Temple of the Scapegoat

by Alexander Kluge

  The Iron Ring that Conquered the Cliff

  When Schlingensief realized his life span was about to drastically shorten, he focused his poetic eye on REDEMPTION. Twice he found a particular way of expressing it. At the end of his Parsifal at Bayreuth—at that time, he didn’t yet know he had cancer—a projection is seen (after the disintegration of his “resurrection rabbit,” Wiedergeburtshase): a gate leading to an upper heaven from the film Star Wars. The image ultimately takes over the entire stage, but remains blurry.

  The second version of his parting statement was more subtle. In the final act of his Bavarian State Opera version of MEA CULPA, he planned for Isolde’s “Liebestod” to be sung. For the heroine, he cast a singer of advanced age. Her vocal cords were worn out, and in this state her throat made the “Liebestod” a devastating experience. Radio stations and media companies refused to broadcast the recording due to its poor quality, failing to recognize the irrefutable beauty of the scene. In her singing, something of the prospect of “love” remained. Which is not unlike how an eleventh-century shepherdess’s capacity for devotion helped a young knight to flee. The shepherdess sealed her bond with her beloved by making him a present of a cheap iron ring. After the knight was taken prisoner by his fiercest rival and incarcerated in a castle high on a cliff, he used the ring to grind a hole in the sandstone—with the image of the maiden so firmly impressed in his mind, the courage and patience for such tedious toil never failed him. When he was finally free, the knight arrived at a cliff overlooking an abyss, which set an objective limit to his flight. That the shepherdess’s beloved could not be saved saddened the audience at Schlingensief’s revue. To console them, the director, already goaded onward by cancer and drawing on his last theatrical reserves, sent in the almost voiceless singer. She hit every note and, through the force of Wagnerian “phantasmagoria in notes,” made the audience forget the unhappy story of the shepherdess and her unrescuable knight—the spectators were too focused on the question of whether or not the singer would hold out (she did), and on the fact that even the ruins of a Wagnerian construction could still massage the ear with curious sincerity.

  Reality Challenges Theater for Top Billing

  Two suicides of party officials. Things are getting serious. Couples who have been together for twenty years separate. Although the district administration in Magdeburg is still officially “guiding” us, the regime is collapsing. The clergy and their sons have our city firmly in hand.

  The people (were the city larger, one could say “the masses”) go out in the evenings not to our “People’s Theater,” but to Saint Martin’s Church. Our city has more than its share of churches, and for years, they have been in standby mode. But now, since the summer, the municipal church has been functioning as a gathering place; it has become the unofficial city center. Spies for the Ministry of State Security hardly dare show up anymore at these town meetings.

  We in the People’s Theater are having a hard time of it. The Magdeburg administrators have stopped depositing the money into the accounts our salaries are paid from. Four premieres are scheduled for December 1989. We don’t expect much of an audience. I’ve just come from the artistic director; he’s worried about the future of the 252 company employees. We are a three-pronged theater—opera, plays, ballet—an ornament of the Workers’ and Farmers’ Republic, quite luxurious for our small city.

  We belong to the “social superstructure,” which, as everyone knows, does not revolutionize as quickly as the base. The program launching the winter season was planned a year and a half ago, and signed off on by authorities who no longer answer our calls. It’s hard to get our people to concentrate on the final rehearsals, which are necessary for each of the premieres—even if only a fifth of the seats in the large theater will be filled. They hang around with the others at the rallies, hold discussions. No one is rehearsing. I’m responsible for public relations at the theater, and I’ve debated suggestions for alternatives with the director: a surprise late addition in lieu of one of the planned premieres.

  FREEDOM OPERA IN THREE ACTS. First act: Six clerics nail theses to the church door of our city, to music from NABUCCO by Verdi. Second act: Magdeburg forbids the production of the play. No one obeys. At the end of this act, the entire ensemble appears as the chorus, including accounting, canteen staff, cleaning crew, backstage, lighting. Third act: three box offices on the stage, lines of patrons. Finale with ballet interlude. We don’t have a final draft of the ending yet. Yesterday we submitted the idea to the city council, still composed of old party officials. They listened. Those old salts have been through a lot. They responded: the people won’t want freedom as an opera, but as reality. Our artistic director also finds the suggestion too flamboyant. We would be better off, he says, putting our efforts into the three planned premieres. The singers should sing “as well as they can.” A project for the coming year is developed: the quick & fresh-new-ideas concept. Plays to be worked out collectively: Lard on Ration Cards (with a contemporary twist) and Stories of Good-for-Something (with ironic accent) will add pep, says the artistic director. I’m responsible for public relations, and I don’t believe they will.

  All of this is displaced by a hustle to get at least the planned projects for December taken care of.

