The traumatic surreal: Germanophone women artists and Surrealism after the Second World War 9781526149800

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The traumatic surreal

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The traumatic surreal Germanophone women artists and Surrealism after the Second World War Patricia Allmer

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Patricia Allmer 2022 The right of Patricia Allmer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4979 4 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover: Birgit Jürgenssen, Hausfrau, 1974. © Birgit Jürgenssen, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen / Bildrecht Vienna, 2021. Image courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter. Typeset by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire

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Contents List of figures page viii Acknowledgmentsxii Introduction1 1 Meret Oppenheim’s hauntologies 29 2 Unica Zürn’s pathographies 72 3 Birgit Jürgenssen’s abjections 109 4 Bady Minck’s tourist imaginaries 163 5 Olga Neuwirth/Elfriede Jelinek: temporality and trauma 197 Bibliography235 Index255

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Valeska Gert, La Diseuse, n.d. Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln, Bestand 200 Valeska Gert, 2/Photos. page 11 Birgit Jürgenssen, Frau, 1972. Black & white photograph, overdrawn, 21 × 33.7 cm, New York, Museum of Modern Art © Birgit Jürgenssen, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen/Bildrecht Vienna, 2021; Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter. 12 Meret Oppenheim, Wir können es nicht sehen, 1947. Oil on canvas, 65.5 × 55.5 cm, © Collezioni Città di Locarno; © DACS 2021. 13 Meret Oppenheim, Dann leben wir eben später, 1933. Ink, gouache, 21 × 27 cm, Private collection. © DACS 2021. 33 Meret Oppenheim, Gespenst mit Leintuch (Spectre au drap), 1962. Wood, fabric soaked in polyester, oil paint, 129.8 × 28 × 19.2 cm, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz KML 2000.02. © DACS 2021. 34 Meret Oppenheim, Das Paradies ist unter der Erde (Paradise Is Under the Earth), 1940. Collage and gouache, 22 × 16.5 cm, Private Collection. Photocredit: J. Bräm, Zürich. © DACS 2021. 37 Meret Oppenheim, ‘Das Album von der Kindheit bis 1943’: Meret Oppenheim, Das Paradies ist unter der Erde (on the left) and Irène Zurkinden, Portrait of Meret Oppenheim, Sommer 1940 (on the right). Reproduced in Lisa Wenger and Martina Corgnati (eds), Meret Oppenheim: Worte nicht in giftige Buchstaben einwickeln (Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess AG: Zürich, 2013), pp. 180–81. © DACS 2021. 39 Meret Oppenheim, Das Tragisch-Komische, 1944. Oil on fibreboard, 39 × 70 cm, Courtesy: LEVY gallery, Hamburg. © DACS 2021. 43 Meret Oppenheim, Wort, in giftige Buchstaben eingepackt (wird durchsichtig) (Word Wrapped in Poisonous Letters [Becomes Transparent]), 1970. Object: string, engraved brass plate, 31 × 14 × 39.5 cm, Courtesy: LEVY gallery, Hamburg. © DACS 2021. 45 Meret Oppenheim, Schwarze Strich-Figur vor Gelb (Black Stick Figure on Yellow), 1960–81. Oil on canvas, 76 × 58 cm, Kunstmuseum Bern, Private collection Bern. © DACS 2021. 46

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Meret Oppenheim, Genevieve, 1971. Sculpture: board, two poles and oils, 128 × ca. 120 × 74 cm. Photo © mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Leihgabe der Österreichischen LudwigStiftung. © DACS 2021. 48 Meret Oppenheim, Krieg und Frieden, 1943. Oil on canvas, 80 × 140 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel, Sammlung Online, http://80.74.155.18/eMuseumPlus, accessed 23/03/2021. © DACS 2021. 54 Kurt Wiemken, Frieden und Krieg, 1937. Oil on canvas, 36 × 58 cm. Photo and Courtesy: Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt. 55 Meret Oppenheim, Einige der ungezählten Gesichter der Schönheit, 1942. Oil on canvas, 81 × 54 cm, Private collection. Photo: Peter Lauri, Bern. © DACS 2021. 63 Meret Oppenheim, Sonne, Mond und Sterne, 1942. Oil on canvas, 48 × 51 cm, Private collection. © DACS 2021. 64 Man Ray, Erotique-voilée (Veiled-erotic) – Meret Oppenheim, 1933. © Man Ray 2015 Trust/ADAGP – DACS, London 2021, image: Telimage, Paris. 68 Hanna Nagel, Untitled (Bare-Breasted Woman in Front of a Printing Press), 1929. Graphite and watercolour on paper, 46 × 60.5 cm, Collection Merrill C. Berman, © DACS 2021. 68 Birgit Jürgenssen, Ich möchte hier raus!, 1976. Black & white photograph, 40 × 30.9 cm, The VERBUND COLLECTION, © Birgit Jürgenssen, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen/Bildrecht Vienna, 2021; Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter.  110 Birgit Jürgenssen, Ich möchte hier raus!, contact prints, 1976. Black & white contact prints, © Birgit Jürgenssen, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen/ Bildrecht Vienna, 2021; Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter. 112 Birgit Jürgenssen, Bügeln, 1975. Pencil, colored pencil on handmade paper, 62.5 × 43. 5 cm, Private collection. © Birgit Jürgenssen, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen/Bildrecht Vienna, 2021; Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter.126 Birgit Jürgenssen, Fensterputzen, 1975. Pencil, colored pencil on handmade paper, 62.5 × 43.5 cm, The VERBUND COLLECTION. © Birgit Jürgenssen, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen/Bildrecht Vienna, 2021; Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter. 127 Birgit Jürgenssen, Hausfrau, 1974. Pencil, colored pencil on handmade paper, 62.5 × 43.5 cm. © Birgit Jürgenssen, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen/ Bildrecht Vienna, 2021; Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter. 128 Grit Böttcher, cover image of Die kluge Hausfrau, 14 February 1959. 129

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List of figures Christian Attersee, Hundebüstenhalter, 1966. Acrylic on canvas, 150 × 150 cm, ALBERTINA, Wien – The ESSL Collection. Foto: Mischa Nawrata, Wien. Birgit Jürgenssen, Dienstmädchen, 1976. Pencil, colored pencil on handmade paper, 52.5 × 39.5 cm, Neue Galerie Graz Joanneumsviertel. © Birgit Jürgenssen, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen/Bildrecht Vienna, 2021; Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter. Birgit Jürgenssen, Hausfrau, 1974. Pencil, colored pencil on handmade paper, heightened with white, 62.5 × 44.6 cm. © Birgit Jürgenssen, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen/Bildrecht Vienna, 2021; Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter. Cover illustration of NS Frauen Warte magazine, 2 February 1941. Birgit Jürgenssen, Bodenschrubben, 1975. Pencil, colored pencil on handmade paper, 43.5 × 62.5 cm, The VERBUND COLLECTION. © Birgit Jürgenssen, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen/Bildrecht Vienna, 2021; Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter. Austria: Onlookers watch as Jews are forced to scrub the streets in Vienna, March 1938. © IMAGO/United Archives. Birgit Jürgenssen, Unter dem Pantoffel, 1976. Pencil, colored pencil on handmade paper, 39.5 × 52.5 cm, Neue Galerie Graz Joanneumsviertel. © Birgit Jürgenssen, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen/Bildrecht Vienna, 2021; Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter. Birgit Jürgenssen, anna-tommie, 1972. Pencil, colored pencil on handmade paper, 52.4 × 39.5 cm, Heidi Horten Collection, Vienna. © Birgit Jürgenssen, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen/Bildrecht Vienna, 2021; Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter. Birgit Jürgenssen, Rückgratveränderung, 1974. Pencil, colored pencil on handmade paper, 62.2 × 43.5 cm, Private collection. © Birgit Jürgenssen, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen/Bildrecht Vienna, 2021; Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter. Birgit Jürgenssen, Ohne Titel (Körperprojektion), 1988. Color photograph, 30.4 × 22.1 cm. © Birgit Jürgenssen, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen/Bildrecht Vienna, 2021; Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter. Exhibition view, wax models (including those of spinal columns), Josephinum, Vienna, 2015. Foto: Bene Croy/Josephinum – Ethics, Collections and History of Medicine, MedUni Vienna. Illustration displayed as part of the wax model collection of the Josephinum. Workshop of Felice Fontana La Pecola, The iliac-rib muscle with its three parts (M. iliocostalis cervicis, M. iliocostalis thoracis

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et m. Iliocostalis lumborum) and the severed and partially removed longest back muscle (M. longissimus), pencil and watercolour, Italy, 1781–86. Josephinum – Ethics, Collections and History of Medicine, MedUni Vienna. 150 3.18 Körperhaltung poster, illustrations by Ludwig Schrott, explanation by Konrad Allmer, c.1950.151 3.19 Birgit Jürgenssen, Mit der Bahn heute in eine bessere Zukunft, 1973. Pencil, colored pencil on handmade paper, 43.6 × 62.6 cm, The VERBUND COLLECTION. © Birgit Jürgenssen, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen/Bildrecht Vienna, 2021; Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter. 154 3.20 Mit Hitler in eine bessere Zukunft (With Hitler into a Better Future), NS-propaganda on the building of the Austrian Touring-Club in Vienna before the ‘Referendum’ of 10 April 1938. AUSTRIA-FORUM MEDIANUMMER 00249026. 155 3.21 NS propaganda slogan, ‘Mit Hitler in eine bessere Zukunft!’, 10 April 1938. © ÖNB Vienna: PLA16318575. 155 3.22 Grete Stern, Los sueños de evasión, Idilio no. 84, 1950. © The Estate of Grete Stern, Courtesy, Fundación CEPPA, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 157 3.23 Grete Stern, Los sueños de muñecos, Idilio no. 39, 1949. © The Estate of Grete Stern, Courtesy Galería Jorge Mara – La Ruche.158 3.24 Grete Stern, Los sueños de trenes, Idilio no. 40, 1949. © The Estate of Grete Stern, Courtesy Galería Jorge Mara – La Ruche.158 3.25 Meret Oppenheim, Die Erlkönigin, 1940. Oil on cardboard, 68.5 × 50.5 cm, MASI-2017.046, Long term loan from private collection, Fondazione Museo d’arte della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano. Photo: Alexandre Zveiger. © DACS 2021. 159 3.26 Photograph of a 4010 at Leoben train station celebrating the centenary of the Leoben-Vordernberger-Bahn railway line, 18 May 1972, in ÖBB in Wort und Bild, no 6, 1972, p. 30. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Wien. 161 4.1 Still from Bady Minck (dir.), Im Anfang war der Blick, Amour Fou, 2003. 168 4.2 Still from Bady Minck (dir.), Im Anfang war der Blick, Amour Fou, 2003. 176 4.3 Still from Bady Minck (dir.), Im Anfang war der Blick, Amour Fou, 2003. 181 4.4 Still from Bady Minck (dir.), Im Anfang war der Blick, Amour Fou, 2003. 183 4.5 Still from Bady Minck (dir.), Im Anfang war der Blick, Amour Fou, 2003. 186 4.6 Still from Bady Minck (dir.), Im Anfang war der Blick, Amour Fou, 2003. 195 4.7 Still from Bady Minck (dir.), Im Anfang war der Blick, Amour Fou, 2003. Photograph of the destroyed Mozart Wohnhaus. Photograph: ‘Bombenschaden an Mozarts Wohnhaus’ (1207.0523), Stadtarchiv Salzburg, Fotosammlung Anny Madner. 196

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Acknowledgments The support of individuals and institutions over the past few years, and in particular during the difficult times of the pandemic, has been extraordinary. I am deeply grateful for the help, collegiality, and friendship I received, without which this project would not have been possible. I am profoundly grateful for the knowledge and support of Bady Minck, Gabriele Schor, Theresa Dann, Effie Rentzou, Julia Drost, Marsha Meskimmon, Paige Mitchell and Allen Fisher, Raphael Costambeys-Kempczynski and Claire Thoury, Neil Cox and Dana MacFarlane, David and Claudia Hopkins, Jonathan P. Eburne and Hester Blum, Anna Watz, Katharine Conley, Mary Ann Caws, Carol Richardson, Andrea Gremels, Tessel Bauduin, Lori Cole, Georgina Ripley, Anna Promey-Faillot, Nils Olger, Heribert Becker, Susan Aberth, Paul de Angelis, Wolfgang Müller, An Paenhuysen, Judith Nobel, Lindsey Richter and Matthias Kramer. I am grateful for the generous support from the following archives and collections: Natascha Burger, Hubert Winter, Irina Morzé, and Galerie Hubert Winter; Nora Lohner, David Oester, and the Kunstmuseum Bern; Ilse Jung and the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien; Roman Hans Gröger, Walter Lampert, and the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv; Elmar Oberegger; Georg Hartmann and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach; Regina Vogel and the Kunsthalle Basel; Sandra Bieri and the Kunsthaus Zürich Bibliothek; Adam J. Boxer, Magda Dzierciolowska, and the Ubu Gallery; Marleen-Christine Linke and the LEVY Galerie; Alexandra Pinter and the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; Paola Capozzo and the Museo d’arte della Swizzera Italiana, Lugano; Iris Müller and the Kunstmuseum Basel; René Schraner and Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt; Alessia Bottaro and the Museo Casorella; Chris Reding and Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess; Frank-Manuel Peter, Bettina Hesse, and the Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln/SK Stiftung Kultur; Carolina Groverman and Galería Vasari; Nailya Alexander and Nailya Alexander Gallery; Mathias Böhm and the Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek; Pete Woronkowicz and DACS; Lucía Mara and Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche; and Daniela Hahn and the Josephinum Archiv. I am very honoured that Emma Brennan and the Manchester University Press team have been an integral part of my academic career, and would like to thank them

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for all the collaborations we’ve had and the beautiful volumes which have resulted from them. A number of grants and awards have enabled me to conduct the research and have time to do so. I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for awarding me a Research Fellowship, to the University of Edinburgh’s Moray Fund Award, and to Edinburgh College of Art’s RKEI Awards. Special thanks go to my partner John Sears who has supported me throughout. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

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Introduction And that seems to come easily to us. Ignore, overlook, neglect, deny, unlearn, obliterate, forget. (Christa Wolf)1 Do we not know that we must first pass through Surrealism’s fields of rubble in order to be able to begin anew? (Wolfdietrich Schnurre)2

Valeska Gert (1892–1978), the Berlin-born German–Jewish cabaret performer, already notorious in Weimar Germany for her Canaille act, which represented a prostitute before, during, and after an assignation, performed in Paris at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées at 4pm on the afternoon of 6 November 1926. While Gert was probably more closely associated at that time with Dada, the show was nevertheless advertised in Le matin as a performance by ‘la danseuse surréaliste Valeska Gert’.3 This particular appearance became the occasion of a public and violent conflict between rival groups of Parisian surrealists over the long-contested proprietorship of the word ‘Surrealism’. Gert’s performance had been organised and promoted by the German–French writer Yvan Goll (born Isaac Lang, 1891–1950), aspiring leader of the surrealists and author of the first published surrealist manifesto, issued on 1 October 1924. Objecting to Goll’s use of the word ‘surréalisme’, André Breton (1896–1967), author of the second, better-known Manifesto of Surrealism, published later in October 1924, led a group of shouting, whistle-blowing fellow surrealists in an attempt to disrupt Gert’s performance. Breton was punched, and got a black eye and a police escort out of the building. Gert recalled the incident in her autobiography Ich bin eine Hexe – Kaleidoskop meines Lebens (1968): There was a beautiful scandal (Skandal) around my dance. I couldn’t hear the orchestra any more, that’s how loud they shouted. ‘Elle est épatante! Formidable!’ [‘She’s amazing! Wonderful!’] and ‘À la porte, la vache allemande’ [‘Get out, German cow!’] and  1 Christa Wolf, A Model Childhood, Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt (trans.) (London: The Virago Press, 1983), p. 149.  2 Wolfdietrich Schnurre, ‘Theatre der Zeit’, Der Skorpion, 1 (January 1948), 50.  3 Le matin, 6 November 1926.

2

The traumatic surreal ‘La Gueule!’ [‘Shut your trap!’]. In those days what I danced was completely new and shocking.  […] And the surrealists fought over me. Yvan Goll shouted: ‘This is the true Surrealism!’ André Breton cried: ‘No, this is not Surrealism!’ The audience cried alternately for and against me!4

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This ‘scandal’ caused a minor cultural earthquake whose effects were detectable in Germany, as is clear from the report in the Berliner Tageblatt of 26 November 1926: It was recently reported that a violent dispute over Valeska Gert in Paris had developed on the occasion of a guest dance performance, which even made it necessary for the police to intervene. As Valeska Gert tells us, this was not a dispute about her person and her dances, but a fight over Surrealism. Some supporters of this latest art form attended her dance evening, and one of them proclaimed after the dance that this was true Surrealism. The other wing of the Surrealists had protested against this with slaps in the face and roars, and this caused a riot in the front room.5

Marcel Berger’s article in the 11 November 1926 issue of Comœdia notes Gert’s already well-established ‘European reputation’ (‘réputation européenne’) and comments that she describes herself as ‘surrealist’ (‘surréaliste’) and a ‘dancer of ugliness’ (‘danseuse de la laideur’). Of Surrealism, Berger writes: ‘“Surrealism”! I will admit that this word remained a little vague in my eyes! I knew at least two groups, if not three, fighting over this label’.6 Berger’s slightly comic emphasis on this proliferation of Surrealisms is important. To German observers it had already been clear in 1925 that Parisian Surrealism was not a singular, unified movement but a multiplicity of positions. An article on Parisian art in the Hamburger Nachrichten of 21 February 1925  4 ‘Da gab es einen schönen Skandal um meine Tänze. Ich konnte das Orchester nicht mehr hören. So laut riefen sie: “Elle est épatante! Formidable!” und “À la porte, la vache allemande!” und “La Gueule!” Es war damals ganz neu und schockierend, was ich tanzte. […] Auch die Surrealisten stritten sich um mich. Ivan Goll schrie: “Das ist der wahre Surrealismus!” André Breton rief: “Nein, kein Surrealismus!” Das Publikum brüllte in Sprechchören für und gegen mich.’ Valeska Gert, Ich bin eine Hexe – Kaleidoskop meines Lebens (Munich: Knaur, 1989), pp. 51–2. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.  5 ‘Kürzlich wurde gemeldet, dass anläßlich eines Tanzgastspiels sich ein heftiger Streit um Valeska Gert in Paris entwickelt habe, der sogar das Einschreiten der Polizei nötig machte. Wie uns nun Valseka Gert mitteilt, war dies kein Streit um ihre Person und ihre Tänze, sondern ein Streit um den Surrealismus. Einige Anhänger dieser neuesten Kunstrichtung wohnten ihrem Tanzabend bei, und einer von ihnen habe nach dem Tanze proklamiert, daß dies der wahre Surrealismus sei. Dagegen habe nun der andere Flügel der Surrealisten mit Ohrfeigen und Gebrüll protestiert, und dadurch sei im Zuschauerraum ein Krawall entstanden.’ Berliner Tageblatt, 26 November 1926.  6 ‘“Surréalisme”! Avouerai-je que ce mot demeurait un peu vague à mes yeux! Je savais tout au plus que deux groupes, sinon trois, se disputent cette étiquette.’ Marcel Berger, ‘Combien y a-t-il de ­surréalismes?’, Comœdia, 11 November 1926, 3.

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Introduction

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confirmed the establishment of the word ‘Surrealism’ in German popular critical discourse, noting that ‘in the last couple of months a surrealist direction has been created, however its members are already in disagreement with each other, so that they split into three sub-groups, each of whom claims to represent the true Surrealism.’7 From the German perspective, Surrealism existed in its early years as a polymorphous and competing set of rather indeterminate potentialities. Gert and her danses surréalistes provided a pretext, and the stimulus, for a public articulation in the German press of the movement(s) as something multiple and self-divergent, rather than singular and static. Most importantly, in both Paris and Germany it became clear from the controversy sparked by her performance that Parisian Surrealism suddenly belonged at that moment in 1926 to neither of the patrilinear lines adhered to by Breton and Goll, but occupied instead a contested discursive space, existing momentarily as a performance by a (German) woman that found itself situated within the trauma of a violent splitting. A further and significant complexity resides in subsequent critical dispute over the date of Gert’s ‘scandalous’ performance. The German press coverage and the French press publicity cited above confirms its occurrence on Saturday, 6 November 1926. However, critical tradition has often misremembered and transposed its date to 1924, relocating this belated contest over ownership of the movement to the very moment of origin of Surrealism itself. Jeremy Stubbs, writing in 1997, gets both year and month wrong, asserting that ‘1924 was the crucial year for the two [sic] would-be Surrealisms. Open antagonism began in May with actual fisticuffs between Goll and Breton at a performance of danses surréalistes by the German dancer Valeska Gert’.8 Gérard Durozoi’s definitive History of the Surrealist Movement follows suit, clearly indicating that the performance, occasion of a ‘first skirmish’ in the Parisian dispute over Surrealism, took place in 1924: In 1924, a spectre haunted Paris – at any rate, the spectre of Surrealism – and it was up to Breton and his friends to prove that they did not intend to allow anyone else to clarify its significance (or, inversely, to trivialize it). An evening at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées  7 ‘Endlich sei noch angeführt, daß in den letzten Monaten eine surrealistische Richtung geschaffen wurde, deren Mitglieder aber inzwischen so miteinander uneinig wurden, daß sie sich in drei Untergruppen spalteten, von denen jede behauptet, den wahren Surrealismus zu vertreten.’ Parisian Correspondent, ‘Die zeitgenössische französische Literatur und das Ausland’, Hamburger Nachrichten, 21 February 1925, n.p.  8 Jeremy Stubbs, ‘Goll versus Breton: the battle for Surrealism’, in Eric Robertson and Robert Vilain (eds), Yvan Goll–Clair Goll: Texts and Contexts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 69–82; p. 71. Stubbs refers to Albert Ronsin, ‘Yvan Goll et André Breton – des relations difficiles’, in Michel Grunewald and JeanMarie Valentin (eds), Yvan Goll (1891–1950): Situations de l’écrivain, special issue of Gallo-germanica, 12 (1994), 58–62.

4

The traumatic surreal was the occasion for a first skirmish: ‘surrealist dances’ were scheduled to be performed by Valeska Gert, whose impresario was Ivan Goll; the group disrupted the performance with a concert of whistles, and then a row broke out between Goll and Breton, and the event

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ended abruptly with the arrival of the police.9

Mark Polizzotti’s biography of André Breton gets the year right but misdates Gert’s performance by a day, to 7 November.10 This historical confusion – which is of a different order to the kind of accidental error that (for example) leads Roger Luckhurst to misdate Breton’s 1928 work Nadja to Surrealism’s origin year of 192411  – indicates that at the heart of Valeska Gert’s disruptive performance is an event of ‘scandalously’ traumatic significance for Surrealism and for criticism of it, so traumatic that it has repeatedly (repetitiously) been displaced temporally by critics, resituated to the origin of Surrealism, becoming in the process a strange kind of birth-fantasy and affirming the symbolic significance of Gert’s disruptive and disrupted performance as an expression of Surrealism’s unavoidable multiplicity and of the pivotal position of the female surrealist artist (and, not incidentally, her dangerous creativity) within and as part of that multiplicity. Gert’s interrupted danses surréalistes provide the perfect, disruptive figure for the temporally disrupted narrative of Surrealism that critical tradition has perpetuated, a narrative of dislocated origins and displaced traumas. In November 1926, then, a German woman artist notorious for her popular perversions and subversions of feminine performativity was the stimulus for a belated articulation of the foundational differences within and between competing masculine versions of Surrealism. If Gert’s performance of gender can be seen working disruptively within Surrealism’s myths of origin, we might also speculate on how such differences relate to other divisions and bifurcations between traditions, national identities, and historical developments (that will become frequent objects of scrutiny in this book). Goll’s German–French background (he was born in the Alsatian town of Saint-Dié-des-Voges, near Strasbourg on the German border), for example, distinguished him from Breton’s overtly (and onomastically signalled) French origins in the lower Normandy town of Tinchebray-Bocage, while the distinct but interwoven trajectories of male- and female-centred traditions of Surrealism have, in recent years, become the central concern of much scholarship and many exhibitions. Valeska Gert’s German identity, furthermore, alongside her self-identification in Paris as a  9 Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 65. 10 Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), p. 272. 11 Roger Luckhurst, ‘“Something tremendous, something elemental”  – on the ghostly origins of psychoanalysis’, in Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 50–71; p. 50.

Introduction

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performer of danses surréalistes, raises broader questions about national identifications of and with Surrealism in its early years, and in particular the question of its expression in Germany, where different artistic traditions and interests prevailed in the years immediately following the First World War.

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Surrealism in Germany From its outset, Parisian Surrealism under Breton’s aegis had been projective in impetus, conceived by artists and writers (rather than critics and curators) and already at its origin in 1924 imagining future works and defining future lines of aesthetic development through its deeply Freudian emphasis on what Breton called ‘the resolution of [dream and reality] into an absolute reality, a surreality’.12 This nexus of concerns was clearly distinct from the then-prevalent German critical focus on aesthetic objectivity. The German critic Franz Roh sought to distinguish the French movement of Surrealism from what he understood as a specifically German post-war development in modern art, for which he coined the term ‘magical realism’ (‘Magischer Realismus’). In the ‘Foreword’ to his 1925 book on this subject (published in the same year that, as noted above, ‘Surrealism’ entered German critical language), Roh asserted, pointedly using the French spelling, that ‘Under “Surrealisme” we for the time being understand something different. By “magical”, in contrast to the mystical, it is indicated that the secret does not enter into the represented world but holds itself back’.13 By 1928 it was evident that German critics understood automatism to be Surrealism’s most prominent feature and consequently read the movement in explicitly Freudian terms. In a Börsen-Halle article on the French movement, ‘The Hour’, critic Wolfgang Grunow described automatic writing as ‘idea-photography’: ‘The principle is: all feelings, nervous impulses, and thoughts of the author should be reproduced in their original confusion and uncertainty. The unconscious should have as much space here as the super-ego.’14 Similarly, a 1929 article also equated Surrealism with automatism, describing it as a ‘photography of the psyche’ (‘psychische Photographie’) and asserting it to be comparable with Joycean stream-of-consciousness, and therefore 12 André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924), in Manifestoes of Surrealism, Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (trans.) (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1969), pp. 1–48; p. 14. 13 ‘Unter “Surrealisme” versteht man vorläufig etwas anderes. Mit “magisch” im Gegensatz zu “mystisch” sollte angedeutet sein, daß das Geheimnis nicht in die dargestellte Welt eingeht, sondern sich hinter ihr zurückhält’. Franz Roh, ‘Vorwort’, in Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei (Leipzig: Klinkhardt and Biermann, 1925), n.p. 14 ‘Ideenphotographie. […] Das Prinzip lautet: alle Empfindungen, Nervenreize und Gedanken des Autors sollen in ihrer ursprünglichen Verworrenheit und Unsicherheit wiedergegeben werden. Das Unterbewußte soll darin ebenso seinen Platz haben wie das Überbewußte.’ Wolfgang Grunow, ‘Die Stunde’, Börsen-Halle, 6 August 1928, n.p.

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6

The traumatic surreal

distinct from the focus on objects and objectness/objectivity of Magischer Realismus and the ‘New Objectivity’ (‘Neue Sachlichkeit’) of post-war German art.15 In March 1929, the Hamburger Sezession displayed an exhibition of Neue europäische Kunst, one of the few interwar German exhibitions to focus on Surrealism. Will Grohmann’s review of this exhibition in Der Querschnitt again clearly associates Surrealism with ‘psychic automatism’, describing the movement in terms of a ‘switching off of rational and traditional inhibitions’ to represent artistically ‘the totality of life […] from the inside’.16 Grohmann notes that most of the artists exhibited in the show were living in France – ‘even the Köln-based Max Ernst is so far more acknowledged in France than in Germany’ – but he claims Paul Klee as the German ‘leader’ of the movement (despite Klee being Swiss).17 This view embodies the dominant German critical perception of Surrealism at the time as principally a French movement. The national distinctions were occasionally more pointedly asserted. Kurt Bauer reviewed the Neue europäische Kunst exhibition in Berliner Börsenzeitung, describing Surrealism as ‘a foreign stream […] trying to penetrate the emerging movement of new German art [i.e. Neue Sachlichkeit]. Of course’, he sharply added, ‘it comes from Paris again’.18 Bauer’s pronounced nationalism furthermore perceived the French surrealist artists as ‘calculated “constructivists” of a degenerate intellect’.19 This use in 1929 of a term – degenerate (entartet) – destined shortly to assume grim significance in German cultural history and to encompass in its pejorative staining almost the entirety of the modernist avant-garde, including Surrealism itself, indicates the tensions surrounding the reception into German contexts, in the latter years of the Weimar Republic, of clearly non-German aesthetic movements like Surrealism. Valeska Gert’s claim, as a German artist performing in Paris in 1926, to be specifically a surrealist dancer is thus performed within an emergent and highly contested transnational, German–French historical space in which competing narratives of aesthetic ownership intersected dynamically with myths of national identity and of creative origin. The critical revisionism of the date of her performance indicates a desire to conflate distinct moments of trauma (contested origins, public controversy, 15 Anonymous, ‘Bücher des Jahres’, Hamburger Anzeiger, 17 December 1929, n.p. 16 ‘Programmatisch gehen sie auf den psychologischen Automatismus, die Ausschaltung rationaler und traditioneller Hemmungen aus, künstlerisch auf die Darstellung der Totalität des Lebens, nicht von außen, sondern von innen.’ Will Grohmann, ‘Neue europäische Kunst’, Der Querschnitt, 3 (March 1929), 177–9; 178. 17 Grohmann, ‘Neue europäische Kunst’, 178. 18 Kurt Bauer, ‘Neue europäische Kunst: Zur internationalen Kunstschau in Hamburg’, Berliner Börsenzeitung, 8 February 1929, n.p. 19 ‘Jetzt aber sucht in diese ersprießliche Bewegung der jungen deutschen Kunst ein fremder Strom einzudringen. Natürlich kommt er wieder aus Paris: eine sogenannte neue europäische Kunst, die sich “Surrealismus” bezeichnet.’ Bauer, ‘Neue europäische Kunst’, n.p.

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Introduction

7

male aggression) into a single scandalous symbolic event, suppressing the polymorphous and fractured discursive space in which competing versions of Surrealism existed. Where the bilingual Yvan Goll had unsuccessfully sought to take control of the word ‘Surrealism’ (thus potentially repositioning the movement internationally), Gert’s danses surréalistes, furthermore, demonstrated the unique significance of the Germanophone woman artist within this matrix of conflicting pressures, blurring any national or linguistic proprietorship of the term. The Nazi Party assumed power in Germany in 1933, taking control of all the mechanisms and institutions of artistic and cultural production and fatally curtailing any immediate avant-garde future. Most of the German artists associated, however loosely, with Surrealism had by then already left for Paris. Max Ernst had gone years earlier in 1922, while Grete Stern, Richard Oelze, Josef Breitenbach, and Meret Oppenheim (the subject of Chapter 1, below) had all departed in the early 1930s. Valeska Gert, finding herself subject to new Nazi prohibitions and restrictions on Jewish people and, like Jean Améry, realising that ‘the denial of human dignity sounded the death threat’,20 emigrated from Berlin to England in 1933. Only a few German surrealists, such as Werner Rohde, Edgar Ende, and Otto Umbehr (Umbo), remained in Germany under the new regime. By late 1937, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (who had himself left Germany in 1933) could argue that ‘Surrealism (into which, in France and Czechoslovakia much of the essence of expressionism has fled) found little response in Germany. The world around us torn to pieces and the phosphorescing on the edges – all this uncanny reality found no official expression.’21 In August 1939, a week before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Franco-German surrealist Yvan Goll and his French wife Claire, both from Jewish families, fled Europe for America. Claire’s mother was incarcerated in Theresienstadt concentration camp, and deported on 19 September 1942 to Auschwitz, where she died. Germanophone women artists in Surrealism Ernst Bloch’s lament for Surrealism’s lack of traction in Germany is also an appeal for an art that would be adequate to respond to ‘The world around us torn to pieces’ – that is, he suggests, a German version of Surrealism able to respond to what was already, 20 Jean Améry, ‘On the necessity and impossibility of being a Jew’, in Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (trans.) (London: Granta, 1999), p. 86. 21 Ernst Bloch, ‘Der Expressionismus’ (November 1937), in Vom Hasard zur Katastrophe: Politische Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1934–1939 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), pp.  273–4. Cited in Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (London and New York: Macmillan/The Free Press, 1977), p. 273 n.16.

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8

The traumatic surreal

in  1937, the disaster of Nazism. Where Gert’s scandalous performance disturbed French Surrealism, Bloch yearns, barely a dozen years later, for a Surrealism that would disrupt the ‘uncanny reality’ of German society under Hitler, a reality soon to shatter Europe. At the end of the war, the surrealist artists who, like Breton, had escaped to America, returned to a France traumatised by four years of Nazi ­occupation and the devastation resulting from military liberation, coming under the sway of the new intellectual movement of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, and furthermore traumatically ruptured by the ideological split between (in the existentialist writer Albert Camus’s terms) ‘men of the Resistance’ and ‘men of treason and injustice’.22 Sartre, in What is Literature? (1947), condemned Surrealism in the language of the new philosophy: ‘Surrealism undertook the curious enterprise of achieving nothingness through an excess of being’.23 Alyce Mahon’s detailed history of Surrealism in this period makes clear that Paris remained the centre for Breton’s version of Surrealism after the war. The Le Surréalisme en 1947 (Surrealism in 1947) exhibition at Galerie Maeght in Paris, the first post-war gathering of the movement, was the most public expression of Surrealism’s ostensible post-war renewal and its turn (led by Breton) to a ‘New Myth’, which at least (Mahon argues) ‘had certain “feminine” qualities to it’,24 qualities including the ‘feminine form’25 of Frederick Kiesler’s gallery designs. Mahon quotes a letter by David Hare discussing the French public’s relation to Surrealism at the time: ‘they say to themselves “After all, it is French, it diveloped [sic] in France and now it has come back again”’.26 The counternarrative of origins provided by the event of Valeska Gert’s danses surréalistes suggests the possibility of recalibrating this French, Parisian, and Bretonfocussed trajectory of Surrealism’s post-Second World War development by inserting another potential thread into the critical discourse, shifting its emphasis away from a singular, Breton-centred, and Paris-located history and instead towards one with a Germanophone woman artist at its problematically divided beginning. Such a seismic shift in focus, traumatic from the outset for Surrealism itself, also challenges the critical tradition’s silencing or neglect of Germanophone women artists – a repression that those artists have themselves sought repeatedly to counter. This silencing is evident, of course, in the attempt by Breton’s group of (male) surrealists 22 Albert Camus, ‘Combat’ (20 October, 1944), quoted in E. E. Adams, After the Rain: Surrealism and the Post-World War II Avant-Garde, 1940–1950 (Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2007), p. 99. 23 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Surrealism’, in Modern Times: Selected Non-fiction, Geoffrey Wall (ed.), Robin Buss (trans.) (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 189. 24 Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros 1938–1968 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), p. 117. 25 Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, p. 118. 26 David Hare, letter to Enrico Donati, 14 August 1947, cited in Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, p. 139.

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Introduction

9

to prevent Gert from performing in 1926, but also in the erasure from critical history of virtually any record of the intended content of her Parisian danses surréalistes. Gert’s performances elsewhere have been, nevertheless, documented in hundreds of photographs (key elements of the marketing repertoire of dancers and performers of the time) and written accounts. Among her works was Pause, which she gave during theatrical intervals and curtain-changes. Gert walked onto the stage, assumed a pose, and remained motionless for the remainder of the performance, as the audience grew increasingly restless. Diametrically opposed to the disrupted performance in Paris, Pause, drawing on and subverting the tradition of the tableau-vivant, interrupted the conventions of dance by imposing stasis, redefining the dancer as living sculpture, still and yet dynamised by latent movement and physical tension that found expression in the audience’s increasingly tense response to the performance’s durée. The anonymous photographer of another work, La Diseuse, has captured Gert in a gestural pose (figure 0.1), simultaneously open and inviting, and confrontational; Gert’s body, arms outstretched, legs parted with the right leg raised and bent, face upturned and head twisted slightly backward, presents an almost hieroglyphic form comprising several implicit characters (a T, a W, a reversed K or R) – a compound letter indicating how Gert manipulated physical form through compression and gesticulation. Gert performed dances like Pause and La Diseuse in Berlin theatres in the early 1920s. Fifty years later, in 1972, another Germanophone woman artist, the Austrian Birgit Jürgenssen, made a work entitled Frau (Woman) (figure 0.2), which echoes in its form and content the photograph of Gert’s La Diseuse. Jürgenssen’s Frau presents four photographic portraits of the artist in different poses, each mapping onto one of the four letters of the word FRAU, inscribed in red on each photograph over the female body in the image. In these photographs Jürgenssen wears the black shortsleeved leotard, leggings, and plimsolls of the dancer and has her hair tied back, as if the physical performance of the word involved a kind of dance. The work’s message is clear  – femininity is inscribed on the female body by language, and performed by that body through a choreography of stylised movements enacting the elements and connotations of the defining word. Following Gert’s disruptive and interruptive performances of gender, Jürgenssen prefigures in Frau the definition by Judith Butler of gender as ‘the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame’.27 Jürgenssen’s art will be addressed in more detail in Chapter 3 below. Here it is important to note the continuity of thematic and formal concerns between Gert’s situating of her critique of the gaze and patriarchal power in 27 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (10th anniversary edition) (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 43.

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The traumatic surreal

the performing female body, into which she compresses and palimpsestically overlays a series of potential signifiers, and Jürgenssen’s comparable inscription of that body with the forms of language as defining forces, parsed out into the clarity of verbal expression – a legible sign rather than a provocative hieroglyph. Both works use performance parodically to subvert expectations and to interrupt (in order to disrupt) the routine operation of the (patriarchal) gaze. Both works situate the female body as object, in order to subvert that situation by empowering the female body to speak. If Gert’s dances arrested attention in order to challenge and resist the imposition of legibility by the defining gaze, Jürgenssen’s enactment of the German word Frau makes clear that languages gender their speakers in complex ways that are imbricated by the histories of the nations in which they are spoken. Gert’s work was produced in the aftermath of the First World War, in a historical moment distorted by traumatic legacies, the moment that also forged Surrealism. Jürgenssen’s work is a historically delayed response to the persistence of traditions (of gender-­coding, in particular) that have somehow survived the hugely distorting effects of another traumatic history, that of Nazism and the Holocaust, only to ­reimpose ­themselves, in the Austria of the 1970s, on women’s bodies. Surrealism and trauma As is well known, Surrealism was always already a response to the traumatic experience of early twentieth-century history. Forged in the wake of, and haunted by the experiences of, the First World War, and motivated in part by disgust at that war, which it understood as a highly destructive imperialist exercise, the radical aesthetics of Surrealism responded overtly and covertly to the cultural and psychic effects of the war’s carnage on individual and cultural consciousness – both the wider cultural impact of wartime suffering and the experiences of people who lived through it. As noted above, the movement’s earliest manifesto was published by Yvan Goll (as ‘Ivan Goll’) in October 1924. This text emphasised the distracted will-to-erasure of 1920s cultural memory as already fragile: ‘The art of entertainment, the art of ballet and music hall, curious art, picturesque art, art based on exoticism and eroticism, strange art, restless art, selfish art, frivolous and decadent art will soon  cease to  amuse a generation that, after the war, needed to forget.’28 Goll’s focus on the  ‘need to forget’ pinpoints the significance for any surrealist aesthetics of the paradoxical endurance of

28 ‘L’art de divertissement, l’art des ballets et du music-hall, l’art curieux, l’art pittoresque, l’art à base d’exotisme et d’érotisme, l’art étrange, l’art inquiet, l’art égoïste, l’art frivole et décadent auront bientôt cessé d’amuser une génération qui, après la guerre, avait besoin d’oublier.’ Ivan Goll, ‘Manifeste du surréalisme’, Surréalisme, 1 (October 1924), n.p.

11

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Introduction

Figure 0.1  Valeska Gert, La Diseuse, n.d.

traumatic memory: that which must be forgotten in order to protect the subject from its damaging effects cannot simply be forgotten but, instead, returns insistently as a pathological expression of trauma. The core of my argument throughout this book involves an expansion of historical p ­ arameters – from the moment of Gert’s Pause

Figure 0.2  Birgit Jürgenssen, Frau, 1972

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Introduction

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to the broader historical period, the endless ‘post-war’ of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to which works like Jürgenssen’s FRAU respond – within which surrealist art has been considered as a set of strategic and sometimes interventionist aesthetic responses to the cultural experience of trauma. One such response can be seen in a painting by the German-born Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim, made in 1947 and thus a product of the immediate post-war period (figure 0.3), but also of the long period of depression and intermittent artist’s

Figure 0.3  Meret Oppenheim, Wir können es nicht sehen, 1947

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14

The traumatic surreal

block Oppenheim endured between 1937 and the mid-1950s (which will be discussed later). Wir können es nicht sehen (We Cannot See It) is a small (65  ×  55  cm) oil painting in deep ochre, brown, and ash-grey tones in which a central grouping of white abstract or semi-humanoid figures comprise what appears as a pile of bodies lying prostrate at or falling towards the base of a dark brown-to-black central shaft which, at its peak, breaks volcano-like into a burst of lighter reds, as if depicting an explosion. These reds are echoed on each side of the base of the central form. Higher up, from this dominant central form smaller blocks of ochre and brown branch out to left and right, echoing the pattern of the white shapes and structuring the painting into a rudimentary double-crucifix, or an abstracted study (perhaps echoing Francis Bacon) of figures at the base of a single large cross. The lower portion of the image is a field of bluish-grey in which we seem to detect reflections of the white figures, as on water or ice, but on closer inspection these greyish daubs resemble a tangle of limbs, and some of the figures seem to be stylised human shapes wearing coned hats while others resemble tree branches stripped of leaves. The top left corner fades towards the edges to a dull white. Amid these lighter fields the painting oscillates between large areas of near-darkness and the smaller central pattern of fragmented light-shapes (which are also jagged, like flashes of lightning), creating a visual rhythm suggesting elements of landscape (reinforced by the prevalence of mud and ash tones but undermined by the painting’s portrait format) from which perspective has been flattened, leaving the tension between horizontal and vertical gestures as the dynamising element. The painting is mentioned briefly in Isabel Schulz’s contribution to the catalogue for the Oppenheim retrospective at Kunstmuseum Bern in 2006. This seems to be the only time it has been critically discussed. Arguing that the artist develops ‘an abstract painting that questions or eliminates the visual appearance of the phenomenon of the fleeting’, Schulz notes that works like Wir können es nicht sehen ‘make tangible seeing at the limits of visibility’.29 These works, she suggests, ‘refer to the existence of a spiritual world outside of consciousness, beyond the intellect’.30 This reading of the painting conforms to the dominant critical narrative about Oppenheim’s art, which centres on the persistent notoriety of her best-known work, Le Déjeuner en fourrure (Breakfast in Fur, 1936), and its dangerous and highly eroticised t­actility 29 ‘[…] visuellen Dimension befragt. Werke wie Wir können es nicht sehen […] oder die so genannten “Nebelbilder” machen ein Sehen an der Grenze der Sichtbarkeit erfahrbar’. Isabel Schulz, ‘Die “Allmacht des Traumes” – Traum und Unbewusstes im Werk von Meret Oppenheim’, in Therése BattacharyaStettler and Matthias Frehner (eds), Meret Oppenheim – Retrospektive (Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern/Hatje Cantz, 2006), pp. 52–3. 30 ‘[…] verweisen auf die Existenz einer geistigen Welt ausserhalb des Bewusstseins, jenseits des Intellekts’. Schulz, ‘Die “Allmacht des Traumes”’, pp. 52–3.

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Introduction

15

(hence Schulz’s emphasis on ‘making tangible’).31 Schulz’s interpretation also inserts Oppenheim into the dominant narrative about post-war surrealist art and the Bretonian ‘New Myth’ noted above, reading outwards from the painting into the perceived nebulousness of a vague spirituality. But her analysis leaves unaddressed the questions implied by the painting’s title  – what is the ‘it’ that we cannot ‘see’? And how does what we can see in the painting relate to that which ‘we cannot see’? Schulz rightly connects this painting to a later sequence of ‘Fog Pictures’ Oppenheim made in the mid-1970s (notably Verborgenes im Nebel [Hidden in the Mist] of 1974, with its fragments of colour floating in a fog effected by multiple pencil lines and thin washes of light grey, and Mann im Nebel [Man in Fog] of 1975, in which a human figure seems to struggle against a gale, striding from left to right).32 This link with much later works suggests a sustained thematic preoccupation with the painterly depiction of that which cannot be seen or is obscured from clear vision. Wir können es nicht sehen also connects to a long sequence of depictions of burials and underground scenarios, such as the inverted surreality of Das Paradies ist unter der Erde (Paradise Is Under the Earth, 1940), the underground snake of Brasilia und die grosse Erdschlange (Brasilia and the Giant Earthsnake, 1968), or Baumwurzeln (Tree Roots, 1962). These extend to container works such as the wooden box and noodles of Kasten mit Tierchen (Cabinet with Small Animals, 1936/63) or the oil painting La nuit, son volume et ce qui lui est dangereux (Night, His Volume, and What Is Dangerous to Him, 1934), and depictions of burial such as In der Nacht sterben (Dying at Night, 1953), in which a horizontal corpse sprouts a tree-like object. Burial and containment (along with concealment, demonstrated in her many masks) are, it seems, insistent tropes in Oppenheim’s work, suggesting that the ‘it’ that we ‘cannot see’ in Wir können es nicht sehen may refer not to a single thing but to a prevalent aesthetic concern with that which disappears upon being buried or hidden from view, and thus with what Schulz terms ‘the limits of visibility’, which may also be understood in painterly terms as the limits of representation. Oppenheim’s painting expresses in symbolic form, perhaps, a personal crisis (which will be addressed more fully in Chapter 1)  – the tension between figural and symbolic itself figuring the blocked artist’s struggle to re-enter the field of representation, the explosive violence of the painting gesturing towards an eruption of desire. But it also intersects with the history within which it was produced  – an immediate history of war and its aftermath, violence, destruction, and death, coded into the image as distorted figures, semblances of broken or fragmented human and natural forms like trees, 31 See for example Elisabeth Mansén, ‘Fingertip knowledge: Meret Oppenheim on the sense of touch’, The Senses and Society, 9:1 (March 2014), 5–15. 32 Schulz, ‘Die “Allmacht des Traumes”’, p. 53.

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Introduction

17

seismograph’,35 a poetic compression unpicked by Rosalind Krauss in her discussion of the ‘flow’ of automatic writing: ‘the truth of the cursive flow of drawing is less a representation of something than its recording: like the lines traced on paper by the seismograph or the cardiograph’.36 The image of artist or art as seismograph recurs in art and literary criticism of the post-war period. In her study of repressive silence in post-war West German literature Ernestine Schlant writes of ‘the privileged position of literature as the seismograph of a people’s moral positions’.37 In this critical application the artist/artwork-as-seismograph records cultural shocks, acting as a register of trauma’s traces. Art becomes a registering of what Dylan Sawyer calls ‘the seismic force of the traumatic event’.38 A seismograph records a quake – in German, eine Erschütterung, a quake or shake, a concussion or percussion, a jarring physical jolt or shock or shudder, tremor, vibration, but also implying something unsettling, and, in psychological usage, a trauma. Zutiefst erschüttert means shell-shocked, while vom Krieg erschüttert means war-torn, shattered, devastated. Erschüttert sein means to reel from the effects of something, while etwas erschüttert means that something convulses. Seelische Erschütterung, mental shock, refers specifically to trauma. The Erschütterung registers a trauma as it evokes, in the viewer or reader, a shudder. Adrian Parr, addressing the topography of memorial culture in modern-day Berlin, writes: ‘Walking the streets of Berlin today one cannot help but shudder at the thought of what took place during the late 1930s and early 1940s and in large part […] this is because the topography specific to Berlin expresses the force of memory, a force that largely cannot be measured.’39 Parr’s involuntary ‘shudder’ is a private version of this Erschütterung, explicitly connected to the ‘force of memory’ whose immeasurability is what the artwork/ artist as seismograph nevertheless seeks to record, represent, and redress. Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetic theory extensively deploys the notion of the Erschütterung, which he understands as a moment of ‘shock’ or ‘convulsion’ in the experience of the aesthetic (and specifically the aesthetic in its modernist incarnation): ‘The shock aroused by important works is not employed to trigger personal, otherwise repressed emotions. Rather, this shock is the moment in which recipients forget themselves and

35 André Breton, Nadja, Richard Howard (trans.) (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 160. 36 Rosalind Krauss, ‘The photographic conditions of Surrealism’, October, 19 (Winter 1981), 3–34; 11. 37 Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 3. 38 Dylan Sawyer, Lyotard, Literature and the Trauma of the Differend (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 172. 39 Adrian Parr, ‘Berlin and the Holocaust’, in Parr and Ian Buchanan (eds), Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory, and the Politics of Trauma (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 143–65; p. 144.

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18

The traumatic surreal

disappear into the work; it is the moment of being shaken.’40 In particular, the shock and its effects also (Adorno argues in his 1956 essay ‘Looking back on Surrealism’) characterise Surrealism’s suspension of logic in seeking the effects of the dream-state: ‘There is a shattering and a regrouping’, he writes, culminating in ‘the world-rubble of Surrealism’.41 For Adorno, this ‘shock’ takes place within the subject who experiences the artwork, confronting them simultaneously with what Roger Foster glosses as ‘the trauma of the constitution of the subject in its fearful silencing of nature’42 and with art as ‘the self-unconscious historiography of their epoch’.43 Adorno’s complex relations to Surrealism will inform some of the discussion that follows; it is important to note here the prominence in his theory of this notion of aesthetic ‘shock’ or ‘convulsion’, and to recall his comment that ‘After the European catastrophe the Surrealist shocks lost their force’,44 an assertion of Surrealism’s post-war obsolescence that the arguments in this book will constantly be contesting. Oppenheim’s metaphor of art/artist as seismograph, then, invites analogy with a wide range of associated meanings, from shock to shudder, connecting by association the aesthetic response to trauma and the surrealist emphasis (also deriving from Nadja) on ‘convulsive beauty’. More specifically, the metaphor of (woman) artist as a transformative ‘seismograph’, detecting and recording the (sometimes imperceptible, sometimes ground-breaking) traumatic tremors and quakes of a society while ­simultaneously seeking ways of changing that society by generating (like Valeska Gert) further seismic shocks through her artistic or poetic work, suggests how we might think through the implications of such a recalibration of surrealist histories outside the historical and geographical critical parameters within which they have conventionally been addressed. These parameters have hitherto been largely restricted in critical discourse to the period of early Surrealism, understood as a set of responses to the effects on bodies, minds, communities, and nations of the First World War (1914–18). Amy Lyford’s work on masculinities and Surrealism, for example, has contributed extensively to critical understanding of the complexity of relations between the First World War experiences of key surrealist figures, the art they went on to 40 ‘Betroffenheit durch bedeutende Werke benutzt diese nicht als Auslöser für eigene, sonst verdrängte Emotionen. Sie gehört dem Augenblick an, in denen der Rezipierende sich vergißt und im Werk verschwindet: dem von Erschütterung.’ Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Robert Hullot-Kentor (trans.) (London: Continuum Books, 1997), p.  244; Ästhetische Theorie (Gesammelte Schriften, volume 7) (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), pp. 362–3. 41 Adorno, ‘Looking back on Surrealism’, in Notes to Literature, volume 1, Rolf Teideman (ed.), Sherry Weber Nicholsen (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 86–90; p. 87. 42 Roger S. Foster, Adorno and Philosophical Modernism: The Inside of Things (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), p. 127. 43 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 182. 44 Adorno, ‘Looking back on Surrealism’, p. 87.

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Introduction

19

produce, and the narratives of national and cultural identity at stake in these histories, narratives of which have (as with the misdating of Valeska  Gert’s  Parisian  performance) confused temporal sequences of events. Discussing the insistence of images of dismemberment (particularly, in a patriarchal sleight of hand, of the female body) in surrealist art, Lyford argues for the belatedness of Surrealism as a cultural response, observing that ‘it appears that the surrealists were not the first to fabricate an aesthetic practice that turned on representations of bodily trauma’.45 The Parisian military hospital at Musée du Val-de-Grâce, she notes, had as early as 1917 exhibited sculpted facsimiles of wartime disfigurements and injuries for the purpose of constructing a prospective narrative of French national renewal through reparative surgery. Surrealism, in Lyford’s analysis, arrives belatedly at its own ‘aesthetics of dismemberment’ and its associated traumatic effects. If Surrealism begins in haunting, it is the distorted, confused temporality of haunting itself (‘furtive and untimely’, writes Jacques Derrida of ‘the apparition of the spectre’)46 that characterises the traumatic belatedness of early (but already overdue) Surrealism. By shifting focus to a later period, that encompassing the rise of Nazism and fascism in the 1930s, the resulting Second World War of 1939–45, and the ongoing postwar age, and by concentrating on work by women artists working within a particular group of distinct national contexts that nevertheless share a common language, I propose a reconsideration of the ways in which the adoption and adaptation of surrealist techniques, methods, theories, and practices afforded Germanophone women artists useful strategies for negotiating a specific range of traumatic historical experiences. This reconsideration leads to a redefinition of the post-Second World War trajectories of those aspects of the traditions of Surrealism deployed by Germanophone women artists as responding, in various and culturally specific ways, to the haunting aftermaths of traumatic wartime and Holocaust histories, just as the art and writing produced by the first generation of male surrealists responded to the traumatic experience of the First World War. The Traumatic Surreal thus follows the critical path trodden by scholars like Richard Langston, whose Visions of Violence: German Avant-Gardes after Fascism (2008) maps in detail the post-war German avant-garde landscape, arguing that Comprehending accurately the avant-garde after 1945 requires grasping how context and text functioned as two countervailing forces: the social and cultural repercussions of world war and mass murder at work in the aesthetic transformation and articulation of the historical avant-garde, and, conversely, the post-fascist avant-garde’s inspection of and 45 Amy Lyford, ‘The aesthetics of dismemberment’, Cultural Critique, 46 (Autumn 2000), 45–79; 46. 46 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Peggy Kamuf (trans.) (London: Routledge, 1994), p. ix.

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The traumatic surreal intervention into the effects of mass death and genocide on a population of perpetrators,

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victims, and their children.47

For Langston, ‘the imagined spectral effects of violence from the past’ are ‘the defining feature of Germany’s avant-gardes after the Second World War and the Holocaust.’48 Yet the female German practitioners of Surrealism discussed in The Traumatic Surreal remain absent from his otherwise detailed account, which mentions only Unica Zürn in passing, alongside Paul Celan and Peter Weiss, writing of them elsewhere that [w]hile their work explored markedly different forms and themes, their interest in Surrealism developed in response to surviving Germany’s hellish past. Neither borne [sic] out of nostalgia for the interwar avantgarde nor grounded in an ideology of postwar cultural renewal, their Surrealisms grew out of personal experiences of being elsewhere, as an exile, an émigré, or somewhere in between.49

The traumatic historical experiences in question include personal ones of forced migratory displacement or exile and ‘inner emigration’ (referring specifically to those writers and artists who expressed dissident views but chose to remain in Nazi Germany or German-occupied countries); invasion and military threat; and racial terror and violence. They also include wider, culturally specific and traumatic experiences of military defeat, widespread economic and social devastation and ruin, occupation by and reparation to victorious foreign powers, and the immeasurable impact of the post-war recognition of the Holocaust as an event exercising historically unique and ethically infinite demands of response and responsibility. Furthermore, the artists discussed below express contrasting relations to transgenerational experiences of responsibility and guilt in connection with past acts and to the problematic inheritance of cultural traditions, languages, and other sign-systems that simultaneously connect and separate post-war artists and history. In an interview in 1974, the German novelist Heinrich Böll emphasised the problematic status of tradition for the post-war German writer: ‘[The Third Reich] annihilated all our connections with tradition or with the natural and social environment’.50 What elements of tradition survived the Reich were likely to have been useful to the nationalist Nazi agenda, and thus be tainted by their 47 Richard Langston, Visions of Violence: German Avant-Gardes after Fascism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), p. 9. 48 Langston, Visions of Violence, p. 9. 49 Richard Langston, ‘Peter Weiss and the exilic body’, Modernism/modernity, 14:2 (April 2007), 273–90; 274. 50 Heinrich Böll, ‘Interview’ with Jean-Louis de Rambures, Commonweal, 10 May 1974, at www.commonwealmagazine.org/interview-heinrich-böll (accessed 25 January 2019).

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association with Nazism. Post-war Germanophone women artists find themselves in a similar situation, with the added and continuing problem for the woman artist of the persistent erasure, within patriarchal critical traditions, of women’s historical achievements. None of these frames necessarily excludes any other; each potentially overlaps with the others, generating a complex experiential field in which events and memories, private and public lives, traditions and repressions, and political and aesthetic concerns dynamically interact, generating narratives which are both vehicles for and transformations of memory. Within this complex network of events and experiences, the productive intersections of Germanophone women artists with surrealist practices and traditions clearly invite analysis through the burgeoning discipline of trauma theory, in which historical, ethical, and psychoanalytic modes of investigation intersect productively with textual and aesthetic theories, studies of memory, and theories of identity. The women artists studied here have mined the extraordinary diversity of post-war Germanophone cultural production (in particular literature, music, and cinema), engaging with the iconography of the aesthetics of ‘rubble culture’ (which describes the shattered national landscape of Germany at the end of the war) and ‘Stunde-Null’ (‘Zero-Hour’, meaning the disastrous/salvational moment of end-and-new-beginning for German society signalled and necessitated by the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945) to perform two simultaneous processes  – an examination of the trauma-dialectics of memory and forgetting (conscious/unconscious, represented/repressed) that permeated post-war German cultures, and a revitalisation or redirection of surrealist aesthetics and strategies in line with the new urgencies demanded by German political and economic policies of post-war representation and reconstruction. The problematics of what Böll identified as post-war German culture’s refusal of ‘interiority’51 necessitated revisions and reorganisations of surrealist strategies (which were from the beginning products of an aesthetic-political emphasis on the importance of psychic interiority) to accommodate, respond to, and navigate the absences and traumatic residues of what has sometimes seemed, in some national contexts at least, to be an immense act of post-war cultural repression. Conventional surrealist motifs such as the (decontextualised) object, the fragment, the mapping of unconscious desires, the eroticised body, play and childhood, and the avant-garde aesthetic potential of elements of folk and popular tradition, all come under severe and highly productive scrutiny amidst the responses by artists working in surrealist traditions to the German crisis of post-war representation. Responding initially (in the immediate, devastating aftermath of the Second World War) to a post-war world-become-surreal (fragmented, turned upsidedown), Germanophone women surrealist artists sought new ways of c­hallenging 51 Böll, ‘Interview’.

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The traumatic surreal

r­epresentational conventions, and developed new forms of experimentation that extended and redefined the parameters of surrealist practice in order to accommodate within their art allusions to or registers of events of seismic historical importance.

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The traumatic surreal This book offers a theoretical analysis that seeks to register, and to account for, such shocks through a re-reading of surrealist art produced since the mid-1930s by a representative selection of key women artists from Germanophone countries working in and with surrealist traditions of cultural production in a variety of media. Chapters are organised chronologically to trace the historical development of these engagements. A range of theoretical approaches are deployed to examine specific works by the following artists: the Swiss–German artist and writer Meret Oppenheim (1913–85), the German artist and writer Unica Zürn (1916–70), the Austrian artist Birgit Jürgenssen (1949–2003), the Luxembourg–Austrian film-maker Bady Minck (b. 1962), and the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth (b. 1968). The arguments explore the links, connections, overlaps, and repetitions as well as the differences, ruptures, silences, and omissions that characterise a fractured, transgenerational process of historical response to and engagement with histories of particular and constantly pressing significance for Germanophone cultures. The first chapter focusses on Meret Oppenheim’s period of ‘crisis’, and in particular on her works of the early 1940s when she resided in Basel, a period when she seems to have recalibrated her relations to Parisian Surrealism and sought new connections to avant-garde groupings that formed in wartime Switzerland. The Derridean concept of hauntology, a coinage that plays across languages on notions of haunting and ontology, provides one frame of reference for thinking about how Oppenheim’s works of this period have tended to be occluded by a critical tradition that has taken her own autobiographical statements at face value, while simultaneously focussing attention on works she made earlier, during her period of association with French Surrealism. As Katharine Conley has forcefully argued, ‘Surrealism was a haunted movement from the beginning’,52 and as noted above Oppenheim’s works open up ways of thinking about the surrealist artist’s response to the haunting residues and after-tremors of historical traumas. Oppenheim’s work is read as the expression of an extended experience of melancholia the artist suffered, prefigured, perhaps, in her 1933 drawing Dann, leben wir eben etwas später (Well, Then We’ll Live a Little Later), with its imagery of haunting and the strange temporality of its title. Extensive and remarkably diverse, her oeuvre responds at key moments and in coded ways to her family’s traumatic 52 Katharine Conley, Surrealist Ghostliness (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), p. 1.

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Introduction

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experience of Nazism. The chapter focusses on works Oppenheim produced during the war, and in particular on her little-known screenplay Kaspar Hauser oder Die Goldene Freiheit (Kaspar Hauser or the Golden Freedom),53 written in 1942–43 but only published posthumously in 1987, which explores Oppenheim’s concerns during this period with themes of alienation and incarceration, lost origins, and identity. Many of her post-war works develop, repeat/return to, or elaborate or complete earlier (pre-/ inter-war) projects, preoccupations suggesting an artistic career (de-)structured by longer-term processes of hauntological temporal interruption and delayed completion that assume powerful symbolic force across the oeuvre and which are deeply connected to negotiations of the history Oppenheim both evades and lives through. Chapter 2 engages with the pathographical dimensions of Unica Zürn’s oeuvre, which has been extensively analysed recently by critics of Surrealism and outsider art.54 None address her mental illness via trauma theory, or analyse her works as responses to traumatic historical events to which she is closely linked by family and work connections. ‘Pathography’ describes the study of patient narratives of illness, and Zürn’s works offer an extended narrative addressing aspects of psychological disorder alongside responses to historically traumatic experiences dependent on her social and professional proximity to events in Nazi Germany during the Third Reich. Born in Berlin, she remained in Germany throughout the war, and experienced at first hand the destruction of Berlin from 1943 on. Her early postwar writings offer complex insights into the development of a style and form that respond to these contexts, and her involvement with Berlin avant-gardes prior to her encounter with the surrealist Hans Bellmer offers further insights into Zürn’s development of an idiosyncratic version of surrealist writing. Her 1958 narrative Das Haus der Krankheiten (The House of Illnesses) offers a coded allegory of her wartime experience, which will be considered in relation to the complex and contradictory pathology of innere Emigration (inner emigration), the problematic ideological position adopted by artists and writers who remained in Germany but officially or covertly opposed the regime.55 Much of Zürn’s post-war oeuvre, often read as ‘outsider art’ (and developing from her connections with the surrealist Badewanne cabaret in Berlin), uses pictorial and written metaphors of inwardness/insularity and confinement/­containment alongside embedded and extensive allusions to German 53 Capitalisation is as book is titled. 54 See Esra Plumer, Unica Zürn: Art, Writing, and Postwar Surrealism (London: IB Tauris, 2016); Caroline Rupprecht, Subject to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006); and Katharine Conley, Automatic Woman: The Representation of Women in Surrealism (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). 55 See Neil H. Donahue and Doris Kirchner (eds), Flight of Fantasy: New Perspectives on Inner Emigration in German Literature 1933–1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003).

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The traumatic surreal

literary and cultural traditions to ­generate a complex pathography in which we can trace the insistent verbalisation of personal and historical trauma. A key concern of my pathographical reading of Zürn is to scrutinise her early works (pre-dating those made during and after her decline into mental illness, which have largely pre-occupied critics) as responses to the traumatised condition of Germany and its language and culture in the immediately post-war period, and precursors of her better-known anagram poems. These works display distinct formal features, comparable to developments in post-war German writing as it sought ways of responding to the haunting aftermaths of wartime history. Zürn develops these features into her pathographic versions of the traumatic surreal, in which the deformative and decompositional violences of her anagrammatisations and paratactic experiments engage with a German language damaged by the distorting forces of Nazi ideology. In doing so they construct responses to and ways of negotiating key and traumatic elements of her wartime and post-war Berlin experience. Birgit Jürgenssen’s extensive works explore the effects of power on female bodies. After considering one of her most famous self-portraits, the photograph Ich möchte hier raus! (1976), and locating such early works in relation to key moments in postwar Austrian history, the third chapter will examine her Hausfrau (Housewife, 1974) drawings along with related works like Bodenschrubben (Scrubbing the Floor, 1975), as responses to the prevalent cult of the ‘Hausfrau’ in Austrian post-war culture, a figure of repression and an ideology shaping Austrian cultural identity and the double structure of guilt and evasion marking its historical complicity with the Holocaust. The ‘Hausfrau’ is a figure deeply rooted in Austrian history and popular cultural representations, and Jürgenssen’s versions of it map closely onto National Socialist stereotypes of submissive/reproductive femininity, questioning how (and whether) the post-war redefinition of female roles differs from their construction under Nazism, a period when the female domestic sphere was militarised as part of the nationalist war effort. Feminine abjection is thus a core territory of Jürgenssen’s version of the traumatic surreal, and the chapter traces its manifestations in her explorations of ‘becoming-animal’ which allude to the fetishisation of animal forms in Nazi ideology (and which echo works by Oppenheim and Zürn), and, in particular, the Schuhwerk (Shoe-work) series (1973–76), which again clearly echoes works by Oppenheim but also presents an extended engagement with a key post-memorial icon of the Holocaust, the pile of discarded shoes on display in Auschwitz. Such coded explorations of traumatic memory present an insistent ‘troubling or “rupture” of the representational field’,56 a rupture that corresponds also to the disruptive agency of the 56 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘Birgit Jürgenssen: between the lines, beyond the boundaries’, in Gabriele Schor and Abigail Solomon-Godeau (eds), Birgit Jürgenssen (Ostfildern: Hatje Kantz, 2009), pp. 107–78; p. 125.

