Revolutionary Subjects: German Literatures and the Limits of Aesthetic Solidarity with Latin America 9783110376555, 9783110376227, 9783110553031

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Jamie H. Trnka Revolutionary Subjects

Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies

Edited by Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes and Jonathan Petropoulos

Volume 16

Jamie H. Trnka

Revolutionary Subjects German Literatures and the Limits of Aesthetic Solidarity with Latin America

DE GRUYTER

ISBN 978-3-11-037622-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-037655-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039288-3 ISSN 1861-8030 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston Typesetting: Konrad Triltsch GmbH, Ochsenfurt-Hohestadt Cover image: Poster produced by Asela Pérez for OSPAAAL, Cuba, 1970. Digital image courtesy Lincoln Cushing/Docs Populi. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Man is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his “natural” purpose by the power of words. This literarity is at once the condition and the effect of the circulation of “actual” literary locutions. The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought. —Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics

Contents Acknowledgements

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Chapter 1 Geoculture, Solidarity, and Textual Politics in East and West German Writings 1 about Latin America 7 Comparative and interdisciplinary contexts Literature and politics in divided Germany 12 Material and rhetorical contexts for imagining Latin America 19 Theoretical contexts: the emergence of Cold War transnationalisms, post30 colonial studies, and area studies 40 Imagining the Third World in German cultural studies 50 Verdichtung and the emergence of aesthetic solidarity Chapter 2 The Translator’s Ghosts: Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Latin American 63 Compromiso in Kursbuch and The Habana Inquiry Charting a new course for literature 74 81 Common places The Habana Inquiry 90 Translating genre: testimonio in conversation with a resurgent 93 documentarism 100 Counterrevolutionary zones of equivalence 101 Refusing to translate Translating cultural concepts 103 105 Translating discursive systems Translation and comparison 109 Conclusions 116 Chapter 3 Alternative Internationalisms and Literary Historical Inversions: Volker Braun’s 121 Guevara or the Sun State 133 State solidarity and humanist patrimony Expressionist redux: the New Man and the production of socialism in Volker Braun 136 144 Productive contradictions with Latin American Marxisms Transcontextual interruptions 146 153 Unforgettable guerrillera

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Authoring the New Man Conclusions 163

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Chapter 4 The Task of Decolonial Thinking: Second World Authorship in Heiner Müller’s 169 The Task The theaterbody and its subjects 173 Latin America and the Caribbean at the intersection of revolutionary 185 histories Commentary and relational reading 198 206 The Second World intellectual and writing from the middle Chapter 5 A Rhetoric of Walking Around: F.C. Delius’s Adenauerplatz 215 A new political realism? 223 From trope to rhetoric, from internationalist to transnational antifascist 230 solidarities 241 “Hinter dem Faschismus steckt das Kapital…” Transnational walking around and the globalization of fascist memories 245 259 Solidary sentiments Conclusions 266 Chapter 6 269 The Limits of Aesthetic Solidarity Aesthetics, solidarity, and the political 287 Limits

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Appendix “Walking Around” by Pablo Neruda, with a translation by Donald D. Walsh 293 Archival Collections Works Cited Index

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298

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For A.O., my Α and Ω.

Acknowledgements In his exploration of dialectical criticism, Marxism and Form, Fredric Jameson decried “the inability to imagine anything other than what is” in philosophy and political science, drawing the determined conclusion: “It therefore falls to literary criticism to continue to compare the inside and the outside, existence and history, to continue to pass judgment on the abstract quality of life in the present, and to keep alive the idea of a concrete future.”¹ To those who remind me—some daily, some at intervals—of the social urgency of literature, I am deeply indebted. First among them is always Andrew Oppenheimer, who has accompanied me and this book through every stage of its writing. A thoughtful interlocutor, keen editor, and supportive and patient friend, I am grateful to share my life and work with Andrew. Bettina Brandt provided much encouragement, and kindly read Chapter Two. Her intellectual curiosity and energy are a great source of inspiration to me. A. Hunter Bivens commented on Chapter Three, and was always generous in sharing his considerable insight into East German cultural policy. Patrizia McBride shared her thoughts about Braun’s Expressionist referents well before the book was a book; an anonymous reviewer for the German Studies Review also provided feedback on what became Chapter Three. Barton Byg commented on Chapter Four, and afforded me the opportunity to present and discuss parts of it at The University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Daniel Purdy provided the chance to discuss an early version of Chapter Five at Pennsylvania State University. Barbara Potthast invited me to discuss the project at the Department of Iberian and Latin American History at the University of Cologne. My work at the German Literature Archives in Marbach was generously supported by a C.H. Beck postdoctoral fellowship. Anna Kinder and Marcel Lepper were particularly helpful during my time there, and afforded me the chance to present parts of Chapter Two to other researchers and staff. Hans Magnus Enzensberger and F.C. Delius graciously granted me permission to work with their materials housed at the archives. The University of Scranton provided sabbatical support that allowed me time to write. Series editors Scott Denham, Jonathan Petropoulos, and Irene Kacandes provided feedback on the manuscript that was remarkable in both its focus and timeliness. Beyond her role as an editor, Irene has supported the project—and

 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 416.

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me—tremendously, making time to meet and talk wherever we happened to cross paths, be it in Berlin, Amsterdam, or between panels at the GSA. Editorial director Manuela Gerlof and project editor Stella Diedrich have been a pleasure to work with. Leslie Adelson, David Bathrick, Natalie Melas, and Debra Castillo offered guidance early on in this project. Sky Arndt-Briggs, Christine Becker, Crina Gschwandtner, Marike Janzen, Susan Méndez, Anna Parkinson, Victoria Rizo Lenshyn, Nikka Pierce, and Yamile Silva have all shared well-timed and much appreciated encouragement. Ileana Szymanski provided a second pair of eyes in preparing my translations from the Spanish of Leopoldo Zea. Finally, thanks to my family for their love and support.

Chapter 1 Geoculture, Solidarity, and Textual Politics in East and West German Writings about Latin America In literature, revolutionary subjects chart paths that diverge from established courses of thought and action in order to effect social change. Their relentless pursuit of connections with other loci of change is itself remarkable. Coupled with visions that bring continents together, their promise is also a threat. To write about revolution is to entertain the possibility of its successes and failures; to revolutionize writing itself, to find new means by which to help subjects leap from the page and into the social imagination is the dearest ambition to which revolution’s authors aspire. Each of the authors whose works I consider in the following chapters—Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1929–), Volker Braun (1939–), Heiner Müller (1929 – 1995), and F.C. Delius (1943–)—undertook these tasks. In so doing, they sought to reconfigure an already dense field of connections between East Germany (the German Democratic Republic), West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany), and Latin America.¹ “Colonial fantasies”; histories of travel, emigration, and exile; direct investment and development aid; competition for political and cultural recognition during the 1960s and 1970s; and broad-based solidarity movements are among the material and powerfully symbolic inter- and transnational relationships under consideration in this book.² I coin the term aesthetic solidarity to explore how the intersecting lines of literary and political representation in each of these dense fields of relations can and should be understood as contingent and historical. As a critical lens, aesthetic solidarity enables me to show how literary and political actors embark on new paths across places and struggles which are only seemingly disparate.  I adopt the more colloquial East and West Germany to refer to the two German states in this book; many of the sources I cite or quote from, however, use their official state names or respective acronyms (GDR and FRG). My preference for East and West derives from my larger contention that state forms and actors are much less static than official political designations imply and underscores the relational nature of the two states in the Cold War geographic imagination.  The term “colonial fantasy” is Susanne Zantop’s. Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770 – 1870 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997). German readers may wish to consult her work in translation: Kolonialphantasien im vorkolonialen Deutschland (1770 – 1870) (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1999). The German version includes an expanded bibliography.

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This introductory chapter has three key aims. First, I identify the dominant (though by no means only) conceptual orderings of literature and politics in the two German states that issued from the Allied occupation at the end of World War II. A full engagement with the relationship of literature and politics in German culture would require its own book; suffice it to say, this introductory sketch is intended only as a point of departure into a fuller analysis of Latin America as a site, a cipher, and sometimes even an interlocutor in political literatures East and West German. The second aim of this chapter is to address the appeal of Latin America as a site of revolutionary activity in both German states. I provide a broad overview of the discourse on Latin America in which the book’s case studies are situated and into which their respective authors self-consciously intervened. Given the historical and imaginative connections between Germanspeaking cultures and both Central and South America, it is astounding just how little critical attention has been devoted to the place of Latin America and Latin American thought in German cultures. With a few prominent exceptions, scholarly attention to these links is only now on the rise.³ My analysis is all the more important in light of recent interest in Germany and Latin America under the sign of transnationalism. Against trends in German studies to identify instances of the transnational in order to make a case for Germany’s scholarly relevance, I query the utility of competing concepts of internationalism and transnationalism to the study of revolutionary subjects in East and West German literature from the 1960s onward. While I do not reject the transnational outright, I caution against its uncritical and ahistorical application to all forms of bordercrossing. Third and finally, I make a case for geoculture as a unifying rubric for both inter- and transnational cultural connections informed by the shifting geopolitical constellations of the Cold War from its apex through its decline. Adopting geoculture as a concept has meaningful consequences for how we understand the relationship of national cultures in the world. In what follows, I elaborate on the utility of geoculture as a concept that complements and strengthens the critical interventions of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, world-systems theory, and theories of cross-border connections into the study of Cold War cultures. Approaching revolutionary subjects geoculturally opens a conceptual space for me to advance Verdichtung as a property at the heart

 Recent annual meetings of the German Studies Association have seen an increased number of panels concerned with a German-speaking presence in Latin America. While most scholars remain unfamiliar with the literature available in Spanish, important strides have been made in drawing attention to the historical literature. H. Glenn Penny’s recent review essay offers one such example: “Latin American Connections: Recent Work on German Interactions with Latin America,” Central European History 46 (2013): 362– 394.

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of aesthetic solidarity. Verdichtung signifies both the increasing density of crossborder relationships over time and the aesthetic strategy of casting those relationships in poetic terms. Conceptual and political revolutions are closely linked. Without attention to their mutual imbrication, any study of a transnationally-derived figure of revolution remains partial. Revolutionary subjects only become visible as transnational when we challenge and revise existing disciplinary frameworks. The cumulative effect of two decades of critique of national literature departments, and specifically their insufficient attention to the complex movements and relationships of nationally-defined subjects, has contributed substantially to a revision of both literary and area studies scholarship. Cultural studies constitutes one of the earliest sites for rethinking the nationally-conceived subject. In his Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004), Michael Denning identifies a “double genealogy of cultural studies,” which is attentive to disciplinary formations and the “cultural turn,” and which accompanied the New Left’s development of socioanalytic approaches to the definition and interpretation of culture.⁴ Both strands emerged during what he terms the age of three worlds, the short half-century from 1949 – 1989.⁵ At the same time that the age of three worlds can be demarcated historically, its analytic purchase derives from Denning’s insistence that the term marks a set of cultural, geographical, and ideological dispositions as much as a periodization of geopolitical events. His delineation of how practitioners of cultural studies have endeavored to rethink the relation of culture and society in the age of three worlds makes clear that its myriad articulations entailed a call to rethink the relation of literature as a specific form of cultural labor to society. West German authors Enzensberger and Delius were clearly part of the New Left of which Denning writes; indeed, he includes Enzensberger in his inventory of the New Left’s most prominent thinkers internationally.⁶ A culturally-inflected Marxism was also key to Second World critics of twentieth-century economism, and Braun and Müller number among the most prominent in East German literature.⁷ But why resume the language of three worlds at a moment consigned by most to the global? In short, because the three worlds model continues to underwrite our thinking today. Its terms and categories were taken for granted until

 Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 3, 75 – 96. Chief among the socioanalytics he identifies are commodity theories, theories of ideology and the state, hegemony theories, and theories of recognition.  Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 1.  Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 82.  Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 7.

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very late in the Cold War and remained in wide use in the 1990s. It is difficult to overestimate their impact on thinking about international, transnational, and global relations in and beyond the realm of literary culture. It is only with the ascent of the global as a term of scholarly analysis that the three worlds have become properly available to scholarship. Speaking of the pervasive tendency to date the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the global to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Denning remarks: “Paradoxically, it is precisely the end of the age of three worlds […] that makes its history haunt every account of globalization.”⁸ His effort to “chart the sources and lineaments of a global culture in the age of three worlds” enables me to consider both the powerfully national and doggedly international trajectories of culture.⁹ The emergence of a range of socioanalytic approaches to the study of culture took place not only in Europe and North America, but around the world. The “cultural turn” and its impulse to attend both to global phenomena and highly localized case studies led necessarily to disciplinary interventions that were inseparable from attempts to reassess radical thought outside of the academy as well as within it.¹⁰ This was not the sole prerogative of the Birmingham School, as many diffusionist accounts of cultural studies would have it, but witnessed the roughly contemporary emergence of a number of New Left projects globally. (For example, Denning delineates at least three distinct revivals of the work of Antonio Gramsci in Europe, Latin America, and South Asia.)¹¹ They shared— but experienced distinctly—novel forms of commodity culture, in addition to “the globalizing effect of the Communist experience: the post-1917 generation steeped in the cauldron of Leninist militancy, Popular Front anti-fascism, and a revolutionary anticolonialism.”¹² The affinities among their critical projects may be systematically apparent only in hindsight (as Denning argues), but they were by no means lost on those who actively sought out antiimperialist, internationalist cultural traditions.¹³ I hope to show how each of the authors on whose work this book focuses intuited powerful connections among global engagements with culture, society, and politics already in the age of three worlds. It is those affinities as much as any local contradictions or peculiarly German debates that make their aesthetic solidarity still meaningful today.

 Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 27.  Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 11.  Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 3 – 4.  Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 3 – 4, 9.  Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 7.  Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 9.

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Even more than the three worlds, the term Latin America has a taken-forgranted quality that is rooted in the enduring treatment of geographies as natural. Generally encompassing the Americas south of the Rio Grande and the Caribbean, Latin America describes a physical territory, an arena of geopolitical analysis and activity, as well as a cultural idea that has been alternately a site of contestation and an object of aspiration among actors across the German political spectrum since at least the nineteenth century. Scholars have long advanced competing interpretations of Latin America, and its usefulness as a category, in much the same way they have debated the utility of the category Third World, a designation which I and many other postcolonial scholars ultimately use to describe the real discursive force of a set of assumptions and beliefs about a large segment of the world’s population. As Chandra Mohanty maintains, “the terms Western and Third World retain a political and explanatory value in a world that appropriates and assimilates multiculturalism and ‘difference’ through commodification and consumption.”¹⁴ Still, it is worth recalling that—like Latin America—the Third World is more than a category with connotations of underdevelopment, stagnation, and backwardness imposed by powerful outside forces. It has also been an expression of a positive political program, a critical vantage point, and a category for organizing internationalist solidarity across post- and anticolonial nationalist divisions. Of the phrase coined by French anticolonialist Albert Sauvy in 1952, Vijay Prashad argues that some of its critics “entirely misconstrue Sauvy’s term and indeed the movement that fashioned the category into a political force”: The category is an act of artifice for a global social movement that had only a short history behind it. Sociopolitical identities that are constructed outside sociopolitical movements are often unable to draw people to them–Third World as an idea could not have become common currency only from Sauvy’s coinage or the First World media’s use of it. The anticolonial nationalist movement produced a series of gatherings and a language of anticolonialism that elicited an emotional loyalty among its circle and beyond.¹⁵

That the Third World and Latin America partially overlapped with one another in the East and West German writings under consideration here adds another level

 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Antiimperialist Struggles,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.2 (2003): 505. Republished in Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 17– 42.  Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007), 6, 12– 13.

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of complexity to the already dense connotations of these ostensibly empirical, geographical descriptors. Latin American theorist Walter Mignolo has taken great steps toward systematizing a body of arguments about what he calls The Idea of Latin America (2005) in relation to the modern/colonial world system, a frame for historical analysis that includes but vastly exceeds the age of three worlds.¹⁶ His stated goal is “to uncouple the name of the subcontinent from the cartographic image we all have of it. It is an excavation of the imperial/colonial foundation of the ‘idea’ of Latin America that will help us to unravel the geo-politics of knowledge from the perspective of coloniality, the untold and unrecognized historical counterpart of modernity.”¹⁷ Mignolo insists that the idea of Europe, and of the United States, cannot be separated from the idea of Latin America, and he takes seriously how both imperial/colonial hegemonies and local, creole hegemonies vis-à-vis indigenous and black populations were invested in preserving an idea of Latin America as “part of the West and yet peripheral to it.”¹⁸ Of course, even critiques of geography and epistemology as thoroughgoing as Mignolo’s demonstrate the enduring force of geographical ideas. I continue to refer to Latin America in all of the fullness and contradiction that his account entails, not only because it was an operative category of the literary and political imagination of revolutionary subjects in the age of three worlds, but because it also reminds us that even with the geopolitical disappearance of the three worlds we continue to contend with geographies of power that both enabled and outlived the three worlds as one of our most recent attempts to order and envision the world geoculturally.  Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005). In engaging with his writings here and in Chapter Four, I acknowledge not only the value of Mignolo’s contribution as a touchstone for debates about the geopolitics of knowledge, but also the substantive critiques that it has generated among Latin Americanists. I hope that my work provides a point of entry for Germanists and Comparatists into Mignolo’s writing and that debate in its full complexity. Ricardo D. Salvatore’s review of The Idea of Latin America provides a concise and incisive starting point. He draws out both the utility of Mignolo’s epistemic analysis and the limitations of coloniality as a “metacategory” that is at times insufficiently historicized, philosophical at the expense of the social and the material, and which naively privileges local knowledges that are no more immune to appropriation than are other kinds of truth. Ricardo D. Salvatore, “A Post-Occidentalist Manifesto.” Review of The Idea of Latin America, by Walter D. Mignolo, A Contracorriente 4.1 (2006): 126 – 138, esp. 132– 138.  Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, x-xi. It is because of this relationship between the colonial and the modern that Mignolo and other Latin American critics insist upon the notation modern/colonial to mark their conceptual interdependence and to restore coloniality’s visibility in contemporary debates about modernity, modernization, and globalization.  Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, xiv-xv.

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Attending to how authors in the age of three worlds anticipated our contemporary debates about global cultural formations, Revolutionary Subjects addresses both strands of cultural studies’s “double genealogy,” rethinking its objects and approaches as well as the challenges they pose to existing scholarly formations, including area studies and cultural studies itself. It is with an eye to revolutions conceptual and historical that I approach literature and geoculture to ask: which frames attend to the subject of cultural politics? What kind of intersubjective relationship is solidarity? Where are the limits of an aesthetic solidarity that a specific cultural politics invokes? (How) do new geocultural frames coincide with or contradict existing disciplinary formations and contexts?

Comparative and interdisciplinary contexts The last several years have seen a resurgence across national literature departments of analytic categories long associated with comparative literature in the US academy. Translation and world literature are chief among them; they have enjoyed critical attention in recent scholarship by, among others, David Damrosch and Emily Apter, whose work suggests broad methodological, contextual, and curricular changes.¹⁹ Prior to this critical moment, the tension between area studies and cultural studies, a methodological and genealogical distinction conveniently elided by the moniker “German studies,” encouraged a different kind of comparative practice in the form of multi- and at times even interdisciplinarity. The contemporary recalibration of literary boundaries has increased attention to boundary-troubling objects and methods once left to comparatists, and it offers an opportunity to reconsider inherited area studies structures. Increasingly, though, scholars find themselves in the position of defending rather than critiquing existing, national cultural studies formations in the face of changes within the corporate university, which claims to produce global citizens but threatens language departments and other vital sites for the promotion of intercultural literacy. Masao Myoshi aptly highlights the challenges of the situation at hand: American education has not freed itself from the ideology of a Cold War narrative. […] The newer cultural studies has shown a greater openness and less commitment to maintaining

 David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); idem, How to Read World Literature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

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rigid disciplinary boundaries. […] But it has, like the older area studies, often reproduced the same concern for difference (for different reasons), as area studies emphasized cultural uniqueness in its holistic representation of national society. In this regard, the two have converged to over-determine the sense of difference and its culturalist dimensions, despite the disclaimers of cultural studies that it seeks to avoid holistic representations.²⁰

The comparative impulse pushes scholars to address and revise overdetermined notions of difference. Attention to the transnational leads us to a productive instance of what Natalie Melas, citing Eduard Glissant, describes as similarities which do not unify. Following Melas, the transnational offers me a site and a cipher for thinking about the relation of cultural, spatial, and historical alterities across boundaries and disciplines within German studies.²¹ Each of these inflections of comparison—translation, worldliness, and disciplinarity—reveals the limitations of established approaches to the Third World in German literature, approaches that dismiss as allegorical textual references that critics may not be prepared to read otherwise. Beginning in the 1990s, scholars who drew attention to German Third World references made significant contributions to the field of German literature, but by and large they did not venture beyond critiques of Eurocentrism, desire, and identification in German discursive systems. Consequently, their analyses failed to account for German political relations to and reception of Third World authors as producers of theory and literature. It is undoubtedly true, as Neil Larsen has written, that in writing about the South—or, for that matter, in writing about how the North writes about the South—the North writes about itself.²² But this observation cannot be an end. It must be a point of departure for a comparative cultural analysis. By contrast to much existing German studies scholarship, this book advances readings of East and West German texts that utilize discourse analysis as only one of several lenses onto the representation of Latin America in documentary and literary texts. I demonstrate how material contexts of violent revolution and asymmetrical economic exchange are always co-constitutive of a text’s social meanings. In addition to more accurately accounting for attempts in the 1960s and 1970s to revolutionize German subjects in and through literary texts, attention to Latin America opens up a range of critical questions about  Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian, Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 12.  Natalie Melas, “Versions of Incommensurability,” World Literature Today 69.2 (1995): 275 – 281.  Neil Larsen, Reading North by South: On Latin American Culture and Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 2. At no time do I exempt myself from his incisive critique.

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the nature and consequences of aesthetic solidarity among revolutionary subjects in Latin America and the two German states. These questions include: How do East and West German references to Latin America operate against the grain of a three worlds model that sharply delineates First, Second, and Third World political, social, and cultural subjects? When, how, and why do transnational subjects begin to displace internationalist subjects of solidarity and concern for radical social change in East and West German literatures? How does the emergence of transnational subjects prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall challenge existing accounts of transnationalism as a post-Cold War phenomenon commonly associated with the accelerated proliferation of global media and the intensification of economic exchange? Tracing a series of imaginative and material relations with Latin America through exemplary East and West German literary texts that were produced against the backdrop of the Cold War requires comparative reading practices. I read Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Das Verhör von Habana (The Habana Inquiry, 1970); Volker Braun’s Guevara oder der Sonnenstaat (Guevara or the Sun State, 1975); Heiner Müller’s Der Auftrag (The Task, 1979); and Friedrich Christian Delius’s Adenauerplatz (1984) with an eye to the Caribbean, Andean, and Chilean texts and contexts around which the respective authors constructed their critical forays into literary and political debates in the two German states. It is also with an eye to the relative locations of Latin American and German cultural studies within the larger field of globalization studies that I approach the question of revolutionary subjects. As Haun Saussy reminds us: “Comparative literature does not leave untouched the objects of its arguments.”²³ Any comparative enterprise “perturbs the settled economy” of two or more discursive systems, raising the question of which “distortion effects” accrue to the objects compared in the act of comparison itself.²⁴ It is with his admonition in mind that I wish to situate my project relative to these three disciplines and the broader field of cultural studies, particularly its postcolonial inflection. First, this study is part of comparative literature’s ongoing conversation about what constitutes comparison and how we come to regard different textual forms as literary in relation to other forms. Mine is a comparison that, as Roland Greene writes, exists more in process than in substance, consisting “not [of]

 Haun Saussy, “Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares: Of Memes, Hives, and Selfish Genes,” in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Saussy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 29.  Saussy, “Exquisite Cadavers,” 29.

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works, but networks.”²⁵ Arguing for a comparative practice that has as its primary concern “the exchanges out of which literatures are made: the economies of knowledge, social relations, power, and especially art that make literatures possible,” Greene highlights the difficulty of all process-oriented endeavors, but also their indispensability. While their objects “are always at risk of dissolving into the stations they connect with one another,” process networks possess an explanatory potential that allows comparatists to account for literariness as a dynamic relation among texts rather than as a stable property possessed (or not) by texts.²⁶ The dynamic relations among East and West Germany and Latin America vary from author to author and text to text. A comparative approach reveals more than just common tropes or settings; it speaks to how subjects are constituted in the very act of comparison. The nature of the comparison at issue in a given case study may vary. In my analysis of Enzensberger, it is translative, and in Braun citational; in Müller it is philosophical and geopolitical, and in Delius rhetorical and rooted in economic exchange. Carefully constructed networks of relations among and within literary and non-literary texts characterize all four of the examples that I consider in the chapters that follow. As I analyze the unfolding geocultural formations with which each author contends and of which each is a part, the networks at issue emerge as multiple and dense. At the level of each literary text, the comparative method which such process networks entail can be difficult to distinguish from what Denning terms globalization’s own “abstract logic of the process.”²⁷ In place of a specific narrative of globalization as a historical formation or even as a world cultural formation, most theoretical accounts of the global involve different ways of evaluating global flows or circuits of commodities, communications, and people in which the process itself becomes the narrative.²⁸ Here again, discussions about our disciplinary objects and practices converge with how we think and engage with world phenomena more broadly (in this case, globalization). Especially after the age of three worlds and the privileged symbolic position of the two German states in its consolidation and demise, Germanists are called upon to think critically about the consequences of addressing things German as were they untouched by global networks or circuits. This must

 Roland Greene, “Not Works but Networks: Colonial Worlds in Comparative Literature,” in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Saussy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 214.  Greene, “Not Works but Networks,” 214.  Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 23.  Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 22– 23.

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entail not only a new openness to connections with things previously designated as non-German (connections most frequently initiated via migrations and colonial encounters), but a reshaping of the discipline itself. I understand my account of aesthetic solidarity as advancing such a rethinking and my book as a response to the myriad programmatic calls for genuinely interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship in the field of German studies.²⁹ My interest in German-Latin American connections in each of these German texts comes from having identified the process networks such connections engender as having been pivotal to each author’s self-understanding at a historical moment characterized by a heightened sense of urgency for change and qualitatively new attempts to articulate localized critiques of Cold War ideological consolidation and state power in distinctly international terms. Consequently, a renewed interest in engaged literature and authorship emerged during the Cold War in both East and West Germany, leading key literary figures to advance model (German) subjects in terms of extrinsic spaces, most notably Latin America. The close association of nationalism and fascism in the recent German past vexed the very idea of German national subjects and may have made their definition in internationalist terms—terms that require comparative analysis—all the more attractive to authors and readers alike.³⁰ Against this background, both East and West German engagements with Latin American revolutionary subjects manifested a sense of hope on the crest of despair that literature could contribute substantially to the project of imagining other, more democratic world orders.

 Too many others have made significant contributions along theses lines to provide an exhaustive list, but even a cursory look at recent professional fora, such as The German Quarterly’s 2005 discussions “How Much German in German Studies?” and “German Studies and Globalization,” demonstrate a sustained professional interest in resituating the study of German culture broadly defined relative to other languages, places, and global phenomena. I find especially compelling Nina Berman’s contribution, which underscores the importance of a curricular and methodological committment to genuinely comparative work. The flurry of panels on transnationalism at recent years’ annual conferences of the German Studies Association suggests that the project is similarly urgent in social scientific and humanistic approaches to the study of German culture. For Berman, see “On the Relevance of Comparative Cultural Knowledge to German Literary Studies,” in German Quarterly 78.2 (2005): 243 – 245.  By now, attention to the role of literature in national subject formation is commonplace. However, Wilhelm Dilthey’s assertion that the importance of literary culture was redoubled in the German case due to the absence of formal state structures during national consolidation bears noting. Alois Hahn, “Schriftsteller und Gesellschaft in Deutschland,” in Schriftsteller und Politik in Deutschland, ed. Werner Link (Düsseldorf: Dröste Verlag, 1979), 16.

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Literature and politics in divided Germany Reading East and West German texts and contexts comparatively, and with an eye to Latin American cultural studies, I can demonstrate the erosion of hegemonic Cold War subjectivities beginning roughly in the 1960s. I proceed by asking two related sets of questions about the status of Latin America in East and West German literatures. First, my readings show how Enzensberger, Braun, Müller, and Delius all queried hegemonic East and West German understandings of the proper relation of literature to politics through the thematic, formal, and aesthetic choices they made. The second set of questions asks how and why authors in the two German states approached German political relations with Latin American countries during the Cold War, especially as those relations were mediated by competing East and West German understandings of revolution. In referencing distinct literary-political positions in East and West Germany, I do not advance the problematic argument that East and West Germany be considered as separate and easily distinguishable cultural states. Instead, I aim to address how their divergent geopolitical alignments and prevailing conditions for the articulation of culture and politics in literature resulted in distinct inflections of arguably common cultural concerns. For the purposes of this project, I date the crystalization of debates about the status of a politically engaged German literature around Latin American revolutionary subjects roughly to 1961, following the building of the Berlin Wall and the spike in Cold War tensions around the Bay of Pigs invasion.³¹ This moment coincided both with a heightened literary attention to Latin America and an increasing need for the production of new and distinctly East and West German national subjects in and through literature due to what was widely understood to be a second, highly symbolic act of state formation initiated by the East German state. Literature’s role in the production of national subjects came into sharp relief, highlighting the geopolitical and domestic political stakes of culture in the Cold War drive to ideological conformity and global political influence. The geocultural constellation lent a sense of ur-

 The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an unsuccessful paramilitary action sponsored by the US CIA on 17– 19 August 1961. Cuban exiles opposed to the revolution were provided with training and resources by the US government and launched an attack from Guatemala, whose loyalty to the US had been secured in a CIA-supported military coup in 1954. The date roughly coincides with, but was not immediately precipitated by, the erection of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961. Nonetheless, the two events marked an escalation of Cold War tensions, and both contributed to the run-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. The public tribunals held in Havana following the invasion are discussed at greater length in Chapter Two.

