Temple of the Scapegoat

by Alexander Kluge

  Rigoletto, the Gnome

  Disarmament in war and in the opera;

  the latter is more difficult.

  F. Nietzsche, “The Dawn”

  No doubt the dwarf was more hideous than his descriptions. What was so horrifying was not his small stature and his hump, it was that his skin was nearly transparent, and so delicate that it tore like paper. He suffered from abscesses, swathed all his infirmities in cloth. Xaver Holtzmann wrote: I am trying to dedramatize the story.

  1st Possibility: no Gilda

  He had acquired his beautiful wife — whom he lost after a year of secret wedlock when she died giving birth to Gilda — because there was no one else to care for her.3 The dwarf purchased her in a suburb of Ferrara, just like buying a puppy from a circus. He wouldn’t have been able to hold on to her. She behaved as though she were his nurse. He wouldn’t stand for it. He tested her. To prove whether she was attached to him for his own sake. All these tests were failures.

  She would have been his alone if he’d given her time to prepare for this role. The undramatic variant would have been for the child to die at birth along with her. No Gilda would have been born. The only reason being the filth on the midwife’s fingers. The toxins lodged stubbornly under the nails.

  2nd Possibility: Gilda as an old woman taking care of her father.

  The daughter growing up after her mother’s tragic death, Gilda: straight-statured normality, an outstanding sight, an enchanting thing. This seduced the duke. His lust helped her realize that she had to leave her father, or she’d end up as an unhappy old maid at sixty. Rigoletto, her father, would never have let her “stray from him” with a husband. That would have belied all the gestures of affection the girl had lavished on the gnome from earliest childhood. On the other hand, the wise mind trapped in the jester’s contorted body couldn’t have stood to watch her turning old-maidish, exhausting herself in caring for him. And so he would have pried, made matches for her, then sought the sign that she belonged to HIM ALONE. He got no wind of the affair with the duke. And so the days pass.

  3rd Possibility: Rigoletto does not incur Monterone’s curse in the first place.

  Now we must assume, to de-dramatize the story still further, that when Count Monterone — once before condemned to death as a rebel and pardoned — forced his way into the rooms of the duke, accused him of having dishonored his daughter, and was condemned to death a second time for insulting the sovereign, Rigoletto rescued him with a series of jests. And so Rigoletto escaped the curse of Count Monterone. Rigoletto made sure the rebel would learn that he owed his life to him. In his misfortune, which had not, however, ended his life, the man was grateful to Rigoletto, but after a while forgot him entirely.

  4th Possibility: Rigoletto and Gilda escape to Pisa. At his daughter’s request, Rigoletto forgoes his revenge.

  Now Rigoletto and Gilda would be emigrés in Pisa, refugees, an unlikely couple in the eyes of their neighbors: an affectionate old man and a young woman expecting a child in January. They registered as a married couple. They had no identifying documents. Third-party information led to accusations of an incestuous relationship. Rigoletto could not claim to be sterile, with his daughter there as living proof of his earlier virility. He was thrown into a dungeon and later burned at the stake. The comely child was regarded as a witch. The duke was informed, but did not insist that his illegitimate child be handed over to him. He had lost interest in his experiment. After four years locked in a dungeon, Gilda joined her father in death, undramatically, killed by the magistrate’s notions of order and the loquacity of the neighbors.

  Xaver Holtzmann’s Project:

  “Imaginary Opera Guide”

  The editor of the Berlin edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung possessed more curiosity than one generally expects at big-name newspapers. One of his discoveries was the little-known Xaver Holtzmann, all 600 copies of whose book IMAGINARY OPERA GUIDE had sold out.

  — We know what an opera guide is, but what do you mean by “imaginary”?

  — I’m asking: What are the operas that don’t exist? The twentieth century offers us operatic themes, just as every other century provides material worthy of serious treatment, i.e., an opera, a “work,” but operas exist for certain themes and not for other ones. That was what interested me. On that basis I’m developing a proposition or an algorithm. If opera history contains around eighty thousand operas, why shouldn’t we have the chance to create about seven hundred missing operas that would be needed to convey the substance of our contemporary experience?