  Evita, a Musical

  Czar and Carpenter

  The Gypsy Baron

  Christmas Tales

  At the time, the planning of the program had represented a compromise between the demands of the headquarters in Berlin and Magdeburg on the one hand, and our theater directors on the other. There had to be something emotionally consoling (the musical), something that humorously incorporated our brothers in the east (Czar Peter the Great in Lortzing’s opera), as well as something we’d had down for 40 years and that our ensemble was accustomed to (the work by Johann Strauss, which could almost be described as an opera, if one were to stage it seriously). Our orchestra and singers could also have put on LA FORZA DEL DESTINO, from the repertory three years ago. That play would have better suited the SERIOUSNESS AND SPIRITUAL REVIVAL with which the pastors were now dragging the populace along behind them. Too little, too late.

  Nevertheless, the ballet interlude in the second act of THE GYPSY BARON needs to be rehearsed. I have to jump in. In summer the choreographer had given us the slip by emigrating to the West through Hungary; she left behind a heap of slackers for a dance collective. The dancers with costumes from CARMEN don’t yet form a proper group. They are new and have to practice.

  I’m ashamed that we’re not in tune with the times. How can our dance troupe find its place in the “hurtling movement of our days”? How do we “horn in”? Should we move to Saint Martin’s Church with those parts of the ballet interlude that are more or less rehearsed (I suggest this), and perform it as an interpolation into the event taking place there, a discussion of the future of the Old Town? Our house dramaturge advises against it. The public mood is heating up. People hang on the lips of the preachers as though Luther’s purge of Germany were at hand. You can’t have twelve scantily clad ballerinas showing up and offering a “good vibe.”

  Now, amid all the turmoil, we need to show our practical side. Our lighting staff could install electrical wiring in the salvageable buildings of the Old Town (which have been rotting away for years). Our bookkeepers could help out in City Hall. An auction of costumes and props at the fish market. The dramaturgy department is prepared to offer life coaching and matchmaking (“West-marriages”). As soon as we knew the wall would come down, we saw before us a theatrical no-man’s-land all the way to Braunschweig. “We can perform to our hearts’ content,” said the director, “as long as we keep the door to the future open.” Time gets compressed. A day feels as long as a year.

  Today, twenty-five years later, I would know what to do. I just saw Peter Konwitschny’s stage adaptation of Bach’s cantata 102, “Herr, deine Augen sehen nach dem Glauben!” at the Theater Chur. Konwitschn
y takes the texts of the cantata literally. A solitary believer sits in an interrogation cell and in his last hour must make a conscientious reckoning of his life; we hear extremist demands being made of him. Interrogation experts as we know them from the Ministry for State Security play the extremists. We could have cast our Florestan from FIDELIO as the believer. It would have made an indelible impression. We could have run this in all five major churches, every weekday, as the People’s Theater’s contribution. “Theater goes beyond reality.”

  What we didn’t think about in all the tumult was that we had LOVE AND INTRIGUE up our sleeve. The play had been part of our repertory for 40 years. We could have borrowed selections from the piano reduction of Verdi’s LUISA MILLER as musical accompaniment. I would have styled Ferdinand as a Western lawyer with experience in rescuing Eastern firms. Luise, a fifteen-year-old local girl, falls in love with the savior! I go back and forth as to whether we would have had to give the thing a tragic ending. Reality is one thing, the stage is another. In this case, since the times were all about “flourishing landscapes,” theater might actually have been more real than REALITY, which had never experienced such a dazzling breakthrough in our city as it did in December 1989—but which, just three years later, had already deflated. With the delay inherent in the “cultural superstructure,” we could have made something beautiful out of it on the stage. Instead of the socialist propaganda evening we had in repertory, “The Dignity of Humanity Is in Your Hands” (Schiller, sparsely attended)—LOVE AND INTRIGUE, the new version (Schiller, full house). It would have been perfect, had it occurred to us in time.

  Sunday August 4, 2013, Elmau

  A conductor is here. He is carrying a child, roughly a year old, on his arm. His second wife is an actress who works at the Burgtheater in Vienna. I made a film about this conductor almost twenty years ago when he performed Gluck’s ALCESTE at the Berlin State Opera. His wife wants to see what he looked like in so much younger a state. I have to get a DVD.

  Alceste, an opera of surging emotions. It deals with a homecomer’s fate. The King of Thebes, Admetus, has been fatally injured in war. He will only survive, the gods say, if someone else sacrifices themselves for him. Only his wife Alceste, who loves him, is prepared to do so. Admetus later accuses his wife of high-handedness; she cannot enter the kingdom of the dead without her husband’s consent (states an earthly law). As they love each other, they both choose death.

  Is there a comparable level of emotionality about any act of love from the end of the Second World War? Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s music contains passages that point back to the war’s end in 1945. One can be sure that there were examples of self-sacrifices in the reality of April 30, 1945: a Jewish secret agent goes far behind German lines to find his siblings, who had been sent on a death march from a concentration camp. He dies. A newlywed woman takes horses from her parents’ country estate to her husband’s trapped garrison so that they can escape together.