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gency to the reassessment of literary efficacy and the role of the literary intellectual in the public sphere. Given that theater has long been associated with revolution in Germany, it is no surprise that three of my four case studies are devoted in whole or in part to dramatic texts.³² Those authors, directors, actors, and theater administrators who embraced the revolutionary potential of theater found themselves in conflict with segments of the Socialist and Communist Party leadership, repeating a pattern that dates back to the nineteenth century. Indeed, one might argue that a conflict about the political efficacy of literature in general and theater in particular underlies the cultural politics of the German Left since the Sickingen Debate, in which Ferdinand Lasalle (founder of Germany’s first socialist workers’ party) first argued with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels about the nature of the proletariat’s relationship to bourgeois literature.³³ In this respect, key debates in East Germany during the 1960s and 1970s about the status, responsibility, and political efficacy of theater (understood in terms of its affirmative political function) resumed a much older discussion about the relationship of literature and politics in German culture. This occured at a historical and political moment inflected by a revised and expanded understanding of socialist, humanist internationalism in which, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger observed in the West German context, Europe found itself not at the center, but rather on the periphery of world revolution.³⁴ Ostensibly manifesting different theaters of European conflict

 Helmut L. Müller dates revolutionary theater to Schiller: Die literarische Republik. Westdeutsche Schriftsteller und die Politik (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz Verlag, 1982). Jürgen Rühle provides an overview of the most important figures and developments in and around German theater from the November Revolution to the Third Reich: Theater und Revolution. Von Gorki bis Brecht (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1963), 127– 158. Looking at the same period, Klaus Kändler focuses more specifically on theater as a mass medium and on the relation of theater to historical events: “Drama und Klassenkampf. Zur Entwicklung der sozialistischen Dramatik in der Weimarer Republik,” in Literatur und Klassenkampf. Beiträge zur sozialistischen Literatur in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Deutsche Akademie der Künste zu Berlin. Forschungskollektiv Geschichte der Sozialistischen Literatur (Dortmund: Werkkreis Verlag, 1973), 95 – 117.  Carl Korn’s 1908 critique of Lasalle sums up the two positions as historical (Lasalle) and functional (Marx and Engels) approaches to literature. For an extended citation of Korn’s critique and the place of the Sickingen Debate in socialist cultural policy more generally, see Frank Trommler, “Die Kulturpolitik der DDR und die kulturelle Tradition des deutschen Sozialismus,” in Literatur und Literaturtheorie in der DDR, ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl and Patricia Herminghouse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 21– 26. A related conflict between Lenin’s emphasis on a classical cultural patrimony and the proletkult of Aleksander Bogdanow and Platon Kerzhentsev’s agitprop movements was also important to early cultural policy in the Soviet zone of occupation, later East Germany.  Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Europäische Peripherie,” Kursbuch 2 (1965): 154– 173.

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in the Cold War, East and West Germany experienced parallel but distinct shifts in representational strategies for negotiating and ascribing political meaning to violent revolutionary conflicts in Latin America. The seeds of what would become East and West German articulations of literature and politics could already be detected during the period of Allied occupation. Short-lived attempts to create common cultural fronts and fora were quickly suppressed by the occupation authorities. To cite a prominent example, the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany), best understood as a resumption of Weimar-era Volksfrontpolitik (an antifascist, popular front politics broadly associated with the Comintern but encompassing participants from a wider political spectrum), advocated a radical break with the Third Reich and a unified effort to create a new German cultural life. Founded in July 1945 in the Soviet zone of occupation, the group was—despite its widely divergent membership—made up primarily of communists of various stripes. Attempts by leading figures such as Johannes R. Becher (1891– 1958) to place bourgeois authors in visible positions of leadership while committed communists continued to control the direction of the organization failed to achieve the desired appearance of a non-partisan cultural organization, and the Kulturbund was banned in all three western zones in November 1947.³⁵ Efforts at coordinating a German authors’ organization that encompassed all four zones were likewise unsuccessful.³⁶ The hope that by conserving German cultural unity one would necessarily maintain political unity and a single German state was sorely disappointed; the tensions between eastern and western zones of occupation were, by 1947, impossible to overlook. At their most basic level, East and West German understandings of the relationship between literature and politics were mirror opposites. The hegemonic position in the West assumed that politics corrupt literature, while the East assumed an essential and desirable relationship between literature and politics.

 Becher achieved prominence as an author in the interwar years. He was a member of the Spartakus League in 1918, joined the Communist Party in 1919, and suffered serious criticisms for his Expressionist literary leanings. He served as editor of the communist paper Rote Fahne beginning in 1928, but was forced to flee to Austria in 1933, and subsequently to Switzerland and France before settling in the USSR until 1945. Having worked in a number of literary, editorial, and political capacities while in exile, he assumed various leadership positions and served as President of the Akademie der Künste from 1953 – 1956 and as the first East German Minister of Culture from 1954– 1958. “Becher, Johannes R.,” in So funktionierte die DDR vol. 3: Lexikon der Funktionäre, ed. Andreas Herbst, Winifried Ranke, and Jürgen Winkler (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994), 29 – 30.  Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuchverlag, 2000), 72– 77.

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In light of this difference, it is critically important to recall that literatures in East and West Germany, while they drew on common traditions, themes, and even styles, produced different political effects. Despite this divergence, they shared a common metric for the commingling of literature and politics. Although debates on the proper relation of literature and politics in German-language literature date back at least to the eighteenth century, it is little wonder, given the heights of their explicit and deliberate ideologization immediately preceding and during the Third Reich (1933 – 1945), that most postwar German debates took the early twentieth century as their stated or implied point of reference. What underlay and bound the positions that began to take shape by the 1950s was an assumption of the basic value and efficacy of language and literature in the public sphere. In this sense, the two positions were closer than is generally acknowledged. West German authors pointed to a radical unity of Geist and Macht (spirit or intellect and power) between 1933 and 1945 as the cautionary ends to which a politically conceived literature could lead.³⁷ Of course, even an ostensibly apolitical literature toes a tacitly understood political line. To take one example, literary historian Klaus Briegleb points to Gruppe 47-founder Hans Werner Richter’s repeated intimations to close friends that left-leaning writers’ indirect political influence was an important organizing principle for the group, which is generally taken to be one of the most explicitly, self-consciously apolitical literary constellations in postwar West Germany. Though a no debate rule generally kept politics out of official Gruppe 47 meetings, Richter alludes to this indirect politics in his correspondence with Fritz J. Raddatz.³⁸ The first public exhortation of West German authors to political participation came from the Social Democratic politician Carlo Schmid in 1958. His insistence that intellectuals should develop a positively formulated program of political action, rather than maintain an exclusively negative, critical stance vis-à-vis the

 In the context of his study of the importance of the Geist/Macht dichotomy for literature in West Germany, H.L. Müller advances a provocative counter-interpretation, namely that it was under National Socialism that the most radical separation of Geist and Macht pertained. Müller, Die literarische Republik, 27.  See Klaus Briegleb, Mißachtung und Tabu: eine Streitschrift zur Frage: “Wie antisemitisch war die Gruppe 47?” (Berlin: Philo, 2003), 82– 84. Richter (1908 – 1993) was better known for his influence as founding editor of the postwar literary journal Der Ruf and as a leader within the Gruppe 47 than for his own literary writing. Raddatz (1931– ), literary critic, editor, and cultural correspondant, completed his literary and historical studies at the Humboldt University in 1953. After working in the international division of the publishing house Volk und Welt, he emigrated to West Germany for political reasons and assumed key editorial positions at publishing houses and prominent newspapers.

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Chapter 1: Geoculture, Solidarity, and Textual Politics

state, ushered in a gradual integration of authors into party political work.³⁹ The highpoint of this party activity occurred in 1969 (after the dissolution of the Gruppe 47) with extensive author participation in electoral campaigns. By the 1960s, West Germany witnessed a relative resurgence in the German tradition of revolutionary drama, suggesting a renewed desire to explore the possibility of broad-based social change through literature. Wolfgang Rothe provides a suggestive generic timeline: revolutionary dramas clustered at the beginning of the twentieth century all focussed on European revolutionary situations; after a thirty-year gap in the popularity of the genre, which can be explained only in part by the cultural politics of the National Socialist regime, revolutionary drama resurfaced around 1964, this time focused exclusively on Third World sites of revolution.⁴⁰ At this point, West German authors showed a strong preference for documentary and operative forms in their revolutionary dramas. An essential element in the genre’s ongoing development was consequently the identification of appropriate extra-literary agents of social and political action who offered authors promising dramatic material. Once the dramatist had identified such an agent, he could establish historical-political equivalencies through a practice Ulla Hahn terms aesthetic generalization. Hahn uses the concept primarily in her discussion of protest poetry and documentary theater to signify how, by representing a specific event or series of events in a new, aestheticized context, an author elicits partisan solidarity with a role which is no longer identical with a historical agent.⁴¹ Intentionally or not, aesthetic generalization that figured extra-German locales often resulted in an erasure of difference. In other words, West German authors could regain a sense of their own literary efficacy through the apparently contradictory processes of internationally-oriented documentation and aesthetic generalization that domestic objects of social criticism could not easily offer. By ascribing to Latin American locales and political struggles the political efficacy

 H.L. Müller, Die literarische Republik, 67.  Wolfgang Rothe, Deutsche Revolutionsdramatik seit Goethe (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989). Resurgence in the genre is evident in both West and East German literature of the period.  I prefer the term operative literature to the more widely used agitprop, which carries a more specific reference to Bolshevik cultural production. In her survey of operative literature in West Germany, Ulla Hahn includes all forms of literature that self-consciously intervene into their respective contemporary political realities, including but not limited to documentary, journalistic, poetic, and street-theatrical work. Ulla Hahn, Literatur in der Aktion. Zur Entwicklung operativer Literaturformen in der Bundesrepublik (Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1978), 49.

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they desired, West German authors could indirectly reinvest literature as a social practice with a positively valorized, political purpose. East German literature, on the other hand, took its official political cue from a classical humanist tradition that understood literature and aesthetics more generally as integral parts of a personal formation or education (Bildung) that is as much political as cultural. The Nazis chose the wrong German tradition, even defamed and falsified the right one; the problem was therefore not a question of mixing literature and politics per se, but rather of identifying the correct politics for the historical context. East German authors who wrote in this humanist framework were more attentive to antecedent debates on the relative status of bourgeois and proletarian culture, ultimately asking how to articulate the subject of a socialist literature with the worker as the subject of socialist history.⁴² Socialist realism, a if not the dominant model for cultural production in East Germany, was understood to contribute to the creation of a proletarian culture in several ways. Articulated most explicitly during the formalism debates in and following 1951, socialist realism had four major characteristics: the hierarchical relation of content to form; a positive relation to history (i. e., not the historical pessimism of Expressionism or high modernism); the resumption of a bourgeois humanist cultural inheritance (Kulturerbe); and the possibility of reader identification with a positive, socialist hero (witness the countless Hans Garbe-inspired works of the 1950s and 1960s). The notion of Erbe (inheritance, but also executor), in turn, implied three main, overlapping roles for authors and intellectuals, and governed ideas about how they should relate to a broader, proletarian public. Assigned the weighty role of caretakers of a tradition considered foundational to (East) German cultural and political identity, authors were expected to continue the humanist project; to this end, their role was understood as fundamentally pedagogical.⁴³ Literature was to serve not only as a cultural product or artifact (Kulturgut) to be transmitted to individual citizens; it was also a space where humanist cultural processes and proletarian material processes could merge to further East Germany’s revolutionary development.⁴⁴

 Karl Robert Mandelkow, “Die literarische und kulturpolitische Bedeutung des Erbes,” in Die Literatur der DDR, ed. Hans Jürgen Schmitt, vol. 11 of Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (Munich: dtv, 1983), 78.  Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte, 12, 41– 48.  Greiner discusses the space accorded to literature in this model in terms of a proletarian public sphere. Bernhard Greiner, “Im Zeichen des Aufbruchs: die Literatur der fünfziger Jahre,” in Die Literatur der DDR, ed. Hans Jürgen Schmitt, vol. 11 of Hansers Sozialgeschichte der Literatur (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser, 1983), 337– 339.

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The lines between left-bourgeois, socialist, and proletarian-revolutionary writing, however, became increasingly difficult to manage. By the time of the Bitterfeld conference in 1959, it had long since become apparent that journalistic accounts of factory life diverged from the stated aims of the proletarian literature of the 1920s.⁴⁵ The conference, organized by the Mitteldeutscher Verlag and expanded at the behest of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) leadership, was attended by 150 professional authors and 300 worker-authors and popular correspondants. But despite their claims to the contrary, cultural officials were generally disinterested in cultivating the unmediated voices of worker-authors, preferring instead intellectual accounts with a proletarian perspective. In fact, while the resulting Bitterfeld Path promoted worker-authors and was ostensibly designed to eliminate the separation between high culture and workers’ culture, and between professional and lay writers, many critics have pointed to its rapid bureaucratization and emphatic subsumption under—even subordination to— the socialist humanist legacy (Erbe).⁴⁶ As West German authors began to experiment with documentary and even factory genres, East German authors such as Braun and Müller moved away from traditions in workers’ literature that had been appropriated by state cultural policy in favor of an anti-productivist aesthetic. Authors committed to redirecting the socialist project increasingly turned to models outside of officially sanctioned German cultural traditions, including Latin American socialisms. Thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Leon Trotsky, José Carlos Mariátegui, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Fidel Castro, and C.L.R. James, representatives of international, heterodox Marxist traditions that had been reread and reinvented in Latin America, found their way back to East Germany through the official politics of internationalism and oppositional practices of critical solidarity. In the West, a perceived absence of historical German models for political change often contributed to emphatically uncritical declarations of solidarity with Latin America. Werner Balsen and Karl Rössel’s introduction to their sweeping history of international solidarity movements in postwar West Germany offers an especially glaring example:

 For a summary of the conference and its program, see Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte, 129 – 131. The Bitterfeld Path was officially promoted by the Socialist Unity Party’s Cultural Conference in 1960 and followed from the conference of the same name. Like the 5th Party Congress in 1961, it aimed to eliminate the gap between art and life.  Specifically, Greiner describes the organizational pressures imposed on authors by the Bitterfeld Path, and, ultimately, the program’s termination by the 11th Plenum of the Central Committee in 1965. Greiner, “Im Zeichen des Aufbruchs,” 378 – 379; Mandelkow, “Die literarische und kulturpolitische Bedeutung des Erbes,” 98.

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One look at the defeat of the democratic movement in this country [i. e., by Nazism] may give pause to some solidarity committees today in their ex cathedra criticisms of the politics of liberation movements in Third World countries. “We” have nothing, nothing whatsoever, to offer others that might be worth emulating.⁴⁷

Authors from both German states thus pursued questions about the possibility of radical change by rearticulating the relationship of literature and politics in contradistinction to earlier hegemonic discourses on political literature and with reference to Latin American subjects. In the process, they troubled established concepts of revolutionary subjectivity and advanced the destabilization of German national subjects already set into motion by the Allied occupation and partition of Germany after World War II.

Material and rhetorical contexts for imagining Latin America The political and literary appeal of Latin America to German writers was manifold. Latin America had long been an ambiguous cultural cipher in the German polity and its social imagination. Outside the web of formal German colonialism, the region connoted sites of informal colonial activity with even greater economic and political significance than formal German colonies in Africa and the South Pacific.⁴⁸ Latin America’s perceived position between the absolute Otherness of Africa and a normative Europe, and its more recent status as victim of neoimperialism and agent of revolutionary resistance, are key to understanding German preoccupations with Latin America as a site of oppositional agency and political authenticity in the age of three worlds. Literature has been a privileged site for exploring German-Latin American relationships, as well as for producing affective responses to and political knowledge about them. From a literary-historical perspective, Latin America has also offered clear models for antiimperialist writing dating back to its nineteenth-century independence movements, and for antifascist writing dating to the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939). Latin American literature since independence stands in marked contrast to European literary currents. So fundamental are the differences that literary historical approaches to the two regions are largely incompatible. While many Euro-

 Werner Balsen and Karl Rössel, Hoch die internationale Solidarität: zur Geschichte der Dritte Welt-Bewegung in der Bundesrepublik (Cologne: Kölner Volksblatt-Verlag, 1986), 29. All translations from German and Spanish are my own unless otherwise noted.  Thomas David Schoonover, Germany in Central America: Competitive Imperialism, 1821 – 1929 (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1995).

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pean literary currents can reasonably be approached in terms of progressive technical developments, Latin American literature is characterized by a series of ruptures and fresh starts organized around successive responses to social conditions.⁴⁹ Naturalism, regionalism, socialist realism, and indigenism were explicitly concerned with the material realities of inequality and social stratification, and expansive notions of the real and of social and artistic commitment (compromiso) were widely accepted by the 1950s and 1960s. One of the most esteemed authors of the new Latin American novel (la nueva novela latinoamericana), Argentine author Julio Cortázar, addressed its critics by speaking to the important role of commitment in the potenciación of the real—the strengthening and development of society’s capacity for understanding and imagining realities.⁵⁰ The Latin American avant-garde’s penchant for hybrid forms was resumed and magnified in its critical engagement with new media that began around the same time as the ascendance of compromiso and continued well into the 1970s. Authors such as Ariel Dorfman (Para leer al Pato Donald [How to Read Donald Duck, 1972]) and Eduardo Galeano (Las venas abiertas de América Latina [The Open Veins of Latin America, 1971]) combined their literary talents with biting cultural criticism to achieve wide readerships in and beyond Latin America. The period leading up to the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a critical rediscovery of Latin America’s historical avant-garde in Latin American and European literary circles, culminating in the 1971 award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904 – 1973). Hans Magnus Enzensberger translated both Peruvian César Vallejo (1892– 1938) and Neruda before turning his literary and editorial attentions to the colonial priest Bartolomé de las Casas (1484– 1566) and to his own contemporary, Cuban Miguel Barnet (1940–).⁵¹ But before Enzens-

 Jean Franco, The Modern Culture of Latin America (New York, Washington, and London: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), 1– 2.  Julio Cortázar, Literatura en revolución y revolución en la literatura (Mexico City: Siglo Vientiuno, 1971).  Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies, 1552) was translated and published in German in 1790, but Enzensberger considered it highly relevant to the contemporary, neocolonial situation, and proposed a new edition and introduction to the existing translation, which was published by Suhrkamp in 1966. For more on Las Casas and the origins of the “Black Legend” of Germans’ reportedly inhuman participation in the Spanish conquest, see Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 18 – 30. More recently, worldsystems theorists including Immanuel Wallerstein and Mignolo have revived interest in Las Casas (and his interlocutor Juan Gínes de Sepúlveda) in the context of debates on cosmopolitan rights. See Immanuel Wallerstein, European Universalism and the Rhetoric of Power (New York: New Press, 2006) and Walter D. Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12.3 (2000): 721– 748. Barnet’s Biografía de un ci-

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berger, returning antifascist exiles translated members of the avant-garde and more self-consciously socialist realist authors in equal measure beginning in the 1950s. Their choices stretched from Neruda’s early avant-garde poetry to Brazilian Jorge Amado’s (1912– 2001) socialist realist novels.⁵² What becomes clear is the range of texts translated. The German reception of Latin American political literature was by no means dominated exclusively by realism or new, documentary impulses such as testimonio. ⁵³ Instead, Latin America offered a broad field of possibilities for rethinking the role of the artist in society and the relation of the literary to the political. To argue for the specificity of Latin American referents in East and West German political literature in the 1960s and 1970s is not to argue for their exclusivity. There can be no doubt that Third World locales in Asia and Africa were also of considerable import for intellectual and popular attempts to reconsider the place of the two German states in a postcolonial world polarized along the lines of the Cold War and rife with local struggles for historical and political agency. Recent historical and literary scholarship on Asian-German connections and on Africa attests to their importance.⁵⁴ Yet the sheer volume of literary writing on Latin America is striking. According to Wolfgang Rothe’s inventory of twentieth-century East and West German revolutionary dramas, to take but one genre as an example, roughly one third of the dramas produced since

marrón (Biography of a Cimarrón, 1966) is widely regarded as foundational to the testimonial genre. I discuss his relationship with Enzensberger in Chapter Two.  Jens Kirsten, Lateinamerikanische Literatur in der DDR. Publikations- und Wirkungsgeschichte (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2004), 24– 26.  Testimonio is a narrative form that derives its name from practices of witnessing or testifying collectively. Described by René Jara as urgent narratives (narraciones de urgencia), testimonio is closely associated with oral traditions, and its political intent to capture authentic, first-person accounts of marginal protagonists is complicated by the frequent involvement of a formally educated, mediating writer or editor. As a literary genre, testimonio was initially popularized in 1960s Latin America and gained international attention after its codification in 1970 by the Cuban Casa de las Américas. Despite its close associations with the Cuban and, later, Central American revolutions, the category is sometimes used to describe literature dating back to the colonial era. René Jara and Hernán Vidal, eds., Testimonio y literatura (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1986). For an English-language account that represents the decades-long, primarily US American debates surrounding testimonio, see John Beverley, Testimonio: The Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). For further references, see my discussion of Enzensberger and Latin American commitment in Chapter Two of this book.  I have in mind especially Nina Berman’s work on Africa, discussed below, and the collection of essays Imagining Germany Imagining Asia: Essays in Asian-German Studies, ed. Veronika Fuechtner and Mary Rhiel (London: Camden House, 2013).

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1961 are about Latin American revolutions.⁵⁵ Latin American antiimperialism and revolution, particularly in Cuba and Chile, held an emotional valence that even Vietnam in the early 1970s could not. Klaus Vack, a prominent activist in West German solidarity organizations from Algeria to Nicaragua, a leader in the Easter March Campaigns of the 1960s, and an active participant in other, domestic protest initiatives from the 1950s through the 1980s, describes the significance of massive protests against the Chilean putsch on 11 September 1973 as follows: [The speed and success of popular mobilization] again makes clear what kind of longings, hopes, and expectations were behind it [i. e., West German solidarity with Allende’s Popular Unity government] and had been crushed by the coup. And that is the difference from Vietnam. In Chile there was a social-revolutionary process and it was crushed. In contrast to Vietnam, where the solidarity movement first got on board when the process of destruction and war was already in gear.⁵⁶

Where in the German popular imagination Vietnam marked embattlement, injustice, anger, and retribution, revolutionary violence in Latin America signified hope in the eyes of social leaders like Vack. Theoretical concerns about postcoloniality also gained popular momentum around Latin American events in the 1970s. An interest in Germany’s formal colonial exploits that dates roughly to the 1980s and 1990s had not yet taken hold, but reception of scholarly and literary writings from Latin America was already remarkably developed in both East and West Germany. The 1976 Frankfurt Book Fair—the first to have an official theme—celebrated Latin American authors. Even there, the literary and economic were conspicuously linked: the fair was co-opened by prominent Boom author and then-president of the PEN-Club Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru, 1933– ; Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010) and Minister for Economic Cooperation Egon Bahr (1922– ).⁵⁷ The popularization of literary translations from Latin America continued to pick up speed following the

 Rothe, Deutsche Revolutionsdramatik, 257– 258. On the proliferation of East German dramas about Latin America in the late 1970s, see Frank Hörnigk, “Erinnerung an Revolutionen. Zur Entwicklungstendenzen in der Dramatik Heiner Müllers, Peter Hacks’ und Volker Brauns am Ende der siebziger Jahre,” in Tendenzen und Beispiele. Zur DDR-Literatur in den siebziger Jahren, ed. Hans Kaufmann (Leipzig: Philip Reclam jun., 1981), 148 – 184.  Vack cited in Balsen and Rössel, Hoch die internationale Solidarität, 298.  See Michi Strausfeld, “Die großen Multiplikatoren: Autorentreffen, Festivals, Messen und andere Zusammenkünfte,” in Deutsche in Lateinamerika, Lateinamerika in Deutschland, ed. Dietrich Briesemeister, Karl Kohut, and Gustav Siebenmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert Verlag, 1996), 285 – 296.

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book fair, reaching the height of their popularity in the 1980s.⁵⁸ In the West, reading texts oriented toward conditions in North Africa and Persia (Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnes de la Terre [The Wretched of the Earth, 1961] and Bahman Nirumand’s Persien, Modell eines Entwicklungslandes oder, die Diktatur der freien Welt [Persia, Model of a Developing Country, or: The Dictatorship of the Free World, 1967], respectively) often led literary intellectuals to explore their resonances with Latin American contexts.⁵⁹ Enzensberger’s journal Kursbuch, which provided sustained attention to literary and political developments in Latin America, served as an important forum for translating and publishing the work of these and other early postcolonial theorists (see Chapter Two). In the East, formal author exchanges and subsidized translations and anthologies are well documented.⁶⁰ East Germany placed a high premium on the role of cultural politics in general and literature in particular for fostering meaningful international relationships; it was only natural, then, that authors, editors, and publishing houses were assigned a key role in the expression of political solidarity with Latin America. Antifascist exiles to Latin America returned overwhelmingly to the Soviet zone of occupation after the war, where they quickly began to translate and publish Latin American authors beginning in the late 1940s. By all accounts the foremost advocate of Latin American literature in East Germany, Anna Seghers (1900 – 1983) was president of both the Liga für Völkerfreundschaft (League of Peoples’ Friendship) and of the Schriftstellerverband (Writers’ Union). Her person underscores the overlap of literature and internationalism characteristic of East Germany during the Cold War.⁶¹ In the West, economic analyses, especially variations on Latin American dependency theory, were often closely linked to postcolonial political and cultural analyses.⁶² Insofar as rethinking the terms of international political engagement

 See Meg H. Brown, The Reception of Spanish American Fiction in West Germany 1981 – 1991: A Study of Best Sellers (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994).  To my knowledge, the first published German translation of any part of Fanon’s 1961 text was “Von der Gewalt,” Kursbuch 2 (1965): 1– 55. Bahman Nirumand, Persien. Model eines Entwicklungslandes oder die Diktatur der Freien Welt (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1967).  Kirsten, Lateinamerikanische Literatur in der DDR.  The Liga für Völkerfreundschaft (1961– 1990) was the umbrella organization for national friendship societies and a coordinator of foreign cultural policy. For a description of the organization’s functions, see “Liga für Völkerfreundschaft,” So funktionierte die DDR, vol. 1, ed. Andreas Herbst, Winifried Ranke, and Jürgen Winkler (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994), 600 – 607.  For a concise overview of West German reception of Latin American economic theory, itself prompted by the 1976 Frankfurt Book Fair theme, see Denkanstoße aus Lateinamerika: Theologen, Soziologen, Politik- und Wirtschaftswissenschaftler berichten, ed. Albrecht von Gleich and

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was allied to rethinking the possibility of a politically efficacious literature domestically, many authors paid close attention the debates such analyses engendered. I take this up at greater length in Chapter Five. Among the most explicit attempts to define the terms of solidarity with Latin America in West Germany was a local Heidelberg group’s discussion paper published in Chile Monitor. In it, group members argued for the expansion of Chile-solidarity to encompass a broader, Latin American focus. They believed that any future solidarity actions should be characterized by the development of structural, economic analyses of US and West German neoimperialist practices: “Why can’t we consider Chile in isolation from other countries in Latin America? In order to answer this question, one must first consider the historical development. THE HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICA’S UNDERDEVELOPMENT IS THE HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM.”⁶³ The paper identified the most important programs as educational campaigns designed to expose the complicity of US American and West German firms with the Chilean military dictatorship. Although their concept of solidarity ostensibly encompassed humanitarian, democratic, and revolutionary elements in addition to antiimperialism, all “concrete tasks for solidarity in the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany]” concentrated on the dissemination of economic information. Attention to the economic to the exclusion of humanist internationalism belied the idealist moments in such discussion papers, usually buried deep under varying degrees of Marxist-Leninist verbiage. Thus, categories of empathy and sociohistorical analysis remained secondary to larger, structuralist economic frames and proscriptive plans for practical West German intervention. To cite another example, solidarity group members aimed to justify basic humanitarian efforts such as the provision of food, clothing, and shelter to Chilean exiles in West Germany because these acts would facilitate the eventual return of political prisoners and exiles to guerrilla cells in Latin America. The effect of such language was a chilling, almost antihumanitarian commitment to Latin America as a site of revolutionary action against global neoimperialist agents, wherein individual lives and commitments became secondary to the preservation of fighting bodies. Such examples bear out Carlos Rangel’s insightful writings about the enduring purchase of racist and colonialist ideologies in left-revolutionary treatments of Latin America by Latin Americans and Europeans alike, which he summed up as the transforma-

Germán Kratochwil (Hamburg: Institut für Iberoamerika Kunde, 1976). One of the most substantive attempts at a popular dissemination of dependency theory is “Lateinamerikanische Theorie der Abhängigkeit,” Dritte Welt Materialien 1– 2 (1976).  “Diskussionspapier des Lateinamerika-Komitees Heidelberg zur Entwicklung der Arbeit des Chile Komitees auf andere Länder Lateinamerikas,” Chile Monitor 4 (1976).

