Temple of the Scapegoat

by Alexander Kluge

  Yet in the reality of war outside, the GRAND ILLUSIONS of 1940 had long since fallen away, and my parents were not political, nor had they ever understood the workings of world power. Thus my mother lived in thoughts of self-improvement (returning to the capital from the provinces). And my father, too, constructed notions of what might yet beckon to him in a liberated life.

  For my mother to reach decisions in a crisis, operas would generally have been no help. In my father’s case, moments from certain operas — of which, however, there were no records in his cabinet — could have caused a STRETCHING OF HIS EMOTIONS, so that hidden powers of volition might have emerged from the caverns and crannies of his character and given him the crucial inspiration while it was still possible for the divorce suit to be retracted. Such opera scenes include:

  Fidelio, Act 2, Leonore’s aria, “Come, hope.”

  Un ballo in maschera by Verdi (Amelia’s farewell from her child; while witnessing this scene, her husband, who believes himself betrayed, redirects his aggression away from her; instead he will kill his former friend, whom he takes for the adulterer).

  Arabella by Richard Strauss (the finale, in which the intrigues are unraveled and Arabella returns to pledge herself to the Slovenian landowner).

  Conversation Between Siblings

  My sister disputes my interpretation of the scene in which our father listens to Pagliacci and fails to come to a decision. She claims our father put the first record back on after listening to the third so that he wouldn’t remain stranded in the despair of the third act (“Murder in the Theater”). He wanted to hear, one more time, the prologue that begins the opera, that still holds out hope and expresses the opera’s ludic character, not the POWER OF FATE. And he ignored me, the whiner, because he was weeping inside.

  But I argued: the surging of the music should have given our father strength to call our mother back to him.

  He felt too guilty to do that, my sister rejoined. There had been angry words. He had practically thrown our mother out of the house for her adultery.

  Yes, I replied, yet the opera, that compilation of such monstrous seriousness, ought to undo those preceding actions. Music lets people overcome all emotional obstacles to recover the dearest thing they have.

  To that my sister answered: Try explaining that to a heart in need. We are speaking of two different people here: the real young woman called Alice Kluge — or the mother we imagine, as the case may be. And on the other hand, the man Ernst Kluge in the year 1942 — or the father we both have an image of, as the case may be. Only opera brings things together to make a unity.

  But then, I argued, hothead that I am, new forms of seriousness (namely operas) should be invented to recover our mother, to break the obstinacy of our father.

  Such operas, my sister was quick to retort, would do no good retroactively.

  My father playing the violin. Musicians from Infantry Regiment 12.

  Opera Scene that Makes Me Cry

  I don’t know why, but tears always come to my eyes in the third act of the Meistersinger when the shoemaker and poet Hans Sachs enters and at that very moment the crowd breaks into song:

  Awake, awake, the day draws nigh;

  I hear its song in greenwood vales,

  a sweet delight: the nightingale.

  The night sinks toward the Occident,

  the day dawns in the Orient

  In Peter Konwitschny’s staging, Hans Sachs begins by standing unnoticed in one of the last rows of the chorus. In the version of the Meistersinger at the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin (performed by just six singers and seven orchestra musicians instead of the 196 customary in Bayreuth; the chorus is made up of all the theater staff members who usually work in the offices or backstage), I cried still harder because the minimal staging, the UNOPERATIC QUALITY, assailed me even more intensely. This skeletal Wagner was by no means an anti-opera, it was Wagner sans phrase. I AM TOUCHED, I THINK, BY THE SUDDEN EMERGENCE OF COOPERATION. The opposite of melodrama. Some beloved thing returns home to the rest of us. I imagine how, in the year 1523, a sudden inspiration might have led the peasants, city people, scholars, the nobility (that is, knights) somewhere in Germany to fall into each other’s arms (instead of killing each other). Just as the minds of the French were united on July 14, 1789. Even if the images made after the fact strike me as propaganda, my DESIRE FOR THAT COOPERATIVE MOMENT overwhelms my reason. The point of my tears is to wash away the feeble remnants of critical thinking that seek to prevent me from believing in SELFLESS ABANDON.

