Mnemosyne

Horst Janssen: Hölderlin at 17 and 72.

Inspired by the Werner Herzog cave movie described in a recent post, and by my re-reading of Gustaf Sobin's marvelous Luminous Debris and my current study of the 9th-10th Carolingian annales histories, I have been contemplating the role played by imagination in the writing of history. It seems to have peaked at the very outset with Herodotus, the mother of historians, and then run slowly downhill before almost disappearing  in the course of the 18th century, only to be revived in recent decades in the wake of postmodernist influences.

Such an inquiry concerns the application of literary values to the historiographic process, but since it gets quite complicated trying to explain what "literature" really means—cf for example Derek Attridge: The Singularity of Literature (2004) —I suggest instead a deficit in creative imagination: why don't we require historians to take courses in writing poetry as an antidote to the hamster-driven, data-parading assaults upon factuality thrust upon us in graduate school? Has the historicism of past generations become so shameful that it precludes any real thinking about historical events?

Going further, which poets have written about writing history? My favorite is Friedrich Hölderlin, and his poem Mnemosyne which I translate as follows:


Mnemosyne
                                   (Third version)


The fruits are ripe, dipped in fire,
Cooked and sampled on earth. And there’s a law,
That things crawl off in the manner of snakes,
Prophetically, dreaming on the hills of heaven.
And there is much that needs to be retained,
Like a load of wood on the shoulders.
But the pathways are dangerous.
The captured elements and ancient laws of earth
Run astray like horses. There is a constant yearning
For all that is unconfined. But much needs
To be retained. And loyalty is required.
Yet we mustn’t look forwards or backwards.
We should let ourselves be cradled
As if on a boat rocking on a lake.


But what about things that we love?
We see sun shining on the ground, and the dry dust,
And at home the forests deep with shadows,
And smoke flowering from the rooftops,
Peacefully, near the ancient crowning towers.
These signs of daily life are good,
Even when by contrast something divine
Has injured the soul.
For snow sparkles on an alpine meadow,
Half-covered with green, signifying generosity
Of spirit in all situations, like flowers in May —
A wanderer walks up above on a high trail
And speaks irritably to a friend about a cross
He sees in the distance, set for someone
Who died on the path... what does it mean?


My Achilles
Died near a fig tree,
And Ajax lies in the caves of the sea
Near the streams of Skamandros —
Great Ajax died abroad
Following Salamis’ inflexible customs,
A rushing sound at his temples —
But Patroclus died in the King’s armor.
Many others died as well.
But Eleutherai, the city
Of Mnemosyne, once stood upon
Mount Kithaeron. Evening
Loosened her hair, after the god
Had removed his coat.
For the gods are displeased
If a person doesn’t compose
And spare himself.
But one has to do it,
And grief is soon gone.



*    *   *

The poem demonstrates Hölderlin’s ability to develop his thoughts in a succession of metaphors and images, which is characteristic of his later writing. This technique of metaphorical thinking surfaced decades later in the writing of Rainer Maria Rilke, and more allegorically in the stories of Franz Kafka. It is an agenda imagined by Kant, who famously stated that images without concepts are blind, (a fair description of the current state of affairs in modern poetry).

The question Hölderlin presents is whether it is and how it might be possible to retain historical memory of past events, exemplified by the deaths of the Greek heroes. Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory. She slept with Zeus and gave birth to the nine Muses, whose activities are also by nature historicizing.

Hesiod writes of Mnemosyne:

Them [the Muses] in Pieria did Mnemosyne, who reigns over the hills of Eleuther, bear of union with the father, the son of Kronos [Zeus], a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow. For nine nights did wise Zeus lie with her, entering her holy bed remote from the immortals. And when a year was passed and the seasons came round as the months waned, and many days were accomplished, she bare nine daughters, all of one mind, whose hearts are set upon song and their spirit free from care, a little way from the topmost peak of snowy Olympus. [Theogony 53-63, Penguin Classics.]

And again, he [Zeus] loved Mnemosyne with the beautiful hair: and of her the nine gold-crowned Muses were born. [Theogony 915-917.]

Pindar also writes about Mnemosyne:

If success crowns a man’s venture, sweeter then than honey the libations he pours into the Mousai’s [Muses’] stream. But lacking the songs to praise them, the mightiest feats of valour can but find a sorry grave a deep darkness. But for fine deeds a mirror to establish, one way alone we know if Mnamosyna’s [Memory’s] shining diadem will grant recompense for their labours, in the glory of music on the tongues of men. [Pindar, Nemean 7, ant1.]