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tion of the noble savage into the good revolutionary.⁶⁴ In each figure, an idealized stereotype overshadows a more complex historical experience, cast by members of the Heidelberg collective as an opportunity to redress the fundamental global excesses of European capitalism. By the early 1970s, 70% of West German direct investment was in Latin America.⁶⁵ Early critiques of development aid made it difficult to dispute that a preference for Latin American projects was related to private-sector interests in the creation of infrastructure that would benefit German investment abroad, and private investors openly praised the relative stability of military dictatorship from the perspective of capital. Solidarity activists warned against the potential consequences of Latin America’s new, dictatorial stability: “Let us keep in mind that after the revolutionary development in Asia and Africa West German imperialism will concentrate even more than before on LA.”⁶⁶ In addition to broad campaigns against direct investment and development aid, solidarity groups focused their energies on exposing individual corporations. As most companies made no secret of their investment practices—a wide array of advertisements appeared in the financial sections of regional and national papers immediately following the Chilean coup—Third World solidarity publications collected and re-

 Carlos Rangel, Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1982). The noble savage has a storied career in colonial imaginations both in and beyond Latin America, and is most frequently traced to Rousseau’s A Discourse on Inequality (1755). Postcolonial critics generally agree that it is a figuration of European loss: “The concept arises in the eighteenth century as a European nostalgia for a simple, pure, idyllic state of the natural, posed against rising industrialism and the notion of overcomplications and sophistications of European urban society. […] It creates images of the savage that serve primarily to re-define the European. The crucial fact about the construction is that it produces an ostensibly positive oversimplification of the ‘savage’ figure, rendering it in this particular form as an idealized rather than debased stereotype.” Post-Colonial Studies. The Key Concepts, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 210. As such, it also ideally typifies the link of the modern and the colonial upon which Arturo Escobar (and Mignolo, who adopts his usage) bases his argument for a research agenda devoted not to modernization, modernity, or colonialism, but to modernity/coloniality. See Escobar, “‘World and Knowledges Otherwise’: The Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Progam,” Cuadernos del CEDLA 16 (2004): 31– 67; and Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, viii.  “Wirtschaftswunder durch Multis? Privatinvestitionen in der Dritten Welt,” Information Dritte Welt 35 (1976).  “Wirtschaftswunder durch Multis?”

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printed particularly insensitive and opportunist advertisements for West German direct investment in Latin America from the national press.⁶⁷ Criticisms of specific German companies introduced some of the first systematic accusations of fascism into popular debates about German-Chilean relations. (Other, more sporadic and imprecise accusations were present in slogans as early as 1973, e. g., “Fascist military junta!” and “No development aid for the fascists!” in early numbers of the Chile-Zeitung [Chile Newspaper].) Members of the solidarity movement gave depth to slogans such as “Bayer, Hoechst & Mannesman lead the fascists!” in reports on the history of West German investment in Latin America, in some cases by companies that profited under the Nazis.⁶⁸ Specific connections between German investment and conservative political support for the military dictatorship bolstered already popular arguments linking capitalism and fascism. Some of those arguments were loosely based on vulgar Marxist theories of capitalism’s inexorable march toward fascism that had been current in the 1930s; some were more modestly advanced around the idea of social fascism in contemporary West Germany. Social fascism, some members of left-oppositional groups argued, was a by-product of (West) German restoration under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and had been cemented by the Social Democrats’ appeasement of capital interests in their 1959 Godesberg Program.⁶⁹ Regardless, each of these positions called unequivocally for an antifascism that would fight political and economic developments in Latin America’s Southern Cone. East Germany, by contrast, had articulated and aggressively advanced critiques of fascist German capital since its inception. Often cited as an exemplar

 For examples from immediately after the Chilean coup, see Chile Zeitung (Chile Newspaper), ila-info (the news publication of the Informationsstelle Lateinamerika [Latin American Information Center]), and Chile Nachrichten (Chile News).  See for example Chile Zeitung Nr. 3 (1973) and “Si es Bayer…es bueno?” Materialien zum Antiimperialistischen Kampf. Entwicklungshilfe und Ausländerstudium i.d. BRD 5. Apr. 1974 (originally published in the Peruvian Sociedad y politica [1972]). More sustained, book-length analyses were not far behind. See for example Gaby Weber, ‚Krauts‘ erobern die Welt. Der deutsche Imperialismus in Südamerika (Hamburg: Libertäre Assoziation, 1982).  Adopted by an overwhelming majortity at the 1959 party congress in Bad Godesberg, the Godesberg Program was the culmination of internal party debates prompted by a series of electoral defeats. It marks the Social Democratic Party’s break with Marxist tradition and cemented its aspiration to become a mainstream party (Volkspartei). The contours of the plan remained central to the party platform for decades. Most important among them were the explicit recognition of a social market economic system as a democratic system; the acceptance of the state as an arbiter of class equality, and the rejection of class struggle as a world view; and the explicit rejection of communism.

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of antifascist cultural production, prominent literary and political actor Anna Seghers’s biography coincides in many ways with an official genealogy of antifascist literature.⁷⁰ Seghers’s work was profoundly shaped by her Mexican exile during the Third Reich. Antifascist cultural organizations proliferated in Latin America in the 1930s. Ludwig Renn, Bodo Uhse, Egon Erwin Kisch, Walter Janka, and Stefan Zweig were among the other authors in Mexico City alone.⁷¹ In addition to its affinities with Volksfrontpolitik, the experience of Latin American exile may have contributed to their articulation of the role of the author in society upon returning to the Soviet zone.⁷² Close working relationships with leading Latin American communist artists and intellectuals (including Pablo Neruda, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and David Alfaro Siquieros) reinforced not only an understanding of and commitment to political art, but gave Germanspeaking exiles a sense of the political status accorded to authors in Latin America and the Caribbean since independence.⁷³ Alexander Abusch (1902– 1982)

 Christina Zehl-Romero suggests that Seghers was not only a prominent member of East German cultural institutions, but herself became an institution. Of a large photo of Seghers and Honecker displayed at a Writers’ Congress in the early 1980s, she writes: “It projects the message of a successful alliance between Geist and Macht in the GDR.” “Seghersmaterial in Heiner Müller and Volker Braun,” in Studies in GDR Culture and Society 9. Selected Papers from the fourteenth New Hampshire Symposium on the German Democratic Republic (Langham, MD and London: University Press of America, 1989), 57.  Wolfgang Kiessling’s two volume Alemania Libre in Mexiko provides the most comprehensive account of exile activities centered in Mexico City. His Exil in Lateinamerika provides a more general account of exile activities in other major urban centers as well as in Mexico City. For a more condensed introduction to the antifascist cultural organizations Das andere Deutschland (The Other Germany) and Freies Deutschland (Free Germany), see Patrik von zur Mühen, Fluchtziel Lateinamerika. Die deutsche Emigration 1933 – 1945: politische Aktivitäten und soziokulturelle Integration (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1988), 117– 31.  The number of exiles to Latin America who returned to the Soviet zone of occupation was disproportionately high for several reasons. First, many exiles went to Latin America and especially Mexico precisely because emigrants with communist political associations were less likely to receive visas to the US. Second, reemigration policies were designed to screen returnees politically; even once reemigration papers were in order, the US often denied or delayed transit visas for return passage. The Soviets, on the other hand, actively pursued potentially cooperative leftist exiles’ return to their zone of occupation. On reemigration policy see von zur Mühen, 284– 90.  A number of scholars have explored the leading roles of authors in Latin American politics from Cuban writer and nationalist revolutionary José Martí (1853 – 1895) to Nicaraguan writer and politician Sergio Ramírez (1942– ) and Nicaraguan priest, poet, and politician Ernesto Cardenal (1925– ). The most systematic and widely received is Angel Rama’s La ciudad letrada (Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1984).

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went so far as to claim that the humanist legacy of Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) first attained meaning to Germans in Mexican exile.⁷⁴ The common experience of the Spanish Civil War, itself a catalyst for what Neruda termed “impure poetry,” no doubt provided an important point of connection between German antifascists and committed artists and intellectuals in Latin America.⁷⁵ What is more, it served as an important metonymic link between antifascist internationalism since the 1960s and earlier antifascist movements. Recounting discussions with Ludwig Renn and Bodo Uhse in Cuba shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion, East German author and Tamara Bunke (a.k.a. Tania la guerrillera) biographer Eberhard Panitz comes close to suggesting that Cuba and other potentially revolutionary sites in Latin America were his generation’s Spain.⁷⁶ Attempts to represent a genealogy of internationalist antifascism in East German literature overlapped substantially with an official politics of international solidarity. One of the objectives of state sponsored travel organized through official friendship treaties was to increase the “international content” of East German literature.⁷⁷ East Germany was particularly interested in establishing formal

 Alexander Abusch, “Alexander von Humboldt. Gelehrter—Humanist—Freund der Völker,” in Tradition und Gegenwart des sozialistischen Humanismus (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Marxistische Blätter, 1971), 12. Abusch, himself in Mexican exile until 1945, held a number of political positions after returning to the Soviet zone and served as East Germany’s Minister of Culture from 1961– 1971.  Pablo Neruda, “Sobre una poesía sin pureza,” in vol. 3 of Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1975), 636 – 37.  Eberhard Panitz, Cuba, mi amor. Die letzte Insel (Berlin: edition ost, 2004), 16, 27, 79. Despite the recent publication date, the text consists largely of travel diaries from late July through early October 1961. Bodo Uhse (1904– 1963) and Ludwig Renn (1889 – 1979) were both East German authors, veterans of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and former Mexican exiles. For biographical information on Bunke, see Chapter Three of this book.  Archiv des Schriftstellerverbands, Akademie der Künste, SV969 “Zusammenarbeit mit dem Ausland, 1959 – 1965.” The official nature of early treaties—and much other international cultural work—also must be understood as part of the East German movement for political recognition. A key strategy was to achieve that recognition through activities organized around a pre-existing cultural recognition, especially over and against West German campaigns to be the sole representatives of German culture and the state. Many examples of friendship treaties can be found in SAPMO-BArch DY13/2844, “Arbeitsvereinbarungen mit Hauptpartnern,” but are also scattered throughout other parts of the Liga für Völkerfreundschaft collection (DY13). Treaties typically outlined celebrations of the states’ respective holidays and anniversaries of national cultural figures, and described the planned exchange of educational and cultural materials and delegations. Reams of notoriously scarce paper were spent denouncing the cultural imperialism of the Goethe Institute, accused of corrupting and falsifying German humanism to serve its own political ends. See for example SAPMO-BArch, DY13/2350, “Arbeit des Gegners

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relationships to Latin America, as made explicit in a memo from the cultural division of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs dated 17 June 1963: “In collaboration with Comrade Bator the union will soon discuss and take under advisement all possibilities to intensify work directed at the capitalist world in the future, especially Latin America.”⁷⁸ Official cultural organizations including the Schriftstellerverband, the Liga für Völkerfreundschaft, and the Deutsch-Lateinamerikanische Gesellschaft (DeuLaG, the German-Latin American Society) actively worked to compile, translate, and publish works by Latin American authors.⁷⁹ DeuLaG’s mission was to maintain, expand, and deepen German-Latin American relationships and to provide un-self-interested help. (The last was undoubtedly a criticism of West German development aid policies, and must be read not as a fact, but as a calculated political claim.)⁸⁰ Founding documents describe East Germany’s role in the relationship as follows: “The ‘German Latin American Society in the German Democratic Republic’ disseminates knowledge about democratic construction, and economic and cultural development in the GDR, which stands firmly alongside peaceful forces against imperialism and colonialism.”⁸¹ Significantly, both the Liga and DeuLaG were invested in positioning themselves in a cultural line that extended back further even than antifascism in Spain and Latin America to the person of Alexander von Humboldt. In speeches, treaties, and planned cultural initiatives, he was described as the embodiment of German humanism and antiimperialism. His person stood for the cultural—and by extension political—legitimacy that East Germany sought to consolidate internationally in the face of the Hallstein Doctrine.⁸² Consistent recourse to Alexander von Humboldt throughout the 1960s and 1970s demonstrates that he and the Romantic nationalist discourses exemplified

und Arbeit mit der Presse.” Lists of exit visas by country and travel reports filed by returning authors offer a broad overview of travel sponsored through the Schriftstellerverband. See Archiv des Schriftstellerverbands, Akademie der Künste, SV964 and SV1029.  Archiv des Schriftstellerverbands, Akademie der Künste, SV969.  Although many publishing house catalogues were lost or destroyed around the time of reunification, Jens Kirsten has documented at least 450 Latin American titles published between 1947 and 1990 by the East German Verlag Volk und Welt, Verlag Philipp Reclam jun., and Verlag Neues Leben. Kirsten, Lateinamerikanische Literatur, 14.  SAPMO-BArch DY13/2847a.  SAPMO-BArch DY13/2847b.  The Hallstein Doctrine describes the West German state’s 1955 policy of regarding the diplomatic recognition of the East German state by any state outside of the Eastern Bloc as an affront against West Germany and potential grounds for the discontinuation of diplomatic relations by Bonn. It was intended to promote West Germany’s claim to be the sole legitimate representative of the German people and to isolate East Germany internationally.

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in his writings were not only the stuff of historical fantasy and reciprocal invention of German and Latin American nation-states, but were themselves consistently reinvented to suit the interests and needs of cultural policy on both sides of the Atlantic.⁸³ An East German reinvention of von Humboldt fused his often uncoupled roles as scientist and passionate humanist, highlighted his relationships to leaders of Latin American independence movements at the turn of the nineteenth century, and positioned him as a precursor to scientific socialism and the profound contemporary solidarity expressed with new struggles for autonomy in Latin America. In Chapter Three, I take up at length Alexander von Humboldt’s privileged status as a figure of East German internationalism. The literary-political expression of East German internationalism reached new heights at the onset of what Latin Americanist Jean Franco has called the second Cold War in Latin America.⁸⁴ In the wake of the 1973 coup in Chile, statements on the relationship of literature to solidarity with Chile characterized the vast majority of speeches at the Seventh Congress of the East German Writers’ Union (14– 16 November 1973).⁸⁵ The already staggering number of translations and anthologies of Chilean authors and intellectuals increased steadily as more than 2,000 Chilean exiles were granted asylum in East Germany, making up fully 20% of the total number of Latin American publications in the country between 1947 and 1993. Of those publications, 83% were belles lettres. ⁸⁶ From international friendship societies to the national Writers’ Union, translation and publication of Latin American literature were promoted as active forms of solidarity work.

Theoretical contexts: the emergence of Cold War transnationalisms, postcolonial studies, and area studies Literary representations of Latin American revolutionary conflict played an important role in the solidarity movements that I introduce. The idea of Latin America that emerged in them was mediated by distinct but substantially overlapping German cultural experiences, expectations, and fantasies about violent conflict

 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 138.  Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).  VII. Schriftstellerkongreß der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. Protokoll, 2 vols. (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1974).  Kirsten, Lateinamerikanische Literatur, 388.

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and political change (especially but not exclusively the Holocaust and National Socialism and, in the East, Stalinism). In the 1960s and 1970s the problem of violence was often formulated in terms of the relation of state order to freedom, and was frequently discussed under the signs of colonialism and imperialism. More often than not, the opposition of Latin American action to German thought underlay otherwise critical literary treatments of violent revolution. Dramatic conflicts often reproduced a stereotype of Latin America as a place without intellectual traditions and attempted to find a place in it for German action nearly as often as they introduced Latin American thought to East and West German reading publics. Whether and how cultural—especially literary—production might itself constitute such action is fundamental to my literary and political inquiry into the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. The Cold War context within which Enzensberger, Braun, Müller, and Delius wrote established a system of ideological conflict that was brought to bear on a multitude of local historical conflicts, each of which reflected racial and economic hegemonies within nations, regionally, and geoculturally. Those conflicts, which troubled national-cultural boundaries, did and do not map neatly onto the three worlds carved out of Cold War geopolitics. Germany provides a particularly fruitful object of study in this respect. I argue that three key features of the German-German relationship lend themselves to a critical revision of received knowledges about culture in the age of three worlds, which I pursue through the comparative analysis of East and West German attempts to forge aesthetic solidarities with Latin America. First, debates on state propriety over national cultural traditions in East and West Germany, in which international political recognition was sought on the basis of already attained cultural recognition (especially by the East German state) highlight the constructed and contested nature of national cultural identities. Second, the blurred boundary between the national and the international in East and West German political and cultural relations requires novel reading strategies that shuttle between sites and scales of geocultural negotiation. Third, the shared history of a single nation divided not only into two states but into two worlds is mediated in no small part by constructing a series of critical relationships to a third in the shape of Latin America. The two German states are privileged not only in accounts of the three worlds’ emergence, but also in their demise, most frequently invoked in the figure of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In short, as the site of one of the Cold War’s most literal boundary inscriptions, the two Germanys troubled already strained conceits of co-terminus nations and states, as well as the dominant terms of international relations in the social and humanistic sciences. In the East, proletarian internationalism dictated the terms of geopolitical relations and formal cultural exchange, particular-

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ly through state solidarity initiatives in the form of the numerous friendship societies referred to above. Proletarian internationalism underwrote an official politics of peace and cooperation, dovetailing with East German claims to a longer antifascist politics of peace. In the West, critical perspectives on neoimperialism and the rise of multinational corporations were directed largely against individual states (most frequently West Germany and the USA). Departing from socialist internationalism in any strict sense, the West German New Left frequently shifted the terms of class analysis to accommodate a view of proletarian and capitalist states in a new international division of labor and power. Enzensberger’s essay “Europäische Peripherie” (“European Periphery,” 1965) illustrates this shift well.⁸⁷ At the same time, forms of transnational relation and imagination were emerging within some cultural expressions of internationalism in both German states, sparked by the reception of Latin American political and cultural production (see Chapters Three and Five). My understanding of transnationalism is informed first and foremost by Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc’s path-breaking social scientific research on transmigration, which offers an empirical foundation sorely lacking in literary scholarship on the transnational. In their case studies of Caribbean and Filipino transmigration, they distinguish among specific forms of transnationalism as creative responses to the forces of globalization. Their empirical work explores processes of nation-states’ deterritorialization, though it never confuses those processes with the demise of the state form. In their sociological analysis, the transnational “signal[s] the fluidity with which ideas, objects, capital, and people now move across borders and boundaries.”⁸⁸ In the context of my literary analysis, I understand the term broadly to indicate engagements with thematic, textual, and/or aesthetic forms and traditions that seek to do the same. Transnational literary practices are neither international nor global, but are predicated on elements of both. The transnational includes a cultural component that resists hegemonic spatial identities, of which the nation-state form remains the most tenacious.⁸⁹

 See n. 34.  Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (New York: Routledge, 1993), 27.  Basch et al., Nations Unbound, 7.

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To clarify the continued importance of the state form, Thomas Faist advances the alternate concept “transstate.”⁹⁰ Transstate denotes increasingly dense (verdichtete) economic, political and cultural relationships between people and collectives that cross the borders of sovereign states. They connect people, networks and organizations in multiple locales beyond their respective state borders. ⁹¹

Fields of transstate contacts have, in Faist’s analysis, intensified since roughly the 1970s via migration, exile, and the exchange of goods and information.⁹² They indicate not only physical spaces, but also social and symbolic connections. His definition thus expands Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc’s work on transnational contacts that take shape around the lived experiences of transmigrants to include new, expanding forms and spaces of transstate contacts that are no longer predicated on geographic mobility per se.⁹³ Fields of transstate cultural contacts constitute individual and community resources as well as their collective representations. Faist explains: “Cultural capital entails common interpretive frameworks which come to fruition in symbolic connections, as resources such as solidarity […]”⁹⁴ According to Faist, solidarity includes the cultivation of empathy and a willingness to deprioritize selfinterest, at least in the short-term.⁹⁵ Attention to transstate formations and to the solidarity and reciprocity they entail in the respective interpretive frameworks of East and West German literary texts allows me to highlight how cultural production in the two German states anticipated a more generalized crisis of the nationstate in a period of increased structural, economic, and political consolidation and regionalization cited in the humanistic social sciences as beginning in the 1990s. In the German case, the crisis of state authenticity was first precipitated by its postwar occupation and division and, consequently, preceded state crises globally. German authors’ attempts to articulate forms of aesthetic solidarity that are inherently internationalist serve as key examples of shifting concepts of national, international, and transnational filiation that significantly predate current discussions of the transnational and the global in literary and cultural studies.  Thomas Faist, “Grenzen überschreiten: Das Konzept Transstaatliche Räume und seine Anwendungen,” in Transstaatliche Räume: Politik, Wirtschaft und Kultur in und zwischen Deutschland und der Türkei, ed. Thomas Faist (Bielefeld: transcript, 2000).  Faist, “Grenzen überschreiten,” 10.  Faist, “Grenzen überschreiten,” 11– 12.  Faist, “Grenzen überschreiten,” 15.  Faist, “Grenzen überschreiten,” 30.  Faist, “Grenzen überschreiten,” 30 – 38.

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As an analogue to Faist’s social scientific definition of the transstate in terms of an increasing density of economic, political, and cultural relations (verdichtete Beziehungen), literary articulations of the transstate can be defined both in terms of their density and their reference to multiple sites of cultural production. In the chapters that follow I use the concept of Verdichtung as a casting in poetic terms, in which literary language opens onto (sometimes conflicting) landscapes of cultural memory and calls into being new imaginative spaces in which revolutionary subjects traffic.⁹⁶ Literary language thus does more than reflect or mimic social scientific models of transstate relationships. An aesthetic strategy predicated on Verdichtung has the capacity to move beyond existing transstate connections to generate novel forms of solidarity by increasing the density of poetic and social relationships within and beyond the two Germanys. Because of its explicit reference to both changing constellations of inter- and transstate relationships globally and to their attendant cultural frameworks, geoculture offers a complementary and especially useful rubric for the analysis of German literary engagements with Latin America. Immanuel Wallerstein defines geoculture as “[a] term coined by analogy with geopolitics, not because it is supra-local or supra-national but because it represents the cultural framework within which the world-system operates.”⁹⁷ He underscores that “geoculture does not come into existence automatically with the onset of a world-system but rather has to be created.”⁹⁸ Geoculture addresses itself to the different modes of interaction at play in globalization (as distinct from universalization or homogenization) because, as a process concept, it attends to the simultaneous and sometimes contradictory developments that Basam Tibi describes as structural globalization and cultural fragmentation.⁹⁹ In combination with the terms transnational and transstate, geoculture can accommodate a broad set of cultural interactions, as well as their political contexts and consequences, spanning a period from the 1960s through the 1980s. In analogy to geopolitics, the geocultural looks to how forms of cultural relation coexist with state forms to straddle and traverse their assumed cultural boundaries. When cultural and political relations occur within an official state ideology of internationalism, as they did in East Germany, only flashes of

 I take the term “landscapes of memory” from Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology and the Second Age of Modernity,” British Journal of Sociology 5.1 (2000): 99.  Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 11.  Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 93.  Basam Tibi, Islam between Culture and Politics, 2d ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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potentially disruptive transnationalism are apparent; for the most part, discrete national subjects related to one another without blurring or substantially traversing national boundaries. Similarly, the West German New Left’s internationalist politics, while not reinforced at the level of the state, continued to embody discrete national subjects and allegiances even as it increasingly incorporated a new density of transstate poetic referents. However, both close and contextual readings of literary texts allow me to trace the uneven historical shift from inter- to transnationalism over the course of three decades of literary production within a geocultural frame. Postcolonial theory and its contestation provide another key intellectual context for my arguments about literature and geoculture in the two German states. At the most basic level, postcolonial analyses of European cultural imaginaries constituted via reference to the rest of the world underwrite my own interest in the status of Latin America in German imaginations. More specifically, I am guided by newer Latin American attempts to define the overlapping contours of imperialism and colonialism, which help to expose informal colonial ventures and modes of what Walter Mignolo calls colonial thinking that, he argues, are foundational to present-day cultures of scholarship.¹⁰⁰ Gayatri Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), which includes a revised version of her earlier influential article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), responds to both disciplinary and geopolitical changes since the end of the global Cold War. It provides an important point of theoretical departure for any discussion of German colonial or postcolonial imagination.¹⁰¹ The book is simultaneously a critique of postcolonial studies as a body of theory and as an increasingly entrenched scholarly formation at its apex in the late 1980s and 1990s. Spivak demonstrates as no previous scholar the constitutive role of the Third World in Europe’s idea of its own place in the world, but ties her critique to the postcolonial critic’s reliance on European philosophical traditions. Against the background of a well-formulated critique of Eurocentrism, Spivak selectively recuperates much-maligned European—particularly German—thinkers as ultimately necessary to the formulation of oppositional positions within postcolonial studies. As postcolonial studies moves toward what she views as a “substantial subdisciplinary ghetto,” and in light of the changing significance of

 Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); idem, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Carry Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271– 316.

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postcolonial categories such as the Third World in the wake of larger transformations in the world system (most notably the collapse of the Soviet Union), she argues for a reassessment of the historical and political positions espoused by postcolonial theorists since the 1980s.¹⁰² Of course, postcolonial studies as a mode of thinking that insists unselfconsciously on the links between academic and political knowledges is less easily dispensed with than her criticism implies it could or should be. Geocultural transformations do not necessarily or immediately mirror geopolitical formations. As scholars from Denning to Wallerstein to Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery have noted, the legacy of the Cold War and its three worlds continues to shape our disciplinary and common-sensical thinking today.¹⁰³ Spivak’s interest is not only in reconfiguring the existing three worlds model’s primacy in academic knowledge production, but also in tracing the philosophical antecedents of schematic and developmentalist models that have served as tacit structuring assumptions for theoretical and practical interventions into postcolonial social and political relations. Her earlier location of colonial and postcolonial relations in theoretical and philosophical positions (as opposed to in an exclusively historical colonialism) does not just open, but in fact demands a space for German thought, which she argues generated notions of universal subjects that persist to this day. Addressing German material, in turn, demands a reevaluation of any postcolonial theory conceived largely in terms of French and British colonial practices and postcolonial relations. To take but one example, the conversion of Kant’s man in the raw to philosophical man depends, in Spivak’s analysis, on a teleology closely related to the material interventions of ongoing modernization projects. The function of German thought in universalistic narratives of modernization allows Spivak to draw out both the specificity and generality of the German case within an imperialist Europe: Cultural and intellectual “Germany,” the place of self-styled difference from the rest of what is still understood as “continental” Europe and Britain, was the main source of the meticulous scholarship that established the vocabulary of proto-archetypal (“comparative” in the disciplinary sense) identity, or kinship, without direct involvement in the utilization of that other difference, between the colonizer and the colonized; in the nascent discourses of comparative philology, comparative religion, even comparative literature. The difference

 Spivak, Critique, 1– 4.  Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery, “Thinking Between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51.1 (2009): 6 – 34. This article first came to my attention via David Featherstone, Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (London and New York: Zed Books, 2012).

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between a William Jones (1746 – 1794) and a Herder (1744– 1803)—taxonomizing Sanskrit and thinking alterity by way of language/culture, respectively—will bring home my point. […] The field of philosophy as such, whose model was the merging of science and truth, remained untouched by the comparative impulse. In this area, Germany produced authoritative, “universal” narratives where the subject remained unmistakably European.¹⁰⁴

If we are to restructure the postcolonial ordering of knowledge manifest in the three worlds model and area studies, we must engage with its antecedents in German thought. While my own project is more modest in scope, it contributes to larger inquiries into universalizing narratives of revolutionary subjects by examining how German authors from the 1960s through the 1980s alternately reinforced and undermined enduring philosophical and geopolitical categories in their respective expressions of aesthetic solidarity with Latin America. Closer study of the German case complements postcolonial lines of inquiry by questioning the geocultural premises of the Cold War and their attendant ideological mappings of the three worlds. On this count, I find it useful to review the arguments presented by Carl E. Pletch in his seminal discussion of the three worlds model, “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950 – 1975,” (1981), which Spivak invokes but does not elaborate upon in her Critique. ¹⁰⁵ Pletch traces the development of the three worlds model in the Cold War-era, and demonstrates the profound and authoritative impact it had on the production and classification of knowledge as a commodity through the development of area studies and a social scientific division of labor.¹⁰⁶ He argues: “The Soviet Union was a prior concern that governed Western thinking about the underdeveloped world from the start.” Area studies programs emerged as “Western intelligence communities” that sought to produce knowledge about and secure alliances with other countries, particularly in the Third World. Insofar as Third World countries were compelled to align themselves either with “democratic capitalism” or “authoritarian communism,” capitalist models of modernization theory became “almost inextricable from the idea of three worlds.”¹⁰⁷ By invoking Pletch, Spivak expresses her interest in more than a single epistemological model for theoretical discussions of the relation of the First and Third Worlds, turning also to a range of material interventions into Third World cultures and economies that continue to have influence today under the rubric of

 Spivak, Critique, 8.  Carl E. Pletch, “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950 – 1975,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23.4 (1981): 565 – 590; Spivak, Critique, 2.  Pletch, “The Three Worlds,” 565.  Pletch, “The Three Worlds,” 567– 571.

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modernization and development discourse. In this way, Pletch explains, “Terms of ethnocentrism, condescension, imperialism and aggression were systematically replaced by apparently neutral and scientific terms—euphemisms.”¹⁰⁸ Part and parcel to this model for the production of knowledge and power was the division of social scientific labor that ascribed particular traits to the different worlds, with the First and Second Worlds being the province of sociology, politics, and economics, and the Third of anthropology. Pletch’s schematic account of the social scientific division of labor describes a system in which the First World is modern and scientific, employs utilitarian decision making, possesses technology, is efficient, democratic, and free; the Second World is modern, technically sophisticated, rational to a degree, authoritarian, repressive, inefficient and impoverished by contamination with ideological preconceptions, and burdened with an ideologically motivated elite; and, finally, the Third World is traditional, cultural, religious, irrational, underdeveloped, overpopulated, and politically chaotic.¹⁰⁹ To Pletch’s geography of disciplinary traits or practices Denning adds a global dimension: culture, which he identifies as a fifth appendage to the four modern social sciences.¹¹⁰ Cultural studies cuts across all of the three worlds and is related to an increasing attention to global processes, to attempts to think the world not as three, but as one.¹¹¹ Denning’s account of the social sciences refers to the mediating figure of Wallerstein rather than directly to Pletch; Wallerstein does not cite Pletch, but his argument for the relation of world-systems theory to social scientific disciplinarity is very much of a piece with Pletch’s earlier article.¹¹² The nineteenth-century liberal ideologies that Wallerstein shows to have bolstered the treatment of social domains as separate both in practice and in theory (the state and politics; the market and economics; the less-defined society and sociology) did not anticipate the emergence of culture as a domain for consideration the world over. Instead, they treated culture as limited to the “uncivilized world” (which becomes Pletch’s Third World) and the fourth modern social science of anthropology.¹¹³ With the cultural turn, the historical social sciences needed a way to account for different kinds of cultural objects indisputably intertwined with those already

 Pletch, “The Three Worlds,” 575.  Pletch, “The Three Worlds,” 574.  Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 5.  Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 11.  Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 4. Denning cites Wallersteins’s 1987 essay “World-Systems Analysis,” reprinted in The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press, 2000): 129 – 148, here: 133.  Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 4; Wallerstein, “World-Systems Analysis,” 133.