  Rules for Crying

  When damp wood sings as it burns, it is the crying of poor souls. When the wind whistles in the firewood and around the corner of the house, the unbaptized children are crying. In the valleys of the North Harz Mountains (especially up in Schierke and Elend), the godfather must buy the newborn baby’s cries on the third day after birth. He’s supposed to put money in the baby’s cradle. If a pregnant woman cries, she’ll have a baby that screams and bawls. My mother, as noted above, cried bitterly in February 1937, but the child she bore on April 2, 1937, my sister, has always been cheerful, and never screams at people, as her father and I definitely do.

  In Switzerland they say children must be left to cry, for while they cry their hearts grow. In Homer, among the Sioux, on the Andaman Islands and in New Zealand, people returning home are received with tears. That, says Derrida, is not an expression of emotional agitation, but rather a force meant to avert evil. They wish the homecomer well, and wish him to import no evil.

  The tears of those left living — those who loved the dead man — burn in the deceased like fire. The more the dead man is wept over, the more water he must bail in the underworld. Thus, in a side valley of the Adige, where an old Latin dialect is spoken, it’s said that one should shed at most a cup’s worth of tears for a dead child. The deceased see all that goes on for two days after their death, and so there should not be too much weeping in these days.

  Deceased children, suffering from their mothers’ tears, appeared in the house and pointed to their wet, heavy little shirts. They lugged along a pitcher, filled to the brim with tears, and wouldn’t let themselves be laid back in the grave until their mothers promised to stop crying.

  My father with Magda Bügelsack, right, Frau Laube (the caretaker’s wife, responsible for the housecleaning) and Hilde Wasserthal (successor to Magda as my sister’s nanny), left, in the sunroom at my sister’s baptism in 1937.

  Godard’s Fragment

  The dress rehearsal for Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Paris Opera was set for a date which — as no one imagined when it was scheduled — turned out to be three days before the Germans marched into Paris. The répétiteurs were practicing, the stagehands and set designers were preparing the scenery. Management had decided to stage the opera, the war with Germany notwithstanding, because Ludwig van Beethoven was Austrian (or indeed a citizen of the world); in the management’s view, even Austria’s annexation by the German Reich had not affected the national affiliation of his oeuvre.1

  Then all the operas and theaters in Paris were closed by official decree; the personnel prepared to evacuate to Bordeaux along with crucial pieces of scenery. The opera house, the Palais Garnier, was padlocked. But in this ancient building’s warren of rehearsal rooms, near the subterranean lake far below its stage, in rooms the news did not reach, the second cast went on rehearsing Fidelio. They were completely unaware that the main body of the opera had decamped. Only the next day, having finished rehearsing Act 2, did they find the doors locked. They were trapped, cut off from the Earth’s surface, from the light. The group’s stage manager, a conscientious sergeant left over from Verdun (kept on at the opera as a charity case), made a mental survey of their provisions and the prospect of drawing water from one of the wells in the depths of the opera. He thought it possible to hold out for ten days. He organized one group to send signals up t
o the surface by means of shovels originally used for stoking the opera’s boilers. As for the rest of the troupe, he thought it best to rehearse the final act, about a liberation. Swift steeds carry a government minister to the gate of a prison. The governor in charge of this prison plans to murder one of the prisoners, his enemy, but is foiled at the last moment. The pale comrades, criminals and freedom fighters united, step out into the light of world history. This must be rehearsed note by note; it is a moment full of improbability, a great moment in music.

  Busy with their rehearsals, these lost souls in the opera’s bowels were blind to the desperate nature of their situation. Their bread and water were as tightly rationed as in a Spanish prison at the actual time the opera was set.