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Introduction

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feminine in Surrealism. The Schuhwerk works, in particular, extensively explore this rupture, mapping the sexualisation of female footwear onto the fetishisation of footwear in Nazi ideology, for example in Unter dem Pantoffel (Under the Slipper, 1976), which alludes to Heinrich Himmler’s criticism in his speech of 8 November 1937 of the Pantoffelhelden or ‘slipper hero’, the henpecked man who only has power over his slippers. In Jürgenssen’s works, the diverse forms of feminine footwear available in post-war capitalism become ghostly traces of the fetishised footwear of Nazism and the abandoned shoes of the Holocaust – the surrealist object of Oppenheim becomes, for Jürgenssen, the surrealist abject. This abjection extends to the representation of the Austrian landscape in Jürgenssen’s Landschaften pictures, and the chapter concludes with attention to a related drawing from 1973, Mit der Bahn heute in eine bessere Zukunft (With the Train Today into a Better Future), which connects Jürgenssen’s oeuvre to traumatic moments in Austria’s wartime history, and links her work to that of Bady Minck, subject of the next chapter. Chapter 4 analyses Luxembourgian Bady Minck’s film Im Anfang war der Blick (In the Beginning Was the Eye, 2003), which weaves Austrian popular, intellectual, and cultural traditions and their traumatic legacies within wartime/post-Second World War history, inscribing transgenerational memories into an Erinnerungslandschaft (‘memory-landscape’)57 collaged from high and popular cultures, including imagery of Austria’s tourist industry alongside allusions to works by Elias Canetti. Alluding to the ideological uses of tourism in 1930s Germany,58 Minck develops her ‘tourist imaginaries’ as recycled mythographies of national identity, which spatialise and negotiate historical legacies to explore how sites of trauma are repackaged as tourist destinations; public spaces are redefined in Im Anfang war der Blick in terms of the traumatic histories they witness/repress, and Minck’s film uses surrealist techniques of object-montage, oneiric juxtaposition, and disrupted temporalities to deconstruct the touristification of sites of trauma (a process of commodification critiqued in Finkelheim’s The Holocaust Industry)59 while also alluding to popular Austrian comic myths about the mountains being heaps of rubbish left behind by tourists. Drawing on animation techniques that connect it to post-war surrealist animation film traditions, Im Anfang war der Blick maps tensions within Austrian wartime and post-war history to negotiate the traumatic legacies of the nation’s annexation to the Third Reich in 1938 and its subsequent complicity with Nazism. The film’s soundscape, connected 57 Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). 58 See Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People (London: Elliot and Thompson, 2017). 59 Norman G. Finkelheim, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000).

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The traumatic surreal

to the ‘memory-landscape’, exploits the whisper to generate paranoia (as rumour and betrayal ravaged Austrian society during the Reich) alongside the radio as auditory source of information and propaganda, while trauma is constituted as a (literal) national wound in images of the Erzberg, a huge industrial site and crucial opencast mining resource exploited by the Third Reich’s importing of forced labour, a process of enslavement narrated by the whispered voice-over as it recounts annual statistics of numbers of labourers employed during the war. This site of industrial labour is counterpointed with palimpsestic tourist representations of contemporary and 1930s Salzburg. Flickering postcard images peel back post-war history to reveal the historical city, its buildings and streets unchanged but bedecked with swastika flags. The film thus scrutinises the inscription of transgenerational memory in visual and auditory landscapes, offering a critical perspective via dense literary, musical, and philosophical allusions (to Elias Canetti, to Mozart, and, in the final apocalyptic scenes of the film, to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’). Developing from the previous chapter’s concluding attention to auditory experience and the psychological impact of traumatic soundscapes, the final chapter addresses the opera Bählamms Fest (1994–98, recorded 2003) by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth. Based on a little-known precursor text, The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday (1940) by the surrealist English artist Leonora Carrington, and with a libretto by the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek, this piece explores the importance of musical tradition for Austrian cultural identity, and examines how those traditions have negotiated (or otherwise) the legacies of National Socialism in Austrian political and cultural life. While working on the opera Neuwirth wrote an Arbeitsjournal (Working Diary) which offers important insights into her thoughts and emotions during the compositional process, which occurred against the backdrop of a resurgence of far-right, and openly Nazi-apologist, politics in late-1990s Austria. She uses fragmented, deconstructed, and collaged musical, visual, and sound sources to produce musical and stage texts that challenge the conventions of performance and tonality that are endlessly celebrated in Austria’s traditional classical music culture. Her art is better understood as decompositional in its relentless and creative critiquing of conventions, traditions, and established forms. Bählamms Fest is one example of Neuwirth’s use of works by other precursor women surrealists, and her music interacts in transformative ways to effect intertextually decompositional and dynamic intersections with a variety of key avant-garde works and oeuvres. The auditory effects of voice and orchestra in Bählamms Fest (drawing on experimental classical and popular German music traditions) exemplify Neuwirth’s negotiations of trauma as integral to contemporary extensions of surrealist traditions. Max Silverman’s notion of ‘palimpsestic memory’, in which memory is understood as multi-directional and multi-dimensional, working through ‘transversal connections across time and

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Introduction

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space’ to ‘disrupt essentialist readings’,60 affords a way of theorising the reworking by Neuwirth (in music) and Jelinek (in the libretto) of Carrington and other texts in Bählamms Fest. The extraordinary variety of Neuwirth’s oeuvre extends the range of critical and aesthetic practices by Germanophone women surrealist artists explored in previous chapters, and frames some theoretical conclusions to the themes and practices discussed throughout The Traumatic Surreal. Artists working within culturally interlinked Germanic traditions require distinct and specific examination in relation to the manifestation, in the post-Second World War period, of traumatic experiences consequent on the unique historical environment and legacies of German Nazism and its politico-cultural expressions in other German-speaking nations. Furthermore, the cultural and referential aspects of these artists’ works are rooted deeply within, and in constant dialogue with, various national Germanophone cultural histories. They thus enact forms of remembrance as displacements of/away from traumatic memory, deflecting critical enquiry into other (often no less fruitful, but different) areas of scrutiny. The specific but interconnected cultural, intellectual, philosophical, and linguistic traditions and histories of the Germanophone countries discussed in this book are interwoven with localised and traditional mythic and folkloric textures (often unfamiliar to Anglophone readers and thus requiring some explication) and with those of (more internationalised) popular and mass cultural forms of modernity. These linkages, alongside the shifting relations of women’s experience to both traditional and emergent cultural forms, generate a rich and complex tapestry of artistic production with, furthermore, its own traditions of internal cross-referencing. This structure of influence constitutes another level of cross-generational remembrance and repetition, evident (for example) in Jürgenssen’s allusions to Oppenheim, and Neuwirth’s engagement with Carrington or (in other pieces) works by Zürn. The extensive body of work theorising trauma, with its explicit interests in multiple levels of cultural production and its concern with tracing the processes by which unconscious motivations emerge into expression, affords a particularly suggestive set of methods and practices for exploring the complexities of these relations. Germanophone women artists’ aesthetic responses to and analyses of the legacies of the Second World War and its traumas and aftermaths are further complicated by their various perspectives as women who lived through the wartime period (Zürn, Oppenheim), or were born in the early post-war period (Minck, Jürgenssen) or later (Neuwirth). Their differing explorations of the impacts and legacies of the cultural and political contexts of the Second World War assume complex tones and layers of 60 Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), p. 22.

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The traumatic surreal

meaning through their aesthetic engagements with the historically shifting sexual, bodily, and domestic politics of womanhood (complementing and recalibrating dominant schools of cultural trauma theory that tend to focus on deformations of masculinity by war trauma).61 This position also productively complicates questions of the gaze, of looking and looking away,62 which become key elements of post-Second World War Germanophone conceptualisations of National Socialist Mitwisserschaft (or ‘historical complicity’) and underpin theoretical questions of evasion, repression, and other forms of negotiation of historically traumatic events. The critical concept of The Traumatic Surreal seeks to navigate these concerns as they find expression in key works by artists which, often little known to Anglophone audiences, offer new insights into, and affect the historical development of, post-war Surrealism. The artists discussed here comprise one line of matrilineal descent from the male surrealists of the 1920s who responded to the traumas of the First World War; their works register the Erschütterungen across decades of the mid-century trauma of war and Holocaust, exile and displacement, internment and bereavement, and, in doing so, they constitute the traumatic surreal as a set of continuing, provisional, and constantly revised aesthetic responses to history.

61 See, for example, Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London: Routledge, 1992). 62 See Donna West Brett, Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany after 1945 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011).

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1 Meret Oppenheim’s hauntologies Even the Matterhorn fades from the mind, after many years. The photographs we took there, traces of the event, survive. (Susan Rubin Suleiman)1 Tagelang nachher zeigte sein Wesen noch die Spuren der empfundenen Erschütterung … (For days he bore the signs of shock …) (Jakob Wassermann)2

For a long time (the narrative goes), around 18 years from 1936–7 to 1954, the Swiss surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim (1913–85) endured a catastrophic psychological blockage that prevented her from working. This period haunts subsequent critical engagement with her work, just as it haunted Oppenheim’s memory. Decades later, in her 1984 interview with Robert J. Belton, she would bristle at questions about this period of ‘crisis’: ‘Let’s not talk about this any longer. Remember what I said about friendship’.3 A constellation of significant events surrounds the historical origin of this period of artistic blockage. In 1936, Oppenheim held her first solo exhibition, at the Galerie Marguerite Schulthess in Basel (the city to which she would soon relocate to escape the war). In the same year, at the Surrealist objects show at the Charles Ratton gallery in Paris, her Breakfast in Fur – the work to which her entire career has frequently been metonymically reduced by critical convention – was exhibited (writes Belinda Grace Gardner) ‘almost en passant – in the lower shelf of a vitrine, surrounded by non-European objects’.4 The popular and endlessly repeated narrative about the creation of this object – that it was Picasso’s idea to cover things in fur, that Breton

 1 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 11.  2 Jakob Wassermann, Caspar Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Herzens (Stuttgart and Leipzig: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1908) (Project Gutenberg e-book), pp. 20–1; Jakob Wassermann, Caspar Hauser: The Inertia of the Heart, Michael Hulse (trans.) (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 9.  3 Robert J. Belton, ‘Androgyny: interview with Meret Oppenheim’, in Mary Ann Caws, Rudolph Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg (eds), Surrealism and Women (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 63–75; p. 69.  4 Belinda Grace Gardner, ‘From Breakfast in Fur and back again: the conflation of image, language, and objects in Meret Oppenheim’s “applied poetry”’, in Thomas Levy (ed.), Meret Oppenheim: from Breakfast in Fur and Back Again (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2003), pp. 7–24; p. 11. This work was also displayed at the Burlington House International Surrealist Exhibition, London, June–July 1936.

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The traumatic surreal

gave the object its title – performs the now familiar function of such tales, ‘celebrating’ the remarkable creativity of the young woman artist by carefully distancing her actual agency from the production of her work, which is implicitly re-credited to the male artists associated with her. Consequently, the work (as Gardner notes) ‘eclipses its author and blots her out’,5 to the extent that Robert Belton could write (in 1991): ‘In fact, we are justified in asking whether the work is truly Oppenheim’s at all’ because ‘she implied to me that it was not her “creation” apart from the actual manufacture’.6 Such erasure began early with Oppenheim, as evident from the fact that one American critic of the December 1936 MoMA Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism show, which exhibited this work (recently purchased by Alfred H. Barr) alongside around 700 others, assumed she was a man: ‘If you would go insane quite pleasantly and painlessly, let me recommend that you bag off one of the attendants a lump of 1921 sugar out of Mr Duchamp’s Sneeze-Trap, drop it into Mr Oppenheim’s Fur Cup, stir well, and then sit down to disintegrate at the hearth of Mr Terry’s “Fireplace with Waterfall”.’7 The uncanny, distorting, centrifugal force of Le Déjeuner en fourrure (its  posthumous power described astutely by Gardner as ‘more zombie than werewolf’)8  – its seeming ability to suck in the critical gaze, seductive and distracting  – adds a further complexity to the relations between the artist’s memory, the historical record, and the expression or representation of historical events in artworks, which will be an indirect subject of, and will thus haunt, some of the discussion below. While Oppenheim was experiencing the international ‘succès de scandale’9 generated by her most famous work, historical events elsewhere in Europe were moving fast. On 3 March 1936, the Nazis banned Jewish doctors, including Oppenheim’s father, Erich, then working in Steinen, from practising in Germany (where Meret Oppenheim had been born). Erich Oppenheim relocated to the family house at Klingenthal 13 in Basel, but was also barred from practising medicine in Switzerland, meaning the family could no longer finance Oppenheim’s artistic life in Paris. In 1937, while many works by her friends were being exhibited across Europe in the Entartete Kunst exhibition, Oppenheim joined her family in Switzerland, part of the flood of surrealist artists leaving the increasingly threatening situation elsewhere in Europe. On 5 October 1938 Germany implemented (at the request of the Swiss authorities) a  5 Gardner, ‘From Breakfast in Fur and back again’, p. 13.  6 Belton, ‘Speaking with forked tongues: “male” discourse in “female” Surrealism’, in Caws, Kuenzli, and Raaberg (eds), Surrealism and Women, pp. 50–62; p. 53.  7 Edward Alden Jewell, ‘Fantasy in perspective: the Museum of Modern Art opens show of Dada …’, New York Times, 13 December 1936, 12.  8 Gardner, ‘From Breakfast in Fur and back again’, p. 13.  9 Edward D. Powers, ‘Meret Oppenheim, or, these boots ain’t made for walking’, Art History, 24:3 (June 2001), 358–78; 361.

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policy of marking all Jewish passports with a large letter J to restrict Jews from immigrating to Switzerland, a punitive law adding to the already mandatory requirement (since August 1938) for all German Jews with names of ‘non-Jewish origin’ to adopt the forenames Israel or Sara, making their identification by Swiss passport officers simple. The political climate for Jews in Switzerland in the late 1930s, while nowhere near the ever-escalating and violent oppression of Nazi Germany, was nevertheless clearly unpleasant. In her important essay on wartime and post-war Swiss exceptionalism, Regula Ludi highlights the ‘intensive economic, financial, and political entanglement between Switzerland and Nazi Germany’ and notes that ‘Swiss authorities had excluded Jewish children from popular relief programmes after the Nazis had started rounding up Jews in occupied territories’.10 In this chapter I want to focus attention on the early years of Oppenheim’s period in Switzerland during the war. My intention is to reconsider her shifting aesthetic allegiances (particularly to the group of Swiss artists who formed Gruppe 33) and artistic output during this period, taking as a guiding metaphor Oppenheim’s own image of the artist as seismograph discussed in the Introduction  – the artist as responding to, and recording traces of, the Erschütterung or ‘shuddering’ effects of the historical events amid which she finds herself living, and reading exemplary works as expressive of a complex and insistent aesthetic response to historically traumatic experiences and events. This will involve rethinking key works in Oppenheim’s output during a period conventionally regarded by criticism as mainly unproductive, and reassessing what these works suggest about her relations to Surrealism and to other avant-garde groups in Switzerland during the war, as well as what they may reveal of the artist’s own concerns, conscious or otherwise, and her relations to historical events. Just as the critical narrative will need redirecting, we will also need to reconsider some of the apparent swerves and evasions of Oppenheim’s own subsequent autobiographical recollections, which, I will argue, work hard to construct a specific narrative, and thus an identity, that are – like some of the works she made during her ‘crisis’ – haunted by another history and a different identity, suggesting the complexity of memory and recollection in relation to traumatic and palimpsestically dense histories. Discussing Holocaust memories, Michael Rothberg argues: In ‘making the past present’, recollections and representations of personal or political history inevitably mix multiple moments in time and multiple sites of remembrance;

10 Regula Ludi, ‘What’s so special about Switzerland? Wartime memory as a national ideology in the cold war era’, in Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu (eds), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 210–48; pp. 233, 234.

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The traumatic surreal making the past present opens the doors of memory to intersecting pasts and undefined futures. Memory is thus structurally multidirectional, but each articulation of the past processes that multidirectionality differently. In other words, as soon as memory is articulated

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publicly, questions of representation, ethics, and politics arise.11

Such questions permeate Oppenheim’s oeuvre, and become particularly prominent during the period of her ‘crisis’. As noted in the Introduction, earlier paintings like Dann leben wir eben später (1933) suggest a distorted temporality that critics have tended to read psychologically and in terms partly determined by Oppenheim’s own well-known interest in Jungian theory (figure 1.1). Matthias Frehner, for example, connects this painting in general terms to Oppenheim’s characteristic symbolism and out into a wider surrealist iconography, arguing that: a number of emblems that are part of the basic inventory in Oppenheim’s dreams and work […] are also part of the collective symbolism of Surrealism; the tower, the spiral or serpentine lines, the temple, water, plants and flowers. The round temple that crowns a long staircase in 1933 in the gouache Dann leben wir eben später is just as much an anticipation of the motif as the vortex condensed into a spiral in the picture Sterben in der Nacht (Dying at Night) of 1953.12

Such criticism concentrates on recurrent symbolism and repetition but ignores a crucial specific element of Dann leben wir eben später – the strange double figure descending the steps on thin, pointed legs in the foreground, a composite, Manichean image of a dark, seemingly fur-coated human apparently carrying a spectral, white figure which seems to float, arms outstretched as if crucified and wavering in a visible shiver or quaking. This ghostly hybrid form – evoking a figure burdened with its own ghostly cross, which is a chromatically inverted version of the figure itself – is both highly schematised (the faces are mere sketches of lines and dots, the legs and feet barely realised) and powerfully uncanny, conveying a vague sense of violence and threat. Connotative of burden and balance, but seemingly on the verge of toppling, it destabilises the painting’s entire formal balance, its constitutive elements confined 11 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 35–6. 12 ‘In der Brunnenplastik finden sich eine Reihe von Emblemen, die in Oppenheims Träumen und Werk zum Grundinventar gehören und die ebenso zur kollektiven Symbolik des Surrealismus zählen: der Turm, die Spirale oder Schlangenlinien, das Tempelchen, Wasser, Pflanzen und Blumen. Das Rundtempelchen, das 1933 auf der Gouache Dann leben wir eben später eine lange Treppe krönt, ist ebenso eine Motivvorwegnahme wie der zur Spirale verdichtete Wirbel im Bild Sterben in der Nacht von 1953.’ Matthias Frehner, ‘Gebaute Metaphysik: Der Berner “Meret-Oppenheim-Brunnen” von 1983’, in Battacharya-Stettler and Frehner (eds), Meret Oppenheim – Retrospektive, p. 101.

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Figure 1.1  Meret Oppenheim, Dann leben wir eben später, 1933

to the left, while the right-hand half of the image depicts a vista of steps and clouded sky. Coupled with the strange, dislocated temporality indicated by the picture’s title, with its decisive emphasis (‘Well … then’) on deferral (‘we’ll live’) into an indeterminate future (‘later’), the haunting/haunted figure-pair assumes the status of a double-revenant – a ghost of a life deferred, perhaps, a spectre of a future self. Barbara Zürcher offers an oddly literal, autobiographically predictive reading of the title’s distorted temporality – with this work, she argues, Oppenheim ‘intuitively visualises the coming melancholia and later artistic crisis’.13 Frehner, furthermore, suggests that this painting is connected to Sterben in der Nacht (1953), but a closer thematic link might be seen in works like the charcoal drawing Gespenst (Ghost) of 1954 and the ensuing line of works  – such as the gouache Gespenst of 1959, and the object Gespenst mit Leintuch (Ghost with Sheet, 1962) (figure 1.2)  – along with formally similar works like those both titled Maskierte Blume (Masked Flower, 1954 and 1958). 13 Barbara Zürcher, ‘A chronicle of life and work’, Meret Oppenheim (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 2004), at www.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/en/exhibitions/meret-oppenheim/a-chronicle-of-lifeand-work/ (accessed 18 May 2020).

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Figure 1.2  Meret Oppenheim, Gespenst mit Leintuch (Spectre au drap), 1962

The traumatic surreal

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Considered together, such works indicate the kind of traumatic representation that E. Ann Kaplan, discussing trauma in cinematic melodrama, has called ‘narration without narrativity […] without the ordered sequence we associate with narratives’.14 The disturbed temporality of haunting is explicitly thematised in these works – ghosts are made literal, their shivering presences working as iconic indicators of persistence of vision and memory, their uncanny effects echoing (the tremors of the traumatic Erschütterung) across decades from the early 1930s to the 1950s and early 1960s, moments of experience separated by the historical gulf that contains the traumatic events of the late 1930s and 1940s – the gulf that coincides with Oppenheim’s long period of ‘crisis’. Oppenheim’s ‘crisis’ While in Basel in 1937–39, Oppenheim studied at the School of Commercial Arts, and trained as a picture restorer, securing herself a source of income. She returned to Paris in mid-1939 to attend an exhibition of work by her close friend Leonor Fini, and for the display of her own piece Tisch mit Vogelfüssen (Table with Bird-feet, 1939) at René Drouin and Leo Castelli’s newly opened gallery on Place Vendôme. On 13 July 1939, a few weeks before the outbreak of the war, she departed again for  Basel. Her family soon moved again, to the grandparents’ residence at Carona,  near the Italian  border  and thus on the opposite side of Switzerland, but Oppenheim remained  in her room at Klingenthal 13 while the rest of the house was let to raise  much-needed income. At this point, most critical accounts of Oppenheim’s life  are  interrupted by  the 18-year gap. Deborah Sugg writes of ‘a period of depression which had started  in 1937’.15 Robert Belton describes ‘a prolonged period of artistic  crisis  and emotional despondency’.16 ‘The crisis lasts for eighteen years, until 1954. Like a  phoenix Meret Oppenheim soars up from the shadows’, writes Gardner.17 Whitney Chadwick refers, in a brief biographical note, to an ‘eighteen-year period of artistic crisis and redirection’.18 Oppenheim would, much later, repeatedly ascribe her ‘crisis’ to her experience as a woman artist. In a 1983 interview which further fogs any detail about the period or dates involved, she told Margot Mifflin: ‘During the war, I fell into a crisis which lasted nearly 17 years. For 14 E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Melodrama, cinema, and trauma’, Screen 42:2 (Summer 2001), 201–5; 204. 15 Deborah Sugg, ‘Meret Oppenheim 1913–85 – Desire: redefining the object for consumption’, Institute for Contemporary Arts, Women Artists Slide Library Journal, 31/32 (January–February 1990), 4–6; 5. 16 Belton, ‘Androgyny: interview with Meret Oppenheim’, p. 65. 17 Gardner, ‘From Breakfast in Fur and back again’, p. 9. 18 Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), p. 242.

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a long time I had been depressed; it had nothing to do with the war, or my marriage, or my financial situation, although I was terribly poor at the time – I was living on student finances. And [Le Déjeuner en fourrure] was 10 years old. It wasn’t that … it was a psychological problem having to do with being a woman. Very important because … I don’t like to talk about it, but it’s something that every woman must experience’.19 This statement relocates the origin of the ‘crisis’ from 1936–7 to ‘during the war’, redefines its length (‘nearly 17 years’, which would take it up to the late 1950s or even early 1960s), and mis-ascribes the age of her most notorious piece (made in 1936, and thus ‘10 years old’ in 1946, after, not ‘during’, the war). Such re-arrangement of biographical details seems to be an act of conscious self-correction – a redefinition of the causes of this problematic period via her experience of the politics of gender (equally damaging in both the surrealist movement and the art-critical world), a politics that (as we’ve already seen) was from early on working hard to erase her as active agent, as producer of her own work. ‘I don’t like to talk about it’ foreshadows her plea to Belton a year later – ‘Let’s not talk about this any longer’. Oppenheim’s own will-to-silence about this (long) period testifies indirectly to its significance – an autobiographically prominent, if not crucial, lacuna in a life and an oeuvre, one which happens to coincide with a period of violent historical rupture, and one that criticism has yet fully to explore and elucidate. This will-to-silence has in fact generated a palpable critical vacuum, in particular in relation to Oppenheim’s experiences and activities in the late 1930s and early 1940s, making it comparable to the kind of trauma that Cathy Caruth has called ‘unclaimed experience’.20 A major work of this time, the collage Das Paradies ist unter der Erde (Paradise Is Under the Earth, 1940) (figure 1.3), is dedicated to ‘Hans Ueli’  – Hans Ulrich, ‘Jimmy’ Ernst, Max Ernst’s son, who in 1940 was petitioning Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee to release his father from internment by France’s Vichy government as an ‘enemy alien’ in Camp des Milles in Aix-en-Provence. (We’ll return to Ernst’s internments in Chapter 5.) Das Paradies ist unter der Erde has received some critical attention  – Elisabeth Bronfen, for example, argues that ‘visually the picture is about the dialectic of invisibility and visibility’ (‘visuelle geht es um die Dialektik von Unsichtbarkeit und Sichtbarkeit’);21 while Dominik Imhoff describes the image: ‘Inside the well is a tree, one can recognise even a whole landscape. Downward the 19 Margot Mifflin, ‘An interview with Meret Oppenheim’, Women Artists News, 7 (1986), 30–2; 30. 20 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 21 Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘“Man weiß nicht woher die Einfälle einfallen”’  – Über das Verhältnis von Form und Nichts bei Meret Oppenheim’, in Heike Eipeldauer, Ingried Brugger, and Gereon Sievernich (eds), Meret Oppenheim: Retrospektive (Bern: Bank Austria Kunstforum/Hatje Cantz, 2015), pp. 35–44; p. 37.

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Figure 1.3  Meret Oppenheim, Das Paradies ist unter der Erde (Paradise Is Under the Earth), 1940

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The traumatic surreal

same tree continues to grow in the opposite direction, into the subterranean sky.’22 The deep browns and reds of this image delineate a colour-palette that will recur in many works of Oppenheim’s ‘crisis’ period, while the inverted and interred branches suggest not the growth of the tree but its burial. The dating of this collage to 1940 places it close to Oppenheim’s relocation in Basel in mid-1939, suggesting a double and obvious autobiographical significance – the flourishing tree suddenly cut down, its branches incarcerated in the coffin-like space of the well, and, simultaneously, the experience of being uprooted and relocated or transplanted. In their exploration of art-making, Björn Krondorfer and Karen Baldner write that ‘To be uprooted is less the result of a deliberate cutting of one’s roots than a response to unsettling forces greater than oneself: exile, expulsion, emigration’.23 Oppenheim’s image pre-visions Paul Celan’s lines ‘In der Luft, da bleibt deine Wurzel, da,/in der Luft’ (‘In the air your root stays on, there,/in the air’; from the poem ‘In der Luft’ of 1963), cited by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer as an epigraph to their essay on nostalgia and rootlessness, ‘“We could not have come without you”: Generations of Nostalgia’.24 Das Paradies ist unter der Erde, with its severe cut and its iconography of constriction, incarceration, and burial, powerfully expresses the sense of uprootedness explored by Hirsch and Spitzer. The recently published facsimile of Oppenheim’s scrapbooks reveals that she placed a monochrome reproduction of this work opposite a reproduction of a portrait of herself by Irène Zurkinden (captioned by Oppenheim ‘In meinem Atelier, 1940 [Sommer]’) (figure 1.4).25 This juxtaposition reveals remarkable similarities between the two paintings. The brick patterning of the well in Das Paradies resembles the checked dress Oppenheim wears in the Zurkinden portrait, which is also cut square across her décolletage, like the well’s upper brick section; the coiled well-rope is echoed by the ventilator bars in the upper right of the portrait. Together, the two images suggest a kind of double-self-portrait – a painted portrait, with its realism of resemblance and framing context (In meinem Atelier), and its surreal re-collaging and re-framing into a cross-section via a cut-up image, dislocating it generically from portrait to landscape. They relocate Oppenheim as object of a new, double gaze, 22 ‘Im Inneren des Brunnens ist ein Baum, sogar eine ganze Landschaft zu erkennen, und nach unten wächst derselbe Baum in die entgegengesetzte Richtung weiter in den unterirdischen Himmel.’ Dominic Irmhoff, untitled catalogue text, in Battacharya-Stettler and Frehner (eds), Meret Oppenheim – Retrospektive, p. 224. 23 Björn Krondorfer and Karen Baldner, ‘From pulp to palimpsest: witnessing and re-imagining through the arts’, in Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro (eds), Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2013), pp. 132–62; p. 140. 24 In Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (eds), Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 79–95; p. 79. 25 Lisa Wenger and Martina Corgnati (eds), Meret Oppenheim: Worte nicht in giftige Buchstaben einwickeln (Zürich: Scheidegger and Spiess, 2015), pp. 180–1.

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Figure 1.4  Meret Oppenheim, ‘Das Album von der Kindheit bis 1943’: Meret Oppenheim, Das Paradies ist unter der Erde (on the left) and Irène Zurkinden, Portrait of Meret Oppenheim, Sommer 1940 (on the right)

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comprising those of herself and the female painter Zurkinden, and not the principally male gaze of the surrealists – for example of Man Ray, who had photographed her seven years earlier (images to which we’ll return). They furthermore position her in a new domestic and national context, into which, like a cutting, she is grafting herself. In this reading, Das Paradies ist unter der Erde is recast as a work indicating and exploring Oppenheim’s shifting allegiances consequent on her uprooting and relocation to Basel at the end of the 1930s. ‘A dark time …’ One effect of Oppenheim’s autobiographical statements has been to distract critical attention from the kind of narrative that would account for how her works and actions may be read in this way, as responses to historical events and experiences. Her metaphor of the artist as seismograph is, in this sense, an illuminating clue, in the light of which this other narrative might begin to be discerned. In 1987, Hans Christoph von Tavel published in the Berner Kunstmitteilung his notes for a biographical outline of Oppenheim he had intended to be included in the exhibition catalogue for the big retrospective Meret Oppenheim at the Museum der Stadt Solothurn (28 September–10 November 1974).26 Von Tavel’s notes reveal a wealth of information that Oppenheim, for initially unclear reasons, did not want included in her biographical narrative, and which provides the initial basis for recasting critical histories of her activities during the late 1930s and the early war years. Her decision to return to Basel, according to von Tavel’s notes, was because (she told him) ‘into the wealth of life, love, and art settled increasingly a darkness. Depressions, which had already been suffered in Parisian times, became a constant state […]. From externally a dark time had broken in, even though, as M.O. says, that didn’t influence what she was experiencing inside.’27 This emphasis on separating the artist’s inner experience from external historical reality, while sustaining the contradictory metaphor of an intrusion from outside to inside – darkness intruding ‘from externally’ – characterises the swerves and elisions of classic Freudian repression, which develops into a form of self-censorship bordering on disavowal. Cathy Caruth argues that ‘Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its 26 Hans Christoph von Tavel, ‘Meret Oppenheim und ihre Biographie. Autobiographische Notizen’, Berner Kunstmitteilung, 254 (1987). Reprinted in Wenger and Corgnati, Meret Oppenheim: Worte nicht in giftige Buchstaben einwickeln, pp. 412–17. 27 ‘In die Lebens-, Liebes- und Kunstfülle nistete sich immer mehr Dunkles ein. Depressionen, die auch während der ersten Pariser Zeit immer wiedergekehrt waren, wurden zu einem Dauerzustand. […] Äusserlich war eine düstere Zeit hereingebrochen, wenn diese auch, wie M.O. sagt, keinen Einfluss hatte auf das, was in ihrem Innern vorging.’ Von Tavel, ‘Meret Oppenheim und ihre Biographie’, p. 416.

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very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on.’28 Oppenheim’s conversation with von Tavel reveals a crucial and apparently ‘unassimilated’ fact: that Oppenheim asked him to omit from the biography ‘the difficulties that the Jewish name ‘Oppenheim’ created for her family and herself during the Nazi regime’.29 This desire for silence is, of course, deafening in what it reveals. Von Tavel’s notes record what Oppenheim said to him, revealing a narrative markedly different from that of the oppressed woman artist: When the flood of excrement and filth engulfed the Jews, I was a child. I didn’t know anything of the existence of anti-Semitism. In my family, and nowhere amongst acquaintances and at school, nobody differentiated protestants, Jews, catholics. Of course I had to confront it now. It wasn’t easy, you must consider that I felt as ‘Jewish’ as, for example, imagine your grandfather was a Freemason. Suddenly there is a hunt for Freemasons. It also impacts on you (even though you never bothered about Freemasons) […] Your reaction would certainly be the same as mine – namely, why does this have anything to do with me? But the longer and the more I thought about this anti-Semitism, the more I saw the backgrounds, the great unfairness, the more it became clear to me (I also read about it) that since the 3rd century church and state stimulated the most primitive feelings towards Jewish people. The Jews are people exactly like everybody else, and the criteria by which people label the Jews either developed through how they were forced to live or are just imaginary, slanderous. Please leave out: ‘as “a Jewess” which she could not overcome’ [Bitte lass aus: ‘als “Jüdin”, was sie nicht verwand’]. The mourning for the persecution of the Jews or the African Americans or the Native Americans is the same. All this should never be overcome [verwinden]. It is deeply sad, a mark of shame. I doubt whether it ever changes. The strong ones will always stamp on the weaker.30 28 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 4. 29 Von Tavel, ‘Meret Oppenheim und ihre Biographie’, p. 416. 30 ‘Als sich eine Flut von Kot und Unrat über die Juden ergoss, war ich ein Kind. Ich wusste nichts von der Existenz von Antisemitismus. In meiner Familie, aber auch an keinem andern Ort, bei Bekannten, in der Schule, hatte man einen Unterschied zwischen Protestanten, Juden, Katholiken gemacht. Natürlich musste ich mich nun damit auseinandersetzen. Es war nicht einfach. Du musst denken, dass ich mich so “jüdisch” fühle wie z. B. Du. Stelle Dir vor, ein Grossvater von Dir sei, sagen wir, Freimaurer gewesen. Plötzlich setzt eine Freimauererverfolgung ein. Auch Dich trifft es (obwohl Du Dich nie um die Freimauerer gekümmert hast). Hast Du den Eindruck, dass Du Dich als Freimauerer “fühlst”, weil Dein Grossvater Freimauerer war? Deine Reaktion wäre sicher die gleiche wie meine es war, nämlich: Was geht das mich an! Aber je länger je mehr ich mir diese Sache mit dem Antisemitismus überlegte, je mehr sah ich die Hintergründe, die grosse Ungerechtigkeit, je klarer wurde mir (ich las auch darüber) dass seit dem 3ten Jahrh. Kirche und Staat die primitivsten Gefühle gegen die Juden aufhetzten. Dass die Juden Leute sind exakt wie alle andern, und dass alle die Eigenschaften, die man als jüdisch bezeichnet, nur durch die Bedingungen entstanden, in denen man sie zu leben zwang, und die man ihnen

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The relation to historical events recorded here is significant for two reasons. Firstly, it indicates that Oppenheim’s identity was, during the late 1930s, forced by historical events to confront its ‘difference’, one that had previously been of little or no concern to her (‘it impacts on you’). Unconsciously she echoes Franz Kafka: ‘What have I in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself …’.31 This forced confrontation led Oppenheim to a kind of crisis that necessitated a subsequent repression or silencing. The surrealist ‘child-woman’ (of which, Bettina Brandt argues, Oppenheim was ‘the perfect embodiment’)32 becomes the child-witness (‘I was a child’ – but Oppenheim was 20 in 1933, the year of Hitler’s rise to power) to historically traumatic events that shift both her self-perception and her culturally defined identity. Secondly, the passage clearly indicates that Oppenheim spent much time and thought (‘I also read about it’) on trying to understand the historical context within which she found herself, and perceived its influence as ‘a mark of shame’. Oppenheim’s work from 1939–40 onward, and particularly that made during the war years, demands careful reinterpretation in light of the impact of that effort to understand her historical situation (‘why does this have anything to do with me?’), and its coinciding with the beginning of her long period of ‘crisis’. In this light, wartime works like Das Tragisch-Komische (The Tragic-Comic) (figure 1.5), painted and (as we’ll see) exhibited in 1944, assume new significance. As noted above, many works of this period deploy a colour palette of reds, browns, and greys  – redolent of blood, earth, and ash  – a tonal range connoting confrontations with historical events, and indicative of a tension between Oppenheim’s struggle to redefine or reidentify her work and her self in relation to her new working context and to historical pressures beyond her control, and her continual renegotiation of her surrealist past. Das Tragisch-Komische depicts a strange sculptural object, a sinister melding of organic and machined material, bone and concrete, clean lines and irregular geometry, with a strange futuristic glass device nestling atop it, against a field of deep speckled red fading to the left to light brown with, at the base, a sharp linear block of black with a recurrent green cross pattern, like a wallpaper, separated from the larger reddish-brown field by a thin white line. Reminiscent of tightly folded limbs or butchered animal corpses, suggesting a merging of the savagery of Chaim Soutine’s Le boeuf écorché (Carcass of Beef, c.1925, a work possibly seen by Oppenheim at a ausserdem andichtet. Bitte lass aus: “als ‘Jüdin’, was sie nicht verwand”. Die Trauer ist die gleiche, ob ich von Juden-, Neger- oder Indianerverfolgungen höre. All das kann u. soll man nicht verwinden. Es ist tieftraurig und ein Schandfleck. Ob es je ändert zweifle ich. Immer warden die Stärkeren die Schwächeren zertreten.’ Von Tavel, ‘Meret Oppenheim und ihre Biographie’, p. 416. 31 Franz Kafka, ‘8 January 1914’, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, Max Brod (ed.), Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt (trans.) (London: Penguin, 1948), p. 252. 32 Bettina Brandt, ‘The coming of age of the child-woman: Meret Oppenheim, Surrealism and beyond’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1993), p. 18.

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Figure 1.5  Meret Oppenheim, Das Tragisch-Komische, 1944

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The traumatic surreal

Soutine exhibition in Paris in 1937)33 with the cool abstraction of brutalist sculpture, Das Tragisch-Komische presents a three-dimensional sculptural object or pattern (an exercise in violent geometry) that recurs in a variety of forms in subsequent works. Analogous forms can be seen, for example, in the near-abstract drawings Sonne, Mond und Formen (Sun, Moon and Forms, 1960) and the tree studies Weisser Baum (White Tree), Baumgeäst (Branches of a Tree), Baumgeäst (mit kleinen Rautenformen (Branches of a Tree [with Small Diamond Forms]), and Baum im Mondlicht (Tree in Moonlight) (all 1960), all of which also evoke memories of Das Paradies ist unter der Erde. In 1962’s Baumwurzeln (Roots of Trees) the folded roots increasingly resemble buried human limbs. The sculpture Unterirdische Schleife (Subterranean Bow), made in 1960, echoes this compressed form. Later works like Spirale  – Schlange im Rechteck (Spiral  – Snake in Rectangle, 1973) and Schnecke (Snail, 1977) offer variations on the basic structure of this form  – folded, overlapping, angular forms that gesture towards artificial pattern and repetition while sometimes sustaining the organic, natural connotations indicated by their titles. The violence of these images  – their forceful crushing and compressing of the  object of representation into confined, distorted, stump-like shapes – indicates their basis in a persistent after-image of a dominant visual symbol of the late  1930s and early 1940s,  the Nazi swastika, which Oppenheim seems, in such works, to be repeatedly and violently twisting, shattering, and transforming into new configurations. This is most evident in the 1970 object Wort, in giftige Buchstaben eingepackt (wird durchsichtig) (Word Wrapped in Poisonous Letters [Becomes Transparent]), a wire construction or ‘Umriss’ (outline) that refolds the swastika’s arms into the skeleton of an empty package (figure 1.6). Bronfen describes this work as ‘das Umreißen des “luftigen Nichts” zum ästhetischen Gegenstand erhoben’ (‘the outline of the “airy nothing” raised to the level of an aesthetic object’), a description in which ‘Umreißen’ retains the ambiguity of meaning both ‘outline’ and ‘tearing down’.34 Post-war works like 1960’s Schwarze Wolken (Black Clouds) and Schwarzer Kamin (Black Chimney, 1966) furthermore appear in this light to be connected thematically, their iconography resonating with that of the Holocaust, ashes, death, suggesting a covert counternarrative structuring Oppenheim’s oeuvre. This iconography permeates the apparent abstraction of paintings like Schwarze Strich-Figur vor Gelb (Black Stick Figure on Yellow, 1960–81) (figure 1.7), which, read in this way, resembles nothing so much as a deconstructed Judenstern. A persistent thread within Oppenheim’s post-war oeuvre returns repeatedly to such contorted 33 Soutine exhibited 12 works at the Les maîtres de l’art Indépendent 1895–1937, Petit Palais, Paris, June– October 1937. 34 Bronfen, ‘“Man weiß nicht woher die Einfälle einfallen”’, p. 37.

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Figure 1.6  Meret Oppenheim, Wort, in giftige Buchstaben eingepackt (wird durchsichtig) (Word Wrapped in Poisonous Letters [Becomes Transparent]), 1970

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Figure 1.7  Meret Oppenheim, Schwarze Strich-Figur vor Gelb (Black Stick Figure on Yellow), 1960–81

or distorted figures, which record haunting after-images of the visual impact of traumatic historical events of the late 1930s and the war years. Wagen 34 (Wagon 34, 1969), clearly alluding to memories of wartime refugee transports, offers another fragment of this counternarrative.

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This reading suggests that we can understand key elements of Oppenheim’s diverse oeuvre as expressions of a persistent preoccupation with haunting memories and experiences during the period of ‘crisis’, including the struggle to distance herself from, while retaining the creative drive associated with, Surrealism. Many of her post-war works develop, repeat/return to, or elaborate or complete earlier (pre/inter-war) projects. The sculpture Genevieve (1971) (figure 1.8), for example, reworks a watercolour study of 1942 and is linked to a number of earlier works including Der Spiegel der Genoveva (The Mirror of Genevieve), a pair of drawings from 1967, the abstract painting Genoveva und vier Echos (Genevieve and Four Echoes, 1956), and the oil paintings Genoveva über dem Wasser schwebend (Genevieve Hovering over the Water, 1957) and Das Leiden der Genoveva (The Suffering of Genevieve, 1939). This group of works, produced in a variety of media across several decades, draws on the medieval legend of Genevieve of Brabant, who embodies the chaste wife falsely accused and exiled. The legend is recollected in literature, music, and film, in numerous works including an 1850 opera by Schumann, an 1866 play by Mathilde Wesendonck, and Arthur Maria Rabenalt’s 1952 film La Leggenda di Genoveffa, indicating how Oppenheim engaged with and contributed her own innovative slant to Germanophone cultural traditions. She may even be alluding in these works to Geneviève Lancelin, who in February 1933 had (along with her mother) been brutally murdered by the Papin sisters in a notorious French crime that caught the attention of the surrealists  – the May 1933 issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution carried a full-page double portrait of the Papin sisters before and after their crime.35 However, Oppenheim suggested, in an interview with Suzanne Pagé and Béatrice Parent in 1984, that the 1971 sculpture might be interpreted as a disturbingly fractured self-portrait, expressive not of a recuperation of past works but of a traumatised failure specifically to recollect her experiences from 1942: ‘When the sculpture was finished, I asked myself what the broken arms meant. In fact, it was the impossibility of doing something, to act, the state where I found myself in 1942’.36 These examples indicate a variety of ways in which Oppenheim returned to works, themes, and concerns which haunted her imagination across decades. The temporal processes of delay, interruption, repetition, and incompletion, along with the implicit identification with legendary figures like Genevieve of Brabant, suggest a longer-term process of hauntological temporal interruption and delayed resolution that assumes 35 See Rachel Edwards and Keith Reader, The Papin Sisters (Oxford Studies in Modern European Culture) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Jonathan P. Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 176–80. 36 ‘Quand la sculpture a été terminé, je me suis demandé ce que signifiaient les bras cassés. En fait c’était l’impossibilité de faire quelque chose, d’agir, état ou je me trouvais en 1942’. Meret Oppenheim, ‘Interview de Meret Oppenheim par Suzanne Pagé et Béatrice Parent’, in Meret Oppenheim (Paris: ARC, Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1984), p. 17.

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Figure 1.8  Meret Oppenheim, Genevieve, 1971

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powerful symbolic force across the oeuvre and is deeply connected to negotiations of the traumatic histories that Oppenheim both evaded and lived through, as well as to the aesthetic and cultural identifications she forged at different periods. This doubling of temporal movement and displacement is an expression of what Bice Curiger calls Oppenheim’s ‘unique perception of time’37  – another version of the artist-as-­ seismograph, detecting and recording, sometimes at significant historical distance and delay, the haunting tremors and temporal confusions of traumatic experience. We will now turn to Oppenheim’s activities in Switzerland during her ‘crisis’ period, in order to trace the development of her aesthetic practice and allegiances during this time. Oppenheim in Basel Bice Curiger’s account of the period of ‘crisis’ draws attention in general terms to Oppenheim’s artistic work during this time: ‘It lasted until 1954, though she did not, as is so often assumed, merely lay down her tools during all those years. Instead, tormented by a kind of mental fatigue, she often destroyed, reworked or simply stacked unfinished pictures in a corner.’38 Edward D. Powers’s analysis of Oppenheim’s objects (‘the most important’ and ‘the most accomplished’ of her works, he argues)39 considers this set of practices in relation to the catalogue raisonné Oppenheim compiled with Dominique Bürgi from the early 1960s onwards: the ideas of her artworks survive these lost or destroyed  – unreproduced or otherwise unaccounted-for – works themselves, if only by virtue of the, at times, wonderfully quizzical catalogue raisonné […]. Its entries memorialize absence no less than presence; indeed, its captions – the media and dimensions, titles and dates she scrupulously enumerates – eloquently and in great number often testify, literally, to nothing, to lacunae where the apposite works ought to be.40

Powers’s language here is suggestive of the haunted critical narrative which can be traced in writings on Oppenheim; indeed, questions of ‘survival’ and of the ‘memorializing’ of ‘absence’ necessarily haunt art-historical narratives of this period. Oppenheim’s catalogue raisonné, reproduced in Curiger’s book, reveals that 92 works have been included without an image (and are thus presumably lost or destroyed)  – 7 from the period up to 1937, 13 from the period of ‘crisis’, and 72 37 Bice Curiger, Meret Oppenheim: Defiance in the Face of Freedom (London and Zürich: ICA/Parkett Publishers, 1989), p. 89. 38 Curiger, Meret Oppenheim, p. 50. 39 Powers, ‘Meret Oppenheim, or, these boots ain’t made for walking’, 361. 40 Powers, ‘Meret Oppenheim, or, these boots ain’t made for walking’, 367.

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since 1954. These statistics need to be mapped onto the fact of her evidently reduced productivity between 1937 and 1954, compared with her remarkable creativity after 1954 up to her death in 1985. Oppenheim’s practice of recording details of works either lost or destroyed echoes that of the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste (German Lost Art Foundation) and its focus on ‘cultural assets confiscated by the National Socialists through persecution, particularly those from former Jewish owners (so-called ‘Nazi confiscated art’)’.41 Its Database website lists works and, where known, their media, dimensions, and provenance, and supplies an image of the work if available; most entries, of course, lack such an image.42 In appearance the Database is remarkably similar to Oppenheim’s catalogue raisonné, which memorialises her oeuvre and its gaps across five decades. Of course, these histories overlap. Anne Rothfeld notes that on 30 June 1939, two weeks before Oppenheim’s departure from Paris to Basel, an auction of 126 degenerate artworks took place in 1939 at the Fischer Gallerie [actually at the Grand Hotel National] in Lucerne, Switzerland, in order to increase revenues for the [Nazi] party […]. Confiscated artworks were often saved for private Nazi and German collections, while some pieces were sold to buyers through neutral countries like Switzerland to raise capital for purchasing additional art pieces and to purchase materials for the Nazi war machine. Additionally, Switzerland offered a large market to sell off ‘degenerate art’.43

Oppenheim’s relocation to Basel needs to be understood in the context of such pre-war events and of Switzerland’s role during the war as a nation whose political neutrality was necessarily compromised on both sides. Detlev F. Vagts comments on one notorious wartime Swiss policy: Most dreadful is the turning away of some twenty thousand Jews who were attempting to escape from Nazism in 1942 after the nature of the threat to them from the Holocaust had become apparent, at least to policy-making members of the Swiss Government. The latter instituted a policy of rejecting claims for refugee status based on race, as differentiated from politics. The persons most affected were refugees from France, since reaching the Swiss border through Germany was already impossible. There was considerable protest 41 ‘Responsibilities and specific tasks of the German Lost Art Foundation’, German Lost Art Foundation, n.d., at www.kulturgutverluste.de/Webs/EN/Foundation/Tasks/Index.html (accessed 5 May 2020). 42 This echoes the curatorial practice of hanging empty frames to represent missing, lost, or destroyed artworks in, for example, the Neue Galerie’s Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937 exhibition (New York, 13 March–1 September 2014). 43 Anne Rothfeld, ‘Nazi looted art’, The Holocaust Records Preservation Project, 34:2 (Summer 2002), at www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/summer/nazi-looted-art-1.html (accessed 4 May 2020).

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within Switzerland as the reality became known and eventually the policy was relaxed, but

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much too late to avoid the destruction of these unfortunate would-be emigres.44

Having herself immigrated to Switzerland from France three years earlier, Oppenheim would surely have been aware of such policies and their implications, which resonated within a national context defined by the reactionary ideological movement of Geistige Landesverteidigung (spiritual national defence), ambivalently antifascist but also characterised (Regula Ludi argues) by ‘its veneration of old customs’, ‘suspicious of modernism’, and, furthermore, propagating ‘a strict sexual division that denied the facts of women’s integration in the labour market and participation in public life’.45 Oppenheim’s decision, while in Basel, to affiliate herself as an artist with the Gruppe 33 thus becomes all the more politically significant. Gruppe 33 was a loose collective of Swiss artists founded on 10 May 1933, the day the Nazis began burning books en masse. Explicitly anti-fascist and deeply critical of Swiss cultural conservatism, the group comprised a number of artists with some pedigree in European modernism. Oppenheim had met, and forged friendships with, many of these artists before her departure from Basel to Paris in 1932 with Irène Zurkinden (1909–87), whom she had known since the late 1920s. Zurkinden stayed in Paris until the outbreak of the war, when she returned with her family to Basel, where she exhibited with Gruppe 33 from 1942. Among the founding members of the group was Zürich-born Paul Camenisch (1893–1970), who had, in 1924, also founded the RotBlau group of expressionist painters. After studying architecture, he had worked with, and been deeply influenced by, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Camenisch’s painting Bild des Bildhauers Hermann Scherer (Portrait of the Sculptor Hermann Scherer) had featured in the Entartete Kunst exhibition in 1937, and is now lost.46 Walter Bodmer (1903–73), born in Basel, had been influenced by Matisse and Derain, and experimented with cubism before turning to abstraction and sculpture in the 1930s. While in Switzerland Oppenheim also associated with the Allianz group, which had formed in 1937 and exhibited collectively early that year at the Neue Kunst in der Schweiz in Kunsthalle Basel. The Allianz group initially aimed (as its name implies) to represent the interests of artists to the government, and to critique the culturally conservative artistic scene in Switzerland.47 Later, the group coalesced in terms of theory 44 Detlev F. Vagts, ‘Switzerland, international law and world war II’, The American Journal of International Law, 91:3 (July 1997), 466–75; 472. 45 Ludi, ‘What’s so special about Switzerland?’, pp. 216–17. 46 Stephanie Barron, ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles, CA: Museum Associates/LACMA, 1991), p. 213. 47 María Amalia García, Abstract Crossings: Cultural Exchange Between Argentina and Brazil (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2019), p. 118.

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and practice around notions of concrete art, holding the Konkrete Kunst exhibition in Basel in March–April of 1944 which (María Amalia García argues) ‘paid tribute to Mondrian, who had died in New York earlier that year, but also provided a space of resistance to Nazi persecution, safeguarding a certain abstract tradition’.48 Two years earlier, the Allianz exhibition of May–June 1942 at Kunsthaus Zürich had featured two paintings by Oppenheim – Der Phoenix (1939) and Einige der ungezählten Gesichter der Schönheit (listed under its French title, Quelques-uns des innombrables visages de la beauté [Some of the Uncounted Faces of Beauty], 1942) – suggesting that, at this time, she was actively painting and finding spaces to exhibit the work she was producing in wartime Basel, in the face of a very guarded critical reception by the conservative arts establishment. A detailed review of this show, for example, makes cryptic mention of Meret Oppenheim ‘mit ihren öffentlichen Geheimnissen’ (‘with her open secrets’).49 The catalogue for this exhibition emphasised the seismographic importance of Surrealism as a register of the haunting uncanniness of current events: ‘The appearance of Surrealism, as it is expressed in the works of Wiemken, Erni, Möschlin, Oppenheim, and von Moos, is inseparably linked to current events. With foresight, the surrealists have already painted the war with its disturbances, abnormalities and senselessness. They have always shown us the ghostliness, the uncertainty of the times, not only their own psychological situation, but above all, the situation of those around them.’50 Perhaps the most significant member of Gruppe 33 for Oppenheim was Walter Kurt Wiemken, whom she may have met while in Paris, where he had first stayed in 1927–28. Wiemken subsequently worked in Collioure, Basel, and the French capital, visiting several times during the period of Oppenheim’s residence there through the 1930s. Born in Basel in 1907, he experimented with expressionism and (via Picasso and Seligmann) Surrealism, and had been affiliated to Camenisch’s Rot-Blau group. Seven of his works featured in the 1942 Allianz show in Zürich. Wiemken died in December 1940, after falling into a ravine in Castel San Pietro. Oppenheim commented on his death: ‘Er hatte das Grauen der Welt nicht mehr ertragen können’ (‘He could no longer stand the horror of the world’)51 – a statement that implies she 48 García, Abstract Crossings, p. 118. 49 Anon (‘me’), ‘Ausstellung der Allianz im Kunsthaus’, Die Tat (Zürich), Friday 5 June 1942, 5–6; 6. 50 ‘der surrealismus, wie er sich in den werken von wiemken, erni, möschlin, oppenheim und von moos ausdrückt, ist als erscheinung untrennbar mit den gegenwärtigen geschehnissen verbunden. vorausahnend haben die surrealisten schon den krieg mit seinen zerstörungen, abnormalitäten und sinnlosigkeiten gemalt. sie haben das gespensterhafte, die unsicherheit der zeit empfunden, uns seit jeher nicht nur ihre eigene psychologische situation, sondern vor allem auch als mittler die situation ihrer umgebung angezeigt.’ Anonymous, catalogue text for Allianz: Vereinigung moderner Schweizer Künstler (Zürich: Kunsthaus Zürich, 1942), p. 3 (non-capitalisation as in original). 51 ‘Immer wieder Basel’, Meret Oppenheim: Leben und Werk, n.d., at www.meret-oppenheim.de/basel.htm (accessed 5 May 2020).

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understood his death to be a suicide. Her major wartime work Krieg und Frieden (War and Peace), painted in 1943 (figure 1.9), was exhibited alongside five other of Oppenheim’s recently made works in the 1945 12 Jahre Gruppe 33 at Kunstmuseum Basel (which, in 1949, bought the painting).52 This painting takes elements from Theodor Barth’s 1934 painting Friedliches Land (Peaceful Country) (notably the symbolic image of the lamb seems to derive from this painting) and merges them with aspects of Walter J. Möschlin’s disturbingly Gothic depiction of wartime devastation, Totes Land (Dead Land, 1940). But Oppenheim’s title also clearly alludes to Wiemken’s 1937 work responding to the Spanish Civil War, Frieden und Krieg (figure 1.10). Wiemken’s painting prefigures the form and some of the details of Oppenheim’s, suggesting her painting may be read, in turn, as a response to his. Both works depict landscapes peopled with faintly sketched or semi-obscured figures. In Wiemken’s, these figures are balanced on branches or frames, walking in gardens or along roads, precariously suspended but seemingly oblivious to the biplanes overhead from which bombs are falling into a pastoral vision with a cluster of distant white mountains etched against a pale sky like a seismograph trace  – a landscape more Swiss than Spanish. Oppenheim’s painting, altogether darker, replaces the frames with what seem to be chains or threads of light (which echo the lines and dots of light that seem to illuminate the woods in Wiemken’s picture). These fragile, filament-like structures criss-cross the bleak, almost featureless landscape like fragments of fencing or the remains of collapsed structures, but shed scant illumination on the gloom. Human figures are faintly discernible, a group of three just left centre including one apparently metamorphosing into a white-rooted tree, another in the foreground dressed in bright red, sitting beside the oversized lamb (which replaces Wiemken’s outlined horse-and-cart and stag), both figures turned away from us towards the distantly glowing horizon. The lamb also replaces the flying white angels above and ahead of the biplanes in Wiemken’s painting. The two pictures perform a kind of symbolic dance involving imagery evoking destruction (Wiemken) or utter desolation (Oppenheim); each deploys a series of schematised motifs, spatial relations, and tonal shifts that suggests a shared psychological palette of anxiety and gloom, a registering of each artist’s experience of a world vom Krieg erschüttert. If, as suggested above, Oppenheim has also acknowledged or borrowed from Barth and Möschlin, it’s possible to read Krieg und Frieden as a work expressive simultaneously of personal psychological tensions and haunted anxieties, prevailing historical threat, and new subcultural affiliation  – the work of an artist actively 52 The other works were: Bouquet de pierres (1944), La Main de la mélancolie (1943), In der Nähe des Mondes (1944), Eine Hexe (1944), and Diana auf der Elsternjagd (1939).

Figure 1.9  Meret Oppenheim, Krieg und Frieden, 1943

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Figure 1.10 Kurt Wiemken, Frieden und Krieg, 1937

redefining her position in relation to her own past, her prior allegiances, and her new context of productivity. Haunted by the form and iconography of Wiemken’s painting, Krieg und Frieden simultaneously erases and reworks its precursor in performing a symbolic critique of a different wartime landscape, both internal and external – or rather (in the terms Oppenheim used with Hans Christoph von Tavel), an internal psychic geography into which the surrounding external darkness has intruded and settled. Oppenheim’s relations with the Gruppe 33 and Allianz artists situated her at the heart of a dynamic, if geographically constrained, avant-garde during the war, affording her opportunities to exhibit her work and so to receive media attention. This provided her with an important opportunity to explore her artistic identity and develop styles  and preoccupations beyond the constraints imposed by Parisian Surrealism, which, as far as the Swiss cultural context was concerned, was rapidly becoming passé, its political and aesthetic relevance waning as the grim realities of the war progressed. In 1941, Oppenheim had been included in the Exposition Surréaliste in Zürich, of which a reviewer wrote, with barely concealed sarcasm: ‘The paintings by Basel artist Meret Oppenheim lead us to the still unknown continent of over-dilettantism as a counterpart to over-realism’.53 ‘Over-dilettantism’ (‘Überdilettantismus’) as a critique 53 ‘In den noch unbekannten Kontinent des Überdillettantismus als Pendant zum Überrealismus führen uns die Gemälde der Baslerin Meret Oppenheim’. Anon (‘tch’), ‘Exposition Surréaliste in Zürich’, Die Tat (Zürich), Wednesday 3 December 1941, 5.

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suggests a deeply provincial conservatism prone to ridiculing or infantilising that which it does not grasp, but it also indicates a degree of scepticism in regard to the significance of Surrealism, and gives some indication of the cultural climate in which the wartime Swiss avant-gardes were working. Despite this, surrealist art managed to sustain some prominence in Switzerland through the war. In April 1942 Oppenheim attended an exhibition of her friend the Argentinian surrealist painter Leonor Fini’s work in Zürich, retaining a flyer for the show in her scrapbook.54 Die Tat gave this exhibition a long and highly complimentary review, which Oppenheim clipped and posted to Fini.55 Oppenheim wasn’t included in Gruppe  33’s tenth anniversary exhibition, 10 Jahre Gruppe 33, in Basel in October–November 1943. This significant show took place alongside an exhibition of works by Fritz Baumann, another Swiss artist with extensive links to the avant-garde. Born in Basel in 1886, Baumann had in 1913 been a member of Der Sturm, the Berlin-based avant-garde group associated with Herwarth Walden’s journal of the same name. He exhibited at the Galerie Dada in Zürich in 1917, and later joined the Artistes Radicaux with Hans Arp and Marcel Janco. Baumann had committed suicide in October 1942, after a long struggle with depression, so the 1943 exhibition of his work was very much a memorial event. Among Oppenheim’s other exhibitions in Switzerland during the war was the 1944 Kunsthalle Basel Christmas Exhibition of Basel Artists, where she displayed five recent works, including the major 1944 paintings Das Tragisch-Komische and In der Nähe des Mondes (Near the Moon). Simultaneously, she had a work (a 1943 drawing, Zwei Frauen [Two Women]) included in the Allianz exhibit at the major Kunsthaus Zürich exhibition Schwarz-Weiss (Black-White), which displayed 348 works, all monochrome, by 107 artists representing the whole artistic community of Switzerland. The exhibition received an extensive review (again by ‘me’) in Die Tat on 24 December 1944: As many artworks in the Kunsthaus prove, shattering contemporary events can be expressed in a way other than what can be read almost literally from the topic, just as in a letter the handwriting of the writer sometimes reveals the state of mind of the writer more than the content of what is written, as in a graphological exercise of interpretation. Regardless of the topic dealt with, the artist’s stylus is able to record the near and distant earthquakes of humanity. In this respect, the etching needle is similar to the registration needle of the seismograph. Graphics are always to a certain extent seismographic.56 54 Wenger and Corgnati (eds), Meret Oppenheim, p. 187. 55 Anon (‘er’), ‘Ausstellung Leonor Fini – Wilhelm Gimmi, Die Tat, Friday 24 April, 1942, 5. Oppenheim to Leonor Fini, 15 May 1942, in Wenger and Corgnati (eds), Meret Oppenheim, p. 237. 56 ‘Wie erschütternd aber das Zeitgeschehen auf andere Art als auf die aus dem Thema fast titelhaft ablesbare zum Ausdruck kommen kann, so wie bei einem Brief die Handschrift des Schreibers

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The reviewer uses the now-familiar metaphor of artist-as-seismograph to describe art’s responses to ‘shattering [erschütternd] contemporary events’ as a kind of revealing inscription – the symbolic register of external events that also reveals the internal ‘state of mind’ of the artist. Furthermore, the reviewer’s shifting metaphors conflate the pictorial response of the painter with the procedure of inscription  – a form of writing – in doing so, shifting the focus of critical attention from visual representation to written recording or documentation (the function of a seismograph being to record earthquakes, not merely to indicate their occurrence). Kaspar Hauser oder Die Goldene Freiheit Within this historical context of wartime Switzerland, its cultural conservatism and problematic treatment of Jewish refugees, its curtailed artistic scenes, and Oppenheim’s own constrained economic and domestic circumstances amid her evident efforts to redefine her own identity and redirect her aesthetic allegiances and outputs, she produced, sometime around 1942 or 1943, a screenplay based on the narrative of Kaspar Hauser. Like the artworks by Oppenheim discussed above, this text affords further seismographic insights into the historical and personal conditions in which she was working at the time. It offers a written recording of the psychic tremors generated by the historically traumatic moment of its production, a register of Oppenheim’s own grappling with her Germanic cultural heritage while simultaneously seeking to distance herself, and sustain creative impetus, from her own (surrealist) past. One register of this grappling is evident from the fact that, in all the Swiss exhibition catalogues that Oppenheim appeared in during and immediately after the war, the Berlin-born artist has listed herself as Basel-born. Reassigning her nationality in a period of deep international crisis was a small but significant way in which identification could be asserted over identity; becoming Swiss-born (rather than remaining German-born Swiss) signalled a subtle but clear allegiance to her new cultural coterie. This careful reidentification can be aligned with Oppenheim’s statement to Christiane Meyer-Thoss: ‘Comparing my situation at the time with Kaspar Hauser – maybe there’s something to that. Being separated, cut off from everything mehr manchmal als der Inhalt des Geschriebenen den Seelenzustand des Schreibenden enthüllt, das würden, einem gleichsam graphologischen Deutungsversuch unterworfen, eine Menge von Werken im Kunsthaus beweisen. Unabhängig vom jeweiligen behandelten Thema vermag des Künstlers Griffel die seelischen Nah- und Fernbeben der Menschheit zu verzeichnen. Die Radiernadel gleicht in dieser Beziehung der Registriernadel des Seismographen oder Erdbebenmessers. Graphik is immer bis zu einem gewissen Grad Seismographik.’ Anon (‘me’), ‘Schwarz-Weiß Ausstellung im Kunsthaus Zürich’, Die Tat, 24 December 1944, 5.