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divvied up among the disciplines: “The study of the logic of this new world, the logic of mass communication, the logic of culture in this new sense, became the fifth social science, a postmodern social science, linked [….] to that other reorganization of the social sciences in the age of three worlds: area studies.”¹¹⁴ Denning’s attention to the shifting parameters of academic debates about the relation of culture and society is but one example—albeit surely one of the most systematic and encompassing—from a broader community of scholars who seek to critique area studies, disciplinarity, and geopolitics with reference to worldsystems and dependency theorists such as Pletch, Wallerstein, and their intellectual heirs in the fields of postcolonial and globalization studies. Postcolonial approaches remain deeply embedded in the project of area studies to the extent that Spivak has advocated a merger of area studies and comparative literature in the twenty-first century (Death of a Discipline, 2003).¹¹⁵ Her dismissal of postcolonial scholarship as a subdisciplinary ghetto does not, however, take into account its place within the larger “cultural turn”; postcolonial studies has by no means reached the end of its history with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of newer, global analyses. It continues to contribute substantially to a critical moment in the history of the three worlds and the refiguration of relations between the political and the cultural. Spivak’s related remonstrance of cultural studies’ lack of rigor and personalized politicization has significant critical purchase, incomplete and overstated though it may be. Moreover, the notion that area studies, with its own ideologically charged history, is easily appropriable for comparative and interdisciplinary projects should give scholars considerable pause. Taking up the relation of culture to cultures of scholarship, Miyoshi and Harootunian observe: “Any consideration of Asian studies must begin with its enabling structure of knowledge.”¹¹⁶ The same is true of German studies. If, between 1949 – 1989, its enabling structure was the Cold War division of knowledges demarcated along the lines suggested by Carl Pletch’s account of the development of the three worlds model and its profound and authoritative impact on the production and classification of knowledge as a commodity through the development of a social scientific division of labor, then we need to reexamine our rela-

 Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 4– 5.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 6 – 10.  Miyoshi and Harootunian, Learning Places, 2. Beyond his consideration of Asian studies in the work cited here, Miyoshi has made major contributions to rethinking the relation of comparative literature and area studies, most influentially in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

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tionships not only to East and West Germany as Cold War states, but also and fundamentally to the status of our disciplinary and theoretical structures in what are now economically and politically changed conditions. This task requires a dual focus. Germany was both a key site of the Cold War conflict that drove the institutionalization of an area studies model still relatively new to the social sciences at the onset of World War II and a key producer of the Enlightenment thought that underwrote European colonialism. The structures of knowledge that enable any recasting of German studies today entail a willingness to shuttle back and forth between these related but historically and politically distinct projects. Even as Germany is underanalyzed in postcolonial theory, so, too is the specific experience of Latin America, whose independence long predates the post-World War II political struggles for independence from France and Great Britain that prepared the ground for postcolonial theory as a set of intellectual and political interventions in the academy. Accordingly, the relevance of postcolonial theory for Latin American cultural studies has been a subject of considerable debate.¹¹⁷ One consequence of the twin neglect of Germany and Latin America in postcolonial theoretical interventions into the production of knowledge has thus been a failure to attend to their complex discursive and material relationships to one another.

Imagining the Third World in German cultural studies Drawing on theoretical interventions made by Spivak, but also by Arlene A. Teraoka, Uta Poiger, Nina Berman, and Susanne Zantop, the first of my own interventions into the scholarship on the Third World in German literature is relatively straightforward: I identify the interest of German scholars and the texts they have produced in the colonial project from its inception, and the continuing import of those interests to contemporary subject formation, academic knowledge production, and political and economic relations. Furthermore, I argue that schol-

 See for example Beverly’s summary of Latin American cultural critics, including Mabel Moraña and Hugo Achugar, who argue that “[s]ubaltern and postcolonial studies represent a North American problematic about identity politics and multiculturalism, and/or a Commonwealth problematic about postcoloniality, which has been displaced onto Latin America, at the expense of misrepresenting its diverse histories and social-cultural formations, which are not easily reducible to either multiculturalism or postcoloniality.” John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 17.

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arship on Germany must reposition itself in relation to other parts of the world in general and to heretofore under-analyzed Latin American locales in particular. While earlier accounts of the Third World in German literature remain important to my arguments about the status of Latin America as a place of real and imagined revolutionary subjectivity, their analyses fall short of explaining the political urgency for change in the 1960s and 1970s, when anticolonial and antiimperialist forces seemingly made headway globally, but when the US and USSR also redoubled their efforts to consolidate geopolitical power and force political alignments through direct investment and development aid, in addition to overt political and military pressures. The special relationship of the two German states to the superpowers as a front line on the Cold War’s European stage meant that they shared alternately in a pronounced sense of complicity with and subjugation to the Cold War superpowers. By combining extensive contextual analysis with close readings, the chapters that follow lend a new dimension to existing discourse analytical studies such as Arlene Teraoka’s East, West, and Others: The Third World in German Literature (1996). Teraoka’s rich literary analysis demonstrates how authors from both German states mobilized problematic images of race, desire, and cultural stereotypes intended as expressions of political activism and solidarity, and it prominently attends to German representations of Latin American and Caribbean revolution. The object of her analysis is not the Third World as a place, but rather as a self-referential German imaginary.¹¹⁸ I am interested in the extent to which political realities exceed tropes or the discursive structures in which they are situated. In other words, where her analytic focus is on the construction and function of a self-referential discursive field in which “certain German writers attempt […] to envision a nonhegemonic mode of encounter with non-German others,” mine is on how attention to Latin American referents puts pressure on that field, generating complex and often contradictory subjects in and of literature, widening the range of possible revolutionary positions available to German subjects.¹¹⁹ Volker Braun’s dynamic imagination of Latin American revolution and revolutionaries, for example, emerges within the discursive system Teraoka describes and critiques, but it also engages in a radically self-critical attempt to relate Latin American and East German subjects of revolution that her analysis at times suggests is less the purview of the author than of the postcolonial critic.

 Arlene A. Teraoka, East, West, and Others: The Third World in Postwar German Literature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).  Teraoka, East, West, and Others, 5.

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At least as important for my own purposes, I am personally indebted to Teraoka’s book, which appeared at a moment when I questioned the compatibility of my interest in German-speaking cultures and my commitment to postcolonial theory and practice. Teraoka’s work anticipates Spivak’s philosophically grounded critique of postcolonial studies in identifying a typically automatic, denunciatory self-critique in accounts of German literary engagements with the Third World as hopelessly Eurocentric.¹²⁰ While Teraoka is committed to the project of examining academic complicity in forms of domination and oppression, she also cautions against mistaking the question of whether a text or author is Eurocentric for the often more complicated question of how and why authors and texts operate in a particular way. Instead, she calls upon scholars “to move beyond issues of content and expression to questions of strategy.”¹²¹ Absent this distinction and “[t]aken to an extreme,” she observes, “self-interrogation of this kind can lead writers and critics to paralyzing modes of pessimism, claustrophobia, solipsism, or silence: unable to speak in a liberative way that is not eventually eroded by the legacy of our language and culture, we might feel forced, as our only remaining option, not to speak at all.”¹²² This danger is all the more germane to acts of aesthetic solidarity, a practice that engages both the discursive colonialism that Teraoka’s study maps so well and a variety of historical and material configurations in Cold War Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In this sense, the limits of aesthetic solidarity explored in Revolutionary Subjects take up long-standing debates among postcolonial scholars regarding the relative priority of discourse analysis and historical materialism. That being said, I would like to distinguish Spivak’s and Teraoka’s respective engagements with Eurocentrism and representations of the Third World from the critical position taken by Russell Berman in his Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (1998). A series of close readings that focus on spatiality and alterity in texts from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, his book addressed a serious lacuna in the English-language scholarship on German literatures of travel and exploration, and rightly pointed to the limits of postcolonial models derived primarily from British colonial encounters. Yet his project is framed in a deeply defensive, even embattled mode that seems to take quite personally what he calls “attacks on the Enlightenment […] that are tied to political attacks on colonialism,” and which he links to a broad “anti-Eurocentrism.” He ultimately argues that the solution most readily to hand is “to

 Teraoka, East, West, and Others, 2– 3.  Teraoka, East, West, and Others, 5.  Teraoka, East, West, and Others, 3.

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redefine Europe, science, and culture to accommodate difference within an unapologetically universalist project.”¹²³ Such an approach is inadequate to the path I seek to chart in Revolutionary Subjects, because the authors whose work I consider in the subsequent chapters are both limited by Eurocentric perspectives and deeply committed to the anti-Eurocentrism and anti-universalism that Berman so disdains. By moving beyond discourse analysis to rigorously contextual analysis, I acknowledge the limits of their aesthetic solidarity, but also our continuing indebtedness to it. Since Teraoka’s pathbreaking work, which I discuss in greater detail in Chapters Three and Four, numerous scholars have taken on the question of Germany’s relation to imperialism, colonialism, and postcolonialism. Yet historians such as Uta Poiger, who brings material economies of exchange to bear on diverse cultural products and formations, frequently neglect to reference Latin America in their analyses. Poiger’s article “Imperialism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Germany” (2005) argues for the adoption of imperialism and empire as new historical paradigms that might account for “how consumption relates to the understanding and obscuring of international relations and inequalities.”¹²⁴ She references Susanne Zantop’s work on colonial fantasy about Latin America in the interest of establishing an expanded periodization of German empire, but she does not include Latin America in the geography of imperialism she plots through her analysis of commodity culture and international exchange.¹²⁵ Building on foundational work by scholars such as Zantop, whose work I shall discuss in more detail below, my analysis of political and economic relationships among East and West Germany and Latin American countries provides a material context for both the imaginative and material exchanges that Poiger calls for in her new agenda for German historiography. Similarly, in Impossible Missions? German Economic, Military, and Humanitarian Efforts in Africa (2004), Nina Berman limits her focus to places—if not times— of formal colonial activity.¹²⁶ Building on her earlier, persuasive arguments for attention to German material in postcolonial studies in Orientalismus, Kolonialismus, und Moderne (Orientalism, Colonialism, and Modernity, 1996), N. Berman points to the analytic import of expanding scholarly attention to pre- and post-colonial pe-

 Russell Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 13 – 16, 238 – 239.  Uta G. Poiger, “Imperialism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Germany,” History and Memory 17. 1/2 (2005): 118.  Poiger, “Imperialism and Empire,” 122 and 129 – 137.  Nina Berman, Impossible Missions? German Economic, Military, and Humanitarian Efforts in Africa (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).

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riods in the interest of studying largely neglected continuities among them.¹²⁷ Taking as her point of departure a survey and critique of German postcolonial studies, the emergence of which she dates to the mid-1990s, she argues that critical engagement with both European cultural representations of the colonial world and analyses of texts by colonial and postcolonial authors are inadequate to the task of explaining links between discourse and social action: [T]he premise of both areas of research grouped together under the rubric of postcolonial studies was and continues to be to describe the interconnection between cultural production and various forms of economic, political, and institutional power. Yet, as [Achille] Mbembe points out, “on the pretext of avoiding single-factor explanations of domination, these disciplines have reduced the complex phenomena of state power to ‘discourses’ and ‘representations,’ forgetting that discourses and representations have materiality.”¹²⁸

Berman locates the shortcomings of postcolonial discourse analysis in its lack of attention to the relationship of modernization theory to colonial and imperialist discourse, as well as a lack of knowledge about the relation of those discourses to heterogeneous colonial practices.¹²⁹ She advances an alternate approach: her discursive analysis carefully postions the autobiographical narratives of what she terms “secular missionaries” in relation to extensive, contextualizing information about Africa.¹³⁰ The resulting study aims to show the discrepancies between Germans’ accounts of their lives and actions and the real effects of the German presence in Africa.¹³¹ Berman’s stated interest in ideologies of modernization, progress, and development as enabling discourses of German religious, cultural, and economic missions that can and should be linked explicitly to forms of social action sets an important research agenda that should be extended beyond her African examples. The lack of attention to Latin American material by Germanists who take up these enabling discourses is all the more striking when we consider the key role of Latin America in the overall development of the modern/colonial world system as such. So long as important critiques such as Berman’s are  Berman, Impossible Missions? 17; Nina Berman, Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne. Zum Bild des Orients in der deutschsprachigen Kultur um 1900 (Stuttgart: M und P Verlag, 1996). Berman broke important ground in crafting a space for German material excluded by Edward Said in his Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). She critiques his exclusion of German material directly in “K. und K. Colonialism: Hofmannsthal in North Africa,” New German Critique 75 (1998): 3 – 27, esp. 3 – 9.  Berman, Impossible Missions? 6 – 7.  Berman, Impossible Missions? 13, 15.  Berman, Impossible Missions? 18.  Berman, Impossible Missions? 213.

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aimed primarily at postcolonial approaches developed around and out of twentieth-century anticolonialism in formerly British and French territories, Latin American material will fall at least as far by the wayside as does the material that some Germanists, including Berman herself, have sought to bring to bear on postcolonial studies since the mid-nineties. In the interest of expanding the field of analysis to include Latin America, I draw extensively on Zantop’s critical reassessment of Germany and German texts within the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial projects. Her restructuring of an earlier periodization of German colonialism, which was limited to the relatively short period of official colonialism, shifts the dominant analytical focus from sites of German colonialism in Africa and the South Pacific to Latin American colonial fantasies and precolonial experiments such as the Welser colony and even German mercenary participation in the Spanish conquest.¹³² Through these key analytical shifts, Zantop’s work leads me to pursue a restructuring of our understanding of how German subjects are constituted in transnational contexts. Her analysis of colonial fantasy not only reinforces Latin America’s place on the German scholarly map, it also draws attention to the shortcomings of postcolonial theories that ignore or underplay the importance of German material as well as those which fail to attend to important relations between race, gender, and sexuality in conquest.¹³³ Identifying a discourse parallel to Said’s Orientalism, Zantop argues that German Occidentalism emerged out of a need to recreate geographical, racial, and cultural mappings in the wake of 1492, radically destabilizing the Orient-Occident opposition and European constructions of identity and location more generally: “To introduce a third, a fourth, a fifth into the Occident-Orient dyad thus not only rendered the categories more dynamic; it also reinforced the notion of ambivalence, the anxieties that were operative in the colonialist mind, anxieties about the loss of sexual, racial, cultural, or recently acquired political identity.”¹³⁴ As a concept in her later work on “postcolonial amnesia,” Zantop elabo The Welser Colony (1528 – 1555) was the first, failed German colonial venture in what is today Venezuela. Named for the merchant banker Bartholomä Welser, who negotiated an exception to the Spanish colonial claim to all lands West of the Line of Demarcation and received political backing from Charles V. Zantop discusses the Welser colony and its specific place in German colonial fantasies, as well as providing extensive references. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 18 – 30 and 216 – 222.  Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 5.  Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 15. Occidentalism in the context of German colonial and postcolonial thought is therefore distinct from Occidentalism in Latin American cultural studies, where it denotes a western, capitalist civilizational paradigm usually opposed to post-Occidentalism, a way of thinking against and overcoming western paradigms. See especially Roberto

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rated on Occidentalism’s reliance on triangular structures of identification, developing a vocabulary flexible enough to enable her to apply a unified methodological approach across historical periods, and even to account for the relation of German colonialism and postcolonialism to contemporary German material and political contexts of racism and xenophobia by identifying connections between “unacknowledged racism and un-worked-through colonialism.” ¹³⁵ The more recent permutations of German cultural imaginaries under consideration in this book’s case studies affirm the enduring nature of such flexible structures for thinking complex relationships of race and coloniality, but they also attest to the role of such structures in redefining both the revolutionary subject and the idea of authorial subjectivity in the global Cold War. Mignolo, whose work was introduced briefly above and will be taken up again in Chapter Four, offers more generalized analyses of the idea of Latin America, the elaboration of the modern/colonial world system, and the geopolitics of knowledge that each entails. A brief juxtaposition of Zantop and Mignolo serves to recall both the historical embeddedness of German imaginaries of Latin America in modern/colonial geopolitics and geoculture as well as to identify how Occidentalism underwrote Cold War East and West German visions of Latin American as both a part of and outside of European revolutionary traditions. Both Zantop’s and Mignolo’s analyses have been indispensable to my own understanding of the complex relationships among German and Latin American revolutionary subjects. Occidentalism is a key term of analysis for both Zantop and Mignolo, but they use it quite differently. Zantop’s Occidentalism marks a discourse parallel to Said’s Orientalism, a system of representations that emerged out of a need Fernández Retamar, “Nuestra América y Occidente,” Casa de las Américas 98 (1976): 36 – 57; Fernando Coronil, “Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories,” Cultural Anthropology 3 (1996): 51– 87; and Walter D. Mignolo, “Postoccidentalismo: el argumento desde América Latina,” Cuadernos Americanos 67 (1998): 143 – 165.  Zantop, “Colonial Legends, Postcolonial Legacies,” in A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies, ed. Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, Jonathan Petropoulos (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 191. Zantop draws on Katrin Sieg’s concept of triangulation as “a theater of identity in which the brown-white relationship pivots on an absent third party.” In treating triangulation as a critical concept that disrupts binary structures of relation, it is apparent that she is more interested in the structural potential of triangular relationships than in Sieg’s theoretical grounding of triangulation per se, which Sieg develops more rigorously in reference to Amy Robinson’s theorization of passing as a “triangular theater of identity” and to minstrelsy. Zantop references Sieg’s initial formulation from “Ethnic Drag and National Identity: Multicultural Crisis, Crossings, and Interventions,” in The Imperialist Imagination, ed. Sara Lennox, Sara Friedrichsmeyer and Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 295 – 319. Sieg substantially expands on the concept in her book-length account, Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).

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to recreate geographical, racial, and cultural mappings attendant to the European encounter with the Americas. The fifteenth century’s destabilization of a spatialized and oppositional Orient-Occident dyad precipitated a reconceptualized world within which inhered multiple and contradictory positions for identification, a system that was no longer dichotomous, but instead constantly shifting. By contrast, Mignolo’s Occidentalism is a precondition for Orientalism’s very emergence, and denotes not flexibility, but fixity.¹³⁶ It specifies a process by which Europe located its own privileged locus of enunciation and established a civilizational paradigm. The European center and the Latin American periphery were (and remain) mutually constituting; there can be no center from which to speak prior to the creation of a periphery. Occidentalism denotes “the place of hegemonic epistemology rather than a geographical sector of the map.”¹³⁷ Despite these differences, each thinker identifies a pivotal relation or set of relations among Latin Americans and Europeans that, they assert, must be disrupted in the interest of establishing new and more egalitarian orders. Zantop locates her project with respect to historical and contemporary struggles for solidarity in the face of racism and xenophobia; Mignolo locates Occidentalism and the unequal relations it engenders within a broader move against what he defines as the transformation of cultural differences into values that underwrites both Occidental hegemony and an oppositional identity politics that has grown inflexible and complicit in the structures it set out to change.¹³⁸ Both authors make a clear case for making Latin America a focal point in their respective analyses of what Mignolo has termed local histories and global designs.¹³⁹ Zantop does so with respect to German-speaking cultures in direct and at times imaginative contact with the Americas since the long nineteenth century (and antecedent contacts dating to as early as the sixteenth century); Mignolo

 Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, 34– 44.  Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, 34– 44, here 37. Mignolo is of course not the only Latin Americanist to use the term. See n. 134.  See “Colonial Legends, Postcolonial Legacies.” I find Mignolo’s claim to be overstated and, in many ways, to disregard the strategic essentialism at play historically in the identity politics he criticizes. Nevertheless, what begins as strategic can become entrenched and commonsensical, and his claim that we should attend to colonial difference as a way to account for power differentials rather than continue to speak of a more neutral cultural difference can be taken as cautionary and constructive.  Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs. Global designs refer to broadly hegemonic projects on a planetrary scale, macronarratives of the modern/colonial system; local histories describe “micronarratives.” While Mignolo allows that hegemonic relations can also obtain at the local level, his analysis tends (problematically) to privilege the local as subaltern and therefore inherently resistant.

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does so with respect to broader claims about the geopolitics of knowledge. Zantop provides important ground for rethinking and reperiodizing German colonialism and the specific and privileged place of Latin America in the German colonial imaginary; Mignolo allows me to consider the relation of those colonial imaginaries to the geopolitical and geocultural formations of the Cold War, and the dominant paradigms of scholarly inquiry they continue to shape. Beyond bringing Zantop’s discussion of Occidentalism into contact with Latin American approaches such as Mignolo’s, my analysis extends, recontextualises, and complicates Zantop’s arguments about German colonial fantasies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Latin America for the late twentieth century. In an analogous fashion to their precolonial and colonial predecessors, authors in the two postwar German states turned to Latin America to craft elaborate fantasies of revolutionary subjectivity. As an analytic term, fantasy allows scholars to examine two things in particular: first, fantasy’s “purely imaginary, wishfulfilling nature” and, second, its “unconscious subtext, which links sexual desire for the other with desire for power and control.”¹⁴⁰ Zantop highlights the ways in which fantasies “create a colonialist imagination and mentality that beg to translate thought into action,” serving as the “vehicle of, and the driving force behind colonialist ideology.”¹⁴¹ As such, they remain “profoundly historical and time-specific.”¹⁴² The uniqueness of German colonial fantasies resides in the fact that they were so long confined to a realm of imagination: In their capacity as “compensatory fantasies,” they hinged on the perpetual “what if” of objectively unsuccessful colonial experiences.¹⁴³ To the colonial Occidentalist opposition of black and white I add the Cold War opposition of Soviet communism and US capitalism, wherein various Latin American locales multiplied the terms of a newer East-West debate. As I shall explain, East and West German authors in the 1960s and 1970s relied on an updated Occidentalist frame, combining the sexual, racial, cultural, and political ambivalences of the colonial period and an antiimperialist fantasy of a revolutionary socialist alternative. Rather than enable the self-positioning of German subjects in an imagined colonial history that coincided with the construction of national subjects, the authors and presumed readers in my study positioned themselves in a distinctly antiimperialist history in a period shaped by a second, symbolic postwar state formation dating to the erection of the Berlin Wall. Consequently, where Zantop’s study addresses a moment of national identity formation, I address texts in    

Zantop, Zantop, Zantop, Zantop,

Colonial Colonial Colonial Colonial

Fantasies, 3. Fantasies, 3, 4, 9. Fantasies, 14. Fantasies, 6, 30.

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which authors are concerned with the possibility of reshaping a national identity that had become tenuous. East and West German authors alike aimed to craft an oppositional space of international solidarity at a moment when national identity had been destabilized by new state formations and rendered increasingly undesirable by broad, public knowledge of atrocities committed in the name of the nation during World War II and the Holocaust. Imbricated as Enzensberger, Braun, Müller, and Delius were in radical revisions of the relation of fact and fiction in various documentary, realist, and materialist modes of writing, the idea of Latin America they produced was arguably less imaginary than its colonial antecedents. This in no way diminishes the fact that they, too, produced literary texts that are profoundly discursive, self-referential, and capable of generating a sense of direct participation via intellectual engagement with revolutionary conflicts in Latin America.¹⁴⁴ Each of the authors I consider shared in aesthetic practices analogous to what Zantop, following Said, calls “colonial suspicion,” moments of contradiction and disruption within otherwise totalizing imaginative gestures.¹⁴⁵ While they expressed differing levels of awareness of the limits of aesthetic solidarity within their texts, it is these moments that provide the best insights into their own contemporary imagination of the revolutionary subject—and into the limits of their aesthetic solidarity with Latin America. Even though my study addresses the construction of East and West German positions in a world no longer the same as the one in which Zantop’s authors and their readers positioned themselves, even though hers is an account of imagining a colonial subject and mine a postcolonial, revolutionary subject, we share a conviction that Latin America served a privileged and pivotal role in German subjects’ self-positioning in the world. East and West German authors may have had divergent political motivations and goals, but they continued to share a common set of cultural referents to Latin America that were reinscribed and contested at intervals. It is above all in this respect that Zantop’s work sets the stage for my own. As rich as Zantop’s work is for widening the fields of colonial and postcolonial German studies, I find it necessary to make one particular qualification. The notion of compensatory fantasies as a substitute for action (Handlungsersatz) that she develops suggests a potentially problematic, causal relation between the imaginative and the historical. In place of the provocative dimension of fantasy as ersatz action, I suggest Arjun Appadurai’s notion of imagination as a use-

 Compare Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 37.  Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 15.

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ful critical alternative to fantasy. Appadurai defines imagination not as a substitute, but rather as a “staging ground for action.”¹⁴⁶ Where Zantop defines fantasy in relation to an unconscious subtext or desire for national and familial power and control, Appadurai defines imagination in terms of the collective, everyday production of thought and feeling. In emphasizing imagination as a specific, social process, he treats it not as ersatz, but as a discrete form of action in its own right. Imagination’s agent resides not in an emergent national collective subjectivity, but rather in a “community of sentiment.” ¹⁴⁷ Insofar as the dominant terms of imagining Latin America in German literature since the 1960s have also entailed various ways of imagining solidarity, imagination’s community of sentiment underscores the emotional valence of solidarity and literary-political imaginings as cognate processes. As an active and potentially reciprocal process, imagination has the added advantage over fantasy of locating thought and action on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time as Appadurai’s concept of imagination allows me productively to amend Zantop’s notion of colonial fantasies, my work challenges his claim to a transnational anthropological practice that “unyokes” imagination from place.¹⁴⁸ In fact, in the chapters that follow I show how authors in East and West Germany reestablished dense fields of connections across places conceptually divided by the Cold War construct of the three worlds, but which remained materially and imaginatively situated and linked. The cultural labor they undertook in making the sites and ciphers of solidarity more legible exemplifies the complex negotiation of geoculture in German texts and merits consideration alongside geopolitics.

Verdichtung and the emergence of aesthetic solidarity Conflicting German discourses on Latin America informed debates among authors about the political efficacy of literary production from the 1960s through the 1980s. In the chapters that follow I demonstrate how East and West German authors mobilized Latin American figures of revolutionary violence in the shadow of the Holocaust and Stalinism to distinct literary-political ends even as they drew on a shared tradition of colonial imaginings about Latin America. Attending, too, to their engagement with Latin American thought, largely neglected in  Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).  Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 8.  Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 58.

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existing scholarship on German literature, I use each of the case studies to illustrate how transnational referents mediate First and Second World political and cultural conflicts represented in German plays and novels about Latin America. The literary and political subjects engaged in violent conflicts in each literary text that I examine concerned authors and activists alike. Consequently, East and West German solidarity groups provide a material context for changing transnational cultural practices and anticipate more recent attention to the global and the transnational in German studies. Each of the following chapters shows how an author pushed the boundary of literature and politics via critical engagement with Latin American subjects of violent revolution. Close reading and careful contextualization reveal a range of approaches to solidarity as an inter- and transnational phenomenon. East and West German authors referenced Latin American literature, politics, philosophy, and even economics in their pursuit of alternate approaches to authoring social change in the unstable geocultural constellation of the Cold War. Casting geocultural relations in poetic form and increasing the visibility of transnational networks, each case study offers an example of Verdichtung, introduced briefly above, as a principal context for and technique of aesthetic solidarity. As a poetic practice, Verdichtung exceeds its social scientific reference to the density of economic, political, and cultural relationships that cross state borders to create novel forms of imaginative contact rooted in subjective rather than exclusively or even primarily territorial attachments. The case studies of Chapters Two through Five document how this process unfolded through what Spanish philosopher and writer Miguel de Unamuno (1864– 1936) might have termed monodialogical scripts. A conversation in which one interlocutor does not speak but without whose presence no monologue would take place, a monodialogue entails an exchange that is as complex as it is asymmetrical.¹⁴⁹ Latin America was central to the articulation of East and West German revolutionary subjects, written in response to contemporary transstate and geocultural relationships, even though the density of relationships (the verdichtete Beziehungen) which enabled authors to cast transstate forms in poetic terms (Verdichtung) were not always symmetrical or even bivalent. In elaborating the working definition of aesthetic solidarity that emerges from my consideration of monodialogical scripts and geocultural comparisons in Enzensberger, Braun, Müller, and Delius, I do not seek to advance or advocate a unified aesthetic model to be rigidly applied without regard to the particular

 Unamuno cited in Angel Rama, Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo Vientiuno, 1982), 46.

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geohistorical conditions that obtain to distinct texts. Quite the contrary, my decision to structure the book as a whole around a series of case studies reflects my insistence on the historicity and contingency of aesthetic practices and the geocultural grounds against which they unfold. My aim is not a systematic way of thinking, but rather a critical one.¹⁵⁰ To that end, I have tried to keep in mind Klaus Harro Hilzinger’s characterization of his own attempts to relate aesthetic and sociological approaches to the real—in particular in documentarism—as open-ended analyses of individual texts whose study could, nonetheless, reveal generalizable problems: “Close textual analysis does not yield comprehensive interpretations of individual works, but rather demonstrates different attempts at aesthetic solutions whose failure or success, in turn, underscore general structural problems.”¹⁵¹ The following chapters, summarized briefly below, reveal structural problems that may be characterized broadly under different rubrics that all share in what I term the limits of aesthetic solidarity. In Chapter Two, I identify them principally with the translator’s ghosts, or, the formal and comparative limits that emerge from an attempt at the translation of subjective testimonies into documentary practices rooted in objective aesthetic generalizations. Chapter Three explores the historical (and literary historical) limits of utopian thinking. Chapter Four attempts to isolate the intersection of the bodily and epistemic limits of decolonial thinking. Finally, Chapter Five walks around the limits of exchange and equivalence in an economically-inflected antifascism. These limits are not exhaustive, and the nature of their articulation in contemporary literature would no doubt be otherwise than their historical articulation in the period roughly between 1961 and 1989. Together, though, they provide important points of departure for a multidisciplinary approach to ongoing geocultural processes and the limits of new aesthetic solidarities not yet visible as such. In drawing attention to aesthetic solidarity and its limits, I recall to mind that the work of solidarity is never complete. At once metaphorical and mathematical, limits remind us that our movements are at best incremental approximations of an ideal, and yet inspire in us a vision of possibilities that prompts us to draw ever closer to it.

