoteric speculation and the link to the contemporary networks of the avantgarde in Japan and the United States. There is also a mixture of aesthetic media: pictograms, icons, writing and painting. All of these are brought together into the same semiotic realm. But more importantly, the Date paintings refer to the artist as such. Travelling all around the world – a major topic in post-modern cultural studies  –, the artist organised his daily life and occupation by Date paintings charting events that are political because they are events in media that are media of time. Kawara organises his life as a contemporary and thus his art as contemporary art, an art just in time. His diarising changes his own life and transforms

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the artist into a living work of art. And vice versa his series of works of art become living because of the manifestation of an irritated ego that sends telegrams with the message I am still alive or postcards stating I got up (including the exact time of such events) from 1968 to 1979.¹ Yet as others before, Kawara brings his own variant of the concept of unifying art and life. There is no longer an emphasis on the power of synthetis the German Romantics liked so much. Instead, one is confronted with an asymmetry between the subjective and the objective aspects, between the spaghetti and the atomic bomb. The importance of the events outside does not really correspond with daily life. As far as I can see, Kawara brings no project for the future. All the unforeseen events he enters into his journal of Date paintings refer to (two) the traumatic event: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This marks a critical moment in human civilisation. The bomb and Vietnam are events which permanently point to human disaster. To borrow from Günther Anders, a leftist follower Heidegger’s, Kawara’s narrative plot has a post-human perspective: It refers to a possible world without man (Anders 1981, 1–10), but also a possible world of man without world (Anders 1984). The first aspect is the result of the possible power of real destruction, the second ties in with the fact that such power transcends the possibility of understanding. A world with links to a participating subject means a world of meaning and symbolic forms. As observers of Kawara’s painting, we are not forced to think that this disaster has already become real, but that there is a strong tendency in the world to overcome the human measure. Essayism has always been a symptom of crisis: the cruel religious wars in Montaigne, the French Revolution and its perversion in the case of the German Romantics, the crisis of the modernist world and the breakdown of the Habsburg Empire in Musil. With regard to those diarists and essayists, Kawara’s work has a moment of radical outdoing and triumph. In contrast to most literary diarising works, his Date painting has a specific form of presence and presentation. Usually, diaries and notebooks are published long after their genesis, after after their date of production and reference. Hence, there is a clear difference of time between coding and decoding, between production and reception. On Kawara’s telegrams programmatically make clear that the event, the entry and the reading could happen on the same day as the telegram programmatically makes clear. The internet today can establish such a real-time. It reveals a new subject after the end of the

1 On Kawara, Date paintings – Today Series (Audio), Museum Ludwig, Köln-Episode 252440. http://www.podcast.de/episode/252440/130 %2B-%2BOn%2BKawara%253A%2BDate%2BPai ntings%2B-%2BToday%2BSeries (last accessed 21.06.2009).

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classic subject which announces that I am here and still alive just in time referred to the universal diary of the modern media complex. For clarity, the term postmodernism does not only indicate a time after modernism, but also an advance, a reflection on its predecessor. The fantasy of bridging the split of time is written into modern computer software. To some extent, Kawara’s paintings follow a postmodern ethic (in a Lyotardian sense), an ethic of defence and irony (Lyotard 1993). Yet the outfit of the work is both offensive and playful. The Date Paintings can be decoded – like many predecessors – as exercises in modern contingency which nevertheless have a fix objective reference as in traditional forms of ego-documents: the irritating experience of destruction symbolised by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dimension of an end of the world in an endless series of entries day by day. “Recently the notion of humanity has been threatened by matter. In daily life I feel this every moment. Political and economic anxieties overwhelm individuals.” (Kawara 1955 in Watkins 2002, 42) There is no (traditional) utopia of a better world in Kawara; but there is a hope. As in every diary, his entries establish a system of signs for remembering – not just now; but also later on. Thus, they presuppose subjects after the end of the traditional subject who are able and willing to read the message. It is not only the ironic and non – ironic message I am still alive but also the narrative tableau of spaghetti-eating children, which includes hope and consolation face to face with modern events which transcends the homogenous time: the Shoah, the possibility of collective human self-destruction on many levels from the bomb to genetic engineering.

Postscript Kawara’s œuvre holds a spatial element too that becomes striking in the era of so-called globalisation (Featherstone 1990; Appadurai 1996). Sending telegrams from all over the world from abroad to home and vice versa his works document an act of constant travel. Kawara is a virtual as well as a real traveller who dwell through global space. Perhaps because of that he represents a new type of artist whose self-understanding is no longer restricted to his homeland. He is global, or better, a universal symbolic player. The same is true for his adressees, who come to form an audience no longer restricted by spatial barriers. One could also describe his journey from East to West and back, from West to East, as a narrative about the avant-garde and modernism, as a journey into Western time, because the split between subjective and objective time is the result of “our” Western culture. This split changed the world dramatically: Industrialisation, speed, traffic, capitalism, the dynamic of moderm war and peace. As such

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Kawara’s travelling is also a form of productive appropriation, an adaptation and contextualisation of Western time and – because of that – of Western modernism and the avant-garde. The latter, after all, arose thanks to the invention of modern time in Western, Eurpean culture, and aimed for either an imaginary return to the time before time, or an imagined advance to a time beyond time.

Part 3 The Heritage of Classical Modernism: Broch, Canetti, Musil, Kafka

The Disappearing of Ruins Thomas Glavinic’s The Work of the Night and an Imaginary Symposium with Benjamin, Simmel, Freud and Foucault I. In one of the most successful Austrian novels of recent years, The Work of the Night, the reader is led into an empty urban space (Glavinic 2006, 7f) that is quite clearly marked as Vienna. Jonas, the main and only ‘real’ figure in Thomas Glavinic’s novel wakes up one morning and realises step by step that he is alone in the twentieth district, alone in Vienna, in Austria, alone in the neighbouring countries. Immediately before the end of the novel, he drives to England to find traces of his beloved, who had visited her sister in the UK a couple of days earlier. All modern digital technology and all media of communication and information no longer work. In this nightmare, there is one invisible hand which has switched off all social life in the urban space of Vienna. Vienna is imagined as a ruin, but not as a ruin in a traditional sense. All buildings and traditional structures (including electricity and light) are in normal condition, there are no images of material destruction. Moreover, at the beginning of the novel, electricity still works and he can make use of all the empty cars to realise that he is now living alone in an empty social space. What is ruined is the social space. As the author points out in an interview, he is interested in creating a city, an urban space through literature. On his website www.thomas-glavinic.de/thomas-glavinic, the user can use a podcast and wander through the empty urban space of Vienna, the social ruin. The novel may also be seen as anticipation in the sense of the future perfect. It is a conception of the future as as the present perfect. With a short glance to the topic of the conference, one may ask whether this perspective is typical for the cultural space we describe as Central Europe, referring for example to the tradition of Fin de Siècle and decadence. For the meaning of this “fin, this end, is ambiguous. It means that the people has the characteristic quality of seeing the end of a cultural period or an epoch at the very moment this social and cultural space seems to be alive, vivid, full of actions, emotions and passions. But the phenomenon of the ruin in a general way is also linked with the fascination with the end. Or as in a famous song of the Doors as prophecy: This is the end, my only friend.

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II. Discussing the obsession with this kind of imagination, let’s organise an imaginary symposium with a few prominent guests, Walther Bejamin, Sigmund Freud, Georg Simmel and Michel Foucault. At first glance, Benjamin’s contribution may be quite short, but it is remarkable, impressive and striking. In his essay Paris, the Capital of Nineteenth Century (which was at the same time a draft of his Passagenwerk), Benjamin presents and interprets the figure of the flaneur, created by Charles Baudelaire, a person with a specific habit, a habit noir, a “habitus” in the sense of Pierre Bourdieu (Benjamin 1982, 54–56, 69–72). He is a male figure of and at the threshold, in between the past and the future, but also beyond the social classes. He is not a participant of the new capitalist market in the urban space, because he has not got the real capital to be a player in that game. He constructs the city as an aesthetic phenomenon. Once again and for the last time, his imagination makes visible the architecture of pre-modern Paris hidden behind the surface of the glittering world of the modern economy, the passages. This is one aspect. But there is another one, in the sense of Glavinic’s novel. One can see the future that transforms the present time into the past. This is the heyday of the future perfect, the second future (to use a word for word translation of the German term). As Benjamin points out, it was Balzac who first used the metaphor of the ruins of the bourgeosie. Surrealism has radicalised this perspective (Benjamin 1982, 59). In its imagination, we can see the contemporary urban space as a destroyed area, a world in ruins. In Benjamin, the first glance, from present time into time past, has a melancholy aspect. You see the Old Paris in decline, the Paris of Baudelaiare’s poems, or the Old Vienna in some of Stifter’s or Saar’s stories. This is the Vienna before the Vienna of the Ringstraße: the medieval town with the castle, the labyrinth of small lanes and old houses and the town wall instead today’s famous “ring”. In contrast to Paris, Vienna has maintained its self-image as an old town for a long time, and one could say it represents the paradoxical phenomenon of an urban space where – to some extent – the ruins are recycled, materially and symbolically. So in contrast to Saar’s perception, the Viennese Ringstraße very soon gained the aura of an historical urban space (Müller-Funk 2009, 109). From a symbolical perspective Vienna has traditionally been seen after 1918 as a place of melancholy and nostalgia. Altough it still exists, the modern architecture of the Ringstraße has changed its meaning radically. It has been transformed into a monumental historical piece, into a symbolical ruin, because it no longer represents the world they originally did: the Austrian Empire. Now they refer to a political and symbolical space that has vanished.

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In contrast to this perspective, which goes hand in hand with an inevitable end and destruction of a social and cultural world, the view into the future, in which presence (or the present) is transformed immediately into the perfect, has got clearly an optimistic dimension. It is the triumphant feeling of overcoming the bad aspects of the present in the name of a better future. This is the narrative employment of the political and aesthetic avant-gardes of the 1920s. I think what is typical of Benjamin’s theoretical attitude is that he is ambivalent. He is melancholical empathy with the aristocratic and conservative poet Baudelaire on the one hand and he tries to back and share the utopian and revolutionary dreams of the culturalist leftists (such as the Surrealists) or avant-gardes on the other, who had the Neronian dream of burning libraries, academies and towns.

III. Our next speaker is Georg Simmel, who wrote that wonderful short essay on ruins that can be read as a cornerstone of cultural analysis. Simmel too is ambivalent, but he is different to Benjamin (and like him not ambivalent in a Freudian sense that describes a love-hate-relationship in an intimate context, which is unavoidable especially for the child). One could reduce Simmel’s problem to the most crucial point: Why are ruins so fascinating if they neutralise all human efforts to establish a sustainable cultural space in a metaphorical but also in an non-metaphorical sense? As many cultural theorists before the linguistic turn (especially in the German-speaking realm), Simmel operates with the binary opposition of nature  – culture. It is architecture that represents a fragile balance between nature and culture, between form and intention on the one hand and the power of nature and time on the other. If a building tumbles down, this balance is broken and the superiority of nature appears. The ruin can also be interpreted as the revenge of a nature that shakes off the human yoke. As the ‘work’ of nature, for example the ‘works’ of wind and weather, demonstrate, “the works of man are vain trumpery” (Lucretius). A semiotic commentary on Simmel’s lecture in my imaginary symposium may add that there is a strong semiotic aspect in this phenomenon. The ruin is linked with Peirce’s third semiotic system, the index (Peirce 1991, 350). This is true in two respects. Firstly, the ruin entails traces from the work of nature (wind, weather, sun, temperature) and secondly the ruin as such can be seen as an index itself. It refers to a reality in the past. It is, as Simmel points out, a place of life from which life has gone. The indexical system of the ruin (and incidentally – and in contrast to Benjamin’s view – also of photography) implies the aura of the past. It refers to something that has existed and exists to some extent in the present. It

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exists and does not exist at the same time. It is a blueprint of time (Simmel 1993, 124–126). There is another implication in Simmel’s discussion of the phenomenon that is part of his argument. The ruin is the external and spatial aspect of an internal psychological process. In this process the soul is seen as an arena for opposing tendencies, the will for form and consciousness on the one hand, and on the other for the forces of nature, which since Schelling and German Romanticism have been associated with the power of the unconscious, with the power of death, perhaps including Freud’s “Todestrieb” (Freud is an unromantic heir of Romanticism). Thus, the ruin gives rise to two different and controversial aspects at the same time, imbalance and peacefulness. The artificial ruin that becomes prominent in the time of German Classicism and Romanticism (Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings are the most prominent examples of that kind of aesthetics) may be seen as an approach to bridging the gap between all these contradictions (Simmel 1993, 127–131). As his comments on Goethe reveal, Simmel was quite familiar with that productive time of German literature and aesthetics. In Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), Charlotte and Eduard are depicting an ideal landscape, a park with ruins. As they do so, it becomes more and more evident that their own love relationship will develop as a sort of a social “ruin”. There is a touch of future perfect in the novel: the landscape they have constructed with its ruined monuments anticipates the end of their own relationship. The artificial ruin is a ruin made by man. It has a mimetic aspect. It is mimesis of the work of nature performed by (wo) man. It is a quasi-religious concentration of form-will and consciousness of the unconscious, time and nature. It is a kind of affirmation of becoming part of nature again – this is the classical definition of Freud’s Todestrieb, which has remarkable affinities with the pantheism of the German Romanticists (such as Novalis). In the centre of the project there is also a strategy of a secondary control, a strategy against the superiority of time and nature. So the fragments of the past are transformed into semiotic material to keep in check the world to which they refer: through re-collecting, through fantasy, through imagination: by inventing the past, for example the past of the ancient world, the world of Ancient Greece and Egypt. Most of the participants in my imaginary symposium are fascinated by archaeology and by another obsession which Freud has seen as a substitute for the desire of Don Juan: collecting elements of a vanished culture. Goethe, Simmel and especially Freud had their own collections of arts and documents, remnants of ancient or foreign cultures. These objects can be seen as accessoriess of a world in ruin that rises from the dead through the work of imagination, remembrance and re-collecting. It implies a classical pathos formula expressed by T.S. Eliot:” […] it is what justifies other peoples and other generations in saying, when they

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contemplate the remains and the influence of an extinct civilisation, that it was worthwhile for that civilisation to have existed.” (Eliot 1948f, 27)

IV. Freud’s contribution to my symposion may take a little longer. One can show that archaeology, that is the systematic collecting of the broken pieces and remains of a ruined world in time or space, plays an extraordinary role in Freud’s way of working. We know from his biographers that he used his Egyptian, Greek or extra-European examples of his collection for psychoanalytical practice, that he took a part of the collection with him during his summer holidays in the mountains. It is also quite evident that archaeology in general played an enormous role in developing psychoanalysis as a consistent theoretical concept at least on two levels: psychology and cultural analysis. It would be an attractive project to apply Hans Blumenberg’s concept of “metaphorology” (Blumenberg 2005) to this topic. Freud refers to this master trope not only in a traditional rhetorical sense, as a kind of illustration. He uses the metaphor also in the sense of Ricœur as a vivid and active element that opens the door to virgin soil, in his case to the world of the unconscious. But there is, as we will see, also an analogy betwee psychoanalysis and archaeology. Moreover, Freud has established psychoanalysis as a type of archaeology. This can be illustrated with reference to Freud’s commentary on Wilhelm Jensen’s novelette Gradiva. For Freud, who received a copy of Jensen’s book from C.G. Jung, his pupil in the early twentieth century, this Pompeian piece of fantasy was an ideal object for demonstrating his own theory at the beginning of the new century. I cannot discuss here Freud’s specific technique of detective reading against the intention of the text and its ‘author’ (this would be a lecture in itself), but I want to make the point that this text by Jensen, who was a typical post-Romantic and pre-modern writer and a literary friend of Paul Heyse, illustrates the atmosphere of the time, the Zeitgeist, including some aspects of psychoanalysis: there is the collection of ancient artefacts and fragments, there is a direct connection between the ruins of ancient times and the ‘ruins’ of the dream. But especially the parallelism between archaeology and the unconscious was so striking that Freud decided to write a long commentary on Jensen’s novelette to demonstrate the work of dream, daydream and delusion and especially to demonstrate the work of psychoanalysis at the boundary between the real and the imaginary, between myth and science. The subtitle of Jensen’s Gradiva. Ein pompejanisches Phantasiestück (A Pompeijan Piece of Fantasy) contains a hidden connotation or in other words an inter-

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textual allusion, namely to E.T.A. Hoffmann, the author of Phantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier (“Pieces of Fantasy in Callot’s Style”). Like the student Anselmus in Der goldene Topf (The Golden Pot) or the student Nathanael in Der Sandmann (The Sandman), part of another collection of Hoffmann’s Romantic pieces and a text that also became the object of Freud’s reading desire, Jensen’s male protagonist Norbert Hanold is a shy, soft and dreamy young man living in a symbolic space charged with fragments and pieces of the past, with archaeological artefacts from ancient times. Norbert Hanold is enclosed in his imaginary world as if in a cave in which fantasy and remembrance have become overlapping and indistinguishable – like Hoffmann’s protagonists. He lives in an imagined past in Pompei, which is represented by the relief of a wonderful young woman, whom he has given the name Gradiva, the woman who is going forwards. This has some consequences. The time aspect is that he lives completely in a distant past and has only a small and thin access to the presence. The sociospatial aspect is that he no longer has any contact to the world about him. But on the other hand, the remains of the ancient world lead him into another world full of life. He realises the Old Pompei as an internal film. It is the work of imagination that brings the ancient town back to life. Dreaming of the last day in Pompei, 24th August 79 B.C., which transformed the small luxury town south of Rome into a ruin, he meets the wonderful young virgin who is in active movement. Norbert decides to travel to Pompei (once again) and is overwhelmed when he finds his beloved Gradiva there in the house of Meleager at high noon. The remains of the ancient provoked a “tiger’s leap” and kicked him into the year 79 B.C. But there is a twist in the temporal logic, because it is the real Gradiva in Pompei, a former young playmate, who pushes him back to the present. The real Gradiva is a charming young woman with a real and attractive human body, not a figure of marble and stone. And the real Gradiva is not only going forwards, but has also a symbolic Greek name: Zoe, life. So Gradiva-Zoe, who might be seen as an allegory of psychoanalytic healing, is at the same time something like a fairy queen, his wished-for, but unexpected therapist and his beloved who kisses him back into life. This marks an illustrative contrast to Hoffmann’s hero Nathanael, who is kept in the ruins of his past. In contrast to Jensen’s Zoe, Hoffmann’s Clara (omen es nomen) fails. In this respect, Jensen’s noveletta is an optimistic and bright answer to Hoffmann’s dark Romanticism. Quite clearly, this is a male fantasy and, moreover, it is linked to the idea that psychoanalysis, represented here by Zoe’s activity, is structurally female. But the clue of the novel can be seen when Norbert, awakening from his nightly dreams and his daydreams, realises that the woman in front of Meleager’s house is Zoe. Like in an operetta duet, Norbert begins the sentence, but is interrupted by Zoe: “It is quite strange […] that someone first has to die in order to

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come alive. But it is necessary for archaeology.” Freud’s comment in the margin is: Schön. I would translate this with “Wonderful” (Freud 1995, 210). This is illuminating with regard to the parallel between psychoanalysis and archaeology. As Freud reasoned in his Traumdeutung, dream analysis can be seen as detective work confronted with a landscape of ruins, remains and mysteries, the drama of the unconscious, the mystery of the past, which in Freud’s version of psychoanalysis is linked to a tragic a priori, a crime, a catastrophe or, to refer to Marx’ famous expression in the 18th of Brumaire, a nightmare (Marx). In Jensen, however, there is no personal catastrophe in Norbert’s dream; it is connected with the image of a general catastrophe that demonstrates the superiority of nature: a volcanic eruption that reduces a town to rubble and transforms it into a ruin in minutes. Interestingly, this narrative does not contain the personal traumatic structure so typical of Freud’s grand récit of the Oedipus myth. Freud’s interpretation of Jensen’s fantasy piece is one of his brightest and most ironic texts, and one could also interpret the fantastic events in Nobert’s unconscious with Jung’s and Neumann’s optimistic concept of archetypes, for example, that Gradiava is the young man’s anima and Zoe is her double. But psychoanalysis follows the narrative movement of the sentence formulated by Zoe and Norbert that someone and something has to die in order to come to life. It describes the dynamics of psychic life as a process at work between the ruins of the past of the landscape of the unconscious and the desires of the present. Norberts dreams of the volcanic eruption immediately after he meets a young girl in his home town, who has for him nearly the same way to walk as the beloved woman in stone. This is, as it proves later, Zoe, the woman, who will free him later from his golden cave of imagination, when he walks through whic the ruins of Pompeji. So the past that is represented by ruins is not completely dead. It has left traces or – to use the vocabulary of psychoanalysis – symptoms. Reading these traces of the past, the ruins and remains of our individual but also collective lives, is the unevitable precondition for the chronotopos of psychoanalysis, but second step is to arrive at present time in life. In this way psychoanalytical man overcomes the antique statue which Nietzsche described in his essay Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fürs Leben and which is so typical of Norbert Hanold’s situation at the beginning of Jensen’s novelette. Accepting support from outside, love and therapy, he enters the present, which is represented by a real Other. Thus, psychoanalysis is sceptical, but not radical, it is not in such a harsh conflict as is the case in Nietzsche, whose essay is quite clearly a pamphlet against the historical consciousness of his time (“a historical illness”, Nietzsche 1988, KSA 1, 245–247). There is also in Nietzsche a tendency to reconcile the antique, the monumental and the critical way of dealing with the past, but there is a clear animosity towards the antique statue, which is the object of

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irony in Jensen’s fantasy piece and in Freud’s commentary. But in Freud, there is nearly no place for a statue Nietzsche describes as monumental, mostly with a positive connotation. Freud’s position is an integrative one, establishing a dynamic process between the statue of death and the statue of life, between the antiquarian and the critical attitude. In Freud, the ruins do not dissappear; they are embedded in the dynamic of psychic life. To some extent, these remains are the precondition of the possibility of entering the reality of life. “Man fights against the still growing burden of the past that presses him down or bends him sideways”, writes Nietzsche (Nietzsche 1988, I, 249, own translation,); if there is a heroic element in Freud, then it is the idea of overcoming this human statue. The narrative movement contains the return to the time of burdening nightmares. One has to cross the Acheron, but here is a way which leads back to the light of days. Structurally, there is no end of history, neither on an individual nor on a collective level in Freud. Therefore, the landscape of psychoanalysis is filled with ruins, with ruins that have changed their meaning. Jensen’s protagonists illustrate the double movement of psychoanalysis: Nobert goes backwards, Zoe, the therapist (Freud 1995, 118), takes steps forwards.

V. Michel Foucault, a keen reader of Nietzsche and of Freud, called his ‘post-structuralist’ method “archaeology”. The structure of a culture, of its discourses, of its epistemic elements, of its vocabulary, of its archives reveals when they are in the state of ruins. Foucault has an intellectual temperament that completely differs from Benjamin, but in one aspect there is a similarity. Benjamin’s flaneur saw the Paris of his time, a town full of life and action, as a necropolis. For Benjamin – or, more precisely, for one Benjamin (the revolutionary one), this was a good message; namely the fulfilment of messianic hopes. The necropolis of the bourgeoisie refers to the socialist town of the proletarians. This is not the case in Foucault, because there is no longer a positive perspective as in Benjamin or as in Freud. Irrespective of whether one subscribes to his critique as a whole, I think Habermas is right when he describes Foucault’s method as follows: “The archaeologist, however, will retransform communicative documents into silent momuments, into objects which have to be freed from any context to become accessible to a structuralist description.“ (Habermas 1985, 294) What Foucault had in mind is an epistemic experminent and experience at once: Foucauldian ‘structuralism’ can be interpreted as symbolic machinery that generates ruins and monuments. Jensen’s archaeologist filled the necropolis of Pompei with imagined people, men and women, actions and talks; in con-

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trast, the Foucauldian archeologist creates monuments, “ruins”, places without human life, by displacing human beings”. The focalisation of Foucault’s narrative implies a panoramic point of view, looking from above upon the coming and going formations and structures of discourses, dispositives, archives and epistemic institutions. To some extent, Foucault’s famous prophecy that (wo)man will disappear like a face in the sand at the seashore (Foucault 1966/1974, 462) is the result and – at the same time – the constitutive moment of his so-called anti-humanistic absurdist emplotment, which Hayden White has termed post-ironical (White 1986, 268–302) The observing narrator of this radical empty world put on the rhetorical mask of indifference and stoicism, but there is a heroic moment in this attitude: the ability to confront oneself with the inevitable end. As Foucault argues in Les chots et les Mots, man is a young invention of Western culture and so man will disappear. S(he) was only a short episode in a long and senseless sequence. There is a hidden gesture of pathos in the whole tableau: the situation at the sea shore with the eternal up and down of the waves, a place of radical lonesomeness (Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk at the Seaside). But more interesting is the expression “a face in the sand”. Does the tableau imply a catastrophic end? And what is the relation between sand and face like? Is it the trace of the face that will disappear? And why it is the face? Because it is metonymy, because it is that specific part of human existence that makes him/her a human being? Foucault’s disappearing of (wo)man is full of mysteries. But there is a third astonishing element in this prophecy which is constructed in the future perfect, like every prophetic narrative of that kind. There will not remain any trace of what Foucault calls “l’homme”. I dare say that the fascinating moment in Foucault is due to this radical and rhetorical attitude, and not only to the message as such. Consequently, he conceives of this end as the end per se: there will be no remains, no fragments, no ruins, and no monuments of the imagined future past. And there is no observer who could begin the job of the archaelologist anew. The face has disappeared in the sand.

Postscript Glavinic’s hero has a daydream: about being a stone at the seashore, hearing the waves. His last man imagines the saint in Saint Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna as the last people from Pompei. Climbing up the steeple he thinks about 4th September, the date two months after the world has become a desert, a world without human beings or animals. The date that will come in a fortnight:

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He was thinking of 4th September. Of the September in two weeks. And of that one in thousand years. There wouldn’t be any difference between those days, not a noteworthy one […]. Already on 4th September in two weeks there would be nobody who could be an observer. (Glavinic 2006, 391, own translation)

Since Hegel, who coined the expression “the fury of disappearing”, there has been a pathos of disappearing. From this perspective it becomes evident that some ruinous narratives are embedded in an occidental master narrative, the apoclaypse. The post-modern apocalypse presents this very last day beyond hope and horror. In Foucault. And in Glavinic.

Fear in Culture Hermann Broch’s Massenwahntheorie I. There are at least three important works on the concept of ‘the masses’ which grew out of the context of Austrian society: Sigmund Freud’s Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921), Hermann Broch’s unfinished Massenwahntheorie (1939– 1948) and, as a postscript, Elias Canetti’s Masse und Macht (1960). To complete the impression that Austrian intellectual culture was obsessed by the topic of the masses, I should like to add three other literary masterpieces: Ernst Weiß’s novel Der Augenzeuge (1939), a psychoanalytical literary case study on Hitler, in which Weiß integrated descriptions of masses seduced by the Führer, and Heimito von Doderer’s Die Dämonen, a work the author started in the 1930s and finished in 1956. The architectural centre of this ambitious Zeitroman is the burning of the Viennese Palace of Justice on 15th July 1927 as a result of a mass demonstration by socialist workers protesting against a sentence passed by the court. Doderer, a former National Socialist, who became an anti-totalitarian conservative later, interprets the protest of the socialist workers negatively as an act of an unconscious and class-orientated crowd lacking any sense of responsibility for (civil) society as a whole.¹ And last but not least, Musil’s epoch-making novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften can be read in the context of the masses. It describes, for example, the national revolts in the bilingual industrial area of Brno/Brünn. Moreover, it sug-

1 Heimito von Doderer, Die Dämonen (1995, 624): “Ein von der sozialdemokratischen Führung am folgenden Tage, dem 15. Juli 1927, keineswegs vorgesehene Demonstration brachte die Arbeiter auf die Beine und in die Innenstadt. Sie marschierten nicht, weil die Mörder eines Kindes und eines Kriegsinvaliden frei gingen. Sondern weil jenes Kind ein Arbeiterkind gewesen war und der Invalide ein Arbeiter. Die ‘Massen’ verlangten die Klassenjustiz, gegen welche einstmals ihre Führer so oft vermeint hatten, auftreten zu müssen. Das Volk schäumte gegen das Urteil des Volksgerichtshofes, gegen sein eigenes Urteil. Damit war der Freiheit das Genick gebrochen: sie hielt sich auch in Österreich nur mehr durch kurze Zeit und künstlich aufrecht. Die sogenannten ‘Massen’ setzen sich immer gerne kompakt auf die in’s Blaue ragenden Äste der Freiheit. Aber sie müssen diese ansägen, sie können’s nicht anders; und dann bricht die ganze Krone zusammen. Wer den Massen angehört, hat die Freiheit schon verloren. Da mag er sich setzen, wohin er will. […] Am selben Mittage noch brannte der Justizpalast lichterloh. Im Kampf mit der Polizei, welche vor allem der Feuerwehr den Weg bahnen wollte, gab es eine schreckliche Anzahl Toter.”

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gests that the solution for the ‘Parallel Action’ will be – analogous to Broch’s later concept of “Massenwahn”).² – some sort of mass hysteria (or mass mania). So the private fate of Clarisse and Moosbrugger anticipates the public fate of the collapsing monarchy.³ Before I try to answer the question as to why Austrian intellectual culture became such a fruitful field for the analysis of modern masses, I have to point out that these Austrian intellectuals and writers were not the creators and inventors of such discourse. When Freud wrote his famous text, he was already confronted with other works, for example with le Bon’s Psychologie der Massen (translated into German in 1912), Kraškovič’s Die Psychologie der Kollektivitäten (1915), Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, McDougalls’s The Group Mind (1920). Whereas le Bon’s analysis is based on the experience of the appearance of political masses in the pre-war period (1871–1914), all the other books (including Freud’s study) refer quite explicitly to the importance of the masses before, during and after the war,including the ideological mobilisation immediately before it and the revolutions and civil wars thereafter. It is symptomatic that Broch’s first reflections on the phenomenon of the “Masse” date from 1918.⁴ The epiphany of war with its levee en masse and its collective enthusiasm completely changed the discourse on the masses.⁵ From the nationalist theoretician Sorel to the revolutionary Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, you may find some sort of heroic idea of the (proletarian) masses who become, through their own appearance, the subject of history, by changing the world in a militant but peaceful way. Here the appearance of the masses is the result of a highly developed class consciousness, whereas in the later psychological and biological discourse the masses are the result of gullibility, credulity and their being easily influenced,

2 See also Goltschnigg (1990). 3 Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1932f): “Das Schattende des Todes wird plötzlich sichtbar. Des persönlichen Todes, ohne daß man etwas ausgerichtet hat u unerachtet dessen das Leben weiter holpert u seine Vergnügungen weiterentfaltet. In der Mobstimmung glauben übrigens alle Leute, dauernd auf Vergnügungen zu verzichten […] Häuser-Hauchartige Masse, Niederschlag an sich darbietenden Flächen. Außerhalb der Bindungen deformiert jeder Impuls den Menschen. Der Mensch, der erst durch den Ausdruck wird, formt sich in den Formen der Gesellschaft. Er wird vergewaltigt u erhält dadurch Oberfläche […] Er wird geformt durch die Rückwirkungen dessen, was er geschaffen hat. Zieht man sie ab, bleibt etwas Unbestimmtes, Ungestaltes. Die Mauern der Straße strahlen Ideologien aus […] U […] fühlt, wie der ganze Mensch in Unsicherheit geschleudert ist. Nach Ja u Nein verlangt.” 4 Hermann Broch, Briefe, KW 13/1, 33. 5 See also Schuhmann (2000, 10–26) and Hardiman (2001).