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that was happening in the fine arts. The fact that I kept going without looking right or left …’.57 Oppenheim is here echoing Kafka’s ‘Report from an Academy’ (‘No, I did not want freedom. Only a way out, to right, to left, no matter where …’), a passage coincidentally used as an epigraph by the French OULIPO writer Georges Perec for his never-completed novel Gaspard, a work loosely based on Kaspar Hauser.58 As with Genevieve, Oppenheim seems to have identified at various points in her career, and particularly in the early 1940s, with the figure of Kaspar Hauser, the foundling child whose mysterious appearance near Nuremberg in 1828 sparked huge international interest in his unknown origins, adoption, education, and eventual murder, triggering numerous cultural responses over the subsequent years, and whose persistent presence in German modernism serves as an obvious historical symbol of deep cultural trauma. Jeffrey Masson, in his study The Wild Child, connects Kaspar Hauser with trauma theory, particularly in relation to debates over traumatic memory and its loss and recovery.59 Identification with the historical figure of Kaspar Hauser allowed Oppenheim to establish an opportunistic symbolic connection with those Germanic cultural traditions from which, in redefining herself as Swiss-born, she was simultaneously politically distancing herself – a double movement suggesting the complex entanglements of personal and cultural identities in which she was caught up at this time. Several events around 1942–43 may have stimulated Oppenheim’s choice of theme and title. An edition of Jakob Wassermann’s 1908 novel Caspar Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Herzens had been published in 1940 in Berlin by Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft. Given its popularity, it is likely that Oppenheim had read Wassermann’s novel previously; Wassermann (1873–1934) was a German Jew whose books were among those burnt by the Nazis in 1933.60 Furthermore, a radio adaptation of the narrative, based on Erich Ebermayer’s dramatic 1926–27 version of the historical Hauser tale, was broadcast in Basel at 8.40pm on Saturday, 13 November 1943.61 The phrase ‘goldene Freiheit’ can also be traced to several potential sources. The former Dadaist Emmy Ball-Hennings, who, with her partner Hugo Ball, had been friends with Oppenheim’s parents in the 1920s and had socialised with the family, was living in Switzerland during the war (in Agnuzzo until 1942, when she moved to Magliaso).62 Hennings published her book Märchen am Kamin (Fairytales 57 Cited in Christiane Meyer-Thoss, Meret Oppenheim  – Book of Ideas  – Early Sketches for Fashions, Jewelry and Designs (Berlin: Gachnang and Springer, 1996), p. 136. 58 See David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words (London: Harvill, 1999), p. 197. 59 Jeffrey Masson, The Wild Child: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), p. 63. 60 See Erich Kästner, Über das Verbrennen von Büchern (Zürich: Atrium Verlag, 2012), p. 49. 61 Basel radio listings, Le Jura, Saturday 13 November 1943, 4. 62 Bärbel Reetz, Emmy Ball-Hennings – Leben im Vielleicht (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), p. 331.

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by the Fireplace) in 1943, in which we read, in the tale ‘Der Müllerssohn und das Wichtelmännchen’ (a version of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’), ‘Achim schöpfte Hoffnung, bald seine goldene Freiheit wiederzuerhalten, und er wurde auch nicht enttäuscht’ (‘Achim started to hope that very soon he would receive back his golden freedom, and he was not disappointed’).63 Hennings also used the phrase ‘goldene Freiheit’ several times in her 1919 novel Gefängnis (Prison), where it refers to the freedom of not being married. Oppenheim may also have been aware of Marcel Schwob’s 1892 tale Le Roi au masque d’or (The King in the Golden Mask), whose title and theme are suggestive when read alongside her screenplay, which deploys its own version of the ‘golden mask’. Schwob’s niece was the surrealist artist Claude Cahun, who had visited the 1936 International Surrealism exhibition in London, which included six works by Oppenheim, and the two artists may have met in London. These potential influences on Oppenheim’s language and symbolism assume significance if we note the tentative dating of her screenplay to c.1942, and the certainty that she returned to and reworked it subsequently (the published version carries an editorial note that the text ‘wurde 1970 in die heutige Form gebracht’ [‘was given its current form in 1970’]),64 implying a work in progress with an unfixed and uncertain origin sometime in the early 1940s. While drawing on this set of contexts, precursors, and influences, Oppenheim’s screenplay very clearly explores her insistent concerns during this period with themes of alienation and incarceration, lost origins, and identity. Its incompleteness (the poem Kaspar Hauser writes remains unwritten, replaced in the published text by an authorial note: ‘I need to write this. M. O.’) and, indeed, the fact that it was never realised as a film conform to the argument of Curiger and others that, while many works of this period were not completed, some (like Genevieve) were later returned to and reworked. The choice of medium is significant. The screenplay by definition exists in a state of becoming, its writerly completion deflected into its realisation in a different, visual medium, for which it comprises a set of descriptive instructions. Surrealism, furthermore, already had a well-established tradition of unrealised ­screenplays – Raphaëlle Moine points out that ‘The number of surrealist films produced seems negligible in comparison with the abundance of screenplays written at the time’, and argues that the screenplay offered a formal freedom unavailable in other, more conventional, textual genres: The rather supple form of the texts, ranging from synopsis to dissection, in an era when the publication of screenplays was neither frequent nor institutionalised, offered new potential

63 Emmy Ball-Hennings, Märchen am Kamin (Köln: Verlagsanstalt Benziger, 1943), p. 233. 64 Meret Oppenheim, Kaspar Hauser oder Die Goldene Freiheit (Bern-Berlin: Verlag Gachnang & Springer, 1987), p. 19.

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narrative or the essay.65

As a form, the screenplay is a written text intended for visual (cinematic) production. It is generically both dramatic (‘play’) and narrative, instructional and descriptive, concerned with both action and mise-en-scène. Oppenheim’s adaptation of the Kaspar Hauser narrative exploits this formal intermediacy; familiar elements of the Hauser narrative merge with surreal and sculptural episodes, allusions to Germanic traditions and histories and contemporary political events, and, threaded through the work, we can detect a continuous undercurrent of anxiety. Martin Kitchen’s comprehensive historical analysis of the Kaspar Hauser phenomenon offers only a cursory survey of the huge range of literary and other cultural reworkings of it, and has little to say about Oppenheim’s screenplay, noting with palpable disappointment that ‘It is a surrealistic fairy tale with very little connection with the story of Kaspar Hauser except that it begins with him as a prisoner (in a stall in an old farm house) and ends with his murder (he is shot while walking in a forest).’66 Nevertheless Kitchen offers a crucial insight into the way Hauser functions within the culturally symbolic frameworks drawn on by Oppenheim. ‘Here’, he writes of the historical figure of Hauser, ‘was a blank screen on which could be projected the fantasies of those with whom he came into close contact’67  – and later he reiterates that ‘he was the screen upon which so many different people projected their fantasies and beliefs’.68 In this light Oppenheim’s screenplay assumes a new significance, presenting a surrealistically redefined historical figure as, literally, something to play with as a screen, a figure onto whom she could project her own ‘fantasies and beliefs’. Kaspar Hauser oder Die Goldene Freiheit merges episodes from the Kaspar Hauser narrative (probably derived from Wassermann’s fictionalised version) with vignettes that express Surrealism’s concerns with the relations between art and life. The screenplay echoes key surrealist works – notably Jean Cocteau’s 1932 film Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet), in which Lee Miller performed the role of a statue that, like Galatea in the myth of Pygmalion, comes to life to confront its creator. Oppenheim’s version is organised into loose but unmarked sections. In the first, we see scenes of Kaspar Hauser housed in his room by day, intercut with night-time scenes in which the room becomes an ‘aquarium’, presenting an ambivalent submarine fantasy of birth or drowning, with Kaspar, wearing his golden mask, rocking gently ‘like a medusa’ 65 Raphaëlle Moine, ‘From surrealist cinema to Surrealism in cinema: does a surrealist genre exist in film?’, Pierre Taminiaux (trans.), Yale French Studies, 109 (2006), 98–114; 101. 66 Martin Kitchen, Kaspar Hauser: Europe’s Child (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 185. 67 Kitchen, Kaspar Hauser: Europe’s Child, p. ix. 68 Kitchen, Kaspar Hauser: Europe’s Child, p. xiv.

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(‘wie eine im Wasser schwebende Meduse’).69 In the second sequence Kaspar is taken by ‘a farmer and a well-dressed man’ (‘ein schön gekleideter Herr’)70 to a country park, with statues and ‘a labyrinth of hedges’ (‘ein Labyrinth aus Buchshecken’)71 where he is transformed by a sculptor into a mechanical sculpture of marble, repeating the simple act of dipping a spoon into a marbled plate. Various people visit and view the Kaspar Hauser statue, including a small dog, and, eventually, a ‘fairy woman’ (‘die Feefrau’)72 who sits in a willow tree. Kaspar then climbs down from his plinth and walks to the willow tree, engaging the woman in the single moment of clear dialogue in the screenplay: ‘The woman in the tree (his sister) asks quietly: “Where did you leave your golden mask?” Kaspar Hauser answers, also quietly: “I have swapped it for freedom.”’73 In the third sequence, Kaspar finds work picking caterpillars off a field of cabbages. He metamorphoses into ‘a hairy caterpillar’ (‘eine haarige Raupe’).74 A small girl arrives, talks to him, and feeds him berries as he transforms back into Kaspar Hauser. Together they walk through a mountainous landscape to a cave, where they meet the girl’s father and two other men, who give food to Kaspar. In the next scene, these men take Kaspar to a butcher’s shop in a nearby town. Kaspar is then seen draping a tree with sausages, setting boiled animal heads in a circle, and climbing inside the carcass of a slaughtered animal. The townspeople see the ‘place of ritual’ (‘Kultort’): ‘Everybody is startled, shocked (‘Alle sind erschreckt, entsetzt’). […] The men pull Kaspar Hauser off the tree, and shake him brutally (‘schütteln ihn brutal’)’.75 At this point, a car arrives and a beautiful woman steps out. She and Kaspar Hauser drive off. The final sequence takes place in a ‘glistening’ (‘glänzenden’)76 underground chamber, where the beautiful woman feeds Kaspar Hauser porridge. Outside, a man in dark clothes stalks, searching. Kaspar Hauser’s sister puts a letter in the mouth of a snail which sets off to deliver it. Back in the chamber, Kaspar Hauser, on all fours, transforms into a golden table laden with food and drink, at which the woman sits to dine. The final scenes intercut Kaspar Hauser walking, and writing a poem for the woman, with the snail crawling with the letter in its mouth, arriving to deliver it just as he is shot by the dark man. As he dies, the golden mask floats towards him across the landscape, and fits itself to his face. 69 Oppenheim, Kaspar Hauser, p. 5. 70 Oppenheim, Kaspar Hauser, p. 8. 71 Oppenheim, Kaspar Hauser, p. 8. 72 Oppenheim, Kaspar Hauser, p. 15. 73 ‘Die Frau im Baum (seine Schwester) fragt leise: “Wo hast Du Deine goldene Maske gelassen?” Kaspar Hauser antwortet auch leise: “Ich habe sie für die Freiheit eingetauscht”.’ Oppenheim, Kaspar Hauser, p. 11. 74 Oppenheim, Kaspar Hauser, p. 12. 75 ‘Alle sind erschreckt, entsetzt. […] Die Männer ziehen Kaspar Hauser vom Baum herunter, schütteln ihn brutal.’ Oppenheim, Kaspar Hauser, p. 14. 76 Oppenheim, Kaspar Hauser, p. 15.

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The autobiographical elements of this narrative are plain. Performing a version of what Bice Curiger has called Oppenheim’s ‘nomadic residency’,77 Oppenheim’s Hauser moves between various scenes of confinement in which mundane, repetitive existence is repeatedly contrasted with an oneiric fantasy of ‘golden freedom’. From the confinement of the prison-space, he moves to the park-labyrinth, where he becomes the constructed object of a gaze, repetitively performing with his bowl and spoon – not Déjeuner en fourrure but Déjeuner en marbre or Frühstück im Marmor, frozen in time, cold and lifeless. From there, Kaspar moves to the cabbage-field to perform a different kind of mechanical, repetitive labour, which transforms him into a caterpillar, a promising symbol of natural transformation, but quickly he becomes again Kaspar Hauser. Talking of her work at this time, Oppenheim told Robert Belton: ‘It was mechanical, like the academic drawing I did at the École’.78 Enshrouding himself in the animal carcass (again, perhaps, echoing Soutine’s beef paintings) is an act of disguise that creates public disgust, leading to a brutal beating. After a journey to a rocky, mountainous region, we see his final transformation, into a golden table, an echo of Oppenheim’s creation of similar domestic objects such as Tisch mit Vogelfüssen, and the 1938 sketch Entwurf für einen Tisch mit drei Beinen (Design for a Table with Three Legs), which was eventually realised posthumously in 2003. This transformation is the precursor to his death, at which he returns to the dreamlike, masked state of the opening. The trajectory, and its paralleling of Oppenheim’s career up to the mid-1940s, is clear – from dreams of golden beauty, through various forms of violent or tediously repetitive constriction, to another kind of fantasised, golden escape – suggesting that Kaspar Hauser oder Die Goldene Freiheit performs a kind of extended self-analysis, offering a portrait of the artist’s travails. Criticism of the screenplay generally relates it to a cluster of associated works by Oppenheim79 – notably Gelbe Maske (Yellow Mask) of 1936, and the drawing Notiz für die Maske (Kaspar Hauser) (Note for Mask [Kaspar Hauser]), made in 1943 (and further reason to be cautious with the dating of the screenplay to 1942). Also of relevance is the object Kasten mit Holzgitter (Box with Wooden Grate, 1943), a cagelike container of ‘pebbles, balls, butterfly wings, etc’,80 that prefigures the boxes and containers Oppenheim will produce, like Der Kokon (er lebt) (The Cocoon [it lives]) of 1974. These works relate in turn to two paintings of 1942 whose iconography suggests their association with Oppenheim’s reworking of the Kaspar Hauser myth  – Einige der ungezählten Gesichter der Schönheit (Some of the Uncounted Faces of Beauty)

77 Curiger, Meret Oppenheim, p. 89. 78 Belton, ‘Androgyny: interview with Meret Oppenheim’, p. 68. 79 See, for example, Brandt, ‘The coming of age of the child-woman’, pp. 89–129. 80 Curiger, Meret Oppenheim, p. 151.

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Figure 1.11  Meret Oppenheim, Einige der ungezählten Gesichter der Schönheit, 1942

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Figure 1.12  Meret Oppenheim, Sonne, Mond und Sterne, 1942

(figure 1.11) and Sonne, Mond und Sterne (Sun, Moon and Stars) (figure 1.12). Both depict harlequin-like statue-figures. In the first, the figure sits, holding a white rabbit. The figure’s head is transformed into a tableau of motifs from German folklore – cloud, a gnome-like face, a rustic cottage, a bird in a gilded cage, a headless hierophant, a bat with a woman’s face, and so on – a medley of icons collectively designating a familiar version of the surreal imaginary. In Sonne, Mond  und Sterne the connection with Oppenheim’s reworking of the Kaspar Hauser myth is still clearer – the figure’s legs and lower abdomen are encased in what looks like folds of plaster, while its torso and head dissolve into an explosion of light containing a brick-like abstract shape. Atop the figure’s head we see floating a complex geometric abstract form, like a glass labyrinth. A clearly feminine figure hovers in the background, her arms and head blossoming into pink, coral-like clusters, while to the left a Magrittean plinth is partly concealed by shrubs and trees. These paintings both resonate with Oppenheim’s narrativisation

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of the Kaspar Hauser story, suggesting the extent to which it preoccupied her during the early 1940s. Oppenheim seems to have borrowed much of her imagery from German and Austrian literature. The shining car of her fairy woman, arriving to rescue Kaspar Hauser, inverts a scene in the second part of Goethe’s Faust, where Galatea (the magically animated work of art produced by the sculptor Pygmalion) appears on ‘a throne of shell’ that ‘gleams like a star’.81 Goethe’s imagery draws, in turn, on Raphael’s The Triumph of Galatea (completed c.1514), a fresco at the Villa Farnesina in Rome.82 Much of the surreal imagery of the screenplay can, however, be traced back to moments of verbal and imagistic counterpoint in Wassermann’s novel, which Oppenheim seems to be literalising in order to emphasise their surrealist potential. For example, Wassermann juxtaposes on the same page the image of a statue (‘In the middle of the lawn there stood a sandstone statue which they said was lifeless although it looked like a human being’) with his Caspar’s discovery of a worm in an apple, ‘the thin body wriggling in the light’;83 and later, Wassermann describes Earl Stanhope (sometime patron and perhaps lover of the historical Hauser) reading to Casper Hauser who appears ‘like a bird in its ne’er to be opened cage, telling tales of flying through the golden ether till at last the jubilant song of liberty broke from its wretched throat’.84 As he dies, Wassermann’s Caspar appears ‘as stiff as a clay figure, his face as grey as pumice stone, the skin of his torso a radiant white, like a magnesium flame’,85 a description closely matching the iconography of Sonne, Mond und Sterne. In a similar way, Oppenheim’s addition of the snail delivering a letter seems to be a literalisation of the German Schneckenpost or ‘snail mail’.86 This strategy of making-literal an accidental juxtaposition or a commonplace colloquialism was of

81 ‘Aber Galateas Muschelthron […]. Er glänzt wie ein Stern.’ J. W. Goethe, Faust (1808), part 2: Act II Scene iv, 8450–2, A. S. Kline (trans.) at www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/ FaustIIActIIScenesVtoVI.php (accessed 25 February 2021). 82 Goethe’s play furthermore features the character of Seismos, the Greek god of earthquakes who gives his name to the seismograph. 83 ‘Aber mitten auf dem Rasen stand eine alte Sandsteinstatue, die sollte tot sein, trotzdem sie aussah wie ein Mensch […]. Da ward ein Wurm sichtbar und krümmte seinen dünnen Leib gegen das Licht.’ Wassermann, Caspar Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Herzens, p. 77; Wassermann, Caspar Hauser, p. 34. 84 ‘[…] dem Vogel im Bauer, im nie zu öffnenden, so lange vom Flug durch den goldnen Äther zu erzählen, bis endlich der jubelnde Freiheitsgesang durch seine Kehle bricht’. Wassermann, Caspar Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Herzens, p. 342; Wassermann, Caspar Hauser, p. 146. 85 ‘[…] starr wie eine Figur aus Lehm, das Gesicht grau wie Bimsstein, die Haut des Körpers strahlend weiß wie eine Magnesiumflamme’. Wassermann, Caspar Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Herzens, pp. 880–1; Wassermann, Caspar Hauser, p. 374. 86 ‘Frustrated Germans used to call their Deutsche Post system “Schneckenpost”, German for “snail mail”.’ Christopher Watts, ‘Hint: it’s not FedEx’, Forbes Incorporated, 166:6–8 (2000), 192.

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course a key element of surrealist poetics, suggesting that if Oppenheim is distancing herself from the surrealist coterie, she is nevertheless still willing to make use of what she has learnt from Surrealism. The snail may also, furthermore, allude to the use, in 1928, by the Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (Schweizerische Ausstellung für Frauenarbeit) of a vehicle constructed as a snail to symbolise and protest at the slow pace of development of women’s emancipation in Switzerland, a stunt which received much ridicule at the time from the conservative Swiss media. Oppenheim’s surrealist treatment of the Kaspar Hauser legend is organised by a series of tensions between speech and silence, clarity and obscurity, movement and stasis, and living or natural and artificial and mechanical. At the centre of this structural organisation is the physical condition of shivering, rocking, s­ huddering – the repetitious physical expression of psychological trauma at the level of involuntary bodily actions. In the first paragraph of the screenplay we read that ‘Mit dem Oberkörper macht er wiegende Bewegungen’ (‘With his upper body he makes rocking movements’). He is then seen sitting: ‘Er trommelt mit den Fersen auf dem Boden’ (‘he drums his heels on the floor’), and, travelling in the gentleman’s carriage, ‘Er zittert am ganzen Leib’ (‘His whole body shivers’).87 The earliest medical commentary on Hauser noted the ‘shock’ he demonstrated on experiencing the outside world.88 Paralleled by the beating he receives from the townspeople, Kaspar’s physical Erschütterung embodies the historical trauma that, in Oppenheim’s version of the narrative, he comes to signify. Her identification with the character implies a double movement – towards aesthetic alignment with Germanic cultural traditions which, in her work, are recalibrated through her surrealist vision, and towards autobiographical alignment with the scene of myth as a surreal performance of the self in the process of becoming. Key to this identification is the notion of the ‘expressionless’, explicit in Oppenheim’s description (in the first paragraph) of Hauser: ‘Sein Gesicht ist ohne Ausdruck, verschwommen’ (‘His face is expressionless, blurred’). Drawing on Walter  Benjamin’s use of das Ausdrucklose (‘the expressionless’) in his analysis of Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Shoshana Felman argues that the ‘expressionless’ is ‘an innovative literary concept: a concept that essentially links literature and art to the (mute yet powerful) communication of what cannot be said in words but what makes art belong in “the true world,” what “shatters” art, says Benjamin, into “the torso of a symbol,” into a “fragment” of the real world’.89 Felman suggests that the ‘expressionless […] are those whom violence has deprived of expression; those who, on the one hand, have been 87 Oppenheim, Kaspar Hauser, pp. 5, 6, 8. 88 See Arne Klawitter, ‘Kaspar Hauser als Diskurstopos und Körperfiguration’, Bulletin of the Graduate Division of Letters, Arts and Sciences of Waseda University, 61:2 (2016), 253–69; 257. 89 Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 13.

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historically reduced to silence, and who, on the other hand, have been historically made faceless, deprived of their human face – deprived, that is, not only of a language and a voice but even of the mute expression always present in a living human face.’90 Felman’s reading of the condition of ‘expressionlessness’ offers a way of thinking about how Oppenheim’s version of Kaspar Hauser figures her own traumatised sense of cultural and political isolation in Switzerland in the early 1940s, a sense that finds retrospective expression in the narrative of her own ‘expressionlessness’, her extended period of ostensible artistic block. The envisioning of Kaspar as sculpture provides further clues to this autobiographical self-narrativising, and its significance in relation to Oppenheim’s ongoing process of self-redefinition in Basel during the war and the renegotiation of her surrealist past that it necessitated. In Paris in 1933 she had been photographed nude, in the studio of the painter Louis Marcoussis, by Man Ray in a series entitled Érotique-voilée (Veiled-erotic), which was published in Minotaure (no. 5, May 1934). In one of Ray’s pictures, Oppenheim is depicted entwined with Marcoussis’s printing press, her arm smeared with black ink, the handle of the press positioned to resemble a dildo (figure  1.13). This photograph echoes a work by another German woman artist, the 1929 drawing Untitled (Bare-Breasted Woman in Front of a Printing Press) (figure 1.14) by Heidelberg-born Hanna Nagel (1907–75). Érotique-voilée, later one of André Breton’s definitions of convulsive beauty (‘Convulsive beauty will be veilederotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be’),91 ‘invokes’ (Rosalind Krauss writes) ‘the occurrence in nature of representation, as one animal imitates another or as inorganic matter shapes itself to look like statuary’.92 Abigail Susik writes of Man Ray’s series of photographs that it depicts a sadistic mise-en-scène in which a nude woman is inked like a sheet of paper by the male artist and then fed into the jaws of a printing press, only to be wiped clean afterward in order to be ‘used’ again. The titular indication of this reinterpreted scene of Pygmalion and his malleable raw material of woman as a ‘veiled’ (voilé) erotic metaphor  […] is also revealed to be a scenario of violation (violé) wherein female agency is assaulted by phallocentric power.93

90 Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, p. 13. 91 André Breton, Mad Love, Mary Ann Caws (trans.) (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), p. 19. 92 Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Photography in the service of Surrealism’, in Krauss and Jane Livingston (eds), L’Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York and London: Abbeville Press, 1985), p. 31. 93 Abigail Susik, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), p. 145.

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Figure 1.13  Man Ray, Érotique-voilée (Veiled-erotic) – Meret Oppenheim, 1933

Figure 1.14  Hanna Nagel, Untitled (Bare-Breasted Woman in Front of a Printing Press), 1929

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Read with this historical context in mind, Oppenheim’s identification with a figure she imagines encased in marble from which he apparently transforms in order to escape becomes readable as an allegorical reworking of her own (need to) ‘escape’ from male surrealist artists’ rendering of her as Galatea to their (photographic or otherwise) versions of Pygmalion. Man Ray’s photographs position Oppenheim (as noted earlier) in poses similar to those assumed by his former partner, Lee Miller, in Le Sang d’un poète. Kaspar Hauser oder Die Goldene Freiheit refigures these conventional surrealist imprisonings of creative women in stone, presenting instead a male statue produced, golem-like, from the unformed material of the previously imprisoned Kaspar Hauser. The golem connection to the Kaspar Hauser narrative, which has been noted by Gérard Legrande in his review of Werner Herzog’s 1974 film Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser),94 suggests another approach to Oppenheim’s text. Oppenheim seems to be reworking elements of the golem myth in her screenplay, suggesting the importance of this text as a register of her deliberate realignment with German and, specifically, German-Jewish cultural traditions (as perhaps indicated in her use of Wassermann’s novel). The golem legend, in which unformed matter or clay is given life and direction by a creator-god or rabbi, is central to Judaic mythology and, as Alfred Thomas notes, has been ‘obsessively revised and rewritten throughout the modernist period’,95 in particular by the surrealists – Kurt Seligmann, for example, had used an image of the golem on the cover of the December 1940– January 1941 issue of View, and, in 1933, André Breton had discussed the golem in his Introduction to von Arnim’s Contes Bizarres. Some of these revisions may well have contributed elements to Oppenheim’s transformations of the Hauser narrative, the basic structure and elements of which bear clear affinities with the golem myth while also offering suggestive parallels with her own autobiographical experience. She would certainly have been aware of the myth’s prominence in modernist film and music (both as a figure of subversively uncanny animation and as a vehicle for anti-Semitic propaganda  – Oppenheim’s adaptation of the myth emphasises the former potential over the latter).96 The Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink published 94 ‘C’est l’éveil de la conscience succédant à la fabrication artificielle de l’être humain. Un tel mythe de la création rencontre d’ailleurs ceux du Golem et, dans une moindre mesure, de Frankenstein.’ (‘It is the awakening of consciousness following the artificial fabrication of the human being. Such a creation myth also meets those of the Golem and, to a lesser extent, of Frankenstein.’) Gérard Legrande, ‘L’empreinte de la chute (l’énigme de Kaspar Hauser)’, Positif – Revue mensuelle de cinéma (May 1975), 2–5; 3. 95 Alfred Thomas, Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 45. 96 See Elizabeth R. Baer, The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2012), pp.  37 ff. for a discussion of anti-semitism in Meyrinck’s and other modernist versions of the golem myth.

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a novelised version of the myth, Der Golem, in 1915, which quickly became a bestseller. Paul Wegener’s two film versions of Meyrink’s novel were hugely popular and shown throughout Switzerland in the late 1920s. A theatrical version by H. Leiwig was performed by the Jewish theatre group Habimah at the Stadttheatre in Zürich in 1929–30,97 and the opera version by Eugen d’Albert was broadcast live from Hamburg on Swiss radio on 11 December 1926.98 Julian Duvivier’s film Le Golem (1936), starring Harry Baur (who died in April1943) was playing at the Cinema Apollo in St Moritz in November 1939, and Oppenheim may well have seen the film in Basel.99 Elizabeth Baer argues that, in the hands of post-war Jewish writers, the golem myth affords a crucial symbolic link to traditions that have survived near-­annihilation: ‘In one of his guises, as a text, the golem serves to affirm the long history of Jewish legend and Jewish imagination in the face of lethal antisemitism and to create memory anew through intertextuality’.100 Oppenheim’s transformation of the shivering Kaspar Hauser – ‘that enigmatic and traumatised figure who haunts German modernism,’101 as Ernest Schonfield describes him  – into a mechanical marble statue (its external hardness perhaps an explicit repudiation of the controversial, ‘feminine’ softness of Le Déjeuner en fourrure), and his subsequent golem-like reanimation, provide a convenient and effective allegory of the process of aesthetic registering of the Erschütterung of her own forced recognition of and response to history and its impact on her own sense of identity. The imagery and action of Kaspar Hauser oder Die Goldene Freiheit embeds within her work of this period a clear turn to German traditions alongside a specifically Jewish cultural allusion that serves the double purpose of affirming her relations to these traditions, while also distancing her from Parisian Surrealism. Her identification with the historical figure of Hauser, with his ‘medusa-like’ formlessness, and her expression of it in the screenplay, exemplify the complexity and diversity of her wartime work in its responses to historical events to which she was traumatically subject, and over which she was gradually, during this period, reasserting some aesthetic control. Eight years after Oppenheim wrote her version of Kaspar Hauser, the psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich published an essay in the journal Der Monat in which he articulated the concept of the Kaspar Hauser complex, a diagnosis of the deep isolation

 97 Neue Zürcher Nachrichten, 22 November 1930, 3.  98 Neue Zürcher Nachrichten, 11 December 1926, 3.  99 Engadiner Post, 14 November 1939, p. 2. 100 Baer, The Golem Redux, p. 25. 101 Ernest Schonfield, Art and Its Uses in Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull (London: Maney Publishing/MHRA Texts and Dissertations 70, 2008), p. 41.

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and cultural alienation of the modern individual, their separation from social being in a condition of fatherlessness. With his partner Margarete, Mitscherlich would in 1967 publish the book Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (The Inability to Mourn),102 a hugely influential Freudian critique of post-war West Germany’s attempts, and failure, to respond to its immediate history, a book described by Anson Rabinbach as ‘the paradigmatic expression of what ultimately became a predominant way of thinking about the burdens of history in Germany in the late 1960s’.103 Aleida Assmann argues that the ‘inability to mourn’ is itself a sign of trauma: ‘The absence of grief can be traced back to a traumatization, to the incursion of a nameless terror […]. In other words, the absence of grief can itself be a symptom of trauma.’104 The arguments of Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern draw on the distinction between individual and social experience that Mitscherlich had earlier articulated in 1950 through the figure of Kaspar Hauser: ‘the complex of modern mass humanity is a complex in the style of Kaspar Hauser’s’.105 Meret Oppenheim’s experience, in 1942, of ‘being separated, cut off’ from the artistic world outside Switzerland (and implicitly located in her own autobiographical past, thus unrecuperable) might be read as an early, self-diagnostic version of the Kaspar Hauser complex, a trauma manifest in the themes of her screenplay and partially redressed by the text’s connections to Germanophone literary and cultural traditions. Such cultural connectivity, in the face of the destruction wrought by war, Nazism, and the Holocaust, will be a key concern of the next chapter, which focusses on the early works of the German writer and artist Unica Zürn.

102 Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behaviour (New York: Grove Press, 1975). 103 Anson Rabinbach, ‘A response to Karen Brecht, “In the aftermath of Nazi Germany: Alexander Mitscherlich and psychoanalysis: legend and legacy”’, American Imago, 52:3 (1995), 313–28; 317. 104 Aleida Assmann, Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity, Sarah Clift (trans.) (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), p. 87. 105 ‘[…] der Komplex des modernen Massenmenschen [ist] ein Komplex im Stile Kaspar Hausers’. Alexander Mitscherlich, ‘Ödipus und Kaspar Hauser: Tiefenpsychologische Probleme in der Gegenwart’, Der Monat, 25 (1950), 11–18; 16.

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2 Unica Zürn’s pathographies In any case shock may now be the only way to reach human beings through language. (Theodor W. Adorno)1 No new world without a new language. (Ingeborg Bachmann)2

In the immediate aftermath of the war, Germany was devastated. Allied occupation removed the national government, temporarily rendering all German citizens stateless. The country’s capital, Berlin, whose inhabitants (Hannah Arendt notes in 1950) claimed that ‘Hitler never entirely succeeded in conquering them’,3 lay in ruins, its social and domestic spaces violently turned inside-out, a powerful symbol of the wider collapse of the German body politic and its various cultural expressions. The city (writes historian Keith Lowe) ‘was completely shattered – just piles of rubble and skeleton houses’.4 Another description notes that ‘The Berlin the National Socialists left behind was, as one study called it, “the largest continuous ruin in Germany and Europe”’.5 The English poet Stephen Spender, travelling across the newly liberated country in the summer of 1945, recorded his own perceptions of the city’s devastation, emphasising its surreal qualities: All the city lay broken and exposed to the weather, and the few shops that had things to sell, the few tenements still inhabited had the small helplessness of hovels amid the surrounding disaster. […] Later, we made our way across the ruins of the city, to see those sights which are a very recent experience in our civilization, though they have characterized other civilizations in decay: ruins, not belonging to a past civilization, but the ruins of our own epoch […]. They are the scenes of a collapse so complete that it already has the remoteness

 1 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Words from abroad’, in Notes to Literature, volume 1, pp. 185–99; p. 192.   2 Ingeborg Bachmann, ‘The thirtieth year’, in The Thirtieth Year, Michael Bullock (trans.) (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987), p. 50.   3 Hannah Arendt, ‘The aftermath of Nazi rule’, Commentary (October 1950), 342–53; 346.   4 Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War 2 (London: Penguin, 2013), p. 8.   5 Reinhard Rürup (ed.), Berlin 1945: A Documentation, Pamela E. Selwyn (trans.) (Berlin: Verlag Willmuth Arenhövel, 1995), p. 59.

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of all final disasters which make a dramatic and ghostly impression whilst at the same time withdrawing their secrets and leaving everything to the imagination.6

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Another first-hand account, by the anonymous author of Eine Frau in Berlin (A Woman in Berlin, 1954), describes ‘Blackened offices, empty tenements, heaps of rubble’: Pieces of rail wrenched high above the ground, upholstery and scraps of fabric streaming out of bombed sleepers and dining cars. The heat is stifling. The smell of fire hangs over the tracks. All around is desolation, a wasteland, not a breath of life. This is the carcass of Berlin.7

The concerns of modernist aesthetic experimentation with the fragmentation of human experience were, in this new situation, suddenly mainstream and tangible, reflections rather than avant-garde interpretations of reality. Post-war Berlin exemplified, indeed, the simultaneous superfluity and urgency of surrealist aesthetics, in particular, in a world rendered actually surreal by history. The writer Lothar Klünner recalls: ‘The shattered Berlin of that time was the surreal city par excellence. Surreal was how we acted, thought and loved at that time because life, survival, set surrealistic priorities for most people.’8 Public discourse in the immediate aftermath of this surreal devastation centred (as Klünner emphasises) on processes of survival, and on the need to respond appropriately to the disastrous historical and political weight of the previous 12 years. The word ‘Schuld’ (guilt) was central to this debate. Both Arendt and the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers (whose teaching post had been suspended by the Nazis in 1937 because of his marriage to a Jewish woman and his vocal opposition to the regime) published major texts in 1945 attempting to define, explain, and understand the significance of the historical moment through analyses of the concept of guilt. Arendt’s ‘Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility’, published as ‘German Guilt’ on 12 January 1945 (and thus predating Germany’s surrender in May of that year), identified the central question in the debate as the ethical necessity to  6 Stephen Spender, European Witness (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946), pp. 234–5.   7 Anon., A Woman in Berlin, Philip Boehm (trans.) (London: Virago, 2011 [1954]), p. 190. The author has recently been identified as the journalist Marta Hiller.   8 ‘Das zertrümmerte Berlin von damals war die surreale Stadt schlechthin. Surreal war, wie wir handelten, dachten und liebten in jener Zeit, weil das Leben, das Überleben, bei den meisten Menschen surrealistische Prioritäten setzte.’ Lothar Klünner, ‘Nachwort’, in Elisabeth Lenk (ed.), Die Badewanne: Ein Künstlerkabarett der frühen Nachkriegszeit (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1991), pp. 153–60; p. 153.

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punishment of ‘war criminals’.9

Jaspers (1883–1969), who had been Arendt’s doctoral supervisor, delivered a series of lectures at Heidelberg University in the autumn of 1945. These talks were published in early 1946 under the title Die Schuldfrage and translated as The Question of German Guilt, a book described by Anson Rabinbach as ‘the founding text of the new narrative of the “European German”, a neutral, anti-militarist, and above all ethical Germany’.10 Jaspers famously defined four distinct varieties of guilt – criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical – arguing that: What is taking place is a crisis of mankind. The contributions, fatal or salutary, of single peoples and states can only be seen in the framework of the whole, as can the connections which brought on this war, and its phenomena which manifested in new, horrible fashion what man can be. It is only within such a total framework that the guilt question, too, can be discussed justly and unmercifully at the same time.11

The October 1945 issue of Die Neue Zeitung published a letter by the Nobel Prizewinning Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset (1882–1949) entitled ‘Die Umerziehung der Deutschen’ (‘The Re-education of the Germans’).12 Undset expressed one position in this complex debate (a position shared by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung),13 which considered all Germans to have been Nazis through active support or passive complicity, suggesting that each individually and all collectively should bear the full burden of guilt, and thus suffer full punishment, for the actions of Hitler’s regime. A month later, Jaspers published in the same journal a letter in response, arguing for  9 Hannah Arendt, ‘Organised guilt and universal responsibility’, in Peter Baehr (ed.), The Portable Hannah Arendt (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 149. 10 Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), p. 132. 11 Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, E. B. Ashton (trans.) (New York: Fordham University Press, 1965), p. 18. 12 Sigrid Undset, ‘Die Umerziehung der Deutschen’, Die Neue Zeitung, October 1945, 46. 13 See Carl Jung, ‘Nach der Katastrophe,’ Neue Schweizer Rundschau (Zürich), 13 (1945), n.p.; English translation: ‘After the catastrophe’, in Collected Works Volume 10: Civilization in Transition, Gerhard Adler, Michael Fordham, Herbert Read, and William McGuire (eds), R. F. C. Hull (trans.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press/Bollingden Foundation, 1970), pp. 194–7.

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a different, more subtle response to the problem of German guilt. He was careful to avoid such blanket accusations (which were, he noted, characteristic of Nazi thought), and instead attempted to evaluate degrees and extent of responsibility: ‘The only question is, in what sense every German has to feel responsible’.14 He further pointed out that ‘Hitler-Germany is not our Germany. But Germany created this regime, tolerated it, and for a large part actively or forced by fear participated in it. We cannot withdraw from this. We are it ourselves, and yet we are not.’15 Jaspers’s response to Undset provoked a letter from a woman in Bad Berneck, Helene Doehle, who wrote to him on 7 November 1945 to express gratitude for his refusal to subscribe to the argument that all Germans were equally guilty. Doehle goes on, however, to argue instead that the responsibility for the disaster should be borne by only ‘a small fraction of degenerate Germans’ (‘ein kleiner Bruchteil entarteter Deutscher’). She attacks major figures in the debate like the émigré novelist Thomas Mann (who had remained outside Germany since 1933, residing in Zürich, Princeton, and, from 1942, Los Angeles) and the anti-Nazi church leader Pastor Martin Niemöller (who had been interned by the Nazis in Sachsenhausen and Dachau from 1938–45), and she contests that the suffering of the German people in defeat should compensate for any suffering they caused to non-Germans: Why is there no longer talk of bomb terror? Is it forgotten? Should it, because of which millions of innocent people had to give up life, health and all their dear possessions, not be a compensation for what was committed in the German country? Shouldn’t the misery of the refugees screaming to heaven have a disarming effect?16

Doehle’s letter articulates a widely held set of opinions that considered the German people largely ignorant, and therefore implicitly innocent, of the actions of a minority of military and political ‘degenerates’ (the reversed meaning of this word here is 14 ‘Die Frage ist nur, in welchem Sinne jeder Deutsche sich mit-verantwortlich fühlen muß.’ Karl Jaspers, ‘Antwort an Sigrid Undset’, Monatshefte, 38:2 (February 1946), 115–19; 116. 15 ‘Hitler-Deutschland ist nicht unser Deutschland. Aber Deutschland hat dieses Regime hervorgebracht, hat es geduldet und hat zu großen Teilen aktiv oder durch Furcht gezwungen, mitgemacht. Wir können uns nicht entziehen. Wir sind es selber und sind es doch gar nicht.’ Jaspers, ‘Antwort an Sigrid Undset’, 119. 16 ‘Warum wird nicht mehr vom Bombenterror gesprochen? Ist er vergessen? Sollte er, unter dem Millionen Unschuldiger Leben, Gesundheit und die ganze liebe Habe hergeben mussten, nicht ein Ausgleich sein für das, was im deutschen Land verbrochen wurde? Sollte das Elend der Flüchtlinge, das zum Himmel schreit, nicht entwaffnend wirken?’ Helene Doehle, letter to Karl Jaspers, 7 November 1945 (DLA, A: Jaspers, Karl, Box 26, Helen Doehle an Karl Jaspers, 7.11.1945. Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach). The ‘refugees’ Doehle refers to are German refugees made homeless by Allied bombing or displaced from the east into western Germany by the advancing Russian army.

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telling), and that the suffering of the civilian population in the final months of the war and the aftermath of total defeat provided some kind of adequation to the alleged crimes of the regime. Most disturbingly, in asserting that Niemöller ‘came from the KZ [Konzentrationslager, concentration camp] with a hundred thousand others alive and well’,17 she implies that the concentration camp reports widely circulating in defeated Germany, publicly-displayed photographs of which were a central plank in the Allied campaigns of denazification and re-education of the German people, exaggerated the suffering. Unica Zürn’s parents Helene Doehle was one of many names assumed by the Swiss-born writer and translator Helene Pauline Heerdt (1892–1974), who is better known as the mother of the German surrealist artist and writer Unica Zürn, the subject of this chapter. Doehle’s intervention in the post-defeat debates on German guilt opens the space for a reframing of the place in conventional critical narratives on Zürn of her family and its significance for interpretations of her art and writing. This chapter will explore aspects of Zürn’s family background and personal circumstances, before turning to her immediately post-war involvement in the Berlin avant-garde which, influenced by Surrealism, articulated its own responses to the traumas of wartime. It will analyse some of her writings up to the mid-1950s against this historical context, before tracing further expressions of traumatic experience in her short narrative Das Haus der Krankheiten (The House of Illnesses, 1958). Helene Doehle has received little attention from critics of Zürn’s work, who have focussed rather more on Zürn’s own commentaries (in works like Dunkler Frühling [1969], translated as Dark Spring) on her relationship with her father.18 Doehle was the daughter of a jobless Frankfurter father and an Austrian mother (in her letter to Jaspers she identifies herself not as German but as Südtirolerin, South Tyrolean), and cousin of the Hitler-supporting writer Rudolph Binding (1867–1938), who had received Friedrich Nietzsche as a house guest.19 She published novellas, aphorisms, 17 ‘[…] der mit hunderttausend anderen lebend und gesund aus dem KZ gekommen ist.’ Doehle, letter to Karl Jaspers. 18 Plumer, for example, mentions Zürn’s mother once in her book (p. 16), while Rupprecht briefly discusses the ‘difficult’ (p. 138) relationship between Zürn and her mother. See Plumer, Unica Zürn and Rupprecht, Subject to Delusions. 19 Günter Bose and Erich Brinkmann, in Unica Zürn, Gesamtausgabe in 8 Bänden, Günter Bose and Erich Brinkmann (eds) (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1991–2001), 6, p. 108. Hereafter referenced by volume and page number only. Binding was the author of the novella Der Opfergang, filmed for UFA in 1942–43 by the Nazi director Veit Harlan and starring Harlan’s wife, Kristina Söderbaum, a huge star during the Nazi period.

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Herero society, panicked, over-reacted, and effectively initiated the Herero-German war’.26 A consequence of this action was that ‘Herero society, as it had existed before 1904, had been completely destroyed’.27 German policy in this colonial war, now understood to be the first genocide of the twentieth century,28 clearly prefigured the actions of the Third Reich towards European Jews and other minority communities. Bart-Gewald reports documents advising that ‘those Herero who surrendered were “to be placed in concentration camps in various parts of the country where, under guard, they could be used for labour”’.29 He quotes the diaries of a Major Stuhlmann: ‘We had been explicitly told beforehand, that this dealt with the extermination of a whole tribe, nothing living was to be spared’.30 Ralph Zürn returned to Germany in 1904 and, after divorcing his wife, the writer Dorrit Strohal (who published under the name Orla Holm)31 in 1910, married Zürn’s mother, Helene Heerdt, in 1913, and had two children, Unica in 1916 (in which year Ralph’s first wife committed suicide by poisoning) and a brother, Horst, who was killed on the Russian front in 1944. Their divorce in 1930, when Unica was 14, was due to Ralph’s bankruptcy (Verschuldung).32 His extensive collection of exotic trophies, accumulated on his colonial travels, adorned the childhood home of Unica Zürn until it was auctioned off in 1929, ‘much’ (writes critic Esra Plumer) ‘to [Zürn’s] dismay’.33 On 1 November 1932, 28 years after his involvement in the Namibian genocide, Ralph Zürn joined the NSDAP,34 despite marrying a year earlier a Danish woman who was also Jewish; Unica Zürn’s case notes from her stay in hospital in Neuilly several decades later in 1966 record that she remembered her father had great difficulty protecting his new wife from persecution by the party of which he was a member.35

26 Jan Bart-Gewald, Herero Heroes: A Socio-political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923 (Oxford and Athens, OH: James Curry/Ohio University Press, 1999), p. 142. Interestingly, Bart-Gewald’s book title exploits a latent translinguistic near-anagram. 27 Bart-Gewald, Herero Heroes, p. 141. 28 See Joshua Kwesi Aikins, ‘Historical guilt’, D+C: Development and Cooperation, 24 October 2017, at www.dandc.eu/en/article/representatives-herero-people-demand-reparations-germany-genocidecommitted-colonial-times (accessed 1 July 2020). Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman note the use of concentration camps by the Germans in Namibia in the ‘Introduction’ to their Concentrationary Imaginaries (London: IB Tauris, 2015), p. 5. 29 Bart-Gewald, Herero Heroes, p. 186. 30 Bart-Gewald, Herero Heroes, p. 174. 31 Rupprecht argues that Zürn idealised Holm. See Subject to Delusions, p. 138. 32 Bose and Brinkmann, in Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 6, p. 110. 33 Plumer, Unica Zürn, p. 16. 34 Plumer, Unica Zürn, p. 16. 35 Dossier ‘Maison Blanche’, 1966, in Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 4.3, p. 403.

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Zürn in Berlin, 1933–45 The lives, activities, and connections of Unica Zürn’s parents – which, Plumer suggests, provided Zürn at least with ‘a rich literary upbringing’36 – also delineate one significant set of contexts for approaching her early work as an expression of the traumatic surreal. Her own circumstances during the Nazi era and at the end of the war, and her post-war involvement in the Berlin avant-garde, provide others. Born in the western Berlin suburb of Grunewald (whose railway station was to be the main conduit for the deportation of Berlin Jews to Auschwitz) and moving in the early 1930s to Charlottenberg near the city’s centre, Zürn lived in Berlin throughout the Third Reich, giving birth to her second child, Christian, in early 1945 when the city was under heavy bombardment. Alongside her family and social connections to high-ranking Nazis, Zürn’s residence in Germany throughout this period, and her remaining there through the post-war years, suggest a problematic relation to the prevailing ideology of the period, one that might be encapsulated in the controversial concept of ‘inner emigration’. The phrase was coined by the writer Frank Thiess in 1933 to describe the position adopted by artists and writers (amongst others) who remained in the country during the Reich (rather than, like Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, choosing exile overseas) but officially or covertly claimed opposition to the Nazi regime. The problem of inner emigration stimulated extensive German public debate in late 1945, a debate which continued through the post-war period and overlapped significantly (Stephen Brockmann argues) with wider arguments noted above around ‘the problem of collective responsibility, if not collective guilt’.37 In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) Hannah Arendt connects the enactment of inner emigration to the notion of secrecy, somewhat sceptically defining inner emigrants as those people who frequently had held positions, even high ones, in the Third Reich and who, after the end of the war, told themselves and the world at large that they had always been ‘inwardly opposed’ to the regime. The question here is not whether or not they are telling the truth; the point is, rather, that no secret in the secret-ridden atmosphere of the Hitler regime was better kept than such ‘inward opposition.’ This was almost a matter of course under the conditions of Nazi terror; as a rather well-known ‘inner emigrant,’ who certainly believed in his own sincerity, once told me, they had to appear ‘outwardly’ even more like Nazis than ordinary Nazis did, in order to keep their secret.38 36 Plumer, Unica Zürn, p. 15. 37 Stephen Brockmann, ‘Inner emigration: the term and its origins in post-war debates’, in Donahue and Kirchner (eds), Flight of Fantasy, pp. 11–26; p. 13. 38 Hannah Arendt, ‘Banality and conscience’, in The Portable Hannah Arendt, p. 356.

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On the other hand, the novelist Elisabeth Langgässer (herself an inner emigrant who was banned from publishing during the Nazi period) ‘condemned those authors who had cultivated inwardness (Innerlichkeit) without making reference to the horrors of the Nazi period’.39 As we shall see, questions of secrecy, concealment, and encryption, and tensions between inside and outside, containment and exclusion, circulate at formal and thematic levels throughout much of Zürn’s writing, suggesting insistent concerns that, directly and indirectly, implicate Zürn’s own post-war guilt as an ethical and emotional response to the ‘secrets’ surrounding her own apparent inner-emigrant status during the period 1933–45. From 25 July 1933 until late 1942 Zürn worked for the cinema company Universum Film A. G. (UFA), beginning as a stenographer. A document reproduced in volume 6 of Zürn’s Gesamtausgabe (but so far, like much of her writing, not translated into English) gives some indication of her involvement in the culture and politics of Berlin and the Third Reich during the war.40 She wrote on 14 January 1942 to the Reichsschrifttumskammer (RSK or Ministry of Letters), the subdivision of the Reich Chamber of Culture that dealt with literature, to apply for membership as a published author and for permission to publish a book. Her application was granted on 25 March 1942, but the book was never published. Glenn R. Cuomo points out that the RSK (from which the inner-emigrant novelist Langgässer had been expelled, in May 1936) ‘followed a strict political and racial screening process’.41 Zürn was required to provide a certificate confirming her Aryan descent, later receiving confirmation from the NSDAP of acceptable racial descent back to her grandparents. She confirmed in this document that she was a member of the DAF (the Deutsche Arbeitsfront [German Labour Front], the organisation that replaced trades unions under Nazism), but not of the NSDAP. At this time, she described herself as ‘Dramaturg’ (playwright) and ‘Filmschriftstellerin im Werbefilm’ (scriptwriter for advertising). She described her father as ‘Major a. D. Ralph Zürn, Schriftsteller’ (i.e. writer), thus retaining his military rank alongside his cultural credentials. Ralph had in 1919 established a publishing company, Zettka-Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, its name using the initial letters of Zürn and his partner Kronos. Zettka, or ZK, reverses the German abbreviation of ‘concentration camp’ as ‘KZ’ (a collocation of letters also prominent in the spelling of Unika Zürn’s given forename, which she changed at some point in the 1940s to

39 Cathy S. Gelbin, ‘Elisabeth Langgässer and the question of inner emigration’, in Donahue and Kirchner (eds), Flight of Fantasy, pp. 269–79; p. 269. 40 Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 6, pp. 152–5. 41 Glenn R. Cuomo, ‘Opposition or opportunism? Günter Eich’s status as inner emigrant’, in Donahue and Kirchner (eds), Flight of Fantasy, pp. 176–87; p. 178.

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‘Unica’). The Ralph Zürn publishing venture lasted ten years; he published a book of tales under the pseudonym Rolf Berndt in 1920.42 Unica noted in the 1942 application that her own writing career began in 1932 with contributions to youth magazines, that she was working permanently for UFA, and that amongst her works were pieces for a Kasperletheater (puppet theatre) which was in 1942 being performed by the Frauenarbeitsdienst (which Zürn voluntarily joined from 5 March to 5 September 1935) for the RAD (Reichsarbeitsdienst or Reich Labour Service). What she calls the Frauenarbeitsdienst had in 1936 been renamed the Reichsarbeitsdienst der weiblichen Jugend (the Reich Labour Service section for Young Women), an organisation which supported the Wehrmacht. In October 1935, she worked as a stenotypist in the animation film department at UFA. She transferred to advertising scriptwriting in May 1936. In 1937, UFA, already majority-owned by the financier and Hitler ally Alfred Hugenberg, was wholly taken over by the Nazi Party and became a propaganda machine for the regime.43 In October 1942, Zürn left UFA and married the older and wealthy Erich Laupenmühlen (who worked for Leica and was exempt from military service due to his economic standing; in 1935 Laupenmühlen is mentioned in the US newspaper Women’s Wear Daily as a manager of the Berlin store Hertie, Waren- und Kaufhaus G.m.b.H. [Hertie Department Store and Warehouse, Ltd Co.]).44 In a letter to Ruth Henry in March 1970, Zürn noted that ‘die Bibel meines Exgatten’ (‘my ex-husband’s Bible’) was Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West).45 Their first child, Katrin, was born in May 1943. Helene Doehle’s house in Grunewald was destroyed by firebombs on 22 November 1943, and the Laupenmühlen home was badly bombed on 15 February 1944, shortly before news arrived of the death of Zürn’s brother in Russia.46 Helene Doehle’s war diaries record the experience of living in Berlin with her daughter at this time. On 18 December 1944 she writes: ‘When I arrived breathless in the bunker, the bombers were already roaring above us and the impacts crashed around us. […] Rubble over rubble.’47 Zürn remained in Berlin through the final battle in spring 1945, while her mother left for Bad Berneck (from where she wrote to Jaspers). Zürn and Laupenmühlen separated

42 See Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 3, p. 228. The volume of tales was titled Fürstin Ljuba Woroschoneff und andere Geschichten. 43 Plumer, Unica Zürn, p. 16. 44 Anon., ‘German store firm increases capital’, Women’s Wear Daily, Tuesday 7 May 1935, p. 24. 45 Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 6, p. 31. 46 Lusardy, Unica Zürn, p. 101; Helene Doehle, ‘Aufzeichnungen: Zehn Jahre’, in Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 6, p. 119. 47 ‘Als ich atemlos im Bunker ankam, dröhnten schon die Bomber über uns und die Einschläge krachten um uns her. […] Trümmer über Trümmer.’ Doehle, ‘Aufzeichnungen’, in Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 6, p. 120.

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in 1946 and divorced three years later. He retained custody of the children, another traumatic experience for Zürn.

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Berlin and Die Badewanne Critical work on Zürn generally cites 1953, the year she met the surrealist artist Hans Bellmer (1902–75), as a crucial watershed in her artistic development. Her involvement in the post-war Berlin cabaret group Die Badewanne (The Bathtub) and her four-year relationship with its co-founder Alexander Camaro (1901–92), who had been condemned by the Nazis as a ‘degenerate’ artist, receive less attention, but pre-date by several years her meeting with Bellmer, and crucially influenced her aesthetic development. Camaro, who introduced Zürn to drawing and painting,48 had exhibited in 1947 at the Galerie Gerd Rosen, which had been (in August 1945) the first art gallery to open in post-war Berlin. He had worked as a troop entertainer on the Russian front during the war before going into hiding after being called up to the German army in 1944. After her divorce from Laupenmühlen in 1949, Zürn lived with Camaro for several years up to 1953. In a letter of 23 April 1970 to Rudolf Springer, she described Camaro as ‘[meinen] unvergesslichen, 4 1/2 jãhrigen Liebhaber’ (‘my unforgettable lover of 4½ years’).49 The Badewanne was an artist cabaret which ran for six months from July 1949 in the cellar of the Femina-Bar, a former puszta cellar of the dance palace Femina in Nürnberger Straße 50–56 in west Berlin. Self-consciously echoing French surrealist responses to the aftermath of the previous war, it was explicitly surrealist in its hybridisation of French café and Berlin cabaret culture. Badewanne aesthetics also bore many traces of the legacies of expressionism, which in the 1920s had been much more significant in Berlin than Surrealism. The Badewanne forged a characteristically modernist aesthetic practice that found expression across a wide variety of media despite (like the earlier Berlin and Zürich Dada performances) a desperate shortage of artistic materials.50 The painter Katja Meirowsky (1920–2012) and her husband Karl (1919–80) were members of the Badewanne; the composer Hans Werner Henze (1926–2012), whose music the group frequently performed, 48 Brinkmann, in Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 4.3, p. 23. 49 Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 6, p. 43. 50 Zürn notes in her 1953 narrative ‘Katrin’, a fictionalised autobiography, that one intention of the Badewanne (which she renames Langer Egon) was the economic need to employ artists who were otherwise struggling amid the reconstruction of post-war Berlin: ‘Es ist entstanden, weil wir nicht wollen daß hier weitergehungert wird’ (‘It was established because we didn’t want continual starvation’). Zürn, ‘Katrin – Die Geschichte einer kleinen Schriftstellerin: Ein Jugendbuch’, in Gesamtausgabe, 3, pp. 67–210; p. 206.

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recalls the Meirowsky house as being at the time ‘the meeting point of Berlin’s visual modernism’.51 Where French Surrealism had reacted to the devastation of war by exploring its effects on the human body, the Badewanne responded to the urban devastation of Berlin, mapping the architectural, civic, and cultural chaos of the immediately post-war period and providing some of the earliest coherent aesthetic responses to the immense traumas accompanying the emergent post-Nazi era. Isabel Fischer notes that in Badewanne activities ‘The engagement with Surrealism is not only theoretical, but also practical’.52 Fischer points out that in the early post-war years there was much public and media discussion of a German, or even Berlin, manifestation of Surrealism, as the first translations of French surrealist works (banned by the Nazis), and accompanying explanatory texts, began to be published, raising the movement’s public prominence.53 Surrealism offered Berlin’s post-war artists an international set of reference points denied them by the now-defunct regime, and the Badewanne artists and writers were aware of and engaged with all phases of the movement from the early 1920s to post-war developments.54 Above all, these artists perceived post-war Berlin, a city fragmented politically into four occupied zones, with its ruins, its inside-out devastation mingling private and public lives, possessions, and practices, and the strange conjunctions and juxtapositions resulting from utter social chaos, as a landscape that was already surreal: ‘However, the Berlin artists agree with each other that through post-war reality one is already in a surreal situation’.55 This perception, Fischer suggests, was the starting-point for their own artistic exploration. Victoria Applebe has argued that ‘Unica Zürn first came to Surrealism in 1953 when she was already thirty-seven’,56 and Zürn’s later meetings with key figures in Surrealism via Hans Bellmer have been well-documented by other critics, but it is clear that her involvement in the Badewanne and her affair with Camaro 51 Hans Werner Henze, Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten: Autobiographische Mitteilungen 1926–1995 (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, 1998), p. 138. 52 ‘Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Surrealismus erfolgt nicht nur theoretisch, sondern auch praktisch.’ Isabel Fischer, ‘Das Surreale surrealisieren: Wie die Berliner Nachkriegskünstler der Badewanne an den Französischen Surrealismus anknüpften’, in Fischer, Agnes Kern, and Dagmar Schmengler (eds), Berlin Surreal: Camaro und das Künstlerkabarett Die Badewanne (Berlin: Nicolai, 2014), pp. 67–80; pp. 67–8. 53 Fischer, ‘Das Surreale surrealisieren’, p. 67; see also Alain Bosquet (ed.), Surrealismus 1924–1949: Texte und Kritik (Berlin: Karl H. Henssel, 1950); and Dieter Wyss, Der Surrealismus: Eine Einführung und Deutung surrealistischer Literatur und Malerei (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1950). 54 See Fischer, ‘Das Surreale surrealisieren’, pp. 67–70. 55 ‘Unter den Berliner Künstlern ist man sich jedoch darüber einig, dass man sich durch die Nachkriegswirklichkeit bereits in einem surrealen Zustand befände.’ Fischer, ‘Das Surreale surrealisieren’, p. 69. 56 Victoria Applebe, ‘‘‘Du wirst dein Geheimnis sagen” (“You will reveal your secret”): anagrams in the work of Unica Zürn’, in Lusardy (ed.), Unica Zürn, pp. 34–53; p. 34.

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introduced her to surrealist aesthetics and their contemporary German relevance in 1949 or possibly earlier. The affair certainly influenced her development as a writer. Quick, the fictionalised version of Camaro in ‘Katrin’, Zürn’s unpublished (c.1953) ­fictional-autobiographical account of her writerly progress, offers paternal advice to Katrin to ‘think and dream. You will try to get some order in your thoughts’.57 The encounter with Badewanne’s assimilation of French Surrealism into post-war Berlin provided her with a context that was simultaneously international and avant-garde, and firmly local, domestic, and German in its focus, in relation to which she could begin to define her own artistic practice. Notably, Badewanne artists deliberately adapted surrealist aesthetics to respond directly to Holocaust and other traumatic post-war imagery. Waldemar Grzimek’s lithograph Buchenwald (c.1950), for example, offers a grim iconography of violence and suffering, its ‘dark, depressing mood’58 expressed in human figures facing dangling nooses while a wolf leans hungrily across the image. Grzimek (1918–84) had served in the German Navy during the war, and later designed Holocaust memorials for Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. The Badewanne’s explorations of dreams and nightmares in diaries and drawings, as well as in other works such as Wolfgang Frankenstein’s 1949 performance Selbstmordnummern (Suicide Numbers), contributed to ‘nightmarish scenes which refer to the real trauma of the time’.59 Frankenstein (1918–2010) characterised the group’s work as ‘a tightrope walk on this dividing line, to fall into huge laughter or, close to suicide, to tear yourself apart. The tragic grotesque, at least for the artists, was the feeling of life during those years’.60 A key figure in the group, the painter Werner Heldt (1904–54), was ‘the most important painterly chronicler of Berlin after the war’ according to the publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler: ‘His views of the ruins with their empty window cavities convey a picture of the city as rubble, which he called Berlin am Meer [Berlin on the Sea]’.61 Reviewing the LACMA exhibition Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, Todd 57 ‘[…] denken und träumen. Du wirst versuchen, ein bißchen Ordnung in Deine Gedanken zu bringen.’ Zürn, ‘Katrin’, in Gesamtausgabe, 3, p. 205. 58 ‘[…] düster-depressiven Stimmung’. Fischer, Kern, and Schmengler, ‘Traum und Trauma’, in Fischer, Kern, and Schmengler (eds), Berlin Surreal, p. 53. 59 ‘[…] alptraumhafte Szenen, die auf das reale Trauma der Zeit verweisen’. Fischer, Kern, and Schmengler, ‘Traum und Trauma’, p. 53. 60 ‘Es war ein Seiltanz auf dieser Trennungslinie, in ein reisiges Gelächter zu verfallen oder nahe dem Selbstmord sich zu zerfleischen. Das Tragisch-Groteske, das ist, bei den Künstlern jedenfalls, das Lebensgefühl dieser Jahre gewesen’. Wolfgang Frankenstein, in Fischer, ‘Das Surreale surrealisieren’, p. 73. 61 ‘Der bedeutendste malerische Chronist des Berlin der Nachkriegszeit, und seine Ansichten der Ruinen mit ihren leeren Fensterhöhlen vermitteln ein Bild von der Stadt in Trümmern, die er “Berlin am Meer” nannte.’ Wolf Jobst Siedler, Wir waren noch einmal davongekommen (Munich: Pantheon Verlag, 2006), p. 176.

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Presner described Heldt’s ‘bleak existential canvases of ruined cityscapes’ as ‘exceptional documents of a moment that was hardly captured or, perhaps more precisely said, hardly able to be captured by German artists’.62 Heldt made works using fragments of rubble and junk, as in Tür (Door, c.1946), a depiction in wax crayons and face-paints of the shattered city landscape with human faces looming in the foreground like tombstones, painted on a door which was itself an object retrieved from that landscape. ‘Here’, writes Fischer, ‘the postwar ruin is not only integrated into the picture as an object, but the picture itself is painted on part of a ruin. […] [T]his door comes from the rubble’.63 Tür operates in dialogue with other works by Badewanne artists such as Jeanne Mammen’s more pessimistic painting Tür zum Nichts (Door to Nothingness, c.1945). While these works are suggestive of openings into new, alternative realities, Heldt’s Tür in particular demonstrates a strategy of self-referential recycling of material and content, in which medium and message collapse into a single object, embodying within the materiality of the work both its substantial solidity and its ephemeral transitoriness as displaced rubbish, repurposed as a surface for representation rather than as a functional object but also bearing the trace of its former usefulness as a historical reminder of a lost, shattered, domestic past. After a long struggle with alcoholism and plagued by a persistent foreboding of his own death, Heldt died of a stroke in 1954. A year later, Zürn produced a short anagram-text, two lines of seven syllables and one of eight, from the sentence ‘Werner Heldt ist mein Bruder’: Werner Heldt ist mein Bruder der Windmuehlen, Sirre-Brett der Nebel. Er ruht erst im Wind.64 (Werner Heldt is my brother of the windmills, Sirre-board of the mist. He rests only in the wind.)

Demonstrating how she adapted and repurposed her experience of the Badewanne, this haiku-like poem, which commemorates Heldt in gentle pastoral imagery, cements her close, even familial, affinity with a central figure of the group through 62 Todd Presner, ‘Review of exhibition: Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures’, Germanic Review, 84:4 (2009), 381–6; 383. 63 ‘Hier ist die Nachkriegsruine nicht nur als Gegenstand in das Bild integriert, sondern das Bild selbst ist auf den Teil einer Ruine gemalt. […] [D]iese Tür stammt aus den Trümmern’. Fischer, ‘Das Surreale surrealisieren’, p. 71. The door belonged to the art collector Max Leon Flemming (1881–1956), one of the founders of the Galerie Gert Rosen, along with Heinz Trökes and Gert Rosen. 64 Zürn, ‘Werner Heldt ist mein Bruder’, 1955, in Gesamtausgabe, 1: Anagramme, p. 22.