 In choosing this language I draw on Jameson’s distinction between systematic philosophy and Marxism’s dialectical thinking as a critical philosophy or canon of thought. See Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 366.  Klaus Harro Hilzinger, Die Dramaturgie des dokumentarischen Theaters (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1976), 3.

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Chapter Two, “The Translator’s Ghosts,” explores Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s engagement with Latin American history, culture, and politics, which were inextricable from his programmatic attempts to redefine the relation of literature and politics in West Germany. Enzensberger’s persistent attention to revolution, metaphor, and the subjective potential of international comparison from 1965 to 1970 point to imaginative features specific to the challenges and demands of revolutionary consciousness and the translation of subjects across syncretic cultural planes. His myriad translative and editorial projects, heretofore largely ignored in the vast critical literature on Enzensberger, range from anthologies of South America’s literary and political avant-garde—most notably works by Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo—to the less conventional and more contemporary testimonial narrative of Cuban Estéban Montejo, compiled by the novelist and social scientist Miguel Barnet. It is no coincidence that Enzensberger’s generic and thematic innovations are marked by shifting concepts of literary engagement in Latin America from the avant-garde to the revolutionary writing of the 1960s. Key among these innovations are the proclamation of an “impure poetry” (a concept first articulated by Neruda) and the celebration of paraliterary forms of poetic witness, characterized by popular aesthetics and the politically and socially calculated use of rhetorical and figurative language to effect change (apparent in his engagement with examples of literatures of witness from Las Casas to Barnet). Enzensberger’s statements on translation’s haunting and innovative functions help to explain that what cannot be contained or rendered completely in translation nevertheless intrudes on the materiality of language to interpose itself between the revolutionary subject and its reality. What I term the translator’s ghosts are the most prominent figural manifestations of the translative remainder in Enzensberger’s engagement with Latin America over the course of two decades. Even in texts that are not themselves translations, Enzensberger’s aesthetic solidarity is inseparable from the revenant force of the translator’s ghosts. They mark not only specific programs and practices of translation into German, but also acts of generic translation in texts that constitute spaces of geocultural encounter and push at the limits of aesthetic solidarity. These ghosts mark both the fact of real bodies now absent and the imagination that perceiving those absences requires. Enzensberger’s revolutionary subjects could not be constituted without recourse to them and the haunting comparisons that they engender. A trope resumed in diverse essays and commentaries on the nature of translation, documentation, and comparison, ghostliness figures heavily in his attempts to define the author as both translator and social-political mediator, alternately described as a go-between or intermediary (Zwischenträger), a transmitter (Überlieferer), or one who hears the voices of ghosts (Geisterstimmen) from other times and places. Through his emphasis on how the spectral intrudes on the ma-

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teriality of language and its concrete relationship to revolutionary practice, translating, writing, viewing, and reading themselves emerge as revolutionary acts. I begin the chapter by asking after the prominent place accorded Latin American revolution in Enzensberger’s influential publishing endeavor, the journal Kursbuch (railway timetable; literally: “course book”). Widely regarded as the most important medium of the West German Left from its inception in the mid1960s through the 1970s, Kursbuch offered a forum for critical perspectives on politics and culture, and routinely brought together authors concerned with subjectivity broadly construed, both in political terms originating in the British and later US American New Left, and in literary subjectivities articulated in writing, translating, and performance. My analysis uncovers an overlooked connection between Kursbuch’s literary political agenda and Enzensberger’s staging of the Cuban revolution in The Habana Inquiry. I identify a series of thematic and contextual references to Latin American revolution in Enzensberger’s three “Commonplaces” essays that underwrite his critical claims to rethink the political efficacy of literature in West Germany. Most literary histories of postwar West Germany attend only to the third in this series, “Gemeinplätze, die neueste Literatur betreffend” (“Commonplaces Regarding the Newest Literature”), in which Enzensberger famously described the “death of literature.” By restoring this essay to its serial context, I illuminate an alternate reading of Enzensberger’s assessment of his contemporary literature, one that is fundamentally at odds with more conventional literary historical approaches. I go on to demonstrate a pivotal relation between Enzensberger’s revised literary concept and his increasing engagement with the newly recognized genre of testimonio in Latin America as a literary antidote to what he perceived to be a naïve documentarism in West Germany of the 1960s and 1970s. Specifically, his Habana Inquiry tracks new common places of revolutionary justice by tracing the continued movements of his rhetorical ghosts into expanding fields of international and moral interest. Recurrent attention to literary and historical ghosts in the Kursbuch essays culminates in a series of haunting metaphorical references to the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in an uncharacteristically long preface to his 1970 drama about the public trial of Cuban expatriots involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion.¹⁵²

 A series of three trials, the longest held from December 1963 to August 1965, followed by shorter trials from December 1965 to September 1966 and August 1967 to June 1968. Camp Commandant Rudolf Höss and other high-ranking camp officials had already been tried and executed in 1947 in Poland; the Frankfurt trials focused on defendants involved in the day-to-day workings of the camp. The aim of the trials was not only to prosecute the defendants, but to provide

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In Chapter Three, “Alternative Internationalisms and Literary Historical Inversions,” I advance a reading of Volker Braun’s Guevara or the Sun State (1975) as representative of a discourse of critical solidarity that questions official East German policies of international solidarity and humanist cultural exchange. The play stages in reverse chronological order the failure of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s 1966 – 1967 attempt to foment revolution in Bolivia. Guevara’s guerrilla was eventually joined by Tamara Bunke—a.k.a. Tania la guerrillera, the Argentine born (East) German turned Cuban and later Bolivian, widely regarded as a hero and martyr throughout Latin America. In addition to stylizing historical material drawn from Guevara’s Bolivian diaries and biographies of Bunke, Braun invents fictional interactions between Guevara and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and between Guevara and his Bolivian executioners, to frame the drama. The reverse chronological flow of events is disrupted at intervals by the appearance of Bumholdt and Bedray, parodies of Alexander von Humboldt, humanist, scientist, and explorer of the Americas, and Regis Debray, French philosopher and popularizer of Latin American revolutionary theory in 1960s Europe. Guevara’s cast of characters thus evokes colonial-era and contemporary European, East German, and Latin American antiimperialist discourses that overlap and interrupt one another. East German plays set in Latin America require a comparative and historical approach that can account for multiple systems of world-historical and aesthetic reference; absent such an approach, scholars will continue to treat them as largely allegorical, reproducing the idea of Latin America as a trope of revolutionary action rather than as a vital site of knowledge production and missing pivotal engagements with divergent European traditions to boot. Consequently, the chapter proceeds in two stages, the first organized around cultural and political genealogies of revolutionary subjectivity; the second around a close reading of the play as exemplary of the role of Latin American thought in Braun’s revised concept of humanist solidarity. Despite Guevara’s similarity to Braun’s early protagonists in steadfastly and selflessly advancing the cause of socialist revolution, Braun’s adoption of a relatively closed, linear form (the reverse chronological staging of the failed Bolivian guerrilla) represents a significant departure for the East German playwright.¹⁵³ Gone is the call for an immediate intervention into existing socialist relationships. Frank Hörnigk explains:

testimony and other evidence of atrocities committed in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Over 200 survivors and approximately 150 expert witnesses testified and radically increased international knowledge of and attention to the Holocaust.  Schuhmann also notes this shift to a closed structure. Klaus Schuhmann, “Anmerkungen zu Volker Brauns Guevara oder Der Sonnenstaat,” TEXT+KRITIK 55 (1977): 33.

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Without a doubt the subjective experience (Erlebnis) of general historical experiences (Erfahrungen) as they had unfolded since the successful fascist coup in Chile directly influenced his work on the Guevara-piece. More generally, it became for Braun an important instance of poetic self-evaluation, among other things with respect to a dramaturgy that had until then […] radicalized prospective progress under our own circumstances; that had wanted quickly what would take longer here, always with the assumption that it would be possible, even by artistic means, rapidly to achieve the most important transition to a mature socialist society. All of Braun’s plays up to Guevara in fact understand themselves in this sense as operative offerings for immediate use. Guevara or the Sun State ends this stage of development in the author’s dramatic production.¹⁵⁴

In Guevara, Braun relocates German debates on revolutionary subjectivity within a geocultural frame that includes Latin America to fracture and creatively rearticulate cultured and gendered subjects of revolution. Citing and revising a tradition of European New Men, Braun emphatically relates it to alternate, Latin American formulations of the revolutionary socialist subject from José Martí to José Carlos Mariátegui to Guevara. In so doing, he unsettles the dominant terms of humanist internationalism and highlights the fissures in broader European concepts of revolutionary subjectivity, from Expressionism to Leninism to socialist humanism, that emerge when actual political conflict in Latin American locales is foregrounded. Chapter Four traces a circuitous route to Second World authorship via “The Task of Decolonial Thinking.” Heiner Müller’s The Task (1979) opens with the delivery of a letter from one revolutionary subject, Britannian farmer Galloudec, to another, the tutor Antoine, who is anxious to hide his past revolutionary affiliations in Napolean’s France. The letter’s delivery precipitates the first of many subjective breaks in Müller’s play. Written on Galloudec’s deathbed in a Cuban prison hospital, it explains that Galloudec was unable to complete an unspecified revolutionary task in Jamaica. The erstwhile revolutionary Antoine experiences a dramatic memory of the incomplete task and the fates of those assigned to complete it: Galloudec, Debuisson (creole oligarch and doctor), and Sasportas (former slave), often understood to be three aspects of a dreaming Antoine. Linking dramatic conflicts in and among individual subject-bodies to geopolitical divisions, the differently-worlded subjects are both antagonistic and mutually dependent.

 Frank Hörnigk, “Erinnerung an Revolutionen. Zur Entwicklungstendenzen in der Dramatik Heiner Müllers, Peter Hacks’ und Volker Brauns am Ende der siebziger Jahre,” in Tendenzen und Beispiele. Zur DDR-Literatur in den siebziger Jahren, ed. Hans Kaufmann (Leipzig: Philip Reclam jun., 1981), 178 – 179.

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The first of many historical references in the play, the French Revolution may serve as a dramatic frame for The Task, but the play’s pivotal referent is the Russian Revolution. Soviet historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has argued convincingly that roles and role-playing were both constitutive for and threatened to undermine the revolution, the threat of counterrevolution having been broached in terms of masks and a need to un-mask traitors since the revolution’s earliest days.¹⁵⁵ It is therefore no surprise that masks should have been adopted as a preferred figure of revolution and counterrevolution in twentieth-century German drama, nor that drama itself should emerge as an ideal form for representing the logics of revolution, sovietization, and the concomitant (self)betrayals of revolutionary subjects from Brecht to Müller. A particularly provocative possibility emerges if we read two masks at once: Frantz Fanon’s Pieu noire, masques blancs (Black Skins, White Masks, 1952)—references to which Arlene A. Teraoka has systematically identified and analyzed—and the language of masking and imposture in the Russian Revolution, heretofore unremarked in the vast literature on Müller.¹⁵⁶ Textual references to the Soviet revolutionary project support my reading of a Second World subject of revolution (in the figures of Galloudec and the Man in the Elevator to Peru), adding to a critical literature on The Task that largely neglects the role of Second World subjects in favor of the dramatic exchanges between the presumed First- and Third-World figures of Debuisson and Sasportas. My analysis thus prompts a provocative rethinking of the oft-cited line: “The theater of the White Revolution is over!” with reference to the White Revolutionaries of civil war-era Russia. My reading demonstrates the potential consequences of Müller’s alternative account of (counter)revolutionary relations in the Cold War with respect to the Caribbean, Peru, France, and Russia as historical geopolitical sites and sites for the production of revolutionary subjects in the play; as well as for how the disarticulation of intact humanist subject-bodies functions in tandem with temporal and geographical (dis)articulations of First, Second, and Third Worlds in order to produce a place for Second World authorship. By foregrounding the relation of revolutionary thought in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in revolutionary Russia, I show how Müller unsettles national and European narratives, rewriting their attendant touchstones of linear development and the spatialization of developmentalist time through commentary, shifting theaters of revolution, and geopolitical mapping. Mexican philosopher  Shiela Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005).  Arlene A. Teraoka, The Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse: The Postmodernist Poetics of Heiner Müller (New York: Peter Lang: 1985).

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and intellectual historian Leopoldo Zea’s fascinating re-positioning of the Americas, Iberia, and Russia as non-Western in historical terms supports reading the Russian Revolution in and with Latin American revolutions, as well as thinking alternative spatial economies of revolution and development.¹⁵⁷ Zea (1912– 2004) was the first to integrate francophone Caribbean writings that theorize revolutionary subjectivity into a Latin American philosophical project that would underwrite dependency theory’s core-periphery model. He anticipated world-systems and later globalization theory, and attended to the intimate relation of cultural and geopolitical frames via a carefully constructed sociology of knowledge. Zea offers a philosophical counterpart to dependency theory’s socio-economic perspective on history by linking the Caribbean, Peru, and Russia in historical and structural terms, revealing astounding parallels with The Task and its aesthetic rejoinder to narratives of development. Chapter Five, “A Rhetoric of ‘Walking Around,’” offers a reading of F.C. Delius’s Adenauerplatz. The novel takes up pivotal questions about the critical, practical, and historical articulation of German and Chilean politics, as well as German and Chilean migration, nationalism, and fascism.¹⁵⁸ Through the lens of Delius’s German Chilean protagonist, the two countries and their respective pasts are brought to bear on one another to reimagine the political conditions for and consequences of mass murder and antifascist resistance. Any number of things might account for the utter lack of a critical literature on Adenauerplatz, by far the least discussed of the literary examples I take up in this book. The novel’s ambitious attention to early and not yet widely theorized transnational forms and movements, or the perceived belatedness of a Chile-novel at a moment when even interest in Central America had begun to wane, could provide partial explanations, as could a critical preference for Delius’s more obviously “German” themes in his German Autumn trilogy and his writings on German reunification. Be that as it may, this novel undoubtedly merits greater consideration as one of the first to approach Latin American-German relationships from the perspective of historical movements of people, capital, and commodities. Adenauerplatz draws attention to the dynamic cultural and political

 Leopoldo Zea, The Role of the Americas in History, translated by Sonja Karsen, edited and with an introduction by Amy A. Oliver (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992); Discurso desde la marginación y la barbarie (Barcelona: Editorial Anthropos, 1988).  For a representative example, see Informationsstelle Lateinamerika e.V., ila-info 3 (1979). Whether Chile was or was not fascist remains a hotly debated issue. For the purposes of my analysis, I am less interested in fascism as a political-scientific classification than in its discursive force.

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allegiances of émigrés and exiles, and the relationship of German cultural institutions to military and economic conflicts in Latin America. Delius narrates the nighttime rounds of his protagonist, economist-turnedwatchman Felipe Gerlach Hernández. Gerlach Hernández is an ethnic German Chilean who seeks asylum in West Germany after the 1973 Chilean coup, retracing the path of his emigrant grandparents under new geopolitical and geocultural circumstances. The novel thereby places aesthetic and theoretical debates about literature and politics in the context of popular political negotiations of solidarity, economics, and the Third World movement.¹⁵⁹ Taking as a point of theoretical departure Michel de Certeau’s rhetoric of walking, I examine the ways in which Delius adopts a rhetoric of “Walking Around” to generate alternative spaces of resistance, solidarity, and memory in an unspecified urban center in 1980s West Germany.¹⁶⁰ Reading Delius’s aesthetic solidarity with an eye to his prior interest in Neruda, a Latin American poet of the internationalist avant-garde, foregrounds the resurgence in the 1970s of literary-political debates surrounding early twentieth-century fascism internationally. Too, in his recourse to a Nerudian rhetoric of walking around, Delius marshalls a distinctly literary mode of articulating memory, history, and antifascist resistance to challenge the priority of economic explanations of fascism within the Third World movement. The broader equation of global capitalism, neoimperialism, and fascism evident in publications of the movement for solidarity with Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s added a new dimension to what was more narrowly framed in much of the postwar period as a problem of national capital, though, at the same time, their equation also suppressed the cultural and historical particularities of German and Latin American locales.¹⁶¹ Economics were the linchpin that held popular, leftist visions of an antifascist Chilean resistance, fascist global capital, and an antifascist German Left together. Delius’s novel puts pressure on exclusively economic explanations of antifascist solidarity by drawing out formal and thematic repetitions of violent histories that were strongly present in  The term “Third World movement” collectively refers to a range of actions and organizations concerned with Third World solidarity dating from the 1950s through the mid-1980s. The movement drew participants from a range of political and religious circles. The most prominent geographic foci of the Third World movement in West Germany were Algeria, Vietnam, Mozambique, Chile, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.  Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).  For a representative example, see “Diskussionspapier des Lateinamerika-Komitees Heidelberg zur Erweiterung der Arbeit des Chile-Komitees auf andere Länder Lateinamerikas,” Chile Monitor 4 (May/June 1976): 32– 39.

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Third World solidarity organizations and popular domestic protests throughout the 1970s. The resulting transformation of a rhetoric of walking into a rhetoric of walking around emphasizes the construction of historical relationships in and through global commodities. Delius’s attention to the logics of exchange and equivalence in commodity fetishism and in his own aesthetic solidarity with Chilean antifascism productively illustrates tensions in and among literary and economic categories rather than prioritizing one over the other. What distinguishes Adenauerplatz from other, contemporary instances of West German antifascist rhetoric is its recourse to subtle structures of literary solidarity and the attempt to construct a transnational solidarity of readers equipped to walk around increasingly dense networks of cultural and economic exchange. Its careful tracking of historical movements of people—not just capital movements or faceless political power—and the sympathetic critique of unreflective and even inhumane solidarities that efface real human connections across time and space encompass a set of tendentially transnational relationships even as they are located in a resolutely internationalist framework. Delius’s prescient novel might be read with accounts of Germany’s role in global imaginations of justice that include Andreas Huyssen’s Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003) and Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009). Transmigration, in this case across generations of emigrants, immigrants, and exiles, would recalibrate both social scientific accounts of globalization that date the emergence of the global to the end of the Cold War and cultural-historical discussions of Holocaust memory with reference to a specific constellation of remembering fascisms in the 1970s. A sixth, concluding chapter takes the form of a postscript and addresses “The Limits of Aesthetic Solidarity.” It reflects on how the Cold War lent new urgency to long-standing German debates about the affirmative political function of literature, and how competing representations of literary-political subjects and the attendant differences in their respective philosophical articulations of subjectivity required geocultural recontextualization. Latin America provided a specific material and geocultural context through which to imagine literary subjectivities that diverged from actual political subjectivities. The space between real and imagined parties to monodialogical scripts requires us to attend carefully to the aesthetic means of that recontextualization. Practices of aesthetic solidarity that include Verdichtung raise a series of questions about contingent relationships of representation not easily dispensed with as Eurocentric on the one hand or authentic on the other. Like any form of solidarity, the aesthetic solidarity expressed in writing, reading, and interpreting literary texts requires constant negotiation if it is to be part of larger, trans-

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formative processes. Aesthetics and solidarity have a common touchstone in the political, and, more specifically, in what Jacques Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible,” the social operation by means of which people and things are visible to us and available to representation.¹⁶² They each privilege subjective terms of analysis; they each rely in equal measure on experiences that elicit subjective responses and on attempts to relate those responses systematically to larger structures or truths. These common elements have guided my thinking on the question of aesthetic solidarity under the weight of Rancière’s bold assertion: “Man is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his ‘natural’ purpose by the power of words. This literarity is at once the condition and the effect of the circulation of ‘actual’ literary locutions.”¹⁶³ I have chosen to forgo defining aesthetic solidarity more narrowly in this introduction in the interest of allowing the reader to see how it is derived from literarity in Rancière’s sense. My readings trace aesthetic solidarity’s emergence in this shuttling from condition to effect that is constitutive of the power of words. Each chapter underscores aesthetic solidarity’s emergence in literarity, and clarifies why it is a concept approached most meaningfully through close and contextual readings of specific literary texts. The final chapter therefore seemed the most appropriate place to synthesize the various expressions and limitations of aesthetic solidarity in the texts I have chosen, and to situate my term relative to a range of social scientific, philosophical, and literary debates on which it bears. It may seem anachronistic to speak of international solidarity at a moment when internationalism has fallen out of fashion as both a political ideology of the twentieth century and as a critical category in an age dominated by what are generally considered to be accelerating forces of globalization. Of course, to speak of texts from another time often requires us to return to the terms on which they were produced, but that is only part of what motivates my interest and belief in the relevance of solidarity and, indeed, in this collection of literary texts from the 1960s through the mid-1980s. My decision to pursue an aesthetic solidarity and to identify its critical limits is prompted by a need to intervene into cosmopolitan rights discourses that often bypass the international en route to the transnational and the global, discourses that attend inadequately to modes of thinking intersubjectivity that are solidary, but not necessarily root-

 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, translated and with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13.  Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 39

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ed in the kind of sympathetic imagination that is built on identification with an Other. This idea of literature, imagination, and cosmopolitan citizenship is perhaps most strongly associated with Martha Nussbaum (e. g., Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination in Public Life [1995]; Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education [1997]; “Educating for Citizenship in an Era of Global Connection,” [2002]).¹⁶⁴ I remain too much an unfashionable Brechtian to applaud identificatory models, and a close enough reader of Müller to know that alienation and recognition are also insufficient. (“Using Brecht uncritically is betrayal.”)¹⁶⁵ There are limits to approaches to literature, recognition, and human rights grounded in citizenship, cosmopolitan or otherwise. Unlike a discourse grounded in cosmopolitan rights, solidarity is not contingent on specific forms of state recognition and inclusion, and in that sense, too, revolutionary subjects are critical and work against a state-centered geopolitics of knowledge. I am not speaking against the important, concrete work many have undertaken in pursuit of dignity, respect, and justice under the moniker of rights. Rather, I venture here to speculate on complementary approaches to revolutionizing intersubjective relationships. As my mother says: if one way is good, two ways are better. Solidarity is a second way. It works as a complementary mode of intersubjectivity and, when its limits are subject to critical scrutiny, a counterweight to the less contingent and more frequently universal claims of rights discourses.

 Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination in Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); “Education for Citizenship in and Era of Global Connection,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 21 (2002): 289 – 303.  Heiner Müller, Rotwelsch (Berlin: Merve, 1982), 149.

Chapter 2 The Translator’s Ghosts: Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Latin American Compromiso in Kursbuch and The Habana Inquiry “Are you haunted by souls? Can you sense them?” writes Pedro Salinas. Souls, that would be saying too much. But certainly they are the voices of ghosts from other times, other places. Things that speak to a person reading foreign poems, call forth strange echoes, mental over- and undertones, and sometimes a body can hardly shake off the radio dramas that play out in the mind—a sure sign that a poem is worth something. The most radical way to deal with such hauntings is translation. —Hans Magnus Enzensberger¹

The translator’s ghosts haunt the pages of national literatures; their untold literary histories are the traces of transnational attachments discounted or noted only in passing. Some have louder voices than others. Foremost among those who listened and sought to retransmit those voices in postwar West Germany was Hans Magnus Enzensberger.² Prior to becoming a Suhrkamp author himself, Enzensberger’s earliest correspondence with the eminent publisher suggested pursuing an anthology of original translations of poems by the Chilean poet and later (in 1971) Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda.³ By the time he joined Suhr-

 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Geisterstimmen. Übersetzungen und Imitationen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 391.  Hans Magnus Enzensberger was born in 1929 in Kaufbeuren. With his socially critical poems (verteidigung der wölfe [defense of the wolves, 1957], landessprache [language of the land, 1960]), he was celebrated by many critics as the West German heir apparent to Bertolt Brecht early in his career. He studied languages, literature, and philosophy in Germany and France, and completed his doctoral work in 1955. Enzensberger soon established himself as a skilled and often polemic essayist, a consummate critic of the West German economic miracle, and what he regarded as passive consumerism and political illiteracy. Influenced by the Frankfurt School, Enzensberger adapted their critique of the culture industry to what he viewed as an emergent consciousness industry (Einzelheiten [Details, 1962]). His literary and essayistic work from the 1950s through the 1970s routinely took up questions about the relation of literature and politics and the use-value of literature. A true polyglot, Enzensberger has also worked tirelessly as a translator and editor over the years.  DLA Marbach, Suhrkamp Verlag Correspondence with Hans Magnus Enzensberger/1956– 1957, Enzensberger to Peter Suhrkamp, 31 October 1956. “I would like to inquire as to whether you might be interested in a selection of Neruda poems for publication by Suhrkamp. This offer has a history. I had been at work on the texts, about whose merit I need tell you nothing, for over a year when I was contacted by a certain Mr. Erich Arendt from East Berlin, who forbade

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kamp, Enzensberger had already published translations of poems by and written a critical essay about Neruda. The latter served as the basis for his afterward to the planned anthology, Die Raserei und die Qual (Furies and Sorrows, after the title of a poem by Neruda written in 1934 and revisited in 1939). That the anthology was finally realized nearly twenty years after he first proposed the project in 1956 is a testament to the persistence of the translator’s ghosts.⁴ In the intervening years, Enzensberger referred time and again in his correspondence with Peter Suhrkamp and Siegfried Unseld, Suhrkamp’s successor as of 1959, to the importance of Latin American poetry in general and Neruda’s trilogy Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth, published in 1935 and 1947, written primarily between 1925 – 1945) in particular. He argued that Spanish-language poets had made by far the greatest contribution to poetry in the twentieth century and had to be brought into the German literary landscape.⁵ He aimed to do so through translation and editorial work, and his influential anthology Museum der Modernen Poesie (Museum of Modern Poetry, 1960) is perhaps the best example of his early success in the endeavor.⁶ In private correspondence and, eventually, in an afterward to his Neruda anthology, Enzensberger went so far as to say that his own work would be unthinkable without Neruda’s.⁷ Already translated and cited at some length in his 1955 me to publish them. He claims to be the only authorized translator. Only small excerpts of my work could appear in Alfred Andersch’s journal. The legal situation was unambiguous. Once again the monopolization of poets by their translators appears to have caused great harm.” The question of who held the legal rights to translate Neruda from Spanish into German was subject to some debate, with Erich Arendt claiming sole rights even though Stefan Hermlin had also published translations of a number of Neruda’s poems with East German publisher Volk und Welt. The letter is also of note because it points to the asymmetrical reception of Latin American poetry in East and West Germany, with East German translation and publication of Latin American authors outpacing the West by nearly a decade. See Jens Kirsten, Lateinamerikanische Literatur in der DDR: Publikations- und Wirkungsgeschichte (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2004).  Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Der Fall Pablo Neruda,” Texte und Zeichen. Eine Literarische Zeitschrift 1.1 (1955): 384– 389; republished in Einzelheiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), 316 – 333; Pablo Neruda, Die Raserei und die Qual, selection, translation, and afterward by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Darmstadt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986). Enzensberger notes that the translations included in the collection all stem from 1952– 1954. In the meantime, Enzensberger published a collection under the title Poesía sin pureza (Impure Poetry) with Hoffmann und Campe in 1968, much to the chagrin of Suhrkamp.  DLA Marbach, Suhrkamp Verlag Correspondence with Hans Magnus Enzensberger/1958 – 1959, Enzensberger to Peter Suhrkamp, 4 March 1959.  Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Museum der Modernen Poesie, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1960). The anthology featured 351 poems in sixteen languages, including poems by over a dozen authors from hispanophone America.  Enzensberger, “Nachwort,” in Die Raserei, 116.

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essay “Der Fall Pablo Neruda” (“The Case of Pablo Neruda”), written for Alfred Andersch’s journal Texte und Zeichen, Neruda’s ars poetica “Sobre una poesía sin pureza” (“On an Impure Poetry,” 1935) assumed pride of place in the West German anthology.⁸ The text opens Enzensberger’s selection and translation with the force proper to any manifesto, a call for a new, impure poetry that engages the human experience in its entirety, a confused poetry of human perception that famously reeks of sweat and of smoke, of lilies and of urine.⁹ By the time Enzensberger began to write programmatic pieces on the relation of literature and politics in earnest, he had been immersed in the work of the Latin American avant-garde for some years, translating and publishing not only individual poems by Neruda, but also an anthology of poems by the Peruvian César Vallejo.¹⁰ Introducing the Museum, Enzensberger remarked on the innovative function of translation within as well as across national literatures: Whoever undertakes a translation must command not only the language from which but also the language into which one wants to translate. The delay with which poetry usually crosses linguistic borders can be explained by the fact that this language [i. e., the language into which an original is translated—JHT] is often not even available to command. It must first be created.¹¹

The translator’s creation is motivated, if not defined, by his ghosts. An effect of the translative remainder, the spectral quality of the language not-yet-created intrudes on the materiality of existing language and interposes itself between the revolutionary subject and its reality. The only way past the translator’s ghosts may be through them: in the years that followed, Enzensberger advanced translating, writing, and reading as stations, or way points, on an indeterminate path to revolutionize literature itself. It is well to note that Enzensberger’s ghostly translations are not to be confused with Walter Benjamin’s idea that translation marks the afterlives of literary texts, ensuring a kind of continuity; instead, they  Neruda’s piece was originally published in the Spanish Republican journal Caballo verde para la poesia 1 (1935).  Enzensberger, “Der Fall Pablo Neruda,” 385. For further discussion of the Residencia poems, see Chapter Five.  Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Die Furien des César Vallejo,” Merkur 27.4 (1963): 349 – 362; idem, César Vallejo. Gedichte Spanisch und Deutsch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963).  Enzensberger, Museum der modernen Poesie, vol. 2, 781. The position is by no means original to Enzensberger; it was advanced most famously in the German–speaking context by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. See Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Toward an Ethics of Difference (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), 77; Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies, 3d ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 66.