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as Freud pointed out in his study.⁶ So the idea of a spontaneously growing consciousness en masse and dreadful mass hysteria mark the two possible extreme positions in the discourse on the masses which were so significant for the first half of the century: self-emancipation on the one hand, and self-imprisonment on the other. It is quite evident that to some extent the First World War marks an important turning-point in the history of modern mass phenomena, because it reveals the connection between violence and the masses in a modern war of mass extermination. This war started with the appearance in most of the European countries of enthusiastic masses, which saw the coming war as an instrument of collective salvation. It was also this war which destroyed the old liberal, half-democratic system of nobility, substituting it with a new type of mass democracy or populist authoritarian movements (as in Italy or Poland). Since the First World War, modern masses have irrevocably become a constant factor in modern politics, culture and economics. The old paternalistic system (in Austria, but also in Germany or in England), “the world of yesterday” (to borrow the title of Stefan Zweig’s book (Stefan Zweig 1970, 14–43)) was quite successful in channelling and arresting the changes in society demanded by the socialist or nationalist movements, but after the Great War the traditional techniques of power came to an end. New political movements arose: fascist, authoritarian and radical left movements; Feminism also became a mass issue. The turning point in post-war Austria was in this respect especially dramatic. Suddenly the people in the heartland of the old monarchy had lost their cultural and political Heimat and identity (Moscovici 1985, 223) and a state, which during the whole of the nineteenth century developed certain techniques of rule to balance its opposites, a system which was extremely careful and fearful in regard to the modern upcoming mass movements. As Musil demonstrates in his novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, the World War had destroyed the world of the ruling classes and their ability to control the masses in a traditional way.⁷

6 Sigmund Freud, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse/Die Zukunft einer Illusion (1993, 41). See also Serge Moscovici, The Age of the Crowd (1985). 7 Robert Musil (1979, 1019f): “Das ist die Psychologie der Masse, Erlaucht!” mischte sich der gelehrte General wieder ein. “Soweit es die Masse angeht, versteh ich das sehr gut. Die Masse wird nur von Trieben bewegt und dann natürlich von denen, die den meisten Individuen gemeinsam sind: das ist logisch, sie benützen logische Gedanken gerade nur zum Aufputzen! Wovon sie sich wirklich leiten lassen, das ist einzig und allein die Suggestion! Wenn Sie mir ein paar Zeitungen, den Rundfunk, die Lichtspielindustrie und vielleicht noch ein paar Kulturmittel überantworten, so verpfllichte ich mich, in ein paar Jahren – wie mein Freund Ulrich gesagt

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So this “Störerfahrung”, this irritating experience (Sloterdijk 1978), produced the need for symbolic clearance work. I wish to examine the attempts of Austrian intellectuals and writers to describe and analyse modern mass phenomena in the face of this cultural and political background. Authors like Broch, Musil, but also Freud and the young Canetti tried to understand what happened after the decline of the Old Empire and the rise of the modern masses as an unavoidable factor in politics, culture and society. The process they described has not come to an end however. The burning of the Viennese Palace of Justice was probably not regarded as a significant event in world politics. The same might be true of the events of 1934 and the creation of a specific Austrian right-wing mass movement which was a farce compared with the Italian Fascism to which it was linked, a parody in the sense of Karl Marx (1913). But with Hitler’s triumph on the Heldenplatz in 1938  – an impressive and terrible revelation of the masses  – Austria returned to the stage of world politics at least on this occasion. But what is more important in regard to those events – 1927, 1934, and 1938 – is that they have a symptomatic and general meaning beyond their historical significance: they are a ‘Lehrstück’, a lesson in political and cultural theory. This is the way authors like Broch, Doderer and Canetti have read these events. But whereas Doderer, Weiß and Musil deal with this historical context, Canetti and Broch try to avoid the impression that these specifically Austrian events play any role in their theories of the masses. But we know from Doderer’s autobiography that there were two events which deeply impressed the young intellectual: the masses in the football stadium of Hütteldorf, the home of Austria’s most famous football team, Rapid Vienna, and the fire in the Palace of Justice in 1927. In contrast to Doderer, Canetti describes the “Masse” as a neutral phenomenon. He points out the spontaneity of the “open” masses which at the very beginning has no need for a leader, as Freud argues in his concept of “Übertragung”.⁸

hat – aus den Menschen Menschenfresser zu machen! Gerade darum braucht die Menschheit ja auch eine starke Führung!” 8 Elias Canetti, Die Fackel im Ohr (1981, 280): “Ein für allemal hatte ich hier erlebt, was ich später eine offene Masse nannte, ihre Bildung durch das Zusammenfließen von Menschen aus allen Teilen der Stadt, in langen, unbeirrbaren, unablenkbaren Zügen, deren Richtung bestimmt war durch die Position des Gebäudes, das den Namen der Justiz trug, aber durch den Fehlspruch das Unrecht verkörperte. Ich habe erlebt, daß die Masse zerfallen muß und wie sie diesen Zerfall fürchtet: daß sie sich selbst im Feuer sieht, das sie entzündet, und um ihren Zerfall herumkommt, solange dieses Feuer besteht […] Ich erkannte, daß die Masse keinen Führer braucht, um sich zu bilden, den bisherigen Theorien über sie zum Trotz. Einen Tag lang hatte ich hier eine Masse vor Augen, die sich ohne Führer gebildet hatte.”

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In his different versions of a theory of mass hysteria, Broch refers to the historical background only in his proposal for founding a Research Institute for Mass Hysteria but very generally arguing that “die Gefährdung des Menschen durch massenmäßig orientierte Geistesverwirrung […] ein offenes Geheimnis und eben hiedurch auch ein offenes Problem sei”. (KW 12, 11) Like Canetti, he tries to avoid taking the material for his investigation primarily from the immediate political and historical events. Obviously Broch’s intention, like Canetti’s and Freud’s, is to establish a theory which has a more general and broader universal validity, a theory which is not a mere case study about Hitler’s mass movement or, in the case of Freud, about the First World War and its cultural and political consequences. It is a theory, which is able to explain the disastrous inclination of human beings to form themselves into masses which eliminate any response to moral behaviour and make people able to treat outsiders in extraordinarily cruel ways. One could also say that the phenomenon of modern violent masses is one of the most significantly irritating experiences for traditional humanism and classical enlightenment – because when they are organised into masses, human beings are able to deny humanistic behaviour and the capacity for self-responsibility. What makes Broch’s unfinished project on mass hysteria so attractive and interesting is the fact that this irritation, Sorge (in a Heideggerian sense), this worry is inscribed and written up in his hesitant and tentative attempts to clear the open problem of the connection between masses, mania and violence. Unlike Canetti and Freud (I refer here to his argumentation in 1921; his Unbehagen in der Kultur presents a different position) Broch addresses the question of political alternatives and answers. The open, sometimes incoherent structure of his argumentation and the post-humanistic worry about the political future of western society (in which he concurs with Hannah Arendt⁹) contrasts with Freud and Canetti. Whereas Freud, as in his letter to Einstein, prefers some sort of calmness and composure (Freud 1994, 165–177), Canetti, who understood himself as an anti-Freud,¹⁰ seems to see violence, mass and power as a disastrous fate for humanity. Beside the enlightening and cathartic shock of the book itself, there

9 Hannah Arendt – Hermann Broch, Briefwechsel 1945–1951 (1996) (further quoted as ABB), letters 36,37, 40, 43–44 and 46 (between 20th of February and 28th of June 1949). When Arendt and Broch exchanged their manuscripts, Arendt commented positively on Broch’s revision of his “Naturrecht”concept of human rights, while Brochs explicitly praised Arendt’s chapter on human rights in her book on totalitarianism (ABB, 94–126). 10 Elias Canetti, Das Augenspiel (1985, 23–43). Canetti interprets the growing distance between Broch and himself as a result of Broch’s uncritical view of Freud (“Dieser war Freud verfallen”, 31).

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is no way to leave this world of cruelty, which is based on anthropological constants.¹¹

II. Until now, Broch has been an author in the shadows of others, at least in the shadow of Freud, Musil and Canetti. But in his case one can show that his concept of mass hysteria is an original theory far beyond being a mere copy of Freud’s concept as could be said for Ernst Weiß, whose interesting literary case study Der Augenzeuge (referring to the Hitler of the Munich period) ultimately proves to be a misogynistic simplification of Freud’s concept in which the transfer between the leader and the crowd is interpreted as a sexual act between man and woman, in which she is subjected.¹² What are interesting in regard to Canetti too are not the similarities (which were rare) but the differences with Broch. Whereas Canetti describes the masses almost as if they were physical entities, where the superstructure does not play any role, Broch’s intention is to write not so much a theory of the masses but a theory of their collective mental and emotional state. For Freud, the collective consciousness of the masses is a pure function of their libido. Although Canetti analyses in one chapter some mass symbols of modern nations (it is not the best part of his book), he devotes his attention to the real movement and development of the masses in their physical state. (Moscovici 1985, 219–229) Broch, however, is the analyst of the superstructure of the historical and the modern masses. Before discussing these concepts, we should briefly look at those of his mighty intellectual rivals. Then I shall outline three of his attempts to define the topic of his study. I analyse them separately because they have three different starting points and methodological approaches. This way I can show the hesitant, cautious and provisional way¹³ in which Broch approaches a subject which is at once real and non-real and which is extremely vague and fluid.

11 See Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht (1980, 559): “Wer der Macht beikommen will, der muß den Befehl ohne Scheu ins Auge fassen und die Mittel finden, ihn seines Stachels zu berauben.” 12 Ernst Weiß, Der Augenzeuge (1982, 150): “Er [H.] stand nicht mehr oben auf der roh zusammengezimmerten Tribüne, er war neben uns, in uns, in dem Verborgensten wühlte er umher, und er zermalmte uns mit seinem sklavischen Wollustglück, gehorchen, sich auslöschen, unten sein, nichts mehr sein.” 13 See Hermann Broch, Die Verzauberung (KW 3, 383): “Zweifelsohne kann man ein massenpsychologisches Geschehen durch ‘objektive Darstellungen’ lebendig machen: man

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The problem of the topic has to do with the fact that ‘the mass’ cannot be easily classified. In regard to the genesis of the mass, you have to analyse the psychological motives behind it; on the other hand, masses are social entities and in this way typical topics of the social sciences without the “dignity of concreteness”. Crowds are also embedded in certain real and symbolic contexts (narratives, symbols, media) in terms of a cultural discourse. (KW 12, 13)¹⁴ When Freud analyses the leader as the constructive element, as the composer of the masses, who has a magic rapport of libido with the people he speaks (Übertragung and Gegenübertragung) he is not really interested in the phenomenology of the masses as such, but analyses the leader, the composer and director of the mass, and its audience as an effect of human beings’ desire.¹⁵ In any case, Freud’s approach is universal and anthropological, there is no acknowledgement that cultures and historical epochs may differ in regard to the masses, that specific symbolic systems produce various forms of real groups. Nor does Freud discuss or analyse the ideograms, narratives and symbols, the banners and slogans, under which people will unify as a mass.

kann einen Flagellantenzug darstellen, oder das Gebrüll bei einem Fußballmatch, oder die Volksmengen vor dem Reichskanzlerpalais, von dessen Balkon Hitlers merkwürdige Stimme ertönt, und man kann auch alle Pogromschrecken sehr anschaulich schildern; aber all diese Schilderungen sind – auch wenn sie einen historischen Hintergrund haben – gewissermaßen leere Behauptungen, sie sagen bloß aus, daß es massenpsychische Bewegungen gibt, verschweigen jedoch alles über deren eigentliche Funktion und Wirksamkeit. Will man hierüber Bescheid wissen, so muß man die Einzelseele befragen […] innerhalb des Massenpsychischen ist der Einzelmensch ohneweiters bereit, die plumpsten Lügen als Wahrheit zu nehmen, sind Männer von großer Nüchternheit und Selbstkritik für die phantastischsten Unternehmungen zu gewinnen, brechen archaische Tendenzen auf, die man längst in dem Abgrund der Zeit gedacht hat, hebt ein mythisches Denken innerhalb der Realität an, nur die Einzelseele, welche zur Beute solcher Unbegreiflichkeiten wird, vermag hierüber Aufschluß zu geben.” 14 “Nur Konkretes kann beobachtet werden, also konkrete Dinge in ihren konkreten Verhaltungsweisen. Das menschliche Einzelindividuum ist ein derartig konkretes Beobachtungs- und Untersuchungsobjekt. Eine Menschenmasse hingegen hat nicht die gleiche Konkretheitsdignität.” 15 See also – in explicit contrast to Freud – Hermann Broch, Massenwahntheorie (KW 12, 81): “Der Führer ist der Exponent eines Wertesystems und der Träger der Dynamik dieses Systems. Er erscheint, wie gesagt, vor allem als Symbol des Systems. Seine rationalen Züge und Handlungen sind von untergeordneter Bedeutung.” In contrast to the Massenwahntheorie, Broch’s novel Die Verzauberung prefers a more Freudian concept. In all of its three versions there is a strong emphasis on the sexual transfer between Marius Ratti, the leader who comes from outside the world of a mountainside village, and Irmgard, die “Bergbraut”, who represents the rural collective and the victim of the collective mass hysteria.

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Canetti’s concept of the masses is also universal and anthropological, so he can also use ethnographic materials from non-European cultures, material from Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Canetti denies the importance of the leader, seeing in him an effect, but not the genesis of the masses. Neither do symbolic forms play a significant role for the genesis of the masses, nor is Canetti interested in a psychoanalytical theory explaining the mass as an effect of human libido. With regard to the individual, ‘the mass’ offers the only possibility for overcoming its/his/her fear of contact with someone else, with a stranger.¹⁶ This reservation about other people has two sides, the fear of touching someone else and the fear of being touched by them. The mass is the only way human beings can overcome this fear. But Canetti does not give an interpretation as to why there is a longing to overcome such a fear. In his eyes this has to do with existential sensitivities. In spite of the contrasts between Freud and Canetti, the programmatic antiFreudian, both concepts have structural similarities, both arguing with anthropological universals which contain biological elements (libido, fear of touch). There is no clear divergence between biological and cultural anthropology. Thus, Canetti describes the mass as a quasi-physical entity, like a mass in a physical sense, as composed matter. He defines the social matter of the mass by naming four necessary moments: growth, direction, density and equalities of the components. Two of the phenomena are quite evidently linked with physics (density and direction), whereas growth might be associated with biological processes. Only equality has, beyond the physical connotation, a reference to the social and political world and makes clear that masses are probably important under cultural, political and social conditions where equality is postulated programmatically, as is the case in communism and nationalism. Broch’s concept of Massenwahn differs, as the title suggests, and an enthusiastic reader of Canetti’s very composed book could easily be disappointed by the convolution of drafts, essays and chapters in Broch’s text (Schuhmann 2000, 35–39). He is not interested in the physics of the masses and also avoids a mere psychoanalytic approach, although, having undergone a “psychoanalytical cure”, he was much more in favour of Freud’s theory than Canetti, who saw in Freud a dogmatic and authoritarian thinker.¹⁷ The traces of Freud in Broch’s

16 Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht (1980, 13): “Nichts fürchtet der Mensch mehr als die Berührung durch Unbekannte. Man will sehen, was nach einem greift, man will es erkennen oder zumindest einreihen können. Überhaupt weicht der Mensch der Berührung durch Fremdes aus.” 17 Elias Canetti, Das Augenspiel (1985, 37): “Er [Broch] stand übrigens so sehr zu Freud, daß er auch gar nicht davor zurückscheute, dessen Termini in ihrer vollen, unangezweifelten Bedeutung in einem ernsten und spontanen Gespräch zu verwenden. Angesichts seiner großen

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studies on the masses are easy to find: the use of terms like neurosis, psychosis and hysteria (KW 12, 282) are part of a psychological discourse; his concept of culture as symbolic sublimation machinery and also the highly problematic use of words like ‘ill’ and ‘healthy’ in the contexts of mental and emotional condition can be seen as a typical issue of psychological discourse. Broch uses psychological and psychoanalytical terminology, in contrast to Freud who tried to describe the mass as a neutral issue (which also includes positive aspects: solidarity). As a special form to satisfy the desire of the libido, Broch pointed out that the mentality which triggers off the genesis of the masses is some sort of illness, a deviation from normal healthy behaviour (KW 12, 13). In his first working hypothesis (Vorschlag zur Gründung eines Forschungsinstituts für politische Psychologie), in which he (following Freud’s Unbehagen in der Kultur but not his Massenpsychologie) defines culture as a rational control and regulation of irrational metaphysical needs and instinctive urges, Broch differentiates typically between two ways of dealing with them (and with other peoples, and in the context of collectives). The first possibility for a single human being but also for a whole culture (and its work on irrationality), Broch calls “Irrationalbereicherung” (irrationality enrichment). Here the single person or a whole culture is able to produce some sort of an “irrationality grant”, which is necessary not only for the satisfaction of the needs and urges, but also for their cultural transformation into communal spirits and senses of community. Broch refers to the ethically founded lifestyle of a community with its cultural bonds and its artistic and aesthetic shaping of existence. The other contrastive way Broch describes is that of “Rationalverarmung” (“rationality impoverishment”). This means a loss of rationality. The individual, the group or a whole culture becomes incapable. Here, rational behaviour will be substituted by collective instincts. The rationalisation is a result of these: because a lot of people share these irrational issues, it receives some sort of legitimacy: the non-ethical revival of uncontrolled instincts seems to be ethical, because it happens en masse (KW 12, 12–14). Interestingly, Broch points out that the inability to deal with irrationality in a symbolic way may be the result of fear, but not a fear of touch as in Canetti (as a result of a reflex of self-protection), but a fear of insanity and madness, the unrealised fear of the dark side of reason.¹⁸ Rationality includes for Broch, as for

philosophischen Belesenheit mußte mir das Eindruck machen, so unangenehm ich es empfand, daß er Freud selbst Kant, den er sehr verehrte, Spinoza und Plato gleichstellte. Was im damaligen Wiener Wortgebrauch zu alltäglicher Banalität geraten war, sprach er neben Worten aus, die durch die Verehrung von Jahrhunderten, auch durch seine eigene, geheiligt waren.” 18 Cf. Gernot and Hartmut Böhme, Das Andere der Vernunft (1992).

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Freud, the ability of the individual to confront himself/herself with the uncanny Other. Broch splits the Cartesian cogito into its two elements. Whereas the cogito is related to truth, and to rational knowledge, the sum refers to the irrational moment of life and value. The human being has no choice, he has to assimilate the outside world into his ego by transforming it into a value (the German word ‘Einverleibung’ is associated with a process of integration of a material into the body). Value in Broch means something similar to Cassirer’s symbolic form. (Schumann 2000, 9–13)¹⁹ So, culture on the symbolic level is a form of participation, to make the world familiar, or in other words an ego enlargement. So the fear in Broch’s study is not a fear of touch but a fear of a horror vacui with which the ego is confronted (KW 12. 16f).²⁰ Here we are very near the world of the dying Vergil and it is evident that Broch combines here an existentialist diagnosis with a theory of culture. In an existentialist perspective, culture is something which transcends the elementary fear of the human being. In contrast, those value elements which cannot be integrated or assimilated by the ego have an effect as premonitory and urgent moments which evoke fear, symbols of metaphysical fear and symbols of death itself.²¹ There are different levels of the enlargement of the ego in order to make the world familiar and banish the fear. There are real enlargements of the ego by clothes, by property and power, by love and violence, both the extreme poles of a breakthrough to the human neighbour; there are also illusionary enlargements such as drunkenness or symbolic enlargements through rational knowledge.

19 I agree that Broch’s concept refers to Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Max Weber and Rickert but also – let us not forget – to Georg Simmel, whom Broch studied quite intensively. 20 “[…] überall dort, wo das Ich in solchem Bestreben gehindert wird, überall, wo es an die Grenzen der “Fremd-Welt” stößt und sie nicht zu überschreiten vermag, überall dort entsteht des Wertes Gegen-Zustand, dort entsteht ‘Angst’: das Ich wird sich dann plötzlich seiner a priori gegebenen Einsamkeit bewußt, es weiß um die metaphysische Einsamkeit seines Sterbens.” 21 KW 12, 17f: “Alle Weltbestandteile, welche vom Ich nicht einverleibt sind oder nicht einverleibt werden können, wirken als Angstmahnungen, als Symbole der metaphysischen Angst, als Symbole der Todeseinsamkeit, als Symbole des Todes schlechthin. Sie sind Ichfremd, und alles “Fremde” wird solcherart zum Angst-Symbol, m.a.W. wird zum Gegenstand der tiefsten metaphysischen Abneigung, zum symbolischen Objekt für den Todes-Haß. Niemals wäre zu verstehen, daß ein weißer Fleck auf der Landkarte für die Menschheit derart beunruhigend sein könnte, wie er es eben ist, niemals wäre zu verstehen, daß zu seiner Bewältigung gefahrvolle und kostspielige Expeditionen in an sich höchst gleichgültige Gegenden geschickt werden, wenn er nicht jenes symbolische Beunruhigungselement in sich trüge, das eben das der metaphysischen Fremdheit ist, wenn durch seine Bewältigung nicht Wertgefühle ausgelöst werden würden, die weit über den praktischen Wert und die praktischen Ergebnisse einer geographischen Expedition hinausgingen.”

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There are, as Broch points out in his second draft Entwurf für eine Theorie massenwahnartiger Erscheinungen (1943) (KW 12, 43–66), two ways of dealing with this elementary fear. One is to accept and realise it; this is the way of “irrationality enrichment”, the other one – “rationality impoverishment” – is to try to suppress and remove it. The first one, in which the ego is the world, Broch also identifies with love, the second one, in which the ego tries to have the world, he identifies with violence. In violence there is the wish to catch the irritating, the foreign Other, where in the case of love one accepts that the foreign Other will be outside of you and that it is impossible to assimilate him/her/it. Like death, love marks – as later in Levinas²² – the boundary of the possibility of culturally marking a territory (KW 12, 17–25). Culture, far from being only a system of regulation (as in Freud’s Unbehagen) is the way of enlargement of the ego and the way of fear reduction. There is a clear difference between Freud and Broch, because the author of Der Tod des Vergil sees religion as the heart of culture and as a symbolic medium for working on fear. For Broch ecstasy is the highest form of liberation from fear. In contrast, panic is the loss of hope of being liberated from inescapable fear, the origin of the modern masses. It is not the longing to overcome the fear of touch (as in Canetti), but panic itself that fears the building of the masses. That is the goal of a value system, as Broch remarks in his third piece, Eine Studie über Massenhysterie. Beiträge zu einer Psychologie der Politik (1943). Already in his second essay, Broch emphasises – and this marks a significant difference to Freud and Canetti – that the genesis of the masses also has to be seen from historical, social, economic and cultural perspectives. There are ages in which phenomena of crowd psychology play an enormous role. The preconditions may be social, cultural or political. The appearance of the masses is linked to the structure and the existence of classes, states and parties but also with catastrophic political, natural or economic events. In some of his essays Broch refers to specific modern mass phenomena such as the dominance of the pictorial element in the media, the paradigm of sport, and the tyranny of money and measurement (KW 12, 21). They all symbolise for Broch, as for Adorno and T.S. Eliot, the longing of crowds which are threatened by panic. Here is the opportunity to acquire what Broch calls super-satisfaction (“Superbefriedigung”), an additional satisfaction which is anaesthesia of fear by mobilising collective aggressive

22 Emmanuel Levinas, Die Zeit und der Andere (1984, 5). In this early version of Levinas’ theory of the other, love is neither a possibility nor our initiative, it is a contingent moment – we fall in love, but nevertheless our self survives.

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instincts. The Superbefriedigung (“super-satisfaction”) can be defined in contrast to authentic ecstasy as a pseudo-ecstasy (KW 12, 22, 56f, 365–378). Broch also examines the role of the leader, and here his position lies between Freud, who argues that leadership is essential for the genesis of masses, and Canetti, who resolutely denies its importance. For Broch, the leader transforms the mass into a historical issue by giving it a direction and a goal. The appearance of a leader in a mass movement also indicates the dimension of despair. Broch’s dualistic concept, which always assesses the difference between the positive and healthy integration of the foreign Other and the negative and self-destructive rejection thereof, distinguishes between the authentic founder of religion and the demonic demagogue. They represent different eras and different systems of belief. Broch suggests that there is an intrinsic connection between a closed system based on fixed value dogmatics and a closed mass. The open system is based on the presupposition that the world is indefinite and that the absolute is only an indefinite remote destination which can never be reached. An open system is able to balance the individual and society by producing a maximum of material security, emotional security and epistemological security (KW 12, 49f, 76, 250ff). So Broch’s concept of mass hysteria and mass mania is normative from the very beginning. The interesting point is that it is not the contemporary civil society, but the Augustinian civitas dei which in his ranking comes first. In other words, Broch, who favours a new socialism beyond the totality of communism and fascism (KW 12,375), is a left-liberal communitarist.²³ This has to do with the fact that Broch sees the capitalistic bourgeois systems in decline as he has described in his Sleepwalker trilogy. Modern society is unable to produce material, symbolic or emotional security. So as in the Middle Ages the breakdown of the value system appears unavoidable. Panic mass movements arise as a result of emotional and symbolic disintegration. Modern mass movements are characterised by extreme panic, so they need leaders who promise to liberate them from this panic and to produce reparation and revenge, a sadistic mode of super-satisfaction.

23 In regard to Broch’s third way position, see his letters to Hannah Arendt. He rejects the invitation to the “Berliner Kongreß für kulturelle Propaganda” because he wants to avoid the political instrumentalisation of his person in the times of the Cold War: “[…] in Berlin habe ich wirklich nichts verloren.” Hannah Arendt, who agrees with Broch, replies polemically: “Diese ungarischen Juden à la Koestler werden dadurch nicht angenehmer, daß man Hitler das Recht absprechen mußte, sie totzuschlagen.” (ABB, 142, 145).

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Broch constructs a philosophy of history which resembles Spengler with psychic cycles,at least in two of the versions of his Massenwahnpsychologie²⁴ The first version includes four stages: Stage 1: The making absolute of the value system (withdrawal of reality control) leads to Stage 2: Hypertrophy and autonomy (mass mania from above) leads to Stage 3: Shaking of the absolute value system (reality proof) leads to Stage 4: Emancipation of the lower value systems and value fragmentation (Mass mania from below) (KW 12, 54 f).

In a later version Broch modifies his model by adapting the figure of the neurotic and psychotic in his theoretical framework. Whereas the neurotic is in permanent struggle because of the difference between inside and outside reality, the symbolic system of the psychotic is closed and he is quite carefree, with no worries about victory or defeat. So history becomes a psychic cycle in which normality changes with neurosis and psychosis: Stage 1: Domination of the central value system; Stage 2: Disintegration, which becomes hypertrophied (psychosis); Stage 3: Establishing of “reality”: Stage 4: Value fragmentation (neurosis). (KW 12, 292)

For Broch, there is no doubt that modern mankind suffers from fragmentation and disintegration. Therefore the appearance of panicked masses will continue until a new value-system has been established. At the same time, there is a lack of material security. So what modern societies need is both religion as well as a sort of democratic and open Marxism. Thus, Broch delivers a concept which is ambitious and unwieldy. Its contradictions –far from being the result of the fragmentary character of the work or the trans-disciplinary approach he had in mind – are obvious. For example, there is a strong contradiction between his philosophy of history and his normative concept: the indifferent Olympian and deterministic point of view about history which contrasts with Broch’s fight for humanist or post-humanist culture. His ambivalence in regard to culture and religion, but also to Marxism, anticipates post-modern ambivalence, whereas the polarity of his concept – the polarity between irrationality enrichment and rationalit impoverishment  – is quite

24 Cf. Lützeler (1997, 87–105).

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obviously the result of a psychological discourse which obeys the binary system healthy/ill. This discourse is linked to a political and normative one. Despite Broch’s deep pessimism in regard to his own era, his work includes an optimistic message: the healthiest solution in politics and culture is also the best one from an ethical perspective. So, in some aspects his thinking is problematic, but in many ways quite contemporary – for example, his ideas on culture, which anticipate some ideas of contemporary German Kulturwissenschaften, and his ideas of the foreign Other, which can be compared with the those of Kristeva (1988) or Levinas. There is no doubt that his ideas on human rights are quite relevant today. In this way, one could say that Broch is a much more political and moralistic thinker than Freud and Canetti. In addition, his psychological approach, although it may be some sort of modern talmi religion, is meanwhile a part of the symbolic system of our post-modern culture. So the analyst of cultural fragmentation proves to be a fragmented analyst. The hope we have in response to Broch’s pessimism is that it is possible to live fragmentarily without being a victim of new totalitarian mass movements which were able to produce the super-super-satisfaction of the Shoah, the perfect crime, because of the closed system of mass mania which he describes as a result of panic. Three concepts of the masses thus exist, with great ambitions and with universal claims to recognition: ‘the masses’ and libido, ‘the masses’ and the fear of touch, ‘the masses’ and the horror vacui. To respect historical greatness it is helpful to be modest. But to be modest may also be a contribution to wisdom, because all these theories try to explain everything. And this is too much. It would be interesting to subject them to an endurance test. September 11 could be such a test. I think here of Canetti’s double masses, but also of Broch’s concept of panic. All these concepts have, besides their universal and anthropological claim of recognition, something in common: they all meditate upon the masses without looking at media and media change. But the existence of the modern masses is due not least to the existence of media which organise virtually millions of people on a national but also on a global level.