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a ­linguistic version of the group’s aesthetics of constrained recycling, a creative ­procedure that generated from initial material a variety of potential new works. Just as the Badewanne’s Berlin Surrealism took and reworked a constrained field of available historical experience and materials as the ground of its art, so Zürn’s anagrams would manipulate fragments of language and texts in articulating her responses to the historical circumstances in which she found herself working – the shattered (but, by the early 1950s, already rapidly regenerating, their fragments recombined into new buildings and streets) urban and cultural landscapes of post-war Germany. This process of linguistic fragmentation and manipulation began in the stories Zürn published between 1949 and 1955 in a variety of newspapers and magazines. Many of these short, abbreviated narratives deal with inconclusive, apparently inconsequential events; the stories are characterised by their fractured, paratactic grammatical style that contrasts markedly with the complex, highly co-ordinated sentences of classical, pre-war German prose. In the major publication carrying new German writing in the early post-war years, the Munich-based journal Der Ruf, Gustav René Hocke had called for ‘a new, honest, and realistic prose style suited to the times’, while the journal’s editor, Hans Werner Richter, argued for a style he termed Kahlschlag, ‘a spontaneous and unambiguous style which prunes away tricks and decorativeness and avoids imitation of earlier German authors’.65 Zürn may have developed her own version of this style (which Mandel calls ‘this bare prose’)66 partly in imitation of stylistic features evident in other prominent post-war German literary texts, such as the notably paratactic prose style of one of the best-selling novels of the post-war years (and one of her favourites), Ernst Kreuder’s Die Gesellschaft vom Dachboden (1946, translated as The Attic Pretenders), or the f­ ragmented-mosaic style adopted by Günther Weisenborn in his 1948 memoir Memorial. The opening of Zürn’s story ‘Nach der Vorstellung’ (‘After the Performance’, published in January 1950 in Der Telegraph) exemplifies her adaptation of such fragmented style: Pierrot left the cloakroom door open behind him. Then he fell on the stone floor. The tip of his brightly coloured cap ruffled his eyes. He was drunk.67

65 Siegfried Mandel, Group 47: The Reflected Intellect (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), p. 13. Zürn seems to have had no formal connection with Gruppe 47, the loose group of post-war German writers organised by Richter and surveyed in Mandel’s book; they didn’t meet in Berlin until 1955, by which time she was living in Paris. 66 Mandel, Group 47: The Reflected Intellect, p. 16. 67 ‘Pierrot ließ die Garderobentür hinter sich offen. Dann fiel er auf den Steinboden nieder. Der Zipfel seiner bunten Kappe rutschte ihm über die Augen. Er war betrunken.’ Zürn, ‘Nach der Vorstellung’, in Gesamtausgabe, 2.1, pp. 32–4; p. 32.

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Short sentences delineate a series of actions and descriptive details whose sequential connectivity is minimally indicated (by the word ‘Dann’ at the beginning of the second sentence). The effect is of an abbreviated, staccato rendering of experience as a series of events that may actually be unconnected, but which are nevertheless linked (as in the modernist techniques of collage and montage) by proximity and juxtaposition. In ‘Er zauberte mit Holz und Feuer’ (published in early 1953) Zürn writes: Arndt was a thin, tough figure. In summer, copper-red like the wood of the pine when the last sun shines on it. He wore an old, green suit, like a hunter, and a hat that he pulled down over his forehead, fibrous like moss.68

The ellipsis of the second sentence momentarily erases the protagonist from the action, leaving only an image and a broad, seasonal sense of temporality (‘Im Sommer  …’). The insistent similes render the world of the narrative as a sequence of image-­comparisons, repeatedly shifting the reader away from what is represented through a repetition of tropes that compresses language and narrative. In the radio play ‘Die Flucht der Häuser: Ein Funkmärchen’ (broadcast on RIAS Berlin on 19 July 1950), Zürn allegorises her experience of bombed-out Berlin, presenting a surreal narrative in which sentient houses eventually abandon their inhabitants, including the office staff of the ‘Bombastic-Werke’, who instead set up their business in the street: ‘As long as the houses are away, we will work here in the street! Typewriters on the right – office tables and filing cabinets on the left – in the service of the Bombastic-Werke we can work everywhere’.69 Zürn’s focus on the absurdity of administrative labour continuing amid the chaos of homelessness clearly embodies memories of immediately post-war Berlin. In other narratives, her stenographic training mobilises explorations of how post-war German language, written, typed, and spoken, has broken down. In ‘Das Stenogramm’ (‘The Stenogram’, a narrative published in Der Kurier in 1950 and clearly resembling passages from the later ‘Katrin’, discussed below), speech momentarily breaks down into typographically rendered fragments: ‘Have you got that? His upper body stretched wide across the desk, his eyes

68 ‘Arndt war eine magere, harte Erscheinung. Im Sommer kupferrot wie das Holz der Kiefern, wenn die letzte Sonne darauf scheint. Er trug einen alten, grünen Anzug, wie ein Jäger, und einen Hut, den er tief in die Stirn zog faserig wie Moos.’ Zürn, ‘Er zauberte mit Holz und Feuer’, in Gesamtausgabe,  2,  pp. 238–41; p. 238. 69 ‘Solange die Häuser nicht da sind, werden wir hier auf der Straße arbeiten! Schreibmaschinen rechts – Schreibtische und Aktenständer links – im Dienste der Bombastic-Werke kann man überall arbeiten’. Zürn, ‘Die Flucht der Häuser: Ein Funkmärchen’, in Gesamtausgabe, 6, pp. 179–94; p. 187 (emphasis original).

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rolled over her lap, “yes –, n – –, yes – – ”, she said’.70 The narrative presents a woman, Ingeborg Preßler, attending an interview and typing test: She drew the bow, put her fingers on the keys as she had learned to: ASDF – JKLÖ – – and her thumbs on the space bar, she sat up straight, looking at the shorthand pad next to her – and apart from one – I – for – that – and – she couldn’t read a single word of it. […]

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She tried to remember what the head of personnel had actually dictated, but she felt as if he hadn’t said anything at all the whole time – what had actually happened in the weather house: door open, door closed, one liveried Messenger, one elegant lady, in, out, and blue glass eyes almost rolled out of a fat face. Mechanically she began to type lines and this sound gave her courage. Then she types ooooooo, then lllllll, then ……., and the sound mingled in beautiful harmony with the clatter around her.71

In this narrative ‘diktiert’, the act of dictation, leads to a collapse of communication; language breaks down into single words, grammar into the incoherent stutter of repeated letters and the ‘Geklapper’ (‘clatter’) of the surrounding office, an environment of bureaucratic power from which Ingeborg finally exits, as the narrative ends, walking ‘very upright out of the room’.72 The result is something similar to what Fredric Jameson describes in his diagnosis of schizophrenic postmodern narrative: ‘the relationship [of signifiers to each other] breaks down, when the links of the signifying chain snap, then we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers’.73 Paratactic style in this short narrative becomes a form of (female) resistance to the power exercised by (male) dictation, combining the wider relation of the surface disruptions of syntactic coherence as a stylistic response to a shattered reality (Jameson’s ‘rubble’ of signification) with a more coded analysis of language as the damaged terrain of a struggle of gender imbalance. The ­‘dictatorial’ 70 ‘“Haben sie das?”, der Oberkörper ragte wiederum weit über den Schreibtisch vor, die Augen rollten über ihren Schoß, “ja –, n – –, ja – –”, sagte sie’. Zürn, ‘Das Stenogramm’, in Gesamtausgabe, 2, p. 96–101; p. 99. 71 ‘Sie spannte den Bogen ein, legte die Finger auf die Tasten, wie sie es gelernt hatte: ASDF – JKLÖ – – und die Daumen auf die Zwischenraumleiste, sie setzte sich gerade, blickte auf den Stenogrammblock neben sich – und außer einem – ich – für – das – und – konnte sie kein einziges Wort darin lesen. […] Sie versuchte sich daran zu erinnern, was der Personalchef eigentlich diktiert hatte, aber da war ihr, als hätte er die ganze Zeit hindurch überhaupt nichts gesagt – was war in dem Wetterhäuschen eigentlich geschehen: Tür auf, Tür zu, einmal ein livrierter Bote, einmal eine elegante Dame, herein, heraus, und blaue Glasaugen wären beinahe aus einem dicken Gesicht herausgekugelt. Mechanisch began sie Striche zu tippen und dieses Geräusch machte ihr Mut. Dann tippte sie ooooooo, dann lllllll, dann ……., und das Geräusch mischte sich voll schönster Harmonie in das Geklapper rings um sie.’ Zürn, ‘Das Stenogramm’, p. 100. 72 ‘Sehr aufrecht ging sie aus dem Zimmer.’ Zürn, ‘Das Stenogramm’, p. 101. 73 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 26.

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logic of this relation resonates historically, suggesting an allegorical reading of a mechanically repetitive German language, void of syntax or sense, in which words and their meanings have been fatally disconnected by the disruptive force of historical trauma, evoking both the material and linguistic rubble of post-war Berlin and what Bob Perelman has called ‘the rubble of snapped signifying chains’74 characteristic of paratactic writing. Life/work and pathography The prevailing critical narrative about Zürn reads her work as principally a­utobiographical in focus and motivation, and proceeds to repeat a restricted bio-pathological narrative structured by constraining dialectics of abuse and creativity, incarceration and release, and above all by her relationship with the German surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, whom she met in 1953. ‘Life’ and ‘work’ become increasingly blurred in such readings. Caroline Rupprecht, for example, asserts that ‘The problem with Zürn is that it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish her “art” from her “life”’.75 The clearly introspective aspect of her work has generally been understood as a ‘symptom’ of a necessary link between ‘creativity and pathology’, as João Ribas puts it.76 Ribas’s version of this understanding translates Zürn’s bi-polar disorder into surrealist terms, reading it as a ‘“staged” or “performed” madness’.77 Her obsession with anagrams (which developed from 1953 onwards but which, I argue, was prefigured in her earlier writing) becomes, in this reading, an ‘intense fixation on phenomena’, a fixation which is ‘paranoid’ but, Ribas insists, ‘must not be entirely pathological’.78 And this has been, effectively, how Zürn’s works have been interpreted – as written and pictorial translations of her experiences of mental illness, expressions of an art ‘intertwined with her illness’, as Katharine Conley puts it.79 While most critical readings of Zürn turn to psychoanalysis and the influence of Bellmer (and thus supplant history with biography), it is also clear that her work relates to key aspects of post-war German culture’s complex processes of forgetting and remembering – processes nevertheless impacting directly on pivotal moments in Zürn’s biographical experience, and ramifying across different dimensions of 74 Bob Perelman, ‘Parataxis and narrative: the new sentence in theory and practice’, American Literature, 65:2 (June 1993), 313–24; 323. 75 Rupprecht, Subject to Delusions, p. 24. 76 João Ribas, ‘Unica Zürn – oracles and spectacles’, in Unica Zürn, Dark Spring, Mary Ann Caws and João Ribas (eds) (New York: The Drawing Center, 2009), pp. 11–12. 77 Ribas, ‘Unica Zürn’, p. 22. 78 Ribas, ‘Unica Zürn’, p. 23. 79 Conley, Automatic Woman, p. 85.

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her works. In reading these works in relation to questions of trauma alongside the ­better-known significance of her mental illness, a pathography emerges in which social and bodily spaces intersect productively with the space of the image-text as well as with psychic territories, offering an aesthetic register of the traumatic resonances of historical events through which Zürn lived. ‘Pathography’ implies the relation between disorder (mental or physical) and the textual inscription of the life of the individual. The biographical and historical circumstances outlined earlier suggest that a deeply destructive social and political ­disorder  –  Nazism – has left a pathographical trace which Zürn’s oeuvre overtly registers and tries, for reasons which will become apparent, to contain and encrypt. Christina Svendsen, one of Zürn’s translators, has written of the artist’s ‘deep psychic distress and projected guilt at the atrocities of the Nazis as revealed in the post-war period, an undistanced suffering that caused one of her breakdowns’.80 As discussed earlier, the question of individual and cultural ‘guilt’ is central to much post-war German art and literature; it exerts a constant pressure in Zürn’s art, and its negotiation clearly shaped her subsequent writing and drawing. In Der Mann im Jasmin (The Man of Jasmine, 1967, first published in French translation in 1971), a late narrative deeply haunted by memories of wartime horrors from decades earlier, Zürn recounts her periods of treatment for mental illness in the early 1960s, in passages where fragmented, traumatic recollections intrude damagingly into the present, registering the effects of historical events as a series of disrupted flows and leakages: Back in her bed she begins to think of things from the past – including the war. Of the bright spring day when hundreds of bombers had cast their fire on to the city, until the sky had been so darkened by black smoke it had seemed like night. In the evening, after this chaos, when the streets had smelt of gas from the broken pipes, she walked past the freshly destroyed, still-smoking ruin of a house and heard a loud, uncanny gurgling noise coming from the charred, decimated walls. Water gushed from a broken pipe into the infinitely sad and despairing evening. She thought that in this solitary noise she could hear the life of her city trickling away, slowly but surely.81

80 Christina Svendsen, ‘Translator’s introduction’ to The Trumpets of Jericho (Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2015), p. xii 81 Unica Zürn, The Man of Jasmine and Other Texts, Malcolm Green (trans.) (London: Atlas Press, 1994), pp. 66–7. ‘Wieder in ihrem Bett, beginnt sie, an vergangene Dinge zu denken – auch an den Krieg. An den hellen Frühlingstag, wo Hunderte von Bombenflugzeugen ihr Feuer in die Stadt geworfen hatten, bis sich der Himmel von schwarzem Rauch so verdunkelt hatte, als sei es Nacht geworden. Am Abend, nach diesem Chaos, wo die Straßen nach Gas rochen, weil die Rohre der Gasleitungen kaputt waren,  ging sie an einer frischen, noch rauchenden Häuserruine vorüber, und in diesen schwarzen,

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Smoke, gas, and water leak out in memories of the city’s shattered body, the solid urban space becoming fluid, just as memories of the past continuously leak into the present of the narrative and, in the narrator’s disordered imagination, the body of the city merges fluidly with her own, collapsing past and present, human and urban in a violent image of traumatic memory in which one kind of incineration clearly substitutes momentarily for another: ‘the image appears inside her of an enormous oven belching clouds of black stinking smoke’.82 Fragments of memory slot into the narrative of contemporary psychiatric disorder, suggesting a destructuring reminiscence haunting the contemporary, and offering a diagnostic reading of Berlin’s history in which personal and cultural disorders merge uncannily. Walls and what they conceal recur as symbols of the collapsing barriers between past and present: ‘she appears to be conjuring up age old days, past events which have occurred here behind the walls of Wittenau mental hospital’.83 By insistently naming the mental hospital ‘Wittenau’, the text asserts the persistence of historical memory despite contemporary efforts to revise or erase it. Wittenau had been renamed the Karl Bonhoeffer Nervenklinik in 1957. In her memoir of Heinz Drossel (who, conscripted into the German army in 1940, nevertheless helped Jews and Russians escape Nazi persecution), Katharina Stegelmann describes Wittenau hospital during the Third Reich as ‘a collecting station for those who had forfeited their right to live’.84 It functioned in the mid-1930s as a transit station for the deportation of ‘prisoners’ to the camps and, later, as a child euthanasia centre where the Nazis experimented with infectious diseases on juvenile Auschwitz inmates and performed forced sterilisation of Jews and other minorities.85 (The narrator of The Man of Jasmine interprets the phrase ‘squashed fruit’ ‘As if this were a memory of an abortion or a sterilisation’.)86

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zerstörten Mauern ertönte ein lautes, unheimliches Rauschen. Aus einem zerbrochenen Rohr floß das Wasser in diesen unendlich traurigen und verzweiflungsvollen Abend hinaus. Da glaubte sie in diesem einsamen Geräusch langsam und unaufhaltsam das Leben ihrer Stadt verströmen zu hören.’ Zürn, ‘Der Mann im Jasmin’, in Gesamtausgabe, 4.1, pp. 135–255; p. 184. Zürn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 119. ‘[…] das Bild eines riesigen Ofens, aus dem sich schwarze, stinkende Rauchwolken erheben, erscheint in ihrem Inneren.’ Zürn, ‘Der Mann im Jasmin’, p. 246. Zürn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 75. ‘Sie scheint sehr alte Zeiten heraufzubeschwören, die Vergangenheit, die sich hinter den Mauern der Irrenanstalt Wittenau abgespielt hat.’ Zürn, ‘Der Mann im Jasmin’, p. 194. Katharina Stegelmann, Staying Human: The Story of a Quiet WWII Hero, Rachel Hildebrandt (trans.) (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2015), p. 124. ‘[…] there is significant evidence to indicate that an unknown number of patients were killed in Wittenau itself either by lethal doses of medication, starvation, or a combination of the two.’ Melvyn Conroy, Nazi Eugenics: Precursors, Policy, Aftermath (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), p. 180. See also Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University, Press, 2015), p. 312. Zürn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 74. ‘Als sollte das die Erinnerung an eine Abtreibung oder an eine Sterilisierung sein.’ Zürn, ‘Der Mann im Jasmin’, p. 194.

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In a strange historical coincidence, the actor Bruno Schleinstein, who played Kaspar Hauser in Werner Herzog’s 1974 film Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser), was confined in Wittenau in 1940, when he was 8 years old, having become deaf after being severely beaten by his mother. Zürn’s experience in Wittenau in the early 1960s becomes in her narrative an insistent raking over of historical ashes through ‘the shattering experiences of hallucinations’.87 The Nazi past of Berlin’s medical institutions intrudes into the distorted realities of the present as a constant parallel, in which the narrator’s private experiences offer uncanny repetitions of historical events repressed from German public consciousness. The word ‘Wittenau’ furthermore suggests an anagrammatic echo of ‘Auschwitz’, a word and a trope that resonate throughout Zürn’s works. Germanagrammar The recycling of fragments of found material is the fundamental strategy of Unica Zürn’s first major innovative works, her anagrams, which constitute an extended procedural response to the post-war shattering of the German body politic and language, while simultaneously demonstrating Zürn’s assimilation of and adaptation of elements of French surrealist aesthetics of assemblage and juxtaposition. In December 1954 Springer gallery published a limited-edition pamphlet of ten anagrams and ten drawings by Zürn under the title Hexentexte (Witch’s Writings). The title may have been suggested by the work of another German woman artist, Valeska Gert, who returned to Berlin in the late 1940s after several years in exile in New York and developed a complex relationship with the Badewanne group. Gert (who, in 1929–30, had sat for a portrait by Badewanne member Jeanne Mammen) opened a bar in Berlin, off Kurfürstendamm, near the Femina-Bar and Galerie Gert Rosen. In her autobiography, Ich bin eine Hexe, Gert, an influential veteran (as we’ve seen in the Introduction) of 1920s Dada and Surrealism in Berlin and Paris, recalls trying to purchase an empty Hungarian-owned venue, but eventually deciding the space was unsuitable.88 This venue, she writes, later became the location of the Badewanne, and Gert found another venue in the Opernkeller, which she was later forced to vacate to accommodate a cabaret act called Das Atelier – which was again the Badewanne, renamed. Gert moved to a new venue which she christened (echoing Goethe’s Faust) Hexenküche (Witch’s Kitchen), a name Zürn echoes in her first anagram publication,89 87 Zürn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 113. ‘[…] den erschütternden Erlebnissen der Halluzinationen’. Zürn, ‘Der Mann im Jasmin’, p. 240. 88 Gert, Ich bin eine Hexe, p. 166. 89 Gert, Ich bin eine Hexe, pp. 167–8. See also Verena Hein, Werner Heldt (1904–1954): Leben und Werk (München: Herbert Utz Verlag, 2013), p. 59.

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its title thus covertly connecting her work to a specifically German and female avantgarde tradition with its own links to Surrealism. In The Man of Jasmine Zürn defines anagrams as ‘words and sentences which are created by rearranging the letters in a word or sentence’.90 Anagrams depend upon processes of fragmentation and recombination; with their reliance on latent significance and their suggestion of encrypted or concealed meanings, they invite psychoanalytic interpretation. The tendency of the anagram to lean towards repetition, furthermore, constructs a labyrinthine reading experience in which the same  ­combinations, syllables, and words steer the reader insistently backwards to  the point of origin. E. J. Leed famously analysed the expression of First World War traumas in soldiers’ speech disorders such as stammers and stutters, impediments that effectively (Leed argued) reify in language the soldiers’ psychological experience  of terror in the trenches as a variety of labyrinthine text (a version of the labyrinthine  architecture of the trenches) demanding accurate interpretation if the subject is to escape their trauma.91 This suggests that the constrained textual spaces of Zürn’s anagrams, and the confining geographies characteristic of many of her narratives, can be understood similarly as expressions of a traumatic sense of restricted experience. In the context of post-war German literature, the anagram can also be read as a suggestively strategic response to the condition of the German language specifically, and the German body politic more generally in the wake of Nazism, which exerted (many commentators felt) a distorting effect on the language that severely if not irreversibly damaged it, with disastrous cultural consequences. Post-war German, in this analysis, is a language metaphorically characterised by disorders of speech and reference cognate with those identified by Leed and other critics of First World War trauma; the difference is that, for Leed, traumas were expressed in individual disorders, whereas in post-war Germany trauma registered its effects at the n ­ ational-cultural-linguistic level. George Steiner’s important essay ‘The Hollow Miracle’, published in 1959, offered an early diagnosis of a near-fatal historical wound to the German language after the Second World War: ‘Something immensely destructive has happened to it. It makes noise. It even communicates, but it creates no sense of communion’.92 Victor Klemperer wrote of the ‘fog’ of Nazism and its disastrous

90 Zürn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 35. ‘Anagramme sind Worte und Sätze, die durch Umstellen der Buchstaben eines Wortes oder Satzes entstanden sind.’ Zürn, ‘Der Mann im Jasmin’, p. 148. 91 See E. J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), especially Chapter 3 ‘War in the labyrinth: the realities of war’, pp. 73–114. 92 George Steiner, ‘The hollow miracle’, in Language and Silence (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 136–51; p. 136.

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impact on the German language.93 In 1980, Günter Grass delivered a lecture in China addressing the wartime destruction of the German language: In 1945, Germany was not only militarily defeated. Not only the cities and industrial plants had been destroyed. Worse damage had been done: National Socialist ideology had robbed the German language of its meaning, had corrupted it and laid waste whole fields of words.

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In this mutilated language, writers, handicapped by its injuries, began to stammer more than write.94

A similar, if wider, diagnosis is offered by Geoffrey Hartman’s critique of post-Holocaust poetics: ‘The hurt inflicted on appearances – on a (harmonious) correspondence between outer and inner – is so acute that it leads to a stutter in the representational faculties. That stutter in verbal form is akin to poetry like Paul Celan’s, and in visual form it distorts or even divorces features that once were kind.’95 ‘Stammering’ and ‘stuttering’ describe interruptions of flow, failures to articulate (literally, to join together) or to complete verbal sounds, the elements of speech. For philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the stutter is a symptom of systemic disorders, and language itself ‘stutters’ at the moment the writer is forced to represent its failure to communicate: ‘And what language did Kleist awaken deep within German by means of grimaces, slips of the tongue, screechings, inarticulate sounds, extended liaisons, and brutal accelerations and decelerations’.96 When Zürn anagrammatically transforms the sentence ‘Der eingebildete Wahnsinn’ into ‘Weh! Deliria sind Gebete. N-N-N-’ and ‘DEHI, bewegtes DeliriaN-N-N-N-’97 we read something of the ‘fragmented visions’ Deleuze describes,98 but also see an example what Jean-Jacques Lecercle has called délire, ‘a perversion which consists in interfering, or rather taking risks, with language’.99 Lecercle later offers as a description of délire the metaphor of ‘writing a text in a foreign language’ so as to settle accounts with the mother tongue.100 Elsewhere he writes, specifically of  93 Victor Klemperer, Language of the Third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii – A Philologist’s Notebook, Martin Brady (trans.) (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 34.  94 Günter Grass, Headbirths, or the Germans Are Dying Out, Ralph Mannheim (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 12.  95 Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Poetics after the Holocaust’, in The Geoffrey Hartman Reader, Daniel T. O’Hara (ed.) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 447.  96 Gilles Deleuze, ‘He stuttered’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (trans.) (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 107–15; p. 110.  97 Unica Zürn, ‘Der eingebildete Wahnsinn’, 1964, in Gesamtausgabe, 1, p. 119.  98 Deleuze, ‘He stuttered’, p. 113.  99 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking-glass: Language, Nonsense, Desire (London: Hutchinson, 1985), p. 16. 100 Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking-glass, p. 200.

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this a­ nagram-text by Zürn, ‘Intention gives way to possession, skill to symptom, the master of the subject to the free play of the virtualities of meaning which language contains. There is always something grammatical about delirium, there is always something delirious about language.’101 This linguistic delirium is also implicitly subversive, particularly in relation to the authoritarian drive of totalitarian thought. The very existence of the fragment (the basic element of the anagram) embodies the potential subversion of the totality, as Theodor Adorno argued: ‘The category of the fragmentary […] is not to be confused with the category of contingent particularity: the fragment is that part of the totality of the work that opposes totality.’102 If, as Karl Reinhardt and Gerhart Hoffmeister argue, ‘a central theme [of post-war German literature] remained the inability to integrate the traumatic events of 1933 to 1945 into the lives of protagonists and, by inference, bring the Nazi past within the grasp of authors’,103 Zürn’s anagrams constitute one response to this traumatised situation of post-war German language and literature, one effort to explore the shattering, traumatic effects on both German and Germany of the nation’s recent totalitarian history. Zürn’s anagram-texts present fragmented, deliriously subversive distortions and rearrangements of pre-existent German and French sentences from which fragments of other, sometimes invented, languages emerge, traceable in the broken-down units of semi-intelligible speech that result from her procedures. At their core resides the implication of a kind of encrypted meaning, the concealment of a secret, as if the anagram-text was a riddle to which its source line is the answer. The breakdown of linguistic signification forces attention to the characters constituting words, and the notion of secrecy emerges as a key critical concern. Renée Riese Hubert steers us towards Zürn’s drawings when she reads the anagrams as ‘a concatenation of secret images addressed to invisible interlocutors’.104 Victoria Applebe notes that ‘like most Surrealist works of art, [Zürn’s anagrams] are never inclined to completely reveal their secret’.105 Other critics like Pierre Joris have explored the problems such texts pose to translation, noting that their transposition into a different language can mimic either the constraint (i.e. use the same letters to produce texts with equivalent constraints) or the semantic content (attempt to reproduce in the target language the effects of meaning created in the source text).106 In the process of anagram-creation fragments 101 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 58. 102 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 45. 103 Karl Reinhardt and Gerhart Hoffmeister, Germany 2000 Years, Volume 3: From the Nazi Era to German Unification (London: Bloomsbury Press, 1992), p. 93. 104 Renée Riese Hubert, Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, and Partnership (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 155. 105 Applebe, ‘“Du wirst dein Geheimnis sagen”’, p. 36. 106 Pierre Joris, ‘A note on translating Unica Zürn’s anagrammatic poems’, SULFUR 29 (Fall 1991), 87–8.

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of text are further reduced to the bare rubble of language – phonemes, diphthongs, units of sound – which are then rebuilt, with resulting random but productive effects on semantics which are nevertheless constrained, limited by the materials available, claustrophobically prone to repetition and circularity. Writing of the anagrams in The Man of Jasmine, Rupprecht expresses some of the critical frustration such texts present: ‘It seems difficult to interpret these anagrams any further, since they mainly repeat, on a very reduced level, what can be found in all of Zürn’s text’.107 One way of responding to this critical despair is, of course, to connect Zürn’s anagrams to the works of her partner Hans Bellmer, whose contorted female dolls offer a parallel exploration of potentially endless reconfiguration located on the female body rather than the corpus of language. ‘The anagram is the key to all my work’, Bellmer asserted; ‘The body is like a sentence that invites us to rearrange it.’108 Hal Foster’s reading of Bellmer’s dolls, informed by Freudian and Bataillean versions of sado-masochism, posits them as ‘an attack on fascist father and state alike’.109 Zürn’s anagrams work, I suggest, in different ways, mapping not responses to the distortions of fascist art on the (implicitly male) body but, instead, registering the wider impact of Nazism and its consequent devastation on the dual corpus of (German) nation and language. The anagram figures not the armoured totality of the male figure (which, Foster argues, Bellmer seeks to disrupt by mangling the female figure), but the shattering effects of history on the body politic and its figuration in language. Zürn’s anagrams invite and are susceptible to a variety of interpretative strategies, not least in what they reveal by their provenance or their reference to contemporary historical events. Most of the anagrams are non-referential exercises using fragments of text – cryptically self-referential lines from the Bible (‘Toenendes Erz und klingende Schelle’,110 from 1 Corinthians 13: ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or clanging cymbal resounding in the wind’); or from dates, hotel addresses, book titles, poems by the French poet Henri Michaux (1899–1984, a writer on whom Zürn developed a complex fixation), and from German and other literary traditions. Sometimes she chose lines in French, reflecting her reading in surrealist literature (e.g. ‘Les chants de Maldoror’ of 1959, which yields a four-line poem).111 ‘Es liegt in allen Dingen’ is a line from the novelist Herman Hesse (1877–1962),112 while ‘Wenn die Wildgaense schreien’

107 108 109 110 111 112

Rupprecht, Subject to Delusions, p. 145. Cited in Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 103. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 116. Zürn, ‘Toenendes Erz und klingende Schelle’, 1954, in Gesamtausgabe, 1, p. 18. Zürn, ‘Les chants de Maldoror’, 1959, in Gesamtausgabe, 1, p. 73. Zürn, ‘Es liegt in allen Dingen’, 1953–54, in Gesamtausgabe, 1, p. 10.

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adapts a line from a poem by the Japanese poet Ohozuno Ozi,113 and ‘Es war ein Kind das wollte nie’ is from Goethe’s song ‘Die wandelnde Glocke’ (1849).114 ‘Das ist ein Anagrammgedicht’ (‘This Is an Anagram-poem’, 1960) offers an extreme example of self-referential infolding.115 These works offer over nearly two decades a continuous textual register of the convolutions, repetitions, and processes of dismantling and reconfiguration, suggesting an extended response to Zürn’s experiences of traumatic historical and personal events. Occasionally the anagram-texts offer fragments of information about Zürn’s relation to her past or to contemporary political events. ‘Wasserstoff-Bombe wir beten dich an’ (Berlin, 1954)116 responds to the American hydrogen bomb tests over Bikini Atoll on 1 March 1954. Zürn’s involvement in German anti-nuclear protests has received little critical attention – the jaundice that provided the context for Das Haus der Krankheiten (1958) developed after she attended an anti-nuclear meeting in March 1958, suggesting another link between pathology and history. ‘Das Spielen der Kinder ist streng untersagt’ (‘Children Playing Is Strictly Forbidden’) comes from signage on residential flats in Berlin. In 1958 she makes anagrams of her name and childhood address – ‘Ruth Zuern, Berlin-Grunewald, Dunckerstrasse zwei’.117 Dunckerstrasse, less than two kilometres from Grunewald station, had been since 1898 named after the left-wing political thinker and publisher Franz Duncker (1822–88), who corresponded with Marx and Engels and established a union for skilled workers in 1869. The Nazi regime renamed the street Seebergsteig, after the recently deceased evangelist theologist Reinhold Seeberg (1859–1935), author of numerous works including, in 1926, the co-authored Der Weg zur Volksgesundung (The Way to Recovering the Health of the People). Zürn’s anagram thus recalls a Berlin street name erased by the Nazis in 1936, a tiny fragment of the city’s past that, in the post-war years, was gradually being reinstated as history. Many anagram-texts find their way into Zürn’s prose writings like The Man of Jasmine, where, inserted into narratives, they constitute nodes of centrifugal intensity, moments of discursive convulsion that (as Deleuze would argue) cause language itself to ‘stutter’. The editors of Zürn’s collected writings, Günter Bose and Erich Brinkmann, describe The Trumpets of Jericho as ‘the biggest working over and transformation of her complete anagram collection, the work of ten years. It is the opening of the hermetic form of the anagram, and half of it, exactly 59 anagrams, are cited 113 114 115 116 117

Zürn, ‘Wenn die Wildgaense schreien’, 1953–54, in Gesamtausgabe, 1, p. 14. Zürn, ‘Es war ein Kind das wollte nie’, 1955, in Gesamtausgabe, 1, p. 29. Zürn, ‘Das ist ein Anagrammgedicht’, 1960, in Gesamtausgabe, 1, p. 92. Zürn, ‘Wasserstoff-Bombe wir beten dich an’, 1954, in Gesamtausgabe, 1, p. 19. Zürn, ‘Ruth Zuern, Berlin-Grunewald, Dunckerstrasse zwei (die Adresse meiner Kindheit)’, 1958, in Gesamtausgabe, 1, p. 58.

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and inserted as individual lines or paraphrasings.’118 The closed, hermetic forms of the anagrams (which yet signify outwards to their textual sources in the historical reservoirs of German and French writing, and thus connect Zürn’s texts to traditions shattered by the history that has generated them) are verbal equivalents of the enclosed, restrictive, carceral spaces that populate her narratives, spaces pregnant with historical significance that provide a series of allegories of the subject’s confinement within damaged historical narratives. They figure the disordering of perceptual reality consequent on traumatic experiences that are simultaneously individual (personal guilt and shock) and general (the shattering of German social, cultural, and linguistic traditions, the political fragmentation of post-war Berlin into different internationally policed zones). The fracturing of language provides a provisional ground for its reconstruction in the climax to Zürn’s unpublished narrative ‘Katrin – Die Geschichte einer kleinen Schriftstellerin: Ein Jugendbuch’ (1953), her contribution to the German vogue for ‘youth literature’ in the 1950s, the most famous example of which is the Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Langstrumpf (translated into German in 1949). In Zürn’s fictionalised autobiography Katrin, a 15-year-old version of Zürn’s daughter of the same name, wants to become a writer. Like Zürn (and like Ingeborg Preßler in ‘Das Stenogramm’), Katrin reluctantly studies stenography and typewriting, and inhabits a world wholly circumscribed by male figures. She helps her father (also, like Zürn’s father, a writer) to produce his masterpiece, and, on his death, joins an artists’ colony and is ‘adopted’ by Quick, the editor of a children’s newspaper (and a version, as we’ve seen, of Alexander Camaro). ‘Katrin’ allegorises Zürn’s development from a writer of conventional prose to one of avant-garde ambition, her writing destructured by the shattered language and social reality of post-war Germany. The final paragraphs of the narrative, repeating but redirecting the short story ‘Das Stenogramm’ discussed earlier, enact the stuttering or stammering of linguistic break-up, as Zürn’s prose fractures and fragments, breaking away from the conventional narrative of teenage fiction on its final page, at the moment the character of Katrin symbolically encounters her younger self and re-encounters her mother, sewing, her needle rhythmically striking the thimble, onomatopoeically rendered as ‘“zirps – zirps – zirps” – ’, the three dashes echoing across these closing lines. The tale becomes writing, as the mother (in reality, of course, another writer) attempts to speak, but her speech is replaced by the typewritten dashes of an ellipsis, simultaneously the lines of sewn thread and the

118 ‘[…] die umfassendste Ein- und Umarbeitung ihres gesamten Anagrammbestandes, der Arbeit von zehn Jahren. Es ist die Öffnung der hermetischen Form der Anagramme, und die Hälfte, genau 59 Anagramme sind zitiert und montiert als einzelne Zeilen oder paraphrasiert.’ Brinkmann, in Gesamtausgabe, 4.3, pp. 422–3.

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stuttering beginning of the line of drawing (‘– die Mutter sagte – – –’).119 The staccato typewritten dashes, echoes of Zürn’s stenography training, are the connection point between the fictional figure of Katrin and Zürn (Katrin’s mother) as the narrative’s author. At this moment, when the thread of narrative dissolves into repeated lines, Katrin/Zürn begins to write:

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Katrin, deep in the garden of her childhood – secretly saw these two on the lawn – no rain, no October wind – no more presence. She stood hidden behind old, familiar trees, and saw and listened – – – And then she started to write.120

The connection here between containment and secrecy or concealment, and the inauguration of the act of writing delineates Zürn’s aesthetic engagement with the traumas of history. Many of her subsequent works operate within similar paradigms, exploring different forms of confinement and constraint – like the constrained linguistic space of the anagram-text – which are allegorised in images of disease and disorder, both mental and physical, and which, in different but related ways, offer textual registers of the seismic effects of historical trauma. Pathographies of trauma: the secret, the outside Illnesses are frequently suffered by the protagonists of Zürn’s works, and by the figures populating their worlds, like the father at the beginning of Dark Spring whose initial paternal authority dissolves as we quickly learn that ‘he looks ill [because] he had almost died from typhus during that time she cried so much for him’.121 In these texts, disease signifies the effects of trauma pathographically at physical, psychological, and ideological levels. Disorders of the body mean that conventional orders of perception become themselves disordered, bleeding disturbingly into each other; reassuring fantasies collapse into flights of disconcerting, corporeal reality; and corporeal reality becomes itself bizarrely disarranged, as body-parts become synecdochal containers of misplaced organs, like the narrators’ eyes at the start of The House of Illnesses, which 119 Zürn, ‘Katrin’, in Gesamtausgabe, 3, p. 210. 120 ‘Katrin, tief im Garten ihrer Kindheit – sah heimlich diesen beiden auf dem Rasen zu – kein Regen, kein Oktoberwind – keine Gegenwart mehr. Sie stand verborgen hinter den alten, vertrauten Bäumen, und sah und lauschte – – – Und dann fing sie an zu schreiben.’ Zürn, ‘Katrin’, in Gesamtausgabe, 3, p. 210. 121 Zürn, Dark Spring, Caroline Rupprecht (trans.) (Cambridge: Exact Change, 2010 [1970]), p. 38. ‘[…] er sieht krank aus. […] [d]aß er fast am Typhus gestorben wäre, in der Zeit, als sie so nach ihm geschrien hatte.’ Zürn, ‘Dunkler Frühling’, in Gesamtausgabe, 4.2, pp. 291–331; p. 294.

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(her Doctor tells her) have ‘hearts’ which ‘have been shot right through the chest’.122 This anagrammatic formal rhetoric, shifting body-parts into new relations just as the anagram-texts rearrange letters, indicates the extent to which Zürn’s oeuvre is fundamentally (de)structured by the effects of formal and psychological fragmentation, a belated register of her wartime and post-war experience. Bodily organs, in particular, take on deep and ambivalent symbolic resonance in Zürn’s texts. Organs are in turn figured as elements of a symbolic domesticity, an internalised socius reified as internal organicism – ‘the suite of the heart and the room of eyes’.123 In this rhetorical transposition, evocative of surreal feminised domestic spaces like that depicted in Salvador Dalí’s 1935 portrait of Mae West, or his sets for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound, imaginary figures populate ostensibly real spaces and vice versa, and the very structures of grammar and syntax crumble and blur, effacing distinctions between narrator and protagonist, actant and auteur, and constantly calling into question the very notion of a telling and showing narrative self, or indeed of any self that can be understood as distinct from the other selves produced by and contained in its fevered imagination. Add to this disturbing proliferation of subject positions the complex hieroglyphic interdependence of writing and image across Zürn’s oeuvre, and we begin to see how her texts present a critical problem of definition that calls into question the relations between historically grounded biographical narratives and imaginary discursive formations, and the ways each intersects with the other to undermine and destabilise their respective effects, registering the disconcerting experiences of the traumatic surreal. As noted earlier, critics tend to search for fundamental autobiographical significances in Zürn’s writings, and thus to bind them to the biographical narratives defined, in particular, by the author’s own histories of mental illness (possibly triggered by experimentation with mescaline), her relations with Bellmer and Michaux and with Surrealism, and her eventual suicide by defenestration in 1970. The writings themselves tirelessly evade such categorisations. Instead they invite allegorical, fantastic, or other generic comparisons that both reinforce and subtly subvert any simple correspondence with (auto-)biographical histories. Critics have conventionally used these features of her works to locate Zürn problematically within the broad category of ‘Outsider Art’ (I will explore below how the question of the ‘outside’ looms in her writing), and to perform feminist and psychoanalytic readings like Luce Irigaray’s

122 Zürn, The House of Illnesses, Malcolm Green (trans.) (London: Atlas Press, 1993 [1958]), p. 9. ‘[…] die beiden Herzen in Ihren Augen sind mitten durch die Brust geschossen’. Zürn, ‘Das Haus der Krankheiten’, in Gesamtausgabe, 4.1, pp. 43–78; p. 47. 123 Zürn, The House of Illnesses, p. 33. ‘[…] es handelt sich um den Raum der Herzen und um das Zimmer der Augen’. Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 4.1, p. 63.

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controversial short psychoanalytic essay on Zürn, ‘Une Lacune natale (pour Unica Zürn)’ (1985; translated as ‘A natal lacuna’ in 1994). Irigaray attempts to read Zürn’s work as an aesthetic protest, thereby reducing its multi-faceted complexities to a simple tension between ‘a question about art’ and its production by a Laingian ‘divided self’, and that cliché of post-war existentialism, ‘a search for identity’.124 Other critical readings offer variations on this theme, blurring the boundaries between the real and the hallucinatory and sometimes asserting that both are the same thing. Caroline Rupprecht writes cautiously of The Man of Jasmine that ‘its images are no longer fictitious but said to represent real hallucinations’.125 Gary Indiana asserts that Zürn left ‘an unnervingly precise record of her time on earth in her writings, drawings and paintings’, but continues: ‘The writings for which she is best known reflect an excruciating mental state, relieved solely by fantasies and hallucinations; reality, in her description, is unbearably harsh and punitive, a realm of grotesquerie’.126 Renée Riese Hubert, describing the writings as ‘poems and autobiographical texts’,127 nevertheless argues that, in The House of Illnesses, ‘fictionalization frequently surfaces: dreams, intermittent recollections, views from unknown perspectives, echoes from fairy tales and black magic’.128 The insistent question emerging from such readings concerns the ambivalent and unstable relation between fiction and life in Zürn’s narratives. In her discussion of Maurice Blanchot’s récit The Instant of My Death (1994), Ginette Michaud offers the term ‘fictuality’ to describe the kind of blending of factual and imaginative genres that we also encounter when reading Zürn’s texts. Hent de Vries notes of Blanchot’s narrative that in it one finds the elements of literature, philosophy, historical engagement, testimony, and, it seems, autobiography; the interplay, or rather entanglement, of these elements calls for a reading that is at once philosophically astute and sensitive to the text’s apparent fictionality.129

A similar generic mix could describe Zürn’s narratives. Michaud’s concept of the ‘fictual’ describes such complexity and its effects in terms that complement the wider 124 Luce Irigaray, ‘A natal lacuna’, Margaret Whitford (trans.), Women’s Art Magazine, 58 (May–June 1994), 11–13; 12–13. 125 Rupprecht, Subject to Delusions, p. 132. 126 Gary Indiana, ‘A stone for Unica Zürn’, Art in America (June/July 2009), 71–4; 71. 127 Renée Riese Hubert, ‘Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer’, SULFUR 29 (Fall 1991), 98–104; 98. 128 Hubert, ‘Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer’, 103. 129 Hent de Vries, ‘“Lapsus absolu”: notes on Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death’, Yale French Studies, 93 (1998), 30–59; 30.

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effects of stylistic devices like anagrammar and parataxis discussed earlier. Fictuality maps a generic ‘zone in which reference points of intelligibility and reason are no longer of any help’.130 Unmoored from such rational reference points, the reader-critic confronts the fictuality of Zürn’s writings, their construction of elusively fictual zones within thematic and structural tensions between the inside (of the mind, the body, the experience, and the life) and the outside (of the world, the institution, the treatment, the literary tradition). The fictual is inside neither the fictional nor the factual world, but neither is it wholly outside either; instead, it blurs these categories, being both and neither simultaneously, recoding each as a covert or secret subversion or contamination of the other, its formal reconfiguration as something else. This intermingled inside/outside relation (a frequently-noted concern of surrealist art)131 organises the lines of flight of Zürn’s works and figures the extimate intimacy of a key trope in Zürn’s texts, that of the secret. The brief critical survey above indicates how Zürn’s writing constantly confuses generic and geographic insides and outsides. For Esra Plumer, these writings constitute ‘an elusive oeuvre that makes it all the more difficult to really “know” Unica Zürn’.132 This critical difficulty centres on a productive tension that insists in Zürn’s writing between different orders of critical knowledge – factual (historical-­biographical) and interpretive (critical-analytical). Likewise, critics insistently (as Plumer does) blur critical comprehension of the texts with ostensibly real knowledge of the authorial identity that produces them, as if the secret clue to the author’s self were contained inside the text and yet, simultaneously, existing as something outside the text, to which the text must refer. At the displaced heart of Zürn’s writing – in the heart of its eyes (or ‘I’s), as it were – we find a problematic fictuality, a kind of generic doubling and infolding that questions the possibility of knowledge and interpretation, existing both within and around the more overt and visceral oppositions between illness and health, confinement and escape, mental and physical corporealities. Zürn’s fictuality is in effect a refusal or withholding of knowledge (of the author, of the biography, of the text’s ultimate meaning) and a proposition of something else which nevertheless demands the question that is asked by the reader-critic’s will-to-knowledge – the question of the secret.

130 Ginette Michaud, ‘Literature in secret: crossing Derrida and Blanchot’, Angelaki, 7:2 (August 2002), 69–90; 77. 131 See for example André Breton, ‘What is Surrealism?’ (1934): ‘at the limits, I say, we have attempted to present interior reality and exterior reality as two elements in process of unification, or finally becoming one. This final unification is the supreme aim of Surrealism.’ In Breton, What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, Franklin Rosemont (ed.) (London: Pluto Press, 1978), p. 116. 132 Plumer, Unica Zürn, p. 1.

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effecting a troublingly oneiric and unstable narrative world in which ontological fragility embodies the narrating self’s sense of its own disordered being. The central conceit of The House of Illnesses frames the narrator’s incarceration in a medical institution (which imposes upon her its geographical and representational limitations), and the physical illness that necessitates it (partly ‘an eye complaint’).139 Physical illness thus implicitly maps mental disorder, as vision and insight are established, early in the narrative, as problematic, unreliable, damaged. The text constructs a kind of domestic thriller narrative organised around dynamics of defence and attack, of threats from ‘mein Todfeind’ (‘my mortal enemy’) and anxieties centring on a Bluebeardian ‘Verbotene Zimmer’ (‘Forbidden Room’), of traps and their evasion, of subversive resistance to oppressive institutional authority.140 The compressed metaphoricity of this text is generated by the deployment of elements from distinct but overlapping discourses of medicine, espionage, and domestic routine, each of which might ‘stand for’ the other as a discursive constraint to which the narrator is subject. This discursive matrix maps the overlaying and intermingling of three distinct structures of feminine confinement: the domestic space of the house, the corporeal space of the body, and the carceral space of the medical institution. The effect is disturbingly circular and oneiric, as the reader enters a labyrinthine, confused arena delineated by conflicting but interdependent bodily, spatial, and juridico-legal language games and territorialisations reminiscent, again, of the constrained textual form of the anagram. Esra Plumer argues that this constitutes ‘a monadic space with no gaze outward’, in which Zürn ‘conspicuously expresses the state of illness as magical, visionary and pleasurable’.141 This ‘outward gaze’ is, however, an integral element of the cryptographic punning that Zürn employs in this text and, indeed, a key element of the narrator’s apperception – part, in effect, of the secret narrative of the text. This secret narrative is embedded in the textual surface of puns and repetitions so that, as Jacques Derrida argues of literature itself, The House of Illnesses becomes a ‘place of all these secrets without secrecy, of all these crypts without depth’.142 Charles Barbour, writing of the secret in Paul Celan’s poetry (Celan, famously, anagrammed his own surname, Ancel), argues that Celan’s work is ‘Overdetermined by secret references and cryptographic codes’.143 A similar cryptographic or cryptonomic Zürn, The House of Illnesses, p. 25; ‘[…] eine Augenkrankheit’, Gesamtausgabe, 4.1, p. 59. Zürn, The House of Illnesses, pp. 17ff., p. 9; Gesamtausgabe, 4.1, pp. 53ff, p. 47. Plumer, Unica Zürn, pp. 168–9. Jacques Derrida, ‘Literature in secret: an impossible filiation’, in The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, David Wills (trans.) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 157. 143 Charles Barbour, ‘The secret, the sovereign, and the lie: reading Derrida’s last seminar’, Societies, 3 (2013), 117–27; p. 123. 139 140 141 142

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effectively not an ‘outside’ at all. Whatever is ‘outside’ is, implicitly, a mere repetition of the ‘inside’. Nevertheless, the narrative implies that some kind of different ‘outside’ space exists and, at the end of ‘Various Observations: Wednesday’, the narrator asserts: ‘And this afternoon I will finally make my way to the main door (die Suche nach dem Ausgang machen) through which I shall leave this house’.148 Here, Ausgang prefigures in the same sentence the near-collocational echo of ‘Haus … kann’, reinforcing the play between containment and outside. The next section, titled ‘Thursday: Secrets’, dramatically refigures the trope of the ‘outside’ in The House of Illnesses, as the narrator undertakes a ‘secret walk’ that begins: ‘As I stepped outside’.149 ‘Secrets’ (Heimlichkeiten) presents through a series of strategic reversals the experience of the outside as a space in which the narrator risks imprisonment – not a Zuflucht but another kind of Asyl. Firstly, this chapter opens with a retrospective summary of its own contents: ‘Late yesterday afternoon I carried out my resolution’.150 Secondly, this stepping outside is suddenly easy, and indeed seems to have been always already possible: ‘The exit was always there. It seems I had simply not seen it up till now. The door was open. Nobody stopped me.’151 This suddenly available freedom leads the narrator into a new social space, a public street in which (as within the institution) health is nevertheless the primary concern: ‘The first people came up to me and asked me how I was’; in this new space, ‘the House of Illnesses turned hazy and gradually disappeared’.152 But any social reassurance is balanced by the narrator’s burgeoning discomfort with this sudden freedom, and her awareness of its banality: ‘there were no miracles out here (draussen)’.153 The

148 Zürn, The House of Illnesses, p. 39. ‘Schon heute nachmittag werde ich mich ernsthaft auf die Suche nach dem Ausgang machen, damit ich dieses Haus verlassen kann’. Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 4.1, p. 69. 149 Zürn, The House of Illnesses, pp. 41–2. ‘Als ich draußen stand […] heimlichen Spaziergang’. Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 4.1, pp. 69–70. 150 Zürn, The House of Illnesses, p. 41. ‘Noch gestern, am späten Nachmittag habe ich meinen Entschluß ausgeführt’. Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 4.1, p. 69. 151 Zürn, The House of Illnesses, p. 41. ‘Der Ausgang war immer da. Ich habe ihn bisher scheinbar nur nicht gesehen. Die Tür war offen. Niemand hielt mich zurück’. Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 4.1, p. 69. Green (mis-)translates the first sentence as ‘The entrance was still there’, indicating how Zürn’s text has sometimes been altered in the available English version. I have written elsewhere on problems of translation presented by Zürn’s writing. See Patricia Allmer, ‘Outside-in: translating Unica Zürn’, in Anna Watz (ed.), Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 142–55. 152 Zürn, The House of Illnesses, p. 41. ‘[…] vernebelte sich das Haus der Krankheiten und verschwand allmählich. […] Die ersten Leute traten mir in den Weg und erkundigten sich nach meiner Gesundheit.’ Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 4.1, p. 69. 153 Zürn, The House of Illnesses, p. 41. ‘Als gäbe es hier draussen keine Wunder.’ Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 4.1, p. 69.

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‘outside’ quickly comes to mirror the strict routine of the asylum: ‘Here in the world, habit ruled with rigid hands’.154 The ‘outside’ world, in short, closely resembles the institutional regime ‘inside’ the institution, and is thus constituted as a mirror-world of illusory freedom. Any potential escape to this internalised outside is finally erased by the demand to return inside, signified by hearing the voice of patriarchal authority, Dr Mortimer, who, in an overtly Althusserian moment of ideological ‘hailing’, both misrecognises and redefines the escaped patient as a ‘trespasser’ at the boundary of the space of institutional power: ‘Hallo, you down there. This is private property. Entry forbidden.’155 The ‘secret walk’ thus culminates in a return to confinement structured by power’s oppressive misrecognition as a ‘trespasser’ of the patient it ostensibly serves (‘But do you recognize me?’ she asks; the doctor replies, ‘You’ve changed a lot’).156 The notion of ‘trespass’, of illegitimate entry into prohibited spaces, thus concludes the narrator’s momentary enjoyment of secret escape: (‘I had always enjoyed secrets …’).157 The play of outside and inside, secret and knowledge, escape and containment ultimately performs a kind of confused circulation of power-language in which the secret, expressed as the narrator’s desire for the ‘outside’, Draussen, circulates forever on the horizon of that desire and yet is evident, in plain view, within the text, contained within the Haus (building and word), the secret escape from which is revealed as merely movement into another kind of confinement, an entrapment within a history both personal and national. Secrecy’s gesture of refusal furthermore connects Zürn’s protagonist to literary characters like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, another figure with a problematic, even non-existent, relation to the outside (‘As yet I had never of my personal knowledge known [Bartleby] to be outside of my office’, remarks Melville’s narrator).158 Both can be read as agents of a traumatised, subversive secrecy, a refusal that has preoccupied recent theoretical discussion.159 The secret threads through Zürn’s texts as motif, 154 Zürn, The House of Illnesses, p. 41. ‘Hier, in der Welt regierte die Gewohnheit mit erstarrten Händen.’ Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 4.1, p. 69. 155 Zürn, The House of Illnesses, p. 42 (translation modified). ‘Hallo! Sie, da unten, das ist Privatbesitz, Eintritt verboten!’ Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 4.1, p. 71. Green translates ‘Entritt verboten!’ as ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’. 156 Zürn, The House of Illnesses, p. 42. ‘“Aber kennen Sie mich denn nicht wieder?” […] “Sie haben sich ja sehr verändert”.’ Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 4.1, p. 71. 157 Zürn, The House of Illnesses, p. 42. ‘Heimlichkeiten hatte ich immer gern gehabt.’ Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, 4.1, p. 70. 158 Herman Melville, ‘Bartleby the scrivener’ (1853), in Billy Budd, Bartleby and Other Stories, Peter Coviello (ed.) (New York: Penguin, 2016), pp. 17–54; p. 28. 159 See, for example, Giorgio Agamben, ‘Bartleby, or on contingency’ in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), pp. 243–74; Gilles Deleuze, ‘Bartleby, or the formula’,

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figure, and conceit, evidence of an authorial desire for what Charles Barbour calls ‘the possibility of absolute secrecy [which] is also the possibility of a space or a place outside of the sovereign order’160 – a secret ‘outside’ of health, freedom, and desire, a space potentially outside of pathology but also of history – and specifically the recent, traumatic history of Germany – which Zürn’s secretive fictuality locates ambivalently within her surrealist writings, her anagrams and paratactic narratives acting as unstable registers of the seismic and damaging long-term effects of personal and historical trauma.

in Essays Critical and Clinical (London: Verso, 1998); Jacques Rancière, ‘Deleuze, Bartleby, and the literary formula’, in The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 146–64; Slavoj Žižek, ‘Violence enframed’, in The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2006), pp. 381–5. 160 Barbour, ‘The secret, the sovereign, and the lie’, p. 119.

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3 Birgit Jürgenssen’s abjections There are also new things: the Tirolean hats that everyone is now wearing, even the noblest inhabitants of the city that had once been so elegant; the furs of the small businesswomen who had previously only possessed cloth coats, boots everywhere, unknown in England, from the leather jackboot to the ugly hightop felt models. In my day one wore galoshes in the rain, but now the boot rules and transforms every woman into a camp commandant or a Berlin streetwalker of the twenties. (Jewish emigrée writer Hilde Spiel recalling returning to Vienna after the war)1 The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess. (Cathy Caruth)2 Alles ist in Flux: so läßt das Verdrängte es sich nicht gefallen, daß wir es verdrängen, und es holt uns nachts wieder ein. Zwischen ‘Wachen und Träumen’ können wir ‘sehen’ lernen und in der Zukunft ‘ein Morgen’ erkennen. (Everything is in flux: the repressed does not allow us to repress it, and it catches up with us again at night. Between ‘waking and dreaming’ we can learn to ‘see’ and recognize ‘a tomorrow’ in the future.) (Birgit Jürgenssen)3

The possibility of a ‘secret’ space or a place outside (draussen) of the sovereign or symbolic order, the displaced centre of Unica Zürn’s aesthetic, is also an insistent concern of the Austrian artist Birgit Jürgenssen. This possibility is explored in one of her best-known pieces, the 1976 monochrome photographic self-portrait Ich möchte hier raus! (I Want Out of Here!) (figure 3.1). Reproduced in all the major books on Jürgenssen and providing the cover image for one of them,4 this profoundly ­ambiguous  1 Cited in Vansant, Reclaiming Heimat: Trauma and Mourning in Memoirs by Jewish-Austrian Refugees (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2001), p. 46.  2 Cathy Caruth, ‘Introduction’, in Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 5.  3 Birgit Jürgenssen, ‘The inner passage’, in The Search Within: Art Between Implosion and Explosion (Geras, New Delhi: Österreichisch-Indische Gesellschaft, 1998), p. 76.  4 See Natascha Burger and Nicole Fritz (eds), Birgit Jürgenssen: I Am (Munich: Prestel, 2018), p. 229; Gabriele Schor and Heike Eipeldauer (eds), Birgit Jürgenssen (Munich: Prestel, 2010), p. 153; and Gabriele Schor and Abigail Solomon-Godeau (eds), Birgit Jürgenssen (Ostfildern: Hatje Kantz, 2009), cover and pp. 15, 34–5.

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Figure 3.1  Birgit Jürgenssen, Ich möchte hier raus!, 1976

­ hotograph depicts a young woman leaning slightly to the left and towards us, her p eyes engaging the viewer, her right cheek and both hands pressed against a glass pane on which the title is written so that it appears as if projected onto her upper torso, incorporating within the image the conventionally parergonal title. What Jacques Derrida has called the ‘juridical effect’5 of the title (its definition of the work from outside the work) is thus reconstituted as an element of the image itself, reinforcing

 5 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (trans.) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 64.

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Figure 3.2  Birgit Jürgenssen, Ich möchte hier raus!, contact prints, 1976

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Playing on the implications of the word ‘prison’, Schor speculates (in another essay) on the nature of the ‘here’ from which the woman in Jürgenssen’s photograph seeks escape: ‘Get me out of this dilemma. Out of the role which has been forced on me, that of being a mere housewife, wife, and mother in this world’.9 Elisabeth Bronfen uses similar terms in her analysis of this photograph: ‘Visually, her imprisonment and her demand for escape balance each other. […] It is the print of her cheek on the pane of glass that lends a sense of physical urgency to her desire for freedom’.10 Ninja Walbers relates Ich möchte hier raus! to Betty Friedan’s critique of the media stereotype of woman-as-housewife and to the performative and narrative aspects of Cindy Sherman’s later Untitled Film Stills (1977–80).11 Sabine B. Vogel reinforces this interpretation of Ich möchte hier raus! in her 2016 review of a Galerie Hubert Winter exhibition of Jürgenssen’s works: ‘It is an attempt to break out of the role of the bourgeois housewife, from the pressure to conform in her time’.12 Mechtild Widrich argues that ‘the glass acts as a barrier between isolation and an escape from the traditional female role. Are we looking at a shop window or at the framed portrait of a primly pretty housewife?’, and notes astutely that ‘The featurelessness of the space behind her adds to the ambiguity of the scene, making it difficult to assess her situation and rendering the menace oppressing her rather abstract’, before connecting the image to a contemporary echo in the Mad Men character Betty Draper.13 Ich möchte hier raus!, firmly positioned by critics as a work of feminist protest, explores a series of oppositions, each of which adumbrates the distinction between inside and outside, ‘here’ and ‘not-here’, in which the ‘here’ is generally understood as the space of the domestic, and thus associated with conventional constructions of the feminine as confined, restricted, and excluded from the ‘not-here’, the space outside, which remains unseen, uncertain, undefined, merely desired. The critical consensus also seems, in accordance with this reading, to view the persona photographed as a stereotypical Austrian Hausfrau (housewife), despite the published version resisting such a reading by omitting the kitchen apron or indeed any accoutrements implying such an identity. Jürgenssen’s pose in the photograph furthermore evokes rather d ­ ifferent connotations – it’s clearly suggestive of Al Jolson’s ‘Mammy’, and of the familiar poses  9 Gabriele Schor, ‘I am: an act of self-assertion’, in Burger and Fritz (eds), Birgit Jürgenssen: I Am, pp. 67–76; p. 67. 10 Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘Self-irony as an autobiographical strategy: Birgit Jürgenssen’s word games’, in Schor and Solomon-Godeau (eds), Birgit Jürgenssen, pp. 79–106; pp. 85–6. 11 Ninja Walbers, ‘Freed from any constraint: on Birgit Jürgenssen’s photographic experiments’, in Burger and Fritz (eds), Birgit Jürgenssen: I Am, pp. 223–66; pp. 231–2. 12 ‘Es ist ein Ausbruchsversuch aus der Rolle der bürgerlichen Hausfrau, aus dem Konformitätszwang ihrer Zeit.’ Sabine B. Vogel, ‘Ich bin schon draußen!’ (review), Die Presse, 13 February 2016, 45. 13 Mechtild Widrich, ‘The fourth wall turns pensive: feminist experiments with the camera’, in Gabriele Schor (ed.), Feminist Avant-Garde: Art of the 1970s (Munich: Prestel, 2016), pp. 73–8; p. 75.

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assumed by mime artists like Samy Molcho or (Futscher suggests) a clown such as Gelsomina (played by Giulietta Masina) in Federico Fellini’s 1954 film La Strada,14 a connotation reinforcing the image’s exploration of abused, silenced femininity. In this self-portrait Jürgenssen performs, the critical narrative suggests, a version of incarcerated, traumatised femininity articulating its desire to escape, a femininity that coincides with but seems also distinct from that of the artist herself. The ambiguities of the photograph are multiple: the social class of the woman represented (whose status and dress-style seem, despite critical opinion, markedly distinct from the women depicted in Jürgenssen’s Hausfrau drawings and other related works, discussed below) in relation to Austrian society in the mid-1970s; the reference of ‘hier’ and ‘raus’ (the different but indistinct spaces on the image, seemingly separated only by the glass? the evidently entrapped female body? an ideological space of incarceration connoted by the image itself? history itself, implied by the difference between the old-fashioned brooch, with its averted profile, and the modern woman returning our gaze? the contemporary historical moment and nation-space of 1970s Austria?), and the status of the addressee/viewer of the title (the person who has imprisoned her, or a potential rescuer?). All these elements constitute a complex, circulating network of potential signifiers from which other identities and histories emerge, creating a halo of indeterminacy around the signs of self-portraiture, the generic markers which the photograph provisionally sets out. Even the title statement ‘Ich möchte hier raus!’ is only arbitrarily connected by the viewer to the figure in the image, the sheer force of collocation suggesting linkage (there’s no evidence in the picture to indicate that the woman depicted has written these words). Such ambiguities, inherent in self-portraiture, in particular for the woman artist, lie at the problematic core of Jürgenssen’s art, much of which involves performed identities or self-transformations often involving masks and costumes, palimpsestic projections and superimpositions, and collaged juxtapositions that situate those identities in a variety of contexts. What is at stake in this extensive self-portraiture is also the meanings of that for which the portrayed self stands – the nation, the gender, the class, and the histories intersecting with and influencing the identity of the self, from all of which (Ich möchte hier raus! implies) the artist desires to escape. Abigail Solomon-Godeau has argued that ‘there is nothing noticeably “personal” or “autobiographical” in [Jürgenssen’s] work’,15 but we need also to consider the ways in which that work is deeply structured by, and carefully negotiates, the artist’s experiences of being-woman within the specific historical contexts in which she lived and 14 Futscher, ‘Clowning instead of masquerading’. 15 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘Birgit Jürgenssen: seen through the Anthropocene’, in Burger and Fritz (eds), Birgit Jürgenssen: I Am, pp. 187–206; p. 195.