  — So that’s the reason for your projects?

  — Exactly. I propose projects because practical projects are the only way to fight back against silence.

  — And for the Tosca theme you’ve demanded eighty-seven operas?

  — With good reason. At this time there are 88,400 police chiefs in the world. AS TIME GOES BY there will be many more. If you go back in history you find a wealth of different police species. For every single one the tragedy of Tosca must be treated differently. My book is a map that composers and librettists should use to orient themselves.

  — “Should” or “are able to”?

  — Ability is what everything depends on.

  Disarmament of Tragic Action

  — So disarmament is one of your favorite words?

  — It has to do with tragic action.

  — What is tragic?

  — For Aristotle, the highest form of tragic action is: RECOGNITION at the last moment. Thirsting for revenge, the woman is about to murder the offender — when she recognizes her own son. For the Athenians, this recognition has a stronger appeal than the depiction of depressing fates. Salvation at an impossible moment — that’s poignant.

  — But you can’t name many operas that tell that story.

  — That’s what I call the opera’s “speculative bubble quality.” For 150 years, operas outdo each other with ghastlier and ghastlier endings, more reasons for pity and fear. In my view, that has caused them to lose popularity.

  — Not under Hitler.

  — No. Ninety-nine percent approval ratings among Volksempfänger listeners. But that’s the wrong project to pursue. What we need to look for is a HAPPY ENDING.

  Despite the excessive liberties enjoyed by the Berlin section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the editor was only allowed to print an abridged version. Holtzmann’s aesthetic ideals (though he would have spoken in terms of research findings rather than aesthetics) seemed unlikely to appeal to the target audience.

  The Theatrical Demolition Expert

  Expérimenter des variations sans cesse renouvelées de l’action d’opéra jusqu’à ce que des issues se dégagent du labyrinthe de la répétition tragique: événements tragique à issue heureuse, comme l’Odyssée des produit devant nous.4

  For reasons comprehensible only within the French cultural scene, a forgotten East German director had been asked to stage a production of SALOME in a basement room. Sponsorship money was available. Perhaps he’d been asked solely because he’d taken a French course and was capable of expressing himself in this foreign country. But the suddenness with which he was summoned from his dacha north of Potsdam failed to humble him.

  This is my view of the material, he said: SALOME isn’t the least bit in love with Jokanaan (the fanatic John the Baptist), and we don’t end up with the decadent situation in which she orders the execution of the man she loves in order to flaunt his severed head. The situation is more serious. This zealot will overthrow the royal house, and worse, seek to kill her, the princess SALOME. She sees this with the political instinct of all her forebears. She takes charge of events herself (in place of her father, who’s hobbled by Roman law, and the other equally stymied Tetrarchs) by slaying the serpent. I’ll have her appear, said the East German director, in the garb of St. George and escorted by lictors.5 SALOME takes the
ax from the hand of an aide and strikes the fettered fanatic’s head from his shoulders. This is the MOMENT THAT ENDS THE DISCUSSION.

  During rehearsals, it soon grew clear that this would be difficult to pull off using the existing text of the Oscar Wilde play (even when drawing on the versions by Maeterlinck and Hugo von Hofmannsthal). The actors were growing indignant at the highhanded director who took away speech after speech until there was hardly anything left to play. At night he tried to write replacement dialogue, and an artist friend of his translated it into French slang. Soon, however, not just dialogue was lacking, but scenes.

  The troupe was fundamentally game. Rainald — the East German director — was persuasive when criticizing all the decadent things that had been played far too often and could be left out; he seemed at a loss when it came to developing substitute material, or thinking up surprising and convincing innovations. Was he even interested in SALOME and the ancient world? Was he interested in women’s fates or only in executions? By this time the decapitation scene had been thoroughly rehearsed.