In the poem’s first strophe, the “fruits” are simply the deeds or events of history. Their memory disappears from us the same way that snakes crawl away into cracks in the floor, or between rocks. We need to remember things, but our memory is often faulty and can lead us astray like horses on crooked paths. Also there exists a tendency and a willingness to let things slide into oblivion. We should stay nested in the present and not run away to the past or the future.

But what about the experiences of daily life, the common things we treasure, even after we make contact with something that signifies and transcends earthly life? It is like a cross planted in an alpine meadow, an act of generosity by whoever placed it, and a reminder, permitting wayfarers to speculate from a distance about what happened there.

The last strophe places us in the mythic environment of Greece. The heroes at Troy died in various ways, and we owe our knowledge of them to the circumstance that Zeus slept with Mnemosyne on Mt. Kithaeron—“loosening her hair” is a sexual metaphor in older literatures.

Thus historical memory itself is ordained by the gods. When friends or heroes die, we need to pull ourselves together and conquer sorrow by creating a record of what happened. This is perhaps the closest we may approach eternity.

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The history of the unknown

I’m impressed with the idea that as historians we write the history of the unknown rather than of what is known. It seems that facts are helpful in creating parameters for our chosen playing field, but in themselves are boring, even almost contemptible. It’s as if the 19th c. Rankean ideal of “what actually happened” has been replaced with the more compelling depiction of what could have.

The pronouncement that Columbus *discovered* America in 1492—a curious formulation since it was already the world for the millions who lived there, so you might well ask who really discovered whom—is intrinsically inconsequential, since it might have been in 1493 and by Columbus' brother-in-law, and what difference would that have made? More interesting is what isn’t knowable about it, for example which Carribean island did he land upon, the subject of an overly long PBS documentary film a year or two ago.

Writing the history of the unknown proceeds mostly by analogy. In a given social process, we don’t know how A turned into B, but we do have an idea how C turned into D, so we apply that to the former situation. This makes us feel that the know-ability of our undertaking has increased and the aporias correspondingly diminished.

Tenth-century Europe is notoriously difficult for medievalists, who avoid it like the plague, due to a profound lack of documentary evidence. The common practice is to dismiss it as a century of transition. We have the growth of towns and an economy utilizing silver coinage by the year 1000, which wasn’t the case in 900, so it’s like Jack’s beanstalk that grew up overnight when nobody was watching, and we move on quickly to the century following where sources abound.

I’ve been reading Gerd Althoff’s Die Ottonen, a really useful book about the Saxon kings of Germany in the tenth century, but which laments the lack of documentary evidence so often that the reader almost feels guilty for having picked up the book to begin with. One should stop kvetching, accept that the fact that we *know* as much we are intended to, and get on with writing the history of the unknown.

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My favorite German tongue-twister (Zungenbrecher)

.

      Es klapperten die Klapperschlangen,
      bis ihre Klappern schlapper klangen.

      The rattlesnakes rattled
      until their rattles sounded run-down.


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Pissoirs of Berlin: A palatial amplitude at Schlesisches Tor

Forsaking the octagonal shape of the classical Berlin pissoir—the so-called Café Achteck which we have discussed in an earlier post—we now come to an alternate model that combines elegance with magnificent proportions, constructed to accommodate if necessary an entire football team of happy urinators. It is built of the same charming cucumber-green cast-iron plates as the traditional Berlin model, now reimagined in a rectangular configuration.

The particular example of engineering excellence you see above has an especially delightful acoustic feature. Due to its location near Schlesisches Tor ("Silesian Gate"), you can relieve yourself to a thunderous accompaniment as the U-3 overhead hurtles into the train station just a few more meters down the line. 

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thanks: unknown flickr user

The further adventures of Heidi, the Cross-eyed 'Possum

Meanwhile Heidi the Cross-eyed 'Possum has been eating too much, so her keepers at the Leipzig Zoo had to put her on a special diet this week to trim her down. Several facebook groups have been created by her many admirers, and We love Heidi, das schielende Opossum has some especially good photos.

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Image source unknown.

Saturday Gallimaufry

1) If the T.E. Lawrence era in the Near East excites your interest, check this series of aerial photos published this week by Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. The Germans found themselves in the ridiculous position of defending what was left of the Ottoman Empire in WWI, which gave some fliers from Bavaria an opportunity to photograph a few of the important venues of Near Eastern civilization, still largely stuck in the pre-industrial past.