Mass Hysteria and the Physics of the Crowd Canetti and Broch – A Theoretical Divorce¹ Aufklärung ist die radikal gewordene mythische Angst […] Es darf überhaupt nichts mehr draußen sein, weil die bloße Vorstellung des Draußen die eigentliche Quelle der Angst ist. Max Horkheimer/Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung

I. There aren’t two concepts about the crowd in modern culture that are more different from each other than Broch’s and Canetti’s, although both were contemporaries and friends. They differ with regard to the intellectual temperament, the rhetoric, the use of language and the gesture. On the one hand, there is a curiosity for the real phenomena and the lust to be a fearless observer; on the other there is a sceptical attempt of research and intellectual reflection and also a deep irritation, which is intellectual and personal at once. But there is also a deep and astonishing similarity in this parallel intellectual acting. Both writers have the idea to explain the genesis of the crowds with regard to a human quality: the feeling of insecurity. Fear, anxiety, panic. In the very beginning of his essay, Canetti describes and analyses very impressively the fear of human beings to get touched. In contrast, Broch starts his analysis of the collective illusions of the crowd with fundamental reflections on the conditions of the possibility of massillusions, which are the result of fear of existence and of death.² With regard to their common focus – fear and anxiety-they differ from their common intellectual background and counterpart: from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Nearly all of his life, Canetti has written against Freud although he does mention him very rarely whereas Broch integrates the psychoanalysis in his concept of the crowd. Broch’s theory of mass-illusion can be seen as a heretic psychoanalytic theory that is enlarged and enriched by the reception of Heidegger and Binswanger. With

1 Broch Massenwahntheorie. Beiträge zu einer Psychologie der Politik is quoted KW 12 and follows the edition of the Kommentierte Werkausgabe (1979). Canetti’s essay Masse und Macht ist quoted MM and follows the original edition (1960). 2 For a first approach to Broch’s concept see Müller-Funk (2003).

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other words, Canetti and Broch are linked with two classical discourses, which are typical and characteristic in and for modernity, the discourse about fear and anxiety in occidental modernism – after God’s death – and the discourse about the forms of mass-manifestation which are specific in the context of history. Canetti’s concept of Berührungsfurcht (fear of being touched) quite evidently is influenced by a biological behaviourism, which levels the difference between animal and human being. In contrast, Broch refers to a philosophical discourse, which has begun with Kierkegaard’s meditations about fear, and includes Heidegger’s famous analysis of existence and being (Sein). Heidegger does not refer to anxiety and fear explicitly, but it is quite clear that his idea of Sorge (which has a stronger meaning than the English word ‘sorrow‘) entails all the phenomena which are described by the word ‘fear’; so, one can say that Binswanger’s analysis of existence is an adaptation of Heidegger as of Kierkegaard.³ It is striking that Broch does not mention any of those theoretic. Canetti’s essayism very often coincides with the position of a narrator who is an anthropologist or a behaviourist, an attentive, participating, but distant observer. On contrary, the voice in Broch’s text, half an essay, half an academic wok, is speaking from an inside perspective. It resembles the monologue interieur Broch has programmatically used in Der Tod des Vergil (Virgil’s Death).⁴ Freud’s contribution to this history of discourse is quite ambivalent, as Wolfgang Wein (1992) has pointed out in his study Angst und Vernunft. An der Grenze von Rationalem und Nichtrationalem im menschlichen Denken und Handeln (Anxiety and Reason. On the Borderline between Rationality and non-Rationality in Human thinking and Practice). In his lectures on the introduction into psychoanalysis, Freud emphasises the central meaning of fear. In his eyes, fear is a crossing point where different and important questions meet in. Moreover, it is a “riddle whose answering would have to bring into light about our whole inner life”. For Freud, anxiety (Angst) is situated in the Ego, in an Ego that sees itself permanently confronted with three dangers: threatens from the external world, claims from the internal unconscious world and also from the claims of a paternal instance, the Über-Ich, the Hyper-Ego, the voice of conscience. Also in its revisited dualistic version, Freud’s theory, (including the Todestrieb (desire and longing for death) does, however, not allow to focuses fear and anxiety as an elementary and exis-

3 Binswanger (1942); Ellenberger, (1985, 1164–1168); Herzog (1994); Vetter, (1990). 4 Lützeler (1988). Lützeler refers also to the fact that Spengler’s philosophy of history played a significant role for the literary construction of the Roman Empire as for the crisis in and of modern culture, which is so central in Broch’s work. Especially Broch’s cyclic concept of history is an adaptation of Spengler’s philosophy.

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tential feeling anxiety is always a secondary phenomenon, a form of reaction. As Freud points out, anxiety is a “common coin” for which one can exchange all affective impulses (Freud 1987, 308). As – before – Kierkegaard and – later – Heidegger, the founder of Psychoanalysis differentiates between Furcht (fear) and Angst (anxiety). He defines Furcht as “the expectation of danger and the preparation for it, also in the case that it is an unknown one”. In contrast, fear needs a “certain object of which one is afraid.” (Ibd.) Thus, Freud is going on with a discourse (which is in contrast to the common use of the German words, which don’t make this clear differentiation) Kierkegaard has developed. In his philosophical work, fear refers to a specific reaction to a specific situation which is limited, a situation which is seen or interpreted as dangerous and dreadful (Wein 1992, 67), whereas anxiety – at least in Kierkegaard, Heidegger und also Broch – is a permanent disposition, which is part of the existence as a human being as such and has a concrete vis à vis besides the nothing, the death, the loss of the self in all its aspects. To use Kierkegaard’s emphasised terminology, anxiety, but not fear is linked to original sin, which is seen in analogy to the process of individuation. It is the Ego, which constitutes itself by saying no to God, and loses it innocence. Thus, one could say, fear that comes and goes is not connected existentially with human condition, whereas anxiety is part of the development of human being, of this story, which is told in the genesis symbolically. Both, creature and man have fear, but only man has anxiety. Or more precisely, anxiety, elementary fear, is grasping human beings. In Freud’s logic argumentation, there cannot be an anxiety, which is not a fear of something at the end. In Freud, anxiety is a form of fear that maintains unconscious. Broch and Canetti relate to the modern philosophical discourse on fear and anxiety, but in a different way. Canetti discusses and illustrates the crowd in its ‘real’ psycho-physical existence with reference to the fear of being touched. In contrast, Broch describes the existential deep structure of the collective revolt based on a on an exaggerated and hopeless anxiety which appears long before the unloading of the energy the crowd represents. Canetti is the essayist of the fear, a fear that is as unstable as the crowd itself. The crowd is the phenomenon, which makes fear real und, gives it a real stage. Broch, however, is the very analytic of the latent and existential anxiety, which comes to light under the conditions of a modern world, a world without obligatory symbolic forms and values. With reference to these historical circumstances, the outbreak of mass hysteria becomes extraordinarily probable. On the other hand, Canetti – in the intention to become clear – takes the role of the quasi-scientific observer, which has not emotions and especially no fears for the phenomenon he analyses: the crowd. He suggests the self-understanding of an anthropologist who is a curious and at the same time an indolent special-observer. Considering the terrorist and the ‘light’

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consumerist totalitarianism, Broch has fear of the crowd. He seeks for a way out of a precarious historical situation. Both authors have to some degree a leftist tendency. Canetti’s view of the crowd is ambivalent, whereas Broch’s is negative. Especially in the beginning of his occupation with the topic, Canetti who was a left wing participant of the mass demonstration in front of the Justizpalast, had a positive perspective with regard to the crowd, Broch, however who was a fellow traveller of the social democrats in the 1920s had always a horror. So, Canetti represents a post-Marxist approach, Broch a discourse that could be described as conservative with regard to culture (kulturkonservativ).

II. It is not quite easy to explain how the both parts of Canetti’s huge essay are really fit together. For the Machthaber (despotic ruler) is not identical with the leader of the crowd, whose necessity for constituting various crowds is denied by Canetti in contrast to Freud’s psychoanalysis of the masses in which the libidinous relationship between the leader and the crowds is striking. The strong sides of Canetti’s work are – besides of the impressive and powerful language and the innovative metaphors his excellent material, the plenty of examples: there is the ethnographic material from the rain-dances to the Muharram-festival of the Shiites, the case study on Schreber, the story about the saving of Flavius Josephus and die obsession of the Indian sultan Muhammad Tughlak whose fear of his surrounding makes him a permanent murderer. The illustrative material and the simple typology, which he works out only with reference to the crowds, cover the fact that Canetti’s literary and – essayistic approach is to a high degree very descriptive. The author categorically denies analysing the specific historical and cultural presuppositions for the rise of the crowds and absolute ruler ship. Canetti’s cognitive and conceptional metaphorology (cf. Scott 1993) provokes the suspicion that his theory is based on a biological or – moreover – a biologist fundament. It entails also an unsystematic version of etology that does not allow making a clear difference between human and animal behaviour. It is not contingent that Canetti’s again and again connects metaphors from animal kingdom with the world of hunting, especially in the chapters where he deals with the Flucht- and the Hetzmasse (flight-crowd; chase-crowd). This use of metaphors is especially significant in his description of “Meuten” (packs), which generates automatically a symbolic space of a wolf’s haunt. Also the grip of the lion, the “cat beast prey” is such a metaphoric complex, which becomes the illustrative paradigm for the relationship between violence and power. Canetti’s reductionism that ironically surpasses that of his counterpart, Freud, and contains a crude synthesis of eti-

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ology, anthropology and biology, has two crucial consequences for the logic of his discourse. It makes a systematic psychological insight of the phenomenon avoidable and senseless, and it concedes a radical ‘a-moralistic’ perspective that hidden pathetic indolence that suggests an indifferent observer who is able to withstand against the elementary dread and terror. Gottfried Benn has written that the liberal humanist is unable to keep in eye with violence vis à vis. Canetti has worked out a black anthropology which intents to see cruelty and violence with the own eyes, a negative anthropology which has become unavoidable after the catastrophe of the Third Reich and the Shoah. But what have the tyrannical ruler and the crowds in common if the despotic ruler is not automatically identical with the master of the crowd? Moreover, it could be that the crowds threaten his existence. The answer is very simple: it is an involuntary reflex in human (and animal) behaviour. Canetti’s work, which significantly makes no difference between anxiety and fear, begins in a very apodictic way. It points out that man does not fear more than to get touched by the unknown other.⁵ In my view, one must save Canetti from Canetti, the precise observer and the brilliant essayist from the apodictic theoretic. What is decisive here, is, that it is the unknown that creates fear, scare, terror, panic. The danger always comes from outside. To speak with Sartre, the Other is the hell. He; or she, the housekeeper who becomes the terrifying wife, as is the case in Die Blendung. It is always the Other which grasp for me. In Canetti’s interpretation, we have a biological equipment that makes us to beings which are in a permanent state of attack and defence. The extreme version of successful resistance against the threats from outside is not at least the crowd with its instincts and reflexes; the extreme version of the attack is the victorious aggressor who assimilates – imbibes and incorporates – all the unknown, strange and hostile. He is the feeder because of fear and and lust of power. The fear of being be touched is the existence of a creature which is a potential prey and victim of terror. The Machthaber, the absolute ruler, has realised that attacking is the best way of defence to get rid of the fear of being touched.

5 “Nichts fürchtet der Mensch mehr als die Berührung durch Unbekanntes. Man will sehen, was nach einem greift, man will es erkennen oder zumindest einreihen können. Überall weicht der Mensch der Berührung durch Fremdes aus. Nachts oder im Dunkel überhaupt kann der Schrecken über eine unerwartete Berührung sich ins Panische steigern. […] Alle Abstände, die die Menschen um sich geschaffen haben, sind von dieser Berührungsfurcht diktiert. Man sperrt sich in Häuser ein, in die niemand eintreten darf, nur in ihnen fühlt man sich halbwegs sicher. Die Angst vor dem Einbrecher gilt nicht seinen räuberischen Absichten allein, sie ist auch eine Furcht vor seinem plötzlichen, unerwarteten Griff aus dem Dunkel.” (MM, 9).

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In his essay, Canetti gives further examples of the overwhelming importance of the fear of being touched. He refers to typical situations, how we move in the urban space, in the streets, to the behaviour in a restaurant or in the railway. It is always the same, we try to avoid any body-contact. After he has described our fear of being touched in the strong Ouverture of his opus maximum, there is the next apodictic turn. The author risks the uncautious thesis that it is only the crowd that redeem us from the evil of that fear.⁶ If I have understood the logic of argumentation behind this rhetorically impressive, meta-historical description of a virutal mega-body correctly, then it means that there is a dialecticic turn: the powerless single human being which is plagued and tormented by its latent or actual fear of being touched turns over to a flight forward. Considering a threatening attack from outside, which seems to be more dreadful than the everyday fear of being touched, (s)he overcomes this fear and becomes one common body. But is it really true that it is only the crowd which can redeem us from Canetti’s basic fear? Does notthe human being, man and woman alike, overcome this fear of the Other and unknown, hesitatingly indeed, by the love and tenderness, which the French philosopher Levinas has described so paradoxically as a concession and confession of a structural failure to grasp and hold the other in a fixed position? (Levinas 1984, 56–61) In this interpretation, caressing and stroking would be the denial of the desire to keep the other under eternal control. We do not primarily argue in that direction because to contrast Canetti’s black anthropology that entails the plot that man is a beast of prey and its victim at once with a more positive perspective of the human. I only wish to point out, that Canetti’s interpretation is much too restricted. On the one hand, love in its urging to assimilate (incorporate) the unknown and to overcome the abyss between inside and outside, has quite evidently its precarious aspects. On the other, love produces a new elementary form of fear: the fear of being left alone. Thus, people in

6 “Es ist die Masse allein, in der der Mensch von dieser Berührungsfurcht erlöst werden kann. Sie ist die einzige Situation, in der diese Furcht in ihr Gegenteil umschlägt. Es ist die dichte Masse, die man dazu braucht, in der Körper an Körper drängt, dicht auch in ihrer seelischen Verfassung, nämlich so, daß man darauf achtet, wer es ist, der einen ‘bedrängt’. Sobald man sich der Masse einmal überlassen hat, fürchtet man ihre Berührung nicht. In ihrem idealen Fall sind sich alle gleich. Keine Verschiedenheit zählt, nicht einmal die der Geschlechter. Wer immer einen bedrängt, ist das gleiche wie man selbst. Man spürt ihn, wie man sich selber spürt. Es geht dann alles plötzlich wie innerhalb eines Körpers vor sich.” (MM, 10).

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modern societies, men as women, run to and fro between the longing for radical autonomy and the wish for safety.⁷ Canettis’s theory of the crowd is a theory which could be described by a variation of a famous sentence of Lacan: l’amour n’existe pas. Because of that, Canetti does not refer to that phenomenon of love, which is so important for the genesis of the crowds (not of all crowds, but of all crowds with a relative duration and a specific relevance). In as much as Canetti reduces the constitution of the crowd to overcoming an automatic reflex; the aspect of desire of the mass in which the longing for love has its important part has no place in his system. It seems to be transformed into that energy which is necessary to build a mega-body from the ensemble of single human beings Canetti’s reductionism is still more striking in the second part of the book where he deals with violence and power. Here, Canetti works out the hidden impulses and motives behind the ugly face of the lonesome despotic ruler. It is a panorama of obsessions. In contrast to the first part, the author does not only take the role of the anthropologist but also that of a psychologist. As I have mentioned, also in the second part of the book touching plays a prominent role. At the very beginning of the part, Canetti points out that the psychology of grasping and incorporating has not yet written. This implies the directions for the reader to understand Masse und Macht as such a psychology and philosophy of hand gripping and of the palpable. Canetti depicts a phenomenology of the hand, which is seen as an archaic instrument of “animalistic empowerment” (MM, 228).⁸ Interpreting or ‘deconstructing’ theories always mean not only to look to which topics they refer. It is also important to see which topics remains mute and silent. There is no reference to the hand that is an instrument for writing or to the hand, which is so important in the tender encounter between human beings. In Canetti’s radical reduction, the hand advances to the central organ of power. The (despotic) ruler is the beast of prey that transforms and changes all his co-human

7 Bongardt (1995, 46): “Sobald die symbiotische Einheit des Säuglings mit seiner Mutter zerbrochen ist, wird die menschliche Entwicklung von zwei widerstreitenden Strebungen geprägt. Dem Wunsch nach Selbständigkeit, nach Ausdehnung und Selbstbehauptung steht die Sehnsucht nach Geborgenheit und Eins-Sein mit anderen entgegen. Diese Gegensätzlichkeit in einem realistischen Selbst- und Weltbild integriert zu haben, stellt neben der der Ausbildung der Unterscheidung zwischen Selbst und Objekt, d.h. zwischen Ich und Umwelt, in psychodynamischer Sicht die Hauptbedingung für eine gesunde Entwicklung des Individuums dar.” 8 “Die Finger tasten, was dem Körper bald ganz gehören wird.” (MM, 234).

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beings into mice which he saves up for the symbolic and real feeding at the ‘right’ moment. In contrast to the animal beast of prey the human has yet another motive for his wish for capturing and incorporating. He wants to get rid of his potential rival. He is emancipated from the fear, to become the victim of another mighty person who could transform him, like in Kafka’s famous tale into a nothing, a beetle; or a fly or a flea. With reference to the first part of the book, the thesis about overcoming the fear of being touched by building a crowd was half-true. It is absolute empowerment, which guarantees an end of threat and inviolability. The bad news is: one can never be sure. But, nevertheless, to be mighty means the impossibility of being touched or kept. (MM, 228). This situation is connected with another motive, the phantasm of surviving: the oriental despot in Canetti (Canetti is an interesting example of a westernised Orientalism) who puts aside all his competitors will survive, he wins power from his action.⁹ Surviving also means not to be kept and bruised by the grip of death, which also comes from outside as all the unknown. Behind the fear of being touched it is death, which lies in wait, for you – a central theme in Canetti’s whole work. In his drama Die Befristeten (Limited people) the omnipresence of death is the precondition for establishing absolute power. To this extent, one can say that Canetti’s anthropology, too, is determined by the dominant topic of death in modernity, which is a death after God’s death – which the French theoretic Jean Baudrillard has described in a self-commentary to his influential Der symbolische Tausch und der Tod (Symbolic Exchange and Death).¹⁰ Here, perhaps, is the boundary between the anthropological approach and a modern philosopher of death that is no longer based a biology and etology. Here is a field of discourse, which is familiar with the discourse of fear and anxiety and maybe is constitutive for it: the death in modernity. Death is stronger than the ruler, however despotic and powerful he may be, this ruler who wants to overcome him by eliminating and killing all his potential rivals who make an attempt of his life – really or supposedly. And, because this type of ruler is extremely suspicious and perfect, all human beings are potential rivals. The phantasm of the Machthaber which has some similarities with Freud patriarch of the Urhorde is – in Canetti’s eyes – the wish to be alone in the world, to survive all the others.

9 “[…] will überleben; er kräftigt sich daran.” (MM, 268). 10 Baudrillard et al. (1983, 68): “Es bleibt ein ewiger Antagonismus zwischen Subjekt und Objekt, Leben und Tod usw.; die beiden Pole werden nicht aufgehoben, sie bleiben immer antagonistisch. Es gibt da vielleicht eher ein Prinzip des Übels als ein Prinzip der Versöhnung, ein Prinzip der Unversöhnung, das darunter liegt.”

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Canetti does not mention another, less cruel, method of surviving: it is surviving through monuments of memory, which seem to guarantee life after death. The connection between terror and monumentalisation is quite evident¹¹ as one can see in Stalin’s Communist empire, in Mao Tse Tung’s China, in Ceaucescu’s Romania or in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. All these dictators can be described with Canetti as obsessive characters which are moved by fear of being touched and by the thirst of surviving. They become offensive and aggressive: terror as a way to react to fear. Creating fright and fear implies banishing one’s own anxiety. It was Kierkegaard who interpreted Nero’s cruelty in this sense, as Michael Bongards points out in his commentary to Entweder-Oder (Either-Or).¹² In this perspective, anxiety can be seen as a phenomenon of alterity, as a defence against the personal and the non-personal-Other. The unification in the crowd and the attempt to establish absolute power prove to be two contrastive and complementary strategies to guard against the other. It is the phantasm of banning danger forever by eliminating the Other. For man who lives in total fear of the Other, the unknown, the stranger, it seems extremely attractive either to disappear in the ocean of the crowd or to keep a distance from the Other through self-empowerment. It could be a mechanism that is relatively independent from the political, economic and social context, although this may modify it. But whereas the people in the crowd have the experience of a real community event (very often by acting out their aggression against the hostile outside) the lust of power, which is so successful in producing distance, control, elimination and death to all others, has its price: radical lonelinness. Canetti has sympathy for extremes; therefore he mentions all the civil uses of power – besides some cursory references to the English parliament¹³ – in only a few words. But all these societies have the claim – the reality may differ – to control both extremes. They control the march of the crowds as the use of power.

11 See also Jan Assmann/Tonio Hölscher 1988.. 12 Bongardt (1995, 16f.): “[Nero] standen in seiner Machtfülle sämtliche Genußmöglichkeiten offen – und dennoch lebte er nicht als vollendet glücklicher Mensch, sondern als von Schwermut und Angst gehetzter Tyrann, der schließlich in seiner Verzweiflung keinen anderen Ausweg mehr sah, als die für ihn bedrohlichen Menschen mit seiner Macht derart zu ängstigen, daß sie ihm nicht mehr zu nahe traten.” 13 MM, 220–223; Hanuschek (2005, 437–455).

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III. To some degree, Broch’s never finished Mass Hysteria which was not published in his lifetime can be seen as a theoretical summa and a key to the understanding of his literary work which is occupied with a bundle of problems: the loss of values, anxiety, the social crisis, attempts at resistance and overcoming. His novels have very mediocre heroes – for example in the Sleepwalker-trilogy, a naive Prussian officer who is in love with a woman of the demimonde, an unemployed clerk, a swindler and war profiteer, men who have lost their way in the symbolic space of modern society. They are unbalanced persons, dominated by their unconscious. Sleepwalking advances to a metaphor for an inner condition, which is characterised by half consciousness, in which anxiety and fear are inscribed. In Der Tod des Vergil the Roman poet, sick to death, is confronted – to use Canetti’s terminology – with a feast crowd. In Broch’s own terminology the Rationalverarmung (rationality impoverishment) of the feast crowd is opposed to the die Irrationalbereicherung (irrationality enrichment) that is the result for example of poetry. Whereas the poet confronts himself with death, the crowd, which celebrates the arrival of the emperor (Canetti’s ruler), tries to escape into the drunkenness of the feast. It is the crowd which narcotises the anxiety about the Other, the unknown, death.¹⁴ The novel can be understood as a pretentious literary meditation, a poetic self-therapy to overcome the fear of death. This is true for both sides, the writer and its implicit reader, because there cannot be any doubt that in Broch’s novel

14 “Entpuppt sich da das menschliche Geschehen, wie immer und wo immer es statthatte, nicht unweigerlich als Ausfluß der kreatürlichen Angst, als ein besessenes Angstgeschehen, aus dessen Dämmerkerker es kein Entrinnen und kein Ausbrechen gibt, da es die Angst der im Dickicht verirrten Kreatur ist? […] besser denn je verstand er die unverlöschliche Hoffnung der kreatürlichen Massen, verstand er, was die dort drunten, Stimmen und Aberstimmen auch sie, von ihrem wildverzweifelten Gegröle begehrten, verstand er sie, wenn sie an ihrer Inbrunst, an ihrer Pöbelinbrunst unverbrüchlich und unbelehrbar hafteten, aus sich herausschreiend, in sich hineinschreiend, es möge und müsse in dem Gestrüpp eine ausgezeichnete, eine stärkste, eine außergewöhnliche Stimme geben, eine Führerstimme, der sie sich bloß anzuschließen brauchten,um in deren Abglanz, im Abglanz des Jubels, des Rausches, der Nacht der cäsarischen Gottähnlichkeit sich mit einem letztatmig wilden, stierhaft machtbrüllenden Anstürmen doch noch einen irdischen Weg aus der Verstrickung ihres Daseins bahnen zu können, und dies erkennend, sah er, verstand er, erkannte er besser denn je, daß sein eigenes Trachten zwar in der Form und in der Überheblichkeit, nicht jedoch durch Sinn und Inhalt sich von diesem rohen, aber ehrlichen Vergewaltigungswillen der rasend gewordenen Herde unterschied […] oh, er erkannte besser denn je die Vergeblichkeit der massentierischen Ausbruchsversuche und ihrer Furchtgejagtheit […]” (KW 4, 86f.).

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the reader is a writer in the sense of Roland Barthes¹⁵. In the first draft of the Massenwahntheorie, which can be interpreted parallel to the novel, one can read: “Who has widened his Ego to the whole world, has overcome death.” (KW 12, 17) Even if it is not quite clear at this point what is the counterpart of the precarious Ego/I-enlargement in the crowd, the opening to the whole world, two things are evident. Firstly, it seems that this enlargement entails a religious dimension; secondly that the cause of the existence of the crowd and its illusions must be found in the individual and its cultural context. The genesis of the crowds which Canetti describes with curiosity and fascination is from Broch’s perspective ‘only’ the manifestation of a deeper disposition which is latent and based in the psychological structure of human beings. Broch contrasts rationality and irrationality quite schematically (instead of discussing their connection), but it soon becomes clear that he identifies the nonrational with which mankind is confronted, not primarily with the ensemble of feelings, mood, desire, lust, but with the complex Freud has called the “small coin” (“Scheidemünze”) of fear (Freud), every feeling and desire is referred to this small coin. For Broch, elementary anxiety, is the result of our encount with the ‘real’ world.¹⁶ It is interesting that Broch, like Canetti, uses the metaphor of incorporation (assimilation). But whereas in Canetti incorporation (assimilation) means a real and palpable threat that is represented by the Other, the metaphor of incorporation here refers to a more or less positive process, namely the capacity of symbolic integration. Culture, one could say, is seen as the symbolic embodying of the speechless, strange and unknown world outside but probably also inside of myself. The world does not speak as the American philosopher Richard Rorty has pointed out. It is man who makes it speak using “symbolical forms”– myth, sciences, language, arts  – (Ernst Cassirer)¹⁷, which includes values I can refer

15 Barthes (1987, 8). The active reader is seen by Barthes as a text producer who creates meaning. The fact that Broch’s texts deny programmatically such a concept, is evident but does not automatically mean that his texts themselves are not polyvalent and plural. 16 “Immer geht es um das Verhältnis zur äußeren Welt; es bleibt dem Menschen keine andere Wahl, als durch ‘Einverleibung’ in sein Ich diese Außenwelt zum ‘Wert’ zu verwandeln, der die Ich-Erweiterung fortsetzt, und überall dort, wo das Ich in solchem Bestreben gehindert wird, überall, wo es an die Grenzen der ‘Fremd’-Welt stößt und sie nicht zu überschreiten vermag, überall dort entsteht des Wertes Gegen-Zustand, dort entsteht ‘Angst’: das Ich wird sich dann plötzlich einer Verlassenheit und seiner a priori gegebenen Einsamkeit bewußt, es weiß um die metaphysische Einsamkeit seines Sterbens.” (KW 12, 16 f). 17 Cassirer ([1953] 1994, 43). Cassirer defines symolic forms as “Prägungen zum Sein”; as shapings orientated to being. The German metaphor of “prägen” (the ‘real’ meaning refers

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to each other. When this symbolical embodiment fails, the mere existential fear appears, that anxiety which is also seen as a moving power in culture. One could argue (by using an apercu) that Broch writes in the lee side of the Freudian unconscious, but this dark room is occupied not by Freud’s libido but by Kierkegaard’s Angst und Heidegger’s Sorge. Thus, anxiety is quite a productive motor of the psychodynamic process on the individual level as on the level of culture. In contrast to Freud’s Unbehagen in der Kultur, it is not the libido in all its sublimed versions, but fear that brings forth all those symbolic forms Cassirer, but also modern semiology, has analysed. Beyond practical commodities (which it produces), culture is seen as a system of values and forms that give answers to all the existential threats which haunt man/woman at all times and at all places. But it is not anxiety as such which pushes mankind to symbolic incorporation (assimilation). It is also the wish to be set free from fear and anxiety (“von der Angst befreit zu werden”). Broch defines panic as a tricky doubling of fear, as an elementary fear, which is experienced as a situation without a way out. With regard to this fear of fear, the individual feels helpless and displaced and abandoned. Panic produces the decisive impulse for the genesis of the crowd. Anxiety as such is latent and without direction. As Freud and the occidental discourse on fear and anxiety in general, Broch differentiates between the real and the internal, the visible and the visible aspects of this complex.¹⁸ But this situation in which the phantom or, should I say, the ghost of panic appears, is characteristic for modern times. Bringing Broch’s concept in a more systematic form, one could point out that cultures differ from others not only by the way they work out symbolical forms to overcome the irrational but also by the divergent forms of fears which are all linked to the metaphysical elementary fear. The precarious aspect in modernity is that the internal metaphysical fear is actualised by the external economic fear. Both correspond directly to each other by excluding the conscious. The dramatic point is that this anxiety from outside remains invisible. Following Broch, the average man/woman of our times, the “Durch-

to minting) makes it evident that Cassirers concept os symbolic is not only epistemological but has a practical aspect. With regard to the cultural turn, it would be fascinating to compare Broch’s concept of value with Cassirers theory of symbolic forms. 18 “Die Aktualisierung der metaphysischen Angst geschieht zumeist durch irgendeine Aktualangst, die von außen her den Menschen überkommt, und fast ist es ein Segen für ihn, wenn diese, und sei sie noch so groß, aus einer sichtbaren Quelle herstammt, so daß er sich gegen sie wenden und sich gegen sie wehren kann; stammt aber die auslösende Aktualangst gleichfalls aus dem Unsichtbaren, ist auch sie unerfaßlich, so daß sie innerseelische Urangst nicht nur erweckt, sondern auch noch überdies ihr äußeres Symbol wird, dann ist das Gespenst der Panik in unmittelbare Nähe gerückt.” (KW 12, 20).

