Temple of the Scapegoat

by Alexander Kluge

  How forlorn is the packaged good that must be sent back, that must be destroyed. What is a population of cattle harboring one with mad cow’s disease compared to a market that must be cleared on Saturday at 4 p.m. Nothing on the shelves can hope to be sold on Monday morning.

  This thought moved Wolfgang Rihm as he spooned up noodles in the Restaurant Borchert in Berlin—that is to say, as he soothed the cells of his frustrated stomach walls after a rehearsal at the opera on Unter den Linden. These wolfish cells advised him to compose a lament for department store wares that have been declared unfit for consumption. He thought of the cook’s scene in Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. He’d memorized the exquisite melody, as was his wont. It created variations in his head all on its own. Every evening, this cook had exquisitely fed the suitors who were squandering Odysseus’s fortune and beleaguering Penelope. To repeat: on someone else’s dime. Now, after the murder of the suitors, after Ulysses—following an absence of 20 years—had once again claimed his Ithaca, he was being taken out of circulation—a discarded item, a cook who has taken leave of his things. He did not want to go on living like that. “The cook of the great Pompey looked like the great Pompey himself.” Pompey died by his own hand, the cook by his own decision. Monteverdi never wrote a graver lament based on a side plot than he did about the cook who wished to die. Never did Wolfgang Rihm compose subtler funeral music than that which he wrote for his side interest—a bottle labeled “Dyspio” (whatever it might contain) that he passed by without buying. As he strolled past in the Galeries Lafayette, it had sent out its signal. He hadn’t reacted fast enough. Maybe it was a perfume, maybe a beverage. In any event, a commodity. Now the informative lightning bolt—which never intended to end up in the head of a composer—lodged in Rihm’s brain and from there brought about a lament that reached top spot in the magazine Theater Today—directly across from the Stuttgart opera house’s top spot as the best opera house for three years running.

  Alcina’s Implacable Sadness

  Nature as such, uninhabited and devoid of human guests, is bleak. So, too, the island on which the sorceress Alcina lives—originally an inhospitable rocky isle, an “old, terrible sight,” as ugly as the rock to which the Valkyrie was banished.

  Yet Alcina, granddaughter of Circe, inventive sorceress, is able to transform human souls into animals, brooks, green meadows, and lovely fields. And so, the island appears “inhabited.” In her “underground sorcery chamber with various magical instruments and objects” she directs “pale shadows.” But what sorcery! The psychic forces killed in Affect Theater are the fuel of a fairy-tale illusion. People do not seek the truth, said Petrarch, they fabricate illusions. They live blissfully in cocoons and do not catch cold from circumstances that bode ill for them.

  The gods disappeared. The theater machines gathered dust. They could not hold out against sentiment. But now even sentiment is stripped out. The magical construction collapses, and the old witch Nature shows her rocky face once more, the power of water that washes everything away, the mad beauty of swamps and deserts.

  Ruggiero, a soldier. As soon as he emerges from the cocoon of his capacity to love, he will die; he bids farewell to the green meadows of illusion: “Verdi prati.” War is the agent that breaks the sorceress into pieces. She did not bewitch her lover, and when she loses him, it rips her apart. She sends beasts of prey after the unfaithful lover to tear him to shreds, but the beasts tear her to shreds, instead—as a sorceress, however, she won’t die from it. “You pale shadows, you have revealed yourselves to be deaf.” She throws away her magic wand.

  Ruggiero, hitherto a deserter, returns to his regiment. Confronted with such self-sacrifice, the military justice system can’t think of anything better to do than convict him of desertion and execute him.

  Recently, not far from the Brandenburg Gate, in a garden that once belonged to the Liebermann Palace, a MEMORIAL TO THE UNKNOWN DESERTER was erected. At the opening ceremony, “Ah, mio dolor” (from Act 2, scene 8 of Handel’s sorcery-opera Alcina) was played in its orchestral arrangement. The voice of Alcina was denoted by twelve first violins amplified with microphones. The memorial arrived more than a hundred years too late. In future wars, people won’t be able to even flee. “Conquered, disenchanted Alcina!”