2) The Pergamon Museum in Berlin opened a major exhibition on the excavations at Tell Halaf (ca. 6100-5400 BCE) in Northern Syria, which is generally recognized as the most important archaeological site from the Neolithic Period. Here are some pictures of the excavation, and here are more pictures from the show at the Pergamon. The Wiki on Tell Halaf explains what one needs to know. Imagine a public lecture on classical archaeology attended as well as this one on the steps of the Pergamon altar last week:

CHIM KLEUKER/© STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN

3) Don't forget the 44th Annual California Bookfair coming up February 11-13 here in San Francisco.

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Remembering Anneliese Rothenberger

I was saddened by the death of the soprano Anne-Liese Rothenberger in Switzerland last weekend, which aroused dormant memories of my time as a student at the University of Munich in 1961-1963.

I rented one of two rooms which comprised the apartment of Frau Berta Shovanek at Agnesstraße 45, a fifteen-minute walk to the University. Frau Shovanek was a woman in her 70’s who, like so many elderly German women, had lost virtually everything in the War, including her husband, two sons, all of her property, and her homeland, all of which were formerly operative somewhere in the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia. She lived from a tiny refugees' pension from the government and rented out one half of her apartment to students.

She was effusively friendly and a bit desperate for company in old age, as it seemed to me, and it took me awhile to bring her to the realization that I was not there to help keep her occupied in her declining years. Otherwise our relations were cordial enough, and I appreciated the dumplings and sauerkraut and cakes she plied me with from time to time.

One of the peculiarities of life in Germany during those years was that the whole country went into a state of complete lockdown on Sundays, which in Catholic Bavaria meant no shopping, no public entertainments, no movies, no nothing. The idea was that after church (optional) you were supposed to get yourself invited for Sunday dinner somewhere, and thus spend the afternoon on social visits with friends or family. The Museums were open, and you could also go for a walk when the weather was fine, but winters were often severe in Munich, and without relatives or friends I wound up staying home a lot on Sundays.

In those years the Bavarian Radio broadcast operetta music every Sunday afternoon. I became aware of this by hearing muffled arias and choruses sneaking through the hallway underneath Frau Shovanek’s glass-paneled living-room door. Becoming curious, I fired up my tube-driven Grundig radio set and tuned in for myself, and thus I gradually developed the habit of listening to operettas on house-bound winter Sunday afternoons in Munich.

It is hard to imagine a more perfect manifestation of musical kitsch than the German operetta. It grew out of the opéra comique in Paris around the middle of the 19th century which soon found its way to Vienna and Berlin. It frequently described a vanished European world when God was still in his heaven and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was still intact and young princes fell in love with commoners and handsome young men wore beautiful uniforms and nobody got hurt much, assuming you knew the right people. In short, the world of operetta, which has as much intellectual depth to it as say Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma,  was about as far removed from modern masterwork operas like Alban Berg’s Lulu and Wozzeck as it was possible to get.

The genre was therefore popular with older people, especially I imagine with those whose lives had been ruined by two world wars. This was the older audience served by Bavarian Radio on Sunday afternoons, and the reigning queen of operetta was the lyric soprano Anneliese Rothenberger, then at the peak of her fame.

Rothenberger doubtless had her own war stories to relate, starting her professional career in Germany in the 1940’s, an initial role being Berg’s Lulu, which she sang years later at the Met. She was a fine opera singer, especially for Mozart and Strauss, but her voice was absolutely perfect for operettas, which after awhile you’d think had been written especially for her.

She must have recorded every soprano aria in the entire operetta repertory. Unhappily most of this incredible output occurred before the arrival of stereo, although there are some fine stereo recordings from the late 60’s and later. In the 70’s she had two popular shows on German tv, but again these targeted the geriatric crowd, since young people in Germany then as now found operetta music ridiculous.

Anneliese Rothenberger was one of those few celebrity artists one can think of who not only looked gorgeous and sounded wonderful, but who apparently got almost everything else right as well. Widowed after a marriage of 44 years and having recovered from cancer, she wound up in a comfy but hardly ostentatious villa on the Swiss side of Lake Constance, where she spent her later life -- the Germans say Lebensabend, life's evening -- painting vividly impressionist pictures of flowers from her garden.

There are several clips of her in YouTube. For pure perfection, nothing exceeds her Sophie in Rosenkavalier, singing with the cross-dressing Sena Jurinac:



Or you can go to YouTube directly here.

Bertolt Brecht and the Trust Fund Kids

I’ve heard you don’t want to learn anything,
So therefore I assume that you’re all millionaires.
Your future is secure—it stands like a beacon
Before you. Your parents have taken precautions
So that your feet won’t trip on any rocks.
Thus you don’t have to learn anything.
You can stay just the way you are.