  There was no revolt, not even impatience. The Führer’s visit up above went unnoticed by the lost crew. On Tuesday, June 25, with the sun still shining warmly on Paris, the cafés on Boulevard Saint-Germain were packed, rapt Germans already mingling in the crowd. Now the opera staff who had not been evacuated to Bordeaux returned to the Palais Garnier. A stagehand heard the lost brigade’s systematically knocking shovels. IT TOOK SEVEN KEYS TO RELEASE THE REHEARSAL GROUP. Not a single eyewitness left an account of the moment when these forsaken people, these Robinsons of France’s defeat, emerged from the underground.

  Jean-Luc Godard heard this story in 1968.2 He always had a surprise up his sleeve. At the same time, he was laboring under a certain influence: his brain was anesthetized by the value abstraction of the revolutionary process unfolding in Paris in May 1968. Nonetheless, a man like Jean-Luc Godard can’t be influenced completely, even when a large part of his brain stops working. In dinosaurs the pelvic brain remains intact even when the brain-brain fails. And so there exist unique products of civilization in which each individual cell contains an alternate brain that would go on functioning even if the big brain were suddenly subject to occupation — just as well as Godard’s brain would function if it were unoccupied. In this sense, Jean-Luc Godard is the absolute antithesis of the occupation of Paris in 1940. Thus, though his film project THE MOMENT WHEN THE PRISONERS’ CHORUS OF FIDELIO WAS LIBERATED FROM THE CATACOMBS OF THE PARIS OPERA was not actually filmed in 1968, he did sketch it out in pencil, rather illegibly. His wife left him. His new wife was interested in politics, not in the genius’s sketches. But in 1977 Godard, a rigorous man, a Protestant from Geneva, persevered with his notes. The film fragment based on these sketches, one of his best works, depicts in a total of 884 seconds (14.7 minutes, 35mm, b/w, premiered in Seoul, Korea, projected 165 feet high by 230 feet wide onto a highrise, awarded the city’s first prize) the EMERGENCE OF THE SECOND CAST OF FIDELIO INTO THE LIGHT IN FRANCE’S DARKEST HOUR.

  The leader of the troupe, the sergeant, had instructed his motley crew to strike up the Prisoners’ Chorus as they left the Palais Garnier. Eyewitnesses went their separate ways afterward without leaving their addresses for historians to contact them later on. No film team from the Deutsche Wochenschau was standing by, so unexpected was the incident.

  Correct Slowing-Down on the Transitional Point Between Terror and an Inkling of Freedom

  In Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, the prisoners step into the light from their jail and immediately launch into the “Prisoners’ Chorus.” It starts calmly, but very quickly gathers momentum and escalates. The director, Calixto Bieito, considered this form of staging — which follows Beethoven’s score and stage directions — unrealistic. The rigidity of all vital functions that had taken hold of everyone in the prison cell could not be discarded quickly, or individually. The director had decided to have a massive metal grid built as part of the set. Moving the chorus members through this obstacle to the foreground of the stage, the director was able to hint at the drawn-out process within which the memory of earlier life is located, and thus the memory of the hope promised by heaven’s light. Because none of the sheet music for the opera was available during that particular time, Calixto Bieito arranged with the conductor to borrow a substantial number of bars from the String Quartet op. 132. The music was provided by orchestral musicians floating in a basket above the stage.

  Weren’t They Glad to Be Liberated?

  An SS Death’s Head Unit transported the prisoners from the concentration camp to a town near the Danish border and took them to an inn. They were handed over to the Swedish Red Cross (with no concession demanded in return; the intent was merely to facilitate the negotiations by the Reichsführer-SS) and treated by doctors as though in a hospital. At first the Swedes attempted to improve the prisoners’ physical state by giving them invigorating injections and special rations. The prisoners appeared paralyzed.

  —Weren’t they glad to be liberated?

  —No immediate change in mood was observed.

  —As if they couldn’t believe their new situation yet?

  —More as if they couldn’t find their way out of the situation of captivity. Seemingly caught in a labyrinth.

  —Was it possible to question them?

  —At all times. But their answers couldn’t be trusted. They struck us as arbitrary.

  —You mean human souls have too much inertia to cope with such extreme reversals of fate? They need a great deal of time.