  Del pallido Acheronte

  spirite abitatori

  e della notte ministri di vendetta

  cieche figlie crudeli,

  a me venite!

  (Act 2, scene 7)

  Lament for the Death of the Improbable

  The singer of the VALKYRIE from six weeks ago girds herself in a breastplate for the overture of Fidelio. A soul like a fist. Defying the myrmidons, she will rescue her companion, now placed in her care.

  In fact, her actions are naïve: she dresses up like a man but otherwise has no clear plan; she’s just looking for a chance to get in on the action. She is seeking a field of employment for the task of liberation. She deceives people who trust her, instrumentalizes the androgynous powers of attraction she now possesses through her clothing. With a fair amount of luck, at the decisive moment, she becomes a participant in a murder scene and therein finds her battleground.

  Her husband, Florestan, is being threatened by the unscrupulous prison warden, who’s holding a pistol to his temple; Leonore threatens the warden with her own weapon. A deadlock ensues, the execution falters. The prison staff, momentarily confused, acts collectively as a referee.

  Ah, if only such moments of equilibrium could last forever! But in the Stuttgart staging, the two fateful shots are fired at the same time.

  So only the idea of the good survives, the fame of the helpmeet who wanted to liberate her consort at any price—even at the price of her life and his. A lament for the POWER OF THE PROBABLE. Now the armored woman can only weep over her companion, set up the funeral pyre.

  Are we none the wiser? The music and the stage directions for the mourning of Florestan, and for such an ending—the key to any new beginning—are actually to be found in the finale of the fourteen-hour opera, Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, that played six weeks earlier. But that grandiose ending was sung by another singer of the Brünnhilde, alone on stage, without any décor or people around her. In this sense, we could say that in each case the torch of freedom is passed on and tossed forward in a kind of relay. What luck if, against all probability, the funeral pyre doesn’t catch fire and we manage to avoid a global conflagration—even if we didn’t manage to protect our best friend!

  The Resurrection of Musical Theater Out of the Spirit of the Sciences

  At the opening of the Duke of Ferrara’s collections, THEATRUM NATURAE ET ARTIS, an orchestra played. The plebeians gladly performed this service for the aristocrat in exchange for money, writes the critical spirit Dr. Schmiedhelm Weber, born in 1942, now in a holding pattern. The same singers sang who would, the following evening, be rehearsing their IL RITORNO D’ULISSE IN PATRIA. In the ensuing weeks and years, they could have continued to play in the duke’s collections, which displayed monsters, skeletons, wax reliefs of human innards, and painted anatomies, but they did not, and so science was uncoupled from music, technical wonders from musical accompaniment, music from living practice. We observe here, along with Marx, noted Dr. S. Weber, a wrong decision. But nothing in the world is preventing us from going back the same way and repeating this stage, minus the mistake!1 As such, history (as a cycle) is never completed. I received no applause, Weber writes, when I came to this conclusion in my lecture. I receive as little applause for my insights in my own former East Germany as I do in the former West Germany; not even in the adult education center of Tübingen did I get any response to my theses. My remarks, said an audience member, were as unscientific as they were unartistic. At the same time I know that history, and especially the history of music, is a system of tubes and caves in which one can move both forward and backward, an unfinished system of catacombs, like t
he burrows of beavers or marmots.

  Once, as I danced,

  I came to Jerusalem —

  In private, by the light of a meager candle, with curtained windows, the doctors open up the dead, penetrate with their scalpels into the INNERMOST MYSTERIES. These studies lack both a public and a song.2

  A group of astronomers, freezing in the clear winter night on their seats in a lonely tower. Galileo telescopes the miraculous timepiece that we planet-dwellers possess: the movements of the four large moons of Jupiter. But where are the choirs, the four orchestral voices for these moments of discovery? Meanwhile, in every planetarium (from 6 in the morning till 3 at night) we repeat, music-less, Galileo’s cold joy.