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which she evidently experienced as constraining. In this sense, we might propose that Jürgenssen’s art makes use of surrealist techniques in order to interrogate her own identity as an Austrian woman, and, by extension, explore the construction of Austrian femininity in relation to Austrian history, from which Surrealism provided potential routes of escape. Her work is, furthermore, deeply engaged in the mass-, popular-, and folk-cultural iconographies of post-war Austria, and aware too of the histories of these iconographies, their reifications and transformations in mass media representations, their intersections with both domestic and national levels of ideological influence. In scrutinising the contemporary construction of Austrian femininity, she reveals strata of meaning beneath surface appearances, and part of the persistent and disturbing uncanniness of her work lies in its insistent revelation of the shadowy presence – within superficially banal, everyday objects or scenes – of other histories, other times in which such objects and scenes resonated with different significances. The following discussion will outline some of the key elements of these histories and seek to position Austrian versions of the feminine in relation to them, and thus to frame a reading of selected works by Jürgenssen as responses, in particular, to key elements of the legacies of Austria’s involvement in the Second World War, legacies that overshadow the post-war years in which she matured as an artist. Jürgenssen and wartime history Central to Jürgenssen’s critique of the patriarchal construction of Austrian femininity during her lifetime is her awareness that this construction derives from, repeats and extends, and reinforces the oppressions of womanhood that occurred during the Nazi period – a consequence of what Jutta Gsoels-Lorenson (discussing Elfriede Jelinek’s fiction) has called the ‘tenaciousness of fascism in all aspects of contemporary life, particularly in the relations between the sexes’.16 Jürgenssen’s family history magnifies this sense of continuity. The film Eine Eiserne Kassette (2018), directed by her nephew Nils Olger, explores in particular the activities of Jürgenssen’s father, Olaf Johann Oskar Jürgenssen, during the war via documentation and interviews with several family members, in particular Ingeborg Harand, Jürgenssen’s mother.17 Olaf Jürgenssen trained as a doctor in the late 1930s, completing his qualifications as SS-ReserveführerAnwärter in 1940 in Concentration Camp Weimar-Buchenwald. After six years in the Hitler Youth, he had joined the NSDAP and the SS in 1936, aged 18 (at the time both organisations were illegal in Austria). As a medical student he was a member of the 16 Jutta Gsoels-Lorenson, ‘Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten: representing the Holocaust as an Austrian ghost story’, Germanic Review, 81:4 (Fall 2006), 360–82; 364. 17 Nils Olger (dir.), Eine Eiserne Kassette (Vienna: Sixpack Films, 2018).

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SS Mannschaftshäuser and the Innsbruck-based Brixia fraternity, and, later, the NS German Student League. He volunteered for the Luftwaffe in 1939 but was exempted due to his medical studies. He was drafted to the Waffen-SS in 1940 as paramedic, then medical assistant, then full doctor. In January 1944 he was SS-Hauptscharführer, attached as a medic to the 16th SS Division in Nagyvárad, site of what would, later that year, become the largest Jewish ghetto in Hungary. Olger’s narration of his uncle’s life concludes: ‘He spends 15 years of his life in National Socialist organisations.’ In 1945, after the Nazi defeat, Olaf Jürgenssen surrendered to the US troops wearing a Wehrmacht (not his SS) uniform, with his SS blood group tattoo removed. He claimed to be a student, not a doctor, and underwent denazification. Olger argues that he denied his past, launching a new career as a paediatrician, and in 1949 assuming medical management of Glanzing paediatric clinic. In 1956 he took a new post at the Central Children’s Home of Vienna, before opening his own medical practice. Olger’s film makes clear that a key figure in this history is Walter Reder, who was Jürgenssen’s commanding officer in the 16th SS Division. Under his command the division perpetrated (among others) the Marzabotto massacre in Italy in the early autumn of 1944, the worst such atrocity committed by the Waffen-SS in Italy. Jürgenssen, Olger points out, was not involved in these actions, having been reposted in late September as Abteilungsarzt of the 16th SS Tank Batallion. Reder and his division surrendered to British forces near Klagenfurt in Austria in 1945. Reder was extradited to Italy in 1948 and tried for war crimes, and was convicted and imprisoned near Naples. In 1956 the Upper Austrian government intervened to grant Reder his Austrian citizenship (he’d become German in 1934), notoriously making him Austria’s last prisoner of war. He was released in January 1985 and transferred to Austria, to be controversially welcomed at the airport by the Austrian Minister of Defence, Friedhelm Frischenschlager of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), which was then a liberal right-wing party in a coalition government. This official welcome was effectively the first of a series of high-profile events, including the international scandal over the election of former SS officer and UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to the Austrian Presidency in 1986, which triggered deeply traumatic controversies over the evidently persistent legacies of Nazism in 1980s Austria as well as over Austria’s role as perpetrator in the war and the repressions and evasions of the post-war period. The Austrian weekly news magazine Profil (which later broke the story of Waldheim’s Nazi past) ran its 28 January 1985 (no. 5) issue with a photo-­ portrait of Reder on the cover, taken in 1944 by Olaf Jürgenssen.18 18 For discussions of these events in 1980s Austria, see Hella Pick, Guilty Victim: Austria from the Holocaust to Haider (London: IB Tauris, 2000), especially Chapter X: ‘Austria in the dock – the Waldheim saga’, pp. 149–69; and Ruth Beckermann (dir.), Waldheims Waltzer (DVD Editions Salzgeber, 2018).

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Olger’s film reveals that much of the detail about Olaf Jürgenssen’s wartime service was recorded in a diary kept by his wife’s mother, Leopoldine Harand, titled Book of Life (1944), recording events at the time from her home in Gmunden. Olaf’s Japanese heritage (from his grandmother’s side) caused significant problems in Nazioccupied Austria, particularly in relation to the intention of Olaf and Ingeborg to marry. The Tripartite Pact of September 1940 had made Japan an ally of the Reich, but the SS Race and Settlement office had reservations against the marriage to Ingeborg Harand because of his Japanese ancestry. Olaf was assisted in securing permission to wed by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office or RSHA) from January 1943 (during the period in which Jewish and other deportations to the camps significantly increased) and previously leader of the Austrian SS and a major orchestrator of the Anschluss in 1938. Kaltenbrunner, a firm anti-Semite and Hitler loyalist, was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity at Nuremberg and executed by hanging in 1946. He ensured that the wedding was authorised by Heinrich Himmler, who initialled the documents, and Ingeborg married Olaf by proxy at Rathausplatz in Gmunden on 5 May 1945, the day before Gmunden was liberated by the US army. These documented family and historical circumstances, and their connection to events that impacted directly on Austria’s sense of its own history, lend urgency to a reconsideration of Birgit Jürgenssen’s art. Born in Vienna in 1949 (and thus part of Austria’s first post-war generation, the Nachkriegsgeneration of what Marianne Hirsch calls ‘post-memory’) and dying prematurely of cancer in 2003, Jürgenssen constructed from the mid-1960s until her death a remarkably diverse body of work in a variety of media, in which she scrutinises the historical forces impacting on contemporary constructions of Austrian femininity. Educated in Vienna at the Akademie für angewandte Kunst (1968–70) and the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst (1970–71), she also spent several months in the late 1960s in Paris, presumably aware of, if not involved in, the revolutionary student culture of the time. In Paris she encountered the Surrealism of Antonin Artaud,19 and she read widely in the then-popular discourses of structuralism and poststructuralism, discourses that informed her interrogations of gender identity and history. Most critics agree that a key element of her art is its intervention in and extension of surrealist traditions, analysing and reconfiguring their analyses of the effects of power on the female body. Louisa Buck describes her as ‘steeped from an early age in Surrealism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory as well as being widely versed in literature and art history’.20 Hubert Winter notes that ‘Birgit’s work was influenced 19 ‘Birgit Jürgenssen im Gespräch mit Rainer Metzger, 2003’, in Schor and Eipeldauer (eds), Birgit Jürgenssen, p. 275. 20 Louisa Buck, ‘The rat in the bed’, in Burger and Fritz (eds), Birgit Jürgenssen, pp. 207–14; p. 207.

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work of those avant-gardes. In the ‘Introduction’ to the catalogue accompanying The Beginning (2020), the Vienna Albertina’s major revisionist retrospective of post-war Austrian art, the Albertina’s General Director Klaus Albrecht Schröder argues that all the Austrian avant-gardes since 1945 gave expression to ‘the radical rebellion against the bourgeois educational and artistic ideal that has been contaminated by National Socialism for decades’.24 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz has commented on how these avant-gardes intersected with progressive political movements, noting in particular the significance of different anti-fascist positions in Austrian politics during the 1970s: Feminists were also at the forefront of the debates, alongside the intellectuals associated with Jewish traditions. Supra-regionalism had always been at the basis of the feminist movement, so had pacifism and ecological awareness. For example, for several decades, Marie-Therese Kerschbaumer explored the situation of women, as well as the basic conditions for survival, in physical, psychological and creative terms, emphasizing the interdependence of all forms of life – the very issues that drive the anti-nuclear and ecological movements.25

The Beginning (its English title strangely definitive, and seemingly at odds with the complexity of its revisionist historical argument) showcased the new generation of the radical post-war Vienna-based Austrian art scene as being diverse, but sharing (according to one reviewer of the exhibition) a ‘formal and substantive struggle against the bourgeois educational and artistic ideal that was clinging to the values of ​​ National Socialism until well after 1945’.26 Jürgenssen was a significant figure in this scene, teaching and exhibiting in key locations and working with key representatives of this new generation. She exhibited in the Galerie nächst St Stephan in 1975 as part of VALIE EXPORT’s exhibition MAGNA: Feminismus: Kunst und Kreativität, and at its Herbstsalon in November/December of the same year. She also taught on Maria Lassnig’s masterclass at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst (1980–81), and was an integral part of the Akademie der Bildenden Künste from 1982 to 2003, contributing to Arnulf Rainer’s masterclass. 24 ‘Gemeinsam ist den Neueren der österreichischen Kunst die radikale Auflehnung gegen das vom Nationalsozialismus noch jahrzehntelang kontaminierte bürgerliche Bildungs- und Kunstideal.’ Klaus Albrecht Schröder, ‘Einleitung: Prämissen und Ziele von The Beginning’, in Schröder (ed.), The Beginning: Kunst in Österreich 1945 bis 1980 (Munich: Hirmer, 2020), pp. 16–45; p. 17. 25 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, ‘The struggle for a civil society and beyond: Austrian writers and intellectuals confronting the far right’, New German Critique, 93 (Autumn 2004), 19–41; 39. 26 ‘[…] ihnen allen ist ein formelles und inhaltliches Ankämpfen gegen jenes bürgerliche Bildungs- und Kunstideal gemein, das noch bis weit nach 1945 an den Wertvorstellungen des Nationalsozialismus fest­ hing’. Donna Schons, ‘Moderne Kunst in Wien – Rückblick auf den Neuanfang’ MONOPOL- MAGAZIN (5 June 2020), at www.monopol-magazin.de/Albertina-modern-wien (accessed 20 November 2020).

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Jürgenssen’s relations to Austrian avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s are complex and fluid. Her early work is most often approached through its connections with that of the set of Austrian women artists whose works responded to the ­violent, body-centred, but conventionally gendered art of the male Viennese Aktionists (Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler). Brigitte Borchhardt-Birbaumer has noted the women artists’ focus on ‘forward-looking conceptions that tied environments, politics, and aesthetic innovation together in role-play, explorations of identity and creativity, and radical reduction and political resistance’.27 Borchhardt-Birbaumer argues that artists like Jürgenssen, Margot Pilz, Lore Heuermann, VALIE EXPORT, Linda Christanell, and others ‘rejected’ the male Aktionists’ concern with the condition of post-war Austria, instead turning (in the wake of surrealists like Meret Oppenheim) to ‘the stuff of everyday life – kitchen equipment, make-up, laundry, shoes – [which] served to articulate protests against women’s inferior social status’.28 Feminist versions of and responses to Aktionism, Borchhardt-Birbaumer suggests, engage not with the contexts of historical circumstance but with the immediate contingencies of the everyday and its impact on their lives. This argument risks ignoring the extent to which the elements comprising the textures and constituents of ‘everyday life’ are themselves imbued with or influenced by the auratic residues of history (rather than existing somehow outside of its effects), and thus provide coded insights into how ‘everyday life’ is itself structured by those historical forces operating in unconscious ways. Traces of these pre- or unconscious historical legacies permeate Jürgenssen’s works. Unlike Unica Zürn or Meret Oppenheim, her experience of the war and its associated traumas is necessarily second-hand, at some historical distance, and their presence in or influence on her works is thus indirect, often detectable only in the interstices or contextual shading of her art, which offers through this thematic indirection what curators Natascha Burger and Nicole Fritz have called ‘[Jürgenssen’s] own seismographic intuitions of realms prior to the conceptual and conscious’.29 These pre-conscious realms are frequently coincident with the artist’s body, which provides in many works a corporeal screen, a medium upon which are projected the motifs, slogans, and other elements of Jürgenssen’s shifting aesthetic. In their relations to repressed histories, these projections articulate themes and concerns which recur in other media and forms across Jürgenssen’s extensive oeuvre. Her works can be understood as ‘after-images’ in the sense suggested by James E. Young in his a­ nalysis

27 Brigitte Borchhardt-Birbaumer, ‘Vienna’s female actionists: feminist positions in Austria’, in Schor (ed.), Feminist Avant-Garde, pp. 85–9; p. 85. 28 Borchhardt-Birbaumer, ‘Vienna’s female actionists’, p. 85. 29 Burger and Fritz (eds), ‘Foreword’ to Birgit Jürgenssen, p. 7.

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of post-Holocaust memorial culture and memory. Tanja Schult glosses Young’s argument: After-images, understood as products of social memory, do not just illustrate a changing cultural memory (based on new research findings, for example) but can in themselves, as aesthetic experiences, stimulate confrontations with the past, thereby contributing new

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insights. Here, art acts as an arena in which to negotiate established ways of representation, to make viewers aware of processes of commemoration, often by the use of exaggerations and confrontation.30

The events of the wartime era occurred prior to and thus displaced from her own lived experience, but their effects nevertheless persist within it, in the sense that the culture Jürgenssen inhabited was, like her experience of femininity, permeated by such after-images – structured by the politics and psychology of memory, and in particular the inheritance of gendered codes of behaviour and representation that in many ways had changed little in Austria since the war years and earlier. While the social and political position of women in Austria was, in the 1970s, undergoing rapid and significant shifts as ‘new modes of experience for women’ and ‘a new emotional reality’31 developed in the wake of the 1960s revolutions, it is also clear that Austrian social constructions of femininity were deeply conservative (due in part to the cultural predominance of Catholicism) and drew heavily on traditional roles and mythologies that had changed little since the pre-war years and had not been significantly interrupted by the Nazi era. Doris L. Bergen asserts the symbolic significance of the biopolitics of the female body in Nazi ideology, noting that ‘The line dividing insiders and outsiders, life and death, in German-occupied Europe ran directly through the bodies of women’.32 In her study of women in Nazi society, Jill Stephenson observes that ‘The Nazis, with their weird, backward looking philosophy, benefited from attitudes which had already developed and hardened, and found at least tacit – and often open – support for their promised policy of restoring women to a position of security, decency and domesticity.’33 And in her survey (published in 1988) of the history of ‘Austrian Women’s Struggle for Autonomy’, Jacqueline 30 Tanja Schult, ‘The performative power of a problematic public work: art-interventions at Alfred Hrdlicka’s Memorial Against War and Fascism in Vienna’, Public Art Dialogue, 8:2 (2019), 231–57; 237. 31 Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, ‘Introduction’, in Lamb-Faffelberger (ed.), Out from the Shadows: Essays on Contemporary Austrian Women Writers and Filmmakers (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1997), p. 11. 32 Doris L. Bergen, ‘What do studies of women, gender, and sexuality contribute to understanding the Holocaust?’, in Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro (eds), Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2013), pp.16–37; p. 22. 33 Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society (London: Routledge, 1975), p. 250.

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Vansant notes drily that ‘The end of the Nazi regime did not bring about radical changes in policies concerning women […] [and] the fifties and sixties witnessed a general conservatism, which extended to society’s attitude towards women and women’s role[s]’.34 As happened elsewhere in the West, this attitude came under intense scrutiny from that generation of Austrian artists and writers who, like Jürgenssen, came to maturity in the mid-1960s. Post-war Austria: Niemals Vergessen! The first major exhibition in Austria to address the Nazi period and the Holocaust, Niemals Vergessen! Antifaschistische Ausstellung (‘Never forget! Antifascism Exhibition’), was held in the Vienna Künstlerhaus in 1946. Its catalogue, extensively illustrated with works in a variety of media by artists including Victor Slama, Emy Ferjanc, and Heinrich Sussmann, included pages of capitalised statements and statistics (‘5,700,000 TOTE – 61% DES EUROPÄISCHEN JUDENTUMES VERNICHTET’ [‘61% of European Jewish People Destroyed’]) alongside numerous monochrome photographs of the camps and their victims and images of bombed Austrian cities and buildings, maps of European nations, and anti-fascist slogans. The event represented a post-war nation addressing its immediate past by setting out ‘AUF DEM WEG ZUR WELTGEMEINSCHAFT’ (‘On the road to a shared world’), a commonality sharply contrasted with the new threat of nuclear destruction (‘WELTGEMEINSCHAFT ODER UNTERGANG’ [‘World Community or Destruction’]). Amid the many essay contributions is a piece by Bundesminister Oskar Helmer (1887–1963) entitled ‘Oesterreich – das erste Opfer des Nazi-Faschismus’, one of the earliest publications explicitly addressing if not actively constructing what Heidemarie Uhl calls ‘the victim myth’,35 the post-war historical narrative positioning Austria as the first victim of Nazism. Helmer argued that ‘One thing is indisputably certain: the overwhelming majority of the Austrian people not only rejected fascism in general, they rejected Nazi fascism in particular’.36 Another essay by Bundesminister Dr Felix Hurdes

34 Jacqueline Vansant, Against the Horizon: Feminism and Postwar Austrian Women Writers (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 20–1. 35 Heidemarie Uhl, ‘The politics of memory: Austria’s perception of the Second World War and the National Socialist period’, in Günter Bischof and Anton Pelinka (eds), Contemporary Austrian Studies, Volume 5: Austrian Historical Memory and National Identity (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1997), pp. 64–94; p. 83. 36 ‘Das eine steht unbestreitbar fest: die überwiegende Mehrheit des österreichischen Volkes lehnte nicht nur den Faschismus im allgemeinen, es lehnte den Nazifaschismus im besonderen ab.’ Oskar Helmer, ‘Oesterreich – Das erste Opfer des Nazifaschismus’, in Niemals Vergessen! (Vienna: Verlag für Jugend und Volk, 1946), pp. 28–30; p. 30.

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opened with the assertion that ‘What led Austria to misery was for decades presented as a German path and was in truth the Prussian way’.37 Niemals Vergessen! offers an early indication of how post-war Austria would, until the mid-1980s, develop along a different historical and ideological route from Germany, one characterised by narratives based on the twin strategies of denial and displacement, effecting a situation in which history has remained (in James E. Young’s words) ‘decorously submerged, politely out of sight’.38 In an excoriating essay published in New German Critique in 2004, Egon Schwarz (who, aged 16, fled Austria with his parents in 1938) describes post-war Austria as defined by ‘The art of looking the other way’ and cites the popular Austrian cliché, uttered by the voice tutor Alfred in Johann Strauss’s 1874 operetta Die Fledermaus: ‘Glücklich ist, wer vergißt, was nicht zu ändern ist’ (‘Happy is he who forgets what cannot be changed’).39 Having been assimilated into Nazi Germany in the Anschluss of March 1938 and thus effectively ceasing to exist as an independent nation, Austria was occupied by the Allies from April 1945 and treated once again as a liberated independent nation, after the 1943 Declaration of Moscow recognised it as the first ‘victim’ of Nazi aggression – the origin of the post-war ‘victim myth’ and a construction that has been repeatedly both asserted and contested, and which came to define Austrian national identity for several decades. Allied occupation and administration of the country lasted until the granting of full independence as a neutral state in April 1955. During the immediate post-war period Austria’s border position in relation to the Soviet Union (the country borders Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia) meant that any residual anti-fascism became quickly overshadowed by the cold war imperative toward anti-communism, while Austrian political parties courted the votes of over 500,000 former Nazis who had been re-enfranchised after the amnesty of 1948, in which 90 per cent of them had been acquitted of major crimes.40 Before the war, Vienna had been home to the largest central European Jewish community, but after 1945 emigrant Jews were ­reluctant to return to the country (and the post-war government did little to encourage them). Many of the remaining Jewish community in Austria were keen to emigrate to Palestine, for a variety of reasons – Uhl cites ‘the catastrophic social situation of the survivors, who lacked places to live, food, clothing and medicines – but also, and

37 Felix Hurdes, ‘Von Friedrich bis Hitler: Totentanz Österreichs’, in Niemals Vergessen!, pp. 72–4; p. 72. 38 James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 110. 39 Egon Schwarz, ‘Austria, quite a normal nation’, New German Critique, 93 (Autumn 2004), 175–91; 177, 176. 40 Heidemarie Uhl, ‘From the periphery to the centre of memory: Holocaust memorials in Vienna’, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 30:3 (2016), 221–42; 225–6.

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above all, the threat of virulent antisemitism’ in the immediate post-war months.41 Historians generally agree that such shifting contexts contributed to the establishment of the ‘first victim’ argument as the foundational and enduring narrative of post-war Austria. Perceptions of the Nazi period and the subsequent Allied occupation fed this narrative ideologically in an extended process of national repression and evasion that only began to unravel during a series of political controversies in the mid-1980s around the appointment to senior office of men (like Kurt Waldheim) revealed to have significant Nazi pasts and, subsequently, the nation’s swing to the political far right in the 1999 elections. Ambivalence permeates post-war Austrian attitudes to the country’s Nazi past, contributing to what Cathy Caruth identifies as the ‘crisis of truth’ resulting from ‘the historical enigma betrayed by trauma’.42 Hella Pick, for example, asserts in the introduction to her book Guilty Victim (2000) that ‘The country is both victim and perpetrator’, but that ‘Austria has been far less victim than perpetrator’.43 Aleida Assmann points out that the ‘doctrine’ of ‘first victim’ ‘is appropriate in the context of politicians who survived the concentration camps, but it certainly falls short as the formula for a national self-description’.44 Uhl (in an essay published in 1997) noted that ‘There is general agreement that the Nazi period cannot be denied and must be seen as an integral part of Austria’s history’, but also identified ‘a reverse trend which has sought to play down or at least partially justify certain aspects of National Socialism’.45 ‘Unlike in Germany’, Uhl argues in another essay, ‘where the Nazi period became ‘normatively internalised’ as a negative-reference event, National Socialism became ‘externalised’ in Austria as a phase of foreign rule standing outside Austrian history and for which Austria bore no responsibility’.46 Uhl’s psychological reading of post-war Austria emphasises the dynamic of inside and outside, containment and rejection, heimlich and unheimlich that has since 1945 characterised Austrian narratives of the wartime period. It responds in particular to a perception of the country’s history of national incorporation originating in the Anschluss, in which the geographical space of the Austrian nation was internalised as part of the larger body politic of Nazi Germany, and subsumed into German history, providing the ideological alibi on which the ‘victim myth’ was based. The strategic ‘externalisation’ 41 42 43 44 45 46

Uhl, ‘From the periphery to the centre of memory’, 224. Caruth, ‘Introduction’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, p. 6. Pick, Guilty Victim, p. xv. Assmann, Shadows of Trauma, p. 91. Uhl, ‘The politics of memory’, 83, 86. Heidemarie Uhl, ‘From victim myth to co-responsibility thesis: Nazi rule, World War II, and the Holocaust in Austrian memory’, in Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu (eds), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 40–72; p. 48.

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of disturbing or traumatic historical experience – its redefinition as something that happened ‘outside’ the national, ideological, historical, and cultural borders of what eventually becomes the post-war Austrian nation – is a form of abjection, of expelling from the body politic material threatening to the constitution and consistency of that body. It resonates in relation to the desire for ‘outside’ expressed in works by Birgit Jürgenssen like Ich möchte hier raus! and (as we’ll see later) Mit der Bahn heute in eine bessere Zukunft, investing them with additional layers of significance beyond the immediate contemporary of ‘everyday life’. Hausfrauen, animals, and the Anschluss Jürgenssen’s art of the 1970s meditates in complex ways on this contested and haunted historical terrain. Her Hausfrau drawings, a series of several closely related works of the mid-1970s, echo pieces in different media by other artists (like Martha Rosler and VALIE EXPORT) whose work explores similar questions of female labour and women’s relations to dirt and filth. Jürgenssen’s drawings examine the position of women in 1970s Austria, satirising through surreal collocations and transformations the social and cultural conventions within which femininity appears, at best, constrained and, at worst, abjected, like the histories haunting its construction in post-war Austria. The recurrent tropes of these works centre on tensions and oscillations between freedom and confinement, labour and luxury, inside and outside, and the transformation of human into animal or object. In Bügeln (Ironing, 1975) (figure 3.3), a woman wearing dark glasses sits on a table, applying an electric iron to the folds of the white dress she wears, which spreads like a tablecloth. Four chairs surround the table, their spindly legs like stilts; a landscape adorns the wall behind the woman, framing the upper half of her head. The floor of the room is bare, its boards aligning in a slightly disorienting, angled perspective. In Fensterputzen (Window Cleaning, 1975) (figure 3.4), a woman in a blue dress, her hair pinned back, is pressed against the upper right pane of a window in a pose reminiscent of Ich möchte hier raus!, her right hand pressed against the glass, her left scrubbing at it with a cloth. The window around her figure is black; below and to the right, we see a collage of images – male and female faces, a woman wearing a long fur coat, a table with a white cloth bearing glasses, a sports car, a beach scene – connoting wealth and luxury, and contrasting with the window-cleaner’s labour. Hausfrau (1974) (figure 3.5), echoing a photograph of German film star Grit Böttcher that was printed on the cover of the women’s magazine Die kluge Hausfrau (The Savvy Housewife) published 14 February 1959 (figure 3.6), offers another version of the pose of Ich möchte hier raus! in its depiction of a woman, wearing an orange apron over her brown dress, with the head of tiger and sporting a headscarf, caged in a domestic setting over which she towers, pressed against the bars, her right leg raised across the left, both sporting

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Figure 3.3  Birgit Jürgenssen, Bügeln, 1975

green socks and open sandals, her gloved hands transformed to claws that grip the cage. The caged space occupies the centre of the image, and is framed by what appear to be sky and clouds, with two birds flying to the upper right. The women in these pictures are trapped by the imposition of labour, engaged in scrubbing clean the social and domestic spaces of an Austria haunted by the h ­ istory it

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Figure 3.4  Birgit Jürgenssen, Fensterputzen, 1975

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Figure 3.5  Birgit Jürgenssen, Hausfrau, 1974

has abjected. Becoming-animal, they further transgress social and physical boundaries, hinting at bestial natures lurking beneath the social veneer of late t­wentieth-century Austria. Such images of hybridical or animalised femininity, consistently emblematic of the desire to transcend the discursively constrained (female) body, recur throughout Jürgenssen’s oeuvre. Das Tier (The Animal, 1978) depicts a naked female figure

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Figure 3.6  Grit Böttcher, cover image of Die kluge Hausfrau, 14 February 1959

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Figure 3.7  Christian Attersee, Hundebüstenhalter, 1966

crawling on hands and feet, the upper surface of its body emphasised by a halo of brown lines connoting fur. In Der Wettlauf (Footrace, 1975) a running female figure merges with a lumbering ape. The photographic self-portrait Ohne Titel (Selbst mit Fellchen) (Untitled [Self with little fur], 1974/1977), and the related drawing Ohne Titel (1977–78), depict a hybridisation of woman with fox or rat. Such images, SolomonGodeau argues, situate ‘the human and the animal – often the female human being – in some kind of intimate relation or, alternatively, in physical conjunction with other species’.47 Jürgenssen’s explorations of human–animal hybrids draw on works by other avant-garde Austrian artists, notably Curt Stenvert’s installation Stalingrad – Die Rentabilitätsberechnung eines Tyrannenmordes (1964–67), which depicts three Wehrmacht soldiers, one of whom has the head of a wolf;48 or Christian Attersee’s pop-art acrylic painting Hundebüstenhalter (Dog Bra, 1966) (figure 3.7), in which the bra’s cups (in a play on ‘Möpse’, meaning ‘pugs’ – a German colloquial term for breasts) are replaced by dog heads (a substitution Jürgenssen again echoes in Dienstmädchen [1976] [figure 3.8], in which the bra-cups are replaced by slippers). 47 Solomon-Godeau, ‘Birgit Jürgenssen: seen through the Anthropocene’, p. 196. 48 The connection between Nazi ideology and the wolf will be explored further in Chapter 5 below.

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Figure 3.8  Birgit Jürgenssen, Dienstmädchen, 1976

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Figure 3.9  Birgit Jürgenssen, Hausfrau, 1974

the background is a chequered surface, 12 × 14, patterned in various pastel shades of blue, rose, white, and yellow, framed by an orange (perhaps wooden) rectangle and surmounted by two wooden clothes pegs, as if the image were a contact print or kitchen towel hung up to dry, a suggestion reinforced by the appearance of several stains, notably in the lower left corner.

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Jürgenssen may have reworked this drawing from a cover illustration of NS Frauen Warte magazine (2 February 1941) (figure 3.10), reversing and geometrically pixellating the image, and adding a 1950s-style headscarf checked in the colours of the Austrian flag. NS Frauen Warte, published twice-weekly from 1935, was the organ of the NS-Frauenschaft and promoted the Nazi view of womanhood in articles like ‘Die faschistische Frau im Dienste der Nation’ (‘The fascist woman in the service of the  nation’).54 The magazine repeatedly ran articles discussing (for example) ‘Praktische Haus- und Arbeitskleidung’ (‘practical house- and workwear’) for women,55 highlighting clothing like the Schürze (the apron worn by the figure possibly reworked by Jürgenssen), emphasising its praktische (practical) qualities,56 as it could be made by cutting back old clothes (‘Schürzen schonen unsere Kleidung’ [‘Aprons spare our clothes’]);57 or ‘Das Dirndl der Städterin’ (‘The dirndl of the urban woman’), reconstructing the folk-costume Dirndl, prized by the Nazis for its connotation of ‘innere Werte’ (inner values), as a fashion item for city life.58 Jürgenssen’s Hausfrau drawing plays on these nationalist connotations in its use of red and white, the national colours of Austria. Bodenschrubben (Scrubbing the Floor, 1975) (figure 3.11) is perhaps the most complex of the Hausfrauen works. The drawing depicts three female figures, ironically evoking the three Graces (a common art-historical subject, famously depicted by Rubens and Raphael amongst others, and varied in Picasso’s Three Women [1907–8]), or the three Fates, the Morai of Greek myth. Jürgenssen’s three women are scrubbing the floor using what seem to be male rag dolls (Schor comments that this use of the male figure as a Waschlappen or dishcloth puns on the German slang term for a weak or henpecked man).59 The women assume various poses that simultaneously imply faintly erotic or provocative, as well as laborious, activity. The woman to the left, facing towards us, wears a short-sleeved green dress and kneels on the floor, her hands gripping a doll from which she wrings water onto the floor, her brown hair held back by a thin headband. Above her to the right stands the second figure, a woman facing right, her blond hair tied in a blue ribbon-bow, wearing below-the-knee jeans, a red blouse with the sleeves rolled up, and a frilly white apron, bends over a white bucket, into which she wrings another doll. The third figure kneels to the right, her body in profile, her head turned towards us, her eyes wide as if startled – she wears a short yellow dress with an apron tied around the waist, her red hair tied in a yellow 54 55 56 57 58 59

NS Frauen Warte, Jahrgang 10 Heft 1, 1941, 2. NS Frauen Warte, Jahrgang 10 Heft 5, 1941, 75. NS Frauen Warte, Jahrgang 10 Heft 2, 1941, 27. NS Frauen Warte, Jahrgang 11 Heft 13, 1943, 181. NS Frauen Warte, Jahrgang 11 Heft 2, 1942, 27. Schor, ‘“I am”: on the flux of the artistic self’, p. 24.

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Figure 3.10  Cover illustration of NS Frauen Warte magazine, 2 February 1941

­ eadband, her hands scrubbing the floor with another doll. The floor they are cleaning, h and the wall behind them, are flat and featureless, blank screens against which they perform their apparently pointless, contextless drudgery. Their postures emphasise the dynamic performativity of the scene – the viewer is being played to, the women’s eyes engage our gaze, their actions momentarily arrested in self-consciousness as a

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Figure 3.11  Birgit Jürgenssen, Bodenschrubben, 1975

look is exchanged between the viewer and the group. The space of the image is organised by this exchange of looks and bodily postures and alignments, which engages the viewer in a kind of complicity with the enactment of oppression witnessed. Alongside their critiques of female labour as oppression, the activities undertaken by Jürgenssen’s Hausfrauen allegorise through repetitive physical labour (ironing, window-cleaning, floor-scrubbing) the ongoing process of repression – the labour Freud emphasises as ‘a persistent expenditure of force’.60 Women’s labour, Jürgenssen furthermore implies in these works, performs a version of the whitewashing of history and reality demanded by the ideology of post-war Austria. In his essay analysing Jürgenssen’s Hausfrau works, Peter Weibel emphasises this implicit complicity, arguing that ‘Jürgenssen’s drawings are a mirror that reveals what we are socially unaware of or have repressed. These works show socially constructed femininity as a trail of suffering caused by a dictatorship that is centuries old’.61 The connection of social repression with the dictatorial exercising of power affords a crucial insight into the

60 Sigmund Freud, ‘Repression’, in The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 11: On Metapsychology, Angela Richards (ed.), James Strachey (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 139–58; p. 151. 61 Peter Weibel, ‘Birgit Jürgenssen or body art against the semiotics of capital’, Gloria Custance (trans.), Multitudes, 27 (2007), 147–50; 150.

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Austrian history that haunts Bodenschrubben, a history rooted in events surrounding the Anschluss of March 1938, and one which allows us to construct a different reading of Jürgenssen’s image. Historical ambivalence around the Anschluss is complex and governed by vested interests. As Jody Manning points out, media representations of the German annexation of Austria were carefully managed and manipulated, and provided ‘tools in a propaganda war intended to legitimise the annexation of foreign territory’.62 But to emphasise that the exaggeration of Austrian celebrations was a product of Nazi propaganda is to play into the hands of supporters of the ‘victim myth’. The reality, Manning argues, is more complex: there were competing realities as well as propaganda distortions: what was for some Austrians an invasion, was for others a moment of liberation, and yet for others perhaps simply party time: a surreal carnival mood when there was free food in the streets, military music on every corner and the most impressive Faschingsumzug Austria had ever witnessed; that of the mechanized Prussian ‘liberators’ sweeping into the country.63

The ‘surreal carnival mood’ did not extend to the Jewish inhabitants of Vienna. The city the Nazis invaded was marked on its public surfaces by political ­propaganda – slogans, party insignia, and other graffiti – residues of the intended but now abolished referendum on unification that had been proposed by former First Minister Schuschnigg, alongside anti-Nazi slogans. An immediate action of the new unified German state was to empower Nazi mobs to force those deemed ‘responsible’ for this defacement of public space to clean the city of this graffiti. In the words of the journalist G. E. R. Gedeye, the streets of Vienna descended into a ‘pandemonium of sound which intermingled screams of “Down with the Jews!” “Heil Hitler! …Perish the Jews, Hang Schuschnigg”’.64 Photographs and some home movie footage of these scenes exist, and Jürgenssen’s drawing of housewives self-consciously scrubbing the floor clearly echoes elements of some of these historical images (figure 3.12).65 In particular, the white buckets evident in the photographs closely resemble the one depicted in Bodenschrubben. Alfred Hrdlicka’s controversial multi-part Mahnmal Gegen Krieg und Faschismus (Memorial against War and Fascism), installed in Vienna’s Albertinaplatz in 1988, includes a 62 Jody Manning, ‘Austria at the crossroads: the Anschluss and its opponents’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cardiff, 2013), p. 309. 63 Manning, ‘Austria at the crossroads’, p. 310. 64 Manning, ‘Austria at the crossroads’, p. 311. 65 See, for example, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jews-forced-to-clean-vienna-streets (accessed 22 February 2021).

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Figure 3.12  Austria: Onlookers watch as Jews are forced to scrub the streets in Vienna, March 1938

bronze statue of an orthodox Jewish man, prostrate, washing the pavement. As James E. Young points out (noting the ‘civic trauma’ of these resonances), the monument stands on the site where, on 12 March 1945, nearly 200 Viennese had been buried alive when a building collapsed during an American bombing raid, and where victims of a medieval pogrom (coincidentally on the same date, 12 March 1421) were buried.66 Tanja Schult has documented the history behind the monument: The point of departure for Hrdlicka’s bronze figure of the Jew was the public degradation that took place in the capital and other Austrian cities on the night before, and especially in the weeks and months after the Anschluß. In the so-called Reibpartien (scrubbing squads), people were forced to clean the streets of political slogans with brushes, sometimes ­toothbrushes. […] The Reibpartien and other pogrom-like attacks during spring 1938, including the arrest of many political opponents, affected in particular Jewish citizens. Their shops were plundered; many were beaten, raped and driven to suicide. State 66 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 105–6.

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authorities and ordinary fellow citizens carried out these assaults. The word Reibpartien hardly reflects the violent nature of these excesses, but it captures the hatred and malicious pleasure of the people who took part in these public spectacles, enjoying the humiliation of

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the Austrian Jews, their fellow citizens.67

The Reibpartien were a planned response to events in 1934 when Austrian Nazis had been forced to clean up NS slogans daubed on the walls of Vienna. This history periodically resurfaced in post-war Austria. On 15 November 1961, Austrian television broadcast an hour-long theatrical monologue by Helmut Qualtinger and Carl Merz called Der Herr Karl, a confessional text narrated by a typical Viennese bourgeois man, which included an account of the 1938 Reibpartien and which sparked a public outrage, including death threats to the authors accusing them of being ‘Nestbeschmutzer’ (nest-soilers).68 Furthermore, Young notes that discussions around an anti-fascist monument in Vienna began in 1972, ‘at least partly at the urging of Hrdlicka, who had proposed a monument to Viennese Auschwitz victims’.69 Awareness of the shameful history of the Reibpartien was thus widespread in Austria in the 1960s and 1970s, and Jürgenssen’s floor-scrubbing women can be interpreted as a kind of after-image of the trauma caused by moments like its 1961 resurrection – a coded and transformative feminist response to this historical event. Like Cathy Caruth’s victims of trauma, the women ‘carry an impossible history’ within them, a history the drawing teases out in its resemblance to photographs of the humiliation of the Viennese Jews of 1938. In its erasure of context – its isolation of the three women from any context other than that of the vacant interior they are cleaning – the drawing filters out elements of the power relations evident in the 1938 photographs (the standing crowd surrounding and threatening the kneeling Jews, the uniformed Nazis patrolling the activity but clearly on the side of, and part of, the spectating audience, and the very act of taking photographs, the event documented presumably by some of the non-Jewish onlookers). It replaces these with the careful positioning of the viewer by the women’s gazes, which (as in Ich möchte hier raus!) express the wish to escape the network of historical significances the drawing evokes. In 2015, Austrian film-maker Ruth Beckermann staged an aesthetic intervention in the public effects of the Hrdlicka memorial in her work The Missing Image, which used film footage of the 1938 events (recently discovered in the archives of the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna) and an eerie soundtrack by Olga Neuwirth (the subject 67 Schult, ‘The performative power of a problematic public work’, 234. 68 Gunna Wendt, Helmut Qualtinger: Ein Leben (Vienna: Deuticke, 1999), p. 93. 69 Young, The Texture of Memory, p. 105.

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of Chapter 5, below) to restore, through two-channel cinematic video p ­ rojection, a ­symbolic crowd presence around Hrdlicka’s solitary figure. Beckermann’s intention was to recentre the isolated figure, repositioning it in a social context erased by the sculpture but residually gestured towards by the sculpture’s situation as part of a larger ensemble of elements. History’s repression of the social act of public humiliation returns in Beckermann’s looping images, which invited the participation as onlookers of the contemporary Viennese crowd. ‘The bystanders have fun’, writes Beckermann of the figures in the crowd of spectators in 1938, but also, implicitly, of the contemporary audience; ‘They enjoy the feeling of power, looking down on those that have to crawl on the ground’.70 The viewer of Jürgenssen’s Bodenschrubben is placed in a similar position of voyeuristic power; the drawing lays bare, without over-emphasising, the complicity of the viewer in the violent pleasure of watching the women’s physical labour as they gaze into a space outside their frame. The challenge posed by the three women, a decontextualised and gendered 1970s version of the Reibpartien, exposes the strange combination of repression and fetishisation that surrounds images like the Albertinaplatz photographs, another dimension of the ideological and historical circumstances from which Jürgenssen’s art expressed its creator’s desire to escape. Schuhwerk, fetish, and sublimation Jürgenssen’s Hausfrau and animal pictures express different versions of this desire to escape Austrian culture and its histories. Drawing on popular-cultural sources and historical events, they articulate their critique of structures of oppression in Austrian society that have persisted, sometimes in mutated forms, in post-war Austrian society. In mapping the activities of labour that define female experience and revealing how the roots of these activities can be traced back to the period of historical ­repression – Austria of the 1930s and 1940s – and beyond, Jürgenssen simultaneously articulates a critique of gender relations and historicises that critique in relation to the persistence of historical memory in cultural forms, as after-images of events that have been repressed in Austrian history. Her Schuhwerk (Shoe-work) pieces, a key sequence of objects and drawings of the mid-1970s, demonstrate another way Jürgenssen engages with what Dagmar C. G. Lorenz has called ‘residues of the Nazi past’,71 signs and traces of a history Austria tried, at national as well as personal levels,

70 Text at www.themissingimage.at/home.php?il=2&l=en (accessed 24 November 2020). See Ruth Beckermann (dir.), The Missing Image (Video-Dokumentation, 2015), at https://youtu.be/fbHEEj QVqOQ (accessed 24 November 2020). 71 Lorenz, ‘The struggle for a civil society and beyond’, 36.

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to repress. As the word ‘residues’ implies, this is a history which acts as a surplus or remainder, something that should have been cleaned up, implicitly by Jürgenssen’s Hausfrauen, or the Praktische Hausfrauen whose avatars populated post-war Austrian women’s magazines, with their residual echoes of wartime and Nazi concerns with ideologies of thrift and efficiency, the avoidance of wastage, reusing and recycling. Such magazines enacted a kind of cultural sublimation that comes under intense scrutiny in Jürgenssen’s works. Schuhwerk, a remarkably creative sequence of surreal objects, constitutes a major intervention in this process of sublimation. Connected to but distinct from other pictures and objects she produced during the 1970s, Schuhwerk explores the complex polysemy of shoes and their intimate, fetishistic connections to eroticised femininity. In the background of these works (as many critics have noted) lie Meret Oppenheim’s famous objects Ma Gouvernante (My Nurse) of 1936 and Le Couple (1956), a pair of pairs of shoes that raise a variety of questions about coupling and doubling. Renée Riese Hubert has noted the ‘defunctionalised’ aspect of these works, which she links to surrealist themes of ‘cannibalization and feminization’.72 Neil Cox argues that in Ma Gouvernante ‘Oppenheim’s shoes are both fetishes bound and trussed for male fantasy and yet still intimately connected in a literal manner to a woman’s body and its erotic life’.73 Jürgenssen’s Schuhwerk expands on this network of surrealistically fetished associations. Drawing on the meanings put into circulation by Oppenheim’s objects, she produces a new generation of works that creates new associations by registering the cultural tremors of a traumatic history, of which they function as after-­ images, historically deferred, saturated with the residues of older surrealist responses to patriarchal violence. Their wide-ranging creative diversity echoes, for example, the disturbing polysemy of Hans Bellmer’s Poupées (works noted earlier in relation to Unica Zürn) with their extended fascination with convolutions of the female form. Discussing Bellmer’s dolls, Hal Foster argues that Bellmer’s Nazi father is the ultimate figure of the artist’s critique of patriarchal violence: the dolls become (Foster writes) ‘a gesture of assault on all phallic authority – paternal and political’.74 Elsewhere he calls them ‘explicitly an attack on fascist father and state alike’.75 Likewise, Jürgenssen’s Schuhwerk pieces critique patriarchal power’s transhistorical effects, their reference extending beyond the historical moment of their production. 72 Hubert, Magnifying Mirrors, p. 64. 73 Neil Cox, ‘Desire bound: violence, body, machine’, in David Hopkins (ed.), A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2016), pp. 420–41; p. 436. 74 Hal Foster, ‘Violation and veiling in surrealist photography: woman as fetish, as shattered object, as phallus’, in Jennifer Mundy (ed.), Surrealism: Desire Unbound (London: Tate Gallery, 2001), pp. 203–26; p. 215. 75 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 115.

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In her anthropological survey of shoes, Fredrika H. Jacobs asserts that ‘Shoes are never neutral. Neither is the act of wearing them’.76 Jürgenssen’s Schuhwerk pieces collectively probe beyond the limits of the non-neutrality of shoes and their ­significances, exposing in the process the strangely persistent symbolic roles of footwear within Nazi iconographies, and how the rhetoric of Nazi propaganda exploited clichés which survive into the post-war period, marked by their residual association with the totalitarian exercising of power. In Unter dem Pantoffel (Under the Heel, 1976) (figure 3.13), for example, she alludes to the Pantoffelhelden or ‘slipper hero’, the henpecked man, who only has power over his slippers.77 The clichéd image, its associations surviving into the 1970s, is literalised in Jürgenssen’s object, the male figure folded, compressed beneath the shoe. Ingried Brugger summarises some of the themes explored in the Schuhwerk: Jürgenssen’s preoccupation with the fetish culminates in the drawings, photographs, and footwear objects in which she seeks to ‘analyse and even deconstruct the psychological fetishism attached to the representation of femininity’. Shoes become screens on which are projected longings, fears and dreams […]. In footwear the artist addresses our most sensitive places; high heels, a supporting attribute of femininity and the cause of agonizing deformations, the shoe as a symbol of female victim, masochism and submission, the shoe as a substitute for female genitalia, pregnant shoes, the shoe heel as an arm prosthesis […].78

Some of these works are disturbingly anatomical, suggesting the female body constrained, if not deformed, by a grotesque combination of prosthetic and internal forms. The 1972 drawing anna-tommie plays in its title with such associations; it 76 Fredrika H. Jacobs, ‘Shoes’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 70/71 (Spring–Autumn 2019), 284–294; 289. 77 The Nazis held the Pantoffelmann in contempt. Heinrich Himmler (for example) used the image to question the masculinity of his fellow SS officers in a speech delivered on 8 November 1937 to the SS-Gruppenführer conference in Munich. See Katarzyna Leszczyńska, ‘Hexen und Germanen: Das Interesse des Nationalsozialismus an der Geschichte der Hexenverfolgung’ (PhD thesis, EuropaUniversität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder; Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2009), p. 48 n. 57. 78 ‘Jürgenssens Beschäftigung mit dem Fetisch kulminiert zweifelsohne in den Zeichnungen, Fotografien, und Objekten Schuhwerk, in denen sie “den der Darstellung von Weiblichkeit anhaftenden psychischen Fetischismus zu analysieren, ja sogar zu dekonstruieren” sucht. Schuhe werden zu Projektionsflächen von Sehnsüchten, Ängsten und Träumen […]. In Schuhwerk thematisiert die Künstlerin unsere empfindlichsten Stellen; High Heels, stützendes Attribut der Weiblichkeit und Grund quälender Verformungen, der Schuh als Symbol weiblichen Opfers, des Masochismus und der Unterwerfung, der Schuh als Substitut weiblicher Genitalien (Relikteschuh […]), Schwangerer Schuh, der Schuhabsatz als Armprothese […]’. Ingried Brugger, ‘Unsere empfindlichsten Stellen’, in Schor and Eipeldauer (eds), Birgit Jürgenssen, pp. 45–56; p. 53.

Figure 3.13  Birgit Jürgenssen, Unter dem Pantoffel, 1976

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depicts a single green, flat woman’s shoe from above, containing the pink veins and exposed organs of some indeterminate creature. These internal organs are laid disturbingly bare, suggesting exposure and vulnerability rather than the containment and protection conventionally associated with footwear. Like many of Jürgenssen’s works, anna-tommie appears as a kind of wound, a connotation that introduces into its meanings the possibility of trauma (the word derives from the Greek -tere, ‘to twist or press’, leading to trauma, ‘wound’) (figure 3.14). In the course of her analysis of Surrealism’s complex concerns with the object, Johanna Malt points out that the movement’s imagery ‘teems with fetish objects of many kinds. Not only are inanimate objects eroticised to an unprecedented degree by the contexts and configurations in which they are made to appear; the body itself figures as object and as fetish, presented in fragmentary form, the whole adding up to less than the sum of its fragmented parts’.79 Malt explores the surrealist object in relation to its critique of commodity fetishism. ‘This anxious and repetitive shoring up against the incursion of reality’, she writes, ‘is one aspect of what is going on in the proliferation and repetition of fetishistic imagery in Surrealism’.80 In classical Freudian theory, the fetishised object masks a repressed trauma, the male trauma of castration-anxiety. In his 1927 essay on ‘Fetishism’ Freud famously connects fetishism to female footwear: It seems rather that when the fetish is instituted some process occurs which reminds one of the stopping of memory in traumatic amnesia. As in this latter case, the subject’s interest comes to a halt half-way, as it were; it is as though the last impression before the uncanny and traumatic one is retained as a fetish. Thus the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish – or a part of it – to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up […].81

Freud’s association of feminine footwear and female genitalia was not lost on the surrealists. The role played by women’s footwear within surrealist uses of fetishism is emphasised by Salvador Dalí’s description of his contribution to the ‘Objets surréalistes’ featured in the third issue of Surréalisme au service de la revolution in 1931: A woman’s shoe, inside which a glass of warm milk has been placed, in the center of a soft paste the colour of excrement. The mechanism consists of the dipping in the milk of 79 Johanna Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire – Surrealism, Fetishism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 103. 80 Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire, p. 136. 81 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’, in The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 7: On Sexuality, Angela Richards (ed.), James Strachey (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 345–58; p. 354.

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Figure 3.14  Birgit Jürgenssen, anna-tommie, 1972

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The traumatic surreal a sugar lump, on which there is a drawing of a shoe, so that the dissolving of the sugar, and ­consequently of the image of the shoe, may be observed. Several accessories (pubic hairs glued to a sugar lump, an erotic little photograph) complete the object, which is accompanied by a box of spare sugar lumps and a special spoon for stirring lead pellets

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inside the shoe.82

Jürgenssen’s Schuhwerk pieces (first exhibited in Nuremberg in 1976, and collected for an exhibition in Vienna in 2004)83 play on the queasily abject tensions between looking, feeling, and consuming – the frictions between pleasure and discomfort, nutrient and abjected waste, solid and liquid, erotic and obscene – evoked by Dalí’s description. They often merge footwear with body parts and organs, non-human creatures, or inanimate objects. The object Netter Raubvogelschuh (Nice Bird of Prey Shoe, 1976) reconfigures feathers, a chicken foot, and a metal frame into a form resembling both a shoe and the body of the ‘nice bird of prey’; two different drawings associated with this work suggest either a chicken or a kestrel. Schuhsessel (Shoe Chair, 1974) combines a shoe with a wooden chair. Unser täglich Brot/Brotschuh (Our Daily Bread/ Bread Shoe, 1976) offers a boot apparently made of bread. These works contribute to Surrealism’s preoccupation with the fetish by simultaneously revealing the functionality of such amalgamations – the link between fetish and utilitarian object – and pointing out their connections to repressed cultural histories. Some of the Schuhwerk works (like the objects Matratzenschuh [Mattress Shoe, 1973] and Bettschuh [Bed Shoe, 1976]) combine footwear with domestic objects, emphasising the connection between feminine domesticity and sexual fetishism – the exercising of oppressive patriarchal power through reduction, fragmentation, and fetishisation on which most criticism of these works focusses. Solomon-Godeau’s analysis of Schuhwerk, for example, focusses on how Jürgenssen ‘“elevated” the debased and trivial fetish object so as to render it articulate, to make it address its own hidden agendas of mutilation, of violence, of objectification’, making the fetish ‘speak of many of the things [it] normally masks or obscures’.84 Alongside this overt concern with female oppression, many of Jürgenssen’s objects and drawings of the 1970s can also be mapped onto a variety of image sources that reveal the relations of these works to the repressed history of Austria’s involvement in Nazism, of which they perform a subtle critique. The naming of works like anna-­tommie provides one clue to such sources. The medical institutions of Vienna

82 Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire, pp. 116–17. 83 Birgit Jürgenssen – Schuhwerk – Subversive Aspects of Feminism, MAK, Vienna, March–June 2004. 84 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘If the shoe fits: fetishism, femininity, and Birgit Jürgessen’s Schuhwerk’, in Schor and Solomon-Godeau (eds), Birgit Jürgenssen, pp. 231–56; pp. 244, 242.

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(with which Jürgenssen’s father was professionally connected) have long been associated with anatomical modelling – Birgit Nemec, surveying Viennese anatomical collections, writes of ‘the vivid and well-known local tradition of artistic anatomy for which Vienna was praised’.85 The Wachsmodellsammlung des Josephinums in Vienna, which Jürgenssen almost certainly visited (her father was a doctor practising in the city through the late 1940s and 1950s), includes over 1,200 prepared anatomical objects, mapping bodily functions, processes, deformities, and abnormalities, many of which find echoes in Jürgenssen’s art.86 Rückgratveränderung (Backbone Alteration, 1974) depicts a female torso from behind, its spine exposed, the bone structure clearly derived from such anatomical displays (figure 3.15). The image is reworked via body projection in Jürgenssen’s Ohne Titel (Körperprojektion, 1988) (figure 3.16), in which a schematic spine is projected onto the artist’s naked back. The collocation reworks older images; it resembles drawings of spinal columns and muscle structures seen hanging on the walls of the Josephinum over displays of human spines (figure 3.17), and recalls those used in a Körperhaltung (Body Posture) poster from the 1950s (figure 3.18). Like several other works, this picture echoes the traditions of anatomical diagrams in the educational charts advising on physical and medical topics such as correct posture, healthy footwear, and dental hygiene, which were hanging on the walls of Austrian schools in the 1950s. These posters were captioned by medics (such as Konrad Allmer [1907–65], from 1947 custodian of the Anatomical Institute of the University of Vienna, based at the Josephinum, and a member of the NSDAP from 1932) who had worked in Viennese hospitals during the war.87 The artwork on many of them was by the Vienna-born scientific illustrator Ludwig Schrott (1906–70), who had also contributed illustrations to the notorious Topographische Anatomie des Menschen, edited by the Austrian anatomist and committed Nazi Eduard Pernkopf (1888–1955) and probably substantially based on dissections of the bodies of political prisoners during the Nazi era. Pernkopf became Rector of Vienna’s University in 1943, and had already (after the Anschluss in 1938) purged the School of Medicine of all Jewish faculty.

85 Birgit Nemec, ‘Modelling the human – modelling society: anatomical models in early twentieth-century Vienna and the politics of visual cultures’, Histoire, médecine et santé – Revue d’histoire sociale et culturelle de la médecine, de la santé et du corps, 5 (Spring 2014), 61–76: paragraph 4, at https://journals. openedition.org/hms/638?lang=en (accessed 29 November 2020). 86 Daniela Hahn, archivist at the Josephinum Medizinische Sammlungen, confirmed that these displays remained unchanged between 1965 and 2019. Email exchange with the author, 2 June 2021. 87 Ingrid Arias, ‘Entnazifizierung an der Wiener Medizinischen Fakultät: Bruch oder Kontinuität? Das Beispiel des Anatomischen Instituts’, Zeitgeschichte, 6:31 (2004), 339–79; 357.

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Figure 3.15  Birgit Jürgenssen, Rückgratveränderung, 1974

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Figure 3.16  Birgit Jürgenssen, Ohne Titel (Körperprojektion), 1988

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Figure 3.17a  Exhibition view, wax models (including those of spinal columns), Josephinum, Vienna, 2015

Figure 3.17b   Illustration displayed as part of the wax model collection of the Josephinum. Workshop of Felice Fontana La Pecola, The iliac-rib muscle with its three parts (M. iliocostalis cervicis, M. iliocostalis thoracis et m. Iliocostalis lumborum) and the severed and partially removed longest back muscle (M. longissimus), 1781–86.

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Figure 3.18  Körperhaltung poster, illustrations by Ludwig Schrott, explanation by Konrad Allmer, c.1950

Traces of these histories, largely repressed in Austria until the late twentieth ­century, can be found in Jürgenssen’s Schuhwerk. For example, the object Schwangerer Schuh (Pregnant Shoe, 1976) comprises a pink stiletto shoe decorated with the folded body of a foetus. This anatomical juxtaposition echoes that of Zungenleckschuh (LickTongue Shoe, 1974), in which a long, dark pink tongue extends from the crown of the heel to the sole of a woman’s high-heeled shoe, while in Muskelschuh (Muscle Shoe, 1976) the muscles of the human foot seem laid bare, bound to the endoskeletal form of another stiletto. The drawing Zwitterschuh (Hermaphrodite Shoe, 1976) combines male and female sexual organs – the toe, adorned round the edges with short bristly fur, resembles a vagina, while the heel is an erect penis extending downwards. One of the most powerful of these works, Relikteschuh (Relict Shoe, 1976), comprises the lower jawbone of a small predator inlaid with a leather pad on which we see the imprint of a human foot, the ensemble resting on a white satin cushion like a religious relic. The human trace – the bare footprint, with its covert echo of René Magritte’s Le modèle rouge (The Red Model, 1934), in which a pair of boots transform into human feet firmly planted on the ground – persists within the skeletal animal remains. In her discussion of distinctions and connections between Freudian and Marxist theories of fetishism, Laura Mulvey notes that ‘the Freudian fetish includes a trace of

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indexicality in its function as “memorial”’.88 The footprint’s indexicality as marker of both shoe and wearer offers a complex meditation on this ‘memorial’ function of the fetish. Its assertion of mortality and persistence emphasises the relation of human footwear to traditions of memory, a relation upon which a substantial portion of post-Holocaust memorial culture rests. Jacobs notes the prominence of footwear in Holocaust history in her anthropological analysis of shoes: When on January 27, 1945, the Soviet liberators passed through Auschwitz’s Arbeit macht frei gate, they were confronted by the remains of incarcerated lives – skeletal bodies, ashen faces, sightless eyes … and some 43,000 pairs of shoes. Many more pairs smoldered in fires set by the Nazis nine days earlier as they abandoned the camp to those interned within it. It is tempting to reduce this jumbled mound of shoes to metonym, to see them as an amassed whole evincing a collective denigration structured to deny individuality. Yet each pair of shoes, selected by design and shaped by wear, is as much a material record of a singular life as a synecdoche for an environment of horror.89

She goes on to cite the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi: They would throw a pair, no, actually two mismatched shoes, at you. One with a high heel, one without. One had to be almost an athlete to learn how to walk like that. One was too tight, the other too big, and we had to make complicated exchanges to find a way to match two shoes that could fit. In any case they were shoes that hurt your feet, and those who had delicate skin would suffer from infections […]. [T]hose who were sensitive to infections would die. Die of shoes – of infected wounds that never healed.90

These graphic images of ‘environment[s] of horror’ and ‘infected wounds that never healed’ imply the historical shadows behind Jürgenssen’s Schuhwerk, after-images in which we see fetishism (in its memorial function) put to critical use in confronting silence and evasion. In these works, the diverse forms of feminine footwear available in post-war capitalism become ghostly traces of the fetishised footwear of Nazism and the abandoned shoes of the Holocaust – the surrealist object of Oppenheim becomes, for Jürgenssen, the surrealist abject. As Mulvey asserts: ‘The fetish acknowledges its own traumatic history like a red flag, symptomatically signalling a site of psychic pain’.91 What Emily Apter has called ‘a larger episteme of fetishism grounded 88 Laura Mulvey, ‘Introduction’, in Fetishism and Curiosity (London: BFI/Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 6. 89 Jacobs, ‘Shoes’, 287. 90 Cited in Jacobs, ‘Shoes’, 288. 91 Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, p. 12.

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in ­medico-anatomical synecdoche’92 becomes, in Jürgenssen’s historicisation, an extended commentary on Austria’s ‘never healed’ repression and some of the cultural fetishisms that have evolved to compensate for it. The remainders of historical atrocity traumatically return in the Schuhwerk as grotesquely hybridised and fetishistic reminders of historical complicity.

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Eine bessere Zukunft (‘How to listen to departure’)93 A final example of the complexity of Jürgenssen’s extensive response to Austrian historical trauma can be seen in the 1973 drawing Mit der Bahn heute in eine bessere Zukunft (With the Train Today into a Better Future) (figure 3.19), a picture again expressing the desire to escape from history and social reality into a different space of potentiality, a symbolic outside, now displaced into the abstract concept of ‘a better future’. The drawing’s title echoes the slogans and ideological positioning of the SPÖ (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreich/Austrian Social Democratic Party) in the 1970 election campaign, suggesting an immediate anchor for the work in contemporary political satire: ‘A catchy slogan and pictures of happy people of all generations determined the SPÖ election campaign in 1970, intended to pave the way into a better future’.94 But it also echoes the phrase ‘Mit Hitler in eine bessere Zukunft’ (‘With Hitler into a better future’) (figures 3.20 and 3.21), which appeared as NS propaganda across Austria in 1938 printed on banners and fliers in support of the German occupation of the country.95 Jürgenssen’s use of the phrase, playing on the persistence of memories of one historical moment within another, invests it with a heavy irony and exposes the saturation of contemporary political and advertising rhetoric with the residual nuances of Nazi usage; adding the word ‘heute’ (today) initiates a play on the tensions between ‘today’, the ‘future’, and the unstated but implicit ‘past’, while implying the persistent ‘presence’ of all three within the instant depicted. Mit der Bahn depicts a high fence on which sit two birds. The fence bears a billboard displaying a poster featuring the title phrase above a train whose engine faces us in the immediate foreground, its carriages curving far back like an exercise in perspective, until it is cut off by the edge of the poster. In front of the poster, a 92 Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 29. 93 Caruth, ‘Introduction’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, p. 10. 94 ‘Ein eingängiger Slogan und Bilder glücklicher Menschen aller Generationen bestimmen den Wahlkampf der SPÖ 1970, der den Weg in eine bessere Zukunft ebnen soll.’ Norbert Hölzl, ‘Wählen Sie das moderne Österreich …’, at www.demokratiezentrum.org/bildstrategien-zusatz/bildstrategien-liste. html?index=762 (accessed 6 December 2020). 95 See photograph at https://austria-forum.org/af/Bilder_und_Videos/Historische_Bilder_IMAGNO/ Nationalsozialismus/00249026 (accessed 6 December 2012).

Figure 3.19  Birgit Jürgenssen, Mit der Bahn heute in eine bessere Zukunft, 1973

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Figure 3.20  Mit Hitler in eine bessere Zukunft (With Hitler into a Better Future), NS-propaganda on the building of the Austrian Touring-Club in Vienna before the ‘Referendum’ of 10 April 1938

Figure 3.21  NS propaganda slogan, ‘Mit Hitler in eine bessere Zukunft!’, 10 April 1938

woman, her face turned blankly toward us like the front of the railway engine, walks along the pavement from left to right as across a stage, pushing a baby carriage from which an infant, facing away from us, seems to be leaping athletically into the driver’s compartment of the pictured train. The drawing’s trompe-l’œil illusion collapses two realities (the picture on the billboard and the figures on the pavement) into one, as the infant moves from one to the other, while the written phrase superimposed over the billboard image offers an implicit commentary on the scene depicted. The woman

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holds a strangely sideways, arrested pose reminiscent of ancient Egyptian portraits, while the fence resembles a screen from which (in an obvious echo of one of the earliest cinema screenings in December 1895 of the Lumière brothers’ 1895 film of a train arriving at La Ciotat)96 an apparently moving train (itself reminiscent of a length of cinematic film) seems to obtrude. The child is frozen in mid-leap, arms and one leg outstretched as it clambers out of its reality and into a picture. The flatness of this scene is countered by the extended perspective of the train, stretching far back in the image as if into history itself. The trompe-l’oeil effect literalises the cinematic myth of the 1895 viewers panicking as the approaching train seemingly threatens to escape the bounds of the screen and burst into the cinema space, an illusion of movement collapsed by Jürgenssen into a compression of different times in a single image. The  drawing plays a complex game with spatial and temporal perspectives, constructing a kind of historical collage out of its elements. The clothing of both mother (in an old-fashioned overcoat and stout shoes and socks) and child (wearing a hooded beetle-costume and leggings) is historically ambiguous – the overcoat looks old-fashioned, but the knee-socks are typical of 1970s style. The modern children’s buggy (a 1960s–1970s Frankonia model) reinforces the evident modernity of the electric train. While there are echoes in Mit der Bahn of a variety of contemporary Austrian works, including Günter Brus’s 1967 Aktion mit Diana (in which the artist performed with a naked infant) and (in the crawling posture of the child) the crawling doglike man (actually the artist Peter Weibel, quoted earlier) in VALIE EXPORT’s 1968 performance Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit (From the Portfolio of Doggedness),97 the elements of this drawing assert a strong continuity with specifically female surrealist traditions. Structurally the drawing echoes some of Grete Stern’s Dreams photomontages of 1949–50, for example in the posture of the infant and its counterpointing of the rows of horizontal lines which invoke Stern’s Los sueños de evasión (Dreams of Evasion, 1950) (figure 3.22); in the doll-like appearance of the child in Stern’s Los sueños de muñecos (Dreams of Dolls, 1949) (figure 3.23), its posture similar to that of Jürgenssen’s infant; or in the organic-machinic counterpoint of woman and train resembling Stern’s Los sueños de trenes (Train Dreams, 1949) (figure 3.24). These connections suggest that Jürgenssen’s drawing can be interpreted as a collage of elements of Stern’s oneiric photomontages. Mit der Bahn also echoes elements of Meret Oppenheim’s 1940 painting Die Erlkönigin (figure 3.25), in which the Erl Queen and 96 Jürgenssen has omitted from her drawing a steam train apparent in the original photograph and resembling that filmed by the Lumière brothers. 97 In Klaus Albrecht Schröder (ed.), The Beginning: Kunst in Österreich 1945 bis 1980 (Munich: Hirmer, 2020), pp. 266–9; Wieland Schmied and Silvie Aigner (eds), Austria: Confrontations and Continuities 1900–2000 (Vienna: Sammlung ESSL, 2006), p. 291.