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schnittsmensch dieser Zeit” feels subjugated (“unterworfen”) to invisible incomprehensible forces (“unsichtbar unerfaßlichen Gewalten”) such as conjuncture, inflation, unemployment, which are overwhelming in a nearly mythical way (“in beinahe “mythischer Weise übermächtig”) so inescapable that man/woman feels delivered up to them as a plaything without any will of their own (“so unentrinnbar, daß er sich als willenloser Spielball ihnen überantwortet fühlt” (KW 12, 20). It is interesting that Broch refers in his discourse to the political mass movements of his times in which those duplications of elementary fears become evident in an irritating and dreadful way. Instead, he begins to talk about modern mass culture and consumerism. It will be – the analogy to the kitsch in literature is striking – described as a symbolic machinery of diversion which tries to soothe the panic of modern mankind by the worship of success, by admiration of record or by permanent idolatry. The occupation and, moreover, obsession with victory and record suppresses the idea of the own mortality. It renders forgotten the elementary feeling of fear. In its sexual component, it ‘transcends’ sexual impotence and the lack of ecstasy of the individual (KW 12, 322).¹⁹ Much more dangerous, however, is the sort of mass-producing panic which is directed to the stranger. Where and when symbolic integration fails und must fail (as it is the case in economic invisible fear which can be increased to panic), where and when the world in general remains principally strange, panic refers to the stranger as such. Anxiety appears when symbolical safety has been lost. Now, it turns against the supposed reason, the stranger, in a sadistic way (KW 12, 56). The inability of a single person, of a group, of a society to deal with the Other in an adequate real and symbolical way is presented as the quality of the stranger. In a relaxed situation, strangeness is seen as comical. Broch mentions here the image of the Czechs in the Habsburg Monarchy or the perception of the Jews in Western Europe. But this situation may change suddenly and dramatically if the strangeness of the untransparent world (“Fremdheit der undurchdringlichen Welt”) is seen and experienced as danger and awakens fear. More or less in the sense of Freud’s conception of Projektion (projection), the dreadful situation must be fixed externally.²⁰

19 “Es geht um das Symbol der bei aller Hoffnungslosigkeit noch immer ersehnten Ekstase. Die Bildsehnsucht des panikbedrohten Menschen ist Symbolsehnsucht.” (KW 12, 21). 20 “[…] nichts eignet sich hier für so gut wie der fremde Nebenmensch, der ‘fremde Nachbar’, keiner ist so gut wie dieser für die eigene Angst verantwortlich zu machen, und so erwacht der Haß gegen den ‘Fremden’, also an dem Angehörigen einer Minorität; die Komik dieser Minorität, ihre Harmlosigkeit, ihre Selbstpersiflage ist vergessen, denn sie ist zur Würde eines Symbols aufgestiegen, und da es um die Aktivierung der menschlichen Ur-Angst geht, so wird archaisch-infantil mit dem schlichten Wunsch nach konkret-physischer Vernichtung

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This analysis of xenophobia, which was developed by Freud and his followers, including the Lacanian theoretic Julia Kristeva,²¹ has one enormous advantage: it can explain the good feelings and the clear conscience of those who collectively pursue appalling and terrible actions. At the same time it makes clear that all moralising and logocentric enlightenment with regard to xenophobia must fail in the end. From Broch’s point of view, it is much more important if man/woman is able to learn to deal with his/her fears and anxiety in a positive way, if (s)he can work them out symbolically. Bloodthirstiness for and against the stranger proves to be as counterproductive for the individual as for the group. It delivers no solution to the problem, apart from a temporal satisfaction. Murder is ecstasy but not overcoming death, nevertheless it is a goal. (KW 12, 24) Broch uses the term ecstasy, which means in the philosophical discourse on religion a state of being beside and a situation of self-displacement in a double and quite remarkable way, positive as negative. At first, it means a stepping out of the individual from itself. Corresponding to this meaning, Broch interprets the phenomena of modern mass culture and political mass movements. Ecstasies reduce the full scope of rationality and therefore  – including all the symbolic loadings mean a “Rationalverarmung” (rationality impoverishment). They are moved by the panic of loss and have the wishful and unreal illusion that they can possess the world, because of the belief that through this act fear will disappear from the world. The other positive ecstasy is lonesome from the very beginning until the end. Here, the individual follows Kant’s categorical imperative but in a remarkable psychological transformation: to have the courage to confront yourself, to develop a form of enlightenment that is no longer a logocentric self-enlightenment but the ability to confront him/herself with the uncanny Other. Here, it becomes central to localise one’s fears and anxieties and to face up to them them without fear. Irrationalbereicherung (irrationality enrichment) means that the ecstatic man/woman opens for the Other in him/herself and therefore also for the world outside. From Broch’s perspective, this symbolical self-confrontation is the central function of literature under the circumstances of modernity. It is

dieses lebenden Angst-Symbols reagiert, m.a.W., es wird der ‘Fremde’ nicht mehr als ‘Mensch’ betrachtet, sondern als Symbol des angsterzeugenden ‘Bösen schlechthin’, dessen Wegräumung zur ethischen Pflicht wird, da nur durch solche Vernichtung des symbolischen Widersachers sich der Weg zur Angstbefreiung, zur Panikbefreiung, zur Ekstase wieder öffnet.” (KW 12, 24). 21 Julia Kristeva, Fremde sind wir uns selbst (1990, 11): “Auf befremdliche Weise ist der Fremde in uns selbst. Er ist die verborgene Seite unserer Identität […] Wenn wir ihn in uns erkennen, verhindern wir, daß wir ihn verabscheuen.”

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exactly in this point that kitsch fails and is part of Rationalverarmung (rationality impoverishment). The crowd refers to power – “I have the world because I have subjugated it.” In contrast, ecstasy which overcomes death implies a religious, moreover a mystic dimension and gesture: “I am the world because the world has come into me.” (KW 12, 25). In his last novel about Virgil, Broch described this lonely ecstasy in a literary form. The novel is the literary illustration of Broch’s Massenwahntheorie. It seems to me that the differentiation is not as consequent as Broch may believe. It is quite evident that positive ecstasy and symbolical participation is an act of Einverleibung (that means assimilation, – or to maintain the metaphor of the German original word ‘incorporation’ or ‘embodiment’). Without keeping and fixing the world there is no possibility of relative security. In contrast to Canetti, Broch develops a discourse on fear and the crowd which is analytic and normative. It aims at analysing the deeper reasons for the collective states of fear in modern capitalism and capitalistic modernity. It tries to show ways out of the modern crisis which becomes manifest in the appearance of panicked crowds. Broch’s project – it was really a research project²² – is in its very substance political or –better – meta-political. It makes an appeal not to a collective but to the individual. Broch’s fragmentary book on mass hysteria is based on a form of self-enlightenment, which is psychologically transformed. It includes a potential of hope after the end of great narratives, a diagnosis that is anticipated by Broch especially in his discussion of Marxism. The modern society only has a chance if it is able to overcome xenophobia, mass hysteria and internal vacuum, if woman/ man is referred to his or her own Other and has the courage to face it. In Broch’s eyes, this is not so much a question of a healthy Ego but an ethical obligation that is in favour of woman and man. Hereby, one could say that literature receives a decisive function analogous to the Aristotelian catharsis, which now refers to modern fear and anxiety, automatically increasing with the process of individualization. In remarkable contrast to Freud and his verdict against religion as a form of infantile regression, Broch’s encounter with fear is structurally religious. Symbolical working at the end is only possible in an act and in a attitude that is religious. To some extent, like Kierkegaard a century earlier, Broch reverts to the traditional critique of religion (which was elaborated by the French enlightenment in particular). In this critique, religion seems to be nothing more than a phantom, a symptom or a rationalisation of fear. In Broch, elementary fear, anxiety becomes

22 See Paul Michael Lützeler, in: KW, 12, preface.

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the internal ‘place’ to reveal the whole weight and insecurity of human existence; a place where an experience becomes manifest, which is undoubtedly religious: the opening toward the Other. This stepping out has no concrete content, it is empty und can be occupied symbolically in different ways. It may be the only acceptable form of religious experience for a consciousness, which is enlightened and reflected, after God’s death. The weight of Broch’s argument culminates in the thesis that this kind of universalised religious attitude, the opening towards the world, is not only something which is desirable for the individual but also absolutely unavoidable for the fight against mass hysteria. The fact that Broch – who had Jewish origins – quite evidently prefers Christianity, does not follow automatically from his concept of a positive ecstasy of the individual which he contrasts with the mass ecstasy of the many blind. It is much more probable that Broch – in contrast to Freud – does not believe that Christianity is over as a candidate for historical hope because it is able to undermine the modern obsession with victory and the victorious, in the sense of an ethical and psychoanalytical socialism that favours the loser, the humiliated, the oppressed, the enslaved. Implicitly, his most political book entails the programme of a society of equals, who are also equal because they are, to use an expression of Julia Kristeva’s, strangers to themselves. Despite some dramatic events, I think we still live in the same symbolical space as Broch. Whether we still live in the same world as Canetti, especially in his Masse und Macht, is not so sure. One may doubt it, especially with regard to the theoretical background of this brilliant essay. But this is a theoretical and philosophical comment, not a literary valuation, which would have to praise Canetti’s tableaux of dense descriptions, the illustrative material and use of language as such. But his great and apodictic lines of argumentation provoke intellectual objection. In contrast to Broch, whose theory gets caught up with the typical contradiction between pessimism in culture and cultural psychotherapy, Canetti is a proponent of intransigency. Programmatically, he avoids dramatic gestures and appeals. There is no present hope. At the end of the book, he concludes that double helix of crowd and power will be closed in an age where collective selfdestruction has been possible. Face to face with the nuclear potential of selfdeconstruction, the essay comes to an open end, that power has lost its legitimation.²³

23 Die uralte Struktur der Macht, ihr Herz- und Kernstück: die Bewahrung des Machthabers auf Kosten aller übrigen, hat sich ad absurdum geführt, sie liegt in Trümmern. Die Macht ist größer, aber sie ist auch flüchtiger geworden. Alle werden überleben oder niemand. […] Die kontinuierliche Drohung, deren er (der Machthaber, der Überlebende, A.d.V.) sich bedient

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This is one of the rare parts of the book in which Canetti expressis verbis refers to the specific conditions of modernity. The increase in the usable potential of power and the possibilities of collective self-extinction, which are linked with this change, describe the radical new condition that Günther Anders has analysed and described in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. It is the possibility of the very last action of the crowd as of the ruler. (Anders 1956, vol. 1, 233–324) Twenty years after the publication of Masse und Macht, Anders’ and Canetti’s diagnosis remained current in the field between politics and culture, for example in the Western peace and grassroots movement which were ex negativo influenced by a secularised apocalyptic narrative (cf. Müller-Funk 2002, ch. 10), in which woman and man disappears but also the obsession for power and the crowd. The disappearance of mass hysteria and power obsession in this way cannot be seen as consoling.

und die das eigentliche Wesen dieses Systems ausmacht, richtet sich schließlich gegen ihn selbst. Ob er tatsächlich von Feinden gefährdet ist oder nicht, er wird immer ein Gefühl von Bedrohtheit haben. Die gefährlichste Drohung geht von seinen eigenen Leuten aus, denen er immer befiehlt, die in seiner nächsten Nähe sind. Das Mittel zu seiner Befreiung, nach dem er nicht ohne Zögern greift, auf das er aber keineswegs […] verzichtet, ist der plötzliche Massentod.“ (MM, 558).

Musil’s Version of Round Dance in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften Quite obviously, woman is a central topic in Musil’s œuvre. From the early novellas (Drei Frauen, Vereinigungen) to the magnum opus, the author is extremely interested in the female psyche. There is a deep tension and ambiguity in Musil’s work. Using literature as a medium of his/her own version of psychoanalysis, the keen reader Weininger (1903) is fascinated by the fin de siècle image of the woman as the entirely uncanny and inferior Other of man. In the early collection Drei Frauen (Three Women) we are confronted with mysterious women who are strange because of their sexual difference – which goes hand in hand with their ethnic and, partly, with their social inferiority. They, like the farmer’s wife Grigia, represent a premodern and pre-civilised world in the Alps. The similarities with the natural savages outside Europe are striking. The cave in which Homo ends lethally, a huge vulva (as in Almodovar’s film Hable con ella, 2002), is not the heart, but the hole of darkness as such. (Müller-Funk 2009a, 195–205) In contrast, the later, famous novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften does not confront us with women who are strange because of their ethnic background and represent sexuality as female and archaic although Diotima’s servant Rahel is perhaps one exception. Most of the female figures in Musil’s epoch-making novel are ladies from the upper classes like Gerda, Clarisse, Diotima, Bonadea and Agathe. One could say that these more or less hysterical women are potentially adressees of Freud’s psychoanalysis. In the Man without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), Ulrich is the dominant voice in the novel, making the case for the idea of contingency, essayism and non-identity. This sporty, intellectual and sexually aggressive young man is obsessed by the wish to overwhelm all his female counterparts with rough sexual intercourse. In the early works there was some sort of fear of female domination resulting from sexual power. In contrast, the later novel represents male strategies of dominating women in the field of sexuality. Coitus is seen as an an act of subjugation of women by men. In analogy to Schnitzler’s famous play Der Reigen, one could argue that the novel presents a Reigen of women dancing around the male hero. But there are some differences; the round dance in Schnitzler has no personal centre, there is a circle of sexual intercourse with changing partners until at the end we meet the partners from the beginning again. In Musil, there is a centre, Ulrich, the male hero, the central star around whom all women circle because they are impressed

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or obsessed by this new type of masculinity. So we have – until the projected end of the novel – a male sun with at least seven circles, seven round dances. There is also a second difference to Schnitzler. Schnitzler’s male and female figures are constituted on a socio-cultural level. They are prototypes, not individuals; we have the “süße Mädel” (sweet girl), the young man, the actress, the poet, the soldier, the servant. Musil’s figures are individuals and entail a psychological dimension. As I shall demonstrate, every one of the seven main female figures has more or less a psychological handicap. This typolgy includes non-flattering portraits of ladies: the nymphomaniac Bonadea, the Platonic “Diotima”, the borderline type Clarisse, the hysterical Gerda, the lascivious servant Rahel or the gluttonous Leona. There are only two positive portrayals of the female Other: the major’s wife (“Fernliebe”), and in contrast, Agathe, the depressive sister, the incestuous Other. It is quite evident that Ulrich represents the intellectual and sublime Other of the ripper Moosbrugger. To some extent, this Bluebeard is his double. With regard to this structure, it is quite evident that Ulrich must be seen not primarily as the double of the author but as a representative and symptomatic construction of masculinity. The first woman who appears in Musil’s round dances is a young singer with the Viennese name Leontine, called Leona, the lioness, who is described as an old-fashioned, lazy Viennese demimondaine and aristocratic prostitute: “sie war groß, schlank und voll, aufreizend leblos und er nannte sie Leona.” The interesting point is that it is Ulrich, the man, who gives her a name in that way, as we do with animals, real and artifical ones. The act of naming marks his general hegemony, his symbolical rulership. She is like a trophy, an animal in the cave that is fed by man (Musil 1979, 22).¹ It is important that she is seen as a lifeless phenomenon, because it is this lifelessness, as a statue, as a living automaton (as in E.T.A. Hoffmann) which makes her an attractive object of the male imagination. Man’s self-distance goes hand in hand with the mode of contingency: there is no sufficient reason to have an affair with a woman who is characterised as a beauty in the style of Juno, but at the same time as completely stupid. She is a trophy but also an object of Ulrich’s experiment, in which he attempts to find out the limits of her gluttony by organising huge portions of first-class food instead of acknowledging the beauty of her female body. So, Ulrich’s cruelty, which is part of the self-construction of his masculinity, is the cruelty of withdrawal. To some extent, he represents a self-controlled and uninvolved subject as in the natural

1 “Da beschloss Ulrich, sie Leona zu nennen, und ihr Besitz erschien ihm begehrenswert wie der eines vom Kürschner ausgestopften großen Löwenfells”.

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sciences, whereas the woman has the role of the object in a psychological laboratory. It is her lonely excessiveness that stimulates her male counterpart. She feels abused as a woman, realising that she is not loved because of her soul (Musil 1979, 24). Leontine is presented as a person who disappears in the very beginning of the novel, but there was a plan – namely that she should reappear as the concubine of Arnheim, Ulrich’s rival, the entrepreneur of the soul. One could argue that the abstract author acts as Ulrich’s supporter in the novel by creating this ironic intrigue in which a false romantic such as Arnheim becomes affiliated with the lifeless Viennese demimondaine at the end. The male protagonist also names his second concubine, who saved his life after he was attacked. Bonadea is the name of a goddess of chastity who became a temple prostitute. (Musil 1979, 41)² She does not know the second meaning of her nickname, which refers to the woman’s double life as an exemplary upper class wife with a hidden excessive sexuality. Thus, she becomes the victim of her sexual obsessions and the object of Ulrich’s experimental cruelty. Incidentally, it is striking that the difference between woman and man is organised as a contrast in self-control. Both Bonadea and Leona are characterised by their lack of selfcontrol. They are handicapped by nymphomania and love obsession. In contrast, man is chacterised and constructed by the idea of self-control, which in modern times is exercised through sport. Thus, Ulrich’s sportiness reflects the use of sport to create a modern version of male self-control which is seen as a base for male domination of woman. That is the reason why he steers their first talk towards the topic of sport, which the young lady finds brute and disgusting. His dominant position becomes quite clear, because in all conversations with ‘his’ women, he is the one who controls the discourse. As a result of this capability (which is part of this rational and linguistic dominance) Ulrich is able to control his own sexuality and to withdraw from her. But at the same time, this man, who has taken holidays from life, is able to make use of her nymphomania. As one could say, he is the psychoanalyst in sexual intercourse who transforms her depression into sexual mania. (Musil 1979, 43)³

2 “Er hatte sie Bonadea getauft, die gute Göttin, weil sie so in sein Leben getreten war, und nach einer Göttin der Keuschheit, die im alten Rom einen Tempel besessen hat, der durch eine seltsame Umkehrung zum Mittelpunkt aller Ausschweifungen geworden war”. 3 “Es blieb ihm kaum etwas anderes übrig, um ihre Klagen schweigen zu machen, als sie schleunigst aus dem Zustand der Depression in den der Manie zu versetzen. Dann sprach sie dem, der das tat und ihre Schwäche missbrauchte, jede vornehme Gesinnung ab, aber ihr

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In Bonadea’s nymphomania the interpretation of coitus as a symbolic death of the woman becomes quite evident. In one passage, the sexual treatment of the woman is compared with the punishment of children in traditional authoritarian education, to break female defiance and resistance. (Musil 1979, 878)⁴ The third female circle is configured by Ermelinda Tuzzi, the wife of the most important person in the administration of the Habsburgian Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Ermelinda is an Italian name and means ‘the universal soft woman’. This is sheer irony. Therefore also this young lady receives a new name from the protagonist of the novel: Diotima, the muse of Platonic discourse. This is, on the one hand, an ironic allusion to her blue-eyed idealism and philanthropy, but to some extent it also has a hidden pathetic connotation; a certain version of the Platonic concept becomes real in another round dance, in the relation with the sister, who, following the Platonic myth of the hermaphrodites, represents the other half of the brother and vice versa. In the novel, Diotima is presented as Ulrich’s relative, a cousin. To some extent, one could argue that she is the relative who is close to Ulrich, but not close enough, not his sister. It is not contingent that Ulrich proposes tha they live like in a novel, concentrating only on the most relevant and important things in life. This is part of his project of “Möglichkeitssinn” (sense for possibility) and his pathos of an exact life. This is the form of life he will live with the sisters later in the novel.The cousin is the woman with whom he cannot realize this project; she cannot understand him because she is full of idealistic illusions and phrases. In one projected chapter called the Gartenfest (garden party), Diotima confesses that she loves him like a brother. It is quite evident that his relation to her can be characterized by ambivalence, love-hate in an orthodoxian Freudian way; he has a “specific animosity against her”. (91) She is a “hydra of beauty” (Musil 1979, 95), an ideal woman with an intact virginity and an undeveloped femaleness, and represents a challenge for the man who does not fix his social roles a twentieth-century Don Juan, an outsider in the centre of this epoch who depicts a new self-image of modern man.

Leiden legte ihr einen Schleier nasser Zärtlichkeit über die Augen, wenn sie, wie sie das mit wissenschaftlichem Abstand auszudrücken pflegte, zu diesem Manne ‘inklinierte’.” 4 “Bonadea lag mit geschlossenen Augen da und gab kein Lebenszeichen mehr. Die Empfindungen, die sie in ihrem Körper hatte, waren nicht unähnlich denen eines Kindes, dessen Trotz durch Prügel gebrochen worden ist. Jeder Zoll ihres Leibes, der völlig satt und zerschlagen war, verlangte nach der Zärtlichkeit einer moralischen Vergebung. Von wem? Bestimmt nicht von dem Mann, in dessen Bett sie lag und den sie angefleht hatte, sie zu töten, weil ihre List durch keine Wiederholung und Steigerung zu brechen war.”

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Bit by bit, Ulrich feels attracted by her beauty, although the fear of getting eaten up by her remains a stable element of his interaction with her. It is around this fear that his sporting style of masculinity is organised. The relation beween man and woman is organised as a fight by hook or by crook. It is a fight for selfconsciousness as in Hegel’s famous chapter in the Phenomenology of Mind, it is a fight for acknowledgment which creates an image of man and his superiority. After many ups and downs the round dance ends in violent coitus, making clear that – as long before in Kleist – the body is the battlefield in the war between man and woman. It is the incapability of the woman to offer resistance that produces “Groll” and stimulates him. There is a signal in the text to understand the scene as a real war. The garden party is organised as a carneval in which the traditional identities and positions are undermined, with many of the women wearing trousers. Diotima is dressed in a military uniform, the uniform of a Napoleonic colonel, because she is upset with her husband and with Arnheim. So, the time has come for Ulrich to beat and hit her. Before they become intimate, the woman feels fear and acknowledgment of him, whereas he clenches his fists saying: “You do not know what kind of bad guy I am. I cannot love you. I would have to be allowed to beat you before I could love you.” (Musil, 1979, 1620)⁵ In this coitus too, which he starts with a slap, Ulrich acts as a psychoanalyst. His crude behaviour opens – that is the plot of the scene – the door for Diotima to return to the early times of childhood. (Musil 1979, 1621)⁶ The fourth woman is a subordinated one, Diotima’s servant, who, like all the other women in Musil’s round dance, is in love with this man who is, according to Diotima’s observation and perspective, clean-shaven, tall, taut and lithe, mus-

5 “Ich denke seit Monaten an nichts anderes, als Sie zu schlagen bis Sie brüllen wie ein kleines Kind.” In diesem Augenblick hatte er sie schon bei den Schultern gepackt, nahe beim Hals. Die Opferblödheit in ihrem Gesicht nahm zu. Noch zuckten Ansätze darin, etwas zu sagen, die Lage durch eine überlegene Bemerkung zu retten. In ihren Schenkeln zuckten Ansätze aufzustehen und kehrten vor dem Ziel um. Ulrich hatte ihren Pallasch ergriffen und halb aus der Scheide gezogen. Um Gotteswillen! – fühlte er – ich werde, wenn nicht etwas dazwischen tritt, sie damit über den Kopf schlagen, bis sie kein Zeichen ihres verfluchten Lebens mehr von sich gibt! – Er bemerkte nicht, daß in dem napoleonischen Obersten indessen eine entscheidende Veränderung vor sich ging. Diotima seufzte schwer auf, als entflöhe die ganze Frau, die sie nach ihrem zwölften Lebensjahr gewesen sei, aus ihrer Brust, und dann neigte sie sich zur Seite, um Ulrichs Lust über sich ergießen zu lassen, wie er mochte.” 6 “Weit zurückliegende Kinderworte und gebärden mengten sich hinein, und die ablaufenden wenigen Stunden bis zum Morgen waren wie erfüllt von einem dunklen, kindischen und seligen Traumzustand, der Diotima von ihrem Charakter befreite und sie in die Zeit zurückversetzte, wo man noch nichts überlegt und alles gut ist.”

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cular, his face light and mysterious, in one word, he appeared to himself to be a prejudice most woman have formed regarding an impressive young man. (“glatt rasiert, groß, durchgebildet, und biegsam, muskulös, sein Gesicht war hell und undurchsichtig; mit einem Wort, er kam sich selbst wie ein Vorurteil vor, das sich die meisten Frauen von einem eindrucksvollen noch jungen Mann bilden”, 93) He looks like the men we know today from advertising for espresso machines and razors. The important point is that this relation between a superior man and a subordinated woman is completely relaxed. Reciprocal sexual attraction is not mixed with extreme aggression, which is so characteristic for Ulrich’s relation with Leona, Bonadea, Diotima and, as we will see, for Gerda. Rahel, the ewe, the female lamb, is an Algerian-Jewish beauty from Polish Galicia, is a small black “lizard” (Musil loves the analogy of females to animals), a possible sex object for a man like Ulrich, who is attractive for a young woman, inclined to good looking men with some sort of power. This power is based on the physical power of his athletic body but also on his position in society. With regard to Hegel’s famous chapter on the master and the servant, she is a literary relative of Diderot’s servants, but also similar to Broch’s Zerline in Die Schuldlosen. Because of her subordinated position she is dominant. The fifth woman is Clarisse, the ‘clear’, the wife of his friend Walter, with whom she lives in permanent gender trouble. In her youth, she was sexually abused by her father – a narrative we know from Breuer’s and Freud’s studies on hysteria (Didi-Huberman 1997). She is enthusiastic about Nietzsche and denies her husband because he is a bourgeois, not an aesthetic genius. In contrast, Ulrich is seen as the genius of a new time. Clarisse is fascinated with the idea of redemption and visits Ulrich because she wishes to bear the modern redeemer. She is also described as a small and quick person, a lizard. There are some drafts of a chapter in which it is she that seduces him. This is the unique inversion of male activeness and female passiveness in the novel. In the first drafts of the novel, Clarisse was originally depicted as the main female character, the antipode of the man, who had the name Achill or Anders – these names too include an offensive male self-image and also a clear protest against the name of the father. The sixth woman, Gerda (‘the woman with the spear’), has her own name and is perhaps the most tragic figure in the round dance with Ulrich. The name refers to her character of a brave fighter, and she is really a woman in revolt. On the one hand, Gerda is in love with Ulrich and would like to become his wife. One the other hand, she is in battle not only with her Jewish liberal-bourgeois father, but also with Ulrich, the older man. She has, to use Freud’s terminology, Penisneid (penis envy), or in other words: she wants to have a phallus, since she has never realised that woman is a phallus in the sense of Lacan.

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She is affilated with a German nationalist and Proto-National Socialist, Hans Sepp, who praises purity and denies sexuality because it is dirty. Gerda’s visit to Ulrich’s house ends in disaster, a hysterical attack. The gift of virginity is refused. She has not reached the status of acknowledgment. She has been the object of a man’s perverse satisfaction of having her at his disposal. The problem of at least four women – Leona, Bonadea, Gerda and Diotima – is that Ulrich has overwhelmed them in the sexual battlefield of their bodies. But following Kojeve’s (1933–1939) interpretation of Hegel, this sexual punishment and domination do not lead to acknowledgment, because acknowledgment is only possible as a retrospective act, in which two persons accept each other as equal. As in the fairy tale – see the Bluebeard story – Agathe, the seventh woman is the exceptional other. As the name suggests, she is the good one. She is not the incompatible other as in Levinas’ Time and the Other, but the harmonic counterpart of the man in a Platonic sense. Here, man and woman build a new unit and overcome the gap between the genders. She is also the angel who frees the man from his imprisoned body. This is a radical symbiosis in which the man represents the intellectual, the woman the social and emotional side. They feel and think as if they were one person. Thus there is no difference between them. I think that is the reason why this relationship must ultimately fail. It is the radical version of romantic love that excludes all the others. In a draft they become intimate on an island that is described as a paradise. There is no other, no outside, all is one. But this “other” state cannot continue. In the next scene, Ulrich tries to find a man for his sister. It is important to say that Ulrich’s experiment collapses as the Parallelaktion. It is the end of classical humanism. There is a principal difference between the virtual figure of the author and the hero. There is also the difference in time, the difference between the time setting, 1913, and the time of storytelling, the 1930s. Another remarkable aspect of the novel presents is its treatment of identity. Ulrich is described as a man without traditional identity because he lives distanced to his social roles and indeed because he has not only one but many roles. The identity of the man without identity is that he is a man. There is not a woman without identity, although there maybe some tendencies in Agathe. He is Anders, other than all the others and he is Achill because of his athletic body and his male aggressiveness. His Eigenschaftslosigkeit is the way in which he constructs his male identity, especially in his broad bed in the house, which is constructed in the same way as his identity and his round dances with the women in the novel: by contingency, relativism, mixture. But behind the many non-identities there is one identity: Ulrich is a symbolic Bluebeard and just as sentimental.