  Or the ravishing DUTCH OPTICS: “OPTICKS,” Newton’s publication is entitled. What does the draftsman see through the ground glass? Samples of his saliva, music-less, and within them tiny animals—monsters. He knows that such creatures destroy his teeth, daily he cleans his biting-tools with a cloth, makes an effort to keep them in good shape. Radical discoveries long for a collective will engendered by music.

  The human being befriending itself. Philanthropy, allocated to the products of science, befriending nature: how is that supposed to work (volumes 4, 5, and 6 of my commentaries discuss this, writes S. Weber, but the publisher Suhrkamp rejected them) without the participation of both hemispheres of the brain—one of which is inaccessible without the means of music? With this perspective (workforce and song arts of 350 years), it would not have been necessary to obliterate the German Democratic Republic through annexation. Indeed, the GDR wouldn’t even have come into being as an actually existing thing in the first place. Despite Hanns Eisler, from the very beginning it lacked one thing: music.

  I cannot understand how humanity can allow its most powerful force, that of the singing voice—which we call music—to be wasted on mediocre theater plays or religious prejudices (called “operas” or “oratorios”). Imagine if music had accompanied progress! Music and emancipation! Music and knowledge! Fascinated, “indeed, as if obsessed, the enemy soldiers crouched down and listened to the music broadcast by the loudspeakers. Not for that moment only did they forget the battle.” This occurred in the confusion of the combat around Sedan in 1940.

  Three years of waiting, then dropped. Landed in a dacha in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. My library, still unpacked, is sitting in a nearby barn. In Russia, my name would be known. In the world-republic, no one knows who I am.

  At least the books, unread by me, are protected from rain, snow, and theft. I worry that predatory thieves who have no use for the books and who are unaware of their worth will destroy them in a rage over the uselessness of their booty. I’ve affixed three padlocks to the barn.

  From my meager pay, which has already been cut many times, I save what I can for travel expenses. I attend international congresses. In my only decent suit. I deliver my lectures. Whatever my point of origin, it takes me twelve hours (with my bicycle and on foot) to get from Berlin’s main station back to my hideout.

  My research area: I am writing the 18-volume commentary to the preface to the Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (rough draft). This preface comprises seven printed pages. But what I’m after is what’s in the gaps. What differentiates Hercules from a joint stock company? This is still a crucial question. As long as Hercules puts his powers to the test, he incorporates globalization.

  Doesn’t your exhaustiveness go a bit too far, esteemed comrade Schmiedhelm, people ask me?

  It doesn’t go nearly far enough! I would like to explain this using a simple example: in 1632, things came within a hair’s breadth of turning out very differently. To repeat: the same orchestra played, and the same singers sang, for the opening of the collection of the ducal THEATRUM NATURAE ET ARTIS, who had earlier rehearsed an iteration of the myth of the return of Odysseus (with music). No one knows whether the myth is reporting something that really occurred. THEATRUM NATURAE ET ARTIS, however, exhibited actual unusual births (bona fide monsters), real inventions, and machines. At night, spectators paid an entry fee to watch corpses torn up, sewn back together, carried away: autopsies seeking the secrets of the body. Here, I would have suggested that they bring in soothsayers from antiquity, who would have handled the innards with more care, and more cheerfulness about the future. There were still some in Ferrara, 54th-generation soothsayers. And musical accompaniment would have set the human senses of both spectators and anatomists in motion.3

  The goal is to make the petrified objects dance

  to their own melody—

  The natural sciences as a consequence of social ferment, social ferment as a consequence of the art of song, the indomitable longing people feel to make their surroundings flow, only by means of music, but not by music alone, also with sentiment as it expresses itself in action, but the latter as scientific action—this is (and not only “would be”) the way of opera.

  And be it not yet embarked upon, it is still my purpose, at pathologists’, physicists’, and astronomers’ congresses, but also in talks before the directors’ conference of the German Theater and Orchestra Association, to urge that this project—begun one day in the year 1632—finally be completed. The history of humanity is not such that we can say: because something was so, so must it remain.