  In addition to the stories in which one person sacrifices themselves for another, there is also the emotion of LIBERATION: those condemned to death, imprisoned or worn down suddenly find themselves liberated, or liberate themselves. That has not been set to music. But it forms a part of that day. The “dark God of pain” still reigns. So I imagine some funeral music.

  Night of Decisions

  In honor of the German Federal Chancellor Schmidt, an after-dinner performance of an operetta by Sullivan in the rose garden of the White House had been prepared. Sitting in armchairs that had been moved to the garden, the guests and their wives, the President, a few senators, and some foundation presidents sat facing the small orchestra and the singers. The space was tight. Thanks to the midsummer twilight, the light faded very slowly. Many of the event’s visitors wished there could be a clear decision between the remaining sunlight and electric light.

  Outside of this tiny venue where the ruling circle was spending the evening, dramatic events were taking place at the same time.

  In New York there was an electricity blackout. In the skyscrapers the lights went out by the millions. People were trapped in elevators for hours. The Governor of New York declared a state of emergency. For a while it was unclear whether the accident had been caused by an attack or a failure of long-distance lines that had escalated into a disaster. News of this was brought by messengers across the narrow strip of turf between the orchestra and the first row of seats to the assistant sitting on the President’s right, then by mouth to the latter’s ear.

  Only a few moments later, before the singers had launched into what was meant to be a humorous potpourri, the President’s security advisor entered the scene with inappropriate haste, knelt down at Jimmy Carter’s feet and conferred with him in this posture (Brzezinski is a tall man) about a dangerous state of affairs (the other guests only learned the reason for the conversation and its content later on): there had been an exchange of fire with a U.S. warship in the sea off North Korea; a Soviet ship had been involved. The question was whether this constituted a provocation that required a military response. In terms of possibly triggering a war, Zbigniew Brzezinski told the President, it was just as dangerous to react to fire from an insufficiently identified side as it was to show weakness and cause an escalation for that precise reason. So the result was almost the same whatever one decided, the President replied, as it was risky either way. Impossible, the Federal Chancellor rudely interjected after listening to them; one option was never as dangerous as the other, there was always a third way. A response was needed quickly, the security advisor exclaimed; every further word or argument was wasting time. Would it be better to make the wrong decision than to waste time? the President asked reluctantly.

  The President, who was not interested in the music, still pretended in front of the guests that he was listening. In the present situation, he was unable to contribute anything in response to the urgent questions that were conveyed to him. The operetta by Sullivan from 1929, at any rate, did not contain any clues to solving political problems. For a moment, Carter weighed whether he should get up from his chair and summon his staff to the rooms of the White House. Interrupting the program would have been a dramatic step, itself a preliminary decision that a decision by the U.S. President was imminent. Now three military men also brought the news that U.S. citizens in Iran had been taken into custody in addition to the embassy staff who were under siege by the country’s authorities. At that moment, there was daylight on the other side of the planet. Events were rushing along while America lay down to sleep.

  Is there anything bothering you, Mister President? Federal Chancellor Schmidt politely asked. Nothing worth mentioning, the President replied. But the troublemaker Brzezinski, completely in his conspiratorial element, was still hovering close to the President’s ear and speaking insistently to him. For the guests, the situation was unclear. Sullivan’s operetta dealt with a billionaire’s daughter who could not bring herself to divorce a boy in Brooklyn whom a schemer had accused of being UNFAITHFUL to her. It was unclear, as the singer explained, whether he loved another or only her — having repeatedly promised her the latter. This remained the problem until the end of the performance.

  Lament of the Goods Left on the Shelf

  A purchase transaction lasts 30 seconds. On average, the consumer makes a decision within seven seconds. Two-thirds of decisions are made in the supermarket itself. These are facts from market research.

  Hunter societies developed their intelligence on game trails. In the marketing mix, packaging is the last bridge to the customer. Within the final seven seconds—which decide the fate of the item—the packaging must take its effect, without upsetting the consumer’s preparatory measures of the previous 30 seconds and the approximately ten minutes comprising arrival and hesitating movements through the store. An acutely active spearhead must be linked with a plump softness or bluntness. The desire for the single commodity must not destroy the mood and suggestiveness of all of the commod
ities.

  0.0005% of poets and thinkers on the globe are informal collaborators who work on the marketing mix. The distribution of maximized imaginative power on the planet is a matter of the organizational ability of 0.01% of organizers. These findings were made by Martians.

  In the supermarket itself, expired products are nudged to the front, fresh products to the back. Each item must have its chance—even if, thanks to its expiration date, it is mortal.

  This battle for the customer’s seven seconds of attention is just as wide as it is deep. It occurs on a daily basis.

  Ennio Morricone composed a requiem for failed commodities. Impulse buys require an agitator. The power of the brand name mustn’t be upstaged by the special signaling of the packaging.