A violent-peace: the IBA opens in Wilhelmsburg

How many officers would you deploy, if you were in charge of policing an event where between 300 and 1000 demonstrators were expected, who, according to the police's own statement, can be categorised as ''middle-class'' ⁱ, i.e. harmless ? One hundred, perhaps? - remember, you're putting in the officers in full riot gear, helmets, body armour, metre long truncheons. That must be enough, that would give you a ratio of one well-armed, potential combatant to, at the most, every lot of ten do-gooders. The head of the Hamburg police service, under the direction of Michael Neumann, Minister for Interior Affairs and Sport, decided to deploy six hundred and fifty police officers at the official opening of the IBA  – the city's proudest piece of gentrification – in Wilhelmsburg on Saturday evening. The presence of these six-and-a-half centurias on that one day has cost the city an estimated €100 000 ⁱⁱ. A spokeswoman for Hamburg police was unwilling to confirm this estimate, but also refused to present their version of the costs, even though the arithmetic involved is simple.

Hamburg-Klopstock calling Goethe! Come in Goethe!

“If the Duke continues to drink himself to the point of illness then he will succumb to that illness, and will not live long, instead of, as he claims, strengthening his body with the drink ... The Duchess may continue to suppress her current discomfort, due to her very manly way of thinking. But this discomfort will turn into sorrow. And will she be able to suppress that? Luise's [the Duchess's] sorrow! Goethe! -- ... ”

So wrote Hamburg poet Friedrich Klopstock to Goethe in Weimar in 1777. At that time, Klopstock was still seen as the fatherly head of all German language writers. Like Günter Grass today, he had many detractors who enjoyed the sport of mocking him, and yet nevertheless enjoyed a huge status. Goethe, 28 and already a famous writer, was making news with his rugby-player-after-five-pints sort of behaviour together with his patron & close friend the Duke of Weimar, Karl August. They slashed around themselves show-offishly on the market place with big whips, jumped on their horses, and rode through the villages playing sadistic practical jokes on the locals, knowing these people had no means of redress against such actions. Klopstock gets to hear of this in Hamburg and is incensed, it undermines his ideal of the poet as someone who rises on the sublime above all such iniquities. He also feels responsible, seeing Goethe as a promising but errant relative of the family of poets which he presides over. And so the letter continues:

“Goethe! -- no, do not drape yourself in that glory, you do not love her as I do .... Up to know the Germans have been right to complain about their rulers, because these rulers haven't wanted anything to do with you scholars (=writers). Your friendship with the Duke takes him straight away out of that category. But if you continue to dance with the Duke to this old tune, there's no limit to the excuses the other rulers would have to make in their defence, [for not being interested in writers], if it actually one day will have happened, that thing which I fear most?”

Klopstock asks Goethe to show the letter to the Duke too. Whether Goethe did this or not we don't know, but we do know that he only answered two months later, in a tone of clear refusal: “Do spare us such letters in the future”, adding casually that he'd have no time at all for himself if he responded to all such letters and warnings.

Klopstock didn't like this not very veiled insult at all: “And as you even threw my letter into that category of 'such letters' or 'such warnings' – you express yourself as strongly as that ­-- my letter, containing the proof of my gift of friendship, then I declare you not worthy of that gift I gave you.” ⁱ The break between the two of them was final.

Goethe treated many people badly; and his response to Klopstock shows him as a careerist, understanding art as a career-ladder and the necessity of shoving people off the top of that ladder, to make way for himself. Or, as Yeats puts it in his poem, The Fisherman: “The beating down of the wise / And great art beaten down.” If you translated Klopstock's name literally into English you would get Knock-stick. Knocking his stick at Goethe didn't help Klopstock.

For those of you out there who want to get more into the Klopstock feeling, come along to the annual Hamburg "Poetry Slam in a Church" event, to be staged  in what's known as the Klopstock-Kirche - the Christianskirche in Altona - where you can even see Klopstock's tomb. My Writer's Room colleague Hartmut Pospiech is hosting the evening (around the 3rd weekend in June.) My biggest question is whether Hartmut will allow sexually explicit or explicitly political poetry in the church - and how the vicar will respond. The fact that this is my biggest question seems proof of an infantile part of my mind, concerned with scandal & smut, a quality of mind that Goethe hung onto for a long long time, well into his late thirties.

i For the original German version of the quotes from the letters from Klopstock & Goethe, and for the historical background to the above post, please see: Friedenthal, Richard. Goethe. Sein Leben und seine Zeit. Piper, 1996, Munich. p.190 – 191.

Luscious faith, left-wing activism and one poet: Michael Buselmeier.

Dante’s German: The Catharsis (2)

by Michael Buselmeier.  
 