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haunt, interrupt, and disrupt the translator’s aspiration to aesthetic solidarity. Initially unbidden, they work upon the translator to insert themselves into a literature with revolutionary force: “The most radical way to deal with such hauntings is translation.”¹² This obtains not only lexically (in the generation of new words or phrases) or syntactically (in experiments with standard word order), but also at the level of form. By this I mean that a translator may be called upon to translate texts that know no real equivalent in the target language, texts that may indeed be made up of words that are intelligible within a cultural frame, but whose composite form has no comparable cultural purchase and is not yet generically intelligible in its new cultural context. I will argue that, as Enzensberger’s translative project moved away from more conventional literary translations and anthologies, it became increasingly fixed on the translation of generic practices along these lines. A prolific reader of an emergent body of Latin American testimonial literature, Enzensberger sought to redefine German literary conventions most frequently associated with the representation of real historical events, especially documentary literature. He redefined authorship itself in the process of relating Latin American compromiso to German engagement. While much attention has been paid to Enzensberger’s concern for redefining literature, literary genres, and the role of the intellectual broadly speaking, critics generally plot his literary-political trajectory squarely in a European tradition.¹³ This tendency extends even to include recent research on the journal Kursbuch’s place in literary history by Enzensberger scholar and Suhrkamp editor Henning Marmulla. Marmulla relocates the Kursbuch project within an international and internationalist context (with specific attention to the journal as a national iteration of the failed international ambitions of the Revue Internationale), and attends to Enzensberger’s recurrent genre critique from his 1964/1965 Frankfurt Poetics Lectures onward.¹⁴ As a practical instantiation of Enzensberger’s genre critique, Marmulla cites the author’s collaboration with composer Hans Werner Henze on the opera El Cimarrón, based on the testimonio of Estéban Montejo as recorded and arranged

 See n. 1.  See, for example, Gunther Witting, “Übernahme und Opposition. Zu Hans Magnus Enzensbergers Gattungsinnovationen,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 31 (1981): 432– 61.  See Henning Marmulla, Enzensbergers Kursbuch. Eine Zeitschrift um 68 (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2011). The poetics lectures were only recently published: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Scharmützl und Scholien. Über Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), 9 – 82.

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by the Cuban enthnographer and author Miguel Barnet (1940– ).¹⁵ However, even as Marmulla draws attention to Enzensberger’s increasingly experimental approach to genre and cross-cultural mediation from the 1960s and into the 1970s, his narrow focus on the West German author obscures Barnet’s similar critique of genre. Enzensberger’s and Barnet’s shared positioning vis-à-vis the politics and efficacy of genre make visible precisely those generic features of contemporary Latin American literature which drew Enzensberger to testimonio beginning in the mid- to late-1960s, even as he had been drawn to Latin American avant-garde poetry a decade before.¹⁶ As for his own programmatic remarks on El Cimarrón, Barnet wrote baldly: “I no longer believe in genres, as the people have never believed in them.”¹⁷ To understand Enzensberger’s specific and sustained engagement with Latin American themes and histories, we must account for the Latin American literary forms that are part and parcel to them. The aim of this chapter is consequently to trace Enzensberger’s engagement with impure and testimonial forms and to

 Miguel Barnet, Biografía de un cimarrón (Havana: Academía de Ciencias de Cuba, 1966); Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Hans Werner Henze, William Pearson, Karlheinz Zöller, Leo Brouwer, Tsutomo Yamash’ta, El Cimarrón. Ein Werkbericht (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1971). The libretto, reprinted as part of the Werkbericht (Working Report), lists Enzensberger and Barnet as co-authors. Enzensberger first published a version of his poetic translation in Kursbuch 15 (November 1968): 1– 17—the same volume concluded by his third and final “Commonplaces” essay—that listed him as translator rather than as co-author. Editorial notes in Kursbuch 15 referred interested readers to a more conventional, prose translation of the text soon to be published by Hildegard Baumgart, Der Cimarrón: Die Lebensgeschichte eines entflohenen Negersklaven aus Cuba, von ihm selbst erzählt (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1969). Enzensberger’s El Cimarrón is more appropriatel]y an adaptation or variation on a theme than a translation in any strict sense, and was subject to popular and scholarly critique. See, for example, Sara Lennox, “Enzensberger, Kursbuch, and Third Worldism: The Sixties’ Construction of Latin America,” in “Neue Welt”/“Dritte Welt”: Interkulturelle Beziehungen Deutschlands zu Lateinamerika und der Karibik, ed. Sigrid Bauschinger and Susan Cocalis (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1994), 189. (The published criticism of Enzensberger’s translation on which Lennox bases her evaluation of the Spanish was written by Reinhard Baumgart, husband of translator Hildegard Baumgart.) All criticisms aside, the inclusion of the H. Baumgart reference minimally makes clear that Enzensberger made no claim that his was a literal or definitive translation of the text. I choose not to adopt the standard English translation of the title (Autobiography of a Runaway Slave), because there is no satisfactory equivalent to cimarrón, which indicates not simply a runaway slave, but a wild, untamed spirit, a “maroon” who hides in the mountain forests of the Caribbean.  See the section titled “Die Schweinebucht, der Negersklave und Durruti. Drei Dokumentationen von Geschichte,” in Marmulla, Enzensbergers Kursbuch, 235 – 246.  Miguel Barnet, “The Alchemy of Memory,” afterward to Biography of a Runaway Slave, trans. Nick Hill (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1994), 206.

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draw out their ghostly remainders in texts that, while not themselves translations, consistently exhibit translative practices. In pursuing Enzensberger’s concept of authorial agency as it evolved over time, I am less interested in identifying the contradictions and even breaks than in the creeping continuities in his writing, the ghosts that stalk and haunt across his admittedly disparate poetic positions.¹⁸ I contend that those continuities derive in no small part from his sustained interest in Latin American literature, in particular ideas about impure poetry and generic innovation. They ground part of my argument for the primacy of Latin American references in Enzensberger’s writing from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s. Unlike the other case studies in this book, each of which focuses on a single work by Braun, Müller, or Delius, my analysis of Enzensberger requires that I address the position and function of Latin America vis-à-vis West Berlin and West Germany across multiple texts, a series of three Kursbuch essays and the play Das Verhör von Habana (The Habana Inquiry, 1970).¹⁹ I do this first and foremost by offering a theoretical framework for thinking about generic translation and its relation to what I term the translator’s ghosts. By tracing their emergence as threats and promises to the literary subject of politics it is possible to see the real import of Latin America not only as a cipher for revolution, but also as a less often acknowledged literary-historical touchstone in Cold War-era West German debates on political literature. Thinking the Latin American antecedents of so influential an essay as “Gemeinplätze, die Neueste Literatur betreffend” (“Commonplaces Regarding the Newest Literature,” 1968) is a first step toward opening national literary histories to the broader, geocultural systems in which they are embedded.²⁰ Reading the “Commonplaces” essays together with The Habana Inquiry, I can attend to how Enzensberger positions Latin American revolution in a matrix of West German concerns for revolutionary sub-

 More systematic and extensive attempts have been made to trace changes in Enzensberger’s authorial subjectivity and the relationship he posits between literature and politics. See for example Arnold Blumer, Das dokumentarische Theater der sechziger Jahre in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Verlag Anton Hain: Meisenheim am Glan, 1977), 332– 333 and passim; and Klaus L. Berghahn, who identifies a shift from “Adornean engagement” to “political publicism”: “Es genügt nicht die einfache Wahrheit. Hans Magnus Enzensbergers Das Verhör von Habana als Dokumentation und als Theaterstück,” in Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ed. Reinhold Grimm. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 280 – 282. Marmulla comes as close as anyone to characterizing his work, observing that the most consequent thing about Enzensberger is his refusal to occupy any fixed position. Marmulla, Kursbuch, 250.  Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Das Verhör von Habana (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970).  Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Gemeinplätze, die Neueste Literatur betreffend,” Kursbuch 15: 187– 197.

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jects past, present, and future. Equally as important, it reveals some of the ways in which the translation of literary programs and the transformative political projects of which they were a part influenced concepts of revolutionary justice in West Germany of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, the play in particular sits uncomfortably at the intersection of testimonio and a resurgent West German documentarism’s penchant for the tribunal play as an explicit performance of justice. A practice and a disposition taken for granted by most readers, translation’s significance extends beyond the dissemination of any single text. Lawrence Venuti argues that the cultural and political effects of selecting and representing foreign language texts for translation occasion the formation of cultural identities: “Translation wields enormous power in constructing representations of foreign cultures. […] In the long run, translation figures in geopolitical relations by establishing the cultural grounds of diplomacy, reinforcing alliances, antagonisms, and hegemonies between nations.”²¹ More specifically, he argues, translations are “designed precisely to form domestic cultural identities [by] constructing an authorial subject through an affiliation with a particular literary discourse.”²² Subject construction inevitably cuts both ways: the process constitutes both a historically and culturally specific, domestic representation of the foreign and what Venuti terms “a domestic subject, a position of intelligibility that is also an ideological position, informed by the codes and canons, interests and agendas of certain domestic social groups.”²³ In short, seemingly localized practices of translation are in fact sites for the construction and contestation of evolving geocultures. By the time of Kursbuch’s founding in 1965, Enzensberger’s translative project self-consciously aimed to change how West German subjects conceived of themselves in just such a global frame. For all that Venuti develops his argument via an analysis of US American translations of Japanese literature, he concludes convincingly that: The history of translation reveals other projects that were designed precisely to form domestic cultural identities by appropriating foreign texts. In these cases, the translations have tended to be highly literary, designed to foster a new literary movement, constructing an authorial subject through an affiliation with a particular literary discourse.²⁴

   

Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 67– 68. Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 76. Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 68. Venuti The Scandals of Translation, 67– 87, here 76.

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In Enzensberger’s case, the “particular literary discourse” in question is a Latin American committed literature (literatura comprometida). A literature concerned broadly with democratic social change and associated overwhelmingly with the Latin American Left, commitment should not be confused with engagement in the Sartrean sense that otherwise dominated West German debates in the mid1960s; its grounding is not existential, but profoundly social. Enzensberger returned time and again to an expansive array of committed texts, ranging from the critical, colonial-era writings of Bartolomé de las Casas to internationalist avant-garde poetry by Neruda and Vallejo, to contemporary, testimonial narrative institutionalized by the influential Cuban cultural organization Casa de las Américas.²⁵ Reading texts in isolation from one another, or, just as often, delimiting critical projects with respect to the very generic categories that Enzensberger sought time and again to elide, has meant overlooking translative work as a concatenation of projects extending from translations of individual texts into German, to editorial projects, to attempts to translate generic practices. Read cumulatively, this diverse group of texts generated connections across historical and discursive fields including fascism, colonialism, and neocolonialism. Yet, as is so often the case in self-consciously political literature, the articulation of literature and politics in Enzensberger’s translative work reveals both a space of internationalist encounter and negotiation, and a limit of aesthetic solidarity. First emergent in more conventional acts of poetic translation, Enzensberger sought to systematize such encounters in Kursbuch, a project that I argue was fundamentally translative. The effects of the twin processes of negotiation and limitation—the translator’s ghosts—are palpable at the latest in Enzensberger’s The Habana Inquiry. The final sections of this chapter demonstrate how Enzensberger’s cultural negotiation pivots on the potential of testimonial and paraliterary modes to reinvigorate West German literature. The specific lim-

 Enzensberger edited and wrote an afterward for a new edition of D.W. Andreä’s eighteenthcentury translation of Las Casas’s Kurzgefaßter Bericht von der Verwüstung der westindischen Länder (A Short Account of the Devastation of the Indies, 1966). Other examples include his Freisprüche. Revolutionäre vor Gericht (Acquittals: Revolutionaries on Trial, 1970); El Cimarrón, already referenced above; and the remarkably unsuccessful adaptation of another Barnet book in collaboration with Henze, La Cubana, oder ein Leben für die Kunst (The Cuban Woman, or a Life for Art, 1974). For representative reviews of the stage version of La Cubana, see DLA Marbach, Hans Magnus Enzensberger: 7. Zum Werk/g. zum dramatischen Werk/2. zu einzelnen Werken/La Cubana (Libretto). On the history and significance of the Casa de las Américas to the Latin American Left, and especially its place in debates about commitment and literature, see Judith A. Weiss, Casa de las Américas: An intellectual review in the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill: Estudios de Hispanófila, 1977).

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its of his program of generic innovation and aesthetic solidarity, explored with an eye to the political challenges of translation, comparison, and metaphor, are manifest in the seeming impossibility of an adequate staging of the play. Given Enzensberger’s accumulation of authorial functions (translation, documentation, selection, montage, criticism, introduction) within a single text, The Habana Inquiry brought with it an unusual density of literary-political relations. His increasing interest in literatures of witness alone would have sufficed to destabilize notions of the autonomous and singularly creative literary author; embedding his generic translation in a more expansive project of historical and cultural translation amplified its blow to authorship conventionally conceived. In the field of literary production, both the translator and the documentarist occupy curious and uncomfortable positions, tasked with the imaginative labor of rendering (social) texts and contexts intelligible across times and places, but judged according to ill-conceived notions of fidelity. Even at their most accomplished, they are considered derivative, even technical.²⁶ There has been no lack of scholarly challenges to commonsensical understandings of translation along these lines; Venuti, for one, advocates what he terms heterogeneous translations. Heterogenous translations complicate theories of translation oriented toward equivalence or communication in favor of an expansive understanding of translation as a creative cultural practice. Fundamental to his approach is the treatment of language itself as a “collective force” (i. e., not an individual act) and, consequently, a site of power relationships among major and minor linguistic constituencies within the assemblage that is language.²⁷ J.-J. Lecercle, on whose work Venuti draws, terms those minor variations the remainder: The linguistic variations released by the remainder do not merely exceed any communicative act, but frustrate any effort to formulate systematic rules. The remainder subverts the major form by revealing it to be socially and historically situated, by staging “the return

 See especially Venuti’s chapter on translation and authorship, The Scandals of Translation, 31– 46. Berghahn points to analogous debates surrounding documentary literature (“Es genügt nicht,” 287).  Venuti’s (and Lecercle’s) understanding of language follows Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, describing language as “an assemblage of forms that constitute a semiotic regime. Circulating among diverse cultural constituencies and social institutions, these forms are positioned hierarchically, with the standard dialect in dominance but subject to constant variation from regional or group dialects, jargons, clichés and slogans, stylistic innovations, nonce words, and the sheer accumulation of previous uses,” The Scandals of Translation, 9 – 10.

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within language of the contradictions and struggles that make up the social” and by containing as well “the anticipation of future ones.”²⁸

Heterogeneous translation is the name Venuti gives to translation that takes advantage of the remainder: it is a “minoritizing translation.” As such, it makes cultural difference visible at the same time as it undertakes the assimilatory work of translation.²⁹ As elaborated by Venuti, Lecercle’s remainder helps to put a finer point on the cultural labor of the translator’s ghosts, to show them at work not only at the edges of Enzensberger’s conventional translation, but also to consider their significance as literary figures in their own right. The tropes of ghosts and ghostliness mark a limit, a translative or comparative remainder on the field of revolutionary metaphor. They prove symptomatic of Enzensberger’s own, intuitive sense of the limits of an aesthetic solidarity possible under the dominant concept of authorial subjectivity that he undertook to revise in the 1960s and 1970s. But his preference for metaphorical language surrounding ghosts and ghostliness across genres and publishing contexts, in evidence most clearly in The Habana Inquiry and its long introduction, had already emerged several years earlier as part of an exemplary series of essays on literature, politics, authorship, and the production of knowledge written for and published in Kursbuch. Repositioned in this line, I read The Habana Inquiry as part of a sustained literary-political project concerned with the efficacy of writing in and about revolution in order to show how and to what effect the play reiterated and amplified the trope of ghosts and ghostliness common to Enzensberger’s essayistic, documentary, and translative work of the period. In considering Enzensberger’s endeavor, Emily Apter’s concept of the translation zone provides a useful complement to Venuti. She writes: In fastening on the term “zone” as a theoretical mainstay, the intention has been to imagine a broad intellectual topography that is neither the property of a single nation, nor an amorphous condition associated with postnationalism, but rather a zone of critical engagement that connects the “l” and the “n” of transLation and transNation. The common root “trans” operates as a connecting port of translational transnationalism (a term I use to emphasize translation among small nations or minority language communities) as well as the point

 Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 10; internal quotation Lecercle, The Violence of Language (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).  Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 11. I resume and elaborate on the question of assimilation below.

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of debarkation to a cultural caesura—a trans—ation—where transmission failure is marked.³⁰

An important caveat in introducing Apter’s discussion of more recent, transnational phenomena into any discussion of Enzensberger’s work from the 1960s and 1970s is that his deliberative framework was always resoundingly international, whatever germs of a transnational project it may have contained. That not withstanding, in emphasizing the translation zone as “a point of debarkation to a cultural caesura,” Apter’s “intellectual topography” describes the shifting ground against which Venuti’s ideal translation outcome—a heterogeneous and minoritizing translation—unfolds alongside translations that can and do obscure or mystify their status as such. Her terminology highlights Enzensberger’s continuing failure to transmit Latin American revolution to West Germany more precisely than any blanket critique of his Eurocentrism could. For Apter, the translation zone’s caesura is not simply an interruption or loss; rather, it floats between the poetic drawing breath of the original term and a break or pause that—in the “debarkation to a cultural caesura”—might serve for critical reflection on precisely which aspects of a cultural text are not transmitted. Kursbuch’s eponymous reference to locomotive transport and its aspiration to identify novel points of debarkation and transfer invite a ready set of associations. Apter’s focus on connection and failure offers a means to consider what Enzensberger’s Habana Inquiry can and cannot translate in the Latin American-German zone he had long since worked to articulate. In the translation zone, failed translation is a catalyst of political and subjective change that Enzensberger hoped to achieve through the concrete relation of poetry to praxis and in less individually oriented forms of literary expression. In this respect, the translator’s ghosts illustrate the complex relation of Verdichtung (an increasing density of social relations and their poetic recasting) and the limits of aesthetic solidarity as articulated through the convergence of sociological and literary analysis. Cast as an act of love, and as an act of disruption, translation becomes a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history; a means of rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself; a way of denaturalizing citizens, taking them out of the comfort zone of national space, daily ritual, and pre-given domestic arrangements. It is a truism that the experience of becoming proficient in another tongue delivers a salubrious blow to narcissism, both national and individual. Translation failure demarcates intersubjective limits, even as it highlights that “eureka” spot where consciousness crosses over to a rough

 Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 5.

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zone of equivalency or crystallizes around an idea that belongs to no one language or nation in particular. Translation is a significant medium of subject re-formation and political change.³¹

With these features, designs, and functions in mind, I have identified three overlapping types of translation that make up the landscape of Enzensberger’s Cubano-German translation zone: refusing to translate, translating cultural concepts, and translating discursive systems. Embedded within his generic translation, each contributes to Enzensberger’s attempt to carve out a new literary-political subjectivity for himself as a West German author at a moment when he ostensibly rejects the very notion of the revolutionary subject.³² They also contribute to a comparative project that seeks to subsume a specific West German literature and its historical relationship to the political into an international narrative of (neo)imperialist violence and antiimperialist revolution. Such a narrative would “belong to no one nation in particular,” thereby “repositioning the subject in the world and in history” to the potential exclusion of more nuanced accounts, in this case, of Nazi-fascist culture and literary responses thereto.³³

Charting a new course for literature Latin American revolution was prominent in Enzensberger’s influential publishing endeavor, Kursbuch. Widely regarded as the most important medium of the West German Left from its inception in the mid-1960s through the 1970s, Kursbuch offered a forum for critical perspectives on politics and culture. The journal routinely brought together authors concerned with subjectivity broadly construed, both in political terms originating in the British and, later, US American New Left, and in terms of literary subjectivities articulated in reading, writing, and translating. It provided an issue-oriented forum for linking domestic and international social movements around 1968, excerpting, translating, and publishing texts that laid important groundwork for geocultural projects.³⁴ More than

 Apter, The Translation Zone, 6.  Enzensberger, “Berliner Gemeinplätze,” 163.  Apter, The Translation Zone, 6.  See Marmulla. Sara Lennox, for one, has pointed out that the international focus was limited to the period from the journal’s founding in 1965 through the Vietnam War (Lennox, “Enzensberger, Kursbuch, and Third Worldism,” 197). I would note that this period coincides with Enzensberger’s term as editor of the journal. Christoph Kapp does well to question Marmulla’s decision to focus on Kursbuch to the exclusion of other influential publications in the extraparliamentary milieu: Christoph Kapp, review of Enzensbergers Kursbuch. Eine Zeitschrift um 68.

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any other place outside of West Germany, Latin America was featured alternately as an object of political and economic analysis and as a key site for rethinking the theory and practice of revolution internationally. Albeit less frequently, Latin America figured as a site for the independent production of theory, usually through Kursbuch’s dossier of translated texts by non-German speaking thinkers. It was the first region to which an entire issue of Kursbuch was devoted, closely followed by the journal’s first single-country issue on Cuba.³⁵ No other region received such sustained discussion during Enzensberger’s tenure as editor (1965 – 1975). The inauguration of Kursbuch marked a key moment in the popularization of Latin America as a site and cipher for rethinking the relation of revolutionary subjectivity to literary projects among members of the West German Left, both by translating literary authors (such as Julio Cortázar, Edmundo Desnoes, Heberto Padilla, and Nicanor Parra) and more explicitly theoretical texts (by José Martí, Fidel Castro, Frantz Fanon, and Carlos Fuentes), and by embedding them in sustained conversations about the role of authors and intellectuals in West German society. While Enzensberger’s own engagement with Latin America significantly predates the journal, Kursbuch was a key vehicle for the dissemination and popularization of Latin American material. Kursbuch was quite literally a translative project, concerned with moving readers and texts across linguistically and culturally distinct spaces. It advanced an editorial program organized not around a set of fixed points or ideas, but rather around movement and timely connection, points of transfer and debarkation: “Kursbücher prescribe no directions. They indicate connections, and they are valid as long as these connections are valid. That is how the journal understands its timeliness.”³⁶ The editorial statement’s emphasis on generating connections among the widest possible field of places and times was underwritten by the journal’s dossier, which consisted overwhelmingly of translated materials.

Berlin 2011, by Henning Marmulla, H-Soz-u-Kult, 22 March 2012, http://hsozkult.geschichte.huberlin.de/rezensionen/2012– 1-207. Debates about the primacy of Kursbuch aside, no one could reasonably dispute that it was among the most important journals of the day for the discussion of politics and culture on the Left.  These were Kursbücher 11 and 18, respectively. Reprinted versions of all Kursbücher published by Suhrkamp (i. e., before the separation of the journal from the publisher in 1970) are available in two volumes: Kursbuch I (1 – 10/1965 – 1967) and Kursbuch II (11 – 20/1968 – 1970), ed. Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1976).  “Ankündigung einer neuen Zeitschrift,” reprinted in Kursbuch I 1 – 10/1965 – 1967, n.p. The German word Kursbuch refers to train routes and their schedules or timetables and consequently includes spatial coordinates lost in choosing a single English word that would privilege the temporal.

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The journal was explicitly open to authors regardless of prestige, language, and nationality, and it used formal innovation and translation to convey an immediacy perceived to be absent from contemporary West German literature: The journal is open to new poetry and new prose, irrespective of how well known or unknown its authors are, and irrespective of their language and nationality. In this respect, Kursbuch is a literary journal. It is not a literary journal insofar as it is also open to that to which literature is called but cannot master. Our literary consciousness is limited (begrenzt); it ignores broad zones of civilizatory reality. Where literary intervention (Vermittlung) fails, the Kursbuch will attempt to capture the immediate expression (den unvermittelten Niederschlag) of the facts: in protocols, reports, reportage, excerpted documents, polemic and unpolemic discussions. This function is served by the establishment of the “dossier,” which will appear in each number.³⁷

Kursbuch—and particularly the dossier—modeled a reading practice designed to change the consciousness of authors and readers alike. Thus, while Enzenzberger declined to outline a more specific editorial program on the grounds that one may as well publish an index of opinions, he did not hesitate to advance a programmatic call to revise “what is already there”; there in the sense both of what exists and of what is already placed: the journal took as the possible objects of its revisionary project an unlimited field of themes that existed in a deictically constructed space.³⁸ How to get from here to there requires any index’s user to learn how to read it correctly, and of course presumes a desire to get from a here to a there in the first place. While Kursbücher may not, as a rule, prescribe itineraries, some theres were certainly privileged implicitly over others in Enzensberger’s Kursbuch. Considering the journal in the context of its translative and transformative aims highlights both the privileged status of Latin American material and its translators’ attempts to reposition German readers along the lines characterized by Venuti’s theory of translation as a process that situates readers within “domestic intelligibilities that are also ideological positions, ensembles of values, beliefs, and representations that further the interests of certain social groups over others,” creates “peculiarly domestic canons,” and “ultimately […] alters reading patterns.”³⁹ In other words, translation supports many of the processes valorized

 “Ankündigung einer neuen Zeitschrift.” I have chosen to translate begrenzt as limited, but it is worth noting that it also conveys a literary consciousness shaped by borders (Grenzen). Too, the opposition of literature’s Vermittlung to documentary modes as unvermittelt is clearer in the original German.  “Ankündigung einer neuen Zeitschrift.”  Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 78, 67, 13.

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in Kursbuch’s editorial prospectus, reinforcing principles of connection, comparison, and movement to change readers’ understandings of “what is already there.” Enzensberger’s sustained endeavors to promote West German translations of committed literature in general and testimonial forms in particular were ultimately eclipsed by the emergence of an alternate, West German domestic canon of Latin American literature in the shape of “Suhrkamp’s South,” with its focus on Boom authors Julio Cortázar, Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Juan Carlos Onetti.⁴⁰ In his own recommendations to Unseld, by contrast, Enzensberger advocated a much broader range of authors, including not only Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez (on both of whom Suhrkamp missed the boat), but also the lesser-known Edmundo Desnoes, Carolina María de Jesús, and Ricardo Pozas.⁴¹ In the meantime, however, the Kursbuch dossier introduced readers to testimonial forms unfamiliar to German language literature—more often than not to texts for which Enzensberger himself sought to create new audiences and which became the stuff of his other projects. (For example, in addition to the better-known Montejo and Barnet testimony, the testimonial “Manuela die Mexikanerin” [“Manuela the Mexican,” 1968], based on interviews conducted by the Cuban ethnologist Aida García Alonso, was first published in Kursbuch 18, and later as part of Freisprüche [Acquittals, 1970].) It is the second issue of Kursbuch that is most frequently cited as foundational for the emergence of an internationally-oriented West German New Left. Including translations of Frantz Fanon, Carlos Fuentes, and Fidel Castro, reports on China and the Middle East, and an introduction to debates surrounding development aid and its role in international economies of exploitation, Kursbuch 2 concludes with Enzensberger’s essay “Europäische Peripherie” (“European Periphery”), which relocates the presumed center of a future revolution from the

 As part of a series of exhibits celebrating the acquisition of the Suhrkamp-Insel archives, the Literatur Museum der Moderne in Marbach organized the exhibit “Cortázar, Onetti, Paz. Suhrkamps großer Süden,” 11 June – 3 October 2010. On the marketing and reception of the Boom in West Germany, see Meg H. Brown, The Reception of Spanish American Fiction in West Germany 1981 – 1991: A Study of Best Sellers (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994). The Boom as a literary marketing phenomenon was of course not an exclusively West German occurrence.  This list is by no means exhaustive. For these examples see SUA, Suhrkamp/01 VL/Autorenkonv. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 1969, letters from Enzensberger to Unseld from 6 April 1969, 1 May 1969, and undated (presumably Fall 1969). Enzensberger’s description of a book he calls la favela (the slum) and whose author he does not mention appears to be Carolina María de Jesús’s Quarto de Despejo (Child of the Dark, 1960).

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metropolitan industrial proletariat to the Third World.⁴² The argument was not unique to Enzensberger, but reflected a basic tenant of New Left thought oriented increasingly toward superstructural analyses and a fundamental reconceptualization of subjective and objective factors in world revolutions. Sara Lennox bolsters her claims about the centrality of the journal to the emergence of Third Worldism, or, the substitution of the Third World for the European industrial proletariat by some Western Marxist thinkers in the 1960s,⁴³ with recourse to observations by author and critic Peter Hamm (1937– ) about Kursbuch 2: “This longsince famous second issue of Kursbuch, which dedicated itself exclusively to the Third World, in principle meant—thankfully we can determine this—the beginning of a New Left in the Federal Republic, a Left that one could no longer identify with the established communism […]”⁴⁴ One could dispute Hamm’s claims on many grounds—for example, the existence of significant antecedent interests in the Third World in 1950s West Germany—; more interesting (to me) is how and why assertions such as his retrospectively became important for the self-definition of the West German New Left and subsequent critiques of it as Eurocentric. Attending to translation complicates more straightforward criticisms of Enzensberger’s Eurocentrism, because it requires us to focus on specific limits to aesthetic solidarity without dismissing its possibility out of hand or failing to recognize the important political role of journals such as Kursbuch in solidifying incremental changes in the reading habits of the West German New Left. That Kursbuch was a Eurocentric project and Enzensberger’s writing on Latin America and the Third World generally may be characterized as such seems to me indisputable.⁴⁵ But attending more precisely to the mechanisms and motivations of the journal, its authors, and its editors will go much further toward resolving the problem that Lennox, drawing on Edward Said, has identified as perhaps most relevant to readers of Kursbuch today: “The problem Kursbuch’s treatment of what is termed the Third World poses sharply is one that is still unresolved for

 For a brief summary and critique of the essay, see Lennox, “Enzensberger, Kursbuch, and Third Worldism,” 186 – 187. More recently, see Sara Mamprin, “‘Was also bleibt, ist der Westen, der sich in alle Himmelsrichtungen ausbreitet.ʼ Eurozentrismus und Euro-Exzentrizität bei Hans Magnus Enzensberger,” TEXT+KRITIK 49, 3d revised ed., ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Munich: edition text+kritik, 2010), 83 – 86.  Lennox, “Enzensberger, Kursbuch, and Third Worldism,” 186. As Michael Denning convincingly argues, the attempt to reinvent Marxism without the working class marked a much broader problem with the New Left’s attempt to refocus cultural analysis on commodities and markets rather than on states. Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 84.  Cited in Lennox, “Enzensberger, Kursbuch, and Third Worldism,” 185.  For a survey of his shifting assessment of Europe since the 1960s, see Mamprin, “Eurozentrismus und Euro-Exzentrizität.”