But in case of any difficulties—
I've heard somewhere that the times are uncertain—
You have your mentors who will tell you
Exactly what you need to do to stay well.
They’ve studied with people
Who know about the truth,
And how that truth will always be valid,
And who have prescriptions to help you.

Because so many people are working for you,
You won’t need to lift a finger.
Of course, if things were different,
You would have to learn about things.



I’ve heard you don’t want to learn anything was written in 1930, when Bert Brecht was more or less on the top of things. Three-Penny Opera had been a huge success, and Rise and Fall of Mahagonny was about ready to premiere in Berlin. In 1930 Brecht married Helene Weigel, who gave birth to a daughter the same year. He was working on new ideas for a new “epic theater,”and on the script for the movie Kuhle Wampe, released in 1932. And yet Brecht the poet had “heard somewhere that the times are uncertain”—possibly the understatement of the year in view of mass unemployment and the approaching Nazi take-over in 1933.

Brecht’s plays were seldom performed in this country in the 40’s and 50’s, no surprise considering the fear of Communism at the time. In the 60’s and 70’s, the plays started to attract audiences here, until lapsing once more into their present obscurity, along with a concern for social justice and the fading promise of revolution. What I think that theater-goers missed during this brief period of florescence was that Brecht was also a great German lyric poet.

His verse often drips irony, perhaps nowhere more than here. One wonders what inspired the poem. Perhaps he was sitting in an outside Berlin café, watching the jeunesse dorée pass by who were having too good a time to bother with university studies? Maybe not, times were hard in the Weimar Republic, and Bohemian lifestyles were popular also with the less than well-to-do, as portrayed in Isherwood’s I Am a Camera.

But of course the poem really isn’t about rich kids at all. It’s about their parents, whose wealth helps their offspring to remain stupid in a world filled with fake realities. It’s even more about poor students, who must learn to live by their wits if they’re going to survive—Brecht’s dramatic heroes are for the most part uncannily clever social underdogs.

And by requiring readers to define their social identity just by reading the poem, it’s about you too, and the need for poetry and art to foster political action.




Ich habe gehört, ihr wollt nichts lernen

Ich habe gehört, ihr wollt nichts lernen
Daraus entnehme ich: ihr seid Millionäre.
Eure Zukunft ist gesichert—sie liegt
Vor euch im Licht. Eure Eltern
Haben dafür gesorgt, daß eure Füße
An keinen Stein stoßen.
Da mußt du Nichts lernen. So wie du bist
Kannst du bleiben.


Sollte es dann noch Schwierigkeiten geben,
Da doch die Zeiten
Wie ich gehört habe, unsicher sind
Hast du deine Führer, die dir genau sagen
Was du zu machen hast, damit es euch gut geht.
Sie haben nachgelesen bei denen
Welche die Wahrheiten wissen
Die für alle Zeiten Gültigkeit haben
Und die Rezepte, die immer helfen .


Wo so viele für dich sind
Brauchst du keinen Finger zu rühren .
Freilich, wenn es anders wäre
Müßtest du lernen.


_______________________________

"It is easier to steal by setting up a bank than by holding up
a bank clerk."                    — Bertolt Brecht

The Panther, by Rainer Maria Rilke (1903)

His eye-sight is so fatigued from walking behind the bars
of his cage that it no longer focuses on anything.

For him it's as if there were a thousand bars,

and in front of the thousand bars no world exists.

The soft pacing of sinuously strong steps

that go round and round in a tiny circle

is like a dance of power around a center,

in which great strength of will remains paralyzed.

Sometimes the curtain over his pupils lifts
without a sound, and an image enters,
penetrates the tense silence of his limbs

and ceases to exist in his heart.

In 1905 Rainer Maria Rilke moved to Meudon, France to take a job as Rodin's secretary. When Rilke told Rodin that he had not been doing much writing lately, Rodin advised him to go to the zoo (Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes) and look at an animal until he could really see it. 

The poet chose a panther, so benumbed by its captivity that it no longer recognizes any world beyond the bars of its own cage. It paces about in a cramped space, a symbol of great power brutally restrained and forced into paralysis. Perhaps once in awhile a thought or idea of freedom enters the panther’s consciousness, but it quickly dies, stifled by the immobility and the “silence” of the animal's useless limbs.