From Early Modernism to the Late Avant-garde Movement The Austrian Example 1. Avant-garde and the cultural turn Romanticism and avant-garde can be seen as progressive or continuous historical and cultural forms which transcend traditional segments and sectors of traditional stratified societies (to use Niklas Luhmann’s terminology (1982, 9)), as formations which can only be understood through a multidisciplinary approach. The co-operation of disciplines like philosophy, literary theory, the history of ideas and the arts themselves can be subsumed under the terminology of cultural analysis as a network. The cultural turn implies a principal change of perspectives. It is directed at the analysis of forms of presentation and to the grasping of specific media formations and equipment which vary in different cultural contexts, technically and symbolically. Cultural analysis also entails a focus on the way ‘reality’ is constructed through the “symbolic forms” of a specific culture (the term was developed by the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer). In this respect, cultural analysis interprets the avant-garde not only as a mental construction but also – following T.S. Eliot’s famous definition – as an innovative blueprint and a provocative screenplay for a new “whole way of life” (Eliot 1948, 31). With regard to this theoretical background, the striking features, the preference of ‘classical’ avant-garde movements like Dadaism and Italian Futurism (but also of German Expressionism and of American Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art) for scandal is striking. It can be understood in terms of an economy of attention and attentiveness which has been developed by Georg Franck (1998, 126). This economy works with the predilection for self-presentation and demonstration, phenomena which are linked to the intrinsic logic of corresponding media and to its theatrical effects. This economy of attentiveness is unthinkable without ‘open’ institutions – galleries, exhibitions, special events, video – which guarantees possibilities of self-presentation and self-directing. (Pfeiffer 1996, 61ff.) From the very beginning of avant-garde movements, their members were media artists within a group. Thus, the old programmatic postulate of unifying arts and life which was claimed by German Early Romanticism (Schlegel 1972, 37, Athenäumsfragment 116) gains importance in the media as a personal representation of this actual unity of life and arts, as an instrument for breaking taboos and for producing scandals, as a comical and pathetic reference to the emergency and solemnity behind the game which is so characteristic in using modern media. This is also

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true in the case of the Vienna Group, as one can read in H.C. Artmann’s EightPoint Proclamation of the Poetical Act: “There is one statement which is irrefutable, namely that one can be a poet without having so much as written or spoken a single word.” (Artmann 1975, 363f.) The precondition of the possibility of avant-garde movements is generally linked to the paradigm of progress as a collective mega-narrative, as a grand récit (in the words of the French philosopher Lyotard).¹ This can be specified with reference to a cultural materialistic approach. Avant-garde can be interpreted (as Peter Demetz and Birgit Wagner (Wagner 1996) have done with regard to Italian Futurism) as a specific way of reacting to modern technology and to the media turn itself. So, the early avant-garde Romantic project in which the literary journal (the Athenäum) played a key role is based on a certain development of media, on the progress of alphabetisation and the existence of a system of note-taking, that is, a certain level of writing culture (Aufschreibesysteme)². It goes hand in hand with the genesis of a public sphere which is expressed and constructed by new genres like the novel (in German language the name for novel Roman has the same etymological root as the movement: Romanticism) on the one hand, by the newspaper (which delivers literature with news, with novellae) on the other hand. In the case of the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, new media such as silent film, radio and photography, as analysed by such theoreticians as Walter Benjamin (1974) and Rudolf Arnheim (1932; 1936), make available new possibilities for connecting writing, language, image and music, to open space and time, to present the real in the framework of the arts. Avant-garde also means experimenting with new media opportunities offered by cultural change, testing the new symbolic possibilities. In contrast to its own, often revolutionary intentions and impulses to overcome for example the existing bourgeois society, the avant-garde made and makes an important contribution to the stabilisation of the existing culture. It is Culture’s laboratory in which the symbolic adaptation of the technical – especially new media – takes place. The structural change of communicative and aesthetic media has lead to a new type of post-avant-garde movements inspired by the promise and hopes of the new digital media. In this respect, the Cyborg corresponds with old Nietzsche’s Übermensch (superman), it sheds some ironic light on the history of all the avant-garde mainstreams. In its background one can find a strange combination of affirmation on the one hand and systematic contradiction of the existing culture on the other. Meanwhile it has become clear that there is an inner and structural connection between the

1 Cf. Müller-Funk, Die Kultur und ihre Narrative (2002). 2 Cf. Kittler (1995); Habermas (1962).

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juvenile escapism of the ‘old’ avant-garde movements and the potlach in popular cultures of the late 196s which has been presented by media with an enormous capacity for producing attentiveness. There are groups such as The Doors (an aptronymic name for a group), Velvet Underground or Black Sabbath where this reference of popular music to the classical avant-garde can be noticed directly: in the habits, the mentality, in the song lyrics etc. But generally one may argue that the pop culture of our times has cultivated all those mechanisms in the context of a mass society which the avant-garde has developed decades before on the level of elite. (Fiske 1999) Especially in the Central European context the genesis of modern avant-garde movements (the English world is a remarkable exception) is linked to another precondition: the building of the nation state. In this perspective, German Romanticism must be seen as a sort of pre-avant-garde which seeks to make a name for German arts and literature by succeeding and overcoming the older European Spanish, French and English examples. At the same time and against Weimar, it claims to be the adequate way of aesthetic modernism on the national level. Romanticism as an early avant-garde is the result of a belated nation (belated in relation to France or England). From that perspective the Austrian example is illustrative. In contrast to all the other crown lands of the monarchy and later successor states in which one can find modern avant-garde movements before 1918 at least in nuce (which very often combine the aesthetic elan vital with the gesture of nationalistic or social revolutionary thinking), the Austrian kernel, the rest, was quite obviously not able to create the cultural energy necessary for the development of such an avantgarde, namely a group enjoying exposure through its own manifestos, its own media and its own subversive network. Hermann Bahr (cf. Zand 2003), Franz Blei (cf. Mitterbauer 2003) or the young Stefan Zweig were compilators of the Symbolistic and Expressionistic avant-garde movements in Paris or Berlin, but they never were prophets and preachers of a revolutionary aesthetic program that was also a mirror of a young ambitious nation in the time of new departures. Austria’s lack of an avant-garde of its own makes clear that ideal and real factors such as new media are necessary, but not sufficient preconditions for the formation of avant-garde movements. What Vienna and the German-speaking parts of Austria were missing was a clear and distinctive national framing narrative of future and progress. Instead of such a narrative, the monarchy was symbolically embedded in a dynastic and genealogical narrative. Its vector did not point to the future but to the past. After World War II the situation had changed dramatically: the young belated nation (also in contrast to Germany) created, in the Wiener Gruppe (1997), this first genuine Austrian avant-garde, its provocative counterpart to the his-

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torical avant-garde of its neighbouring countries. Avant-garde also underlies the modern phenomenon of dissimultaneity. With regard to the distinction between modernism and avant-garde the Austrian example is extremely helpful. There can be no doubt that composers such as Schönberg or Webern, the painters of the Secession (Klimt and Schiele), authors such as Schnitzler, Musil or Broch (who like Joyce used the inner monologue) were ‘modern’. They break with tradition; they differ from Classicism and focus on the crisis in Western culture also central for modern avant-garde movements. But they differ with regard to their concentration on the oeuvre (instead of developing programmes and manifestos), with regard to the concept of time, which is more sceptical than future-orientated, and with regard to the political sphere. In a way similar to Musil’s conservative anarchism, Adorno’s aesthetic theory also has a conservative background which is incompatible with the etymology of the avant-garde, which is by definition the military vanguard of the march into the future. On the level of cultural analysis this means that this non-avant-garde modernism, which may be more influential than the transitory avant-garde-movements (especially in the field of literature and music), is not under the same self-prescribed pressure which is characteristic for the aesthetic and political revolution of the twentieth century. There may be some irony in avant-garde presentations, as is the case in Dadaism, Futurism or the Wiener Gruppe, but it is strictly limited by that pathos playing a heroic role in the history of arts and of politics.

2. Avant-garde or modernism? If avant-garde and modernism are quite often unified into one cultural complex, then it is for the reason I would call the Romantic project. Undoubtedly, Romanticism can be understood on the one hand as a fore-runner of all later avant-garde movements (Expressionism, Surrealism, Symbolism, and Futurism) but it is also an archive which is inscribed in cultural modernism as a whole. This has to do with the programmatic character of Romanticism itself, especially in its early version, let us say between 1795 and 1805. According to this aspect, avant-garde can be described as an unavoidable aspect of the very process Pierre Bourdieu has analysed in his study Les regles des arts: avant-garde and bohème are cultural symptoms and effects of that kind of process in which the arts become a selforganised and independent symbolic field in modern Western societies with its own rules: “l’art pour l’art” is the programmatic expression for that self-manifestation against the symbolic field of economy which is based on the logic of profit.

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Early German Romanticism had a clear understanding of itself as a holistic and extensive movement with a fixed group of actors and an established program which transcends the idea of aesthetic innovation and postulates a change in all relevant areas of life, including politics, economics, the way of life, gender relations and social problems. It culminates in the fascinating but precarious idea of unifying or reunifying life and the arts. The New Mythology is the concept which proves to be the most important element in Friedrich Schlegel’s and Novalis’s fragments. At the same time they create a new way of life and an autonomous symbolic field: a life in literature and the arts. Two of its most prominent protagonists, Tieck and Schlegel, lived and worked as professional writers and/or critics. They did not only live from the production and distribution of literature; their self-understanding is also grounded in the new independent symbolic field of literature. So, one could say that Romanticism was and is still modernism plus avant-garde. In this way, avant-garde can be seen as a specific effect in the field of a culture which has attained (relative) autonomy. Hermann Broch has understood the avant-garde in painting in nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a programmatic break with the previous century in analogy to what the Rembrandt School had realised earlier: And probably with an even greater vehemence of unconcerned unconsciousness, the painting at the beginning of the twentieth century made a break with the ending millennium to become the harbinger of the new epoch, no matter how long it will last. That this feeling for the new, for a new era, was announced for the first time by a quite mediocre group of painters in a quite mediocre document, the Futurist manifesto of 1904, and that therefore these demonstrators were not good painters (because even a future-anticipating manifesto cannot fix artistic attitudes, though it can at least improve political ones) is of no importance. But it is of significance that there was a painter like the young Picasso among them – maybe it was contingency, maybe he was inspired by their will for the future. (Broch KW 9.1, 236)

Broch’s sceptical defensive reaction to the Futurist pseudo-revolutionary attitudes (“Pseudorevolutionarismus”) is remarkable. For the ethicist Broch, the inadequacy of the avant-garde results from its total program, in which the primate of politics vis à vis the arts goes hand in hand with that vis à vis of the manifesto with the esthetic experience. From Broch’s perspective, it is not contingent or of importance that the Futurists combine a poor, moreover a precarious policy with mediocre painting. Nevertheless, they are, as the name suggests, innovators, people who give impulses, market barkers of the new. In this way, they open the way for non-mediocre artists such as Picasso in painting or for authors such as James Joyce, whose work, like Picasso’s, is based on the modern and paradoxi-

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cal ‘tradition’ of rupture by adapting and developing the aesthetic techniques proclaimed by avant-garde manifestos. What the representatives of the avantgarde have in common with the modernists (such as Broch) is that they deal with the crisis of modern culture symbolically. This crisis Broch often describes as a decline of values. In favour of the difference between aesthetic modernity and avant-garde modernism, one can also refer to the first Futurist manifesto Broch qualifies as quite poor and mediocre. In this document, distance is constitutive for its rhetoric: namely the sultry night presented in the text proves to be nothing other than the symbolic world of the Viennese fin de siècle, which represents in contrast to the modern Italian nation state the world of yesterday: We have been awake the whole night, my friends and I under mosque hanging lamps with their open copper bowls, studded with stars like our souls and like them lit by the electric shine of an electric heart. For a long time, we have bared our laziness to and fro, (we) have discussed until the furthest borders of logic and much paper we have blackened with confused jottings. (Asholt/Fähnders 1995, 3)

This is the past, the night which has gone, a night which has begun with the setting of the Romantic sun. In this essay Broch denounces Hofmannsthal and his time as the non-style of the nineteenth century. In Broch’s retrospective, this happy apocalypse in Vienna proves to be a poverty covered up by richness. It is no coincidence that the post-modernists in the 1980s realised themselves in the mirror of the Viennese fin de siecle. It is quite evident what Broch would have thought about the post-modern vacuum and its relativistic tendencies, which in his perspective would be nothing other than a new state of the decline of values. To some extent, Broch is as conservative as T.S. Eliot (not politically but culturally); some of his arguments have astonishing similarities with the diagnosis Hans Sedlmayer’s presented after World War II in his book Der Verlust der Mitte (Losing the mean). In contrast to the emigrant Broch, Sedlmayer had been an apologist of the Third Reich and was also a political right-wing intellectual who disliked Picasso and the Italian Futurists. In his essay on Joyce which brings him quite close to the position of a modernist, but non-avant-garde theorist, Broch interprets Ulysses as the exemplary novel of the first half of the twentieth century, because it is able to keep the modern fragmented world together in a very paradoxical and broken way, thanks to the capacity of the ‘medium’ novel. The presentation of totality perhaps only in the form of concentrated fragments remains the task of poetry, the aesthetic challenge for every novelist, including Broch. In contrast to the historical avantgarde and postmodernism, his version of modern literature is orientated in favour of a rigid ethical pathos; one can speak of an ethics of aesthetics, realised for

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Broch in the Anti-Naturalism of avant-garde in the field of painting. Broch writes in sentences which have some similarities with Kafka’s and Benjamin’s messianic hopes: “the artistic l’art pour l’art is therefore also always an ethical ‘art pour l’art’, so that at the same time, the development of the arts (not its non-existing progress) always serves ethical progress and participates in the mythical hope that it exists and that in the end it will overcome the evil in the world.“ (Broch, KW 9.1 275, own translation) Compared with this demand, Hofmannsthal, the Dichterfürst of the Viennese Non-Style, is seen as an poet who fails in an honourable way, an author who remains an epigone. But at the same time, his oeuvre is interpreted by Broch as a symbol in the modern cultural vacuum, albeit not the symbol of the vacuum. In contrast to Broch’s ethical demand and his sensitivity for the crisis of modern culture, the vacuum is a symbolic emptiness which produces masques such as the Makart procession. In Broch’s eyes, those processions are in terms of their political and aesthetic aspects the most disgusting examples of its symbolically concealed poverty, a poverty for which they are, as we would put it today, compensating. Avant-garde ideology sometimes operates with irony and exaggeration; one cannot be sure if the artists are playing a game or want to rescue the world, but, as the beginning of the Futurist manifesto makes programmatically clear, they feel tired of hanging lamps, décor and ornament – the masque of decoration. For the last time, the Futurist friends have been awake the whole Romantic night, represented by the interieur of Broch’s non-style: Orient and opium; Standstill. Softness; The inability to act; Only senseless intellectual debates. But in its unproductive sultriness, this 1001st night of the fin de siecle reveals ex negativo the most important elements of the new avant-garde actors with their electric hearts: departure, emergence, acting, permanent moving, activism, élan vital, the primacy of the future, the cult of the group and the collective prophecy; The direction of a new pathos of a new and holistic world, of the new totality and the total new. In a first and ideal-typical confrontation one can differentiate between avant-garde and modernism on the basis of the following characteristics:

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Avant-garde

Modernism

Primacy of programme and ideology

Distance from and scepticism regarding programmatic fixation Praise of the lonesome individual, idiosyncrasy (speaking exclusively for him or herself) Sensitivity, absence Disgust and ennui with regard to media Pathos of withdrawing oneself Narrative of crisis Distrust in history and progress Pessimism The other time of poetry Anti-politics Separation of the arts from politics

Cult of collectivism (speaking as representatives) Performance is of constitutive meaning Production of attentiveness (scandal) Pathos of action Narrative of progress (technology, new media) Optimism Regression to archaic elements Revolutionary claims A change in the whole way of life (reform of life, new culture, new nation, new society) Radical break with the recent past and the traditions of the arts Youth culture Self-presentation Privileged field: visual arts, performance

Integration of new elements no radical break with the past Neutral with a certain preference for age Self-irony and melancholy Privileged field: literature, the modern novel and lyric poetry

Another article would be required to analyse why only the fine arts were the field in which the avant-garde movements were enormously successful and were able to establish an aesthetic norm which has become dominant in the symbolic field of fine arts. In contrast, avant-garde also played a certain role in literature but was unable to change the field in a comparable way. I think this has to do with the difference of the semiotic system (between visual phenomena and writing), the different function of representation in fine arts and literature and the divergent use of media. Without any doubt, such a comparison, which could be enlarged by a typology of post-modernism, is schematic and its meaning is only heuristic. It is something like Wittgenstein’s ladder that can be thrown away after use. Certainly, there are borderline cases such as Kafka’s literary circle, Existentialism in Paris or a single figure such as Walter Benjamin whose writings refer to classical modernism (Proust, Baudelaire) and to the new avant-garde (Surrealism). But in general, I would argue that all these examples are an integrative part of modernism, not genuine examples of an exaggerated avant-garde which was characteristic of the immediate pre-War years and for the Interbellum. In the case of literature, our scheme makes it possible to describe authors such as Borges, Gombrowicz, Lorca, Huxley, Musil, Canetti, Broch, Thomas

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Mann, Thomas Bernhard, Unamuno, Schnitzler or Pavese (and probably Kafka and Pound too) as modern in the specific sense Broch has outlined: they are up to date (‘zeitgerecht’) with regard to the crisis of modern culture. But we would not assume in the case of these authors that they were avant-garde authors, regardless of what one might think about each of them in terms of their international prestige or their ranking in their respective national culture. On the contrary, authors such as Robert Müller, the young Franz Werfel, whom Musil mocked in the “Man without Qualities” through the distanced figure of fire mouth (which is a good metaphor for an avant-garde speaker), Johannes R. Becher, the militant Expressionist and later Communist poet, later minister for culture in the GDR, Bert Brecht and his circle, the authors of the Neue Sachlichkeit, Dada, Kurt Schwitters, Ernst Jünger, Gottfried Benn, the German Expressionists, the French Surrealists can all be seen as representatives of avant-garde movements as such. They are just in time. They are obliged to the pathos of the revolutionary moment at least in the symbolic field of fine arts and/or literature. They say, to quote the title of one of Goya’s famoust pictures: Ya es hora. The time has come – as Benjamin has pointed out – to use the powers of ecstasy for the revolution. They are in permanent motion because of the stimulating proximity of politics and the arts. At least in the beginning, the representatives of early Romanticicism in Jena too saw themselves as an intellectual and aesthetic counterpart to the French revolution, as the Jesus (Novalis) and St. Paul (F. Schlegel) of the coming times. From the very beginning, Futurists, Suprematists, Expressionists and Surrealists are concerned with both aesthetics and politics: the aesthetic break with the immediate past goes hand in hand with the political and cultural break. After all, one may argue: they were presumptuous. They wanted too much. This is really the point which has undermined their prestige: there is am inevitable connection between avant-garde movements and such revolutionary regimes which established a totalitarian regime. From our perspective today, the symbolic fight that was never fully realised between the moderns and the hyper-moderns of the avant-garde ended in favour of the moderns, at least in terms of ethics. But this does not mean that avant-garde impulses have not survived in Western society. They really work, as it were, from Woodstock to the manifestos of the cyber-space movement (Haraway and others). The avant-garde effect is sustained especially because of the permanent media change and the logic of fashion – which Simmel has identified as systematically being first. Fashion is a conformistic step to be the first in a specific moment. You are the trend-setter. Perhaps against its own self-understanding avant-garde in a broader sense is an effect and a laboratory of media change. Avant-garde means a high professional profile in the production of attentiveness. It is threatened by implosion, because New Media have a minimal half-life.

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There may even be a lot of co-relations between avant-garde groups and (post-) modern ‘singles’. Sometimes the modernist backbencher may take place at the first range in the avant-gardist movements. Nevertheless, the function, the strategy, the mentality and the self-understanding remain different and contrastive. If the one represents the revolutionary awakening in the time of media change, advanced technology and nation building, the other functions as a symbolic arriègarde, as a rearguard with the pathos of cultural sustainability. It is only in the unique cosmos of Austrian culture that one can demonstrate the strange dialectic in and of modern culture. The Austrian culture started with the structurally postmodern non-style of the belle epoque, followed by a genuinely modern period marked by authors such as Musil, Broch, Roth, Canetti und Kafka (Schnitzler is a transitory figure). Even after 1945, Postmodernism and Modernism were followed by the young and youthful avant-garde movements of the Wiener Gruppe and later the Wiener Aktionisten. Austria, one could argue, was not only the first country of post-modernism but also the site of some of the last decisive and programmatic avant-garde movements. In these three cultural periods, Austria has passed through all the different three meanings of itself: Austria as the multi-ethnic empire, Austria as a second German state (as was the case in the First Republic, a symbolic nowhere-land), Austria as a late nation-state clearly differentiated from Germany. In all its three meanings, Austria was peripheral, in time and space.

3. Viennese Modernism: Broch’s looking back Broch’s judgement of Hofmannsthal is quite differentiated. It seeks to be fair. Maybe against his intention, his essay contains a methodological element we associate with cultural materialism. Following Broch, one could say that he did what was possible in literature under the circumstances of his time. Nothing else is said by the formula of the “symbol in a vacuum which is not identical with the symbol of the vacuum: Being happy without hope (“Glücklich sein ohne […] Hoffnung”), as Broch quotes Hofmannsthal. This pre-post-modernist “wanted to fix the being and the mood of his youth, this meant fixing Austria, and Austria, as it existed, was Baroque and Biedermeier, again and again, scarcely changed, again and again as it would be for the last time, and every year it lasted was like a wonder. “ (Broch KW 9.1, 252, own translation) Quite evidently, this is a retrospective narrative. It is not very probable that people in 1900 were as conscious of their own decline as Broch, who spent his youth in this period, was when he wrote this essay in 1947/48, at first unwillingly and with more and more interest. But there can be no doubt that the cultural pre-

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conditions in the old monarchy were quite specific. In contrast to its neighbours inside and outside the territory of the empire, the German-speaking elite was in a state of broken expectation with regard to the future. There was an evident lack of perspectives. There was no possibility to transfer the great narrative of progress to a great narrative of a glorious nation state in the future. Compared with the aggressive avant-garde in the fine arts, architecture and literature of that time, Viennese modernism is defensive and moderate, as is evident in authors like Hermann Bahr, Franz Blei, Stefan Zweig, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the young Musil, who fight for a certain innovation of Austrian culture. There is a mixture of melancholy and hope as in Hofmannsthal’s famous Chandos-Brief or a touch of self-irony as in Hermann Bahr’s essay Barbarians, which Bahr later included in a representative collection of his most important texts. Bahr, not highly regarded by Broch or Karl Kraus, was notoriously a gogetting ghost, a project-maker, open-minded towards everything, a person who had tested his talents in almost all genres and cultural functions. Under other circumstances he would perhaps have been the ideal speaker of an avant-garde. But what he lacks throughout his open-minded light-heartedness was the ability to be a serious avant-garde opinion-leader. This becomes visible in his ambitious essay The Barbarians. Bahr does not present a program of modernism or of contemporary avant-garde movements. He provides an analysis of their sensitivities and their self-understanding. Thus from the very beginning of the essay, this perspective undermines the subversive content of the phenomena described. He presented himself as a narrator from a distance, not a participant. He describes the fight between the old and the modern as a conflict of generations which is focuses on terms such as culture and civilisation. Even if he includes himself as a modern Barbarian (“Wir Barbaren”), the sub- and context allows a self-ironic reading of that kind of barbarism: “At the moment, we are working – as it seems – to become barbarians.” (Bahr 1921, 138)³What becomes evident in this approach, which is part of Sociology and part of History of Ideas, is the denial of the paternal world of values and norms, in which the concept of culture and civilisation play a central role. Those two terms were common sense in the bourgeois culture of the day and this discourse can be characterised by the intellectual effort to save culture from barbarian damage and support progress. This is, to refer to Musil’s magnum opus, the world of the bank manager Leo Fischl. The modernistic or avant-garde break with tradition, which is described with scepticism and without enthusiasm by Bahr, is analysed from the perspective of a person who permanently changed between inside and outside, between the

3 “So sind wie jetzt am Werke, fast will es scheinen, Barbaren zu werden.”

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position of a representative and an observer. Or in other words, this text is not a manifesto but a critical essay: “If someone would have said: Let the barbarians come! Or: Yes, I am a barbarian, yes I want to be one, because I dislike our whole culture and civilisation or at least because it is not worth its cost and or because for me the human being, the living human being is in any case much more important than one of his works, nobody would really have understood him, no one would have understood how such an idea could come into the mind of a human being. One would have denied such a controversy!” (Bahr 1921, 237)

Following those historical explanations, the text delivers some interesting observations which are also relevant with regard to cultural analysis, for example the latent aspect of institutionalised discourses, the function of common sense as an unconscious element in the field of culture. The rhetorical strategy of the text is not to convince the reader to become part of the ‘barbarian’ project of modernism, but to make understandable the dramatic change in culture within a few years. Name-dropping briefly, Bahr mentions Ibsen, Marx, Nietzsche and Tolstoj as the great thinkers and poets (Denker und Dichter) of the break, the strong questionmakers who pose their questions with a hammer (“starken Frager, die mit dem Hammer fragten”). From here, he goes on with his argumentation, which is a confession and a commentary in one, and uses military metaphors, as is usual for the self-understanding of avant-garde movements: “They have razed the walls, they have forced the doors, they have the old property in and of culture and civilisation. Now with us (!) the barbarians are really entering. Barbarians we may seem, we intruders into morals and custom, into the spirit and law of the past. Sometimes we really have the impression we are a race closer to primeval manhood. We call for the primeval human in ourselves; we throw off the chains of the archaic instincts. Thus, whenever man does not progress, when his conditions he has realised by adaptation suddenly become an obstacle because of the change in conditions, when man in his formation has no more place for breathing, then he kisses so to speak the earth to suck energy from it and goes back to the beginning.” (Bahr 1921, 139)

There has probably never been a more modest agitator of modernism than Bahr, the cultural importer of Impressionism and the écriture artiste. The cultural anthropology follows the confession of modern culture and neutralises, undermines and denies its own avant-garde or modernistic élan. Mentioning the regression to the imagined archaic times and the vision of the machinery of synthesis and animal attitudes he really and correctly describes a main tendency of radical modernistic mainstreams which one can find also in some manifestos of the avant-garde. But this analysis does not make him a propagandist, but ‘only’ a

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beneficiary. Bahr pretends to be a “barbarian”, he is someone who plays with the idea of being such a person. But at the same, he is full of distrust also in himself. Moreover, this is the case of Hofmannsthal, the most symptomatic figure of the Viennese fin de siecle. His Chandos letter is very often read and praised by literary theory as a founding manifesto of Viennese modernism. The historical costume of the English upper aristocracy is already characteristic of a backwards-orientated mental state. Viewed psychologically, it corresponds to the longing of the Austrian upper bourgeois groups to join the nobility to build a gentry, a marriage between money and tradition. The addressee of the fictive letter is, incidentally, none other than Francis Bacon, the unlucky politician and philosopher, the author of Nova Atlantis, the Novum Organum and the Essays. The letter of the young man, Chandos, is anything but a program of aesthetic progress, it is rather a report of its loss. What is planned is a historical and aesthetic withdrawal: I have lost all my capacity to think and speak about anything in a co-ordinated way (Broch, KW 9.1., 436)⁴ Language has disintegrated in his attempt to speaking his ‘own’ words. This sensitive aristocrat feels confronted with hostilities which he believes he can heal only through a religious attitude, through the love of things. Therefore, the letter contains a diagnosis of the crisis, but – one could argue as an expression of strength – the protagonist as well as the author himself have organised themselves in this symbolic realm. Thus, Hofmannsthal’s protagonist is in search of a language in which the silent things talk to me, (“in welcher die stummen Dinge zu mir sprechen”). (Broch, KW 9.1., 444) The diagnosis of the lost sense is radical. The world of symbolic forms and values becomes more and more not understable. But the response to it is quite clear. With regard to this point, Broch’s comment is very striking, when he writes: “If Hofmannsthal had had the same radical attitude, he would have achieved a new form of poetry. But his radical efforts were directed to realising and knowledge. And although his poetic capacity probably outshines that of Joyce in a significant way (this can be demonstrated everywhere Joyce remains in the traditional, curiously enough in the lyric), here he was prevented by his shame from breaking through the last barriers and throwing overboard the forms of the past. Joyce’s poetry slips into the dream to win its lightness from the dark of the dream. Hofmannsthal’s starts with the dream and feels oblige, to make its darkness visible by lighting, at least in the limelight.” (Broch, KW 9.1 288, own translation)

The comparison between Joyce and Hofmannsthal Broch draws from the perspective of an up-to-date representative novelist is both strange and illuminating

4 “Es ist mir völlig die Fähigkeit abhanden gekommen, über irgendetwas zusammenhängend zu denken oder zu sprechen.”

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at once. To borrow Harold Bloom’s terminology, Hofmannsthal is presented by Broch as a weak poet unable or unwilling to kill symbolically or to consign his forerunner(s) to oblivion; he is gripped by the fear of breaking with the old. He is a weak author, not because he is a bad poet, but because he has not gone far enough. In contrast, Joyce is a positive example, namely insofar as he has realised the presentation of the heterogeneous and the fragmented quite radically. He uses radical form experiments without uncritically following all the overwhelming political and cultural obsessions, fashions and fantasies of the avant-garde of his time. Broch places Hofmannsthal in two contextual references, in the cultural structure of the monarchy with its specific traditional symbolic forms, mentalities and historical perspectives on the one hand, and on the other in the symbolic archive of a modern European literature which has left behind the traditional Christian culture of Baroque and Reformation. Hofmannsthal is representative of his time, but only with the focus on the cultural marginal state of the monarchy, whose energy is mainly reduced to retardation. But that kind of poetry is in no case and under no circumstances  – to use Bahr’s expression  – “barbarian” enough to act out a radical break with the mighty tradition of the old Austrian state. Between 1810 and 1830, Austrian literature had established a clear distance to the German Romantic movement, the forerunner of all the later avant-garde movements but also of classical modernism, and between 1880 and 1910 this cultural difference would be reproduced anew. After World War II and the historical catastrophe, with the proclamation of the nation state there is a cultural frame for avant-garde movements also in Austria, such as the Wiener Gruppe, the Wiener Aktionisten or the Forum Stadtpark. All those groups follow the image of medial loudness, attentiveness, taboo-breaking and provocation so typical in the history of the avant-garde movements since the begin of the twentieth century, including the farewell to history and society, as Oswald Wiener has done in his manifesto The betterment of Central Europe, a novel (1965–68) “along with history I reject compromised language. I don’t do away with it to proclaim its decay by means of the gesamtkunstwerk of many talks.” (Wiener 1969, XXXVI, own transl.) 1997 the work of these avant-garde groups was presenbted at the Biennale di Venetia by Peter Weibel, meanwhile a well-established curator and professor for fine arts. Without them the history of modern culture would be incomplete and not understandable. Today Austria is a quite normal European nation state with its own avant-garde – indeed one which has become somewhat old. But the specific point of it lies in the fact that it grew up in broken modernity, before the end of modernity, as it were. Later, it was identified as postmodernism avant la lettre, which remains the standard classification to this day.

The Broken Mirror The Construction of America in Lenau I. Lenau: American experiences 1832–1833 I will send my fantasy into the school, into the American primeval forests.

Stereotypes can be seen primarily as symbolic smuggled goods, routed either for import or export and very often for both. They are the flotsam and jetsam of cultural transfer, garbage which soon proves to be a threat to intercultural relations. And yet, upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that there is no cultural transfer without the production of stereotypes. They seem to be cultural, and not merely linguistic forms of translation, and part of what one may call contextualisation. They are not simply wrong and falsified representations of other cultures. On the contrary, these other cultures exist in our own culture only through the images produced inside of our culture. There is no “true” image behind the veil of the “false” one. It seems that we are free to choose how we analyze stereotypes. At first glance, we understand the stereotype as a problematic reference or assertion regarding another culture. Undoubtedly, they do work in this way. This is why any critically and educationally oriented mind feels a spontaneous urge to correct the stereotype as an unacceptable, incorrect and offendsive image of the Other. And yet this is at most half true: stereotypes are to some extent quite reliable images because they refer unconsciously and unintentionally to our own symbolic order, to our values and our way of life. Implicitly, one can read the stereotype as an assertion of our own culture. Such arguments are well known to us from psychoanalysis, from deconstruction and from discourse analysis of Foucault’s sort. I need only mention Edward Said’s famous and influential book Orientalism. We project our fears, desires and sensitivities into the cultural Other, into a mirror, not realizing that it is a reflector of our Self.¹ Or we define all these phenomena as strange and embarrassing, excluding and expelling them from our own world as a means of constituting ourselves as superior, rational, Western,

1 Laplanche/Pontalis, Das Vokabular der Psychoanalyse (1972, 400): “Im eigentlichen psychoanalytischen Sinne Operation, durch die das Subjekt Qualitäten, Gefühle, Wünsche, sogar ‘Objekte’, die es verkennt oder in sich ablehnt, aus sich ausschließt und in dem Anderen, Person oder Sache, lokalisiert.”