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Western radicals: how to produce and transmit knowledge about cultures other than our own that is not always already implicated in the power that has subordinated them to us.”⁴⁶ The need to translate may itself be a limit to the more egalitarian production and transmission that Lennox has in mind. Venuti argues: Translating can never simply be communication between equals because it is fundamentally ethnocentric. Most literary projects are initiated in a domestic culture where a foreign text is selected to satisfy different tastes from those that motivated its composition and reception in its native culture. And the very function of translation is assimilation, the inscription of a foreign text with domestic intelligibilities and interests.⁴⁷

Although translation must perforce be assimilatory and ethnocentric, it can still be more or less ethically undertaken. Heterogenous or minoritizing translations, for example, retain the foreignness of the foreign text and manifest rather than mystify cultural difference; text selection itself can prove a powerful strategy, especially when the translator selects texts that resist seamless incorporation into domestic reading patterns.⁴⁸ Enzensberger may well have viewed testimonial texts as comparably resistant.⁴⁹ As Venuti sees it: “The goal [of heterogenous  Lennox, “Enzensberger, Kursbuch, and Third Worldism,” 197.  Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 11. The insight is of course not original to Venuti; scholars of the postcolonial have queried the relation of translation studies and coloniality at least since the 1990s. See for example the pioneering collection of essays Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Crosscultural Texts, ed. Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1996).  Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, Chapter One.  In light of debates in the 1990s, one could dispute how resistant testimonial texts may or may not be to translation. Critics have indeed argued that testimonio itself came to be instrumentalized and ultimately depoliticized within the US academy as an “anti-literary literary genre.” Abril Trigo provides a remarkably concise summary of their arguments: “The 1990s: Practices and Polemics within Latin American Cultural Studies,” in The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Ana del Sarto, Alicia Ríos, and Abril Trigo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 347– 374, here 353 – 354. No doubt many US American readers are most familiar with testimonio in the context of those debates. Yet it would be inappropriate and anachronistic to project those debates back onto a quite different set of concerns on hand in West Germany of the 1960s, and I ask that critics bear with me as I attempt to read Enzensberger’s interest in these forms rather more sympathetically (which is also to say historically). It may be fair by the 1990s to call scholars to account for “the suspension of [testimonio’s] literariness while being construed as a literary icon,” and to argue that “[t]his iconization implied the epistemological fetishization of the text as the ground of unmediated truth, and the consequent political fetishization of the poetics of solidarity that enabled the critic to identify with the testimonial subject. The literary canonization of testimonio ended up depoliticizing it, by converting its sociopolitical vigor into academic aura, whose final goal was to legitimize the metropolitan academic’s locus

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translation—JHT] is ultimately to alter reading patterns, compelling a not unpleasurable recognition of translation among constituencies who, while possessing different cultural values, nonetheless share a long-standing unwillingness to recognize it.”⁵⁰ Translation—intimately linked, as Venuti points out, to recognition—is a limit of which Enzensberger seems to have been painfully aware. For example, “European Periphery” invokes not only the paucity of available translations of heterodox texts by Third World revolutionaries, but a generalized inability to read them. To a European audience, the appropriated and re-signified language of Third World revolutionaries who speak colonial languages sounds used up, out of fashion, “like a reverse translation (Rückübersetzung).”⁵¹ But that is not so. Even if “[e]very slogan is a translation,”⁵² we should not discount the complexity and deliberate negotiation of power differentials at play in them. When we read these passages from “European Periphery” with Enzensberger’s broader, positive assessment of translation in mind, the emphasis shifts from a lament about linguistic and cultural imperialism to an invitation to account for what Third World translations of European theories of liberation have created by subjecting Europe to minoritizing translations, generating the translative remainder Enzensberger describes as the almost uncanny effect of reverse translation. In the case of the Latin American authors whose texts, ideas, and formal innovations Enzensberger translated, what we see is an attempt to translate the revolutionary subject “back” to a European audience. Texts and contexts that can no longer be the same once they have been re-forged in powerfully transformative acts of translation—and even reverse translation—require Europeans to learn how to read all over again, a fact which calls to mind Enzensberger’s conviction that literary authors must promote political literacy.⁵³

of enunciation. Testimonio offered an extraordinary alibi for the metropolitan Latin Americanist to bypass the mediation of local (Latin American) intellectuals in order to establish direct political alliances with the ultimate subaltern subject (natives, Indians, women, civil society), and by doing so, reinstate his metropolitan position in a devalued and de-centered field.” But in the case of Enzensberger’s relationship to a not-yet-codified and certainly not-yet-canonized testimonio in the 1960s, not to mention his relationships with precisely those mediating Latin American academics, the criticism is too precipitous.  Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 13.  Enzensberger, “Europäische Peripherie,” Kursbuch 2 (1965): 163.  Enzensberger, “Europäische Peripherie,” 163.  He advocated the promotion of political literacy most explicitly in “Commonplaces Regarding the Newest Literature,” which I discuss below. Since I began writing this chapter, Bruno Bosteels has published an extraordinary account of the reception and transformation of Marx and Freud in Latin America that goes a long way toward tracing the cultural processes surrounding

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Enzensberger’s translative practice differs so much from language to language, text to text, and author to author that it is unreasonable to offer a unified assessment thereof or to identify a particular ethics that shape it.⁵⁴ Nonetheless, it can be fairly said with respect to his translations from Latin American Spanish that his selection overwhelmingly favored committed literature. Promoting new modes and habits of reading through Kursbuch had its limits. Still, what was legible to a West German audience before and after the first five to ten years of Kursbuch’s publication had likely changed. The increased exposure of West German readers to authors and ideas from outside of Western Europe, and the emphasis they placed on anti- and postcolonial perspectives, generated an increased awareness of the geocultural processes that accompanied the more broadly acknowledged geopolitical conflicts of the global Cold War. Latin America and the Caribbean were not the only places that upset the settled economy of a West German social imagination, but they were by far the best represented in both Kursbuch and in Enzensberger’s literary oeuvre before and after his tenure as editor of the journal.

Common places If Kursbuch 2 provided an imprecise relocation of revolutionary potential to the “European Periphery,” Kursbuch 11, “Revolution in Latin America,” marked a more specific terrain of internationalist struggle.⁵⁵ And as short-lived as the journal’s focus on Latin America may have been, its consequences for the idea of revolutionary subjectivity endured. Revolution’s restoration to West Germany from Latin America was plotted via three essays published in 1968: “Berliner Gemeinplätze” (“Berlin Commonplaces,” Kursbuch 11), “Berliner Gemeinplätze II” (“Berlin Commonplaces II,” Kursbuch 13), and—by far the best known—“Ge-

and motivating the translation of European theory in Latin America: Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis, and Religion in Times of Terror (London: Verso, 2012).  Few authors have undertaken studies devoted entirely to his translation, but that may be changing. See for example Aristizábal Cuervo, Der Dichter als Übersetzer. Auf Spurensuche: Hans Magnus Enzensbergers Übersetzungsmethode(n) (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 2008). The most recent edition of TEXT+KRITIK devoted to Enzensberger likewise includes an article on translation: Gerhard Wild, “Zwischen ‘belles infidèlesʼ und ‘faux-amisʼ. Anmerkungen zu einigen literarischen Übersetzungen von Hans Magnus Enzensberger,” in TEXT+KRITIK 49, 3d revised ed., ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Munich: edition text+kritik, 2010), 147– 156.  “Revolution in Lateinamerika” was conceived jointly with Gaston Salvatore, a prominent, Chilean member of the West German student movement and Salvador Allende’s nephew. See Marmulla, 144.

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meinplätze, die Neueste Literatur betreffend” (“Commonplaces Regarding the Newest Literature,” Kursbuch 15).⁵⁶ Revolution’s return was both a homecoming and a haunting. The ghosts that inhabit these three essays range from the intertextual and allusive specters of well-known, internationalist texts, to the pale imitations of past documentary and realist traditions that could only be reinvigorated through translation; they lurch across the antecedent corpses from which all ghosts originate, and mingle with the ghosts of history and memory. Enzensberger’s “Commonplaces” exemplify an important gesture of aesthetic solidarity and all too ably point toward the limits of that gesture, limits visible in the figure of the translator’s ghosts. The translative remainder takes shape around ghosts more often German than Latin American. Given Venuti’s remarks on the inherent ethnocentrism of translation, this is hardly surprising. It is the hows and whys of that ethnocentric practice that interest me, as well as the functions of the translative remainder that emerged as part of revised and expanded modes of reading (West) Germany, Latin America, and the world. Before Kursbuch’s better-rembered Third-Worldist turn in its second issue, more immediate ghosts came home to roost at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, which made up the focal theme of the first issue. With the “Commonplaces,” Enzensberger set out to balance those voices with the translator’s ghosts, insistent voices from other poetic and historical traditions. (The relationship of the first and second issues shall become especially clear in this chapter’s final sections. Suffice it for now to note the elision of (West) German pasts in the New Left’s self-styled roots associated with Third World acts of liberation and solidarity.) Literary historians have too frequently read Enzensberger’s final “Commonplaces” essay in isolation from its immediate predecessors, contrasting it instead with his 1962 essay “Poesie und Politik” (“Poetry and Politics”).⁵⁷ Together, the three “Commonplaces” essays locate German revolutions—and more specifically their failures—not just alongside, but within a discussion of Latin American revolution. The failure to read the “Commonplaces” serially has also obscured the translative processes by which Enzensberger related Latin American revolution to West German history and politics and, ultimately, to literature’s own potential to communicate practical and theoretical conflicts that arise in and out of revolutionary situations internationally. (Enzensberger embeds each of the three es-

 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Berliner Gemeinplätze,” Kursbuch 11 (1968): 151– 169; idem, “Berliner Gemeinplätze II,” Kursbuch 13 (1968): 190 – 197; and idem, “Gemeinplätze, die Neueste Literatur betreffend,” Kursbuch 15 (1968): 187– 197.  Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Poesie und Politik,” Einzelheiten I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), 334– 353.

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says in thematically focused issues of Kursbuch on revolution in Latin America, international student protests, and literature, respectively.) Conceptually, the origin of the “Commonplaces” in the issue most immediately concerned with revolution and firmly entrenched in a Latin American frame of reference bears heavily on my interpretive project, which seeks to reestablish Kursbuch’s connective and translative impulses. Restoring the third essay to its published context brings into focus the dynamic relation of the revolutionary subject to Enzensberger’s larger translative project. The ghosts that wander in and out of the three essays refigure the idea of Latin American revolution in German political literature even as they refigure German poltical literature itself, etching out a new rhetorical position for the literary author as an agent of change and resistance to oppression. The incremental relocation of revolution to Latin America culminates theoretically in Enzensberger’s assessment of a renewed potential for literary-political subjectivity at the very moment of West German literature’s presumed death, celebrated and mourned in equal measure. The first of the three essays, “Berlin Commonplaces,” consists of twentyseven numbered theses in short, argumentative passages, and concludes the January 1968 number on “Revolution in Latin America.” Enzensberger guides the reader to interpret the essay’s title and his own role as author in terms that exceed his role as the text’s writer: Postscript. These notes are called commonplaces because they belong to no one individual; Berlin commonplaces because they have been demonstrated in the squares of this city. I record them in the hopes that they will become German commonplaces. Insofar as they are critical, they apply to me as much as to others.⁵⁸

Here, he begins to relocate his authorial position relative to common or public discourses—commonplaces overheard, recorded, and interpreted. In the process he privileges a level of immediacy proper to the arranger of commonplace observations; they are without an author in the sense of a singular originator. His newly assembled commonplace speculations on the nature and propriety of revolution in and for contemporary Europe and (West) Germany define revolution’s potential—and potential failings—with ostensibly contextual reference to Latin America. He opposes them to modes of implicitly inauthentic, mediated knowledges and experiences at the root of European theories of revolution, theories he identifies as inadequate and even dilettantish. From the first, Enzensberger’s essays map another, figurative place of international revolutionary commonality, a common place for politically efficacious  Enzensberger, “Berliner Gemeinplätze,” 169.

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subjects of Cold War Latin America, (West) Berlin, and (West) German literature to commingle. The essay begins: 1. Ghosts. A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of Revolution. The revenant is met as were its great predecessors: with scorn and panic, skepticism and hysteria, and, like them, only in smaller doses, met with: mollification and oppression. The apostles of death are at work, the thugs await their hour. What is spoken of here is, as yet, a mere shadow. The revolution in Europe is not a material force (keine materielle Gewalt). Because it lacks a strong class base, it appears disembodied. […] But no shadow without a body to cast it; without a corpse, no ghost. The shadow of the revolution is the shadow of another one, a greater one, a starving, pillaged and bomb shattered world. Its dead come home to roost. The revolution in Europe is still today the meanest shadow of those revolutions that Europe sought in vain to put down. Today it leaves this work—out of weakness, not insight—to the United States of America. Each victory and each defeat in this struggle plunges us deeper into the shadow of the revolution. What returns there, disrupts the peace, will not be deterred, is the future. Insofar as that word still has meaning, in Europe.⁵⁹

In a clear allusion to the Communist Manifesto (1848), the specter of Revolution replaces that of Communism. Its revenant quality, its undeadness, makes it a dangerous, liminal figure in anthropological terms. Enzensberger thus combines a historical reference to the defeat of past European revolutions with an anthropological reference to something hovering at Europe’s present doorstep. That the revolution appears as disembodied is a function of its double-shadowed existence—first, as the shadow of its failure in nineteenth-century Europe and, second, as the shadow of European and US American violence in the Third World. Its spectral shadow ultimately achieves the status of a rhetorical commonplace in all three essays. In the rhetorical commingling of living body and corpse, Enzensberger achieves an enabling ambivalence: in his reference to “those revolutions that Europe sought in vain to put down,” the proximate, syntactical reference would be geographic—those revolutions of the “bomb shattered world”; in temporal terms, it could reference revolutions of a Europe past. Were one to consider a more recent past accorded a revolutionary potential at various points throughout Enzensberger’s essay, “a starving, pillaged and bomb shattered world” might more provocatively refer to postwar Germany itself. In Enzensberger’s essays, the West German state is synonymous with failed revolution. The postwar power vacuum that might have given way to unspecified revolutionary developments was limited by Germans’ inattention to anticolonial developments internationally and, ultimately, repressed by the ruling classes  Enzensberger, “Berliner Gemeinplätze,” 151.

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and integrated into Cold War counterrevolutionary forces.⁶⁰ He cynically casts coming to terms with or overcoming the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) as part and parcel to just such a limited (i. e., nationally oriented) field of vision in the postwar period. All the while he insists that concern for fascism in its uniquely German form—denoted as 1933—yields at best an incomplete understanding of the present, and at worst distracts from restorationist tendencies. Calling it an illusory moral turn in German history, understood to distract Germans who might otherwise have exploited a moment of crisis to revolutionary ends, Enzensberger goes so far as to argue that coming to terms with the past undermined the very prospect of revolution in Germany: Instead of doing the only thing that could have saved it, making revolution, the western part of Germany decided in the year 1945 to convert. Transforming itself morally instead of revolutionizing itself politically, a restoration, not a coup, stabilizing society from above instead of revolutionizing it from below, coming to terms with the past instead of launching a class struggle for the future.⁶¹

Beyond identifying it as a distraction from the revolution, Enzensberger fails to specify what is meant by coming to terms with the past—a fact that might be excused only insofar as it was a failure endemic in West Germany of the day. He nevertheless treats it as a process constitutive for the founding of the West German state, or, in his view: for restoration and failure. At greater length— and as a touchstone in all three “Commonplaces” essays—Enzensberger takes special issue with the moral role ascribed to literary intellectuals in the immediate postwar period, specifically the Gruppe 47.⁶² In particular, he cites the Gruppe 47’s vague antifascism and lack of an affirmative political program as both unproductive and unduly bound to national concerns. After his meditations on the failed German revolution, the hollowness of rhetorical solidarity among the intelligentsia, and also the potential of the student opposition, Enzensberger turns abruptly to replace the very concept of a German revolutionary subject with that of a revolutionary movement firmly en-

 Enzensberger, “Berliner Gemeinplätze,” 153 – 156.  Enzensberger, “Berliner Gemeinplätze,” 153.  As literary historians will note, Enzensberger was himself at various times affiliated with the group, which did not keep a membership roster. Instead, it functioned via invitations to participate in annual meetings and cannot easily be ascribed unified positions literary, political, or otherwise. These facts notwithstanding, the group has long been characterized as deliberately apolitical, most adamantly so by Klaus Briegleb, Missachtung und Tabu. Eine Streitschrift über die Frage: Wie antisemitisch war die Gruppe 47? (Berlin: Philo Verlag, 2002).

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trenched in Latin America.⁶³ Any revolution limited to Germany is unthinkable: “All political action now stands or falls in the context of the international revolutionary movement […]”⁶⁴ The essay culminates in a discussion of the utility and futility of a range of intellectual engagements with and dissemination of revolutionary theories and practices. While Enzensberger applauds steps to make social contradictions visible within Europe, he declares the romantic identifications with revolutionary movements in the Third World that underwrote many protest actions futile, even laughable. A “hot summer” in Berlin and the resulting hope for the emergence of a core, revolutionary opposition, however promising, should not be mistaken for the emergence of an authentic revolutionary subject.⁶⁵ Such a subject can no longer be conceived of as singular, nor can marginalized groups in Europe form a cohesive, collective subject. Enzensberger’s references to Third World revolutionaries in this and other passages are immediately qualified by more specific references to guerrillas, consistently reinforcing the predominance of Latin American referents in his concept of the Third World.⁶⁶ He goes on to assert that the absence of a science of metropolitan revolution results in ignorance and dilettantism, and impedes the “sober mediation between liberation movements in the Third World and political action in the metropoles.” ⁶⁷ Enzensberger’s self-positioning as precisely such a mediator—that is, a producer of useful connections with and translations of revolutionary movements and perspectives—anticipates his designation of politically efficacious literary models in his final and best-known “Commonplaces” essay, “Commonplaces Regarding the Newest Literature.” Two issues later, before that essay’s publication in Kursbuch 15, “Berlin Commonplaces II” resumed Enzensberger’s numbered theses where the first essay left off, this time in the wake of an assassination attempt on student leader Rudi Dutschke (1940 – 1979) and with an increasing emphasis on the West German student movement. The “Commonplaces” cast the movement as confronting counterrevolutionary and even neofascist forces in West Germany. Drawing on the stark composition and visual rhetoric of widely publicized photos, Dutschke’s injured body provides the essay’s most haunting figure. The absence of Dutschke’s body characterized images of the site of his attack, its ghostly trace marked by a chalk-line silhouette, a shoe, an abandoned bicycle. Enzensberger

    

Enzensberger, Enzensberger, Enzensberger, Enzensberger, Enzensberger,

“Berliner “Berliner “Berliner “Berliner “Berliner

Gemeinplätze,” Gemeinplätze,” Gemeinplätze,” Gemeinplätze,” Gemeinplätze,”

160 – 163. 159. 157. 160. 167– 168 and 160.

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invokes the injured body to identify a continuous fascist past made unintentionally visible by Dutschke’s would-be assassin, Josef Bachmann. Where the first “Berlin Commonplaces” included only two brief, emblematic references to Nazi fascism, such references pervade “Berlin Commonplaces II.”⁶⁸ Enzensberger’s initial dismissal of reflection on the German past in all its forms as precluding future-oriented social processes clearly does not deter him from using the past as a key rhetorical trope in his own revolutionary commonplaces. The specter of fascism and the unreflected emblem of Auschwitz surface at moments meant to call up reactionary violence writ large, without attention to the specificity of Nazi genocide. The revolutionary potential Enzensberger had only recently attributed to student protesters—albeit with the insistence that they were not the revolutionary subject—recedes in the face of his analysis of reactions against them, which he locates squarely in a tradition of German fascism and failed revolution. His attention to German fascism and antifascism is crucial to his serial, common placement of German authorship and a renewed literary-political engagement with Latin American revolutionary developments. Already identified as structurally analogous to imperial and (neo)colonial endeavors in “Berlin Commonplaces,” fascism and capitalism are used interchangeably by the end of “Berlin Commonplaces II.” The interlocking structures of imperialism, capitalism, and fascism constitute a global metasystem in an essay that appears but for its title and continuous numbering to be an unrelated series of theses on domestic political conflicts: the present must turn not to the history of Germany under the cipher of 1933, but rather look to the imperialist world system in its totality; the counterrevolutionary forces mobilized by the consciousness industry against student protesters in West Germany are but a weak parody of the counterrevolutionary forces globally.⁶⁹ It is with recourse to Latin American revolution and revolutionaries that Enzensberger makes a place for potential revolutionary subjects in Europe; only by means of the newly authorizing function of figurative and literal commonplaces wherein the author relates and elaborates commonsensical ideologies and establishes a shared set of geospecific referents can he reposition the literary subject of politics as a revolutionary subject. Despite a number of formal changes, the rhetorical continuity of “Commonplaces Regarding the Newest Literature” with the first two essays is striking. Enzensberger abandons Berlin, eliminates the consecutive numbering of arguments, and modifies the title to reposition himself emphatically in a line with

 Enzensberger, “Berliner Gemeinplätze,” 152– 157.  Enzensberger, “Berliner Gemeinplätze II,” 191.

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G.E. Lessing (1729 – 1781), a literary historical allusion that recalls a similar gesture in the journal’s initial prospectus, in which Enzensberger juxtaposed his plan for the new journal with J.W. v. Goethe’s (1749 – 1832) and Heinrich Luden’s (1778 – 1847) 1813 “Gespräch über eine neue Zeitschrift” (“Conversation about a New Journal”).⁷⁰ Enzensberger’s title thereby represents both a continuity and a break with the notion of more widely public commonplaces in favor of tracing and challenging what he earlier described as left oppositional, intellectual commonplaces. “Commonplaces Regarding the Newest Literature” expands the field of revolutionary referents laid out in the first two essays to include specifically literary terms, evoking Lessing’s Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend (Letters Regarding the Newest Literature, 1759 – 1765), the “17..Literaturbrief” (“17th Literature Letter”) and its call for a new German national literature being by far the best known.⁷¹ One of the earliest figures in German literature to link literature and politics explicitly, Lessing lends considerable heft to Enzensberger’s own position. In a postwar context in which National Socialist cultural policy served as a frequent example of the monitory ends to which a politicized literature could lead, Enzensberger resets the historical parameters of debate in one swift move to position himself in a literary historical line with Lessing as a harbinger of epochal political and cultural changes in the tradition of the German Enlightenment. Paired with his alternate formulation of authorial subjectivity as the effect or accumulation of commonplaces produced by a collective subject, Enzensberger’s choice of literary historical referent challenges authors to recall that the interrelation of political and poetic subjects is not an exclusively twentieth-century phenomenon. Indeed, the redefinition of a progressive literary subjectivity as a specific form of political subjectivity has antecedents in the eighteenth and, still more emphatically, in the nineteenth century. The most enduring concepts of authorship in the West remain in no small part the inheritance of German Romanticism, overlapping with and substantially reinforcing the nineteenth-century political liberalism that Enzensberger and many of his contemporaries took to task. As often as it has been misread as proclaiming the “death of literature,” Enzensberger’s essay in fact explores the potential of contemporary authors to produce a politically literate West German populace. For the third and final time in his “Commonplaces,” he inscribes the figure of the revenant, describing a funer “Ankündigung einer neuen Zeitschrift,” 3 – 4.  Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend. Mit einer Dokumentation zur Entstehungs- und Wirkungsgeschichte. Textkritisch durchsehen, kommentiert und mit einem Nachwort versehen von Wolfgang Albrecht (Leipzig: Reclam, 1987).

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al procession in minute detail in the essay’s opening passage. Preceded in the first two essays by the ghosts of indeterminate historical and geographical revolutions as well as student activist Rudi Dutschke’s critically injured but not-yetdeceased body, only this third revenant has received sustained critical attention: The funeral procession stirs up a dust cloud of theories, few of which are new. The literati celebrate the end of Literature. The poets prove to themselves and others the impossibility of poetry. The critics croon over the definitive demise of criticism. […] What might remain is sponsored by television: panel discussions on The Role of the Author in Society.⁷²

Enzensberger’s ironic introduction to the final “Commonplaces” essay gives way to an argument in which he turns abruptly away from revolution as his primary analytic term, distancing himself from those who would proclaim the death of literature as an act of cultural revolution. Instead, he locates contemporary debates about the “death of literature” relative to foundational assumptions about the relation of literature and politics in Germany since 1945. As in “Berlin Commonplaces,” he turns his attention to the unique role ascribed to literature in postwar Germany. With a nod to diverse ideological functions and motivations behind a literary-political mandate (ranging from antifascism to idealism to a desire to regain international prestige as a Kulturvolk), Enzensberger argues that literature’s greatest self-deception and, indeed, the “fiction” of engagement in postwar West Germany arose out of the “exculpative and ersatz functions […] that it naturally could not fill. Literature was supposed to stand in for that which was absent in the Federal Republic, a genuine political life.”⁷³ The political ineffectiveness of literature in the postwar period is not identical with Literature’s death, but rather the death of plausible claims to a revolutionary literature in West Germany. Nor, by Enzensberger’s account, are critiques of Literature as a conservative force in and of themselves revolutionary when they fail to develop appropriate tools for the critical evaluation of a political literature.⁷⁴ Enzensberger envisions an alternative system wherein the use value of literature might exceed its market value, thereby removing it from the cycle of formal innovation and cooptation within the consciousness industry.⁷⁵ To this end, he argues, “Other, less personally-bound possibilities must be thought out and re-

   

Enzensberger, Enzensberger, Enzensberger, Enzensberger,

“Gemeinplätze, “Gemeinplätze, “Gemeinplätze, “Gemeinplätze,

die die die die

neueste neueste neueste neueste

Literatur Literatur Literatur Literatur

betreffend,” betreffend,” betreffend,” betreffend,”

187. 189 – 190. 195 – 196. 197.

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hearsed.”⁷⁶ Whereas Lessing looked to Shakespeare (and his own—fabricated!— Germanic Doktor Faustus fragment) for models of authentically German, rather than French, dramatic traditions, Enzensberger looks to historical German experiments in documentary, internationally-oriented essayism, and especially generic innovations modeled on Latin American testimonio as alternatives to the (also French) littérature engagée. ⁷⁷ His “Commonplaces” prepared the ground for new expressions of a collectively constituted literary-political subjectivity at a moment when he continued to advocate for the translation and publication of testimonios with Suhrkamp, experienced a period of intensified personal relationships with key Latin American thinkers, including Barnet, and initiated work on The Habana Inquiry. ⁷⁸ Enzensberger’s generation of metaphorical specters—always anticipated, as he reminds us, by their corpses—underwrites the drama of a Cuban revolutionary process produced and performed in Germany. The corpses that cast the longest shadows are Latin American. First appearing in “Berlin Commonplaces,” they fall across the ghostly cipher of Auschwitz and a range of Nazi-fascist violences to link counterrevolutionary, capitalist, and neoimperialist forces in the production of contemporary corpses whose ghosts likewise haunt Europe, accompanied by an undead West German Literature on the verge of a staged encounter with justice.

The Habana Inquiry In keeping with his conception of Kursbuch in general and the third “Commonplaces” essay in particular, Enzensberger embeds his literary rendering of the Bay of Pigs interrogations in West German debates about the proper relation of literature and politics. He declares the Cuban process—and, by extension, his translation thereof—to be uniquely communicative. Through it, he asserts,

 Enzensberger, “Gemeinplätze, die neueste Literatur betreffend,” 196.  Marmulla discusses West German debates on the inadequacy of a Sartrean concept of engagement that were already well underway by the mid-1960s (Kursbuch, 176 – 184).  In addition to Barnet, Enzensberger’s correspondence with Unseld makes clear that he was in contact with Roberto Fernández Retamar, to whom he asked that copies of his work be sent, and Alejo Carpentier, and was familiar with writings by many other leading Latin American intellectuals, including Fernando Ortiz. DLA Marbach, Suhrkamp Verlag Correspondence with Hans Magnus Enzensberger/1969. See for example his letter dated 6 April 1969 and the telegram dated 14 April 1969.