  —Something like that. And everything had to be translated from German into Swedish or English. Information got lost.

  The Scapegoat Principle

  When the metropolises of the East were founded (Uruk, Babylon), people were crowded so closely together that aggression built up between them. Only the priests know how to adjust the scales to deal with this “social fever”: from time to time a scapegoat, an innocent human being, must be publicly sacrificed. Afterward the victim is canonized, briefly preserving the well-being of the community. This, claims French thinker René Girard, is what operas portray now that religions have been put in their place.

  When one rationally questions the magical devices by which the priests (and their operatic echoes) balance out the scales and memorize the new balance, these devices lose their power. For this reason Jürgen Habermas insists that a certain stock of religiosity — like a supply train — must be taken along on every march of the Enlightenment.

  A Crucial Character (among Persons None of Whom Are Who They Think They Are): Rachel in La Juive3

  One day the costumes and the scenery burn up (towers, equipment for the cauldron of boiling oil into which Rachel is plunged). And so for several years the audience cannot watch La Juive. But its scenes are indelibly burned into the eyes of the young Proust.

  The tale concerns the biological daughter of a powerful Christian in Rome. He believes this daughter is dead. Neapolitan troops set a fire. But a Jew rescues the child from the burning house. He calls her Rachel and raises her. Rachel is proud to be a Jew. In the finale of La Juive she goes to her death. She would rather be pushed into the inferno than betray the faith of the man she trusts and believes to be her father. “Let the skin peel from my bones.”

  The Advantage of a Relationship between Two Women (or between Loyal Men) as Opposed to the Caricature of Man and Woman. An Observation of Proust’s

  Léopold, the high tenor in La Juive, is one of the emperor’s generals. He is married to Princess Eudoxie. And so he is committing adultery when he disguises himself as the Jew Samuel to “work” in Rachel’s father’s workshop and seduce her. In the end he vanishes from the scene. A coward. The two rivals who love him — his wife and Rachel — join forces in solidarity to save the high tenor.

  The Opera with Two Roles for High Tenors. Explanation of the Fanaticism of Éléazar, Who Sacrifices Rachel, on the Basis of His High Vocal Range

  Éléazar, Rachel’s foster father, could easily save her in the fifth act. He need only tell Rachel’s biological father, the cardinal, that she is his daughter. There is nothing the cardinal, this SUPREME JUDGE OF THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE, longs for more than the return of the daughter he believes is lost forever.

 
; In Act 4 the cardinal meets Rachel, now condemned to death, and seems to sense that he should protect her. Just as children at a puppet show warn the hero when the crocodile is sneaking up on him, the spectators at the Grand Opéra want to call out to the characters to tell them the mistakes they’re making. Doom, a very thin garment. Salvation, nearly naked on the stage. In the following scene (the cardinal washes the Jew’s feet, humbling himself), Éléazar comes within an inch of telling the truth. Only the unwavering conviction of the Parisian audience — that the seriousness of an opera is proven by the lack of a solution in the fourth act — prevents the singers from embracing one another, holds them back from friendship and enlightenment.

  Another strict demand of the medium prohibits a duet between two basses (Éléazar and the cardinal). Thus Éléazar must be sung by a tenor. Singing in such a high range, the Jew can develop no sense of generosity. During the intermission Proust spent a long time discussing this external constraint, which proceeds from the assumption that in the opera house it is not production but consumption — i.e., the spectators’ passive enjoyment — that is the “overarching element”: the finding of happiness.

  The Heroine of the Third Volume of À la recherche du temps perdu

  After the death of her husband Georges Bizet, Geneviève Halévy married the banker Straus from the Rothschild clan. The Jewish beauty maintained a grand household in her domicile on the Champs-Élysées, built to resemble a noble palace. Her guest and childhood friend Marcel Proust made her into the Duchess of Guermantes (with all the attributes of old French nobility). And so the suffering inflicted upon the scapegoat Rachel in the opera La Juive (composed by Geneviève’s father) was redressed by an illustrious identity for the daughter. Poetry is the exercise of sovereignty.