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male persons. By excluding the Other, we organise our own discursive and narrative community. (Said 1978) But there is a third possibility for decoding images of the Other. Hetero-stereotypes, one could say, make strong assertions about the relationships between cultures. Stereotypes, as Clemens Ruthner has shown, are symbolic constructions without which the cultural Other would not be what it is. They are a means of integrating, even of annexing, the alien Other into one’s own world, of forming an effective counter-image in the process of self-constitution. (Ruthner 2008, 82–100) Stereotypes are not clothes that can be taken off, and thus, after all is said and done, the American of the 1830s – the true American behind the false image – is revealed in the depictions of America of the Austro-Hungarian poet Nikolaus Lenau, and of the Austrian novelists of his day. Stereotypes are not merely abbreviations or codes of perception, or to use a formula from Doderer, an act of Apperzeptionsverweigerung (denial of apperception) (Treml 1986, 18). Like Orientalism, Americanism also reveals elements of the cultural and intercultural reality it describes and constitutes, especially of one’s own cultural reality. The stereotypes it uses are letters and messages from far away that develop a symbolic design of the stranger and of the strange world. They are travelogues in a dialogic form. As Homi K. Bhabha has shown in his book The Location of Culture, they are stable and fragile at the same time. They really need permanent repetition. The fact that stereotypes are very often contradictory does not affect their efficiency (Bhabha 2000, 66–84). The exaggerations and distortions that go hand in hand with the process of stereotype production are repeated again and again, until they seem plausible. Hence I would like to propose that we understand stereotypes not as faulty descriptions, but as more or less reliable references to intercultural constellations. Stereotypes are relational. Therefore they tend to undergo permanent change. It was Ferdinand Kürnberger who worked out quite systematically  – and probably for the first time – a new and quite negative image of America, revising the prevalent positive image of the New World as an alternative with a promising future, in contrast to Europe. In his novel Der Amerikamüde (The Man Tired of America) Kürnberger made use of Lenau’s life story, although he modified certain details of his compatriot’s adventures in North America. It is a literary work that brings together the aversion to America of two authors: Lenau and Kürnberger. (cf. Müller-Funk 2009, 81–91) The biographical background to Kürnberger’s novel is the failed American adventure of Nikolaus Lenau, who wrote poems and grim letters home on his trip to the new continent. During his journey, Lenau advanced to the status of a star poet in Germany. Thus the contemporary reader easily recognized Lenau – the

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author of the Schilflieder (Songs from the Reeds) – behind Kürnberger’s protagonist, a mysterious Hungarian stranger, even through some details, such as the love story with the daughter of a powerful American politician, may well be pure fiction. The title of the book is a reference to the German-speaking context of the era. In broaching the issue of aversion to America, Kürnberger clearly wanted to revise the positive stereotype of America associated with the auto-stereotype of Europamüdigkeit (an expression used by contemporaries to express a certain selfaversion and weariness of European life). At first, America is represented in the novel as “the cadence in the concert of human perfections” (“die Kadenz im Konzerte der menschlichen Vollkommenheiten”) (Kürnberger 1985). After the suppressed revolution of 1830 (especially in Poland), many Central European emigrants left the Old Continent, among them revolutionaries, but also religious sectarians like the “Harmonists.” In their colony near Pittsburgh – named “Economy” – Lenau, suffering psychically and physically under America, spent a couple of months recuperating. Incidentally, one must appreciate how well the group’s name – the “Harmonists” – captured its remarkable combination of religious sectarianism and business acumen! Since the Declaration of Independence in 1776, America had been seen as the paradise of the free world, a positive counter-image to a Europe afflicted and devastated by wars and despotism. Sealsfield, an older compatriot of Lenau and Kürnberger, described the Austria of Metternich as Europe’s China (in Austria As It Is) (Sealsfield 1828). From this point of view, America is not a prosaic or even a tragic place of exile, a diaspora, but the Promised Land, a New Jerusalem. There is a clear and logical reason for the radical transformation of such unreserved and unconditional enthusiasm into a categorical denial of a whole culture. The expectations that went hand in hand with the overwhelmingly positive heterostereotype were apparently much too high. Lenau, the young Austro-Hungarian poet  – and the darling of Swabian Romantics like Schwab, Uhland and Kerner – has planned his journey to America very carefully. He has enough money in his pockets to buy farmland. He shares the pathos of American freedom and, like Heine, he demonstrates solidarity with the suppressed revolution of 1830. Moreover, the author of the Schilflieder has a deep longing for pure and unspoiled nature beyond civilisation. In March 1832, he tries to persuade his friend Sándor (this is Prince Alexander of Württemberg) to join him on his trip to America. But the friend, having married an AustroHungarian magnate, Countess Helene von Festetics von Tolna, has lost interest in killing wild bears, seeing the American jungles and forests, and visiting the natives – those “comical and funny chaps” (“recht possierliche Kerle”) who are,

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as Lenau points out, also “God’s creatures” (“Geschöpfe Gottes”).² This ironic and condescending formulation quite evidently corresponds with the judgement of its aristocratic addressee. Still, Lenau’s use of the expression “American ape” (not only for the Native Americans) is already an anticipation of the radical and rude turn that his originally positive image of America would take. From the very beginning, the motifs of Lenau’s longing for America are ambivalent. Beyond political and biographical considerations (escape from the confines of a traditional marriage with a niece of Gustav Schwab), Lenau shared the fascination with nature typical of German Romanticism. The poet, who – in sharp contrast to other contemporary catastrophe scenarios – expects a spread of polar coldness and predicts the disappearance of the nightingales, will send, as he writes in a letter, his fantasy into the school of nature, into the American wilderness.³ For Lenau, the jungles and primeval forests of America serve as an excellent surface onto which to project his impetuous inner life. Thus America is also an aesthetic project. In this respect, Lenau remains within the philosophically ambitious character of the Romantic discourse on nature. At the center of this speculative philosophy of nature there is an analogous dynamic concept of natura naturans connecting external nature with the internal psyche. However, as the unfortunate trip makes clear, Lenau was not able to advance to become an Austrian Thoreau. To borrow from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, Lenau was searching for “Correspondences” in the forests of Northern America. As mentioned earlier, Lenau has come into money, so that he is able to enter into a joint stock with emigrants in Stuttgart, which proves to be an insecure project. The plan is to settle in Missouri. The poet will stay there for five years at most. Afterwards he plans to hire an administrator. This is the dream of a man who at the beginning of his trip is in no way tired of America, although he has some doubts. There are a lot of positive images about the other world beyond the Atlantic: freedom, nature, economic possibilities. And yet gestures of scepticism are highly visible. In a letter to his friend Karl Mayer in Weinsberg, he mentions a poem by Chamisso in which a painter crucifies a young man to get an idea of the pain of death.⁴ Lenau reverses this early document of modern aestheticism, arguing that he is a man who is willing to

2 Lenau to Alexander von Württemberg. Weinsberg, 11. (?) March 1832 (Sunday) (Lenau 1989, 180). 3 Lenau to Karl Mayer, Weinsberg, 12. (?) March 1832 (Monday) (Lenau 1989, 181). 4 Lenau refers to Chamisso’s poem Das Kruzifix. Eine Künstlerlegende, which has been published in Berliner Musenalmanach in 1831. Cf. Lenau 1989 (vol. 5/2, 240).

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crucify himself if the result is a good poem (“Ich will mich selber ans Kreuz schlagen, wenn’s nur ein gutes Gedicht gibt.”)⁵ Ruthlessness towards oneself is seen here as the necessary precondition for radical artistic creation. Later, Lenau will refer to this argument again, when he compares himself with John the Baptist. In this comparison, America becomes the desert, a wasteland kat’ exochen. Thanks to his letters and his commentaries on his surroundings, Lenau scholars have been able to reconstruct his route with hardly any gaps. Lenau left his mark everywhere, although we have fewer letters from the trip itself than from the period immediately before it, from January until July 1832. He travels from Mannheim via Cologne to Amsterdam and later to the island of Texel, from which he starts his ten-week passage across the Atlantic. On 16 October, he reports to his brother-in-law that he arrived in Baltimore on 8 October. From Baltimore he will continue his journey to Pittsburgh. There he spends several months in the Harmonists’ settlement, Economy. In Crawford County he buys land and settles in Lisbon (Ohio). The whole undertaking is born under a bad sign. The business he buys from is not trustworthy, Lenau falls ill, and his purchase of land proves to be an incredible flop. Via Erie and Buffalo, Lenau reaches Niagara Falls, which in those days was already a pathos-laden symbol of America. Via Syracuse and Albany he enters New York in May 1833. He is in a hurry to leave the Promised Land as soon as possible. Instead of five years, he has spent only eight months in the New World. (cf. Lenau 1992, 64–87) Material wealth has not materialized, and he brings back from America nothing more than “a few literary souvenirs,” a little aesthetic capital. His fantasy has gone into the school of American nature. What he brings to Europe are poems which refer to Niagara Falls and to the aborigines of North America, poems on the Atlantic and the elemental power of the sea, on the simple life of the colonists in their log cabins. There are also many sharp-tongued letters about American habits and manners. Some of the elements of this symbolic baggage are productive for our cultural analysis of stereotypes. The letters’ display is not so much tiredness with regard to America as disgust, ennui, and one can find it not only in Lenau and Kürnberger, but also in Tocqueville, although the perspective of the French liberal aristocrat is much more differentiated than the judgements of the two Austrians. (cf. Tocqueville 1985, 41) Lenau’s ardent and categorical animosity against America is a very interesting phenomenon: it clearly illustrates how differentiations are made between Europe and America, and how symbolic lines were already being drawn in the

5 Lenau to Karl Mayer (Lenau 1989, 181).

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1830s. There is one simple syntactic pattern underlying all of these various stereotypes, a pattern that still retains its efficacy in modern media. It is based on a short sentence with the definite article and the ambiguous verb to be. It entails a predication, a noun and a predicate. Thus all the spoken or unspoken, explicit or implicit sentences have the same apodictic pattern: “The Americans are […] or have […].” Lenau’s Americans have no wine, only cider; no nightingales, only mockingbirds. The American is always thinking about the dollar in his pocket. They are all petty-minded souls whose greed stinks to high heaven, in contrast to the Germans, who are poor but not obsessed with money. They are completely uninterested in the life of the mind, and that is the very reason the poetic nightingales do not want to join them. They have nearly no time for good food and good drinking, because spending too much time eating and drinking would mean losing time for earning still more money. These passages, with their harsh judgements, are taken from a letter to Lenau’s brother-in-law dating from October 1832. This document is not only a beautiful example of early anti-Americanism, but also an object lesson in how stereotypes are constructed. The essentialist assertions of how the Americans are is introduced by contrast. The mockingbird and its unattractive song is opposed to the lovely musicality of the European nightingale, the poet’s heraldic animal. This statement goes hand in hand with the contrasting of primitive, acidic cider with the culture and refinement represented by wine. In the poem Die Blockhütte (The Log Cabin), the lyric ego is drinking Rhine wine in his primitive American lodging.⁶ Culture evokes differences, and at the same time it is their medium. The other cultural observations in the quoted letter can also be reduced to the sentence that the Americans are lacking in Culture (with a capital c). The opposition between economy and culture is equated with the difference between Americans and Germans. The binary opposition between economy and culture also becomes evident in Lenau’s description of a meal taken in an urban hostel in Baltimore. Here the nourishment of guests is subordinated to a meticulously organised temporal regimen. There is only one objective: not to waste time. In Lenau’s eyes, the economisation of eating implies a complete loss of sociability, of aesthetic distinction and of the pleasure derived from good food. The perspective of the depraved Hungarian nobleman gives rise to the image that the Americans eat as quickly as animals, and that they are conditioned like them. They are set in motion by a simple acoustic signal, which Lenau calls the “feeding clock.” One also finds another, remarkably early, stereotype: Americans are commoners, men and

6 Nikolaus Lenau: Das Blockhaus: “Und mir wollte der Rheinwein nicht mehr munden./Uhland! wie steht’s mit der Freiheit daheim? […]” (Lenau 1995, 59).

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women of base motives, people of the masses. In contrast, the European visitor is the opposite: sociable, noble, not greedy for money, distinguished. Lenau’s comments are very aggressive. In his letter he calls the people of Baltimore poor chaps and rascals. There is a deep need for delimitation. Eight days in Baltimore are sufficient to change all his images of America. One single stay in a public hostel is enough to make him disapprove of all the inhabitants of the New World as economic monsters. My point is that this production of very simple stereotypes is not the work of a blind and uneducated person of conservative bent. Interestingly, it is the judgement of an intellectual who is critical with regard to the European situation. Hetero-stereotypes can come and go very quickly, they can be very fragile, but they also can be “sustainable,” as is shown by symbolic constructions like America or the Orient, which are to a great degree built upon such images. Although there are a lot of references to the “mistakes” and deficiencies found in the American landscape,⁷ nature is the only positive aspect of Lenau’s America. Niagara Falls, this marvelous piece of nature, is the most important example of the existence of the sublime in the new continent. For Lenau it is possible to integrate the Falls into his own symbolic system, into his philosophy of nature and his Romanticism, which sees nature as a revelation of God. Only Niagara Falls can rival the song of the nightingales, which are, as Lenau states, unknown in America, because its inhabitants are deaf to their message. Obviously, a Continental European must be lonely in America: “I have lived a very lonesome life in America.”⁸ In a letter to his soul mate Emilie von Reinbeck, the Austrian traveller in America compares himself with John the Baptist. Here America is perceived as a continent without real nature. It is both an internal and an external desert, a place for meditating on radical loneliness. Five months after his arrival, Lenau writes to one of his soul mates – interestingly, there are several – from Lisbon (Ohio) that he has a hole in his head from an accident with his sledge, and that he had to be patched up. He gives this accident, and also the rough climate, a symbolic and symptomatic meaning. He states that “the paths to freedom are rough, and the hole in my head is very good,” because

7 Lenau to Emilie and Georg von Reinbeck, Lisbon (Ohio), 5. March 1833 (Tuesday). “In dieser großen, langen Einsamkeit, ohne Freund, ohne Natur, ohne irgend eine Freude […].” (Lenau 1989, 235, note 69). 8 Lenau to Joseph Klemm, Lisbon (Ohio), 6. March 1833: “Ich habe in Amerika viel einsam gelebt.” (Lenau 1989, 243, note 69).

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“through this hole, the last ideas of senseless travelling to find happy human beings and a better life on earth will escape from my head.”⁹ Lenau interprets the hardening of his negative image of America as a positive disappointment, a loss of illusions. Here he is returning to the utopian yearnings that were originally the foundation of his positive image of the country, which led him to cross the Atlantic in the first place. It was the hope for a better future, not in time but in space. In the letter to the female friend far away, he refines his argument, stating that the roughness of the Americans is not a product of the wildness and strength of this “natural” people, but a cultural effect. He interprets it as a symptom of decline. With reference to Büffon, he adds – quite absurdly – that he has never seen a fiery horse or a courageous dog. In contrast to wild nature, the American is terribly weak.¹⁰ The diagnosis from Baltimore is sharpened in a later letter by the hypothesis of biological degeneration, in which Lenau anticipates the biologically oriented stereotypes of the first half of the twentieth century. An explosive symbolic mixture comes into play, in which anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism and later – this is not the case with Lenau – anti-Semitism fit together. Such attitudes were backed by a fundamental discontent with the medium of money, which Georg Simmel would later explore in The Philosophy of Money.¹¹ One of the precarious actualities of Lenau’s description of America is the continuing relevance of his critique of American capitalism. Using the designation “rascal” (Schuft), Lenau identifies money with bargaining, which he considers to be a morally condemnable activity. Money itself as the medium of exchange seems to be the symptom and symbol of a funda-

9 Lenau to Emilie und Georg von Reinbeck, Lisbon (Ohio). 5. March 1833 (Tuesday). “Die Wege der Freiheit sind sehr rauh; das Loch im Kopf aber ist sehr gut; ich glaube durch dieses Loch werden die letzten Gedanken an ein weiteres Herumreisen (eigentlich Herumrasen) um glückliche Menschen und überhaupt besseres Erdenleben zu finden, aus meinen Kopf hinausfahren. Wie aus dem geöffneten Bierkruge die fixe Luft, so machen sich aus meinem geöffneten Kopfe die fixen Ideen los.” (Lenau 1989, 235). 10 “Ihre Rauheit ist aber nicht die Rauheit wilder, kräftiger Naturen, nein, es ist eine zahme, und darum doppelt widerlich: Büffon hat Recht, daß in Amerika Menschen und Thiere von Geschlecht zu Geschlecht weiter herabkommen. Ich habe hier noch keinen muthigen Hund gesehen, kein feuriges Pferd, keinen leidenschaftlichen Menschen. Die Natur ist hier entsetzlich matt.” (Lenau 1989, 235). 11 Cf. for example Simmel on the “peculiar flattening out of life” (“eigentümliche Abflachung des Lebens”) and the “characterlessness” (“Charakterlosigkeit”) of money (Simmel 1989, 595ff). It would be intriguing to systemtically compare the qualities Simmel ascribes to the capitalist way of life with the stereotypes of America in Lenau and Kürnberger, but also in Joseph Roth (Hiob) and Kafka (Der Verschollene/Amerika).

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mental lack of culture. Particularly in Kürnberger (more programmatically than in Lenau), German and European culture is opposed to American civilization and the American way of life. It is the dynamic capitalism of the New World that becomes the negative image of the new anti-American clichés of the nineteenth century. This coincides with the argument that the Americans have only mercantile and technical education and abilities.¹² It is quite evident in Lenau’s production of stereotypes that the contradictions contained within his descriptions do not affect or diminish the efficacy of his hetero-images. If one reads Lenau’s letters and Kürnberger’s novel between the lines, then it becomes quite clear that the diagnosis of biological degeneration does not make sense in combination with the assertion that the Americans have a robust constitution. What really generates resentment is the perception that the Americans are cleverer than the new emigrants from the Habsburg Monarchy or from Germany. Like all insiders, they have – in contrast to the newcomers, the outsiders – an efficient network and knowledge of the formal and informal rules. Moreover, they are keener and more experienced in the use of the exchange medium of money, and are more knowledgeable of the calculations and the strategic options associated with this first universal medium. The European newcomer comes to America with the idea that he will be deceived by people who have already settled into the New World and adapted its way of life. The persistence of this idea can be observed in Kafka’s much later novel Amerika. Austrian visitors, both real and fictional, also miss the ubiquity of the state as a guarantor of order and justice. Lenau, an adamant opponent of Metternich’s despotic regime and an ardent supporter of the Jungdeutschen (and “Young Austrians”) movement before 1848, writes of the American state and society: “The American does not know anything, he seeks nothing but money. He has no ideas, and thus the state is not a moral institution, not a fatherland, but merely a material convention.” (“Der Amerikaner kennt nichts, er sucht nichts, als Geld; er hat keine Idee; folglich ist der Staat kein geistiges und sittliches Institut-Vaterland, sondern nur eine materielle Convention.”)¹³ In my view, the problematic aspect of such quick judgments is not the gesture of exaggeration, the hyperbolic style that can also be found in Thomas Bernhard’s depictions of his own Austria, although it may be seen as an indication of a perspective that does not allow any irritation because of its strong filter. It is not only the negative projection as such, but the fact that this kind of

12 Nikolaus Lenau to Joseph Klemm (Lenau 1989, 244). 13 Nikolaus Lenau to Joseph Klemm, Lisbon (Ohio), 6. March 1833 (Wednesday) (Lenau 1989, 244).

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hetero-image production does not take into account the connection between the perceiver and the perceived. This relationship is condensed to the point that it ceases to be evident what the topic of the discourse is: Capitalism, America or Austria? Gender images of America and Europe are also revealing in this respect. Here Lenau and Kürnberger establish a double-speak. One does not know what the actual topic of their statements is: the strange habits of American men, or the new question of women’s rights in Europe? In these early hostile images of America, there are two elements that are connected in a strange way: the notion of supremacy and the primal fear of economic inferiority. Quite clearly, the resentment of America, and of the aggressive energy it is seen to embody, is based on this fear. In contrast to Tocqueville, who presents a much more differentiated analysis of American issues, Lenau does not develop a cogent perspective on America’s political constitution and institutions. (Tocqueville 1985, 45) The former, from the very beginning, is aware of the comparative character of his analysis.¹⁴ Tocqueville’s image of America differs from Lenau’s and Kürnberger’s in central aspects. He understands the “peculiarities” of the Americans not as a consequence of their essentialist national character, but as a result of political institutions produced by modern democracy and its economic counterpart, money. In other words, the perspective of the French aristocrat is not cultural, but political. Drinking Rhine wine, Lenau longs for a specifically German liberty during his stay in democratic America. In contrast, Tocqueville realises an internal connection between the American and the European revolutions. Democracy in Europe, he maintains, will also give rise to a new kind of culture typified by that of America in 1835, or at least a tendency towards it. Thus, the trip to America proves to be a sort of “time travel” for the French intellectual. What was not realized by Lenau in 1832–33 that becomes evident in Tocqueville’s clear analysis of the American situation in 1835? As a first result of our analysis, one can say that Lenau’s construction of America contains implicitly central changes in society and culture that are hidden by the portrait of the ugly American. It is the cultural aspect of money, the use of time, forms of social behaviour, the relationship between man and woman. It is,

14 “Ich gestehe, dass ich in Amerika mehr gesehen habe, als Amerika; ich habe dort ein Bild der reinen Demokratie gesucht, ein Bild ihrer Neigungen, Besonderheiten, ihrer Vorurteile und Leidenschaften; ich wollte sie kennenlernen, und sei es nur, um wenigstens zu erfahren, was wir von ihr zu erhoffen oder zu befürchten haben.” (Tocqueville 1985, 31).

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to refer to Eliot and Williams, “the whole way of life,”¹⁵ which is constructed in Lenau’s view only through the medium of money. This fits together with a stereotype which is also so striking in Kürnberger. Lenau speaks of a striking gallantry towards women. In his eyes, a new cult has arisen with the woman at its center, whereby he attests American women little musical sense and a lack of eroticism, comparing their gaze with “the gaping of two cellar windows” (“es klaffen nur zwei Kellerfenster”). The Austrian is astonished by the gallantry and the extreme adoration of American men for these charmless and unattractive human beings. He is annoyed that men have to buy everything for their wives, who stay at home leisurely rocking on rocking chairs constructed especially for their comfort” (“während die Frauen sich zu Hause sehr behaglich und sehr müßig auf eigenes dazu eingerichteten Schaukelstühlen hin und herwiegen”).¹⁶ This judgement reveals a deep irritation about a contested social issue at home. It is the fear that in Europe too, gender relationships could develop in the direction described using the American example. Quite evidently, Lenau – who is seen in the history of Austrian literature as an exponent of radical republicanism – has shown himself here to be a genuine conservative. The derogative remark about the unattractiveness of American woman is combined with praise for her European counterpart. It contains a sort of promise of faithfulness to European woman at home. The astonishment about the reason why unattractive women are served and spoiled by men goes hand in hand with the Central European visitor’s fearful suspicion that women have too much power in America. The following six-word statement is characteristic of the construction of the Other: “Die Weiber sind fast heilig gehalten.” The women are practically worshipped. The next sentence explains to the reader why: because in American cities men go to the vegetable market with shopping baskets on their arms and buy all the necessary things for daily life, while women sit comfortably at home with the reins in their hands.¹⁷ Behind the bugbear of the American woman, there is a foreboding that has not fully come to light and remains latent, namely the question of women’s rights. These tendencies are foreshadowed in America, and Lenau sees them with dread when he thinks of his own culture, of Europe. It is the spatial shift into another

15 Cf. Eagleton (2000, 1–31). 16 Lenau in a letter to Joseph Klemm, Lisbon (Ohio) 6. March 1833 (Wednesday) (Lenau 1989, 243, Note 6). 17 Lenau in a letter to Joseph Klemm, Lisbon (Ohio) 6. March 1833 (Wednesday) (Lenau 1989, 243, note 6).

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culture that quickly transforms a progressive “Byronian” European author into a conservative cultural pessimist. The emptiness of the other culture and its highly developed credit system – a topic of great relevance today – are further culminating points in Lenau’s generally negative view of the New World. But first and foremost, it does not offer any comfort or coziness. This culture has no place for a day bed. Overall, America (and its people) represents an uncomfortable symbol. It is a sign that in Europe things could become less pleasant as well. Far from healing Lenau’s melancholy, Europe’s counterpart and antipode deepens it. The journey to a distant place proves to be a trip into another time as well. Facing this future, the European seeking freedom from the subjugation of the ancien régime feels helpless and displaced. Hence, the only place that is connoted positively is Niagara Falls, which is seen in typical Romantic manner as a mirror of one’s own existential state and feelings. A “double poem” with the interesting title Different Interpretations (Verschiedene Deutung) is programmatic: one version is from outside, and one is from an interior perspective.¹⁸ There is a catchy image: the pathetic smashing of “waves in thunder-fall,” which is associated with an implosion of the Self that scatters (or negates) the perception of the “Iris” light. It seems as though the lyric subject itself has been caught up in the maelstrom of the tableau, becoming a part of the waterfall. In

18 “Verschiedene Deutung Sieh, wie des Niagara Wellen Im Donnerfall zu Staub zerschellen, Und wie sie sprühend nun zerflogen, Empfangen goldene Sonnenstralen Und auf den Abgrund lieblich malen Den farbenhellen Regenbogen. O Freund, auch wir sind trübe Wellen, Und unser Ich, es muss zerschellen, Nur stäubend in die Luft zergangen, Wird es das Irislicht empfangen. Trüb, farblos waren diese Fluten, Solang sie noch im Strome wallten; Sie mussten vielfach sich zerspalten, Daß sie aufblühn in Farbengluten. Nun fliegt ein jeder Tropfen einsam, Ein armes Ich, doch stralen sie Im hellen Himmelslicht gemeinsam Des Bogens Farbenharmonie.” Lenau (1995, 56).

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the second version, the second interpretation of the moment, lonely drops fly as lonesome individuals into the shared light of the rainbow. This is the other side of modern subjectivity: solipsism and radical loneliness, mental states that are intensified by dense metaphors of light and water. The alien backdrop is constructed as a projection screen for a very modern experience of boundlessness. The poem expresses the sublimity of a strange and deserted nature which cannot be found in Lenau’s European poems on Hungarian and Swabian landscapes. In this specific context, solipsism and the dissolution of the self can be understood as specific forms of reaction against the nightmare of the American Dream. Here Lenau is fitting his symbols not into the format of the letter, but the poem, which makes the elevation of reality possible. Modern aesthetic configurations, such as the loneliness of the lyric ego and the longing for self-revelation, arise from the same cultural context as his polemic image of America, which at the same time is an image of a possible future. To the poet faced with the directness of this new form of capitalist culture and the increasing power of women, withdrawal  – the dissolution of the ego  – appears as the only attractive alternative. It implies, as mentioned earlier, a form of boundlessness which differs fundamentally from the emptiness of economy. There is a dizzying vertigo in this lifting off from history. The Romantic experience of the dissolution of the ego into the dynamic of nature is set against the emptiness of modern culture. The second form of reaction against the new era, for which America served as the projection screen, overlaps with the first one and has similarities with Eichendorff or Chamisso. Here the poem is also the symbolic vehicle, and the theme is solidarity with marginalised and colonised peoples, with the historical loser. In the Europe of the time, these were, for example, the brave Poles who struggled in the November Uprising of 1830. Or they were people without a real or symbolic homeland, for example the Romani (one of various ethnic minorities in Europe known collectively as the “gypsies”) in Lenau’s native Hungary. They represent a modern way of life, an unbounded and nomadic existence, seemingly free from any economic or political pressure, a life in nature. In the American context, the indigenous peoples of America, the “Indians,” occupied this position in Lenau’s poems. They are seen as living in harmony with nature, from which they were expelled. European discontent with America and Romantic notions regarding its natives are two sides of the same coin. There are in Lenau’s oeuvre two familiar poems, Der Indianerzug (Indian Migration) and Drei Indianer (Three Indians), which describe the exodus of the autochthonous population from its homeland: their lamentation on the banks of the Susquehanna River, their early ecological prophecies, their unavailing curse of the White Man. The first poem alludes to the biblical Exodus from the Holy Land. In the second, the plot is concentrated on the idea of finding in death an honorable

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end in the face of decline. An old Indian and his sons jump into Niagara Falls, a symbol of longing in Lenau’s poem, which is identified with self-extinction. Read together with the other Niagara Falls poem mentioned above, this allows one to appreciate how Lenau’s pathetic Romanticism equates the death and self-extinction – under nature’s power – of the last Indian with that of the European tourist. The Native Americans are seen as kindred spirits, remaining tied to nature in their heroic death. There is no alternative to this last melancholic revolt.¹⁹

19 Nikolaus Lenau: Die drei Indianer (Lenau 1989, 328f., note 13). The poem Indianerzug, in which the Susquehannah River is mentioned on 324–327: “Fluch den Weißen! Ihren letzten Spuren! Jeder Welle Fluch, worauf sie fuhren, Die einst Bettler unsern Strand erklettert! Fluch dem Windhauch, dienstbar ihrem Schiffe! Hundert Flüche jedem Felsenriffe, Der sie nicht hat in den Grund geschmettert! Täglich über’s Meer in wilder Eile Fliegen ihre Schiffe, gift’ge Pfeile, Treffen unsre Küste mit Verderben. Nicht hat uns die Räuberbrut gelassen, Als im Herzen tödtlich bittres Hassen: Kommt, ihr Kinder, kommt, wir wollen sterben! Also sprach der Alte, und sie schneiden Ihren Nachen von des Ufers Weiden, D’ rauf sie nach des Stromes Mitte ringen; Und nun werfen sie weithin die Ruder, Armverschlungen Vater, Sohn und Bruder Stimmen an, ihr Sterbelied zu singen. Laut ununterbroch’ne Donner krachen, Blitze flattern um den Todesnachen, Ihn umtaumeln Möwen, sturmesmunter; Und die Männer kommen festentschlossen Singend schon dem Falle zugeschossen Stürzen jetzt den Katarakt hinunter.”