Pained-lust, chained burden, you say, you are the field

of God’s graveyard world; you are of life

in chewy circles of death. I’m the bread, the breath

the wine in chalice bright, the word of stone, 

tanned hide, the flag red and white,

the limes’ blossom in the park, the birches’ call,

the incense-smell, the talk of birds, the bells

so near in the wind, as I, half-blind with sleep,

threw open the shutters, and there the children knew

kneeling on the petals, O and A, A and O.    

Will we be the last, to feel God lead us

under the canopy of cloth, winding through the lanes?

to swing ourselves heavenwards, wreathed in jasmine,

singing songs that strawberry ice-cream’s spilt on? 

And at the rear the shimmering monstrance.

(In publishing this workshop-translation, I'm making use of the German "right of citation" or "Zitatrecht". All rights for the original German text, "Dante deutsch: Die Läutering (2)", remain, of course,  with Mr Buselmeier's publisher, Das Wunderhorn Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany. I, Henry Holland, reserve rights for that part of any future published translation of Mr Buselmeier's poem, which uses my text above.)

  

       Blogs aren't meant to be finished things. Why should they match the academic & aesthetic standards that you'd expect from a printed book on the same subject? As most bloggers aren't being paid, it would be foolhardy of them to invest too much time in their online writing. 

      That said, here's a snapshot of a poetry & a poet who needs to be talked about now, before there's time to finish & perfect, time to smooth him for a chapter in a book. The poet's Michael Buselmeier, the poetry book could be called Dante's German in a not-yet written English edition; the German title is Dante deutsch, and came out last year. The section of that poetry quoted & translated by me above is a depiction of the processions for the Feast of Corpus Christi, a religious event still celebrated with vigour in small towns & villages in Catholic southern Germany & in Austria. Carpets made from petals, painstakingly laid out to picture, for example, a smiling Mary embracing an angel, adorn the ground in front of houses & the sides of streets. The consecrated bread, the circular host, is carried in the "monstrance", something like a mini sedan-chair – covered in gold & jewels with sides open so the public can see in – & paraded through the towns.

     For those of you filled with ambivalence or even antipathy for all things Catholic, the fact that Buselmeier originally made a name for himself in the early 80s with a novel in which a left-wing protagonist passionately protects his threatened urban habitat, may add a twist of lemon to the story -- (The Fall of Heidelberg / Der Untergang von Heidelberg, 1981).** On first sight German Catholicism and the grassroots-left are two worlds which could not be further apart. But look again, and you will find attitudes & behaviours shared by the two groups. A commitment to the cause that goes miles beyond the bounds of reason. A belief that the end (the triumph of Catholic values or the triumph of left-wing goals) can justify the means. And a need to do the same thing again and again, the need for ritual. Parading the streets following a piece of chewy dry bread, transformed into the body of Christ. To be seen again this year on the 30th of May. Or the left marching on the 1st of May, same old slogans, same old beer & sausages; the more energetic among them staying up to nightfall of that day, when the ritual throwing of bottles at the riot police, the ritual retaliatory riot police charge, the ritual sofa burning on the streets of Hamburg & other larger German cities commences.

** I made extensive use of Michael Braun's article about Michael Buslelmeier, p. 18, issue 3, 2012, of the print edition of Volltext to write this blog post. 

More moustache-wax, sir! The Hamburg Players stage Arms and the Man.

     Go see this production if you like, enjoy the fin-de-siècle not-quite-decadent if you can, the officer with the handle-bar moustache greedily groping his fiancée’s servant — a mood of rich silliness only counteracted by Jonathan Greenman's portrayal of Bluntschli as an obnoxiously reasonable progressive thinker — but don't expect any new ideas from this staging of Shaw's clapped out, socialist-snobbish script. War's not glorious, sermons Shaw — hammering out his message as if afraid the thickies at the back won't get it — it's a bloody business where underlings take part in cavalry charges against walls of guns & other such PTSS inducing activities, for the simple reason that they're scared of disobeying their officers, because these officers possess a higher social status. And this — post the 1st and 2nd Gulf Wars, post eleven years of western troops in Afghanistan — is meant to be news? Hands up all those who've already seen or who intend to see this production, who have a romantic or glorified picture of war? Even the warmongers in Germany and abroad no longer sell their violence in places like Libya & Mali as romantic glory, but rather as sombre & technocratic endeavour, actually something only really the experts can understand, but still essential for reducing the terrorist threat (sic) on the streets of our European metropolises.

     There is occasional interesting detail about the world of the 1880s/90s. Greenman's Bluntschli tells Raina, played upper-middle flauntingly by Poppy Tirard, that the most common injury sustained in a cavalry charge are not bullet wounds but broken knees, as the riders, scared shitless, press their horses too close together in a reflex attempt to avoid what's going to hit them. Yet these curious little finds should not excuse the Hamburg Players' decision to work hard on a complacent play for a complacent audience.