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Figure 3.22  Grete Stern, Los sueños de evasión, Idilio no. 84, 1950

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Figure 3.23  Grete Stern, Los sueños de muñecos, Idilio no. 39, 1949

Figure 3.24  Grete Stern, Los sueños de trenes, Idilio no. 40, 1949

The traumatic surreal

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Figure 3.25  Meret Oppenheim, Die Erlkönigin, 1940

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her child inhabit a gloomy landscape beside a shining silver tree, while, in the dark background, a sinister train makes its way from left to right across the terrain. Jürgenssen’s drawing, however, refocusses Oppenheim’s disturbing combination of folkloric and modern elements into a new and specifically Austrian composition, articulating in this refocussing a series of comments on Austrian history. The train she depicts in meticulous detail in Mit der Bahn is clearly recognisable as a 4010 engine, a type introduced in the mid-1960s and, by 1973, the most popular electric train in Austria. Jürgenssen has closely copied a specific photograph (published in ÖBB in Wort und Bild, no. 6, 1972, p. 30)98 of a 4010 at Leoben Bahnhof (figure 3.26), dated 18 May 1972, on the occasion of the centenary of the Leoben-VordernbergerBahn, a railway line connecting the mining town of Leoben in Styria with the mining district around the smaller town of Eisenerz (a district to which we will return in the next chapter). This railway line was eventually (in 1891) extended to Eisenerz itself and became the Erzbergbahn, linking the mountain of the Erzberg to the surrounding towns. At the centre of an extensive mining district in southern Austria, the Erzberg was (and still is) a primary source of iron ore, and during the war was crucial to the Nazi war effort. Several new settlements were established by the occupying Nazis in the area to accommodate the burgeoning population (rising to 18,000 during the war) of prisoners of war and other slave labourers. By 1942, the Nazis had established an outpost of the concentration camp at Mauthausen on the Erzberg, employing 300–400 prisoners. In March 1945, they force-marched thousands of Hungarian Jews working on the south-east border of the Eisenerz region to Mauthausen, about 120km north. Jürgenssen’s choice of train carefully embeds into her drawing these latent references to the traumatic history of Austria, and the different elements of the image combine to produce a pictorial allegory of Austria in the 1970s – forward-facing a ‘better future’ which nevertheless arrives into ‘today’ (HEUTE) on a vehicle burdened by the symbolic freight of a repressed past. The image relentlessly pushes the emptiness of the slogan, collapsing its confused temporality into a complex set of overlapping, contradictory gestures. Any notional ‘better future’ is, the work implies, compromised before it has even begun, hobbled by the failure of Austrian society to address the continuing residues of its own traumatic history, and bound up in the conflicting temporalities of that trauma. Jürgenssen’s analysis draws furthermore on post-war philosophical efforts in the wake of the devastations of total war and the Holocaust to comprehend the relations between memory/history, desire/the future, and the present moment. In the ‘Preface’ to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) 98 Elmar Oberegger, Zur Eisenbahngeschichte des alten Österreich, 2011, at www.oberegger2.org/altoester​ reich/kap10.htm (accessed 13 November 2020).

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Figure 3.26  Photograph of a 4010 at Leoben train station celebrating the centenary of the Leoben-Vordernberger-Bahn railway line, 18 May 1972

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Hannah Arendt wrote: ‘All efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are in vain.’99 As the epigraph to this ‘Preface’ Arendt quoted Karl Jaspers: ‘Weder dem Vergangenen anheimfallen noch dem Zukünftigen. Es kommt darauf an, ganz gegenwärtig zu sein’ (‘Neither falling into the past nor the future. It is important to be fully present’).100 Mit der Bahn, viewed in light of these debates of a generation earlier, casts a melancholy gaze over the troubled terrain of 1970s Austria, recasting it as a screen memory of an older, persistent version of the nation. Jürgenssen’s drawing depicts this pervading sense of historical entrapment, of how the sheer weight of history deforms the present and imposes upon it a perspectival slant. The leaping child, spanning in one movement the past, present, and future perspectives of the image, resembles Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’, with his face ‘turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet’.101 The mother, her stony gaze facing the viewer, turned away from history and the future, embodies the repression and evasion of her culture. The billboard, with its proclamation that faces both forward to a ‘better future’ and backward in its echoing of Austria’s Nazi past, is another surrealist version of the screen (like the body in Jürgenssen’s self-portraits and body-projections), a medium through which she performs her analysis of the persistent tremors of historical trauma in 1970s Austria.

 99 Hannah Arendt, ‘Preface’ to The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1973), pp. vii–ix; p. ix. 100 Arendt, ‘Preface’, p. vii. 101 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the concept of history’, in Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (eds), Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 389–400; p. 392.

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4 Bady Minck’s tourist imaginaries Un crématoire, cela pouvait prendre à l’occasion un petit air carte postale. Plus tard, aujourd’hui, des touristes s’y font photographier. (A crematorium from the outside can look like a picture postcard. Today tourists have their snapshots taken in front of them.) (Jean Cayrol)1 Eva Brenner: ‘Are you referring to Alpine tourism as a perfect means to cover up history in Austria?’ Elfriede Jelinek: ‘Yes. Everything that has been done in this country since 1945 was the result of an intricate cover-up. We managed to do this better than any other country – for example, better than Germany, where the dead are haunting the living, where deeds of repentance are common. Especially in the cultural arena Austrians have perfected this technique of covering up history’.2

Birgit Jürgenssen’s 1973 train to a ‘better future’ – parodying the classic tourist poster advertising transport as a means of escape from everyday reality – performs the double ideological function of critiquing Austria’s 1970s present and satirically echoing older, more sinister promises of other ‘better futures’, particularly in relation to the economic and political significance of the Erzberg, the ‘Steirischer Brotlaib’ (Styrian loaf mountain, so-named because of its economic importance to the region) to which, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, the train is symbolically connected. An immediate consequence of the Anschluss in 1938 was the requisitioning of the Erzberg and its community and resources for the Third Reich, with accompanying rhetorical ­gestures to the ‘future’ from Reichsminister Hermann Goering, then ‘Plenipotentiary’ of the Nazis’ four-year rearmament programme. Directly after the Anschluss, Goering travelled to Eisenerz where he announced: ‘Just like in Salzgitter [in Germany], the best German iron will be forged in Eisenerz and Donawitz in the future. From now on

 1 Jean Cayrol, script for Alain Resnais, Nuit et Brouillard (1955).  2 Elfriede Jelinek, interviewed by Eva Brenner. ‘Where are the big topics? Where is the big form? Elfriede Jelinek in discussion’, in Jorun B. Johns and Katherine Arens (eds), Elfriede Jelinek: Framed by Language (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1994), pp. 18–34; p. 30.

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there will be life here and it is impossible that even a single worker in Eisenerz will ever be unemployed in the future’.3 The prioritisation of the Erzberg’s productivity demanded the extensive use of forced labour, provided by the territories annexed by the Reich and by imported Jewish and other minority ethnic or political prisoners. The extent to which locally resident Austrians were aware of these activities at the time remains contested. In his discussion of the Nazi use of forced labour at the Erzberg, Johannes Moser suggests that there was ‘a collective awareness of the conditions in Eisenerz at the time’,4 quoting amongst other contemporary witnesses he interviews a former mine-manager who was born in 1933 and, as a child, experienced the conditions in the labour camp: ‘We had a camp down there, the prisoners were there, as soon as you drove over the Pichl over there, right side of the camp [meaning in Krumpental]. There were people downstairs, I mean, we were school boys, and they, and those, the prisoners were driven in there, with clubs and what I don’t know what and they were beaten there, you could always see that at night.’5 Eisenerz and the Erzberg became outposts of the Mauthausen network of labour camps, and constituted one element in the wider network of labour, transit, and concentration camps established by the Nazis across Austria (and, indeed, all of Europe) until early 1945. On 6 April 1945, just outside Eisenerz, around 200 Hungarian Jewish prisoners, members of a labour transport on a forced march to Mauthausen, were massacred by members of the Eisenerz Volkssturm, an event that seems to have been premeditated by the perpetrators.6 As discussed in the previous chapter, the nation’s post-war negotiation of such historical realities has been increasingly a topic of cultural debate. One key element of this debate has focussed on Austria’s tourist industry, a crucial contributor to the country’s post-war economic recovery but also a powerful ideological apparatus facilitating the revision and repression of history. As early as the autumn of 1945, the Austrian president was calling for the resurrection of tourism to  3 ‘So wie in Salzgitter wird nun in Zukunft in Eisenerz und Donawitz bestes deutsches Eisen geschmiedet werden. Von nun an wird hier Leben herrschen und es ist ausgeschlossen, dass jemals in Zukunft in Eisenerz auch nur ein einziger Werktaetiger arbeitslos wird’. Quoted in Johannes Moser, ‘Mißtraue der Idylle … Zwangsarbeit am Erzberg zwischen 1939 und 1945’, in Heidi Dumreicher and Olaf Möller (eds), Im Anfang war der Blick: Ereignishorizont eines Films (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2008), pp. 80–91; p. 82  4 ‘[…] kollektives Wissen über die damaligen Verhältnisse in Eisenerz’. Moser, ‘Mißtraue der Idylle’, p. 87.  5 ‘Wir haben da unten ein Lager gehabt, da sind die Gefangenen da unten gewesen, gleich wenn du über den Pichl drüber gefahren bist, rechte Seite das Lager [meint im Krumpental]. Da sind die Leute unten gewesen, ich meine, wir waren Schülerbuben, und die, die Sträflinge sind da reingetrieben worden, mit Knüppeln und was weiß ich was und die sind da geschlagen worden, das hat man gesehen in der Nacht immer –’. Anonymous, quoted by Moser, ‘Mißtraue der Idylle’, p. 86.  6 See Gordon J. Horwitz, In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen (New York: Macmillan/The Free Press, 1990), pp. 159–61.

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the country: ‘We love our home, but we need the foreign! We need tourism and we invite all the world to be our guests. Vienna and Salzburg as sites of art, and the Alps as prime tourist destinations, will welcome foreigners with joy.’7 The conjunction in this appeal of an indeterminate but strictly Austrian and metropolitan idea of ‘art’, with all its baggage of tradition, aesthetic ideals of beauty, and cultural values, alongside the evocation of the Alps as signifiers of sublime natural beauty and implicit physical activity (skiing, hiking), indicates the careful construction of a new, post-war and post-Nazi ideology of nationhood, its connection to the preceding seven years of Austrian Reichhood only faintly detectable in the problematic word ‘Freude’ (joy). Tourism had, of course, been a key target and vehicle of the Nazi propaganda machine in the pre-war years, and Julia Boyd’s survey of Travellers in the Third Reich concludes with comments on the degree of confusion felt by many tourists about the ‘realities’ of Nazi Germany: ‘once they were actually there, the propaganda was so pervasive and truth so distorted that many found themselves uncertain about what to believe’.8 Gundolf Graml documents how Austria’s highly critical post-war literary culture mobilised an extended critique of the ways tourism was utilised to manufacture the concealment of history, or, as he puts it, ‘to avoid responsibility for an inconvenient past’.9 This process of historical evasion has proved highly successful, as in 1990 Austria came fifth in the list of most popular international tourist destinations.10 This whitewashing function of tourism is hardly unique to Austria. German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger analysed a similar process in Germany in his 1958 essay ‘A Theory of Tourism’, pointing out that ‘Without warning, the Kraft-durch-Freude [strength through joy] trip turns into a crammed deportation: behind the summer camp loom the watch towers of those other camps that have come to symbolize our era’.11 Recent studies of ‘Dark Tourism’ have noted (for example) how ‘the reality of Auschwitz-Birkenau [in Poland] is now consumed as a surreal tourist attraction under curatorial remits and museum codes’.12 Nevertheless the particular d ­ ifficulties  7 ‘Wir lieben unsere Heimat, aber wir brauchen die Fremde! Wir brauchen den Fremdenverkehr und laden alle Welt zu uns zu Gaste. Wien und Salzburg werden als Stätten der Kunst, unsere Alpen als touristische Ziele ersten Ranges die Fremden mit Freude begrüßen’. Cited in Gundolf Graml, ‘We love our Heimat, but we need foreigners! Tourism and the reconstruction of Austria, 1945–55’, Journal of Austrian Studies, 39:3 (2013), 51–76; 51.  8 Boyd, ‘Afterword’ to Travellers in the Third Reich, p. 411.  9 Graml, ‘We love our Heimat, but we need foreigners’, 52. 10 See John Urry, Consuming Places (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 168. 11 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘A theory of tourism’, Gerd Gemünden and Kenn Johnson (trans.), New German Critique, 68:2 (1996), 117–135; 131–2. 12 Richard Morten, Philip R. Stone, and David Jarratt, ‘Dark tourism as psychogeography: an initial exploration’, in Philip R. Stone et al. (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 227–55; p. 244.

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encountered by post-war Austria in negotiating its history (seen in the previous ­chapter in relation to Alfred Hrdlicka’s Mahnmal Gegen Krieg und Faschismus) suggest that the speed with which its post-war government sought to reinvigorate the tourism industry betrays an alertness to the potentials of that industry in navigating the avoidance of historical responsibility and the assistance of historical revisionism. This chapter examines the Luxembourg-born and Vienna-based director Bady Minck’s film Im Anfang war der Blick, which engages in complex and creative ways with various aspects of this historical legacy, and locates its critique firmly within discourses around the construction of versions of the Austrian nation in the touristic imagination. Im Anfang offers a densely intertextual surrealist analysis of specific elements of Austrian cultural history and their roles in the ideological construction of a ‘tourist imaginary’, a construct Maria Gravari Barbas and Nelson Graburn have defined as made up of shared representations, fuelled by – or associated with – material images (postcards, posters, blogs, films and videos, guide books, brochures, magazines, as well as handicrafts and other artifacts) and intangible ones (legends, tales, accounts, speeches, anecdotes, memories), worked by the imagination and socially shared by tourists and/or the other actors in the tourism system (indeed sometimes by both sides, even if they do not share the same meaning).13

While its focus is on ‘material images’ in this sense, Minck’s film also maps several of the key cultural features comprising the Austrian tourist imaginary, offering them as problematic positions from which commentary and critique might be exercised. The film’s oneiric qualities, established from the opening shots in which we apparently awaken into its strange reality, add further levels of critique, providing a platform from which the utilitarian function of the postcard image can be subverted, its representational values called into question. In an interview in Femmes magazine in October 2020, Minck stated, ‘Dans mon cinéma, le point de départ est souvent ou presque toujours le rêve’ (‘In my cinema, the point of departure is often or almost always the dream’).14 Im Anfang war der Blick, which premiered at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs at Cannes in 2003, was Minck’s first full-length feature. Born in Ettelbruck in 1962, Minck has since the late 1980s produced an oeuvre comprising increasingly important works, contributing significantly to the extension of the surrealist tradition in film and 13 Maria Gravari-Barbas and Nelson Graburn, ‘Tourist imaginaries’, Nelson Graburn (trans.), Via: Tourism Review, 1 (2012), at https://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/1180?lang=en (accessed 19 January 2021). 14 Godefroy Gordet, ‘Bady Minck: je fais appel aux rêves’ (interview), Femmes (October 2020), 42–3; 42.

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to the development of a feminist cinema in Austria. Her family was deeply affected by the Nazi annexation of Luxembourg in May 1940. Suspected of being members of the Luxembourgian resistance (and actually involved in hiding deserting conscriptees and assisting their safe passage across the border to occupied Belgium), her grandmother, aunt, and father were deported by the Nazis in 1942 to forced labour camps in Germany.15 As we will see, this history resonates in relation to Minck’s film. Minck’s most recent directorial project, MappaMundi, premiered in 2017. While grounded in avant-garde traditions, she also works as a producer on mainstream and transnationally-funded films, including Jessica Hausner’s Amour Fou (2019) and Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt (2013). This chapter will propose a series of connected and overlapping critical frames facilitating analysis of Minck’s film as an extended engagement with issues of post-war history and memory in specifically Austrian contexts. Im Anfang war der Blick Im Anfang war der Blick (‘In the beginning was the eye’, literally ‘the gaze’) is a 45-minute ‘Science-Docufiction’ film, released in early October 2003 (coincidentally, just a week after Birgit Jürgenssen’s death) by Minck’s production companies Minotaurus Film Luxemburg and Amour Fou Wien. The film’s narrative concerns a male protagonist, a librarian-researcher-traveller whom Minck calls the Poet, played by the Austrian writer Bodo Hell (b. 1943). The Poet inhabits a book-lined apartment, in which he reads and types and, in particular, looks at postcards (figure 4.1). He specifically studies postcards depicting firstly the Erzberg and its environs, and secondly Salzburg and its Alpine locale – twin sites exercising a powerful seduction for the tourist gaze. This double focus corresponds to a double process of stripping away (as the surface mining of the Erzberg has stripped the mountain) and hollowing-out (as salt was mined from the mountains around Salzburg), drawing attention to the symbolic process of constructing touristically motivated facades in which surface prevails over depth, appearance dominates over substance, and image overrides reality. The camera spends much time panning along the shelves and walls of the Poet’s apartment, allowing detailed views of texts and images that resonate in relation to the film’s themes, and constructing a palimpsestic visual field that corresponds to the textual world inhabited by the Poet. As part of his research into something called ‘Projekt EQUAL’, he takes from the shelves, next to Doré’s illustrated Bible and a set of books by the Vienna-born Czechoslovakian photographer and film-maker Karel Plicka, a large red book entitled Im Anfang war der Blick. This action inaugurates the principal 15 Bady Minck, email correspondence with the author, 4 April 2021.

Figure 4.1  Still from Bady Minck (dir.), Im Anfang war der Blick, Amour Fou, 2003

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action of the film, its narrative trajectory across the landscape and through history, as the Poet, equipped with compass, maps, and other touristic trappings, sets off on a journey into Austria’s tourist imaginary. A version of Minck’s film is thus present within itself at the beginning of its narrative as a text, an object to be read, in a kind of transmedial mise en abyme. And yet, when opened, this book contains only blank pages – it offers not a text to read but a page on which to write. The image, as narrative, is initially blank, an absence awaiting the inscription of the history that constitutes the film. From one of these pages a three-dimensional pyramidical model emerges, with the pencilled writing underneath, Der Erzberg. The Poet lifts this model, places it onto his bald head, and presses it into his skull. The film thus implies the Poet’s internal mental processes as the territory on which its analysis of external historical imagery is performed, emphasising in doing so that its exploration is of an imaginary, ideological space. In doing so it closely approximates Theodor W. Adorno’s description (written in 1956) of the role of the surrealist image in post-war culture: Surrealism’s booty is images, to be sure, but not the invariant, ahistorical images of the unconscious subject to which the conventional view would like to neutralise them; rather, they are historical images in which the subject’s innermost core becomes aware that it is something external, an imitation of something social and historical.16

With this literal process of internalisation, the film zooms into the images pinned to the wall behind the Poet, a shift of perspective and focus initiating a flickering sequence of postcard images of Austria (a technique Minck explored in her earlier short Seen Sehen [Seeing Lakes, 1998]), sometimes proceeding too rapidly to discern individual images, amongst which the Poet sometimes appears as a moving character interacting with elements of the image. He pursues a journey across Austria mapped out by the postcards, moving north towards Eisenerz, the town beside the Erzberg, and, after a brief return to his apartment to type, and bake a loaf of bread in the shape of the Erzberg, further north and west to Salzburg and the Alpine region. The film then shifts to a mixture of animation, depicting a bread model of the Erzberg (literalising the ‘Styrian Brotlaib’ cliché) with Minck’s modern film footage of the town juxtaposed with or superimposed over more postcard images of Salzburg, asserting the evidently extensive historical continuity between pre-war and contemporary appearances of the region. In the final sequence, the Poet detaches himself from the image and appears as a two-dimensional monochrome cut-out, buffeted helplessly across the landscape by an increasingly powerful wind which eventually blows him into the sky and away into the distance. 16 Adorno, ‘Looking back on Surrealism’, p. 89.

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Such a resumé does little justice to the complexity of the film or the granular and densely symbolic detail of its mise-en-scène, some elements of which will be explored in this chapter. The Poet’s journey through Austria is also a journey through twentieth-century Austrian history, partly mapping through images and public spaces the repressed, mid-century process of Austria’s ‘becoming-Nazi’. While critics have linked aspects of the film’s style to the animated body-horrors of David Cronenberg and the monumental formal theatricality of Hans Jürgen Syberberg,17 Minck’s film is clearly also a powerful post-memorial text that draws extensively on surrealist film traditions, most obviously the stop-motion model animation techniques of the Czech film-maker Jan Švankmajer (b. 1934) and the American animator Terry Gilliam (b.  1940). Minck’s satirical edge matches that of Gilliam’s early animation work in Britain with the Monty Python team, while her use of the animation technique of staccato stop-motion photography echoes the prevalence of that style in Švankmajer’s animations, which he has called ‘magical operations’.18 Animation, Švankmajer argues, ‘isn’t about making inanimate objects move, it is about bringing them to life’.19 This surrealist cinematic concern with ‘bringing to life’ extends, in Minck’s film, to a kind of re-animation, the bringing back to life through the moving image of a historical reality so deeply repressed that its apparent death and burial – its seeming erasure from historical consciousness – has dominated and distorted subsequent narratives. Im Anfang war der Blick asserts a kind of persistence of vision, and implicitly of memory, through its formal visual techniques, notably the flickering stop-motion animation, and by speeding up and slowing down the sequence of images (thus playing with variations in film speed characteristic of cinema history before the establishment of 24fps in the late 1920s with the advent of sound). In one notable sequence in the 20th minute, the camera rests on a memorial plaque in Eisenerz to August Musger (1868–1929), the inventor of slow-motion cinema technology, and then cuts to a markedly accelerated sequence of images of the Eisenerz festival and marketplace.20 Such surreal undercutting and counterpointing is typical of Im Anfang; elsewhere, in her short film La Belle est la bête (2005), Minck depicts a woman’s mouth opening to reveal a fur-covered tongue, a direct allusion to Meret Oppenheim’s Le Déjeuner en fourrure and clearly an assertion of explicitly surrealist lineage. Im Anfang’s use 17 Hans Schifferle, ‘About the mechanics and the magic of images’, and Raphäel Bassan, review in Brel, in booklet accompanying DVD of Im Anfang war der Blick, pp. 12, 8. 18 Jan Švankmajer, ‘Decalogue’, in Patricide Seven – Surrinema, Neil Coombs (ed.) (Llandudno: Dark Windows Press, 2014), pp. 11–14; p. 11. 19 Švankmajer, ‘Decalogue’, p. 11. 20 For a discussion of the significance of Musger in Minck’s film see Christoph Huber, ‘Die Dehnung des Zeitmassstabs: August Musger und die Vergänglichkeit der Dinge’, in Dumreicher and Möller (eds), Im Anfang war der Blick, pp. 44–50.

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of techniques of object-montage, oneiric juxtaposition, and disrupted temporalities, alongside its reliance on postcards as objets trouvés, affirm its indebtedness to and extension of the surrealist film tradition. In his review of the film Marc Ries notes that ‘The principle of filmic movement is changed by remarkable images which have never been seen before (not one single shot of the film is “real”, i.e. subject to the conventional 24 frames per second)’.21 This cinematic effect generates a pervading sense of unreality, a dislocation of the movement-image from its familiar process of representation into a different mode of visual implicature. Memory-landscapes, lieux de mémoire, and postcard reality ­ opular, Through these surrealist techniques, Im Anfang weaves together Austrian p ­intellectual, and cultural traditions and their traumatic legacies within wartime/ post-Second World War history, reanimating, exposing, and exploring the transgenerational memories inscribed into what is known, in German, as an Erinnerungslandschaft or ‘memory-landscape’. Rudy Koshar’s analysis of monuments and memory in twentieth-century German culture develops this concept as a theoretical tool which connotes the mnemonic qualities not only of architectural landmarks and monuments in the narrower sense but also of street names, public squares, historic sites such as World War II bunkers or concentration camps, and even whole townscapes or natural l­ andscapes. […] [T]his topography is steeped in memories and images that may be intensely personal but also highly public in the sense that large numbers of individuals recognize the collective meaning of certain buildings or spaces.22

In Minck’s film, the Erinnerungslandschaft is in part a product of specific auditory, visual, and animation effects. Playing on the conscious production of cultural meanings and memories (with which Koshar’s analysis is principally concerned), Im Anfang subtly subverts the official narratives and cultures of memory that organise Austrian versions of the past. It introduces into the official ‘self-image’ of Austria another version of the nation, one that, as the film progresses, gradually and uncannily emerges from the shadows of a half-forgotten, incompletely repressed past. Im Anfang constructs a version of Austria that inhabits the dark interstices of the filmic flicker – a country haunted by its own history, which insistently returns in visual, musical, and linguistic echoes, traces of memories and events that haunt 21 Cited in DVD booklet, p. 12. 22 Koshar, From Monuments to Traces, p. 9.

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the landscapes of the Austrian imagination and offer alternative, disturbing narrative possibilities. Stop-motion and animation techniques interact to perform this double-perception of historical trauma as simultaneously narrative and event. At the same time, Minck challenges Adorno and Horkheimer’s notorious dismissal of film as a medium in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), where they write: ‘The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry. The familiar experience of the moviegoer, who perceives the street outside as a continuation of the film he has just left, because the film seeks strictly to reproduce the world of everyday perception, has become the guideline of production.’23 Im Anfang war der Blick inverts the passing of the world through the culture industry’s filter, exploring how cinema can reveal not the reproduction of the world of everyday perception, but its transformation by the revelation of the unheimliche Heimat produced when the repressed traumas of history find expression. In constructing its version of Austria’s Erinnerungslandschaft, Im Anfang war der Blick cinematically reworks Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire or sites of memory, places in which (Nora argues) ‘memory crystallizes and secretes itself’. This process has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn – but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory.24

Austrian lieux de mémoire are seen in postcard scenes of buildings, town squares, markets, ski resorts, Alpine lodges, mountaintop memorial crosses, roads and tracks, meadows, forests, woodland scenes, lakes, and rivers. Austria appears, in these images, as a land of pastoral tranquillity, its facade of idyllic beauty an effect of flickering images, a construction that simultaneously pervades revisions of, and is yet subverted by, historical reality. Each image is invested in the construction of a version of Austrian cultural identity rooted in shared versions or imaginings of the past which the film relentlessly critiques. Im Anfang offers an extended analysis of how such sites of memory are also sites of traumatic echoes, and thus of repression and attempted forgetting. In many 23 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Gumzelin Schmid Noerr (ed.), Edmund Jephcott (trans.) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 99. 24 Pierre Nora, ‘Between memory and history: les lieux de mémoire’, Representations, 26 (Spring 1989), 7–24; 7.

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cases such lieux de mémoire have been repackaged as tourist destinations, and the film explores how public spaces have been redefined through images that nevertheless gesture towards the traumatic histories they witness/repress. Gordon J. Horwitz describes the late twentieth-century landscape surrounding Mauthausen, the most feared labour camp in the Third Reich and a key Austrian lieu de mémoire:

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Mauthausen sits amid lovely rolling hills whose fields cover the Austrian landscape like the bedspread of a giant. The town nuzzles peacefully along the north bank of the Danube, whose swift current is quickened by the nearby confluence of the Enns. Mauthausen is a stroller’s paradise. Marked hiking routes provide shaded paths to nearby churches and castles. Beautiful resting spots provide pleasing views of the Alps and of the Bohemian forest.25

The imagery of a tranquil pastoral, a holiday-maker’s idyll, offers a surface appearance, a deceptive facade that Horwitz’s historical enquiries will debunk. The extended sequence of postcard images in Im Anfang offers a similar debunking. The sequence constructs remarkably diverse visual experiences, confirming Antonin Artaud’s assertion in his essay ‘Sorcery and Cinema’ that ‘Any image, even the slightest and most banal, is transfigured on the screen’.26 Some flicker past and are barely visible to the viewer, creating a blur as if the world and its history were rushing past too quickly to be perceived; some are more slowly and carefully counterpointed, often depicting the same landscape but revealing elements added or removed, or exaggerated or downplayed, by the editorial process of ‘touching-up’; some are dwelt upon lingeringly as the procession of images slows momentarily, allowing us to read their content and guess at their significance within the evolving narrative; and some provide emerging scenarios in which the film’s central character is momentarily situated in a performative role, so that the postcard image extends to become an element of the filmic mise-en-scène, and thus a significant aspect of the historical landscape that the film constructs. In her ‘Director’s statements’ on Im Anfang, Minck informs us that she has ‘picked up 15000 postcards from flea markets and antiquarian shops’.27 The provenance of these postcards as both images in the possession of the film-maker and as signifiers of a commonly owned and publicly available image-archive indicates the complex cultural politics of her film. Postcards are markers of popular history and registers of 25 Horwitz, In the Shadow of Death, p. 23. 26 Antonin Artaud, ‘Sorcery and cinema’, in Paul Hammond (ed.), The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2000), pp. 103–5; p. 103. 27 Minck, ‘Director’s statements’, in Dumreicher and Möller (eds), Im Anfang war der Blick: Ereignishorizont eines Films, pp. 131–3; p. 132.

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the rise of mass communications and travel, as well as being quintessential surrealist objets trouvés, markers of transient private experience made public, presence and absence (‘Wish you were here!’), the moment and its endurance as they become elements in collections (like that compiled by Walter Benjamin, who planned, but never wrote, an essay on the postcard). They indicate the development of a tourist industry predicated on the specular redefinition of Landschaft as a consumable commodity put into circulation as image, and drawing with it (specifically in relation to Austrian traditions) ideas of land, bucolic rurality, and their connotations of the nostalgic notion of Heimat or ‘home’. This generation of a powerful visual semiotics of ‘homeliness’ is transformed by the film into a specifically unheimliche aura of secrecy (Geheimnis or Heimlichkeiten) and concealment, as the flickering images relentlessly display a world whose sheer repetition and insistence indicates an uncanny, disturbing kind of absence at the heart of the reality they construct. Something menaces in the endless tropes of kitsch landscapes, happy tourist wanderers in the mountain, meerschaums and yodels and isolated farmer’s huts, goats and sheep and snow and greenery and sun. The reassuring, welcoming ‘home’ of Heimat is gradually corroded, leaving an unheimliche Heimat that is neither ‘home’ nor ‘exotic’: an overfamiliar, excessively represented Landschaft emerges, as the sequence of postcards performs an excavation of Austrian geography and history to reveal its own version of the Erzberg mine, a kind of psychic scar that deforms Austria’s past and exerts a damaging traumatic influence on its present. The public messages and surface images of the postcards conceal a historical tragedy, a disastrous destiny for the messages they are dispatched to deliver.28 Erzberg/Salzburg The Erzberg constitutes one key lieu de mémoire in the film. Minck has commented on the role the mountain plays: ‘The people in Eisenerz have consumed their landscape directly and openly by strip-mining the mountain’s surface. The result is something which resembles a Mexican stepped pyramid in the middle of an Alpine landscape, the Erzberg. This is a true gem, a wonderful image and a fascinating cult object for visitors.’29 In exploring how the mountain has become rendered ‘exotic’ by the processes to which it has been subject (processes including, of course, the effects of forced labour during the war), the film is thus concerned with scrutinising the consumption of landscapes and images, their construction as fetishised commodities (‘GEGESSEN 28 See Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Alan Bass (trans.) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 23. 29 Bady Minck, ‘Director’s statement’, at http://badyminck.com/filmography/eye/ (accessed 27 October 2020).

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GEGANGEN’ [‘Eaten Walked’], one inserted text, provided by Bodo Hell, informs us – and landscape is, as noted earlier, literally bread in Minck’s animation) (figure 4.2). It also analyses how that process of consumption transforms what is consumed. This transformation of the Austrian landscape into the exotic and unheimlich resemblance to an Aztec pyramid emphasises the processes of consumption – of food, of experience, and of history and geography – that lie at the heart of Minck’s critique of post-war Austria. Im Anfang war der Blick reaffirms the surrealist rewriting of the book of commodity fetishism, finding, as Paul Hammond puts it, ‘subversive mythic traces in the objects created by capitalism’.30 Consuming the image, Minck suggests, means also consuming an ideologically transformed version of historical reality. The second principal lieu de mémoire is the town of Salzburg, a key site in Austria’s tourist imaginary and its memorial history, particularly in relation to classical music, as the birthplace of Mozart and Herbert von Karajan, but also literature, as the birthplace of Georg Trakl and Stefan Zweig. In 1938, Salzburg (along with Linz, where Hitler spent his youth, and Vienna) celebrated the arrival of German troops in the Anschluss – despite having held between 1933 and 1937 an international reputation for resisting Nazi Germany through ‘its defiance of German economic pressure via tourist restrictions (Tausend-Mark-Sperre), its rejection of Wilhelm Furtwängler in favour of the anti-Fascist conductor Arturo Toscanini, and its celebrity status as a destination for wealthy American, British, and European opponents of Hitler’.31 Erik Levi highlights the role of Salzburg in connecting Austrian cultural life with that of the wider Germany in the inter-war years, noting in particular ‘the Mozart Renaissance that began in Munich during the late 1890s under the guidance of Richard Strauss and Ernst von Possart. This revival of interest in the composer had wider consequences, culminating, for example, in the establishment of the Salzburg Festival in 1920, with Strauss as one of its most significant guiding spirits’.32 The Festival, Levi argues, also constituted a significant contested space in the pre-Anschluss struggle between Germany and Austria, in which the status of Mozart was caught up: ‘The Salzburg Festival was particularly troublesome to the Nazis, dominated as it was by Jewish interests and representing to their mind a betrayal of Mozart’s German spirit. Efforts to undermine its existence began almost immediately after the Nazis came to power.’33 Salzburg had also hosted the International Mozart Congress in 1941, marking the 150th anniversary of the composer’s death. In emphasising the town as a 30 Paul Hammond, ‘Available light’, in Hammond (ed.), The Shadow and Its Shadow, p. 3. 31 Michael Burri, ‘Austrian festival missions after 1919: the Vienna music festival and the long shadow of Salzburg’, Austrian History Yearbook, 47 (April 2016), 147–66; 147. 32 Erik Levi, Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 19. 33 Levi, Mozart and the Nazis, p. 22.

Figure 4.2  Still from Bady Minck (dir.), Im Anfang war der Blick, Amour Fou, 2003

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locus of ambivalent historical significance, Im Anfang also marks Salzburg’s complex symbolic status in post-war Austria as repository of high-cultural values and of problematic history, with the former tending to override the latter in cultural memory. As Michael Burri argued in 2016, ‘the post-1945 project of Austria as a “culture nation” that would both help to consolidate an inchoate national identity and pay tribute to a yearning for lost grandeur has found its apotheosis in Salzburg’.34 The other significant single lieu de mémoire in the film is the Poet’s library, an archival resource that conforms in its significance to Nora’s definition of the predominantly archival procedures of modern memory: Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. What began as writing ends as high fidelity and tape recording. The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs – hence the obsession with the archive that marks our age, attempting at once the complete conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past.35

Minck’s film explores through these interactions with different kinds of ­ emory-space the historical construction of Austrian landscapes and urban spaces as m tourist imaginaries. The film presents these as densely symbolic repositories of endlessly recycled mythographies of national identity. Minck’s symbolic rendering of this process centres on the cultural function of the postcard as pictorial and written record of popular and historical experience. Using around 1,800 colour and monochrome picture-postcards of Austrian scenes, the film presents an extended stop-­motion survey of landscape images accompanied by the whispered narrations of various voices drawing on messages written on the postcards, as well as on poetry and popular and classical song (key elements of the cultural matrix of Austria). The postcards presented in the film provide pictorial evidence of historical reality which simultaneously mythologises the depicted world, constructing a facade of idyllic pastoral that conceals or glosses over the traumatic effects of history. Minck exploits this double and deceptive nature of the postcard ‘realities’ of Austrian history: ‘Photographs’ (she writes) ‘that do not correspond to the cliché of Austrian Alpine landscapes are consistently retouched by postcard manufacturers. The Austrian postcard is cosy and clean, and hardly any people or animals are visible. Even the ski lift stations are apparently made of wood, and the modern alpine huts are built in a rustic style.’36 The 34 Burri, ‘Austrian festival missions after 1919’, 162. 35 Nora, ‘Between memory and history’, 13. 36 ‘Fotografien, die dem Klischee österreichischer Alpen-Landschaften nicht entsprechen, werden von den Postkartenherstellern konsequent retuschiert. Die österreichische Postkarte ist gemütlich, sauber,

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postcard is also two-sided, its depictions of idyllic scenes backed by narrations that frequently conflict with the pictured idyll. Minck notes that this tension parallels that between sound and image in film: Just like the image and sound tracks of a film, every postcard works with a word-image separation that manifests itself on the illustrated front and the written back: The sun is

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always shining on the front, the sky is blue – the back tells of heavy rain. In front the world is an idyll, in the back there is talk of skiing accidents and broken hearts – and quite a few old cards are signed with ‘Heil Hitler’.37

In Minck’s film, postcards (and, implicitly, the film itself) become ambivalent missives transmitting information across time and space, and questioning the very process of historical transmission in the process. They fulfil Walter Benjamin’s diagnosis of fatal historical ambivalence in Thesis VII of ‘On the Concept of History’: ‘There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is never free of barbarism, so barbarism taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one hand to another.’38 The Benjaminian dimensions of Minck’s film extend beyond this connection; at the climax of Im Anfang (a scene to which we’ll return) Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ (from Thesis IX of ‘On the Concept of History’) is indirectly invoked, suggesting a complex messianic dimension to Minck’s cinematic allegory of Austrian history and opening the space for a consideration of the relations between Minck’s touristic imaginaries and philosophical attempts to think about the historical experience of trauma, both of which are grounded (the film argues) in the primacy of vision. Trauma and the eye Minck’s film clearly addresses historical trauma from a post-memorial, early t­ wenty-first-century perspective. The concept of historical trauma has been developed in relation to cinema by the film theorist Kaja Silverman, whose book Male Subjectivity und meistens menschenleer. Sogar die Skilift-Stationen sind scheinbar aus Holz, und die modernen Alpenhütten sind im rustikalen Stil gebaut.’ Bady Minck, ‘Director’s statements’, in Dumreicher and Moser (eds), Im Anfang war der Blick, p. 132. 37 ‘Genauso wie die Bild- und die Tonspur eines Films arbeitet jede Postkarte mit einer Wort-BildTrennung, die sich auf den bebilderten Vorder- und den beschriebenen Rückseiten manifestiert: Auf den Vorderseiten scheint immer die Sonne, der Himmel ist blau – die Rückseiten erzählen von Dauerregen. Vorne ist die Welt eine Idylle, hinten geht die Rede von Skiunfällen und gebrochenen Herzen – und nicht wenige alte Karten sind mit “Heil Hitler” unterschrieben.’ Minck, ‘Director’s statements’, p. 132. 38 Benjamin, ‘On the concept of history’, p. 392.

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at the Margins (1992) focusses on post-Second World War American cinema and specifically on the crisis in masculinity consequent on the traumatic physical and psychological impacts of the experience of the war. For Silverman, historical trauma describes the persistence of traumatic affect as ‘a historical ramification extending far beyond the individual psyche’.39 Trauma in this sense is cultural, not personal, and its effects can be detected in cultural production (rather than in the analysis of individual psychic traumas), where it manifests as symbolic symptoms. For Silverman, cinema constitutes a major medium in which this persistence can be traced. Film opens the space in which traumatic memories return, to re-establish what E. Ann Kaplan calls ‘a politics of terror and loss’40 through their conflicting with and disruption or disordering of the dominant fiction of a culture, its overriding myths of unity and coherence. Silverman’s analysis of historical trauma begins with a discussion of Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge as marking a ‘premature’ break with the ‘ideology debates’ of the 1960s, which, she argues, still reverberate in later theory (and we might note in passing the striking physical resemblance of Minck’s Poet to Michel Foucault).41 Bady Minck’s film is, too, profoundly ideological in its analysis of the ways human thought is simultaneously constructed, reflected, distorted, and misdirected by the image. The film takes up this argument in relation to cinematic Surrealism and its conjunctions with, and critiques of, the power of the image in modernity. Robert Short argues that ‘the assault on the eye’ – the violent slashing of a woman’s eye in Dalí and Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou (1929) and the bloody blinding of an old woman in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) – defines avant-garde and revolutionary cinema.42 We might add to this the machine-eye of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and the ‘camera eye’ of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939), modernist texts of the eye that eschew literal violence in search of an objective, mechanical (and thus inhuman) viewpoint from which to construct their world views. Im Anfang war der Blick deploys this modernist rhetoric of the eye to frame its superficially dispassionate view of central motifs of the dominant cultural memory of post-war Austria. The film draws on a variety of traditions – cinematic, pictorial, intellectual, pop-cultural, and, importantly, literary – to trace the traumas of history within the visual field it constructs. As we’ve seen, this visual field combines animation, stop-motion, human actors, and collage techniques deriving from surrealist 39 Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, p. 55. 40 E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 54. 41 Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, p. 15. 42 Robert Short, The Age of Gold – Surrealist Cinema: Dalí, Buñuel, Artaud (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 5.

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cinema to construct a work that displaces narrative from the literary-linguistic to the visual field. In doing so, the film repoliticises the surrealist aesthetics it employs, using the techniques of montage, cut, juxtaposition, and animation-effects to expose via historical images provided by postcards (rather than the surrealist iconography of the unconscious) the disruptive influence of historical trauma within the visual mythology it represents – a mythology closely connected to and formative of modern Austrian national identity at personal and national levels. Palimpsestic vision: Mayröcker and Canetti Via the historical images provided by postcards, the film analyses Austrian identity and its fracturing by historical trauma through techniques that, following E. Ann Kaplan, we might understand as constructing an ‘affect aesthetic’. Elements of this ‘affect aesthetic’ include complex, pictorially dense frames, laden with visual clues – book titles, press cuttings and headlines, posters, photographs, and other images that demand the viewer’s close attention in the effort to decode the film’s symbolic world (figure 4.3). Minck’s film asserts in its very title the (temporal) primacy of the eye, through a deliberate rewriting of the opening line of the Biblical Book of John. Im Anfang opens with a literalised ‘eye-view’, a sequence of six establishment shots through a blinking camera-eye complete with lashes, revealing in gradually clearing scenes a series of rooms lined with books, floors cluttered with chairs and writing tables, and walls and doors covered in posters, photographs, post-its, and other documentation revealing the Poet’s library or archive of textual material. We begin the film inside a consciousness apparently approximating that of an awakening viewer-observer, a viewpoint identical to our own as viewers. These establishment shots use fish-eye lenses and low-level camera angles to establish space and containment, before the eye-aperture shifts to a more conventional camera-aperture view on the Poet’s world. Within these rooms the Poet appears, reading, scouring the bookshelves, sometimes typing, sometimes walking through the rooms. We begin, then, as viewers in a repository of books and other texts, or rather, inside a viewing subjectivity – that of the film-maker, or that of ourselves as viewers – that sees itself located within a library adorned with posters, printed statements, and other texts that demand to be read. This opening sequence establishes the visual field and the regimen of sight and, specifically, of reading as the process which will concern Im Anfang – reading books, reading postcards, reading history, reading culture, and reading the image as the condensation of the ideological and semiotic precipitates of all these texts. The library sequence occupies the first nine-and-a-half minutes of the film and maps a palimpsestic repository or archive of cultural knowledge. We read signs in

Figure 4.3  Still from Bady Minck (dir.), Im Anfang war der Blick, Amour Fou, 2003

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various languages posted on the bookcases and walls: ‘Im Prinzip Gilt’ (‘In Principle’ or ‘The Principle Applies’, and the title of Bodo Hell’s 2001 collection of short stories), ‘Ja, ich bin es aber incognito’ (‘Yes, it’s me, but in disguise’), and (in large ­capitals) ‘ISITOLOTOLO YUYASAKI’ (a phrase contributed to the film by Bodo Hell) (figure 4.4). The camera lingers over the bookshelves long enough for us to identify certain texts out of the hundreds we see, for example volumes of works by Albrecht Dürer and George Baselitz, an English edition of Osler’s Principles and Practice of Medicine, and a conspicuously placed copy of German poet Paul Wühr’s 1997 epic novel Salve Res Publica Poetica. Other books momentarily visible include Kafka’s Der Prozeß (Kafka figures extensively in several of Minck’s films including La Belle est la bête, in which the first sentences of Die Verwandlung are written onto a blank page), Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947), volumes by Shakespeare and Grimm, and books of artist and architectural works such as Van Eyck and Meyer’s Grosser Hausatlas. Other prominent images include reproductions of Alexandr Rodchenko’s 1924 photographic portrait of Osip Brik and Parmigianino’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524), the latter on display in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The palimpsestic effect of these carefully placed texts and images is to weave together a detailed set of cultural traditions, visual and written, from which the narrative exploration undertaken by the Poet is launched. Key amongst the books we can see are works by major twentieth-century Austrian writers, which offer further insights into the dynamics of the film. Early in the film we see on the shelves, laid on its side so we can easily read its title, a book called Als es ist – Texte zur Kunst (As It Is – Texts on Art, 1992), an essay collection (yet to be translated into English) by the experimental Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker (1924–2021). Later, a poem by Mayröcker appears on the Poet’s refrigerator, and her voice is heard reciting lines from other poems at various points elsewhere in the film. Mayröcker’s avant-garde status in Austrian literature invests Minck’s film with further cultural significance. She was born in 1924 and taught English in Vienna for many years up to 1969 when she withdrew from public life and took up writing full-time. During the war she was conscripted into the Luftwaffe as a Flakhelferin or ‘flak girl’, working at an anti-aircraft defence tower in Vienna. She published her first major collection, Tod durch Musen (Death by Muses), in 1966. Her prominence in Minck’s film seems likely to be due to her surrealist credentials rather than any overt connection with the film’s analysis of Austrian history. Ryan Ruby has commented on her ‘fruitful cross-pollination of ‘post-surrealist’ collage techniques, Steinean syntax, deconstructionist meditations on writing, and autofictional documentary’, noting also that ‘There are scattered references in her books to her family’s poverty during the Depression and to her memories of living in a city undergoing aerial bombardment and then military occupation, but the postwar reckoning with

Figure 4.4  Still from Bady Minck (dir.), Im Anfang war der Blick, Amour Fou, 2003

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the Third Reich is not a central theme of her work, as it was for many other Germanspeaking writers of her generation’.43 Jeremy Over identifies Mayröcker’s influences as including ‘Breton, Artaud, Bataille, Michaux, Derrida, Barthes and Beckett’ – a clearly surrealist-­inflected line of descent, to which we should add the French poet Francis Ponge, whose 1967 essay collection Texte zur Kunst provides the title of the Mayröcker book we see in the film. Over notes that Mayröcker’s ‘reading, writing and daily living feed each other and are seamlessly woven together [giving] one the feeling that the whole of her art and life forms one grand collage in the manner of the Dadaist and fellow “rag picker” Kurt Schwitters and his series of Merzbau.’44 In an interview in 2007 Mayröcker offered a description of her own work that partly explains the presence of her book and her poetry in Minck’s film: ‘I live in pictures. I see everything in pictures, my complete past, memories are pictures. I transform pictures into language by climbing into the picture. I walk into it until it becomes language.’45 With its clear echoes of Minck’s Poet and his insertion into the world of images, this statement, four years after the release of Im Anfang war der Blick, suggests the close aesthetic and thematic connections between the film and the work of a major post-war German language poet working in surrealist traditions clearly connected to those related to Minck’s film. Mayröcker’s partner was the Dada-influenced sound poet Ernst Jandl ­(1925–2000), works by whom also appear in Im Anfang, and to whom the film is dedicated. In 1980 Jandl released an album of spoken-word recordings of his poetry titled him hanflang war das wort, a distorted precursor of Minck’s title. The title is the opening line of the poem ‘Fortschreitende Räude’ (Progressive Mange), the first stanza of which reads: him hanfang war das wort hund das wort war bei gott hund gott war das wort hund das wort hist fleisch geworden hund hat hunter huns gewohnt46

Along with Bodo Hell, Jandl and Mayröcker provided Minck with ‘word ­donations’ – short poems, pairs of words, haiku, and ‘Gstanzl’ (short, conventional 43 Ryan Ruby, ‘A heaven of the book’, 23 November 2020, at www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/154848/ a-heaven-of-the-book (accessed 20 January 2021). 44 Jeremy Over, cited at zoran rosko vacuum player, https://zorosko.blogspot.com/2019/02/fried​ erike-mayrocker-tumult-ferocity-ow.html (accessed 22 February 2021). 45 ‘Ich lebe in Bildern. Ich sehe alles in Bildern, meine ganze Vergangenheit, Erinnerungen sind Bilder. Ich mache die Bilder zu Sprache, indem ich ganz hineinsteige in das Bild. Ich steige solange hinein, bis es Sprache wird.’ Friederike Mayröcker, Interview in Heimspiel [journal of ORF], March 2007, p. 5. 46 Ernst Jandl, him hanflang war das wort: sprechgedichte, gelesen vom autor (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1980/2000).

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mocking dialect songs traditional in Austria and Bavaria) for the image and sound elements of the film, which appear as many of the phrases visible in the Poet’s library.47 The ­connection with Mayröcker and Jandl links Im Anfang war der Blick to the postwar Viennese literary avant-garde, and in particular its manifestation in the various configurations of the surrealist-influenced Wiener Gruppe, a loose ensemble of writers and artists working in Vienna during the 1950s and with roots in the ‘Art Club’ of 1946. Wiener Gruppe performances and readings regularly provoked the conservative audiences of the city. Gerhard Rühm recalls one such event: for a recital in december 1959 the publishing house had succeeded in engaging a popular actor from the burgtheater, the comedian richard eybner, to read from ‘hosn rosn baa’ together with the authors at the mozartsaal of the konzerthaus. things went well as long as eybner read the more innocuous poems, but, when it was our turn, unrest among the audience grew, swelling to a chorus of catcalls and shouts like ‘insult to culture’ and ‘off into the gas chamber’.48

The cultural clash between post-war avant-gardism and Austrian aesthetic tradition generates outrage that echoes, or repeats, that of the pre-war Nazi period. Through such allusions, Minck’s film weaves into its textual fabric the resonances of these events and public responses to them, situating the film carefully in relation to Austrian avant-garde traditions and their registering of public feeling. Several books are prominently visible on the Poet’s desk early in the film, ­including a French copy of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1972) and a German copy of La jeune née by Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément (1975). Most clearly visible is a copy of Elias Canetti’s Masse und Macht (1960, translated in 1962 as Crowds and Power) (figure 4.5), a book which offers several clues to the intellectual procedures and positions of Im Anfang war der Blick. A photograph of Canetti is visible earlier in the film (see figure 4.4), pinned to a bookcase next to Kafka’s Der Prozeß (Canetti’s book Kafka’s Other Trial explores the Czech writer’s relations with Felice Bauer). Canetti was born in Bulgaria but moved at an early age to Vienna (after a short period in Manchester) and wrote in German. He lived in Vienna during the rise of Nazism and was forced to flee in 1938, moving (as did Sigmund Freud in the same year) to London where he continued to live until his death in 1994. Masse und Macht, the product of several decades of research, is a broad-sweep anthropological analysis of power and its 47 Bady Minck, email correspondence with the author, 31 May 2021. 48 Gerhard Rühm, ‘The phenomenon of the “Wiener Gruppe” in the Vienna of the fifties and sixties’, in Peter Weibel (ed.), Die Wiener Gruppe: A Moment of Modernity 1954–1960 – The Visual Works and the Actions (Vienna and New York: Springer/La Biennale di Venezia, 1997), pp. 16–29; p. 26; ­non-capitalisation original.

Figure 4.5  Still from Bady Minck (dir.), Im Anfang war der Blick, Amour Fou, 2003

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manipulation of (and by) the human crowd through history. The book has its origins in Canetti’s experience of the Vienna riots of 15 July 1927, the start of the July Revolt and a crucial episode in the rise of Austro-fascism. He recalls these events in the first volume of his autobiography Die Fackel im Ohr (1980, translated in 1982 as The Torch in My Ear). On that day a mass protest gathered in Vienna in response the acquittal of a fascist shopkeeper and his son who, in Burgenland seven months earlier, had shot two people dead after heckling a crowd of Social Democrats. Violence escalated until the Palace of Justice was stormed and set on fire. By the end of the riot, 89 people had died. Canetti recalled the events decades later as profoundly traumatic: ‘In the following days and weeks of utter dejection, when you could not think of anything else, when the events you had witnessed kept recurring over and over again in your mind, haunting you night after night even in your sleep …’.49 Decades later, he wrote: ‘Fifty-three years have passed, and the agitation of that day is still in my bones. It was the closest thing to a revolution that I have experienced.’50 The events of July 1927 profoundly influenced Canetti’s theory of crowds and power. Offering the metaphor of the ‘wave’ to describe the experience of being part of the crowd of protestors, he writes: During the following year and then again later and later on, I tried to grasp the wave, but I have never succeeded. I could not succeed, for nothing is more mysterious and more incomprehensible than a crowd. Had I fully understood it, I would not have wrestled with the problem of a crowd for thirty years, trying to puzzle it out … .51

Canetti’s only novel, Die Blendung (1935, translated as Auto da Fé in 1947), is also profoundly influenced by his experience of the July riot, and provides in its narrative frame the basis of Bady Minck’s film. Die Blendung (literally ‘The Blinding’, suggesting another connection with the title of Minck’s film), a dark modernist epic allegorising the rise of fascism in Austria, concerns (among other things) the fate of a library owned by a Viennese book collector – ‘the most important private library in the whole of this great city’52 – a scenario to which Im Anfang is clearly deeply indebted. Both the library and its owner are, in the novel’s final pages, destroyed by a fire the owner has himself started, in a clear premonition of Nazi book-burnings and preparing the ground for subsequent literary allegories of Nazism like Max Frisch’s 49 Elias Canetti, The Torch in My Ear, Joachim Neugroschel (trans.) (London: André Deutsch, 1982), p. 246. See also: Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture 1919–1934 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 41–2. 50 Canetti, The Torch in My Ear, p. 245. 51 Canetti, The Torch in My Ear, p. 250. 52 Elias Canetti, Auto da Fé, C. V. Wedgwood (trans.) (London: Pan Books, 1978), p. 8.

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play Biedermann und die Brandstifter (1953, translated as The Fire Raisers). Canetti’s novel is only tangentially surrealist, in some of its carnivalesque elements and in its preoccupation with the modernist grotesque of caricature, physical and psychological deformity, and magnified emotional and physical violence. It is, however, a book dealing with trauma, in particular the trauma of July 1927 and the burning of the Palace of Justice. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz argues of Canetti that ‘The experience of the economic crisis in the defeated country, the postwar trauma, and the horrors of unemployment and inflation made a deep impression upon him, and he later explored these phenomena in his writing.’53 Canetti’s writings provide further avant-garde grounding for the aesthetics of Im Anfang war der Blick. The use of texts by Austrian writers like Mayröcker, Jandl, and Canetti dramatically extends the allusive power of the film, transforming it at key moments from a film to be watched into a text to be read through an extended process of juxtaposition and collocation, just as the surrealist cabinet of curiosities juxtaposed images, texts, and objets trouvés to generate new meanings and new significances. The palimpsestic element of the film develops into a transmedial intertextuality, embedding into the film a tradition of avant-garde literary experiments alongside responses to the historical traumas of Nazism and the Holocaust in Austria. In reading the clues offered by the opening collage-like scenes of the film, we also read its reading of various analyses and diagnoses (like Canetti’s) of Austria’s fascist history and its traumatic effects on subsequent generations. Minck’s elaborately framed images present a series of visual cues inviting or demanding a careful, thick description, a decoding of the plenitude of pictures and texts within the film’s frames, in order to understand fully the process of critique that is being performed. Each element of the library and the walls is potentially significant for this process of decoding; each is a potential clue that might help solve the immense historical crime around which the film circulates. Soundscapes Elias Canetti’s experience of the events of 15 July offers a further insight into the meticulous construction of Im Anfang war der Blick. In an extraordinary passage of recollection, he writes of the ‘eeriness’ of the experience of the crowd: This was perhaps the eeriest thing of all: you saw and heard people in a powerful gesture that ousted everything else, and then those very people had vanished from the face of the earth. Everything yielded and invisible holes opened everywhere. However, the overall 53 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, ‘Introduction’ to A Companion to the Works of Elias Canetti (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), p. 5.

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structure did not disappear; even if you suddenly found yourself alone somewhere, you could feel things tugging and tearing at you. The reason was that you heard something everywhere: there was something rhythmic in the air, an evil music. You could call it music; you felt elevated by it. I did not feel as if I were moving on my own legs. I felt as if I

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were in a resonant wind.54

This passage identifies two key elements of experience that resonate in relation to Minck’s film. Firstly, the saturation of what is clearly a multi-sensory experience by the emerging to dominance of the sense of hearing, of sound, suggests the importance of the auditory in generating the impression of the uncanny or ‘eerie’ of which Canetti writes. His ‘evil music’ implies a particular sonic experience – of threat or menace, coupled with a peculiarly moral kind of strangeness or defamiliarisation – which is nevertheless uplifting or ‘elevating’. Secondly, this sonic experience of psychological elevation transmutes into a physical sense of disengagement, of being propelled by an unseen force that Canetti calls ‘a resonant wind’. This collocation of sound and wind provides the framework for an analysis of the closing sequence of Im Anfang war der Blick as the staging of an apocalyptic evasion of closure that sustains its engagement with an increasingly distant but still-resonating sequence of historical traumas, traces of which echo through the film’s soundtrack. Im Anfang constructs its powerful auditory field via a soundtrack comprising a variety of sources – field recordings of streets and guided tours, brief snatches of classical choral and orchestral music, a stuttering synthesised melody composed by Austrian sound artists B. Fleischmann and Walter Brantner, alias Dr Nachtstrom, and vocal music by Russian singer Sainkho Namtchylak, birdsong and car engines, and, most powerfully, a densely woven medley of barely heard whispers and muttering voices from which only isolated words and phrases intermittently emerge sufficiently to be heard comprehensibly, uttered in German, French, and English – lines from some of the postcards, or lines of poetry and other texts. As the Poet carries his book to his desk, we hear Ernst Jandl reciting his poem ‘Fortschreitende Räude’; a voice names the Salzburg Mozart Wohnhaus distinctly in three languages. As we see postcards of the Erzberg, a voice narrates historical documents concerning the Erzberg’s forced immigrant labour statistics for March 1945 – documentary records of atrocity thus contribute to the film’s archiving of ‘acousmatic memories’ of Austrian h ­ istory.55 The film’s soundscape, connected to the ‘memory-landscape’, demands the viewer’s close attention as an auditory corollary of the visual palimpsest; the viewer 54 Canetti, The Torch in My Ear, p. 248. 55 See Martha Sprigge, ‘Tape work and memory work in post-war Germany’, Twentieth Century Music, 14:1 (2017), 49–63; 62–3.

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engages in a process of learning how to hear while simultaneously learning how to read its imagery. The film exploits the whisper to generate paranoia (as rumour and betrayal ravaged Austrian society during the Reich) and alludes to the radio as auditory source of information and propaganda. This striking soundscape provides an additional element of Kaplan’s ‘affect aesthetic’, in which voices and breathing, along with recorded sounds and music, generate a powerfully emotive auditory universe paralleling the visual world we see on screen. Indeed, the soundscape precedes the image, as the film opens with a black screen over which we hear breath, heartbeats, and intermittent footsteps. In the beginning is actually not, it seems, the eye, but the ear. Within the aural dimension of the film we furthermore encounter a multitude of incidental sounds – footsteps, typewriter keys, scratches and scrapes, the flutter of a sheet of paper falling to the ground – suggesting a double aspect to the film’s auditory field, an unconscious obverse of the sounds we are intended to hear. This doubling corresponds to the double nature (image/text) of the postcard noted earlier, but also to the ideological agenda of revealing the concealed aspects of a repressed history. The relations between the visual and sonic dimensions of Im Anfang war der Blick correspond to the notion of the ‘Audiovisual Unconscious’ described by Amit Pinchevski, who summarises Friedrich Kittler’s media theory to argue that ‘the audio channel of the phonograph and the visual channel of the cinematograph’ are unselective inscription devices, capturing the intentional together with the unintentional, data and noise, indiscriminately as they come. It is against this background that psychoanalysis appears as a contemporaneous method of recording both intentional and unintentional expressions: the meanings conveyed by speech together with the halts, parapraxes, and stutters – which are rendered at least as meaningful as the intended meanings.56

Pinchevski’s focus is on audiovisual recordings of Holocaust testimony. Minck’s film works in a different way, allowing historical documents to disclose experience repressed from ‘official’ memory by focussing relentlessly on the actual messages, allowing them to be heard and read. The result is a disturbingly disjunctive filmic text; the absence of dialogue masks the presence of a multitude of sourceless monologic voices dictating personal narratives to invisible, absent addressees. This strange, discordant aural field reinforces the prevailing aura of discomfort. Secrecy and concealment – a world of deceptive appearances and sotto voce rumours and accusations  –  thus add human presence to the flickering and whispering postcards. 56 Amit Pinchevski, ‘The audiovisual unconscious: media and trauma in the archive for Holocaust remembrance’, Critical Inquiry, 39:1 (Autumn 2012), 142–66; 142–3.

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The final sequence of Im Anfang war der Blick depicts the Poet, detached from the image-world he has inhabited, as a two-dimensional cut-out figure, conspicuously monochrome in a world of colour. It begins with the Poet’s bald head transforming into a grassy hill with trees, which is then superimposed onto a postcard of the Leeberg, a tumulus mound at Großmugl in Lower Austria. With this image the film asserts a new historical perspective, one in which prehistory provides some perspective against which we may measure more recent events. Buffeted by increasingly violent winds and accompanied by a swirling, discordant musical soundtrack, he struggles through the pastoral landscape which becomes increasingly hostile, a world resisting his progress rather than inviting it, and in the face of which he screams, twice, doubly shattering moments of discord contrasting markedly with the subdued voice-overs of the rest of the film. The two-dimensional cut-out alludes to VALIE EXPORT’s Unsichtbare Gegner (Invisible Adversaries, 1976), in which we see the protagonist Anna (played by Susanne Widl) running clockwise around the Mariensäule monument in Vienna (a statue of Maria Immaculata, which performs a variety of symbolic functions in relation to EXPORT’s feminist critique), watched by a parade of eleven cardboard cut-out figures, before collapsing to the ground and transforming herself into a similar cut-out. EXPORT’s film, melding an enquiry into Austrian constructions of femininity with an extended meditation on the country’s history, asking (as Rose-Anne Gush argues) a series of critical questions: ‘What are the psychic forces behind fascism? How does fascism take hold? What is the role of the media in this?’57 Through its allusion to EXPORT’s film, Im Anfang asserts its position in a tradition of feminist cinematic interventions into post-war mediations of Austrian history. Im Anfang thus culminates in a ‘storm of progress’ allegorising the nation’s violent expulsion from the ‘paradise’ of the historical versions of Austria constructed in the picture-postcards. Through this apocalyptic ending, Minck offers the Poet as a kind of ‘Angel of History’, providing (as we noted earlier) an animated gloss on the messianic desire expressed by Benjamin’s description of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), in which a storm sweeps across the Austrian landscape. Trees and fields sway under its force, and the Poet, reduced to an image, folds and flaps helplessly as the wind elevates him into the sky. This sequence furthermore corresponds closely to the experience Canetti describes in every aspect except that of the crowd itself, which is markedly absent from the visual element of Minck’s film. As we’ve seen, she is alert to the depopulated version of Austria constructed by tourist postcards – ‘The world depicted on Austrian postcards is cosy and clean, and hardly any people or animals 57 Rose-Anne Gush, ‘Contradictions in time: fascism’s use of “woman” and feminist resistance in Austria’, Third Text, 33:3 (October, 2019), 2–19; 9.

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are visible …’.58 In their deployment in the film, however, these images are populated symbolically by the content of the film’s soundtrack. Crowds are absent from the images but present as overheard voices, in the sequences in Salzburg, or in the use of a recording of a walking tour of Eisenerz, as the throng of whispers that narrate a history different to that displayed by the postcard imagery.