Images of America, Made in Austria After Lenau – Franz Kafka And when I got to America, I say it blew my mind. (Eric Burdon)

With regard to Americanism in Kafka, which I will analyse in the following, it is important to point out that his fragmentary novel Amerika (known in German as Der Verschollene, i.e. “The Man Who Disappeared”) is linked with the “grand narrative” of modernity. Borrowing Hayden White’s terminology, one can argue that there are at least two versions of linguistic protocols in Kafka, namely romance and tragedy. (White 1991, 563ff.) Essentials aspects of this narrative of modernity are connected with the North American continent, and especially with the United States. Since the nineteenth century, America has served as a projection screen for the “grand narrative” of technical, economic and political progress, and for the future of the Western world as such. North America is to some degree seen as a part of European culture, but it is also perceived as a symbolic counterpart to and a rival of the Old Continent. The United States represents not only another symbolic space, but also another symbolic time. Thus the journey across the Atlantic is also a journey in time or, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s term, into a specific new type of chronotope. It is a trip to another space and time. Here in America, things are possible that have not yet taken place in Europe, and which are still not possible there. The New World evokes astonishment and surprise, denial and rejection. In Kafka, the protagonists are generally suppressed by social circumstances, whereby his unfinished novel Amerika displays a specific gesture of cultural helplessness. This abyss in time and space is written into nearly all critical or affirming symbolic constructions of America in Austrian or German literature since the 1830s, since long before Kafka. It is no coincidence that we find an image of the New World in Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities) which contrasts with that of old Kakania, Musil’s name for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Following the argumentation of chapter 8 in the novel (an internal essay), Musil’s analysis of modern Occidental culture confronts the reader with two macro-phenomena. There is a temporal aspect which refers to America in a manner similar to Kafka. Modern times are seen as some sort of hyper-American town in which nobody would really like to stay or live.¹ Musil’s

1 Robert Musil (1978, 31): “eine Art überamerikanische Stadt in der man für seine Person nicht gerade gern […] wäre.”

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novel evokes the image of a restless and purposeless dynamic modernity, which is also constructed in various films and movies of the 1920s. Maybe Manhattan Transfer could be seen as presenting this kind of stereotype of New York. There is also a spatial aspect to modernity, and interestingly it is related to the Habsburg complex – in Musil and in Kafka, but also in Roth.² This reserved attitude of classic modernist Austrian authors toward America has a longer tradition. It can already be found, for example, in Nikolaus Lenau’s letters written during his stay in America in 1832–1833, and in Ferdinand Kürnberger’s novel Der Amerikamüde, which is based on Lenau’s American experience. What is suppressed in all of these works (not only in a Freudian sense) is more than the drama of modernity performed by the New World for Old Europe. Quite evidently, America also evokes images of political and cultural heterogeneity. There is powerful meta-narrative, including the fairy tale that all immigrants are free to pursue their own happiness. These men and women have ostensibly thrown away their old identity, but nonetheless continue to wear it like a chain. This idea is personified by Karl Rossmann, the main figure in Kafka’s fragmentary America novel, the first chapter of which (Der Heizer, i.e. “The Stoker”) was published during his lifetime.³ The entire work was written at just the time when Musil was preoccupied with the question of the empty space he considered the Austro-Hungarian Empire to be. For Musil, the empire was a vacuum, but this fact was hidden by the richness and variety of the interesting cultural phenomena that were so characteristic of the belle époque. Hermann Broch has called it the Wiener Backhendl-Zeitalter – the era of Viennese fried chicken – but this is a late, retrospective and polemical description, written more than thirty years after Kafka’s fragment and Musil’s essays.⁴

2 Robert Musil (1978, 32): “Dort, in Kakanien, diesem seither untergegangenen, unverstandenen Staat, der in so vielem ohne Anerkennung vorbildlich gewesen ist, gab es auch Tempo, aber nicht zuviel Tempo.” Cf. further the description of America in Roth’s Hiob: “Vor den Augen Mendels wehte ein dicht gewebter Schleier aus Ruß, Staub und Hitze. Er dachte an die Wüste, durch die seine Ahnen vierzig Jahre gewandert waren. Aber sie waren wenigstens zu Fuß gegangen, sagte er sich. Die wahnsinnige Eile, in der sie jetzt dahinrasten, weckte zwar einen Wind, aber es war ein heißer Wind, der feurige Atem der Hölle.” (Joseph Roth, Hiob. Roman eines einfachen Mannes, in: Romane in zwei Bänden, Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch 1984, Bd. 2, 285. Roth’s image of modern New York contains biblical overtones; on the on hand it as a desert through which Hiob has to treck, but on the other hand, similar to his essay on the Anti-Christ, as hell on earth. 3 Quite obviously Kafka was inspired by Arthur Holitscher’s travelogue in the Neue Rundschau (cf. Binder 1983, 75–135). 4 Hermann Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit (Broch 1975, 153ff.).

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Maybe Kafka’s work represents the most famous case of an oeuvre that has been nearly totally de-contextualized. Generally speaking, this is the destiny of all those authors who have been translated into many languages (and cultures) and have become members of the literary Champions League known as “world literature.” With regard to Kafka or Joseph Roth, one can really say that the cultural context was eliminated long ago, before they were translated into other languages. This cultural extinction is the work of German Studies as practiced in Germany, which may show respect for the local particularities of Prague (e.g. Klaus Wagenbach’s famous Kafka biography), but does not really take into account the Austrian context as such.⁵ Kafka’s Amerika tells the tale of a German-speaking Austrian who leaves Prague for the New World. Among the many works of Kafka’s, this one is unique in that it refers quite clearly to a specific “real” cultural space: the United States of America. The modern world as depicted in the novel entails cultural particularities which can be read metaphorically but also metonymically. This America turns out to be an uncanny symbolic space. All of the observations and evaluations made in this mono-focussed work are linked to Kafka’s protagonist. There is no other perspective in the whole novel. All of Rossmann’s adventures occur in a social and symbolic cave. Of course the whole journey is imaginary, an adventure in the mind. The Viennese author Peter Henisch’s novel Vom Wunsch, Indianer zu werden. Wie Franz Kafka Karl May traf und trotzdem nicht in Amerika landete (On the Wish to Become an Indian: How Kafka met Karl May and Nevertheless Did Not Arrive in America, 1994) is a literary commentary and intertextual intervention that plays with the motif of Kafka’s Americanism. Henisch’s fictional Kafka coalesces with the character Karl Rossmann. Kafka/Rossmann is on a ship bound for New York, where he meets the author Karl May and discusses the idea for his new work with him. You might never have heard of Karl May here in America, but in the German-speaking world this author of extremely popular adventure novels set in the American Old West has been a household name since the late nineteenth century. Henisch’s book ends with Kafka/Rossmann jumping overboard immediately before the ship arrives at New York. In Kafka, the steamer from Hamburg to New York is constructed as a culturally and socially heterogeneous space. The passengers and crew are almost all from the Central European cultural field: Rumanians, Austrians, Slovaks (“Slowacken”!), Jews and Germans, but there are also more “suspicious” folk, like Frenchmen and Irishmen. Various social distances and constellations, symbolic

5 Cf. most recently: Wagenbach 2006.

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boundaries and hierarchies exist between these immigrants. (Bourdieu 1989, 217– 220) The dominant aspect is a retrospective aversion toward each other, as Musil has described with regard to the ethnic groups of the Monarchy.⁶ Rossmann’s cultural perception is particularly representative of the cultural stupidity of an average Austrian in those days. This kind of cultural positioning corresponds with a crazy system of fixed stereotypes. The conflict onboard the ship, caused by the supposed dominance of the non-German people, culminates at exactly the time it lands. The Stoker, who is a German, complains to Rossmann and the Captain about the rule of the non-Germans on board, which is unnatural in his eyes. Rossmann, a German-speaking Austrian from Prague – who is just as afraid of the Slovaks, the “foreigners” of his own culture, as he is of the French and Irish  – is very eager and servile in supporting the Germans. (Kafka 1997, 7–13) The differentiations between the German-speaking characters are interesting and symptomatic in many ways. Rossmann, for example, develops an affinity for the German members of the crew against the others, the Rumanians and Slovaks, whereby he puts all his trust in the Viennese Oberköchin (head cook), Grete Mitzelbach of the Ramses Hotel. She is seen as his really countrywoman. Like some of Roth’s novels, especially his early work Hotel Savoy, Kafka’s unfinished novel is in favour of spaces that are heterogeneous and at the same time nomadic, cursory and dynamic, because the personnel is always changing. Beyond the moving space of the ship, there is the hotel and the port office in New York. Very quickly, Rossmann is excluded from all the book’s real and relevant “anthropological places” (Augé 1994, 53–89), for instance his uncle’s house or the villa of the uncle’s business partner. The book also depicts places that are unusual for the European reader: there is a masterfully rendered election campaign in the public sphere, and there are places related to the developing cultural industry (Theater in Oklahoma, Kafka 1997, 278ff). The latter is connected with a strange and lurid figure, a symbolic mixture which entails Latin American and Germanic connotations: Brünhilde, Brunelda. She has an enormous real, sexual, social and symbolic appetite. She is a female version of Hegel’s “master,” who enslaves Rossmann and his annoying companions. The entire fragment is characterised by the situation of an in-between, whereby this specific temporal and spatial situation is interpreted as being disas-

6 Robert Musil (1978, 34): “Denn nicht nur die Abneigung gegen die Mitbürger war dort bis zum Gemeinschaftsgefühl gesteigert, sondern es nahm auch das misstrauen gegen die eigene Person und deren Schicksal den Charakter tiefer Selbstgewissheit an.”

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trous. It is true that there is no longing for the old home, for Prague or Vienna. But there is also no possibility of finding a place in the new cultural space of America. Rossmann will never truly arrive in New York or America. It remains uncomfortable, uninhabitable. That which Kafka presents to the reader in a very absurd way is the other side of heterogeneity. It entails the most tragic human destiny: living as a complete stranger in the human world. Kafka’s Amerika is the most radical version of the Gnostic narrative in which the human being is a total stranger in this disastrous world. America is constructed as a dystopia. The grotesque variation of the Statue of Liberty symbolises this vividly. The sword held in the hand of Kafka’s caricature of Lady Liberty anticipates the coming disaster,⁷ which sets in after the short happy interlude of Rossmann enjoying the kind and supportive welcome of his uncle, an influential businessman and politician. Even the reason for Rossmann’s having to emigrate from Europe in the first place is spiteful and preposterous. He has been sent off by his parents, because he has been seduced by an older woman, his parent’s maid. The symbolic space in which he arrives, America, proves to be a sort of penal colony. In accord with this situation, the actions of Kafka’s protagonist are awkward and painful. Rossmann is a man who has a strong sense of always doing wrong. The strangeness superimposed upon him by cultural and linguistic difference is seen as the very reason for Rossmann’s awkwardness. (Anders 1984, 54–68) He becomes part of a temporal journey, from which there is no return and no escape. It is interesting that Kafka does not depict America as a heterogeneous cultural cosmos (although Lenau and Kürnberger had already done so long before).⁸ The story only takes into account one segment of the American population: white, upper-class, New England. In contrast to earlier Austrian constructions of America (Lenau, Sealsfield, Kürnberger), we do not find any picturesque Native Americans here. It is only the white, rich America that represents the New World, some sort of gentry that displays clear similarities with England’s ruling class. Instead of a socially, culturally and ethnically diverse symbolic space, this America image is strikingly binary and in its strict spatial construction. The internal space is reserved for the English-speaking establishment, while in the external space we find immigrants from all regions of the Old Continent: Germans, Austrians, French, Jews, Irish. Very often they prove to be scattered adventurers.

7 Franz Kafka (1997, 7): “Ihr Arm mit dem Schwert ragte wie neuerdings (!) empor und um ihre Gestalt wehten die freien Lüfte.” 8 Cf. Michael Müller, Nachwort (in Kafka 1997, 293–318). Additional information on research literature can be found there.

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In Kafka, cultural strangeness is only a symptom of a deep and basic strangeness of the world that cannot be overcome. Modernity entails the narrative pattern that the human world has become radically strange to human beings. (Kamper 1986, 15f.) Cultural strangeness can be interpreted as an aspect of this principal strangeness. What we have here is a change of Nomos (more in the sense of Schmitt than of Bourdieu): Rossmann, Kafka’s joker-figure, leaves the symbolic spatial order of the “Landtreter” and enters the world of the “Meerschäumer” (Carl Schmitt), of the project maker (Schmitt 1981, 16). It is symptomatic that the novel begins with the episode of Rossmann’s lost suitcase. The German Stoker, an experienced crewman, explains the totally different symbolic space of America to Rossmann, the ignorant Austrian. Even on the ship, the habits change with the harbors: in Hamburg his mates would have taken care of Rossmann’s suitcase. (Kafka 1997, 9ff) The migrant from Prague experiences capitalism as a foreign and strange cultural phenomenon, as a human cosmos full of insecurity, capriciousness, despotism and subjection. But it is also quite evident that this feeling of being a stranger in the world originates in his homeland; it accompanies him from his own Nomos to America. Thus America proves to be a new version of his own world: patriarchal bureaucracy, double bind, unfathomable and opaque relationships, non-transparent systems of rule and power. For Rossmann, being a stranger in the world has made strangeness into something that is paradoxically intimate. It is a variation of his own experience of being a stranger to himself. In comparison with Kafka’s Amerika, the situation in Das Schloss (The Castle) seems to be quite comfortable, smooth and homely, because here everybody, man or woman, has his or her assigned place. To put it sarcastically, the security of bad luck is guaranteed in The Castle. In Amerika bad luck has also become insecure, contingent and out of order. This is the emptiness of vagabonding money, the obscurity of capitalist economy, the economisation of all fields of human life, collective loneliness and the programmatic distance between people, the arbitrariness of modern times. This new Nomos is represented by Rossmann’s immensely rich uncle, Senator Edward Jakob, the successful immigrant from his hometown, and by his companion, who has the bizarre name Pollunder. The protagonist’s irritation becomes visible in another cultural area. Being a stranger also means being in the wrong place. At the same time, Kafka’s construction of the main figure generates a rhetorical reading, and this proves to be an unreasonable demand.⁹ The novel forces the

9 Cf. Anders (1984, 64); see also the metaphor of the “Marterkarussels”, a strategy to force the reader to enter it.

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reader to identify him- or herself with the poor fellow. (S)he must go hand in hand with this bigoted, limited, uncritical, clumsy man through a space that is often highly imaginary. From this perspective, America becomes more and more the nightmare of modernity. Identifying with this kind of obsequious opportunist, who wants to try to suit everybody and produces only damage for himself (like the old man in Johann Peter Hebel’s calendar story about the man with the donkey), is part of an irritating reading experience that the philosopher Günter Anders has described very exactly. The author of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Outdatedness of Human Being) criticized Kafka for this gesture, arguing that Kafka’s protagonist does not rebel against the dystopia. On the other hand, Peter Henisch has in his witty book identified this foolish protagonist with Franz Kafka himself. Literary theory has taught us not to identify fictive characters with real authors. Yet one might argue that Rossmann is somewhat of a play figure or, psychoanalytically speaking, a substitute (Ersatzobjekt) as described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Rossmann can be read as a symbolic and imaginary placeholder, as a vehicle for a boring self-accusation. This is true for the author himself, the first reader, as well as for the anonymous reader, who in the process of reading occupies the position of the author. Kafka’s oeuvre already generates shame and embarrassment on the level of narrative transmission. But as is also the case with Musil’s protagonist Ulrich, the difference between Rossmann and his author is more important than their common attributes, especially with regard to Kafka’s strategy of alienation and distortion, which excludes and undermines every kind of explicitness. It is well known that the novel remained unfinished. Nonetheless, it is clear from the very beginning that Rossmann will somehow mysteriously disappear from the symbolic space called America – more radically than in The Castle or in The Trial. The fairy-tale beginning, where the rich and influential uncle welcomes him at the office in the harbour quite graciously, will remain the only wonderful and miraculous story in the novel. It is too good to be true, as Henisch’s Kafka tells Karl May in discussing his novel. In the symbol making of modernity, America becomes an absurdly strange continent. But there is yet another aspect, beyond the stereotypes of capitalist alienation. For the immigrant from the Hapsburg Empire, the symbolic world of America remains so strange because it is seemingly dominated by bizarre women –this is also a literary hand-me-down from authors like Lenau and Kürnberger.¹⁰ In contrast to the disdainful head cook of the hotel, his countrywoman Grete is (at the beginning) a helpful and protecting mother, who takes him in under her

10 Cf. Müller-Funk (2009, 57–67) and Anders (1984, 65–67).

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skirt, offering him a place to hide. All the other female figures are terrible. From Rossmann’s perspective, the New World is characterised by female dominance. In the first part of the book it is Klara Pollunder, the sexually offensive daughter of his uncle’s business partner”; in the second part it is the leisure lady Brunelda. Both women demonstrate female superiority. Rossmann, the young man who had to escape from female seductiveness in Europe, once again becomes the victim of draconian and despotic female rule, which has only one thing in mind: the suppression of man. This is quite evident with regard to the young saucy and spoilt daughter of the entrepreneur, who knocks down the male visitor using jujitsu, because he denies her sexual offers – a clear subversion of traditional gender constructions. Brunelda represents another female stereotype. She is the diva in full feather, the personified vulva dominating and devouring all men. In his novel project, Franz Kafka has drawn a radical aesthetic caricature, which works because it creates and performs a play (in prose), a play with comical and excessive projections. This the starting point of a fundamental absurdist tendency in modernism. Behind the cultural strangeness of another space, the uncanny strange, which is not characteristic of a single national culture, becomes visible. This is not so much strangeness in space, but in time. At its core there is a specific experience of modernity. Modernism can also be interpreted as the discontent experienced in modernity. At the beginning of the chapter on Lenau, I differentiated between three understandings of the stereotype: it can be interpreted as an oversimplified construction of the Other, as a hidden reference to the construction of the individual or collective Self, or as a circumscription of the relationship between two groups or collectives in the transcultural field. Analysing Kafka’s unfinished text, one may argue that the negative image of the cultural Other, of America, is coalesced (unconsciously or not) with the future of his own culture. This is the narrative that the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville put at the center of his famous book on America and its institutions (1985, 45). The outstanding and witty literary achievement of Kafka’s text is that they illustrate the fear behind the tragic and uncanny narrative of modernity in American style. Maybe this is the very reason why the cultural differences endemic to the New World are never a topic in this work. There are some astonishing similarities between the United States and the Hapsburg Empire, which some wanted to transform into the United States of Austria. At nearly the same time Kafka was writing his novel, a young sociologist from Chicago, a former student of German Studies and a disciple of Calvin Thomas and John Dewey, noted this similarity. His analysis of the European diaspora in the United States, which is centered on

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the difficulties of living in two or three different symbolic spaces simultaneously, is readable and interesting even today, especially in the European context. His name was Robert Ezra Park, and he was an urbanism specialist and one of the key founders of the Chicago school of sociology. In 1910 he traveled to the Old Continent, and his most important destination was, as Michael Makropoulos has discussed in a stimulating essay, the heterogeneous cultural space of the Habsburg Empire. Park and his black companion Booker T. Washington wanted to study the situation of the workers and farmers in Europe. They wanted to compare this material with the American situation. (Makropoulos 2004, 50) First and foremost, they were interested in ethnic issues, as Park wrote in 1927, and Austria, with its mixed population, was a good place for this kind of research. (Robert Ezra Parker, quoted from: Makropoulos 2004, 50) The specific contrast between their sociological impartiality and the literary partiality of Musil, Roth and Kafka may be interpreted as a specific asymmetry between two different cultural spaces, which cannot be understood only in terms of power. The question of modernity comes into play, but also the problem of ethnic diversity. Both perspectives can be reconciled in the idea that modernity is based on the idea of dealing with differences. Here one is reminded of the election campaign of the post-fascist Freedom Party, who tendentiously intermingled Vienna and Chicago in the slogan “Wien darf nicht Chicago werden.” (“Vienna must not become Chicago.”) only to discover that both cities are on the same symbolic map. Franz Kafka never met Robert Ezra Park or Karl May, but it would be interesting to imagine what they would have talked about. I think it would continue to be relevant today.

Austrian Literature in a Trans-cultural Context 1. Austrian Literature: A Never-Ending Debate There are many substantial insecurities and disagreements about the question whether there is such a thing as Austrian literature and what its characteristics in contrast with German literature are. This is striking, especially when one relinquishes the traditional essentialist idea of identity that goes hand in hand with an affirmative and consensual nationalism. In contrast, contemporary theoretical positions in cultural analysis point out that collective identity underlies historical and cultural change. Following this argument, one might claim that Austrian literature, a symbolic product of self-consciousness and obstinacy, was written, along with the systematic research and reflection about it, over a short period during the process of nation building between 1945 and 1989/1994, after which Austria joined the European Union. Left- and right-wing critics alike criticised Austria’s integration into the European Union, polemically calling it a second Anschluss. The ambitious project of Austrian literature could thus be said to have been a product of the post-war period, a project that lost its cultural energy after 1989 or 1994. Claims about the disappearance of Austria’s own literature in the ocean of a German literature belongs to the central rhetoric within this specific symbolic framework, a rhetoric that is inscribed in Austria with the gesture of grievance. (Cf. Scheichl and Stieg 1986, 25–40) And it is true that there are representative collections in Germany such as Deutschland erzählt that carry the subtitles “Von Arthur Schnitzler bis Uwe Johnson” and “Von Rainer Maria Rilke bis Peter Handke” (von Wiese 1991/1993). Likewise, the cultural neutralisation of Austrian literature in German university libraries is remarkable: Authors such as Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Ödön von Horváth or Heimito von Doderer are fading behind categories of a very specific history of German literature such as Expressionism or Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). In contrast, our library for Romance Studies is politically and scientifically correct in its division into different sections.¹ Nobody would look for the Argentinian author Jorge Louis Borges, one of the most prominent heirs of Franz Kafka, under the subdivision “Spanish Literature”. What Goethe has called world literature, is, to use an image of Walther Benjamin’s, like

1 I am referring here to the Fachbibliothek of the Justus-Liebig-Universität, Gießen.

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a broken vessel that exists only in fragments.² The whole can be reconstructed through thought and reflection. The unity of world literature is always imaginary. When cultural particularity is destroyed in such a complete and all-encompassing way, it is not altogether surprising that one searches in vain in Germany for a representative monograph on Austrian literature in the field of German Studies.³ From such a trans-national perspective the specificity of Austrian literature becomes visible; it emerges as a literature that is not a regional variant of a pan-German literature, but is a “small literature” (Deleuze/Guattari) of its own. Austrian literature can be understood as a very specific and curious national literature that is at the same time a non-national one. It makes use of a very specific understanding of German and is at the same time familiar with other small nonGerman literatures. (Müller-Funk 2009, 8–17) Austrian literature as an object of scientific investigation does exist, especially in Austria, where it is the area of expertise of a handful of specialists; yet even there the notion of a specific national literature seems to be a model that is being phased out. Pars pro toto one has to mention Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Karl Wagner, Friedbert Aspetsberger, Walther Weiss, Klaus Zeyringer, Christa Gürtler, Daniela Strigl, Konstanze Fliedl and a whole generation of Austrian academics after 1968 whose research addresses the question of an Austrian literature.⁴ In my opinion, it is significant that many influential overviews of the history of Austrian literature and culture are written by scholars who are so-called Auslandsgermanisten, above all Jaques Le Rider, Claudio Magris, or the cultural historian Carl Schorske. Also, there are many English, American and CentralEuropean academics who have had the courage to deal with specific topics within the framework of Austrian literature and culture. Apparently, it is a perspective from outside that generates a focus which makes the specific differences between German and Austrian literature visible. The lingering sense of insecurity regarding whether or not there is an Austrian literature is probably connected with the fact that even today language is seen as the central category of cultural difference. From that perspective, Austrian literature can, of course, only be interpreted as a regional phenomenon. This is astonishing insofar as modern cultural analysis insists on the idea that there are many

2 Cf. Walter Benjamin, Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, 18; and Jacobs, The Monstrosity of Translation (1975, 763). 3 The linguistically brilliant essays of the writer and literary theorist W.G. Sebald are not a counter-argument to my thesis, as the author of Austerlitz lived, worked and wrote for a long time in a non-German context in the UK. 4 It may be interesting to note that Schmidt – Dengler had a Croatian and Old Austrian family background, while Zeyringer has been teaching in France for many years.

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more factors that contribute to cultural differences, such as mentality, history, and the whole way of life. These and other elements are relevant for the small difference between German and Austrian literature. In a stimulating and self-critical essay from 1987 (two years before German unification), the Austrian philosopher and essayist Franz Schuh brought this issue into sharp focus when he wrote: “Die Sprache, die wir führen, ist leider wenig geeignet, die wirklichen Dimensionen unseres Landes auszusprechen. Im Vergleich zur Realität wird ihr, der Sprache, alles leicht zum Mythos, zum Fetisch. Eine Infinitesimalrhetorik höchster Langsamkeit im Rahmen unendlicher Beschränkungen wäre vonnöten“.⁵ It is helpful to read these essays and commentaries from the late 1980s to understand the very specific and hidden cultural references and nuances of Austrian literature. The questions remain whether or not there is such a thing as an Austrian literature at all, and whether it must be considered a short-lived phenomenon that was effected by the “invention” of modern post-war Austria. After the aggressive attempts in Austrian German Studies (especially in the 1970s and early 1980s) to institute a genuine national literature by such varied means as Austro-centric research projects, series dedicated to Austrian literature in the academic press, and the establishment of an Austrian literary canon, these efforts have increasingly abated since the 1990s. But there are exceptions, such as the foundation of “Austrian libraries” in the Central European neighbouring states and the subventions that accompanied them. It has been quiet in Austrian literature since the turn of the millennium. There are many reasons for this, above all a sea-change in the overall media and in cultural reception. Austrian film, represented by such well-known figures as Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl, or Barbara Albert, has received much greater attention than its literature. Besides, the critical generation of 1968 and post-1968 that dominated relevant sections of politics, education, culture and science, has aged. When one keeps in mind the integration of the former communist neighbouring countries into the European Union and the effects of internationalisation (“globalisation”), an insistence on the idea of a uniquely Austrian literature tends to look old-fashioned, narrow-minded and somewhat provincial.⁶

5 “The language we are using is not suitable to express the real dimensions of our country. Compared with reality, language transforms all too easily into myth and fetish. An infinitesimal rhetoric of utmost slowness in the framework of infinite restrictions would be necessary” (Schuh 1987, 20); see also Müller-Funk, Ein Koffer namens Österreich (2011). All translations from the German are mine unless indicated otherwise. 6 This point is especially significant if we keep in mind that Josef Nadler, the founder of an essentialist ethnic and racial concept of the literary history of German tribes (which was quickly

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Such a national concept may be regarded as what Milan Kundera has called the “terror of the narrow context”, “Terror des engen Kontexts” (Kundera 1991, 12). Herbert Zeman’s Geschichte der Literatur in Österreich circumvents this problem in quite an elegant manner by defining Austria as a symbolic container. (Zeman 1999) This seems to me a compromise between the concept of a uniquely Austrian literature and that neo-Pan-German version as proposed by, among others, Horst Albert Glaser and Wilfried Barner, one that Klaus Zeyringer has sarcastically described as a “pat on the back”, “das Schulterklopfen der Definitionsmacht” (Zeyringer 2008, 24). In contrast, Zeman understands Austrian literature on the one hand as a regionally specific literature with changing real and symbolical borders and on the other as a discursive phenomenon. It is characteristic of such a position that it is nearly impossible to differentiate between German and Austrian literature. Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler too (who has been more diplomatic than his colleague Zeyringer) has always missed fairness and evenhanded sensibility in German literary historians, stating that the debate about Austrian literature has to be conducted in the field of literary history. I find Schmidt-Dengler’s assertion that Austrian literature does not fit in the scheme of German literary history plausible. As Schmidt-Dengler has pointed out, nearly all Austrian authors become awkward stopgaps of the German history of literature, because Grillparzer is not a genuine Classical author, Raimund is not really a Romantic, Lenau is somehow different from the German Vormärz authors, Stifter is not a Realist and Anzengruber is not a Naturalist. Following Schmidt-Dengler, one can say that Austrian literature displays temporal inequalities that cannot be resolved in the sense of dialectics and that do not disappear. (Schmidt-Dengler 1995, 14) Considered within a cultural approach in which literature is understood as a specific aesthetic medium, as a symbol formation in a certain national or regional culture, this seemingly small Freudian difference between German and Austrian literature, which has to some extent supported a problematic, sometimes even aggressive nationalist resentment, can be deconstructed. As such, Austrian literature and other aesthetic formations – film, music, popular culture – can be considered to have created and indeed invented the small neutral Austria after 1945: without Austrian literature and culture no Austrian nation. This does not overlook the fact that authors such as Hermann Broch, Robert Musil und Joseph Roth, Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann and Elfriede Jelinek play a distinct, but different role in other cultural contexts, for example in Germany,

caught up in National Socialism) was also the inventor of the idea of an Austrian national literature. See Nadler, Literaturgeschichte Österreichs (1951).

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because Germany and Austria represent different narrative communities. (Cf. Müller-Funk 2008) Austrian anti-Heimatliteratur, whose beginnings can be located either in Hermann Broch’s Die Verzauberung or in Hans Lebert’s Wolfshaut and which probably ends with Thomas Bernhard’s Auslöschung, makes the specific difference between Austrian and German literature significant.⁷ Likewise, the delayed avant-garde in Austria (Wiener Gruppe, Wiener Aktionisten, Valie Export) does not have a real West German counterpart. This kind of literature and cultural production can be seen as highly paradoxical symbolic formations that made very specific contributions to the creation of an Austrian identity that is completely different from the German. This approach further includes the idea that Austria is linked to a specific heterogeneity, long before multiculturalism and cultural studies, because of the imperial heritage of the country. Anti-Heimatliteratur is a critical Heimatliteratur, a Heimatliteratur followed by a question mark. In a very sophisticated way, this baroque performance of lovehate speech combines two moments of Austrian reality and its symbolic state. Referring to rural places and peripheries (such as the Alps), it criticises the Austrian collaboration with the Third Reich in extraordinarily concrete and demonstrative ways. Ever since Lebert, it is the countryside that is presented as the Austrian “heart of darkness”, as the place of the symbiosis between Austrian identity and National Socialism. Many authors, such as Jelinek, Bernhard, Handke, and Josef Winkler, who cannot be described (only) as anti-regional writers, come from the background of the Austrian province that is so often depicted as a place of pseudo-familiar insidiousness. (Schmidt-Dengler 1995, 207–211; 369–375) The aesthetic and political power of this literature, which was mainstream literature in Austria in the 1970s and 1980s, was the result not only of a bottom-up perspective, as Zeyringer argues (2008, 134–135), but also of the effectiveness of the traditional regional literature with its concrete details, with its strong reference to social reality, and with its preference for a small world.⁸ As Bachmann, Lebert, Bernhard and Gerhard Fritsch have already done, authors such as Franz Innerhofer, Marianne Gruber, Gernot Wolfgruber, Felix Mitterer and others have now also changed the backdrop, “die Kulissen gewendet”, to use an expression of Zeyringer’s. The regional home, which is smaller than the national home, now refers to an “anti-community”, as Zeyringer notes, to a “Gemeinschaft” that is a “soziales Gefängnis, in dem die Unterdrückten hoff-

7 See Schmidt-Dengler (1995, 288–289) and Zeyringer (2008, 133–138). 8 I think Gerhardt Roth’s Die Archive des Schweigens is a very good example for that kind of writing.