      A disconnect, BBC Radio 3's word of the month, a monstrous series of disconnects, that's what's going on here, a disconnect between what the individual actors & directors in the team choose to present on stage & their real life experience, a disconnect between the Hamburg Players & their audience, a disconnect between what that audience thinks it wants to see in the theatre, & the daily life they go out into the morning after. It's obseqious to give your middle-class audience — the people in society with just enough education to be able to begin taking responsibility — another chance to see a play wearing the 'socially critical' badge. They can see it, then give themselves a good pat on the back. Didn't just sit on their arses watching Jungle Camp, no, dragged themselves out to watch something ... anti-war ... anti-authoritarian, even, well, or so it was, back in the 1890s. Before getting up the next day to lives in which they'll continue either not to vote at all, or vote for parties who've done nothing to stop the continued involvement of German troops & weaponry in Afghanistan. More to the point, some in the audience will get up the next day to go out to work for Airbus, or any one of Airbus's numerous satellite companies in the greater Hamburg region.

      As the epitome of Hamburg-disconnect regarding the question of arms and the man, and as one of the principal reasons why so many English native speakers from all over the globe come to Hamburg, the Airbus world is a subject I'd far rather see on a Hamburg Players' stage than this, Shaw's ignorant & racist fantasy about how Bulgarians, a people whose language he couldn't even speak, might relate to one another. Airbus Military is a business unit of Airbus, which produces five different types of military transport aircraft. None of these planes' final assembly takes place in Hamburg, and nevertheless Hamburg's 10 000 strong Airbus workforce play “a decisive role in the development & engineering of all Airbus aircraft.” ⁱ Is that ethically acceptable: to assist in the production of bizarrely expensive aeronautic long goods vehicles, ferrying soldiers, guns & even small fighter aircraft around the globe, so long as you don't make the bullets & bazookas yourselves? And what about the fact that Airbus is in the middle of an infinite fusion with EADS, the European Aeronautic Defence & Space Company, one of the world's biggest arms manufacturers, & a major backer of the fearless Eurofighter planes? Something for the Airbus dads — who wear their Airbus T-shirts to the artistic celebrations of the local Steiner-Waldorf school where my eldest daughter goes — to be proud or to be ashamed about?

      Hamburg is a city in which the disconnect about militarism is inside all of us. Why weren't the main actors & directors involved in the production interested in exploring rather than concealing that disconnect? I'm party to the disconnect myself: my main income comes from teaching English in the south of Hamburg, where a sizeable minority of the Airbus workforce live; the regularity & size of my income depends in part on a kickback from Airbus's mountainous profits, engineers & purchasing managers with an overly-comfortable salary in their pockets, wanting to buy the language-skills edge to the next promotion from yours truly. Were the Hamburg Players using a strategy similar to the one I use, when the conversation in my English classes is headed towards the north German arms industry? — (as a recent Hamburger Abendblatt article demonstrated, Airbus is just one of many players) — steer clear of the topic, because it's risky? i.e. stage an anti-war play, but not so that it can be seriously experienced as an anti-war play, as you don't really want to trouble your audience?

      Isn't it a far greater risk for Hamburg Players to cling so tightly to their middle-brow agenda, because by doing so they permanently alienate younger generations of theatre goers in Hamburg, for whom competent delivery in period costumes just isn't where it's at? Why don't they commission new work from English native speakers living in Hamburg who, for a minimal fee of something like € 100 - 150 would feel privileged to bring a new piece of art onto the stage? I'm luckily not in a position to be able to write such work myself, but know of half-a-dozen such writers with a track record of print publication who'd jump at the chance of having a proper stage for their ideas. Finally, what's the story with the younger members of the cast, Eddie Gray, Tamaryn Sutherland & Poppy Tirard, none of whom look a day over 26: why do they want to put all that effort & the acting skills they unequivocably have into such an unambitious project? Is it just for that warm feeling you get from sitting on one of the higher seats in an ex-pats' club, or have they at least worked on their own personal cultural-conservative philsophies to guide such actions? And there I am, the audience member, “getting angry, getting angry, with so many questions unanswered.” (Norman MacCaig) 

i Quote from Airbus's own website.

Graphic Novels! evening, this Sat. 9th Feb, Projektor, Hamburg.

Filmmaker, graphic novelist & storyteller Bernard Caleo

This Saturday, 9th Feb, at 8 pm, is your chance to experience an evening devoted to graphic novels, at a film & discussion evening I'm hosting. The venue? - The Projektor, Sternstr. 4, on the first floor, directly above Cohen + Dobernigg book shop. We'll be showing the documentary film "Graphic Novels! Melbourne!" on a big screen, but before that there's a panel discussion with the filmmakers Bernard Caleo & Dan Hayward, & with satirist, children's book writer / illustrator & poet, Andreas Greve. Entrance for whole evening - discussion + film - costs € 10. Hope to see you there!