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Mozart and the Erschütterung Im Anfang war der Blick’s historical perspective affords a careful meditation on the experience identified by Pierre Nora of profound tension between ‘a sense of historical continuity’ and ‘a break with the past’, a tension that has organised (and subverted) post-war Austrian history. The film establishes its own version of the ‘break with the past’ via the now-familiar trope of the Erschütterung, the ‘shatteringly’ traumatic historical event that we have traced in different manifestations across the history of Germanophone women’s engagements with Surrealism. A key moment in Minck’s film occurs around three-quarters of the way through, in the 32nd of its 45 minutes, when the procession of images, voices, and musical fragments is momentarily ­interrupted – torn apart – by an explosion, which contrasts markedly with the whispered voices and melodic music that comprises most of the soundtrack up to this moment. The explosion accompanies a single black-and-white photograph of a shattered ­building – the Mozart Wohnhaus in Salzburg, which was bombed in an air-raid on 16 October 1944 (see Figure 4.7). The import of this single documentary image is to establish as central to Minck’s cinematic aesthetic of movement (both speeded-up and slowed-down, as we will see) the moment of disruptive stasis, the impact of the historical Erschütterung on the procession of images that constitutes commodified history. The film’s sequentiality is momentarily fractured by this arresting image of violence, its realism sharply contrasting the romantic idealism of the postcard image. The entire film is effectively an extended and indirect register of the ripples and shockwaves of this historical event, recorded in the single image, not a postcard but a documentary photograph and thus an interruption of generic continuity that parallels the event’s interruption of historical continuity. At this moment in the film the symbolic import of Mozart is crucial. Erik Levi’s book Mozart and the Nazis discusses in detail how the Nazis exploited (‘abused’, in Levi’s word) the composer’s status as musical icon, and indicates many of the reasons why the bombing of the Mozart Wohnhaus is so significant in Minck’s film. On 6 April 1938, a few days after Hitler arrived in the newly annexed city, Mozart’s Coronation Mass K317 was performed in Salzburg Cathedral (and ‘dedicated to the memory of 58 Bady Minck, ‘Director’s statements’, in Dumreicher and Moser (eds), Im Anfang war der Blick, p. 132.

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the 140 Nazis who had died during an abortive coup in July 1934’),59 conducted by Joseph Messner. The 1938 Salzburg Festival Festschrift featured photographs of Hitler and Goebbels alongside text proclaiming ‘the immortality of Mozart’s genius and the imperishability of the forces from which he arose’.60 The Third Reich deployed Nazi strategies of appropriative (mis-)representation to ‘reposition’ Mozart musically, culturally, and politically. These included distancing the composer from his Italian connections in order to exaggerate his Germanness and his apparent enthusiasm for German nationalism; and downplaying or editing out Mozart’s connections to Freemasonry (despised by Hitler as a product of Jewish conspiracy but clearly evident in the Masonic symbolism of the libretto of Die Zauberflöte) and to Jewish patrons, musicians, and writers like the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. In 1941, the 150th anniversary of Mozart’s death was commemorated by a huge festival held at numerous sites throughout the Reich including (as noted earlier) Salzburg, which opened the events on 26 January with a performance of Die Zauberflöte at the Landestheater ‘with specially invited guests from the Party, SS and Wehrmacht in attendance’.61 The 1941 celebrations in Salzburg ended in November with the Tag der Hausmusik, held at the Mozarthaus, another memorial site in the city. A commemorative publication was issued in Vienna, to which Goebbels contributed a Foreword: ‘The future of our people and those of Europe are bound together by this great German creator of music in whose memory these Mozart celebrations will signal the everlasting value of humanity’.62 Mozart was, of course, also highly venerated by the communities forced into exile by the Nazis. His work symbolised to them an enlightened cosmopolitanism (and, Levi suggests, ‘a kind of therapy for the traumas of displacement, a panacea far removed from the harsh realities of the contemporary situation’)63 that contrasted sharply with Nazi efforts to aryanise it. He thus occupies a complex position in the Austrian cultural imaginary, an embodiment of the malleability of Germanophone cultural history in relation to the nation’s political history, and, in post-war Austria, a crucial symbolic engine of tourism-based national renewal. As Levi notes: In many respects the most salient change in the post-war reception of Mozart has been the shift away from the depiction of the composer as a German to one who is exclusively bound up with Austria. Since 1945 this symbiotic relationship between artist and state has

59 60 61 62 63

Levi, Mozart and the Nazis, p. 147. See Levi, Mozart and the Nazis, pp. 145 ff. Levi, Mozart and the Nazis, p. 156. Cited in Levi, Mozart and the Nazis, pp. 168–9. Levi, Mozart and the Nazis, p. 89.

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and its tourism.64

The lieu de mémoire of the Mozart Wohnhaus, a key symbolic site of Austrian cultural heritage and identity seen in several postcards immediately before the explosion, becomes in this moment in the film the site of a shattering disruption encoded in the arrested sequence of images and its accompanying noise – visual and auditory manifestations of a traumatic moment in Austrian history. Immediately after this image we see the Poet’s hand screw up a postcard of the Mozart Wohnhaus into a ball; subsequently the first postcard images appear of Salzburg streets bearing swastika flags, while voices narrate excerpts telling of musical performances – ‘From Mozart and Haydn to Strauss … We heard Brahms’s Deutsches Requiem … Rheingold and Valkyrie, Beethoven’s symphony …’. (Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was controversially conducted, at Hitler’s invitation, at the 1937 Salzburg Festival by Wilhelm Furtwängler, whose complex and fractious relations with the Nazis are well known; he conducted for Nazi audiences but later assisted several musicians to escape Nazi p ­ ersecution.)65 The musical references culminate in a banal but crucial postcard message, narrated and seen on the screen: ‘Dear Sophie, All the best from dreamy Salzburg. Heil Hitler!’ Another monochrome postcard shows the sun as a swastika hanging in the sky over Salzburg (figure 4.6), with, written above the image: ‘Unfortunately this sun is not yet shining over Salzburg’. This postcard is dated 22 June 1932, thus predating both the Anschluss and the Nazi assumption of power in Germany. The Mozart Wohnhaus becomes metonymic of the entire Austrian landscape, a symbolic expression of the nation and an extended resource of tragic memorialisation. As a powerful lieu de mémoire, erased by historical violence yet persisting in cultural memory and its repeated reification of the symbolic content of the space, it works alongside others like the Erzberg, the Alpine landscape, and the streets of Salzburg, powerful evocationary markers of the persistence of history within the contemporary. The procedure in Im Anfang war der Blick of selecting out key symbols of Austria that resonate powerfully with conflicting versions of its history effects a kind of recoding of spatio-temporal co-ordinates, recalibrating the resonances of history as markers of place and its saturation by symbolic residues. This recalibration ultimately centres its critique of Austrian historical trauma on the single moment of Erschütterung that resulted in the destruction by the eventually victorious allied forces of the Mozart Wohnhaus (figure 4.7) – a moment of destruction that, metonymically, stands for the irreparable destruction of Austrian (and, by extension, European) culture by Nazism. 64 Levi, Mozart and the Nazis, p. 242. 65 See Harvey Sachs, ‘Salzburg, Hitler, and Toscanini’, Grand Street, 6:1 (Autumn 1986), 183–98; 186–7.

Figure 4.6  Still from Bady Minck (dir.), Im Anfang war der Blick, Amour Fou, 2003

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Figure 4.7  Still from Bady Minck (dir.), Im Anfang war der Blick, Amour Fou, 2003. Photograph of the destroyed Mozart Wohnhaus.

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5 Olga Neuwirth/Elfriede Jelinek: temporality and trauma Das österreichische Problem ist nicht Schuld, sondern der Glaube, sich um das Eingeständnis der Schuld und des Schuldig-Geworden-Seins herumdrücken zu können. (The Austrian problem is not guilt, but rather the belief that one can avoid admitting guilt and having become guilty.) (Olga Neuwirth)1 First we took a motorcar ride to Dachau, then a popular excursion spot near Munich. (Who could then have imagined that this small, peaceful hamlet would later become the symbol of such indescribable horror and abomination?) (The Wolf Man)2

In the penultimate paragraph, dated 14 February 1999, of the Arbeitsjournal (Working journal) she wrote while staying in Venice working on her opera Bählamms Fest (which premiered that year in Vienna), Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth (b. 1968) addresses the intersection of personal trauma, temporality, and music in concluding the process of composition: 14th of February? Today is Valentine’s Day, isn’t it? I’ll give myself flowers for finishing. I dedicate Bählamms Fest to my mother. In a strange way, I have the feeling that I was able tortuously to work through my father’s trauma, even if I do not see the medium of music theatre as suitable to address personal experiences. […] I’ve also tried to conjure up the imperfect, if that is possible. A music of confusion, like the infinitely self-reflecting mirrors in the Opera Garnier in Paris or better: the splintering splinters. A world of compressed splinters, of multifarious, unknown details, since the human being is not a whole. You can cut yourself any time on the sound splinters, without noticing it …3  1 Olga Neuwirth, ‘Ich lass mich nicht wegjodeln’, speech to the large demonstration in Vienna on 19 February 2000 against the participation in government of the Freedom Party of Austria, at www. olganeuwirth.com/text5.php (accessed 16 February 2021).  2 Sergei Pankeyev, ‘The memoirs of the Wolf Man’, in Muriel Gardiner (ed. and trans.), The Wolf Man and Sigmund Freud (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 17–149; p. 74.  3 ‘14. Februar? Heute ist doch Valentinstag? Ich werde mir fürs Fertig-geworden-sein Blumen schenken. Bählamms Fest widme ich meiner Mutter. Auf eine eigenartige Weise habe ich das Gefühl, ich konnte auf eine verschlungene Art mein Vater-Trauma bearbeiten, auch wenn ich das Medium des Musiktheaters nicht als den geeigneten Ort für persönliche Erlebnisse ansehe. […] [A]uch habe ich versucht, das

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Alongside the personal traumas to which she alludes, Neuwirth is writing against the backdrop of a significant and disturbing political context, that of the emerging popularity of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) in fin de siècle Austria, a development of which, as a Vienna-born Jew, she is painfully aware. Two decades later, in an interview with Stuart Jeffries in England, she again emphasised the significance of this historical moment and inserted herself and her work into the centre of historical and ethical debate over the significance of the Holocaust in Austrian memory, asserting that ‘Anti-Semitism is in the DNA of Austrians. […] Austria is always the trailblazer for hatred. There was Jörg Haider, long before the new wave of populist haters such as Trump’.4 Haider, a significant right-wing Austrian politician, rose to political prominence in Austria in the 1990s, partly by defending the actions of the wartime generation in the wake of the Waldheim affair of 1985–86 (noted earlier in Chapter 3),5 during which the extent of Austria’s continuing repression of its wartime complicity with Nazism was dramatically exposed. Haider was from 1986 until 2002 Chairman of the nationalist FPÖ, described by historian David Art as ‘a right-wing populist party with openly apologist views on the Nazi past’.6 He led it to power in 2000, in a coalition government that lasted two years and provoked diplomatic sanctions from other European Union countries, an episode in recent Austrian history that demonstrated the political fragility of the country’s post-war social-democratic consensus and the persistence in its politics of far-right extremism. The Austrian political scientist Anton Pelinka pointed out in 2002 that ‘The FPÖ is the only party in any European parliament that was founded by an SS general. Its first chairman was Anton Reinthaller, one of the most prominent members of the Austrian NSDAP and understate secretary in Adolf Hitler’s government. There are some other parties with links to the fascist past, like the Italian Alleanza Nationale, but there is good reason to differentiate between Italian Fascism and German (and Austrian) Nazism. That reason is the Holocaust.’7 Of particular significance is the FPÖ’s cultural policy in the Imperfekte zu beschwören, falls das möglich ist. Eine Musik der Verwirrung, wie die sich unendlich in sich spiegelnden Spiegel in der Opera Garnier in Paris oder besser: die sich splitternden Splitter. Eine Welt der zusammengepressten Splitter, der vielfältigen, unbekannten Einzelheiten, da der Mensch kein Ganzes ist. Man kann sich jederzeit an den Klangsplittern schneiden, ohne es zu bemerken …’. Olga Neuwirth, Bählamms Fest: Ein venezianisches Arbeitsjournal (Vienna: Droschl, 2003), p. 258.  4 Stuart Jeffries, ‘Olga Neuwirth: Austria is always the trailblazer for hatred’, The Guardian, 13 November 2018, at www.theguardian.com/music/2018/nov/13/olga-neuwirth-interview-die-stadt-ohne-judencity-without-jews-barbican (accessed 27 October 2020).  5 For an analysis of the Waldheim affair and some of the cultural responses to it, see Iris Hermann, ‘Shit bucket campaigns and Nestbeschmutzer: the Waldheim affair in Austria’, Cross Currents, 69:3 (September 2019), 291–300.  6 David Art, The Politics of the Nazi Past in Austria and Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 184.  7 Anton Pelinka, ‘Austrian exceptionalism’, Austrian History Yearbook, 33 (2002), 1–14; 9.

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1990s, which involved attacking key figures in Austrian art, music, and literature, as Anthony Murphy describes: I came across the party’s aggressive campaign against artists and intellectuals in the early 1990s, which cumulated in an election poster that appeared in Vienna during 1995 stating: ‘Lieben Sie Scholten, Jelinek, Häupl, Peymann, Pasterk … oder Kunst und Kultur? Freiheit

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der Kunst statt sozialistischer Staatskünstler’ [Do you love Scholten, Jelinek, Häupl, Peymann, Pasterk … or art and culture? Freedom of art, not Socialist State Artists]. A statement that has obvious connotations with the National Socialist drive against ‘entartete Kunst’ in the 1930s, implying an FPÖ party policy of censorship and the promotion of a particular ‘healthy’ form of art.8

Music’s crucial function in Austrian cultural identity, and its role in the performance of cultural memory, haunts Neuwirth’s writing and composing. Simon Trevor Walsh (writing on Thomas Bernhard) notes, in terms that resonate with Neuwirth’s works, that ‘music, as Bernhard portrays it, acts in post-war Austria not as a purely abstract phenomenon amputated from the outside world, but rather as a highly pervasive and privileged sound modality, one capable of both carrying and reinforcing the disconcerting memory of Austria’s National Socialist past.’9 This chapter will explore some of the ways Neuwirth’s music and writings engage with the traumatic persistence of this ‘disconcerting memory’. Neuwirth’s Arbeitsjournal Neuwirth’s Arbeitsjournal of 1998–99 traces some of the discursive distortions and the cultural Erschütterung resulting from Austria’s shift to the political and cultural right, and meditates on its ideological implications. On 4 February 1998, she writes: I think this play [i.e., Bählamms Fest] already fits in well with our time. So it is said, for example, in all seriousness during the mayoral election in Graz to the ruling mayor [Bürgermeister Alfred Stingl, of the Austrian social democratic party (SPÖ)], who, amongst  8 Anthony Murphy, ‘The rise of the Austrian Freedom Party in the 1990s – a culturalist approach’, Österreichische Zeitschrift fü r Politikwissenschaft (ÖZP), 33:3 (2004), 297–307; 300–1. Murphy sources the image he describes in Claus Tieber, Die Letzten von gestern: Die Rechten und die Kunst (Wien: Picus, 1996), p. 40. Along with Jelinek, the other people referred to are: Rudolf Scholten (Education and Arts Minister, 1990–94), Michael Häupl (mayor and governor of Vienna, 1994–2018), Claus Peymann (Director of Vienna’s Burgtheater, 1986–99), and Ursula Pasterk (Vienna’s Councillor for Culture, 1987–96).  9 Simon Trevor Walsh, ‘Music, national identity and the past in postwar Austria’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2014), p. 39.

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everyday terror and indifference. Is it just a matter of time before we reach the abyss?10

Austria’s rightward shift also throws into sharp focus for Neuwirth the media treatment of female political candidates. On 2 March 1998, she writes: ‘Getting angry at a TV show about how Austria deals with the candidacy, for the first time, of two women for the presidential election. When it comes to politics in Austria, I always start gagging immediately.’11 The Arbeitsjournal contests the monological cultural pressure exerted by such Austrian patriarchal and nationalist discourses through a relentless procedure of allusion to a wide transnational and transhistorical variety of Austrian and other texts, films, music, and popular culture, from Renaissance paintings to the films of Pasolini and surrealist art, Porgy and Bess to Pierre Boulez, Elias Canetti and Karl Kraus to Arnold Schönberg and Giuseppe Verdi. It situates its multiculturalism firmly outside the confines of Austrian national territory, in Venice, a city long associated with art history and European cosmopolitanism, but also site of the first Jewish ghetto. The Arbeitsjournal is a diary of composition but also a documentation of multiple traumas, a record of the cathartic process of working as incorporating, alongside aesthetic productivity, a kind of ‘working through’, a negotiation of aesthetic problems which parallel, and are partially supplemented by, a range of personal, cultural, and historical contexts. Neuwirth figures these as ‘splinters’ of time and experience, which become moments, ‘sound splinters’, in the musical work she is composing. The journal records the everyday contingencies of Neuwirth’s working life in the late 1990s in Venice and across Europe – troubles with getting things repaired, personal catastrophes, professional problems, the economic unfairness of how women composers are treated by cultural institutions like the Wiener Festwochen,12 and above all the perpetual soundscape of the city, which provides an auditory undercurrent to the developing work. ‘If you spend most of the day alone, you automatically listen to other rhythms because they are not determined by other people’, she writes on 10 ‘Ich finde, dieses Theaterstück passt bereits wieder gut in unsere Zeit. So heißt es doch z.B. allen Ernstes bei der Bürgermeisterwahl in Graz gegenüber dem regierenden Bürgermeister, der unter anderem auch für Ausländerintegration eintritt: Humanität sei kein politisches Thema mehr. Die menschliche Seele hat sich, solchen Aussagen nach zu schließen, wieder im Akzeptieren des alltäglichen Terrors und in der Gleichgültigkeit niedergelassen. Ist das Erreichen des Abgrundes nur eine Frage der Zeit?’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, p. 71. 11 ‘Regen uns bei einer Fernsehsendung über die Art und Weise auf, wie man in Österreich mit der erstmaligen Kandidatur von zwei Frauen für die Präsidentschaftswahl umgeht. Wenn es um Politik in Österreich geht muss ich immer gleich würgen.’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, p. 88. 12 See Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, p. 72.

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13 February 1998.13 The opera she is composing is constituted in dynamic relation to these everyday contexts and events, which infiltrate and permeate it, resulting in a densely layered, palimpsestic text. Further layerings accrue in the journal’s concern with the intersections of multiple historical moments – those of personal reminiscence (of Neuwirth’s childhood and family memories), of the present of late twentieth-century Europe, and of historical memory of the war and Nazism. Textual and temporal layers intersect and juxtapose in complex ways, generating new and troubling associations and significances. On 23 March 1998, she writes: Giovanni Bellini’s Sacra Conversazione (with its various degrees of sharpness) should be seen as an anticipation of photography and Tintoretto as the forerunner of film (drama, light, movement). The three of us are also enthusiastic about the play of appearance and reality between painted architecture and the additional architecture on the frame of the Bellini picture in San Zaccharia. […] Then that night I see a film on Rai Tre about the book I was given a while ago: Smoke over Birkenau, and a portrait of Elisa Springer, who lost all her relatives in Auschwitz and herself survived only by sheer luck. Always horrible and heart-breaking to listen to these descriptions. Your inference that if the last bit of dignity is taken from people, the victim can also become a beast towards his fellow prisoners, is important and frightening at the same time. Torture and torment change people. There is no return from pain to the immediacy of life. Again and again: please remember and stay vigilant!14

The counterpointing of art-historical theorising with political-ethical experience sharpens the contexture of the process of composition, and the journal, like the work whose composition it records, is permeated by a combination of historical and cultural resonances, the effects of which it seeks to disrupt. Neuwirth is explicit in the Arbeitsjournal about the disruptive intentions of her music and the problems of reception this presents in an Austrian culture drifting towards oppressive social and 13 ‘Wenn man den größten Teil des Tages allein verbringt, hört man ganz automatisch auf andere Rhythmen, da sie nicht von anderen Menschen bestimmt werden.’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, p. 79. 14 ‘Giovanni Bellinis Sacra Conversazione (mit seinen verschiedenen Schärfe-Graden) als Vorwegnahme der Fotografie zu betrachten und Tintoretto als Vorläufer des Films (Dramatik, Licht, Bewegung). Auch sind wir drei von dem Spiel von Schein und Sein zwischen gemalter Architektur und der weiterführenden Architektur auf dem Rahmen des Bellini-Bildes in San Zaccharia begeistert. […] Dann sehe ich in der Nacht noch in Rai Tre einen Film über das Buch, das ich vor einiger Zeit geschenkt bekam: Rauch über Birkenau, und ein Portrait über Elisa Springer, die alle Verwandten in Auschwitz verloren hat und selber nur mit Glück überlebt hat. Stets grauenhaft und herzzerreißend, diesen Schilderungen zuzuhören. Ihr Verweis, dass, wenn Menschen das letzte Stückchen Würde genommen wird, auch das Opfer zur Bestie gegenüber seinen Mitgefangenen werden kann, ist wichtig und erschreckend zugleich. Folter und Qual verändern den Menschen. Es gibt keine Rückkehr aus dem Schmerz zur Unmittelbarkeit des Lebens. Immer wieder und immer wieder: bitte erinnern und wachsam bleiben!’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, pp. 103–4.

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cultural conformity. On 31 March 1998, contemplating the difficulties she repeatedly encounters in getting her works performed, she writes: Who wants to listen to ever more complicated sounds and processes? […] With music you can bring people together, claim the young NPD [the German far-right Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands] members, yes, with simple and generally

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understandable music. And so the ballads of the national resistance and Guildo Horn’s I Am Proud To Be a German [a popular Schlager song] are sung by the proudly shaved heads in high schools. Music gets into the heads of the young people incited to social populism more forcefully than any leaflet. Shouting along is the order of the day.15

Nick Till, interviewing Neuwirth in Graz in 2003, noted ‘a strain of savage parody’ in her music, ‘grotesque mutations of the “thigh-slapping” oom-pa music promoted by the likes of Haider’.16 Neuwirth’s deconstructive experimentalism, influenced by composers like Edgard Varèse (1883–1965) and Pierre Schaeffer (1910–95) and working in the multi-referential and electronic-experimental traditions of figures like Germans Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) and Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918–70), the non-traditional orchestration and homophonic works of Russian Galina Ustvolskaya (1919–2006), and the serialism of Pierre Boulez (1925–2016), clearly sits uncomfortably alongside the contemporary Austrian preference for sentimental Schlager and military marches, and the insistent legacy (noted in the previous chapter) of Mozart as symbol of tradition and musical conventionality. Music and disruption Stefan Drees describes Neuwirth’s music as comprised not of notes or tones but of ‘sounds’ that ‘seethe incessantly’: Sounds reel from one episode to another, gathering up into different aggregate states, before breaking out of them once more. Many tiny events culminate in turbulent sound units and nervous, glimmering textures that are constantly changing shape and volume.

15 ‘Wer will denn da noch komplizierteren Klängen und Abläufen lauschen? […] Mit Musik kann man Leute zusammenführen, behaupten klarerweise die jungen NPD-Mitglieder, ja, mit Einfachheit und Allgemeinverständlichem. Und so werden auch die Balladen des nationalen Widerstandes und Guildo Horns Ich bin stolz ein Deutscher zu sein schon in den Hauptschulen mit stolz kahl rasiertem Schädel gesungen. Musik geht eindringlicher als jedes Flugblatt in die Köpfe der sozial-populistisch aufgehetzten Jugendlichen. Mitgrölen ist angesagt.’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, pp. 106–7. 16 Nick Till, ‘Olga Neuwirth’, Wire Magazine (27 November 2003), at www.olganeuwirth.com/text35.php (accessed 16 February 2021).

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In the process, the formal structures of the music resist the conventions of narrative progression: instead of purposeful continuity, there is an opaque sequence of proliferating sound states, continual interruptions and abrupt breaks. The aborted schemes and changes of direction are also rich in contrast, and from the background, there emerge ever evolving

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and contrasting perspectives of sound.17

The opening bars of the 2003 CD recording of Bählamms Fest by Klangforum Wien affirm this attention to musical resistance, opacity, interruption. The music starts softly with a high G, a single woodwind note, underpinned by faint, seemingly vocal hisses, grunts, and hushing sounds, as it tightens to a thin tone and then a higher, piercing, whistled E. Gentle, amniotic washes of sound provide background for a slowly pulsing tone, and, gradually, more sounds can be heard that may or may not be vocal utterances – before a sudden grating crash of percussion savagely disrupts the auditory space, introducing a series of loud clatters, hisses, a mobile buzzing (a violin, bow sliding) that hovers over the centre of the sonic field, and then the whole orchestra momentarily breaks in with a sudden, declining slide like the engines of a small aircraft suddenly descending. Then – silence, for a short second, before the German language dialogue opens with an unaccompanied female soprano voice, to which a male countertenor replies. A series of dialogue exchanges and intermittent percussive squeaks over melodic silence ends with a sudden percussive crash, the buzz of returning strings, and a sequence of canine grunts and chants, out of which the ghostly rising and falling tone of a theremin emerges, its ethereal tones sliding uncannily in and out of auditory focus. The voices return, the male voice now audibly distorted to an electronic grating as the female voice launches a series of operatic trills in between further conversational exchanges, slipping disconcertingly between speech and song. The entire effect is one of endless and disorienting musical motion and suspense, a swirl of distorting sonic transformation, sudden alarming and violent interruption, and the ever-threatening collapse of human voices into animalistic or mechanical noise 17 Stefan Drees, ‘Equivocalities, shiftings and fractures: notes on the music of Olga Neuwirth’, in Olga Neuwirth (press release) (New York: Boosey & Hawkes, 2010), pp. 8–9. German original: ‘Hier taumeln die Klänge von einer Episode zur nächsten, sammeln sich gleichsam in verschiedenen Aggregatzuständen, um bald wieder daraus hervor zu brechen; viele winzige Ereignisse summieren sich zu bewegten Klangkomplexen und nervös flimmernden Stimmengeweben, deren Fülle und Dichte ständig schwankt. Dabei sperren sich die formalen Strukturen der Musik den Konventionen narrativen Fortschreitens: an die Stelle einer zielgerichteten Kontinuität tritt die unüberschaubare Folge wuchernder Klangsituationen, ständiger Abbrüche und abrupter Einschnitte sowie kontrastreicher Verwerfungen und Richtungswechsel, hinter denen sich immer auch differenzierte Veränderungen klänglicher Perspektiven abzeichnen.’ Drees, ‘Mehrdeutigkeiten Verschiebungen und Brüche: Notizen zum Komponieren Olga Neuwirths’, in Olga Neuwirth (press release), pp. 4–5.

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accompanied by percussive suggestions of violent struggle, against a background of atmospheric tones and orchestral chords that swell and fade, sometimes becoming near-howls like the barking voices, then softening to gentle hums of featureless wash against the carefully articulated speech, slowing to pulse with an indeterminate, irregular, interrupted beat – music that is collapsing in on itself, decomposing into noise rather than progressing thematically towards melodic pattern. Occasional bursts of ­recognisable instrumentation – strings playing recognisable snatches of folk melodies, a blast of trumpets descending half a scale, a high trill of woodwind echoing a vocal vibrato – only serve to emphasise the interrupted, decompositional qualities of the music. The sudden shrieks and grunts, the tensions between shrill musical peaks and deep troughs of growling, the oscillation between speech and song of the operatic Sprechgesang, the sharp interruptions and discordant, context-free sliding sequences, and the constantly mobile tones and chords – all generate the auditory experience of what Catherine Saxon-Kerkhoff has called ‘an endlessly haunting stream of sounds’.18 In writing a ‘music of confusion’ Neuwirth performs a double act of disruptive historical resistance to other (mis-)appropriations of musical forms for different ideological ends. Just as Bady Minck allows the stream of flickering postcard depictions of a tourist fantasy of Austria to subvert itself, revealing a disturbingly different reality behind the images, so the complexity and discordant decompositional qualities of Neuwirth’s music constantly disrupt the processes – of recognisable narrative progression, of melody, of traditional sonic registers, and of conventional distinctions between vocal and instrumental musical forms – by which music can be co-opted to embody nationalistic or fascistic conceptions of social unity. Complexity and montage constantly disrupt the simplistic (fascist) appropriation of music as a socially manipulative aesthetic, opening the work to an oscillating multitude of experiences and interpretations rather than restricting or closing down its meanings. Memory becomes the ground of experience through which Neuwirth deconstructs the dangerously unifying potentials of music through discord and dissonance (contra assonance, melody, rhythm), allowing the palimpsestic unconscious of musical memory to emerge, and plotting that emergence against the social repression of Austrian memory. Bählamms Fest exemplifies this process of resistance encoded in musical performance. Subtitled ‘an animation-opera’ (and thus drawing attention to the transmedial form of the work), and with a libretto by the Nobel Prize-winning, and relentlessly controversial, Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek (b. 1946), it is structured as a music-theatre work in 13 ‘Bilder’ (scenes/images), some of which are separated by musical interludes 18 Catherine Saxon-Kerkhoff, ‘About Olga Neuwirth’ (2015), at www.olganeuwirth.com/about.php (accessed 17 February 2020).

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Neuwirth calls ‘Instrumental-Inseln’ (‘Instrumental Islands’).19 Conceived between 1993 and 1998, it was first performed at the Wiener Festwochen (the city’s annual cultural festival) in Vienna in June 1999, having initially been proposed to but rejected by the Munich Biennial in 1994. It was recently performed at the 2021 Ruhrtriennale in Germany. The music of Bählamms Fest generates a disconcerting and at times frightening aura of chill, shimmering, fairytale unreality which (one reviewer comments) culminates in ‘an ‘open end’ built up to through processes whose intersecting planes suggest constantly shifting, persistently incompatible moods and motivations’.20 Its carefully arranged sequence of incomplete, mobile elements evokes partially recalled childhood memories of menacing tales and forbidden but half-glimpsed images. Instrumental sections slide through incomplete scales and partially recognisable riffs and melodies, producing a sense of disruption or temporal fragmentation, while the arrangement of voices, electronic effects, and orchestration produces a complex, multi-layered auditory experience, a bewildering counterpoint of noise and melody, harmony and disharmony, rhythm and disjunction, that (as Neuwirth puts it) ‘oscillates between laughter and crying’.21 The effect of ‘oscillation’ is, indeed, integral to the experience of hearing the opera – Neuwirth’s compositional strategies effect constant disorienting movement between different levels of the performance and different sources of sound, between human and animal, articulate speech and inarticulate utterance, music and noise, affirming the concern of contemporary music with what Steven Connor has called ‘hearing inhuman sounds as a form of voicing’.22 She deploys an aesthetics of disjunctive multi-layering as a response to the complexities of biographical and historical contexture surrounding both the creation of Bählamms Fest and the production, six decades earlier, of its source text, a 1940 play by the British surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) called The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday. The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday and Bählamms Fest Thanks partly to its complicated publication and translation histories, this source text is little-known in the Anglophone world. Written in English in the same year she 19 A 2001 recording of these pieces has been published separately on the Vampyrotheone CD (Kairos, 2001). 20 Arnold Whittall, untitled review, Tempo, 58:229 (2004), 52. 21 ‘[…] man stets zwischen Lachen und Weinen schwankt’. Neuwirth, ‘Music and peace’, in Stefan Drees (ed.), Olga Neuwirth zwischen den Stühlen: A Twilight Song auf der Suche nach dem fernen Klang (Salzburg/Vienna/Munich: Verlag Anton Pustet, 2008), pp. 107–12; p. 110. A condensed version of this lecture is reprinted in the booklet for the Kairos CD of Bählamms Fest. 22 Steven Connor, ‘The decomposing voice of postmodern music’, New Literary History, 32:3 (Summer 2001), 467–83; 472.

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was included (along with Giséle Prassinos, one of only two women contributors) in André Breton’s L’Anthologie de l’humour noir, Carrington’s The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday was translated into French in the 1970s as La Fête de l’agneau by Geneviève and Henri Parisot, and published as one of the pièces in Jacqueline Chénieux’s 1978 anthology of Carrington’s writings, La Débutante – Contes et Pièces (Flammarion). An English version of this book, The Debutante and Other Stories, edited by Sheila Heti and published by Silver Press in 2017, includes all the contes (tales) but omits the pièces (plays). Consequently, The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday has yet to be published in English, the language in which it was originally written.23 A German-language version, translated from the English manuscript by Heribert Becker as Das Fest des Lamms, was published in 1988 in a German anthology of Carrington’s Theaterstücke (theatre pieces), with an afterword by Käthe Trettin, who describes Das Fest des Lamms as ‘a festival of necrophilia, a festival of sadistic and masochistic ice age desires, a purity phantasmagoria of the blackest humour, a slaughter festival about sensual nature […] an orgy of malice, a poetic satire on the propriety of social pseudo-rituals’.24 Becker’s version provides the basis for Jelinek’s libretto and Neuwirth’s animation-opera, which is thus a transformation into a different medium, animation-opera, of a translated theatre text, a work two removes from Carrington’s original play. Jelinek condenses and reorganises the material in Becker’s (largely faithful) translation, producing an abbreviated version of Carrington’s play from which some dialogue is omitted, and to which the key addition lies in the stage directions for the musical performance, some of which tie the play more overtly to its historical context – for example, the addition in a direction in Bild 8 of a description of the Sheep’s Festival as ‘Parodie auf “Staatsbesuch”, einige können sich sogar Armbinden überstreifen, es soll wie eine politische Massenverzückung wirken’ (‘Parody of a “State Visit”, a couple of them could even slip on armbands, it should look like a political enrapturing of the masses’).25 Through these additions, the libretto reworks this Christmas festival scene as a parodic re-enactment of Nazi pageantry, intersecting productively with the soundscape generated by the music’s transformation of the action of Carrington’s play. Carolyn Birdsall’s analysis of the ‘festivalisation of the everyday’ during the Third Reich is instructive here. Birdsall emphasises the

23 According to Carrington’s literary agent Paul de Angelis, the original and unpublished English typescript (of which he provided me with a photocopy) is probably in the papers archived at the Biblioteca de Mexico in Mexico City. Private email correspondence, 2018. 24 ‘Ein Fest der Nekrophilie, ein Fest sadistischer und masochistischer Eiszeitgelüste, eine Reinheitsphantasmagorie von schwärzestem Humor, ein Schlachtfest übersinnlicher Art […] eine Orgie der Bösartigkeit, eine poetische Satire auf die Verkommenheit gesellschaftlicher Pseudo-Rituale.’ Käthe Trettin, ‘Nachwort’ to Leonora Carrington, Ein Flanell-Nachthemd – Theaterstücke, Heribert Becker (ed. and trans.) (Frankfurt-am-Main; Qumran im Capus Verlag, 1985), pp. 162–72; p. 163. 25 Elfriede Jelinek, ‘Libretto’, CD booklet to Neuwirth, Bählamms Fest, pp. 14–38; p. 32.

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conjunction between ‘a pre-existing festival tradition and new p ­ olitical imperatives’26 leading to a shift in how ‘the sounds of otherness were staged in carnival events, marking Jews as physically and acoustically other’.27 At the same time, conventional distinctions between the time of festival and the time of everyday life were, in Nazi Germany, deliberately blurred, creating a situation in which the ‘proliferation of official events and celebrations within the everyday meant that carnival was officialised, while official events were festivalised’28 – an inversion of the conventionally inverted structure of carnival, which Neuwirth and Jelinek address through the carnivalistic power of laughter, exploiting what Neuwirth calls (echoing Breton) the ‘extreme black humour’ of the play.29 Mixing elements of drawing-room farce, demonic Christmas pageant, and surreal murder mystery, with a cast of ‘Characters’, ‘Ghosts’, and ‘Others’, the Gothicfairytale narrative of The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday concerns the decadent aristocratic Carnis family, comprising old Mrs Carnis, her servant Robert and maid Violet, her (speaking) dog Henry, and her son Philip and his current young wife Theodora. These characters are beset by alcoholism, aged decrepitude, loveless marriage, and repressed, destructive incestuous desires. Their sheep are being slaughtered – ­decapitated – by some unknown creature, and, at the end of Act I, their shepherd Joe Green suffers the same fate, collapsing headless through the doorway clutching a beheaded lamb, the pair ‘like a strange sort of Madonna and Child’.30 Philip’s former wife Elizabeth and his half-brother (son of Henry the dog) Jeremy, ‘the wolfman, a kind of “arctic vampire”’,31 arrive to disrupt further an already chaotic family home. Jeremy and Theodora declare their love in a long Gothic nursery scene featuring various ghostly apparitions including a drowned kitten and two boiled goldfish, a canary with a broken neck, and several wingless bluebottle flies. The action climaxes with various farm and wild animals parodically enacting the Christmas Feast of the Lambs (‘And what may I ask is Christmas?’ ‘The Feast of the Baaaaaaaaaaa-lambs!’);32 Jeremy Carnis and Theodora appear before the animals in deceptively saintly garb, and the lambs misapprehend Jeremy as the Archangel Gabriel coming to bless the Feast. Revealing himself as a werewolf, Jeremy stabs the black lamb playing the role of Mary, and drags off the corpse, pursued by his brother Philip, Elizabeth, and the police. 26 Carolyn Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), pp. 66–7. 27 Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, p. 68. 28 Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, p. 99. 29 ‘[…] sein sehr böser schwarzer Humor’. Neuwirth, ‘Music and peace’, p. 110. 30 Leonora Carrington, The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday, Act I (unpublished ms), n.d. [1940], p. 15. 31 ‘[…] einer Art “arktischem Vampir”’. Neuwirth, ‘Music and peace’, p. 109. 32 Carrington, The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday, Act III Scene i.

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Simultaneous with this event, the closing scene presents Mrs Carnis dreaming the ghostly re-enactment of her mother Gwendoline’s childhood seduction by a young man who is chased off by a man with ‘a huge black dog’.33 Her reverie is interrupted by the arrival of Philip and the police bearing a stretcher carrying the corpse of Jeremy, at which point Mrs Carnis transforms into a dog. Jeremy’s headless ghost appears to Theodora, and slowly dissolves as they declare their undying love. The play ends with Theodora alone, ‘weeping and wringing her hands’, to the sounds of ‘plaintive music, weeping and clapping’. Depicting a countryside ravaged by random and seemingly unaccountable violence and shrouded in chilling snow, within which sits a family home ravaged by murderous animalistic lust and a cult of bucolic innocence violently exploited by that family’s rapacious carnivores, The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday is a complex allegory of the resurgence of repressed traumas in a moment of deep historical crisis experienced by Carrington in what Neuwirth calls ‘an outer world drowning in violence, coldness and terror’.34 Theodora’s constant and unexplained retreat to the nursery fuels her communion with persistent memories of familial violence (the stage directions for Act 2 describe the nursery’s atmosphere as ‘full of the melancholy ghosts of sadistic children’),35 suggesting the intensity of Carrington’s autobiographical self-rendering in a character who is her near-namesake. The key themes of aristocratic ageing and decay, animal–human relations, transgenerational sin and Gothicised sexuality, and pagan–Christian ritual performance organise Carrington’s covertly autobiographical text around a central concern with metamorphosis, a kind of translation – from human to animal, young to old, domestic to wild (and back), loved to feared, life to narrative. Its complex publication and translation histories mean that The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday exists as a surrealist text in permanent and mobile linguistic and intermedial translation, from English to French to German, and from 1940s play to 1990s libretto/ opera – a condition of translation without a published original and thus strangely free-floating, existing only as versions of itself, in a curiously palimpsestic self-relation. Max Silverman’s notion of ‘palimpsestic memory’ provides a theoretical approach to the ways in which this publication history relates to the multi-medial dimension of Neuwirth’s operatic adaptation of the play, and the complex relations of both works to personal and cultural memory, as detailed extensively in Neuwirth’s Arbeitsjournal. Drawing on a theoretical tradition that includes Proust on memory, Benjamin on allegory and montage, Derrida’s notion of the ‘trace’, and Freud’s conception of memory 33 Carrington, The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday, Act III Scene ii. 34 ‘[…] eine äußere Welt, die in Gewalt, Kälte und Terror erstickt’. Neuwirth, ‘Music and peace’, p. 109. 35 Carrington, The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday, Act II Scene i, p. 16.

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as a palimpsestic text bearing traces of past experiences, and taking his examples from post-war French literature and film, Silverman argues that ‘The notion of memory as palimpsest provides us with a politico-aesthetic model of cultural memory in that it gives us a way of perceiving history in a non-linear way and memory as a hybrid and dynamic process across individuals and communities’.36 Palimpsestic memory is, above all, ‘a politics of memory founded on a poetics of memory’37 and is connected in Silverman’s theory to the aesthetic processes and political ambitions of French Surrealism, which ‘exploited the Freudian principle of the palimpsest to construct new composite images which transformed the normalised everyday into an uncanny blend of the familiar and the strange, the here and the elsewhere, and the conscious and the unconscious’.38 This ‘uncanny blend’ is clearly also characteristic of Neuwirth’s opera, which performs similar palimpsestic procedures in its construction of a new ‘composite’ and surrealist aesthetic experience. In the Arbeitsjournal (on 4 February 1998) Neuwirth discusses The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday, arguing that it should be understood as being bound thematically and in terms of its political unconscious to the historical moment of its production in 1940: It is a glaring exaggeration of our everyday fears, our latent violence, but also our hope. Behind the playful jokes of Leonora Carrington, however, the icy pure horror appears. By 1940 people were already habituated to horror. Shortly after The Baa Lamb’s Holiday was written and Max Ernst was taken to a French concentration camp, the war in Europe already claimed hundreds of thousands of deaths. France was two-thirds occupied. Humiliation, hardship, suffering and fears.39

She draws attention to Carrington’s precariously displaced position in 1940 as an aristocratic English surrealist woman artist living in France during that country’s invasion by the Nazis. In this situation Carrington was vulnerable to the imminent violence of both the invading army and the French governmental-administrative response of interning German nationals like her partner Ernst, who was detained in camps at Largentière and Les Milles (where he met, and was painted by, fellow inmate

36 37 38 39

Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, p. 9. Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, p. 22. Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, p. 25. ‘Es ist eine grelle Überzeichnung unserer alltäglichen Ängste, unserer latenten Gewaltsamkeit, aber auch unserer Hoffnung. Hinter den verspielten Späßen von Leonora Carrington erscheint aber das eisige pure Grauen. 1940 hatten sich die Menschen schon häuslich eingerichtet im Schrecken. Kurz nachdem The Baa Lamb’s Holiday geschrieben und Max Ernst in ein französisches Konzentrationslager abgeführt wurde, forderte der Krieg in Europa bereits hunderttausende Tote. Frankreich wurde zu zwei Dritteln besetzt. Demütigung, Not, Leid und Ängste.’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, pp. 70–1.

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and Unica Zürn’s future partner Hans Bellmer),40 before escaping to the USA in 1941. The compounded impact of these internments in late 1940 caused Carrington to suffer a nervous breakdown. The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday is one of several texts and artworks she produced during this period. Her Portrait of M.E. (1940) depicts Ernst as a feathered, fish-tailed bird-man holding a goldfish bowl and sporting striped socks, standing in an icy landscape (perhaps resembling that of The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday) that matches his white hair, a frozen horse behind him. She published a piece entitled ‘The Bird Superior, Max Ernst’, in a special issue on Ernst of the New York surrealist magazine VIEW in 1942, in which she described her partner: ‘The Bird Superior, with all his feathers painting different images at once, moves slowly around the room evoking trees and plants out of the furniture. A still, quiet pulse from the petrified world outside becomes audible like distant drums. The birds and the beasts tramp their feet to the rhythm and small earthquakes ripple under the hide of the earth.’41 Ernst eventually managed to escape the Nazis, fleeing to New York with the assistance of Peggy Guggenheim, while Carrington followed them by boat, having married a Mexican diplomat and escaped to Spain (in the company of a ‘keeper’ arranged by her family). She was hospitalised in Madrid and subject to treatment that caused extreme epileptic fits, an experience she recorded in the autobiographical narrative Down Below (1943) and which was strikingly similar to the treatment endured by Unica Zürn twenty years later. Ernst’s first wife, Lou Straus, was transported to Auschwitz on the penultimate deportation train to leave Paris, in June 1944, and died there. In her lecture ‘Music and Peace’, delivered at Salzburg University in June 1999, Neuwirth emphasises this historical link: Apart from the fact that Carrington’s play also fascinates me as a surreal work of art, it gives me the opportunity to use a (fictional) individual fate to refer to how the Vichy regime dealt with those who think differently and the Jewish population between 1942 and 1944. On July 16 and 17 1942 alone, around 13,000 immigrant Jews, including 4,000 children, were arrested and driven to the Vélodrom d’Hiver in Paris. After the stopover in the Drancy camp, which was under the direction of the Austrian Alois Brunner, they were murdered in the concentration camps. This was done on the initiative of the French authorities of the Vichy regime.42 40 See Bellmer’s Esquisse pour un portrait de Max Ernst, 1939.  41 Leonora Carrington, ‘The Bird Superior, Max Ernst’, VIEW (1 April 1942), 13. 42 ‘Abgesehen davon, dass Carringtons Theaterstück auch als surreales Kunstwerk eine Faszination auf mich ausübt, eröffnet es mir die Möglichkeit, an Hand eines (fiktiven) Einzelschicksals auch auf den Umgang des Vichy-Regimes in den Jahren 1942 bis 1944 mit Andersdenkenden und der jüdischen Bevölkerung zu verweisen. Allein am 16. und 17. Juli 1942 wurden rund 13.000 immigrierte Juden, darunter 4.000 Kinder, verhaftet und ins Pariser Vélodrom d’Hiver, getrieben. Nach der Zwischenstation

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Carrington’s situation when writing The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday was thus profoundly traumatic at both personal and historical levels, and is aptly summarised in Ann Hoff’s analysis of the later work, Down Below: ‘[She] had just found herself alone at just twenty-three years old, disowned by her family, living in a foreign country behind closed borders, besieged by a terrifying war. It is no small wonder that she began to break down’.43 Neuwirth’s decision to create an operatic adaptation of The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday is evidently deeply informed and motivated by her awareness of these significant and traumatic biographical and historical contexts which, in turn,  provide supplementary material that allows both composer and librettist to refocus and recalibrate Carrington’s play in specific ways as a text inscribed within, and responding in complex ways to, historically and biographically traumatic situations. In the recomposing of Carrington’s text by herself and Jelinek, these contexts become suggestively intertwined, excavating traumatic scenes and seams in the o ­ riginal text. The Arbeitsjournal clarifies how these different contexts are linked by an underlying analysis of the constant, but constantly shifting, relationship between patriarchal structures and historical or personal events that in different ways suggest the traces of historically traumatic experience, which (as will be discussed below) persist as disruptive residues in the text and music of Neuwirth’s opera. In theatrical performance, Bählamms Fest is, of course, a multi-media work in which musical layering is combined with the libretto and elements of image projection alongside electronic manipulation of sound and screen. The Arbeitsjournal makes clear that all these contextual influences also find their way into all aspects of the opera, each providing a different layer of significance to the musical and multi-medial palimpsest of the work, each working as a node in the network of traumatic significances channelled by Neuwirth’s opera, creating what Max Silverman calls ‘new associations between disparate spatio-temporal elements’.44 Neuwirth is constantly alert, in the Arbeitsjournal, to these mobile complexities, and to the potential overlap of music, source text, and history, the relevance of Carrington’s play for an interpretation of the contemporary world. On 22 April 1998, for example, she writes: This Philip [Carnis] is troubling me. A mixture of an unskilled trampler and a perverted, brutal philistine who devastates everything around him. He’s not so unintentionally im Lager Drancy, welches unter der Leitung des Österreichers Alois Brunner stand, wurden sie in den Konzentrationslagern ermordet. Geschehen war dies auf Initiative der französischen Behörden des Vichy-Regimes.’ Neuwirth, ‘Music and peace’, p. 108. 43 Ann Hoff, ‘“I was convulsed, pitiably hideous”: electric shock treatment in Leonora Carrington’s Down Below’, Journal of Contemporary Literature, 32:3 (Spring 2009), 83–98; 88. 44 Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, p. 57.

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breeding ground for intolerance. Recurring chords and pitches will accompany him.45

The character of Philip occupies a complex position in Neuwirth’s analysis of her own  working processes, epitomising the ways Bählamms Fest exploits the intersection of personal and historical traumas. A symbol of modern political violence, he also  provides her with a cathartic release in relation to her own father, whose ­behaviour is a constant undercurrent in the Arbeitsjournal. On 1 March 1998, she writes: Mr Father calls and really wants to meet [her sister] Flora and me. We’re dragging ourselves to the meeting point in an inn knowing anyway what he will tell us ‘former children’: that it is him who is so poor and not us, and that he therefore had to cancel the supplementary insurance. It was like that. He’s mad. Despite our warnings, he ran up millions in debts, stirred up chaos and rifts and one day left the house, never came back.46

This family trauma is connected with that of Carrington: ‘In the person of Philip, I will settle accounts with the father person, just as Leonora Carrington did’.47 Carrington’s problematic relationship with her father, a wealthy English manufacturer who opposed her career in art, culminated in her being disowned by him in 1937 when she moved to Paris to live with Max Ernst (who, 26 years her senior, was surely a surrogate father-figure).48 Her story ‘The Oval Lady’ (1939) is a savage autobiographical parody of father–daughter relations in which the father appears through the prism of the 45 ‘Dieser Philip macht mir zu schaffen. Eine Mischung aus ungeschicktem Trampeltier und pervertiertem, brutalem Spießbürger, der um sich herum alles verwüstet. Gar nicht so absichtslos zertrampelt er seine Umgebung, die menschenleer zurückbleibt. Er ist das Symbol für mich, was in unserer Welt vor sich geht. Egoismus, Machtstreben, Brutalität, Grausamkeit, Geschichtslosigkeit, Oberflächlichkeit und Zerstörungswut. Der wildgewordene Kleinbürger als Protagonist des Bösen, der Nährboden für Intoleranz. Immer widerkehrende Akkorde und Tonhöhen werden ihn begleiten.’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, p. 123. 46 ‘Der Herr Vater ruft an und will Flora und mich unbedingt treffen. Schleppen uns zum Treffpunkt in einem Gasthaus und wissen eh, was er uns “ehemaligen Kindern” sagen wird: dass er so arm ist und nicht wir, und er daher die Zusatzversicherung aufkündigen musste. So war es auch. Er spinnt. Trotz unserer Kassandrarufe hat er Millionen Schulden verursacht, Chaos und Zerwürfnis geschürt und eines Tages das Haus verlassen, ist nie mehr wieder gekommen.’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, pp. 86–7. 47 ‘In der Person von Philip werde ich mit der Vaterperson, so wie es schon Leonora Carrington gemacht hat, abrechnen.’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, p. 77. 48 See Annette Shandler Levitt, ‘The bestial fictions of Leonora Carrington’, Journal of Modern Literature, 20:1 (Summer 1996), 65–74; 67–8.

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modern art he opposed, ‘looking more like a geometric figure than anything else,’49 and proceeds to burn his daughter’s favourite wooden horse as a punishment for her disobedience. Neuwirth, alert to this detail, promises a similar treatment of her father: ‘He will be immortalized in Bählamms Fest. That is my working through my personal father story’.50 Bählamms Fest and the Arbeitsjournal constitute, then, a pair of works – one musical, one written – that intertwine thematically in their exploration of how two distinct but interconnected historical moments and experiences – that of Carrington in France, in 1940, and that of Neuwirth in Venice and Austria, in the late 1990s  –  ­resonate with each other, generating significances that shed light on their distinct but overlapping and interlinked traumas. These meanings are interconnected and mutually influential, creating a dense, palimpsestically layered polysemy that derives from the variety of distinct cultural, historical, and biographical contexts – each bearing its own relation to elements of the traumatic experiences with which Bählamms Fest and The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday are concerned, the dual historical moments from which the opera and its source text respectively emerge. The scenic structure of Neuwirth’s work into a series of Bilder, furthermore, suggests a particularly Freudian emphasis on recurrent and re-enacted scenes of experience in the archaeology of individual and cultural trauma. The analysis of the traumatic surreal in Bählamms Fest that follows will attempt to delineate some of the complexities of what John Fletcher calls the ‘palimpsestic structure of scene upon scene’51 of Freudian conceptions of trauma. This structure manifests itself in a pattern of historical repetition already implicit in the doubling of texts – opera and journal – a doubling that expresses Neuwirth’s core concern with questions of memory, both personal and cultural, and its problematic relations to history. Stefan Drees emphasises this concern with the exploration of the mechanisms of memory which threads through Neuwirth’s œuvre since the early 1990s, in works such as Five Daily Miniatures (1994) and Pallas/Construction (1996). This finds expression in different ways in works like the orchestra piece Clinamen/ Nodus (1999) – composed for strings and two micro-detuned zithers and percussion for Pierre Boulez’s 75th birthday tour; in concertos which deal with different kinds of fragmented memories such as the trumpet concerto … miramundo multiplo … (2006), the viola concerto Remnants of songs … an amphigory (2009) and the orchestra piece Masaot/ Clocks without Hands (2013). In the latter, first performed by the Vienna Philharmonic

49 Leonora Carrington, The Debutante and Other Stories (London: Silver Press, 2017), pp. 9–13; p. 12. 50 ‘Er wird in Bählamms Fest verewigt. Das ist das Verarbeiten meiner persönlichen Vater-Geschichte.’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, p. 76. 51 John Fletcher, Freud and the Scene of Trauma (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), p. 7.

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The traumatic surreal in 2015, the composer analyses the mechanisms of political remembering and forgetting, while relating them to the investigation of the roots of her own (artistic) identity.52

Music and surreal temporality

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Neuwirth outlines key elements of her decompositional methodology in her notes on her 2003 opera version of David Lynch’s 1997 movie Lost Highway: The method I’m interested in is to deconstruct images and sounds/music through a discourse of perception, therefore showing that these images and sounds follow a  certain logic and can be manipulated. […]. The problem of images and sounds is that they have a metaphoric quality: they are densified complexes of imagination that provide a texture of sounds and images for an entire scenario of threat.53

She goes on to emphasise her interest in the film’s narrative ‘(Zeit) Schleifen’ (‘(time) loop’) and its presentation of ‘eine grundsätzliche kompositorische Herausforderung’ (‘a basic compositional challenge’) concerning ‘Da es nämlich ein Blick ist für Etwas, das nicht ausgesprochen werden kann’ (‘a way of looking for something that cannot be uttered’).54 The core traumatic themes of temporal disjunction/discontinuity and inexpressibility are thus central to her aesthetic engagement with Lynch’s film 52 ‘Ein eng mit solchen Fragestellungen verknüpftes Anliegen ist auch die Auseinandersetzung mit den Mechanismen der Erinnerung, die sich, gleichfalls seit Beginn der 1990er Jahre in Werken wie den “Five Daily Miniatures” (1994) und “Pallas/Construction” (1996) thematisiert, durch Neuwirths gesamtes Schaffen zieht. Klingende Ausprägung findet die Beschäftigung mit dieser Thematik auf jeweils unterschiedliche Weise in Arbeiten wie dem Orchesterstück “Clinamen/Nodus” (1999) – einer Komposition für Streichinstrumente, zwei mikrointervallisch gestimmte Zithern und Schlagzeug, die anlässlich der Konzerttournee zum 75. Geburtstag von Pierre Boulez entstand –, in den mit Erinnerungsbruchstücken unterschiedlichster Art arbeitenden Konzerten für Trompete (“… miramundo multiplo …”, 2006) und für Viola (“Remnants of songs … an amphigory”, 2009) sowie in “Masaot/Clocks without Hands” (2013). In diesem 2015 von den Wiener Philharmonikern uraufgeführten Orchesterstück analysiert die Komponistin die Mechanismen von politischem Erinnern und Vergessen und verknüpft dies zugleich auch mit einer Erkundung der Wurzeln ihrer eigenen (künstlerischen) Identität.’ Stefan Drees, ‘Olga Neuwirth: Porträt-text’ (publicity sheet) (Berlin: G. Ricordi and Co., n.d.), at https://tinyurl.com/3sx rnxry (accessed 23 February 2021). 53 ‘Die Methode, die mich interessiert, ist die, Bilder und Klänge/Musik durch einen Diskurs der Wahrnehmung zu dekonstruieren, um zu zeigen, dass es Bilder und Klänge sind, die nach einer bestimm­ ten Logik funktionieren und auch manipulierbar sind. […]. Das Problem von Bildern und Klängen ist, dass sie etwas Metaphorisches an sich haben: Sie verdichten einen ganzen Vorstellungskomplex und werden zu einem Ton/Bild-Geflecht für ein ganzes Bedrohungsszenarium.’ Neuwirth, ‘Afterthoughts on Lost Highway: “Waiting for Godot” of passion and proximity – an experimental arrangement of futility’, sleeve notes to Lost Highway (Kairos, 2003), pp. 20, 38 (translation modified). 54 Neuwirth, ‘Afterthoughts on Lost Highway’, pp. 18–19, 37.

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and, by extension, inform her wider oeuvre. She discusses alighting on the notion of the ‘suture’ or ‘seam’ (‘Naht’), ‘die scheinbar abwesende Ursache der Angst, das Phantasma quasi zu überbrücken’ (‘as a way of bridging, as it were, the absent cause of fear, the phantasm’).55 Neuwirth uses the suture, a key element of film theory that seeks to account for how the viewer is experientially inserted (‘sutured’) into the filmic text, to signify a trace or scar, a mark stitched over the (psychic/cultural) wound that persists as a sign of traumatic experience – unutterable and yet searched for, absent and yet bridgeable – and producing an ‘Unheimlichkeit’ (a ‘sinister effect’)56 which is phantasmatic, a ghostly trace of a lost, traumatic moment. The disturbingly surreal qualities of Lynch’s film – the causes of what Slavoj Žižek calls its ‘ridiculous sublime’57 – are thus, for Neuwirth, consequences of the distorting effects of the repression of trauma, of ‘das Unausgesprochene’, or ‘what remains unspoken’: ‘Das Unausgesprochene wird zum Alptraum und das Warten und falsche Hoffen setzen sich in jedem Hautpartikel fest, wenn offene Fragen totgeschwiegen werden.’ (‘The unspoken becomes a nightmare and the waiting and false hopes seep into every pore when open questions are hushed up.’)58 This multiple concern with Surrealism as an affect related to clarity and intensity of a perception which may be phantasmatic, and thus a kind of haunting (‘an entire scenario of threat’), alongside the palpable traumatic resonances of nevertheless phantasmatic historical experiences, permeates Neuwirth’s works, and finds particularly powerful and effective expression in Bählamms Fest. Her formal concern with ‘counter[ing] the absurdity of everyday life using abrupt cuts, overlays, quick successive contrasts, gestures leading to nowhere, and montages employing heterogeneous materials’59 broadly accords with Max Paddison’s definition (following Theodor Adorno, who cites Weill, Krenek, and Stravinsky as examples) of surrealist music as that which ‘juxtaposes its historically devalued fragments in a montage-like manner which enables them to yield up new meanings within a new aesthetic unity’.60 In this reading, surrealist music is itself resurrectionary, reinvesting fragments of a lost past with new, contemporary significances. In ‘Music and Peace’ Neuwirth refers to a key definition of Surrealism as related by Maurice Nadeau, who quotes André Breton: ‘The surrealist turn of mind, i.e. surrealist 55 Neuwirth, ‘Afterthoughts on Lost Highway’, pp. 20, 38. 56 Neuwirth, ‘Afterthoughts on Lost Highway’, pp. 20, 38. 57 See Slavoj Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2000). Žižek’s essay is excerpted in the sleeve notes to Neuwirth’s Lost Highway. 58 Neuwirth, ‘Afterthoughts on Lost Highway’, p. 22. 59 Neuwirth, ‘Afterthoughts on Lost Highway’, p. 7. 60 Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 90.

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behaviour, can be found at all times provided it is regarded as the willingness to bring about “an even clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses”’.61 ‘This’, Neuwirth comments, ‘is also the starting point at which Surrealism excites me’62 – the point at which the movement engages a sensory range of experience beyond the narrative and pictorial. Importantly, this definition is given at a key moment when Bretonian Surrealism engaged overtly with historical reality. The quote from Breton is taken from his lecture ‘What is Surrealism?’, delivered in Brussels on 1 June 1934, in which he presciently warned his audience of the historical danger they faced from ‘the disease of fascism’ emanating from Germany, Austria, and Italy: ‘Let us be careful today not to underestimate the peril: the shadow has greatly advanced over Europe recently. Hitler, Dolfuss and Mussolini have either drowned in blood or subjected to corporal humiliation everything that formed the effort of generations straining towards a more tolerable and more worthy form of existence.’63 Neuwirth’s aesthetic enthusiasm for the heightened sensorial objectives of Surrealism is thus informed by a key Bretonian text that, alongside defining a surrealist sensorium that her opera echoes, also offers a forewarning of the dangers of Nazism, a registering of the historical trauma avant la lettre. In her interview with Jeffries, Neuwirth addresses another work of forewarning that exemplifies her interest in using classical musical forms to intervene in, and resurrect, historical events and contexts that resonate in terms of contemporary responses to trauma and repression. Her 2017 score for Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City without Jews) accompanies the restoration of a previously ‘lost’ silent film by the Austrian director H. K. Breslauer (1888–1965). The restored film and score premiered at a screening in Vienna in November 2018. Breslauer’s film contains what Neuwirth calls ‘unbearable scenes’.64 Made in 1924, it is based on a best-selling 1922 novel by the Austrian writer Hugo Bettauer (1872–1925) which imagines, and forewarns its audiences about the consequences of, the expulsion from Vienna of the city’s entire Jewish community. The film portrays the disastrous economic and cultural effects of this action, consequences that eventually lead to the city welcoming the return of the expelled people. Bettauer, an outspoken opponent of the then increasingly popular Austrian Nazi party, also wrote Die Freudlose Gasse (1924) which was filmed by G. W. Pabst and starred Greta Garbo in her first major screen role. The Nazis

61 Maurice Nadeau, ‘Foreword’ to The History of Surrealism, Richard Howard (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 36. Breton, What Is Surrealism?, p. 115. Cited in Neuwirth, ‘Music and peace’, pp. 108–9. 62 ‘Dies ist auch der Ansatzpunkt, der mich am Surrealismus reizt.’ Neuwirth, ‘Music and peace’, p. 109. 63 Breton, What Is Surrealism?, p. 114. 64 Jeffries, ‘Olga Neuwirth’.

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launched a campaign to smear him, and he was murdered by a Nazi supporter in March 1925.65 Commenting on Breslauer’s film, which prophetically imagines and predicts traumatic historical experience – the early stages of an impending holocaust – and both expresses it and seeks its resolution in aesthetic form, Neuwirth notes: ‘One of the most powerful scenes for me is of the Jews walking out of Vienna as it’s gathering dusk. When I was writing the score, I had to suppress my rage or else the film would have had music which is just an expression of my fury.’66 In engaging with such a pivotal text in the history of twentieth-century Austrian anti-Semitism, Neuwirth is careful here to distinguish between her emotional response to a cinematic (and thus fictional) representation of imagined events which nevertheless (with historical hindsight) can be seen to have occurred, and that response’s aesthetic expression in a musical composition which engages directly both with the film and what it reveals – the traumatic history of Austria’s deep and early involvement with Nazism. Within this careful differentiation we can discern motivations for her music’s movement across and between the wounds of a traumatic cultural memory that persists, revived in the ‘rediscovery’ of a ‘lost’ (filmic) text and its recomposition via her contemporary musical score. In contrasting the ‘suppression of rage’ with the ‘expression of fury’, and exploiting the tension between the ‘unspoken’ and its encoding as ‘nightmare’, Neuwirth draws attention to the double, conflicting demand placed upon the contemporary (musical) artist by the burden of responsibility in relation to historical trauma – a double demand with which her works constantly engage. Belatedness Bählamms Fest is composed and performed as the ‘last text’ in a sequence that ‘begins’ with Carrington’s play, itself a text already assimilating a range of precursor texts, including autobiographical narratives alongside fairytales like ‘Red Riding Hood’ and echoes of musical works like Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (1936). In foregrounding in terms of form and content its complex relation to these precursors, Neuwirth’s opera thus stages its own belatedness, emphasising both the advantages and problems of its post-memorial historical position. Problems of linguistic and intermedial translation impinge crucially on this network of textual and historical relations. Jean Laplanche argues that the Freudian notion of Nachträglichkeit, a concept fundamental to psychoanalytic theories of the belatedness of traumatic memory, presents a 65 See Martin Kitchen, ‘The murder of Hugo Bettauer’, Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism, 3:1 (June 2011), 225–41. See also: Gruber, Red Vienna, p. 164. 66 Jeffries, ‘Olga Neuwirth’.