  The upshot was as follows:

  In twelve reiterations, SALOME and the lictors lent to her by the Roman praetor lop off the head of the defenseless Jokanaan. However, each of these scenes differs in minute details. In night shifts, a music loop was developed from leftover electronic sounds by Pierre Boulez stored in the Centre Pompidou archive, and was used as background music. These loops were interspersed with an aria sung by Adelina Patti, prima voce, from the 1905 version of Salome.

  This “plot” (a sequence of differentiations) is interrupted by Jokanaan’s (mute) tirades, each of which leads to his execution by SALOME. Then he is thrown (mutely) screaming into a well. Later the tetrarch’s palace is set on fire. In the background of these repeated scenes, but still inside the basement room (the theater’s erstwhile coal cellar, fairly spacious, with a ceiling about fifteen feet high), a documentary film is shown on a luminous screen, consisting mainly of images from the Russian Revolution of 1905; all the scenes are reenactments. It’s the music, Rainald claims, that holds all the production’s divergent elements together.

  The theater basement was an uncomfortable place to sit. The theater was popular, though, because it always came up with surprises, ways to outwit the spoiled Parisian audience, and it was the absentees, those who’d missed the play, who gave the theater their particular support and insisted on becoming sponsors. The critic from Le Monde headlined his article SALOME AS JEANNE D’ARC, JOKANAAN AS RIENZI.

  Here (“at last”) a CLEAR CONCEPT OF THE ENEMY was shown on stage, enmity on mutual terms. Either — claimed the now-celebrated East German director — you have the plot that’s decided from the outset, that eliminates the onstage enemy unmourned and thus sets forth the “event,” or you have dialogue. But under my direction dialogue will dismantle the tragedy until no drama is left. What makes me so irresistible, he said, is that I am a broker of peace. Now Rainald was parading pieces in which he took the wrecking ball to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and his Lear (“Homecoming of a King”), as well as a prose version of Parsifal which ends — shortly after the first dialogues erupt — with the revolt of the knights and Parsifal’s death. Rainald retained large quantities of Wagner music as opposed to the text and the onstage action.

  The successful director, now a Parisian star, had no desire to return to Eastern Germany following reunification.

  A Society Does Itself Honor When Small Towns Put on Operas

  The on-call theater doctor sits in Seat 7, Row 3. For plays he usually sends a stand-in. At operas he presides himself. Pharmacist Buhmann, prosecutor Genest, landowner Dr. Wischhuren, Lieutenant-Colonel Welp and twelve of his officers (all dead just two years later), the mayor — a society does itself honor when small towns put on operas.

  Citizens aren’t asking for amusement here. They’re collectively exposing themselves to emotional upheaval. Under these musical conditions, they’d be capable of letting themselves in for things still more serious. But there is no negotiating. No one may disrupt the performance with interjections. But in an emergency the doctor can be summoned. That’s why he sits in Seat 7 in Row 3, where he can easily be found.

  Six years later the theater, a Tudor-style building, has burned down. The performances are held in the auditorium of Heine’s Sausage Factory. The last vestige of “society” (the greater part has fled to West Germany) is watching the premiere of FIDELIO. The cast and orchestra have been borrowed from Magdeburg. At this time all Halberstadt can offer is Countess Maritza. In Seat 7, Row 3 sits the doctor. Functionaries, representatives of the Soviet occupying forces, reluctant delegates from factories, hardly any patrons from earlier days. The opera is preceded by opening speeches. The performance seems endless. A single intermission permitting conversation. During the LEONORE OVERTURE No. 3, traditionally played before the final act, the doctor is summoned. A messenger whispers from the aisle. The doctor squeezes past six seats to get out. A marginal event, a bit of reality encroaching on the performance, animating the auditorium.

  Arriving at the scene of the emergency, the doctor sees a priest covering up mirrors, preparing the final sacraments. A breech birth that led to hemorrhage. The guilty midwife has already absconded. The woman should have been taken to the district hospital hours ago. The doctor turns the child around, works the delicate shoulders out from the blood. A tough piece of life. A slender chance remains for the woman as well. The doctor chides the priest. What’s he trying to do here? Throw in the towel already? It’s impossible to view this pessimist from a different discipline as a colleague.