Rilke is the most famous German poet during the period of symbolism, an arts movement that started in France around 1860 and continued in Germany  till about 1925. In reaction to realism and naturalism, symbolist poets wrote in a metaphorical and imaginative manner, reaching for dreams, ideals, and often for other-worldliness. The realia of daily life are treated as symbols and ciphers of other modes of being: What you see is not what you get with symbolist poets.

Thus the panther is not simply a zoo animal. It is you and I, pacing about in our cages when circumstances prevent us from achieving our goals, or from realizing whatever we think we were born for. It is us, when we feel stymied, stupefied, alone, imprisoned.

DER PANTHER

Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe
so müd geworden, dass er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.


Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht.


Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf—. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille—
und hört im Herzen auf zu sein.


[Photo of Persian leopard from Wikipedia, "Black Panther." ]

Me and Teddy Adorno

never really got to know each other that well, basically because he was at the height of his fame in the mid-60's, and continually surrounded in public by mobs of students and admirers looking for their celebrity fix. I happened to be on the inside track for some meetings and conferences held at the Free University of Berlin, where my Doktorvater, Wilhelm Emrich, who had been one of Adorno's students in Frankfurt, often assisted his appearances. These ranged from lectures held in the Audimax (Auditorium Maximum) in the Henry-Ford Building (oh the irony), to radio shows and sociologist meetings.

What impressed one most was the absolute intensity of his formal presentations. Unlike other German cultural heroes of the time -- such as the mystical Marxist Ernst Bloch, who rambled on at such a sedate tempo, and in such a soothingly avuncular manner that he seemed only to be thinking out loud -- Adorno often spoke rapidly and with such urgency that you could imagine yourself on the deck of the Titanic in its final moments. There was never a moment to lose, whatever the subject. Unfortunately his discourse usually functioned at such a high level of philosophic abstraction that it became difficult to follow him closely -- when you had one sentence figured out, he had already advanced two sentences further, so with luck you might get the general drift, but in detail only every third sentence or so.

Unlike most philosophers, Adorno had the weight of history on his shoulders -- the tragedy of the Holocaust and the loss of many friends, the shut-down of his professional career upon the rise of Nazism, the gradual abandonment of the Institute's plan to reconstruct Marxist theory after the rise of Stalinism and wholesale destruction of Russian peasants during the period of agricultural collectivization in the 1930's.

But he also simply owned the whole intellectual and cultural tradition of German philosophy, and forced you to discover, confront and respect that tradition in almost all that he spoke about, including his periodic and somewhat overdone rants against consumerist cultural barbarism and the inadequacies of a "positivistic," theory-less praxis of sociology in the U.S.

In the early 1960's, Adorno had hardly been translated into English; Heidegger's Sein und Zeit likewise remained untranslated; Marx wasn't taken seriously in American universities; and the only translation of Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes was a hundred-year-old relic (by Baillie) left over from the Victorian era when English philosophers gushed over Hegel as a metaphysical idealist, ignoring the dialectic and concomitantly the substance of Hegelian thought. To be a young American student in Germany in the 60's meant to discover a vibrant intellectual culture and a body of philosophy that was not a subject of attention in the U.S., where academics at the time were still floundering in French existentialism or else trying to figure out Wittgenstein.

In the 1980's and 1990's, the now reasonably-translated Adorno started to gain a certain currency among American authors, who found it remarkably easy to grab a quote from Minimalia Moralia or the correspondence with Walter Benjamin, but who had and still have no time for Adorno's Negative Dialektik, or (with Horkheimer) the Dialektik der Aufklärung, let alone for the two centuries of German philosophic thought upon which Critical Theory itself is based, or, better, is in reaction to.

It would be impertinent for any bystander as weak-minded as myself to assess Adorno's significance as a 20th-century thinker, but I know very well what he meant to me. Although he was probably more wrong than right on most issues -- excepting Heidegger, he was spot on about Heidegger -- he was the most impressive intellectual I ever encountered personally. He embodied like no other the worst calamity in modern European history, in fact it was almost as if he was that history, and he insisted that it not be forgotten by anyone.

He awakened his listeners to the understanding that there exists no philosophy or philosopheme capable of successfully relativizing the significance of violence or brutality -- that evil is in effect relentlessly and irretrievably evil. And that if there is to be an exit from the social hell in which we are all held captive, or if there ever develops a means to break the all but universal entrancement (as he put it) of social untruth and domination, it would only proceed through this same realization.



[The photo of Adorno above, apparently on his way to a Fasching party somewhere with a couple of young undergrads in tow, is no doubt heavily copyrighted somewhere -- I lifted it off the Internet and have no idea whom to credit.]