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nungslos in der von Geburt an festgesetzten Rolle gefangen sind”.⁹ From a sociological perspective, these findings go hand in hand with the aforementioned fact that the overwhelming majority of Austrian authors between 1968 and 1989 come from the rural areas of the country, not from Vienna. This is an interesting parallel and at the same time a lurid contrast to the national sensitivities and to the self-image of the country as beautiful provincial countryside around the Alps, in which the former centre of Central Europe has become the periphery of the periphery. As Robert Menasse (1992) argued quite polemically, the rural auto-stereotype is written into the text of the Austrian national anthem after 1945, which praises the countryside, the rivers and the mountains, the innocence of nature. This scenery does not fit well with the urban space of Vienna, which was rediscovered in the 1990s. To come back to anti-Heimat literature, this type of literature, which refers polemically to the Austrian countryside, has worn thin. The best pieces, such as Bernhard’s Auslöschung, will doubtless survive, Bernhard’s novel not least of all because of its black humour and its rhetorical hypertrophy. In this sense, the Nobel Prize for Elfriede Jelinek (2004) does not mark the beginning but the end of a literary period that was extremely influential and important for the symbolic anatomy of the country. New topics such as migration and heterogeneous cultural spaces are increasingly coming into play. For a long time, there was a fascination with Austrian backwoods areas. This was the exotic, strange element in this particular German-speaking culture, an element that corresponded especially in Germany with the hetero-image of Austria as a backward farming country. For about fifteen years now, Austria has been a richer, more expensive, and arguably more developed country than the unified Germany. In a tacit acknowledgement of this development, thousands of Germans emigrate year after year to Austria, so many that the majority of new immigrants to Austria are now Germans. Austria has become more and more Germany’s second Switzerland. Yet in Austria, this need for Alpine and non-Alpine peripheries is no longer central to the cultural discourse; indeed there is some exhaustion concerning this topic. The anti-Heimat literature, like the discussions about the Third Reich, both of which went hand-in-hand, has fulfilled its task. Moreover, today the rural spaces are no longer representative in view of the global changes of a hyper-modern culture. In retrospect, the anti-Heimat novel or the anti-Heimat play had the function of a literature that can be described as a (more or less) patriotic construction of

9 “a social prison, in which the oppressed are caught from birth and without any hope in their unchangeable roles” (Zeyringer 2008, 135).

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identity. Bernhard can be said to have invented Austria through a negative hypertrophy underlain by melancholia. As Robert Menasse points out in his essay “Das Land ohne Eigenschaften” (the intertextual allusion to Musil is evident), there is a strong link between the anti-Heimat literature and the complex symbolic “constitution” of post-imperial and post-National Socialist Austria (Menasse 1992, 94–109). If domestic and rural areas and regions can no longer be considered central to Austrian literature and culture, and if, more than fifty years after Heimito von Doderer’s urban area of the city, cities, especially Vienna, become so central as heterogeneous and polyphonic spaces, the question is obvious: what kind of consequences may these changes imply? One could argue that with the end of anti-Heimat literature a decisive moment for the literatura austriaca has disappeared. Another more optimistic thesis might be that Austria has become more and more of a normal European nation-state, in which obsessive self-assessment is no longer a compulsory rite. I think it is necessary to give the debate on Austrian identity a cultural turn. What has been labelled as typical Austrian literature is not the “expression” of a setting of timeless, essential qualities and identities; rather, it is the result of history and its symbolic configuration in literature, arts and media that have produced and continue to produce Austria day after day. It may also be worthwhile mentioning, in favour of the concept of a specific Austrian literature, that it involves specific cultural issues, in addition to the two well-known arguments regarding the linguistic idiom and the different history of state and policy.¹⁰ As Zeyringer has convincingly argued, specific national variations are self-evident in other linguistic spaces (such as the Spanish, English, French, Portuguesespeaking ones). Nobody would even entertain the idea of identifying Brazilian literature as Portuguese, or US-American or South African as English literature. (Zeyringer 2008, 23) Considered within the parameters of modern cultural analysis, it becomes clear that the play of cultural differences is no longer exclusively based on language, on its written and oral use, as was characteristic of an understanding of culture following in the footsteps of Herder. Today, other “strong” cultural phenomena, for example mediality, collective memory, cultural transfer, region, the construction of everyday life, and symbolic forms, have become more and more central. With regard to these phenomena, the differences between Austrian and German sensibilities are striking, just as the similarities with Austria’s non-German-speaking neighbours become visible: a gesture of irony and scepticism, a feeling for the unreal, experiences of ethnic

10 For these lines of argumentation, see Schmidt-Dengler’s Bruchlinien (1995).

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heterogeneity and strife, a disposition towards provincialism that goes hand in hand with an overestimation of one’s own capabilities. These and other qualities are more or less part of a post-imperial heritage. It is possible to picture a history of Central European literature in which there would be a place for authors such as Péter Esterházy, Kálmán Mikszáth, Ferdinand von Saar, Marie Ebner-Eschenbach, Thomas Bernhard, Joseph Roth, Bohumil Hrabal, Danilo Kiš, and Miroslav Krleža – and this is only a rather arbitrary beginning of what would constitute a growing list. With regard to the literature of the last decades one could mention Libuše Monikova, Terezia Mora, Peter Esterházy, Irena Brežná or Jáchym Topol. These authors represent literary actors of a common heterogeneous symbolic space in which – in contrast with earlier times – translation is obligatory. But it also proves to be a symbolic space in which the individual sub-spaces have more similarities with each other than with Cologne or Bern. Using Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance (1983, 57) one could say that a lot of important relatives, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces are missing in the family photo of Austrian literature. Paulus Blokker has circumscribed the Austrian relatives by these characteristics: anti-politics, scepticism, anti-essentialism, and multiplicity, cultural diversity, dissent. (Blokker 2010) Undoubtedly, language is still a central element for the general context of cultural connection and bonding, but it is not the only one. From that perspective, Austria differs from Germany as Portugal does from Spain. If considered with a narratological concept of cultural analysis, Austria constitutes an autonomous ensemble of various collective small and great narratives. If there is a very specific “trauma” at the centre of the Austrian narrative material, this could be a specific question of a symptomatic analysis. I think the Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal is right when she warns us against using the term “trauma” in an inflationary manner (Bal 2002b, 11). Trauma, she argues, is not identical with grief, nor with shock. But her definition of “trauma” as a phenomenon that is closely connected to mourning (and, as such, strongly influenced by Freud) can be adapted for Austrian literature, such as for Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten or Ingeborg Bachmann’s story Drei Wege zum See. In both texts, personal pain corresponds to political pain, and in both cases, the terms “hurting” or “wounding” express too little while the term “trauma” in the classical sense of victimisation is too much. Following the Lacanian psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche und Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, it is easy to understand the speechlessness in these texts as a fixation (in a polyvalent sense) and as an inhibition which refer to a structured totality of partially or completely unconscious phantasies and recollections that are highly occupied by affective moments. (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 252) Although the nostalgic and imperial term of the Habsburg myth may not suffice, the larger framework of Austrian literature must still be kept in mind. With

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regard to that frame, one kind of Austrian literature seems to me to be the most powerful in terms of its influence on the construction of the country’s identity and on the production of auto- and hetero-images. This literature revolves around the centre of the complex structure that is Austria; it entails the experiences of modernity and fragmentation, of post-imperialism and nation building, and the traces of the historical catastrophes that make it impossible to create a national narrative as the heroic and optimistic collective story of the Austrians. This literature remains an exciting possibility, insofar as Austria’s fractured national narratives can make a relevant and positive contribution to more differentiated postnational narratives. These narratives no longer follow the binary pattern of inside and outside; they praise a homogeneous “own” space, and they do not exclude all those moments of history that do not fit into the flattering image of a small nation. There are not only ruptures but also continuities with regard to authors such as Grillparzer, Musil, Roth, Kafka and Bernhard. These continuities make it possible to explain the history of modern Austrian literature from a larger cultural perspective. In the same vein, Zeyringer, whose account of Austrian literary history undermines the despotic imperative of a linear narrative, quotes from an interview with Bernhard in which the author defines the difference between German and Austrian literature and culture with regard to language (the pronunciation of the German) and history. “Take the pronunciation, the language melody. There is a considerable difference. My diction would be unthinkable for a German author; by the way, I have a real aversion to the Germans. Do not forget the burden of history either. […] The past of the Habsburg Empire shapes us. […] It is manifest in a genuine love-hatred for Austria; in the end, it is the key to all that I write” (Rambures, “Aus zwei Interviews”, 16.)¹¹ This “genuine love-hatred”, which can be found long before Bernhard in Joseph Roth’s pan-Austrian rhetorical performance, can also be interpreted in a cultural sense. There are not only the political events, not only the Austrian linguistic obstinacy that separating Germans and Austrians, but also different rhetorical strategies of narration and symbol formation. Bernhard’s invective against the German of the Germans is instructive insofar as he discusses two acoustic phenomena: pronunciation and melody. The author of Heldenplatz refers to the

11 “Nehmen Sie die Aussprache, die Sprachmelodie. Da gibt es schon einen wesentlichen Unterschied. Meine Schreibweise wäre bei einem deutschen Schriftsteller undenkbar, und ich habe im übrigen eine echte Abneigung gegen die Deutschen. Vergessen Sie auch nicht das Gewicht der Gechichte. Die Vergangenheit des Habsburgerreichs prägt uns. […] Es manifestiert sich in einer Art echter Haßliebe zu Österreich, sie ist letztlich der Schlüssel zu allem, was ich schreibe.”

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oral system, to the parole, to the performance of language, not to the written system of the langue, and to the fixed and defined system of German writing: The old contrast between Protestant writing and learning culture on the one hand and Catholic Baroque theatrical culture on the other is still relevant. In this interpretation, the rhetorical overkill, the art of the hyperbolic in Bernhard, would be an effect of the mimesis of an oral gesture, an effect that is evident in pieces such as Gehen and Auslöschung. The second point of emphasis in Bernhard’s answer also goes beyond the historical fact as such. Rather, it is about collective sensitivities and self-stylization. It was W.G. Sebald, the German immigrant, professor in the United Kingdom and writer, who today is central and peripheral at the same time, who gave the concept of Heimat a new meaning. Sebald mentions the specific, often traumatic development Austria has passed through: from the expansive Habsburg Empire to the diminutive Alpine Republic; from the monarchy to the corporate state, followed by the annexation to disastrous Pan-Germany, and, finally, the founding of the Second Republic in the post-war years. (Sebald 1991, 11) Even if one should be more careful with the word “trauma”, it can be shown that there are many immensely irritating experiences in this history, such as a series of military and political defeats, an enormous marginalisation, dictatorship, and moral guilt, moments that are an explicit or implicit part of the narrative structure of the imagined community called Austria. (Cf. Anderson 1991, 5–7) Sebald describes literature as a symbolic format that works out irritating experiences; it goes hand in hand with the presence of disaster and misfortune, and with a deeply embodied sense of shame.¹² The very notion of Austrian literature can neither rest exclusively in the antiHeimat literature nor be informed exclusively by a perspective in which, as Zeyringer formulates polemically, Austrian literature becomes completely subsumed into the Pan-Germanic context. (Zeyringer 2008, 25) It becomes evident in an

12 In a different context, I have had to express my reservations about Sebald’s methodology, especially his Marxist critique of ideology which erases the polyvalence of literature (see Komplex Österreich 15). Nevertheless, his two collections of essays on Austrian literature are, because of their productive external perspective and their sensitive empathy, among the most competent reflections on the topic; in this respect, they can only be compared with Franz Schuh’s inside perspective and insight into the symbolic architecture of the Austrian case. From that point of view, it may be worthwhile reading anew Claudio Magris’s often criticised book on the Habsburg myth, which finds itself in opposition to the mainstream Austrian leftist discourse once again. It is not, as is often stated, a work that transfigures the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Instead, Magris tries to read the literary traces of the impossible home called Austria or Austro-Hungary.

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external focalisation which is not German, but English, French, Italian or, for example, Hungarian or Croatian. The specific particularity of Austrian literature is based on a “hybrid” condition humaine that is the result de longue duree. The various languages in the neighbourhood are written into the German language of Austria. They represent the strange element of its very core, of das Eigene. In contrast with the German use of German language, one can say that Austrian literature can be understood to some extent as a small literature, akin to Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Croatian or Slovene literature.¹³ If one uses the plural “Austrian literatures”, then this could refer not only to the plurality of Austrian literature in a narrow sense but could also describe the cultural und linguistic variety surrounding the German-speaking remains of the monarchy. In that trans-national sense, Austrian is written into our neighbouring cultures, which goes a long way to explaining the intellectual distance of Miroslav Krleža’s or Tomáš Masaryk’s project of de-Austrification in the first Czechoslovak republic. This interdependence and trans-cultural situation is much older than the immigration of workers from Yugoslavia in the 1970s, or the virtual intensification of symbolic spaces which modern communication and new media have made possible. Historically, the Austrian issue, this space-in-between that National Socialism tried to create anew as the German “Ostmark”, has undergone various changes, ups and downs. After the breaking up of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 there was a clear need for a unique collective Austrian profile. Josef von Hormayr’s Österreichischer Plutarch is a symptomatic response. This specific Austrian identity, which did not automatically exclude the German, faced a crisis after 1859 and 1867–1871, when the Prussian king created the Prussian-German Empire. Friedrich Heer has described in detail the subsequent Germanification and German-nationalistic infiltration of the Habsburg Empire that took place after the military defeat and long before Hitler. (Heer 1996, 262–321) After 1918 there were some conservative attempts at inventing Austria anew, such as Anton Wildgans’s famous speech “Rede über Österreich” (1929) and Joseph Roth’s oeuvre since Radetzkymarsch (1932), which establish clear symbolic borders between both German-speaking countries. In contrast, it was the programmatic goal of National Socialism to separate all Austrian particularities from the geographic and symbolic area of Austria, with the exceptions of regional folklore and dialect.

13 There are many foreign words in Viennese German, and one can find a similar kind of heterogeneity in the Slavic and Hungarian neighbouring cultures, which are marked by a specific use of German. This bilingualism was characterised by the quasi-imperial condition, by the fact that German was for a long time the dominant language in the region, the language of the elite in politics, economics and culture.

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After 1945, a new chapter began in the long history of constructing Austria as a symbolic item, and it was not by chance that literature was called upon to create a strong difference between German and Austrian. As mentioned above, this period came to an end in 1994 when Austria joined the European Union. Since then a new dynamic has taken place in the dialectic of the “other”. The German influence has increased considerably in nearly all relevant fields of modern society, such as media, economics, and science. Yet the last fifteen years have also seen the return of more intensive relations with those countries which are sometimes referred to in Austria somewhat patronisingly as “successor states“. There is also a growing influence of global tendencies which creates a strange linguistic mixture between Austrian German and American English. The erstwhile Austrian goal of constructing a neutral island in splendid isolation has become obsolete. In this fluid cultural situation and the rapid evolution of social media, a new generation will create a new type of literature, a literature with differences from and similarities to previous periods of Austrian literature.

2. Once Again: Musil, or Austria as a Heterogeneous Space It is well-known that the problematic term “hybridity”, which is regularly used in cultural studies, goes back to Michael Bakhtin (1981, 358). The Russian literary and cultural theorist made use of this ambiguous term hybrid – in the world of Greek mythology and a product of biological breeding  – with regard to the “impossible” hyper-genre of the modern novel. In his analysis, Bakhtin refers to aesthetic and linguistic phenomena such as multilingualism, the mixture and integration of different genres (drama, lyric, letter), multi-perspectivism, pluralism and the diversity of speech-acts. From that point of view, the modern novel can be understood as a mimesis of form that has been so characteristic of the globalising modernity since the beginning of the twentieth century. It is the modern novel that has given modernity its representative form. That Bakhtin’s theory is to some extent unique has to do with the fact that it interprets the pluralism in modern societies, in contrast with traditional Marxism, in a positive way. Implicitly it entails a cultural theory which connects two aspects that play an extraordinarily important role in contemporary discourses in cultural theory, namely political dissent as the precondition of the possibility of post-authoritarian civil societies, and the existence and presence of cultural differences as they become evident in the variety of languages, genders, beliefs and religions. It is the modern novel that is formatting all these kinds of pluralistic issues. It is able to do this symbolic work because of its hybridity, that is, because it is a composed genre and a mixture.

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This concept of mixture and heterogeneity has been transferred by cultural and postcolonial studies from artefacts to actors and authors, to immigrants, to diasporas, and to minorities as such. There is, as Terry Eagleton has shown, a certain cultural restriction in that use of hybridity. (Eagleton 2000, 15) Heterogeneity is seen here (as, for example, in Bhabha) as a paradoxical identity/nonidentity referred to as a cultural in-between, as a threshold, defined by two different parallel cultures. De- and re-constructing Benjamin’s theory of translation, one may risk the thesis that the translator can be understood as a guardian of and at the threshold. From that perspective, Austria can be understood as a potential, if not intentional, station for translation and transfer, a fragile third space (all those so-called third spaces are unstable; as they have a dynamic temporal aspect, they also represent transit stations in the category of time). Austria is a collective point of diverse, overlapping contexts. In contrast with European countries like Belgium and Switzerland that host three or four separate internal literatures that are linked with larger cultural and linguistic spaces, Austria represents more or less only one space, which has, however, a multi-dimensional aspect. This is already true for Nestroy’s polyphone language in the first part of the nineteenth century. This is relevant also in Grillparzer’s and Stifter’s interest in Hungarian and Czech history, which is treated as part of the unique symbolic space. This also comes to light in Ferdinand von Saar’s and Marie Ebner-Eschenbach’s critical stories about Austrian masters and Czech servants, as well as in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Karl Emil Franzos, Jakob Julius David, and Anastasius Grün. In contrast with many other national cultures, Austrian literature stands out because of a very specific and obvious heterogeneity, especially if takes into consideration the biographical background of many authors. Even if one refrains from resorting to biographical interpretation, this does not mean that one has to discount personal and political experiences that are manifested in literary production. This aspect is obvious in famous authors such as Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Joseph Roth and Ödön von Horváth. But there are also moments of heterogeneity in other authors with a Jewish background: Hermann Broch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Theodor Herzl, Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig. Quite often these authors got into the crossfire of contested national, ethnic and political cultures, and they were facing the alternatives of assimilation, integration or disassociation. More to the point, Kafka is not an exceptional example of Austrian literature; he is part of the symbolic core. This is also true for his companions from the Prague circle (such as Ernst Weiss, Ludwig Winder, Max Brod), as well as for Manès Sperber, Paul Celan and other authors from Galicia and Bukovina, or for the bilingual Slovene-Austrian authors Gustav Janus, Florjan Lipuš and, to a certain degree, Peter Handke. The dynamic of the transient, which was so powerful in the Habsburg Empire, is still at work. Authors such as Milo Dor or

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Pavel Kohout have quite evidently a double symbolic marking. After 1989, Vienna has become an urban space for a polyphone literature. It is, for example, represented by Radek Knapp, Julya Rabinowich and Dimitré Dinev. Further, the renewed presence of Jewish identities needs to be mentioned here, pars pro toto Doron Rabinovici, Robert Menasse, Eva Menasse, and Robert Schindel. Schindel’s novel Gebürtig decribes the ambivalent “in-between” of a group of Jewish intellectuals in Vienna in the late 1980s with great feeling and empathy. Schindel’s figures are at the same time home and not at home. They fear to leave the urban area of Vienna and enter the countryside, the symbolic space of the anti-Heimat novels. Schindel’s protagonists occupy a distinctive symbolic space, which is always structured heterogeneously. Conversely, other parts of the population, for example the pauperised supporters of right-wing populism, react to this phenomenon with aggressive xenophobia. In Freudian terminology, this constitues a very problematic aspect of discontent in urban culture that is defined by mixture and hybridity. There is a direct connection between a specific heterogeneity in Austrian culture and an aggressive longing for a homogeneous closed space called Heimat in politics. In my view, this is a classical struggle for symbolic meaning and hegemony in a Gramscian sense. To some extent, this struggle is a new version of an old conflict that took place in Vienna around 1900. To support this thesis, a look at Musil’s famous novel, especially the eighth chapter, entitled “Kakanien”, may be helpful. With respect to what I have called above the complexity of what is Austrian, the emphasis on retardation and the interest in diversity, instability and dissent is remarkable. The essayistic voice in the chapter understands these moments as a characteristic phenomenon of modernity. This modernity anticipates, as Jacques Le Rider has shown, the gesture of post-modernism, which arises for the first time from the complexity of what is Austria and which is also seen as a symbolic space for experiences and experiments. (Le Rider 1990, 419–420) The essayistic voice of “Kakanien” starts with an overwhelming tableau of modernity, the magnificent machinery of a hyper-American town with the hundred thousand windows of their skyscrapers to refer to Kafka’s fragmentary America novel. Musil’s novel uses the technique of stringing together linguistic material. It proves to be mimetic to its topic, a space in terrific and lightning movement but without any direction. Nobody knows what route will be taken. Quite obviously, the metaphors of speed and acceleration dominate. The tableau of the town, some sort of a hyper-New York, owes to the early silent film or a novel like Manhattan Transfer. If one looks rather more intensively at the basic plot of this chapter, it is about a bold outdoing of the great narrative of progress (in Lyotard’s sense using Nietzsche’s master narrative of the uncertain departure of occidental, “post-Columbian” mankind). This chronotopos is characterised

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by the fact that travel has become automatic; there is no hand or parking brake and no stop-button. It is conceivable, even probable, that the participants of this expedition will never return from their departure. Every technical accident in our globalised world participates in this catastrophic mega-narrative. The image of a busy and living space that is cut by streets, cars and metro systems serves as a contrast to the all-Austrian space-time, which is characterized by retardation, restraint and mediocrity. And it contained  – the text consciously uses the past tense – the possibility of leaving the train while traveling, as is common for journeys by train. It would be attractive to use a term from Carl Schmitt’s apocalyptic narrative: Austria is seen as a Katechon, a historical element that checks or even halts the end of the world. Integrating the temporal level of narrating; it is decisive in the apocalyptic drama of John from Patmos, the station before the terminus, the period before the end of time. Musil’s ending leaves open whether this holding moment is an integral part of a moving modernity, an internal counterpart, as it were, or if is a symptom of a dying “nomos” (Schmitt 1981, 71–74). Undoubtedly, the distinctive heterogeneity of the complex structures that combine to make “Austria” with all its in-betweens and its time structure is genuinely modern, including the distrust and the individualistic hate for each other, as the essayistic voice points out at the end of the chapter: “Denn nicht nur die Abneigung gegen den Mitbürger war dort bis zum Gemeinschaftsgefühl gesteigert, sondern es nahm auch das Mißtrauen gegen die eigene Person und deren Schicksal den Charakter tiefer Selbstgewißheit an. Man handelte in diesem Land […] immer anders, als man dachte, oder dachte anders, als man handelte”.¹⁴ In this paragraph the diagnosis of the loss of identity and character is linked with that kind of distrust. The protagonist Ulrich is conceived beyond all ethnic particularity, a hero of the heterogeneous, the marginalized and the unreal, a man not only without qualities, but also without identities. What makes him different from the other inhabitants of this specific symbolic space is his heroic and at the same time indifferent consciousness, the gesture of a man who is free from any illusion. His identity dissolves in the particular. Of the ten different identities the text mentions (nation, region, gender, social position, profession etc.), the tenth is the most mysterious one. It is an imaginary empty and invisible space that is based on passive fantasy, a space similar to a child’s building block town, “nichts

14 Robert Musil (1978, 34): “For it was not only dislike of one’s fellow-citizens that was intensified into a strong sense of community, even mistrust of oneself and of one’s own destiny here assumed the character of profound self-certainty. In this country one acted […] differentely from the way one thought, or one thought differently from the way one acted”.

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als die passive Phantasie unausgefüllter Räume […] eben ein leerer, unsichtbarer Raum, in dem die Wirklichkeit darin steht wie eine von der Phantasie verlassene kleine Steinbaukastenstadt” (Musil 1978, 34). Austria is here, above all, improvisation and mixture kat’ exochen: People have nothing to do which each other any longer. What they have in common is the experience with an uncanny vacuum. This is also true on a manifestly ethnic level. What holds together the complex structure that is Austria is the conflict between the ethnic groups or the nationalist camps. Everybody needs somebody to hate. In this respect, nationalism can be seen as a symptom and a promise, the promise of healing. It is the empty space which is to be filled with symbolic bubbles. This attempt at healing is, as the plot of the novel suggests, in vain. In Musil’s novel, two results are connected: on the one hand, modernity with its specific forms of individualism and egotism and with its uncomfortable coldness; on the other hand the hotspots of national conflicts that interestingly are interpreted as an effect of modern individualism. It is culture that creates these differences that allow conflicts to be sustaining in a more or less peaceful way. The Parallelaktion in the novel is a metonymy for the work of culture as such. At the end, war is the logical consequence of this very strange form of emptiness. There can be no doubt that Musil’s protagonist is an unstable figure in a space in which all the ethnic, ideological and sexual conflicts rage. Even if one keeps in mind the ambivalence of literary texts, the explicit plot structure in the novel suggests that the principle of scepticism has neutralised and overcome the principle of hope. In contrast to contemporary debates, the novel does not portray the heterogeneous as a political candidate for hope, neither in the form of a Romantic communitarism (multi-culturalism) nor in the version of a Romantic individualism which defines identity as non-identity. On the contrary, the empty space, which theoretically entails the possibility of creative acts, produces panic and supports all those political movements that are sustained by the elementary individual social and cultural ear. Heterogeneity becomes a vanishing point for aggressive strategies of national identity politics. Like Broch, the other Austrian literary mastermind of that period, Musil could not imagine a form of culture that is not based on common values. What can be described as the agonal pluralism of modern and post-modern cultures today, a peaceful symbolic war in which everybody respects their counterparts in a highly paradoxical way, was not an option for Broch and Musil. In this respect, the (all-)Austrian complexity remains a current and relevant topic.

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Original place of publication of single chapters Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative: A Transdisciplinary Discourse Report Lecture at the Univ. of Palermo (2012). Forthcoming, in: Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning (eds.) Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter). The Hidden Narratives: Latency, Repression, Common Sense Inaugural Lecture, Univ. of Birmingham (UK) (2002). German version in: Wolfgang Müller-Funk (2002) Die Kultur und ihre Narrative (Wien: Springer). On the Narratology of Cultural and Collective Memory Lecture at the ACS conference, Univ. of Birmingham (UK) (2000). First published in: Journal of Narrative Theory 33.2 (2003), 207–227. Romanticism and Nationalism: The Heroic Narrative – Hermann and the Battle for Germany Lecture, Aston University (2001). Romanticism and Nationalism. The Heroic Narrative – Hermann and the Battle for Germany. German version in: Wolfgang Müller-Funk (2002) Die Kultur und ihre Narrative (Wien: Springer). Polyphem’s Children: (Post-) Colonial Aspects in Western Modernity and Literary Modernism Key note lecture at the MALCA conference, Vermont (2003). German version in: Wolfgang Müller-Funk (2009) Komplex Österreich. Fragmente zu einer Geschichte der modernen österreichischen Literatur (Wien: Sonderzahl). Murder and Monotheism: A Detective Story in Close Reading Lecture at the symposium Die Macht der Monotheismen-Psychoanalyse und Religionen, Sigmund Freud Museum Wien (2009). Space and Borders: Simmel, Waldenfels, Musil First puplished in: Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe (eds.) (2007) Border Poetics De-Limited (Hannover: Wehrhahn). Time in Modern Cultural Analysis Lecture at the Wittgenstein-Symposium, Kirchberg, Austria (2005). Walter Benjamin and the Translational Turn Lecture at the Univ. Coimbra, Portugal (2009). The Arts and the Split of Time: On Kawara Key note lecture at the EAM conference Europa!? Europa? at Gent University (2008). First published in: Sascha Bru, Jan Baetens, Benedikt Hjartason, Peter Nicholls, Tania Ørum and Hubert van Berg (eds.) (2009), Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of the Continent (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter).

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The Disappearing of Ruins: Thomas Glavinic’s The Work of the Night and an Imaginary Symposion with Benjamin, Simmel, Freud and Foucault Lecture at the workshop Inhabited Ruins, Univ. Lancaster, UK (2010). Fear in Culture: Hermann Broch’s Massenwahntheorie Lecture at the MLA conference, New Orleans (2001). First published in: Paul Michael Lützeler (ed.) (2003) Hermann Broch. Visionary in Exile. The 2001 Yale Symposion (Rochester: Camden House). Mass Hysteria and the Physics of the Crowd: Canetti and Broch – A Theoretical Divorce Lecture at the Canetti-Broch-Conference, organised by Österreichische Gesellschaft für Literatur, Elias Canetti Gesellschaft and Arbeitskreis Hermann Broch (2003). Musil’s Version of Round Dance in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften Lecture at the MLA conference, San Francisco (2008). From Early Modernism to the Late Avant-garde Movement: The Austrian Example German version in: Wolfgang Müller-Funk (2009) Komplex Österreich. Fragmente zu einer Geschichte der modernen österreichischen Literatur (Wien: Sonderzahl). The Broken Mirror: The Construction of America in Lenau Lecture at the Austrian Cultural Institute, Washington DC (2011). Images of America, Made in Austria: After Lenau – Franz Kafka Lecture at the Austrian Cultural Institute, New York (2011). Austrian Literature in Trans-cultural Perspective Key note lecture at MALCA, Vienna (2010) and at the University of California/Berkeley (2011). First published in: Michael Böhringer/Susanne Hochreiter (eds.) (2011) Zeitenwende: Österreichische Literatur seit dem Millenium (Wien: Praesens).