  Within minutes the ambulance has been summoned. A vehicle fueled by coal gas. The doctor accompanies the mother and the bundled-up newborn to the district hospital. The chief physician has been alerted. Snatched from death’s clutches, the woman is delivered to his care unscathed, along with her agitated husband. Before the final chorus the doctor makes his way to his seat, past those six operagoers, members of the newly-founded Federation of German Trade Unions, who rise respectfully to their feet. He keeps fidgeting after all the hurry, blood on his shirt, on the back of his pants, he hasn’t quite taken his seat when the doors of the prison open, the chorus floods in from both sides. The auditorium has almost weathered the evening’s travails. A feeling of liberation spreads, matching the elaborate finale. The artists from Magdeburg have to head back to the buses that brought them from their city. They can take a brief nap on the road.

  Walter Benjamin Comes to Halberstadt

  Walter Benjamin came to Halberstadt. The Frankfurt-Berlin express had an accident in Aschersleben. The locomotive could be moved neither forward nor backward, thwarting all attempts to employ a substitute means of traction for the legend’s train. A nervous Walter Benjamin. He mistrusted the town of Aschersleben.6 And felt the efforts of the railroad workers and the train crew were hopeless. A passenger train waiting on the neighboring track took him to Halberstadt’s main station as dusk fell. He took a room at the hotel “Prinz Eugen” on Breiter Weg. That evening he visited the Municipal Theater. Opera was foreign to him. He saw a performance of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.

  At that moment in December 1931, Walter Benjamin, born in 1892, was only about 1,056 yards away from my parents’ home, where I was born two months later.

  Flowers in the conservatory, marking the birth of a Sunday’s child.

  Benjamin sat in the orchestra just twelve yards away from my parents. They sat in Row 2, he sat in Row 14. My parents, who had seen the production twice before, left the theater in the intermission to meet friends at the “Saure Schnauze” pub. The possibility of conversation between Walter Benjamin and my parents can be ruled out.

  Benjamin was puzzled by the plot of this musical drama. Here a young Japanese woman was clearly seeking an “escape route” from the dependencies of a rigidly hierarchical semi-colonial society on 572 islands, making a life-or-death attempt to enter the “free world of the U.S.A
.” It was all about converting “devotion” and the propensity toward hope into the currency of “western traditions.” She pays for her emancipation attempt with her life. In this production, by a Berlin director, Cho-Cho-san (known as Butterfly) kills the son she has borne to her lover, a U.S. navy officer. Having cut off all contact with her, he now returns with his wife to visit his former beloved. She wanted the traitor to realize that she still had some power.

  Then she killed herself.

  This dramaturgic intensification struck Benjamin as “illogical.” Here, rather than two individual people colliding and bringing each other misfortune, two systems of a high degree of ABSTRACTION faced off; Madame Butterfly and the U.S. navy lieutenant were merely tools of these forces.

  — Since when are lovers logical?

  — They aren’t. But a musical drama could be: rather than love, it offers information.

  — Having her kill the pledge of love, the child, gives the whole thing a drastic turn.

  — Perhaps this makes Butterfly less sympathetic, less pitiable, but she gains more “emotional resonance.” It becomes clear that she isn’t powerless against fate.

  After the performance Walter Benjamin made his way through the stage entrance to the artists’ dressing rooms and tracked down the director. They went to the very same pub on the Martiniplan where my parents were sitting with their friends — not many pubs in town were still open after the opera let out.

  My father and Walter Benjamin, born in the same year — what would they have discussed if (for instance in the pissoir) they had spoken to each other, flouting the social conventions whereby a big-city revolutionary intellectual and a small-town conservative doctor could barely communicate with each other? If they had happened to mention Madame Butterfly within the first twenty seconds, some kind of understanding, an acquaintanceship, might have transcended the boundaries of otherness. Both felt that the Berlin director’s embellishment, the killing of the child, constituted an exaggeration: Cho-Cho-san was acting in self-defense. She was no longer “prepared to act,” she was “at the end of all acts.”