  * * *

  1 Karl Marx, Early Writings: “The way out of alienation is always the way into alienation.”

  2 The high ratings of the anatomy and death-cult shows recently added to the reality TV offerings by the station RTL 2, as verified by my colleague Dr. Ulrike Sprenger, reflect the greedy interest that audiences have contained within themselves for 400 years: without music, this interest remains coarse.

  3 Karl Marx: “In practice, human senses behave like theoreticians.” As, first, the labyrinthine ear.

  V “When We Were Still Reptiles, We Did Not Have Feelings”

  Small-Statured Woman in High-Heeled Shoes

  The opera singer rushes by. Tonight she will sing the role of Tosca. Because she is small and heavyset, she is wearing high-heeled shoes.

  Internally, unnoticed, she is wearing an even smaller feeling: YOU’RE JUST ABOUT TO FALL OVER.

  This feeling lies hidden beneath the passionate abandon, the murderous intent in the moment of hopelessness proper to the role of Tosca; and it is concealed by the feelings of Aida, which she sang last season. Still, the feeling possesses power, force, and ancestry.

  When we were still reptiles, we did not have feelings, we understood only action. Resting—waiting—attack or flight.

  Then came the Ice Ages. As it grew very cold on the blue planet, we often thought longingly of the primordial oceans, 98.6 degrees. We learned to have feelings, namely, to say: too hot, too cold.

  To distinguish between the two, and to long: those are the two things feelings can do. Everything else is a combination.

  My grandparents were simple farmers. Up to the birth of Christ, 64 billion ancestors. Each of these ancestors is related to a tree-climber to which all forebears can be traced back, and whose every feeling—falling asleep, tastes good, biting, oh dear, etc.—derives its FAMILY TREE from a single feeling-pair: hot/cold.

  As it grew colder, Adam’s rib was simply outsize longing.

  Ninety-eight-point-six degrees in the warm waters of the primordial seas. We couldn’t forget it, we remembered it in the cold, we kindled this little fire in our interiors. The fire’s antecedents are the oscillations in the colors of atoms. In this sense, music is older than feeling.1

  Is Revolution Founded on Work or Ideas?

  The Ghostliness of Revolutionary Processes

  A colleague from the multifarious consulting firms of Roland Berger, currently busy auditing the insolvent companies of a large media empire, occupies himself in his free time (which is scant) with topics that had been important to his life plans thirty years e
arlier. Politically speaking, he emerged from a group that called itself REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE, based in north Frankfurt. Edwin Fuhrmann’s nature, however, is so tenacious that in 2003 he was still keeping track of issues raised by REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE’s competing organizations; he was convinced of the collective responsibility (similar to the contingent liabilities of a general partnership according to §§128, 130 of the German Commercial Code) of all revolutionaries, regardless of which group they belong to, for the duration. One cannot, he felt, agitate for an idea and then let the inner passion to actually carry it out simply fade away.

  Fuhrmann’s question was as follows: was Mao Tse-tung really the monomaniacal tyrant he was portrayed to be in the memoirs of the victims of the Cultural Revolution? Was the Cultural Revolution—a failure by general consensus—an arbitrary campaign of violence? Will it recur? Can we learn anything from it? Fuhrmann found out that in the archives of the People’s Republic of China, all documents pertaining to the Cultural Revolution are kept classified.

  Now, the analytical methods used in company audits, as Fuhrmann knows them, have improved since 1989. Even vast processes like the Chinese Cultural Revolution can be described using auditing categories.

  In an interview with the Financial Times, Fuhrmann made the following remarks:

  FINANCIAL TIMES: Did the Cultural Revolution come from the periphery, from the center of China, or from below?

  FUHRMANN: It was the result of highly explosive “good will.”

  FINANCIAL TIMES: Occasioned by what?

  FUHRMANN: By the reform of Chinese opera and operetta (into the “political musical”). These cultural products built up a stronghold of idealism, which stirred up emotions.