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problem of translation, of resituating an unassimilated but disruptive or damaging experience into a context in which its effects become manifest as symptoms. The word Nachträglichkeit is variously (and thus problematically) translated by James Strachey (as ‘subsequently’, ‘later’, ‘deferred action’, etc.) in his English versions of Freud’s works (suggesting non-correspondence between the German word and several English equivalents), but Laplanche coins the term ‘Afterwardsness’ to name a concept he insists is ‘inconceivable without a theory of translation […] because the past already has something deposited in it that demands to be deciphered, which is the message of the other person’.67 Neuwirth’s emphasis on the temporal complexities of traumatic experience, recollection, and representation reinforce the point made by Roger Luckhurst in his summary of trauma theory, that ‘No narrative of trauma can be told in a linear way: it has a time signature that must fracture conventional causality’.68 The palimpsestic overlays representing Mrs Carnis’s memories in Bild 10 of Bählamms Fest are a case in point, demonstrating how Neuwirth and Jelinek exploit the multi-medial potentials of the ‘animation-opera’: Mrs Carnis (repeatedly interrupted by giggles): They won’t get you, my darling, my boy! One smooth, one purl, if only I were a little younger … What a wonderful night! My son a murderer …! (spoken) Me freezing to death! You morons … ha! (Suddenly all the lights go on in the salon) Strange … Who could have switched the lights on? (One hears old instruments playing, weird sounds, strange and distant.) Why, I know this music! Who is playing there? My God, the last time I heard this music was when … (A FILM is now playing on the projection screen. Mrs Carnis stiffly gets up and approaches the screen. During the following, she tries to touch the person on the screen, to get into contact with them.)69

The disruption of linear temporality by the intrusion of the past in the form of memory is here palimpsestically represented by multi-media overlays of speech, music, and 67 Jean Laplanche, ‘Notes on Afterwardsness’, in Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, John Fletcher (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 264–9; p. 269. 68 Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 9. 69 ‘Mrs. Carnis (immer wieder von Kichern unterbrochen): Sie werden dich nicht kriegen, mein Schatz, mein Junge! Eins glatt, eins verkehrt, wenn ich doch nur ein bißchen jünger wäre … Was für eine herrliche Nacht! Mein Sohn ein Mörder …! (gesprochen) Ich und erfrieren! Ihr Schwachköpfe … ha! (Plötzlich gehen im Salon alle Lichter an) Merkwürdig … Wer mag da bloß das Licht eingeschaltet haben? (Man hört alte Instrumente spielen, seltsame Klänge, fremd und fern.) Diese Musik kenne ich doch! Wer spielt denn da? Mein Gott, das letzte Mal, als ich diese Musik gehört habe, das war, als … (Auf der Reproleinwand fährt jetzt ein FILM ab. Mrs. Carnis starr erhebt sich und nähert sich der Leinwand. Sie versucht während des folgenden, die Person auf der Leinwand anzugreifen, mit ihr in Kontakt zu treten.)’ Jelinek, ‘Libretto’, p. 34.

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image projection. The ‘repeated interruption’ of laughter (which Neuwirth understands as a ‘state of exception’, an action ‘outside the law’ which ‘reveals the state of the illicit’)70 disrupts the conventional rhythms of nostalgic desire and knitting (‘one smooth, one purl’), and the intrusion of memory is marked by an interruptive change in lighting (‘suddenly’) and music both ‘weird’ and ‘strange and distant’, a double sensorial moment of disruption which stimulates the distinct but simultaneous responses of recognition (‘I know this music!’), enquiry (‘Who is playing there?’), and reminiscence (‘My God, the last time I heard this music was when …’). The film presents a literal screen memory, a projection of Mrs Carnis’s memory as a performance of the doubled self, stimulated by the music and her belated recollection of a crucial moment from her past. At this moment in Bählamms Fest time fractures, and the performance similarly splinters into different but overlapping media. Freudian Nachträglichkeit (which John Fletcher calls ‘the temporality of trauma’)71 and the Derridean notion of différance (difference and deferral) have provided ways of theorising such temporal ‘fracturing’, through which, Stacey Keltner argues, ‘Trauma signals the very disabling of our systems of representation, perception, the subject’s ‘positionality’ within language, and our understanding of time and experience.’72 Luckhurst’s use of the musical metaphor of the ‘time signature’ (the notational convention signifying the number of beats in a musical bar) covertly suggests the possibilities of musical form in the negotiation of these ‘disabling’ and ‘fracturing’ effects of trauma, and invites consideration of the specific potentials of musical temporality implicit in the notion of the time signature in relation to Neuwirth’s engagement with the uncanny temporalities of historical trauma. Tim Rutherford-Johnson has suggested, furthermore, that trauma itself is a key experience linking a wide range of different contemporary musical movements – a ‘shared ground’ that suggests ‘a connecting force’ between the various superficially distinct experimental musical forms favoured by composers like (for example) Steve Reich and Hildegard Westerkamp.73 Discussing her visit in 1986 to Frank Gehry’s house in Santa Monica, Neuwirth comments: ‘What occupies me about this architectural way of thinking is the understanding that through the simultaneous destruction of structure and form we arrive at a renewed construction’.74 An important element of this concern with ‘destruction’ 70 ‘Das Lachen ist der Ausnahmezustand. Es steht außerhalb des Gesetzes, es zeigt den Zustand des Verbotenen.’ Neuwirth, ‘Music and peace’, p. 111. 71 Fletcher, Freud and the Scene of Trauma, p. 241. 72 Stacey Keltner, ‘Review of Tina Chanter, Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger’, Research in Phenomenology, 33 (2003), 306–315; 311. 73 Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), pp. 18–19. 74 ‘Mich beschäftigt in dieser architectonischen Denkweise das Verständnis, durch Destruktion von Struktur und Form gleichzeitig zu einer erneuten Konstruktion zu gelangen.’ Olga Neuwirth, ‘Ideen

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and ‘renewal’ can be heard in Neuwirth’s musical attention to the soundscape indicated in Carrington’s play. Carrington provides a set of stage instructions which at times is elevated to thematic significance. In one notable sequence towards the end of the first act, for example, Theodora contemplates the decapitated sheep: ‘It must be amusing to kill sheep with the snow falling softly all around you, and all the sounds of the world muffled into a dead man’s language’. The stage directions note, ‘The silence is strained’ (‘eine unnatürliche Stille’, in Becker’s translation), and then ‘One hears a confused jangling of bells and the voices of a thousand sheep’ while ‘Henry, the black dog, bounds into the room yapping and foaming at the mouth’.75 The sequence presents a complex interplay of inside and outside wholly structured by contrasting auditory effects, from speech to silence, to the intrusion of disruptive external mechanical and animal sounds, and finally a further intrusion of a yapping dog (itself a hybrid figure, in both play and opera, of the domestic animal/human). Jelinek’s libretto directions for the operatic adaptation of this passage are specific and emphasise multi-mediality and simultaneity while narrowing the sensorium to allow the auditory to predominate: One hears the tinkling of bells, the sound of a huge flock of sheep. Tape! It gets louder and louder, then, by means of a projection – a repro screen must be integrated into the set design – a huge flock of sheep races across the heather and the room, so to speak. Henry the dog, this time more in his animal role (costume!), enters, panting, howling, and drooling. At the same time Theodora jumps out of the window. One hears the shattering of glass and sees her hurrying away across the heather, after the lambs.76

The result of such adaptation is an impressionistically audio-visual patchwork of musical and electronic effects and sonic and visual mediations. Action takes place principally through the sensorium of impressions created by technology, and sounds, voices, and images express both the distorted surreality of Carrington’s play and the allusive textual collage of Jelinek’s libretto.

für ein Raum-Musik-Projekt (London 2004)’, in Drees (ed.), Olga Neuwirth zwischen den Stühlen, pp. 262–3; p. 262. 75 Carrington, The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday, Act I, p. 10. 76 ‘Man hört Glockengebimmel, das Geblöke einer riesigen Schafherde. Tonband! Es wird immer lauter, dann, mittels Projektion – Reproleinwand muß im Bühnenbild integriert sein –, rast eine riesige Schafherde über die Heide und das Zimmer sozusagen hinweg. Henry, der Hund, diesmal mehr in seiner tierischen Rolle (Kostüm!), kommt hechelnd, jaulend und geifernd herein. Gleichzeitig springt Theodora aus dem Fenster. Man hört das Splittern von Glas und sieht sie über die Heide davoneilen, hinter den Lämmern her.’ Jelinek, ‘Libretto’, p. 23.

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Surrealist allusions: painting and music The libretto and musical texts of Bählamms Fest make extensive use of allusion to visual, written, and musical works, embedding the opera (as noted earlier) in a European tradition of cultural production that exceeds that of its source text in significant ways, fleshing out its structuring opposition between innocence and guilt by adding layers of historical and aesthetic significance to the action. Neuwirth’s Venetian Arbeitsjournal, for example, cites a series of paintings such as those by Tintoretto and Bellini mentioned earlier. The significant collections of Renaissance art in Venetian galleries, many of which Neuwirth would have visited during her stay, afford further insights into the processes of textual layering that characterise the opera. The motif of the lamb, in particular, is emphasised at various times during the compositional process, and Neuwirth’s engagement with painterly depictions of lambs informs the musical portrayal of the Lambs’ festival in the opera and its symbolic function as a performed spectacle of naive innocence, preyed upon by the Carnis family. On 2  November 1997 Neuwirth visited the church of the Madonna dell’Orto in Venice to see Tintoretto’s The Miracle of St Agnes (c.1563), commenting on the disconcerting modernity of the painting and its formal organisation: ‘Strange merging of yesterday and today. I am once again overwhelmed by the angels (oh, you putti and angels, my darlings!), this time in light blue robes. The sky is almost half of the picture.’77 In the centre of the painting, beside St Agnes (from the Latin Agnus, lamb, and root of the French word for lamb, l’agneau) and fixed in the same beam of divine light, Tintoretto has placed a lamb, one of the conventional attributes of this Roman saint, on whose saint day lambs are brought to be blessed by the Pope. Venice’s Galleria dell’Accademia also displays several Renaissance works that may have influenced Neuwirth’s conception of Bählamms Fest, including Bartolomeo Vivarini’s polyptych Polittico di Conversano (1475), with its cluster of lambs in the background of the central panel depicting the Nativity; Tiziano Vecellio’s depiction, influenced by Michelangelo, of St John the Baptist (c.1540–42), its lamb prominent in the lower left corner; and Giovanni Antonio De’Sacchis (Pordenone), whose Blessed Lorenzo Giustiniani with Two Canons and Saints Louis of Toulouse, Franc, Bernadino and John the Baptist (c.1528–32) depicts the saints gathering round to worship Christ the Lamb. On 8 October 1998, Neuwirth was in Antwerp, visiting the Royal Museum of Fine Arts to view Gillis Coignet’s St George the Great (1581), and commenting on how ‘the sheep’s gaze (am I already focussed on sheep because of Bählamm?) is 77 ‘Eigenartiges Verschmelzen von Gestern und Heute. Ich bin wieder einmal von den Engeln (ach, ihr Putten und Engel, ihr meine Lieblinge!), diesmal in hellblauen Gewändern, überwältigt. Der Himmel macht beinahe die Hälfte des Bildes aus.’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal pp. 14–15; p. 15.

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i­nnocently inclined downwards, but at the same time incredibly bold’.78 Coignet’s lamb stands beside a naked woman, the pair symbolising innocent vulnerability protected by St George’s slaying of the dragon. Such religious iconography influences key moments in Bählamms Fest, for example the treatment of Theodora’s response to the beheaded lamb which the Shepherd brings into the Carnis house in the first Act. Neuwirth and Jelinek have magnified and intensified the religious elements of Carrington’s play at such moments, satirically linking them to the distortions of religious sentiment mobilised by fascism. On seeing the lamb, Carrington’s Theodora says, ‘What a tender little beast, I would be tempted to bite his head off myself! What pretty little pointed feet …’.79 Jelinek’s reworking of this passage is densely allusive, transforming it from a revealing emotional response (and thus a key moment in the development of Theodora’s character) to a key element of the symbolic and political fabric of the opera. In Bild 3 of Bählamms Fest Jelinek’s Theodora says, ‘Wie zart, wie sanft, welch liebes Tier’,80 a phrase echoing the German language Bible’s Luke, 7: ‘Wie zart, wie sanft ist Marien’s Klage’ (‘How gentle, how soft is Maria’s lament’ [for the dead Christ]) (and thus foreshadowing the Black Lamb Mary, centrepiece of the Festival). This religious echo is combined with direct allusion, in parodically simple verse rhyme, to sadomasochistic paraphernalia: ‘Wie süß sie doch sind, die Hufe die kleinen … Stöckelschuhe aus Lack sollte man meinen …’ (‘How sweet they are, the little hooves, like lacquered high heels, one would think’). The libretto thus makes explicit through this conjunction of violence, religion, and sexuality the mother–whore complex associated with Christianity’s construction of femininity, expanding the significance of Carrington’s shepherd holding the headless lamb, itself an explicit Gothic-parodic version of Christ carrying the lamb, an image familiar from popular Catholic iconography. At several points in Bählamms Fest, fascism and fetish momentarily overlap, and the critique mobilised in this connection affirms Laura Mulvey’s assertion (discussing abjection in the work of Cindy Sherman) that fetishism ‘is a means of erasing history and memory’, but one which itself ‘has a history which may be deciphered’.81 In the Arbeitsjournal Neuwirth indicates another painting that influences her conception of the character of Philip Carnis:

78 ‘[…] der Blick des Schafes (bin ich wegen Bählamm schon auf Schafe fixiert?) ist unschuldig nach unten geneigt, aber gleichzeitig unheimlich keck.’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, p. 214. Neuwirth misnames the artist as ‘Gillis Coigrets’ and the painting as ‘Sebastian und der Drache’. 79 Carrington, The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday, Act I, p. 7. 80 Jelinek, ‘Libretto’, p. 22. 81 Laura Mulvey, ‘A phantasmagoria of the female body: the work of Cindy Sherman’, New Left Review, 188 (July/August 1991), 136–50; 150.

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I visit the Böcklin, de Chirico, and Max Ernst exhibition, A Journey into the Unknown in Munich, because it fits my music theatre problem. I particularly liked the pictures by Chirico and Ernst from the period in which they no longer paint any real space […]. Ernst’s House Angel from 1937 may serve as a suggestion for Philip in Bählamms Fest. Philip’s pointless, angry, automaton-like storming forward knows no beginning and no

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end. What remains is a deserted landscape … ‘Blood and War’ is evoked.82

Ernst’s Hausengel (also titled The Triumph of Surrealism and The Angel of Hearth and Home) was painted in response to the Republican defeat by the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and the destruction of Guernica on 26 April 1937. He described the title as ‘ironic’ for ‘a kind of Trampeltier [trampling animal, a word Neuwirth uses to describe the character of Philip Carnis] that destroys and annihilates everything that gets in its way’. The painting, he commented, offered ‘my impression of what might be going on in the world’.83 The template for Neuwirth’s use of the image as inspiration for the character of Philip, her own symbolic rendition of ‘what is going on in our world’, Ernst’s swastika-like form, a frenzied amalgam of human figure, dragon, and flapping clothes, swirls across a desolate landscape, a symbol of the chaos and destruction of the contemporary world. Where Jelinek has worked religious allusions into the libretto (for example through echoes of the German Lutheran hymn Christe, du Lamm Gottes, a popular text for musical setting in chorales by J. S. Bach, Mendelssohn, and others), Neuwirth’s music offers a correspondingly rich palimpsestic auditory experience that draws on a huge range of musical echoes and allusions. The Arbeitsjournal insistently cites key classical and popular works that occupy Neuwirth’s imagination during the process of composition. The Austrian modernist Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951) is a constant reference point and a key precursor to Neuwirth’s experimentalism, particularly the work with which he parted company with musical tradition: ‘I love Schönberg’s Second String Quartet in f sharp minor [op. 10, 1907–8]. I can’t describe it, but I feel like a soul mate to this composer at times. When “Oh you dear Augustin” begins 82 ‘Gehe in München in die Böcklin-, Chirico-, Max Ernst-Ausstellung “Eine Reise ins Ungewisse”, da sie gerade zu meiner Musiktheaterproblematik passt. Besonders gefallen haben mir die Bilder von Chirico und Ernst aus der Periode, in denen sie keinen wirklichen Raum mehr malen […]. Der Hausengel von Ernst aus dem Jahre 1937 möge als Anregung für Philip in Bählamms Fest dienen. Philips sinn­ loses, wütendes, automatenhaft entleertes Vorwärtsstürmen kennt keinen Anfang und kein Ende. Was zurückbleibt, ist eine menschenleere Landschaft … “Blut und Krieg” wird evoziert.’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, p. 119. 83 ‘[…] ein ironischer Titel für eine Art Trampeltier, das alles, was ihm in den Weg kommt, zerstört und vernichtet. Das war mein damaliger Eindruck von dem, was in der Welt wohl vor sich gehen würde’. Max Ernst, cited in Ulrich Bischoff, Max Ernst 1891–1976 – Jenseits der Malerei (Berlin: Taschen, 1987), p. 61.

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suddenly in the second sentence, you smile animatedly and get goosebumps at the same time’, she writes on 10 March 1998, expressing at the same time less enthusiasm for Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite (1925), except for its third movement, ‘which is always fascinating because it already points to another time’.84 Elsewhere she notes that some of her ‘key musical experiences’ include Schönberg’s major post-war memorial works, the cantata A Survivor from Warsaw (Op. 46, 1947) – one of the earliest responses in classical music to the Holocaust – and the unfinished opera Moses und Aron (1926–32; premiered in Zürich, 1957), a reworking of the Biblical Book of Exodus which Pierre Boulez (a friend of and major influence on Neuwirth) recorded twice.85 Moses und Aron engages with trauma in its concern with divine unrepresentability in language and music, exploring ‘the issue of the unpresentable God through the character of the biblical tongue-tied prophet, Moses’.86 These musical references inform Neuwirth’s own adaptations of modernist musical innovations. In ‘Music and Peace’ she describes the composition of certain passages in Bählamms Fest and draws our attention to another key musical allusion: In the prelude, in the short aftermath and sometimes in a flash, during the fifth Bild, in addition to many children’s toy instruments, horns and rattles, choral giggles and chuckles over loudspeakers, a children’s song, temporally modulated, is played by the orchestra. In addition, there is a distorted music box melody overlaid with glass sounds as a tape recording. This distorted melody seems shrill and symbolizes the lost childhood. To illustrate an unclear memory amalgam, a live-electronically modified tuba is used for these fragments, projected into the room. From all these overlays, two fragmented Yiddish nursery rhyme melodies by Mordechaj Gebirtig vaguely emerge. As a symbol for a world forever destroyed by extreme brutality, as well as a reflection of the time reference, namely 1940. With the melody ‘Huljet, huljet kinderlech, kolsmar ir sent noch jung, wajl fun friling bis zum winter is a kaznsprung’ and the other [titled ‘Kinder-jorn’], which sings of the sweet childhood years which will be remembered forever, may a certain kind of hope appear in contrast to barbarism and the brutal outside world.87 84 ‘Ich liebe Schönbergs Zweites Streichquartett in fis-moll. Ich kann es nicht beschreiben, aber ich fühle mich diesem Komponisten manchmal seelenverwandt. Wenn da so plötzlich im zweiten Satz “Oh du lieber Augustin” beginnt, lächelt man beseelt und bekommt gleichzeitig Gänsehaut.’ ‘Bergs Lyrische Suite ist nicht so mein Begehr, Ausnahme macht der dritte Satz, der immer wieder fasziniert, da er bereits in eine andere Zeit weist.’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, p. 92. 85 ‘Wenn ich daran denke, dass das Bläserquintett op. 26, Ein Überlebender aus Warschau und insbesondere Moses und Aaron musikalische Schlüsselerlebnisse für mich waren … .’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, p. 96. 86 Michal Ben-Horin, ‘The sound of the unsayable: Jewish secular culture in Arnold Schönberg and Aharon Appelfeld’, Religions, 10:334 (2019), n.p. 87 ‘Im Vorspiel, im kurzen Nachspiel und manchmal blitzartig, während des fünften Bildes selbst wird neben vielen Kinderspielzeuginstrumenten, Tröten und Klappern, chorischem Kichern und Glucksen

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This passage indicates the palimpsestic and technological complexity of Neuwirth’s composition, which utilises carnivalesque soundscapes remarkably similar to those described by Carolyn Birdsall in her survey of urban noise in late nineteenth-century German carnivals, noise which prompted repressive legislation: [C]ity authorities cracked down on masquerading, shouting, singing and playing out-of-

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tune instruments. Some of the more typical sounds described in the 1890s included horse whips, trumpets, crashes and the thuds of the goings-on (Strassentreiben), and rhythmic marching music led by three men with a harmonica, a triangle and a large drum […]. Among others, the ritual of the ‘Geese March Run’ (Gänsemarschlaufen), which involved playing of discordant sounds in the street, was banned in 1880 in Düsseldorf.88

Neuwirth dramatically contrasts her deconstructive version of such carnivalesque noise, generated by discordant and disconcerting technological effects, with the reassuring melodic simplicity provided by the folk tunes of the Polish poet Mordechai Gebirtig (1877–1942), who was murdered by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. Gebirtig’s Yiddish songs have performed the function of important musical mementoes of pre-Holocaust Jewish life, and were sung at social events held in the concentration camps, as Margarete Myers Feinstein records: The first concert of the Katzet-Teater in Belsen demonstrated the symbolic importance of song. The excited audience sang along to the opening number, ‘S’brennt’ (It’s Burning). Written by Mordechai Gebirtig in response to a 1936 pogrom, the song calls Jews to action: ‘Don’t stand there brother/Douse the fire!’ During the Holocaust, the Jewish resistance in Krakow adopted the song, and it was popular in the ghettos and concentration camps.89 über Lautsprecher, auch ein zeitlich verändertes Kinderlied vom Orchester wiedergegeben. Dazu kommt als Tonbandeinspielung eine verzerrte und mit Glasklängen überlagerte Spieluhrmelodie. Diese verzerrte Melodie wirkt schrill und symbolisiert die verlorene Kindheit. Zu diesen Fragmenten wird zur Verdeutlichung eines unklaren Erinnerungsamalgams eine live-elektronisch veränderte und in den Raum projizierte Tuba herangezogen. Aus all diesen Überlagerungen tauchen schattenhaft zwei fragmentierte jiddische Kinderliedermelodien von Mordechaj Gebirtig auf. Als Symbol für eine durch äußerste Brutalität für immer zerstörte Welt, sowie als Widerspiegelung des Zeitbezugs, nämlich 1940. Durch eine Melodie ‘Huljet, huljet kinderlech, kolsmar ir sent noch jung, wajl fun friling bis zum winter is a kaznsprung’ und die andere, in der die süßen Kinderjahre besungen werden, die ewig in Erinnerung bleiben, möge eine gewisse Art von Hoffnung als Gegensatz zur Barbarei und zur brutalen Außenwelt vermittelt werden.’ Neuwirth, ‘Music and peace’, p. 111. 88 Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, p. 69. 89 Margarete Myers Feinstein, ‘Reimagining the unimaginable – theatre, memory, and rehabilitation in the Displaced Persons Camps’, in David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist (eds), After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 39–54; p. 42.

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While David G. Roskies has critiqued ‘the genre of Holocaust song’, and the post-­ Holocaust usage of Gebirtig’s songs in particular, as ‘lyrical, communal, sanitized, and vaguely historical’,90 Neuwirth’s use of them in dynamic counterpoint to the brutal soundscapes of Bählamms Fest works to embed the opera more firmly in the tradition of memorial texts, alongside works like Schönberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, that counterpoint experimental and traditional musical forms to create powerful new soundscapes of trauma. The Wolf Man: palimpsest and trauma Alongside these pictorial and musical allusions and echoes, Neuwirth and Jelinek have made extensive use of a key set of textual resources to flesh out the figure of the werewolf Jeremy Carnis. These references cement the significance of Bählamms Fest as a key work in the traumatic surreal tradition, and indicate further the complexity of its engagement with the traumatic histories of Nazism in Austria. Carrington’s choice of the name ‘Carnis’ for her ‘perverse family’ plays into this network of significances in interesting ways. The Latin genitive noun for ‘meat’ or ‘flesh’, and linked etymologically (as Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us) to ‘carnival’ (hence ‘Baa-lamb’s holiday’) and to ‘carnal’ and ‘charnel’, with their connotations of sexual and mortal sin, the word also echoes ‘canis’ (dog), onomastically cementing the wolf–human relationship represented in the play. Carrington draws on werewolf legends popular in Germany and France, and she probably knew of Montague Summers’s book The Werewolf in Lore and Legend, which had been published in 1933, and which notes (during an  extensive discussion of the etymology of the word ‘werewolf’) the tendency of Latin and Greek authors to employ the circumlocution ‘verspellis’, meaning ‘transformation’, citing as an example ‘the history of Barlaam and Josaphat, formerly ascribed to S. Gregory Nanzianzen’.91 Carrington’s writings frequently feature wolves and wolfmen as objects of feminine desire and anxiety. A prominent example occurs in the undated and posthumously published short story ‘Jemima and the Wolf’, where Jemima, hidden in a large tree, sees her father, Ferdinand, walking in the garden with a man: ‘It seemed to her that this man had the head of a wolf’.92 The narrative later refers to him as ‘The wolf-man’, before he is introduced by her father to Jemima as ‘Ambrose Barbary’ (like ‘Carnis’, an etymologically suggestive name). Later we read that ‘All night she had nightmares in which Wolf’s head appeared, but attached now

90 David G. Roskies, ‘Dividing the ruins – communal memory in Yiddish and Hebrew’, in Cesarani and Sundquist (eds), After the Holocaust, pp. 82–101; p. 86. 91 Montague Summers, The Werewolf in Lore and Legend (New York: Dover Publications, 2003), p. 30. 92 Carrington, The Debutante and Other Stories, pp. 88–101; p. 90.

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to a long grey furry body. Sometimes he was a wolf, sometimes a fox or other animal, sometimes the body of all animals mixed with his own’.93 Tara Plunkett has analysed this text in terms of Carrington’s exploration of ‘exquisite corpses and hybrid bodies’, comparing the author’s hybrid characters to Bakhtin’s descriptions of the grotesque.94 These carnivalesque and hybridical dimensions, and the sexual and filial anxieties they symbolically express, clearly animate the werewolf figure of Jeremy Carnis in The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday and his revision in Bählamms Fest. The preoccupations of Nazism with lycanthropy, a significant theme of German folklore, offer further historical contexture to Carrington’s play. Eric Kurlander’s Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich comments extensively on the Reich’s efforts to appropriate the figure of the werewolf from Teutonic myth, noting ‘the Weimar-era Werewolf (Wehrwolf) paramilitary organisation, to which many Nazis belonged’. This  ­organisation was inspired by the 1910 novel Wehrwolf by Hermann Löns ­(1866–1914), a best-selling new edition of which had been published in 1934, following the nationalistically motivated efforts of the Nazi party to return Löns’s body from its grave in France to Germany.95 The book’s popularity was exploited by the Nazis late in the war to encourage Hitler Youth to engage in terrorist or ‘Wehrwolf’ actions against the liberating Allied forces. Kurlander furthermore comments on Hitler’s obsession (noted in the previous chapter) with wolves: ‘Hitler, whose first name derives from “father wolf”, enthusiastically appropriated the (were-) wolf metaphor throughout his life. He compared himself to a wolf on more than one occasion […]. [He] also employed the (were-) wolf metaphor in praising the Hitler Youth as well as his stormtroopers’. He then quotes Robert Eisler, who ‘speculates that Hitler ‘suffered from a cyclothymic manic-depressive psychosis’, which explained his apparent ‘lycanthropic’ emotional transformation into ‘an accursed state of a predatory werewolf or lion man’.96 If one of the historical figures suggested by Carrington’s Jeremy Carnis may be Adolf Hitler, another is surely the ‘Wolf Man’ (der Wolfsmann) of Freud’s famous case history, published in 1918 as Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose (From the History of an Infantile Neurosis). The Wolf Man case is fundamental to Freud’s elaboration of his theory of the primal scene (the experience of witnessing parental copulation that, Freud surmised, formed the child’s foundational but pre-conscious 93 Carrington, The Debutante and Other Stories, pp. 91, 93, 94. 94 Tara Plunkett, ‘Riding along the edge: the shifting subjectivities of Leonora Carrington’s hybrids’, in Ailsa Cox, Roger Shannon, James Hewison, and Michelle Man (eds), Leonora Carrington: Living Legacies (Wilmington, DE and Malaga: Vernon Press, 2020), pp. 41–60; pp. 45–6. See also Susan Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (London: Lund Humphries, 2010). 95 Eric Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 278. Löns was killed in action on 26 September 1914 at Loivre, near Reims in France. 96 Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters, p. 277.

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trauma, an experience that persisted not as memory but as symptomatic repetition). The various autobiographical narratives and other accounts of the Wolf Man comprise (like many of Freud’s case histories) a kind of palimpsestic text enriched by the wealth of critical responses and supplementary texts it has generated, including psychoanalytic analyses of Freud’s own psychoanalytic reading, such as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Török’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word (1976, translated 1986).97 Commenting on his own post-analysis autobiographical contributions to this canon, the Wolf Man himself (the Russian aristocrat Sergei Konstantinovitch Pankejeff, 1886–1979) calls them ‘a small family novel’ and confirms he has ‘given preference to the “epic” element’,98 terms partially echoed in Neuwirth’s description (noted earlier) of Bählamms Fest as ‘a wild epic relating the story of a perverse family structure’. John Fletcher describes Freud’s case study as ‘a tour de force demonstration of the centrality of a given scene  –  […] a dream scene […] – to a range of psychical productions, from symptoms to artworks’.99 Pankejeff’s ‘small family novel’ closely parallels the traumatic history of twentieth-century Europe, as Peter Brooks notes: ‘He lived through the individual and collective disasters of two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution in his native Russia, the Nazi Anschluss in Austria, economic inflation, devaluation, and destitution, his wife’s suicide, the demise of his two principal psychoanalysts, Freud and Ruth Mack Brunswick, and the persistence to the end of evident obsessional traits’.100 His psychoanalysis began in 1910 and ended in early July 1914, a few days after the assassination in Sarajevo of Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, which triggered the outbreak of the First World War. He returned to Vienna in 1919 as a destitute émigré, and was financially supported by Freud and the city’s psychoanalytic circle. His German wife Therese committed suicide by gassing shortly after the Anschluss in 1938 – one of ‘a wave of suicides’ in Vienna at that time.101 The Wolf Man’s memoir ends on 3 September 1939, the day of the outbreak of the Second World War. In the Arbeitsjournal, Neuwirth notes the significance for her conception of Bählamms Fest of the Wolf Man’s (auto-)biographical and psychoanalytic narrative, noting parallels between his life and that of Leonora Carrington: ‘Simultaneous life disasters for Carrington and the Wolf Man after 1939 across the continent’.102 She  97 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Török, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, Nicholas Rand (trans.) (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).  98 Muriel Gardiner, ‘The Wolf-Man grows older’, in Gardiner (ed. and trans.), The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud, pp. 358–82; p. 367.  99 Fletcher, Freud and the Scene of Trauma, p. 221. 100 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), p. 250. 101 Pankeyev, ‘The memoirs of the Wolf Man’, p. 136. 102 ‘[…] gleichzeitige Lebenskatastrophen von Carrington und des Wolfsmannes nach 1939 über den Kontinent hinweg.’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, p. 71.

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cites ‘the forlornness and confusion of the Wolf Man’,103 among other works she notes as relevant intertexts for Carrington’s experience in France. These include Lion Feuchtwanger’s Der Teufel in Frankreich (The Devil in France, 1940) and Muriel Gardiner’s Code Name Mary (1983). Munich-born Feuchtwanger (1884–1958), author of the international best-seller Jud Süss (1925) and an early critic of the German Nazi party (along with Heinrich Mann and Ernst Toller, he was listed on Hitler’s first Ausbürgerungsliste in August 1933, and thus rendered stateless), had lived in Grunewald in Berlin in the early 1930s (shortly after Unica Zürn’s parents divorced and sold their house there). He wrote in The Devil in France of his internment in Les Milles in 1939–40 (and eventual escape to America), which overlapped with that of Max Ernst: ‘There were many painters there, painters of every sort and of every degree of eminence – Max Ernst, for instance, one of the founders of Surrealism; then, a portraitist of great reputation (though his work always strove too hard for effects to suit my taste)’.104 Muriel Gardiner (1901–85), a wealthy Chicago-born American who travelled to Vienna in 1926 hoping to be psychoanalysed by Freud, but was rejected by him, eventually married the socialist and anti-Nazi campaigner Joseph Buttinger. She was resident in Austria during the period of social unrest in the late 1920s which so influenced Elias Canetti. Code Name Mary recounts her time from 1934 working undercover in Austria, offering sanctuary to Jewish fugitives and smuggling false passports.105 She also contributed a major series of texts to the palimpsestic history of the Wolf Man. In ‘Music and Peace’ Neuwirth refers us to Gardiner’s later work on the Wolf Man: Theodora is very young, and what we wanted to show at the end is analogous to what Muriel Gardiner, an American psychoanalyst, has written in her essay ‘The Wolf Man grows older’ about Sigmund Freud’s first case study, The Wolf Man. This man was in his very early years under Freud’s treatment, but after Freud’s death had to live the rest of his long life with his illness, and still, or precisely because of it, he had to fight to lead a liberated life of his own and to find peace of mind.106 103 ‘[…] Verlorenheit und Verwirrtheit des Wolfsmannes.’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, p. 71. 104 Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940, Elisabeth Abbott (trans.) (New York: Viking Press, 1941), p. 59. 105 Walter Roth, ‘A courageous granddaughter of Nelson Morris’, Chicago Jewish History, 32:2 (Spring 2008), 6–7. 106 ‘Theodora ist sehr jung, und was wir nun am Ende aufzeigen wollten, ist analog zu dem was Muriel Gardiner, eine amerikanische Psychoanalytikerin, in ihrem Artikel “The wolfman grows older” über Sigmund Freuds erste Fallstudie “The wolfman”, geschrieben hat. Dieser Mann war in ganz frühen Jahren in Behandlung bei Freud, mußte dann aber nach Freuds Tod noch sein gesamtes langes Leben mit seiner Krankheit verbringen und dennoch, oder gerade deshalb darum ringen,

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She adumbrates the importance of this connection, and again links it to Carrington, in the Arbeitsjournal: Reading Muriel Gardiner’s The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud completely exhausts me. That’s a terrifying case study over so many years. The Wolf-man’s first dream interests me because of Bählamm. White wolves in the trees, absolute silence before they jump through

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the window: fear of the father … Leonora Carrington must have known this case study. Why were the wolves white? It reminded him of the large flock of sheep that was kept in the neighbourhood. Even lambs. By the way – I definitely have to transcribe the howling analyses and send them to the countertenor, Watts.107

Gardiner, who had first met the Wolf Man in 1929, recalls helping him, at that time a stateless Russian émigré, obtain exit visas from Austria to France and England: ‘I realized again that he was as much in danger of destruction from within as were my Jewish friends from Nazi brutality and the concentration camps’.108 Her memoir ‘Meetings with the Wolf-Man (1938–1949)’ is interrupted by the American entry into the war after Pearl Harbor in December 1941, only resuming in 1945. The Wolf Man’s wartime experience thus constitutes a lacuna in Gardiner’s account as well as his own, and is only retrospectively addressed when he and Gardiner eventually meet again in the devastated post-war landscape of Austria, ‘in the shattered, bombed-out railway station of Linz on a beautiful Sunday morning in August, 1949’.109 The war is thus a silent interruption, a moment of historical erasure or forgetting, in the various accounts of the Wolf Man’s life, only belatedly filled in by subsequent recollections summarised by Gardiner in a single sentence: ‘He had suffered perhaps less than many others under the Nazis, being neither politically interested nor interesting to them, and he had not been in an age group to have to take any active part in the war.’110 The Wolf Man’s own account of his analysis by Freud (in which he interestingly notes

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ein eigenes, befreites Leben zu führen und Seelenfrieden zu finden.’ Neuwirth, ‘Music and peace’, p. 110. ‘Die The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud Lektüre von Muriel Gardiner macht mich ganz fertig. Das ist ja eine erschreckende Fallstudie über so viele Jahre hinweg. Der erste Traum des Wolfmannes interessiert mich wegen Bählamm. Weiße Wölfe in den Bäumen, absolute Stille, bevor sie durchs Fenster springen: Angst vor dem Vater … Leonora Carrington muss diese Fallstudie gekannt haben. Warum die Wölfe weiß waren? Es erinnerte ihn an die große Schafherde, welche in der Nachbarschaft gehalten wurde. Schäfchen auch noch. By the way – ich muss unbedingt noch die Wolfgeheul-Analysen ­transkribieren und dem Countertenor Watts schicken.’ Neuwirth, Arbeitsjournal, p. 60. Muriel Gardiner, ‘Meetings with the Wolf-Man (1938–1949)’, in Gardiner (ed. and trans.), The WolfMan and Sigmund Freud, pp. 335–42; p. 338. Gardiner, ‘Meetings with the Wolf-Man (1938–1949)’, p. 340. Gardiner, ‘Meetings with the Wolf-Man (1938–1949)’, p. 341.

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that ‘Freud had no affinity to music’)111 draws attention to the palimpsestic layering or sedimentation of the psyche in Freudian theory, emphasising the well-known metaphor comparing the excavation of psychic layers performed by psychoanalysis with the analogous procedures of archaeology: ‘Freud himself explained his love for archaeology in that the psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist in his excavations, must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche, before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures’.112 Reading the Wolf Man narratives as traumatic, palimpsestic registers of pre-war and wartime experience, Neuwirth and Jelinek emphasise the symbolic potential of the Wolf Man’s famous traumatic childhood dream of ‘six or seven’ white wolves sitting in a walnut tree,113 which clearly resonates symbolically in relation to key scenes in Carrington’s play (Carrington writes of Jeremy: ‘His head is as strange as his intense whiteness, it is the head of a wolf’).114 Narratologists like Peter Brooks and Jonathan Culler have focussed on this dream as a textual sign or site of the confused temporality of trauma, questioning whether the dream was a response to an earlier trauma (as Freud insisted) or, instead, itself the prior traumatic experience that stimulated the Wolf Man’s neurosis – is the dream cause or effect?115 As Nicholas Rand points out, this tension raises the question of whether the Wolf Man’s symptoms should be understood as a result of trauma or fantasy, a question Freud’s repeated return in several subsequent writings to the case of the Wolf Man failed to resolve.116 Sergei Pankejeff was born on 24 December 1866 (just as Carrington’s play is set around the feast of Christmas). John Fletcher emphasises the importance of this religious-cultural context to Freud’s analysis of the Wolf Man’s dream: A further late contribution from the Wolf Man helps establish with more specificity the immediate context of the dream: ‘The tree was a Christmas tree,’ from which Freud infers, ‘He now knew that he had dreamt the dream shortly before Christmas and in expectation of it.’ As Christmas Day was also his birthday, ‘he had gone to sleep, then, in tense 111 Sergei Pankeyev, ‘My recollections of Sigmund Freud’, in Gardiner (ed. and trans.), The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud, pp. 153–70; p. 163. 112 The Wolf-Man, ‘My recollections of Sigmund Freud’, p. 157. 113 The dream is recounted in Sigmund Freud, ‘From the history of an infantile neurosis’, in The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 9: Case Histories II, Angela Richards (ed.), James Strachey (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 227–366; p. 259. 114 Carrington, The Baa-Lamb’s Holiday, Act II Scene ii, p. 16. 115 See Peter Brooks, ‘Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and narrative understanding’, in Reading for the Plot, pp. 264–85; Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 179–82. 116 See Nicholas Rand, ‘Translator’s preface’, in Abraham and Török, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, pp. lv–lvi.

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‘a Christmas dream that had gone badly wrong’.117

Carrington’s Jeremy and Theodora lurk in a tree before attacking the Sheeps’ Festival (echoing Jemima’s hiding in a tree in the short story ‘Jemima and the Wolf’, noted earlier), and Jelinek’s libretto retains this detail in Bild 8, later adding another Gothic detail in describing Jeremy ‘in the tree, like Nosferatu’, thus conflating his vulpine qualities with those of the vampire bat: As she continues, one notices movement in the tree. A creature there begins to flap its wings. A huge bird? Only after a while does it become apparent that it is Jeremy, with Theodora. Jeremy is wearing a long white nightgown and above it two wings. He has a false beard and carries a trumpet. Theodora is disguised as a minor saint. They stand hand in hand, like large birds, above the sheep that continue to celebrate their feast in unsuspecting bliss!118

This image of predatory threat, masked in the garb of religious sublimity deriving from devotional art, palimpsestically merging Gothic and Christian allusions alongside musical and visual effects in its reworking of Carrington’s wartime drama, offers a suitable allegory of the Nazi horror shadowing Europe as Carrington wrote her play, and epitomises the blackly humorous response of Bählamms Fest to the traumas of Austrian history consequent on the nation’s continuing failure to confront its past. Neuwirth and Jelinek have constructed in Bählamms Fest a complex performative engagement with this failure and its historical resonances. In reworking Carrington’s play, and working into that reworking allusions to and echoes of key texts in the continuing documentation of the historical atrocities of Nazism, they register in the fractured, icy, surreal soundscapes and vistas of the opera the tremors of traumas historically ever more distant but still powerfully resonant in the cultural and political life of contemporary Austria. They furthermore articulate through this registering a threat (‘This music can produce in itself that which is dreadful and threatening, it can make heard wherefrom that which is so frightful comes’, as Jelinek puts it),119 117 Fletcher, Freud and the Scene of Trauma, pp. 236–7. 118 ‘Während sie weiterspricht, bemerkt man eine Bewegung im Baum. Ein Wesen dort beginnt, mit den Flügeln zu schlagen. Ein riesiger Vogel? Erst nach einiger Zeit wird sichtbar, daß es sich um Jeremy handelt, mit Theodora. Jeremy trägt ein langes weißes Nachthemd und darüber zwei Flügel. Er hat einen falschen Bart und eine Trompete bei sich. Theodora ist als mindere Heilige verkleidet. Sie stehen Hand in Hand, wie große Vögel, über den Schafen, die in nichtsahnender Glückseligkeit ihr Fest weiterfeiern!’ Jelinek, ‘Libretto’, p. 31. 119 ‘Diese Musik kann in sich selbst herstellen, was furchtbar und bedrohlich ist, sie kann hören lassen, woher es kommt, was da so furchterregend ist’. Elfriede Jelinek, ‘Musik und Furcht’, in Drees (ed.), Olga Neuwirth zwischen den Stühlen, pp. 120–2; p. 121.

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embodied in the predatory Carnis family and their inherited decadence, to the ­social-democratic fabric of the country – a threat re-emerging in the political landscape of late ­twentieth-century Austria. Bählamms Fest, a large-scale, multi-medial artwork deeply and productively informed by the traditions of Surrealism, offers the latest example in this discussion of post-war art and writing by Germanophone women of how these traditions have mobilised historically specific responses to traumas that still, decades later, trouble the cultural and political landscapes of Germanophone nations and, on occasion, threaten their social-democratic consensus. Manifest in a variety of forms in work by Meret Oppenheim in the 1940s, Unica Zürn in the 1940s and 1950s, Birgit Jürgenssen in the 1970s, and Bady Minck, Olga Neuwirth, and Elfriede Jelinek at the end of the twentieth century and the start of the next, the tradition of the traumatic surreal describes different but interconnected aesthetic responses to this failure, which emerges historically as one of the key defining characteristics of postwar Germanophone cultures and an insistent, and repeatedly critically occluded, concern of their art. The women artists and writers explored in this book, acting (in Oppenheim’s metaphor) as seismographic registers of these deep tremors of history, demonstrate the continuing relevance of the innovations and insights of Surrealism and its traditions in affording methods, strategies, and practices that enable the confrontation of complex historical legacies of guilt and responsibility, complicity and evasion, repression and concealment. The analyses in this book have traced some of the ways in which the works of these artists engage directly with their historical contexts, or refract their engagements into indirect, or historically distanced, responses through palimpsestic or intertextual allusions to and reworkings of older texts and artworks, or revisionary reclamations and reconsiderations of shattering events that have been partially erased from, or written out of, the historical record. In their negotiations of distorted perceptions of temporality and memory in particular, but also in their continuing concern with the residues in post-war women’s experience of historical forms of oppression, many of these works respond to the persistent after-effects of traumatic experiences encountered at national and cultural, as well as (in some cases) private and personal, levels. In doing so they exploit the potentials of the immense and endlessly shifting creative reservoirs of surrealist thought – its emphasis on the power of the fragmentary or oneiric, its sense of the subversive potentials of psychoanalysis and other modes of enquiry, its alertness to the disturbing densities of symbolism latent in apparently mundane, everyday ­experiences – to articulate in art wartime and post-war traumas that continue to resonate culturally and politically. At the same time, they indicate new ways of considering Surrealism’s insistent relevance as a mode of enquiry combining artistic, psychological, and political interventions. Repositioning these women artists in

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r­ elation to the traumatic contexts that have shaped their aesthetics, and c­ harting the evolution of these aesthetic responses across generations, allow the clearer emergence of the contours of a different history of post-war Surrealism, expressed in works by Germanophone women artists across several generations – the history of the­ traumatic surreal.

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Index Abraham, Nicolas 228 Adorno, Theodor W. 17–18, 72, 95, 169, 172, 215 Allmer, Konrad 147 Anschluss (Austria) 117, 123–4, 137–40, 147, 163, 175, 194, 228 Applebe, Victoria 83, 95 Apter, Emily 152–3 Arendt, Hannah 72, 73–4, 79–80, 160–2, 167 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) 79 Art, David 198 Artaud, Antonin 117, 173 Assmann, Aleida 71, 124 Attersee, Christian 130 Bachmann, Ingeborg 72 Bacon, Francis 14 Badewanne cabaret (Berlin) 23, 82–5, 92 and Surrealism 83–4 Bady, Aaron 103 Baer, Elizabeth 70 Bakhtin, Mikhail 226 Baldner, Karen 38 Barbour, Charles 104–5, 108 Barr, Alfred H. 30 Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism (MoMA, New York, 1936) 30 Bart-Gewald, Jan 77–8 Barth, Theodor 53 Barthes, Roland 185 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein) (1925) 179 Baumann, Fritz 56 Becker, Heribert 206, 220 Beckermann, Ruth 139–40 The Missing Image (2015) 139–40 Beginning, The (Albertina, Vienna, 2020) 119 Bellini, Giovanni 201, 221

Bellmer, Hans 23, 82, 83, 89, 96, 100, 141, 210 Belton, Robert J. 30–1, 35, 36, 62 Benjamin, Andrew 16 Benjamin, Walter 26, 162, 174, 178, 191, 208 ‘Angel of History’ 26, 162, 178, 191 Berg, Alban 224 Bergen, Doris L. 121 Berger, Marcel 2 Bernhard, Thomas 199 Bettauer, Hugo 216–17 Binding, Rudolph 76 Birdsall, Caroline 206–7, 225 Blanchot, Maurice 101 Bloch, Ernst 7–8 Bodmer, Walter (Gruppe 33) 51 Böll, Heinrich 20–1 Borchhardt-Birbaumer, Brigitte 120 Bose & Brinkmann 97 Boulez, Pierre 200, 224 Boyd, Julia 165 Brandt, Bettina 42 Bratton, Susan Power 132 Brecht, Bertolt 79 Breitenbach, Josef 7 Brenner, Eva 163 Bresslauer, H. K. 216 Die Stadt ohne Juden (1924) 216–17 Breton, André 1–4, 8, 30–1, 69, 207, 215–16 Nadja (1928) 4, 16, 18 ‘What is Surrealism?’ (1934) 215–16 Brockmann, Stephen 79 Bronfen, Elisabeth 36, 44, 113 Brooks, Peter 228, 231 Brus, Günter 156 Buck, Louisa 117 Buñuel, Louis 179

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Burger, Natascha 120 Bürgi, Dominique 49 Burri, Michael 177 Cahun, Claude 59 Camaro, Alexander 82–4, 98 Camenisch, Paul (Gruppe 33) 51 Camus, Albert 8 Canetti, Elias 25, 180–91, 200, 229 Die Blendung (Auto da Fé) (1935) 187–8 Die Fackel im Ohr (The Torch in my Ear) (1980) 187 Masses und Macht (Crowds and Power) (1961) 185 Carrington, Leonora 26–7 Baa-Lamb’s Holiday, The (1940) 26, 205–34 plot 207–8 textual history of 205–6 ‘Bird Superior, Max Ernst, The’ (1942) 210 Down Below (1943) 210, 211 ‘Jemima and the Wolf’ (2017) 226–7, 232 ‘Oval Lady, The’ (1939) 212–13 Portrait of M. E. (1940) 210 Caruth, Cathy 40–1, 109, 124, 139 Cayrol, Jean 163 Celan, Paul 20, 38, 94, 104–5 Chadwick, Whitney 35 Charles Ratton gallery (Paris) 29 Chien Andalou, Un (Dalí and Buñuel) (1929) 179 Cocteau, Jean 60 Coignet, Gillis 221–2 Cox, Neil 141 Cronenberg, David 170 Culler, Jonathan 231 Cuomo, Glenn R. 80 Curiger, Bice 49, 59, 62 Dalí, Salvador 100, 144–5, 179 Deleuze, Gilles 94 Der Herr Karl (Qualtinger and Merz) (1961) 139 Derrida, Jacques 19, 22, 104, 110, 208, 219 De’Sacchis, Giovanni Antonio 221 Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste 50 Doehle, Helene (Helene Pauline Heerdt) (Zürn) 75–8, 81

Index Doehle, Richard Heinrich 77 Drees, Stefan 202–3, 213–14 ‘Dr Nachstrom’ (B. Fleischmann and Walter Brantner) 189 Durozoi, Gérard 3 Eine Frau in Berlin (Anon., 1954) 73 Eisenstein, Sergei 179 Ende, Edgar 7 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 165 Ernst, Max 6, 36, 209–10, 212, 223, 229 Hausengel (1937) 223 Erinnerungslandschaft (Koshar) 171–2 Erzberg (Austria) 26, 160, 163–7, 169, 174, 189, 194 EXPORT, VALIE 119, 120, 125, 156, 191 MAGNA: Feminismus: Kunst und Kreativität (Herbstsalon, Vienna, 1975) 119 Unsichtbare Gegner (1976) 191 Feinstein, Margarete Myers 225 Fellini, Federico 114 Feuchtwanger, Lion 229 The Devil in France (1940) 229 ‘fictual’ (Michaud) 101ff Fini, Leonor 35, 56 Finkelheim, Norman G. 25 Fischer, Isabel 83, 85 Fletcher, John 213, 219, 231 Foster, Hal 96 Foucault, Michel 179 Frankenstein, Wolfgang 84 Selbstmordnummern (1949) 84 Frehner, Matthias 32–4 Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) 116, 198–9 Freud, Sigmund 144, 217–18, 227–33 Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose (‘The Wolf Man’) (1918) 227–32 ‘Fetishism’ (1927) 144 Friedlander, Saul 103 Frisch, Max 187–8 Frischenschlager, Friedhelm (FPÖ) 116 Fritz, Nicole 120 Furtwängler, Wilhelm 175, 194 Futscher, Edith 111, 114

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Index Galerie Dada (Zürich) 56 Galerie Gerd Rosen (Berlin) 82, 85 n. 63, 92 Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna) 113 Galerie Maeght (Paris) 22 García, María Amalia 52 Gardner, Belinda Grace 29–30, 35 Gardiner, Muriel 229–32 Code Name Mary (1983) 229 Meetings with the Wolf Man 1938–1949 (1973) 230 Gebirtig, Mordechai 225–6 Gedeye, G. E. R. 137 Genevieve of Brabant 47, 58 Gert, Valeska 1–5, 8, 18, 19, 92–3 Danses surréalistes 1–5, 6, 8–9 Ich bin eine Hexe (1989) 92 Pause 9–10 La Diseuse 9, 11 Gilliam, Terry 170 Gilmore, Leigh 103 Goebbels, Joseph 193 Goering, Hermann 163–4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 65, 92, 97 Faust 65, 92 Golem legend (and Oppenheim) 69–70 Goll, Claire 7 Goll, Yvan (Ivan) 1–4, 7, 10 Manifeste du surréalisme (1924) 10–11 Graml, Gundolf 165 Grass, Günter 94 Grzimek, Waldemar 84 Buchenwald (c. 1950) 84 Gsoels-Lorensen, Jutta 115 Guggenheim, Peggy 210 Gush, Rose-Anne 191 Haider, Jörg 198, 202 Hammond, Paul 175 Harand, Ingeborg (Jürgenssen) 115 Harand, Leopoldine 118 Hare, David 8 Hartman, Geoffrey 94 Hauser, Kaspar 57–71, 92 Hausner, Jessica 167 Amour Fou (2019) 167 Heldt, Werner 84–5 Tür (c. 1946) 85 Hell, Bodo 167, 175, 182, 184 Helmer, Oskar 122

257 Hennings, Emmy-Ball 58–9 Gefängnis (1919) 59 Märchen im Kamin (1943) 59 Henze, Hans Werner 82–3 Herzog, Werner 69, 92 Jeder für sich und Gott gegen Alle (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) (1974) 69, 92 Himmler, Heinrich 25, 117 Hirsch, Marianne 38 Hitchcock, Alfred 100 Hitler, Adolf 8, 42, 175, 192–3, 227 Hocke, Gustav René 86 Hoff, Ann 211 Hoffmeister, Gerhart 95 Horkheimer, Max 172 Horwitz, Gordon J. 173 Hrdlicka, Alfred 137–40 Mahnmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus (1988) 137–40, 166 Hubert, Renée Riese 101 Hurdes, Felix (Dr) 122–3 Imhoff, Dominik 36–8 Indiana, Gary 101 ‘inner emigration’ 20, 23, 79–80 Irigaray, Luce 100–1 Isherwood, Christopher 179 Jacobs, Frederika H. 142, 152 Jameson, Fredric 88 Jandl, Ernst 184–5, 189 Jaspers, Karl 73–6, 81, 162 Die Schuldfrage (1946) 74 Jeffries, Stuart 198, 216 Jelinek, Elfriede 26, 115, 163, 197–234 Jensen, Meg 103 Joris, Pierre 95 Jürgenssen, Birgit 9–10, 22, 24–5, 27, 109–62, 163, 233 anna-tommie (1972) 142–4 Bodenschrubben (1975) 24, 134–40 and the Reibpartien 137–40 Bügeln (1975) 125 Das Tier (1978) 128–30 Fensterputzen (1975) 125 Frau (1972) 9–10, 12 Hausfrau (1974) 132–4 Hausfrau drawings 114, 125–40

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258 Jürgenssen, Birgit (cont.) human-animal hybrids 126–32 Ich möchte hier raus! (1976) 109–14, 125 Mit der Bahn heute in eine bessere Zukunft (1973) 25, 125, 153–62 Ohne Titel (Körperprojection) (1988) 147 Rückgratveränderung (1974) 147 Schuhwerke (1973–76) 25, 140–53 Unter dem Pantoffel (1976) 25, 142 Jürgenssen, Olaf Johann Oskar 115–18 marriage to Ingeborg Harand (1945) 117 wartime experience 115–17 Kafka, Franz 42, 58, 182, 185 ‘Kahlschlag’ (Richter) 86 Kaltenbrunner, Ernst 117 Kaplan, E. Ann 35, 179, 180, 189 Karajan, Herbert von 175 Keltner, Stacey 219 Kiefer, Anselm 16 Kiesler, Frederick 8 Kitchen, Martin 60 Kittler, Friedrich 190 Klemperer, Victor 93–4 Klünner, Lothar 73 Koonz, Claudia 132 Koshar, Rudi 171 Kraus, Karl 200 Krauss, Rosalind 17, 67 Kreuder, Ernst 86 Die Gesellschaft von Dachboden 86 Krondorfer, Björn 38 Kurlander, Eric 227 Lancelin, Geneviève 47 Langgässer, Elisabeth 80 Langston, Richard 19–20 Laplanche, Jean 217–18 Lassnig, Maria 119 Laupenmühlen, Erich 81–2 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 94–5 Leed, E. J. 93 Levi, Erik 175, 192, 193–4 Levi, Primo 152 Lieux de mémoire (Nora) 172–4, 177, 194 Lindgren, Astrid 98 Löns, Hermann 227 Wehrwolf (1910) 227

Index Lorenz, Dagmar C. G. 140, 188 Lowe, Keith 72 Luckhurst, Roger 4, 218–19 Ludi, Regula 31, 51 Lyford, Amy 18–19 Lynch, David 214 Magritte, René 151 Mahon, Alyce 8 Malt, Johanna 144 Mammen, Jeanne 85, 92 Tür zum Nichts (c. 1945) 85 Manning, Jody 137 Man Ray 40 Érotique-voilée (1933) 67–9 Mann, Thomas 75, 79, 182 Mauthausen concentration camp 160, 164, 173 Mayröcker, Friederike 182–5 Meissner, Otto 77 Melville, Herman 107 Meyer-Thoss, Christiane 57–8 Meyrink, Gustave 69–70 Der Golem (1915) 70 Michaud, Ginette 101–2 Michaux, Henri 96, 100 Mierowsky, Katya and Karl 82–3 Mifflin, Margot 35 Miller, Lee 60, 69 Minck, Bady 22, 25–6, 163–96, 204, 233 Im Anfang war der Blick (2003) 25–6, 166–96 intertextual references in 182 La Belle est la bête (2005) 170, 182 MappaMundi (2017) 167 Seen Sehen (1998) 169 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete 70–1 Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (1967) 71 Moine, Raphaëlle 59–60 Möschlin, Walter J. 52, 53 Totes Land (1940) 53 Moser, Johannes 164 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 26, 175, 202 Mozart Wohnhaus (Salzburg) 189–93 Mulvey, Laura 151–2, 222 Murphy, Anthony 199 Musger, August 170 Muth, Franz Alfred 105

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Index Nachträglichkeit (Freud) 217–20 Nadeau, Maurice 215–16 Nagel, Hanna 67 Untitled (Bare-Breasted Woman in Front of a Printing Press) (1929) 67 Nemec, Birgit 147 Neuwirth, Olga 22, 26–7, 139, 197–234 Bählamms Fest (1994–8) 26–7, 197–234 Bählamms Fest: Arbeitsjournal (2003) 26, 197–213, 221–4, 228–30 Die Stadt ohne Juden (2017) 216–17 Lost Highway (2003) 214–15 ‘Music and Peace’ (1999) 210–11, 215 224–5, 229–30 Niemals Vergessen! Antifaschistische Ausstellung (Vienna, 1946) 122–3 Niemöller, Martin (Pastor) 75–6 Nietzsche, Friedrich 76 Nora, Pierre 172, 177, 192 Oelze, Richard 7 Olger, Nils 115–17 Eine Eiserne Kassette (2018) 115–17 Oppenheim, Meret 7, 13–18, 22–3, 24, 27, 29–71, 120, 141, 152, 156–60, 170, 233 and Allianz (Switzerland) 51–2, 55–7 Catalogue raisonné 49–50 Le Couple (1956) 141 Dann leben wir eben später (1933) 32–3 Le Déjeuner en fourrure (1936) 14, 29–30, 62, 170 Einige der ungezählten Gesichter der Schönheit 62–5 Die Erlkönigin (1940) 156–60 Gelbe Maske (1936) 62 Genevieve (1971) 47–8, 59 Gespenst works 33–5 and Gruppe 33 (Switzerland) 31, 51–6 Kaspar Hauser Oder Die Goldene Freiheit (1942–43) 23, 57–71 Kasten mit Holzgitter (1943) 62 Krieg und Frieden (1943) 53–5 Ma Gouvernante (1936) 141 Notiz für die Maske (Kaspar Hauser) (1943) 62 Das Paradies ist unter der Erde (1940) 36–40, 44

259 Schwarze Strich-Figur vor Gelb (1960–81) 44 Sonne, Mond und Sterne (1942) 64–5 Tisch mit Vogelfüssen (1939) 35, 62 Das Tragisch-Komisch (1944) 42–4, 56 Tree studies 44 Wir können es nicht sehen (1947) 13–16 Wort, in giftige Buchstaben eingepackt (wird durchsichtig) (1970) 44–6 Over, Jeremy 184 Ozi, Ohozuno 97 Paddison, Max 215 Pagé, Suzanne 47 ‘Palimpsestic memory’ (Silverman) 208–10 Pankejeff, Sergei Konstantinovitch (‘The Wolf Man’) 228–32 Papin sisters (and surrealism) 47 Parent, Beatrice 47 Parr, Adrian 17 Pelinka, Anton 198 Perec, Georges 58 Pernkopf, Edouard 147 Picasso, Pablo 30, 134 Pick, Hella 124 Pinchevski, Amit 190 Plicka, Karel 167 Plumer, Esra 78, 79, 102, 104 Plunkett, Tara 227 Polizzotti, Mark 4 Ponge, Francis 184 postcards 26, 166, 169–94 Powers, Edward D. 49 Presner, Todd 84–5 Prokofiev, Sergei 217 Proust, Marcel 208 Rabinbach, Anson 74 Rainer, Arnulf 119 Rand, Nicholas 231 Raphael 65 The Triumph of Galatea (c. 1514) 65 Reder, Walter 116 and the Marzabotto massacre (Italy) 116 Reinhardt, Karl 95 Ribas, João 89 Richter, Hans Werner 86 Der Ruf (Munich) 86 Ries, Marc 171

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260 Roh, Franz 5 Magischer Realismus 5–6 Rohde, Werner 7 Roskies, David G. 226 Rosler, Martha 125 Rothberg, Michael 31–2 Rothfeld, Anne 50 Ruby, Ryan 182 Rupprecht, Caroline 89, 96, 101 Rutherford-Johnson, Tim 219 Salzburg (Austria) 26, 165, 167, 169, 174–7, 189–94 Festival 175–6 Sartre, Jean-Paul 8 Sawyer, Dylan 17 Sax, Boria 132 Saxon-Kerkhoff, Catherine 204 Schaeffer, Pierre 202 Schlant, Ernestine 17 Schleinstein, Bruno 92 Schnurre, Wolfdietrich 1 Schönberg, Arnold 200, 223–4 Moses und Aron (1926–32) 224–5 Survivor from Warsaw, A (1947) 224 Schonfield, Ernst 70 Schor, Gabriele 111, 113 Schröder, Klaus Albrecht 119 Schrott, Ludwig 147 Schult, Tanja 121, 138–9 Schulz, Isabel 14–15 Schwarz, Egon 123 Schwob, Marcel 59 Screenplays (and surrealism) 59–60 Seeberg, Reinhold 97 Seligman, Kurt 69 Short, Robert 179 Silverman, Kaja 178–9 Silverman, Max 26–7, 208–9, 211 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail 111, 114, 130, 146 Soutine, Chaim 42–4 Spender, Stephen 72–3 Spengler, Oswald 81 Spiel, Hilde 109 Spitzer, Leo 38 Springer gallery (Berlin) 92 Stegelmann, Katharina 91 Steiner, George 93

Index Stenvert, Curt 130 Stephenson, Jill 121 Stern, Grete 7, 156–8 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 202 Straus, Lou 210 Strohal, Dorrit (Orla Holm) (Zürn) 78 Stubbs, Jeremy 3 Sugg, Deborah 35 Summers, Montague 226 Susik, Abigail 67 Švankmajer, Jan 170 Svendsen, Christina 90 Syberberg, Hans Jürgen 170 Tavel, Hans Christoph von 40–2, 55 Thiess, Frank 79 and ‘inner emigration’ 79–80 Thomas, Alfred 69 Till, Nick 202 Tintoretto, Jacopo 201, 221 Török, Maria 228 Toscanini, Arturo 175 tourism 164–6 ‘Dark Tourism’ 165 Trakl, Georg 175 Trettin, Käthe 206 Trotta, Margarethe von 167 Hannah Arendt (2013) 167 Uhl, Heidemarie 122, 123–4 Umbehr, Otto (Umbo) 7 Undset, Sigrid 74–5 Universum Film A. G. (UFA) 80–2 Ustvolskaya, Galina 202 Vagts, Detlev F. 50–1 Vansant, Jacqueline 121–2 Varèse, Edgard 202 Vecellio, Tiziano 221 Verdi, Giuseppe 200 Vertov, Dziga 179 Viennese Aktionists 120 Vivarini, Bartolomeo 221 Vogel, Sabine B. 113 Walbers, Ninja 113 Walden, Herwarth (Der Sturm) 56 Waldheim, Kurt 116, 124 Walsh, Simon Trevor 199

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Index Wassermann, Jakob 29, 58, 65–6 Caspar Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Herzens (1908) 29, 58, 69 Wegener, Paul 70 Weibel, Peter 118, 136, 156 Weiss, Peter 20 Widrich, Mechtild 113 Wiemken, Walter (Gruppe 33) 52–5 Frieden und Krieg (1937) 53 Wiener Gruppe 185 Weisenborn, Günther 86 Winter, Hubert 117–18 Wittenau (Karl Bonhoeffer Nervenklinik, Berlin) 91–2 Wolf, Christa 1 Young, James E. 120–1, 123, 138, 139 Zimmermann, Bernd Alois 202 Žižek, Slavoj 215 Zürcher, Barbara 33 Zurkinden, Irène 38, 40, 51 Zürn, Ralph 77–8, 80–1 and the Herero massacre 77–8

261 Zürn, Unica 20, 22, 23–4, 27, 71, 72–108, 120, 141, 210, 229, 233 anagram texts 92–9 Dunkler Frühling (1969) 76, 99 ‘Die Flucht der Häuser: Ein Funkmärchen’ (1950) 87 Das Haus der Krankheiten 23, 76, 97, 99–108 ‘Er zauberte mit Holz und Feuer’ (1953) 87 ‘Katrin’ (c. 1953) 84, 87, 98–9 Der Mann im Jasmin (1967) 90–2, 93, 96, 97 ‘Nach der Vorstellung’ (1950) 86–7 ‘Notizen einer Blutarmen’ (1957) 103 ‘Das Stenogramm’ (1950) 87–9 ‘Werner Heldt ist mein Bruder’ (1955) 85–6 working at Universum Film A. G. (UFA) 80–1 Zweig, Stefan 175