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“[…] for the first time, a call (Ruf) was voiced that was heard around the whole world: ¡Cuba sí, Yanqui no!”⁷⁹ Three interrelated dimensions of this call illustrate my larger case for reading the “Commonplaces” essays together with The Habana Inquiry in order to achieve a more complete understanding of how Enzensberger positions Latin American revolution in a matrix of West German concerns for the past, present, and future of the revolutionary subject. They are: a notion of literary political vocation; publishing endeavors in postwar Germany; and allusions to the power of figural language in political philosophy. Be it in fact the first time a revolutionary call traverses the “whole world”—an adamantly inclusive turn of phrase—or the first time this particular call for solidarity does so, Cuba is made to mark a key moment in the articulation of a world system bound by US American neoimperialism and in the conception of a potentially antiimperialist struggle. Literature is linked to antiimperialism not only in Enzensberger’s attempt to take up, translate, and communicate this call, but also by way of the author’s position as subject to a calling in the sense of vocation; a concept of poetry (Dichtung) as vocation (Beruf) that, in the German context, dates back to Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1704– 1803) and is in a sense appropriated as a source not of poetry’s spiritual or sentimental authenticity, but of a new political authenticity. This literary-political calling is opposed to a second call that Enzensberger had long since characterized as the less authentic, less efficacious call of (West) German authors in the immediate postwar period. Der Ruf, the forerunner organ of the Gruppe 47, is resolutely present in the echo of the Cuban call, albeit one heard not around the world, but only in (West) Germany. Thoroughly abused as “moral” but not “political” in Enzensberger’s first and third “Commonplaces” essays, he opposes the group’s alleged political bankruptcy and incapacity for internationalism to his own internationalist literary project at every step along the way. The international amplifies any merely local call. This brings me to the third feature of The Habana Inquiry’s framing rhetoric, namely, the political force of language itself, manifest here in the decision to withhold translation. The Spanish “Cuba sí, Yanqui no!” may require no translation into German (or, for that matter, into English) insofar as it consists mostly in cognates and its meaning is reinforced by the easily recognizable form of a popular slogan; but, taken as one of a number of instances in which Enzensberger withholds translation, it remains a marker of his authority and a claim to a literary-historical authenticity as the first West German transmitter of a revolutionary call that supersedes

 Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 14.

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the weak, postwar call (Ruf) he so disdained. Overlaying disparate calls (West) German and Cuban, Enzensberger’s introduction to the play offered his clearest articulation to date of what were historically and culturally specific visions of how literature and politics could and should relate. A Cuban call heard around the world re-calls and re-positions the “around Europe” of Enzensberger’s first “Berlin Commonplaces” and its allusion to the Communist Manifesto’s “around Europe”: “A specter is haunting [geht um in; literally: goes around in—JHT] Europe: the specter of Revolution.”⁸⁰ As that essay—indeed, the entire Kursbuch issue “Revolution in Latin America”—ceded the legacy of European communism to Latin American revolution, The Habana Inquiry re-places Enzensberger’s emphasis on West German hauntings within a larger world context that treats antiimperialism as the new communism. Those few critics who have devoted attention to Enzensberger’s work as a translator agree that it is not governed by a single, unified approach.⁸¹ And yet, all of his translations are marked by ghosts. Aristizábal Cuervo argues that Enzensberger’s statements on translation can only be understood with reference to his understanding of literature more generally.⁸² The reverse is also true: if we ignore the translator’s ghosts, we miss key reformulations of more immediately legible domestic or European references that serve the reformulation of literary and political subjectivity accomplished with attention to a committed literature (literatura comprometida) and its engagement with questions of justice and social solidarity. As Enzensberger reminds us, translation not only haunts, but reanimates national literatures: “Translation reinvigorates, it raises the standard in that it makes comparison possible and raises the bar.”⁸³ The Habana Inquiry was the culmination of a series of comparisons and translative acts aimed at generating new fields of contact among literary-political praxes in Europe and Latin America. The play is not of interest because it is successful (on its own terms or theatrically), nor because it is representative (of documentary theater in 1960s West Germany or of Enzensberger’s large and extremely diverse oeuvre). It is of interest because it marks a point of critical condensation of the translator’s ghosts in generic and cultural terms. The contacts that the translator’s ghosts generate among discrete but complementary tradi-

 Enzensberger, “Berliner Gemeinplätze,” 151.  See Wild, “Zwischen ‘belles infidèles’ und ‘faux-amis’” and Cuervo, Der Dichter als Übersetzer.  Cuervo, Der Dichter als Übersetzer, 15.  Enzensberger, Geisterstimmen, 393. That translation can revitalize literature is by no means a sentiment original to Enzensberger, although his language is particularly provocative in the context of ghosts and ghostliness.

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tions of socially animated literatures in Germany and in Latin America produce alternative itineraries for the revolutionary subject. In The Habana Inquiry, translation and comparison emerge as fundamental to Enzensberger’s position as author and intellectual: He claims an absolute authority over the material, reshapes it, relocates it, assigns it new players—in short, he attempts to preserve a concrete relationship to praxis not despite, but in fact through the mediating act of translation. It is therefore worthwhile to embark on one more detour and to consider the play as part of a larger project entailing the translation not just of documentary material, but of generic norms before moving on to examine the specific functions of translation in The Habana Inquiry.

Translating genre: testimonio in conversation with a resurgent documentarism Two texts with unconventionally collective authors (the oral narrator, recorder, and translator of the testimonio and the author of the commonplace) bind the routes and connections afforded the revolutionary subject in Kursbuch 11. Enzensberger’s translation of Montejo and Barnet began the Latin America issue even as his own collection of “Commonplaces” offered its provisional conclusion. His final “Commonplaces” essay includes a suggestive ensemble of contemporary West German writers who might serve as model practitioners of an ideal political literacy campaign—Ulrike M. Meinhof, Gunter Wallraff, Bahman Nirumand, and Fritz Teufel. But more sustained by far than his explicit engagement with West German writers and the journalistic and factographic traditions in which (with the exception of Teufel) they might be located is his unstated engagement with Latin American testimonios. Enzensberger’s Latin American interlocutors may go unnamed in “Commonplaces Regarding the Newest Literature,” but they are no less significant for it. He emphasizes Barnet’s exemplarity as a revolutionary subject repeatedly and in a variety of texts, including El Cimarrón. A Working Report (1971) and in his introduction to Der Weg ins Freie (The Path to Freedom, 1975). (While these two publication dates post-date the Kursbuch essay, Enzensberger had been at work on them well before their publication.) The former, a translation and adaptation that distills motifs from Barnet’s rendering of Montejo’s life story into a libretto conceived and produced with composer and fellow Cuba enthusiast Hans Werner Henze, positively contrasts Barnet’s subjective narrative style to the presumed objectivity of the document. After identifying Barnet as a student of “the brilliant polyhistor, social historian, and ethnographer Don Fernando Ortiz,” and thereby positioning him outside of any conventional literary geneal-

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ogy, Enzensberger goes on to explain the significance of Barnet’s undertaking for literary subjects the world over: Barnet does not hold himself to the detachment of the social scientist—and for that we cannot thank him enough. He lets the cimarrón push his own story forward. The author becomes the agent and mouthpiece of him with whom he speaks: he rouses the cimarrón to speech and makes him the author of his own history. Barnet’s faithfulness to him is not that of the impartial documentarist, the simple reporter or collector.⁸⁴

The Path to Freedom emphatically extends Enzensberger’s critique of West German debates about documentary, referencing literatures of witness as more authentic to an originary story telling impulse: As interview or protocol, the oral autobiography has become formalized in previously unknown ways. This praxis has even mustered a theory, if only a threadbare one. One recalls the debate about so-called documentary literature initiated in this country a few years ago and that has since then persisted in its own dead end. That must be attributed in the main to the hollowness of the concept of the document. Only someone determined to ignore the most basic epistemological questions will choose to work with it. It seldom expresses more than a vague longing for lost authenticity […].⁸⁵

Unsatisfied with the West German debate, Enzensberger’s work in this period is haunted by the Barnet material as a point of comparison and potential revolutionary transfer. His conviction that testimonio offered a compelling set of literary-political concepts and devices prompted him to become the earliest German translator of what is widely regarded as the first testimonio. Enzensberger often used the term factography by way of describing and translating testimonio in his correspondence with the Suhrkamp Verlag, but closer consideration reveals that the key features that distinguish testimonial narrative from European documentary traditions, including factography, approximate precisely those impulses Enzensberger values in the West German writers he singles out at the end of “Commonplaces Regarding the Newest Literature” and in his pointed rejection of any generic strategy that rests on an oppositional relation of literature and politics. In a letter to Unseld from Cuba, for example, he wrote: “i see the situation of german literature similarly to you: i think the alternative literature/politics is in principle a false one, in praxis a transitional one that may be a necessary way to pose the question at this historical moment. it won’t stay that way. maybe at the end of this development there will be—i

 Enzensberger et al., El Cimarrón. Ein Werkbericht, 33.  Enzensberger, Der Weg ins Freie, 113.

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hope—a better or at least more appropriate, more contemporary literature for the world situation.” As to what such a literature might look like, Enzensberger wasted no time in suggesting a number of authors of possible interest to Suhrkamp: Nicanor Parra, José Martí, Guevara, and Barnet top his list.⁸⁶ Enzensberger may well have been involved in Latin American literary debates of the day, specifically via the influential Cuban cultural institute Casa de las Américas, on whose letterhead he wrote to his publisher from Havana in 1969. In this “short update,” Enzensberger made clear that he had access to manuscripts under consideration for literary prizes awarded annually by the institute: “i am sitting here amidst a mountain of manuscripts from all over latin america.”⁸⁷ The following year, the Casa de las Américas awarded its first-ever prize for a testimonio to Barnet for his work with Montejo. Testimonio, as codified by the Casa de las Américas in 1970, emphasizes witnessing; emerges as part of a collective process; is closely associated with oral forms and traditions; and not only recognizes, but prizes subjectivity as complementing truth. A documentary tradition, by contrast, emphasizes the selection and montage of already existing documents; is presented as broadly objective, even when production processes necessarily entail subjective decision making on the author’s part; and is associated with either written or visual forms. The “strong referentiality” that characterizes testimonio in all of its various manifestations, together with its key functions to accuse, record, and animate resistance, shaped critics’ initial celebration of the genre internationally.⁸⁸ My focus here on Enzensberger’s appropriation of the genre rather than on critical engagements with the genre on its own terms should not be mistaken for a similarly uncritical stance. As Satya Mohanty has rightly noted, the refusal to criticize is by no means a sign of respect for the text, which in the case of testimonio is closely bound to its subject and her or his community. On the contrary, he argues, “we can only learn from others if we imagine situations in which they may in fact be wrong about some things in ways that we can specify and under-

 DLA Marbach, Suhrkamp Verlag Correspondence with Hans Magnus Enzensberger/1969, letter dated 24 January 1969. As Martí’s inclusion makes clear, Enzensberger was concerned with contemporaneity in the sense of relevance to, rather than production in, the present moment.  DLA Marbach, Suhrkamp Verlag Correspondence with Hans Magnus Enzensberger/1969, letter dated 24 January 1969.  The phrase “strong referentiality” is Moraña’s. The three functions of testimonio specified here are fundamental to Ariel Dorfman’s definition of the genre in “Código político y código literario: el genero testimonio en Chile hoy,” in Testimonio y literatura, ed. René Jara and Hernán Vidal (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies in Literature, 1986), 170 – 243.

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stand.”⁸⁹ At the same time as more nuanced criticisms of testimonio and especially the author-narrator relation have emerged, at the same time as the genre faces its own limits of aesthetic solidarity, my focus here is on the contemporaneity of Enzensberger’s reception of Barnet and Montejo in order to draw out the specific attractions a Latin American inflection of the literary subject of politics held for him and for his readers at a particular historical moment. Translation, testimonio, documentary, and their critical reception share a number of concerns ranging from the very nature of literary authorship and originality, to fidelity to a primary source, to translatability and authenticity. Enzensberger’s admiration for Barnet’s fidelity to Montejo contrasts somewhat surprisingly with his own translative liberties with the text; too, his very definition of Barnet as authorial agent proceeds through the latter’s objectification of Montejo and negation of Montejo’s self-authoring (Barnet rouses him to speak). Prioritizing the author over the witness suggests a tension never satisfactorily resolved in Enzensberger’s writings about or literary experiments derived from testimonial forms. Together, translation, testimonial, and documentary impulses in Enzensberger’s programmatic generic innovations point toward an underlying tension between the literary subjectivity of the author and the political agency of an original speaker that constitutes another real limit to aesthetic solidarity. At the latest with his work on the The Habana Inquiry, Enzensberger occupied the roles of translator and documentarist simultaneously, negotiating their commonalities and contradictions with varying degrees of success. If ever an author exemplified the difficulty of distinguishing between translation studies and influence studies, Enzensberger is one. Even this brief account of his almost compulsive return to the Barnet and Montejo material, together with his long-standing interest in Latin American avant-garde poetry, shows that Enzensberger’s most influential interlocutors in an evolving, twentieth-century debate on the proper relation of literature and politics were not only Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno, but also—and at least as significantly—the young Pablo Neruda and Miguel Barnet. He repeatedly attempted to bring Latin American theories and forms as well as motifs and metaphors to bear on German debates about the role of literature in society, and he formulated the possibility of restoring literary subjectivity to Europe with reference to Latin America. Even as Enzensberger rejected the notion that literature could itself be revolutionary in his contemporary social order, his conviction that generic innovations could

 Satya Mohanty cited in Kimberly A. Nance, Can Literature Promote Justice? Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 11.

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have the force to restructure consciousness allowed him to maintain a space for a literary subject of politics, if not of revolution per se. For all that the author might not be a revolutionary, Enzensberger nonetheless insisted on an authorial obligation to take a position relative to the revolutionary formations of his day.⁹⁰ One way to do that was to craft or translate new literary forms that made those formations legible to the broadest possible public. In his correspondence with Kursbuch co-editor Karl-Markus Michel, he made clear his preference for publishing writing that did not conform to established genres, forms which he regarded as hiding easily as much about the world as they revealed. More systematically, his lectures on poetics advocated attention not to lyric, drama, and epic, but to “elementary forms such as the letter, the autobiography, and the diary,” and underscored the need to identify and question the processes by which genres became institutions.⁹¹ Marmulla sums the project up nicely: “Changing the world was supposed to start by changing the perception of the world.”⁹² Barnet’s own introduction to El Cimarrón presents a literary vision that has much in common with the ideal literature that Enzensberger sought to formulate around the same time. In addition to rejecting genre convention, Barnet identified the exemplarity of individual life stories to “represent the world in reverse,” a task Enzensberger himself undertook most explicitly in The Path to Freedom. Barnet rejected categories of literary vocation and any knowledge production that defines itself in terms purely literary or sociological, and he even sought to retrieve the testimony of colonial ghosts long silenced (i. e., the ghosts of the slave laborers who built the architecture an author might admire in today’s Havana).⁹³ In light of his own editorial and critical work on the colonial chronicler Las Casas, regarded by many scholars today as one of the first hispanophone authors to adopt the position of the author-witness, we can be certain that Enzensberger was familiar with some of testimonio’s antecedent traditions in colonial Latin America; from his correspondence with Unseld, we know, too, that he was excited about a number of contemporary testimonios pre- and post-dating Barnet’s.⁹⁴ By choosing Barnet as his primary Latin American interlocutor at this phase in his writing, Enzensberger foregrounds a specific strand of testimonial tradition

 Enzensberger cited in Marmulla, Kursbuch, 247.  Enzensberger cited Marmulla, Kursbuch, 235; Marmulla, Kursbuch, 76 and 235 – 236.  Marmulla, Kursbuch, 174.  Barnet, “The alchemy of memory,” 203.  Others include indiginista and costumbrista writings, travel writing and relatos de campaña (stories of military campaigns), and ethnographic writings. See Beverly, Testimonio, 31– 32.

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with two major consequences for the revolutionary subject. First, he affirms a history of the genre that highlights its prevalence in Cuba, in keeping with the New Left’s broad inclination to treat Cuba as a site and cipher for the primacy of subjective factors in contemporary revolution.⁹⁵ Second, with Barnet he advances a notion that authorial subjectivity resides in the license to treat testimony as primary material and to privilege the persuasive function of testimony while maintaining its archival function.⁹⁶ Both the literary-historical and rhetorical dimensions of his choice are significant, for they allow Enzensberger to redirect contemporary European literary debates and documentary practices via reference to Latin American testimony as a politically vibrant alternative for the literary subject of politics. Recognizing the translator’s ghosts, the moments of incomplete translation that emerge as generic innovations and as tropes in their own right, will allow us to understand how the very form of the play operates with reference to multiple discursive traditions and genres. The Habana Inquiry thus stands at the intersection of Latin American testimonial impulses and a domestic documentary resurgence during the 1960s and 1970s. Laureen Nussbaum identifies dominant modes of West German documentary drama during the period that stand roughly in a line with Erwin Piscator’s political theater of the 1920s and early 1930s, and with the Weimar Zeitstück, including the tribunal play.⁹⁷ By employing a stereoptic technique, tribunal plays —of which Enzensberger’s Habana Inquiry is an example—generate insights and connections between historical and contemporary problems.⁹⁸ Of the five major tribunal dramas Nussbaum identifies, only Enzensberger’s does not take as its primary material events surrounding World War II, notably the Holocaust

 In addition to the institutional support the Casa de las Américas lent to the production and dissemination of testimonios, Moraña points to the role of literacy campaigns in the proliferation of testimonios in “Documentalismo y ficción: Testimonio y narrativa testimonial en el siglo XX,” in Políticas de la escritura en América Latina. De la colonia a la modernidad, ed. Carmen Bustillo and Mabel Moraña (Caracas: Ediciones eXcultura, 1997), 113 – 150. Other, proto-testimonial texts to which Enzensberger might otherwise have turned his attentions date back to the 1930s in Cuba and Central America. See Ileana Rodríguez, “Organizaciones populares y literatura testimonial: los años treinta en Nicaragua y El Salvador,” in Literatures in Transition: The Many Voices of the Caribbean Area, ed. Rose Mine (Gaithersburgh, MD: Montclair State College, 1982): 85 – 96.  Barnet cited in Moraña, “Documentalismo,” n 11. These two functions are described by Nance, Can Literature Promote Justice? 125 – 126.  Laureen Nussbaum, “The German Documentary Theater of the Sixties: A Stereopsis of Contemporary History,” German Studies Review 1.2 (May 1981): 237– 240.  Laureen Nussbaum, “The German Documentary Theater of the Sixties,” 241.

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(Peter Weiss’s Die Ermittlung [The Investigation, 1965], Rolf Schneider’s Prozeß in Nürnberg [Process in Nuremberg, 1967]), or civilian casualties of nuclear war and a prospective nuclear holocaust (Rolf Schneider’s Prozeß Richard Waverly [Richard Waverly Process, 1961 for radio, 1963 for stage], Heinar Kipphardt’s In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer [In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1964]). The Habana Inquiry’s anomalous treatment of a Latin American pursuit of revolutionary justice is of a piece with Enzensberger’s broader translative project. All of these tribunal dramas address the problem of individual responsibility even as their techniques of aesthetic generalization foreground not individuals, but social types. Simultaneously, though, The Habana Inquiry refuses a degree of authorial responsibility by way of rejecting generic norms. With reference to its Recklinghausen production (discussed in more detail below), Nussbaum observes: [H]owever effective the device employed by the Cologne TV station in producing the desired stereopsis, [i. e. bringing West German doubles of Cuban social types onto the stage – JHT] it also means that with this type of realization of a text the boundaries of [documentary theater] had been reached, if not overstepped, as long as we hold that [documentary theater] is a form of dramatic art. For, does not the playwright abdicate his responsibility to provide insight by means of his text, materials, and figures, if he depends on people from the outside to transmit his ideas?⁹⁹

Nussbaum’s criticism may seem overstated: after all, open forms necessarily require audience completion. But her language also aptly points to the limits of the genre in general and of Enzensberger’s play in particular. His attempt to foster aesthetic solidarity not only comes up against testimonio’s uneasy self-positioning at the boundaries of history, autoethnography, and literature—as Beverly puts it, testimonial texts “cannot be adequately contained within the category of ‘literature’ without putting the category itself into crisis,”—, but against an incomplete cultural and discursive translation of revolutionary Latin America onto the West German stage.¹⁰⁰ It makes a great deal of sense to read Enzensberger’s drama as belonging to a set of tribunal dramas that took the Auschwitz tribunals as a key interpretive horizon and concrete point of literary historical reference. Indeed, it is nearly impossible not to do so upon considering the sustained and complex introduction of ghostly remainders that connect Latin Amer-

 Laureen Nussbaum, “The German Documentary Theater of the Sixties,” 252.  The definition of testimonio as autoethnography was introduced by Doris Sommer. Beverley, Testimonio, 19.

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ica and (West) Germany from Enzensberger’s earliest translative work, through his term as editor of Kursbuch, and in such texts as El Cimarrón, Acquittals, and especially The Habana Inquiry. The key is to do so without losing sight of the interrelation of the translator’s ghosts and Enzensberger’s generic innovation.

Counterrevolutionary zones of equivalence¹⁰¹ The Habana Inquiry was not Enzensberger’s first work of translation, but, with the possible exception of his work with Henze on El Cimarrón, it was his least conventional to date. The introductions and afterwords to his earliest translations from the Spanish (Neruda and Vallejo) do not direct the reader any more than translation itself necessarily does, nor do they themselves constitute the main intellectual work of the texts upon which they remark. By contrast, his extended introduction to the play exceeds the typical translator’s introduction. Indeed, it is integral to the translation of the play itself. A consideration of the labor Enzensberger personally invested in the play’s respective parts bears this out. He reported to Unseld that the manuscript was complete “except for my introduction” within a mere two weeks of having received a typescript of the hearings from an unnamed “lady […] outside of the publishing house,” but he spent another three months on the introduction.¹⁰² According to Klaus L. Berghahn: “Only by connecting analytic discourse with distilled and dramaturgically rendered realities (dramaturgisch bearbeitetem Konzentrat) does the model become apparent.” Essay and interrogations, discursive and poetic renderings are juxtaposed: they complete one another rather than constituting a unity in the documentary piece itself. […] The book as a whole does what the documentary play succeeds in only momentarily: it is a learning play (Lehrstück) that still—or, better yet, once again—matters to us.¹⁰³

In a related vein, Arnold Blumer points to the unique challenges that accrue to staging a play in which the unity of text and introduction cannot be sustained for the audience absent some directorial contrivance to stage the introduction it-

 “Zones of equivalence” is Apter’s phrase. See n. 30.  DLA Marbach, Suhrkamp Verlag Correspondence with Hans Magnus Enzensberger/1969, letters dated 27 June, 29 June, 8 July, and 16 October.  Berghahn, “Es genügt nicht,” 291; internal quotation Klaus Harro Hilzinger, Die Dramaturgie des dokumentarischen Theaters (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1976), 136.

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self.¹⁰⁴ A look to program design for early stage versions of the play suggests that many directors intuited this problem: the vast majority of programs for East and West German productions featured extensive excerpts from the published introduction.¹⁰⁵ The integrity of paraliterary elements to the main text is typical of testimonial literature. In this way, too, Enzensberger translates—and causes directors to translate—generic features typical of testimonio to the tribunal drama, effecting a heterogeneity that thwarts easy classification. To be sure, the difficulty of classifying literatures of witness makes testimonio ideally suited to address Enzensberger’s stated criticisms of a West German literature that too easily allows itself to be defined and, by extension, made harmless.¹⁰⁶ In search of non-allegorical terms of equivalence (i. e., terms that engender real comparison rather than logics of substitution), Enzensberger is faced with the challenge of identifying rough zones of equivalence that allow connection but defy classification. Like Apter’s translation zone, Enzensberger’s zones of equivalence demarcate failures and intersubjective limits even as they allow him selectively to reposition the revolutionary subject in the world and in history.¹⁰⁷ Testimonial and translative modes of literary-political subjectivity produce the effect of immediacy, but their critical purchase for thinking about the limits of Enzensberger’s aesthetic solidarity lies in those moments when their new, international comparisons are least convincing. Figures of the translative remainder, the translator’s ghosts are most visible at those moments in The Habana Inquiry marked by incomplete or failed translation, moments when the immediacy that was fundamental to testimonio’s codification as a genre is revealed to be a highly mediated effect of the translated text. In Enzensberger’s Cubano-German translation zone, they turn most prominently on refusing to translate, translating cultural concepts, and translating discursive systems.

Refusing to translate Beyond the world call of the Cuban revolution, Enzensberger does not translate Spanish place names with well-known German equivalents. Though he seldom draws attention to his refusal as such, it exerts powerful claims of authority

 Arnold Blumer, Das dokumentarische Theater der sechziger Jahre in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag Anton Hain, 1977), 290 – 362.  DLA Marbach, TH: Enzensberger, Hans Magnus/Das Verhör von Habana.  Enzensberger, “Gemeinplätze, die neueste Literatur betreffend,” 196.  Apter, The Translation Zone, 6.

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and authenticity. In naming places and contexts, he undermines equivalences and selectively links translation to imperialism. His introduction begins with a set of historical premises that open onto nomination as a field of geocultural power: “This, in its briefest form, is the pre-history of the invasion at Girón Beach in April, 1961, better known in the United States as the Bay of Pigs.”¹⁰⁸ Striking is less his attention to the power of naming as such than his own implied claim to a linguistic fidelity co-constitutive of a fidelity to history. By drawing attention to naming he establishes confidence in his ability to transmit realities more authentically than the authors of the deeds he alternately narrates and stages. His translation is itself partial—i. e., “Strand von Girón” and not “Schweinebucht”—translating the Spanish “Playa,” but not “Girón,” as if the US American lie were in the translation or naming of a place rather than in the nature of its military and political intervention, covert training of Cuban ex-patriots, and complicity with Central American dictatorships. Other, unremarked non-translations dot the text: for example, Enzensberger always writes “Cuba” rather than the German “Kuba,” “Habana” rather than the more common German transcription “Havanna.” In short, he works to establish his authority not exclusively as a documentarist, but also as a translator who offers a high level of transparent access to Cuba. As in the “Commonplaces” essays, Enzensberger locates revolutionary potential in the materiality of language. The fidelity or relative authenticity of a translation—even when it assumes the form of non-translation—becomes paramount in his theater of revolutionary justice. Closely related to withholding translation, refusing to name and scornful attention to the perceived linguistic shortcomings of German speakers aligned with the US reinforce Enzensberger’s opening act of non-translation. An Austrian operative under CIA Director Allan Dulles’s command is singled out: “an obscure figure who appeared under the alias Frank Bender. He was reputed to be a native Austrian. [H]e didn’t even speak Spanish.”¹⁰⁹ Cuban ex-patriots allied with the US are deemed unworthy of names or even numbers: “There is no point in naming the countless anti-Castro groups.”¹¹⁰

 Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 9.  Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 12.  Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 13.

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Translating cultural concepts Enzensberger claims that the public interrogation of captive Cubans was not a trial and that no punishments were to be handed down; moreover, he insists that the counterrevolutionary soldiers appeared voluntarily. He offers no evidence, but asserts his authority to make such claims based on his superior insight into Latin American culture. Translating cultural concepts for a Germanspeaking audience takes on a function similar to his refusal to translate place names and slogans. The motivations ascribed to the captive Cuban invaders are explained in brief, contextual remarks, but they lack standard German translations; instead, machismo, dignidad, and valor are made to stand for inequalities and pre-revolutionary values, the remains of a culture since transformed by revolution: To this [naive belief that they are in the right—JHT] one must add those characteristics that emerge from Latin America’s cultural tradition: firm convictions as to how a man must behave in hopeless situations: with dignidad and valor, remnants from the repertoire of machismo. After all, the prisoners know they are being observed. Their real public is not the victors, but their equals: their friends and relatives in Miami and México. For this reason, too, they must guard and defend their position. They are the tools of the global counterrevolution that is an eye- and ear-witness to these proceedings.¹¹¹

To be sure, there exist revolutionary writings against machismo, but dignidad and valor are mainstays of revolutionary vocabulary, fighting words in Latin American socialist demands for ways of being acknowledged and understood that have been systematically withheld from the lower classes and indigenous peoples of the Americas. (Revolution in Latin America, one should note, also signifies the period after a group comes to power, not only the military phase of a revolution.) Yet Enzensberger fails to elaborate on these cultural concepts, identifying them exclusively with the counterrevolution. In so doing he takes advantage of his audience’s reliance on his cultural translation to deny linguistic affinities among revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces which might otherwise trouble his arguments about capital interests or the existence of a singular, global counterrevolution. Enzensberger asserts that the interrogations are based on voluntary participation, transparency, immediacy, and direct accountability to the Cuban people (from whom the imprisoned Cuban ex-patriots are excluded) in the persons of the questioners: “They represent (vertreten) no institution; […] they are the im-

 Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 24.

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mediate representatives of the Cuban people.”¹¹² In this respect, he deems the interrogations themselves a revolutionary event. They occasion a “collective self-portrait,” neither soliciting individual confessions nor conferring individual punishments.¹¹³ Their alleged transparency and consequent translatability is at odds with Enzensberger’s own, more indirect referents and rhetorical maneuvers. He goes to great lengths to rescue the Cuban interrogations from the taint of association with Stalinist show trials without referencing them explicitly: “A process such as this breaks with a bad tradition that is deeply engrained in the history of revolution and turns it around. The captured counterrevolutionaries are not isolated in the basements of the political police or locked up in concentration camps, but made to stand before the people.”¹¹⁴ Per Enzensberger’s translation, The Habana Inquiry contrasts favorably with historical European institutions that understood themselves as practicing revolutionary justice. He invites historical comparisons only to reject them, establishing an alternate set of culturally and historically specific concepts of revolutionary justice now rooted in a tradition of Latin American revolution. This kind of translation builds on the refusal to translate and the belief in the materiality of language (in this case place names as geocultural anchors and cultural concepts that connote specific social relations). Each underwrites the possibility of translation on a larger scale, namely, the translation of entire discursive systems that have too long been separated by the limiting, culturally specific inflections of failed or counterrevolutionary activities—be they located in Cuban or German history. Enzensberger had already undertaken pointed comparisons of Latin America and West Germany in editing and interpreting other texts. An afterward to his new edition of D.W. Andreä’s eighteenth-century translation of Las Casas’s Kurzgefaßter Bericht von der Verwüstung der westindischen Länder (A Short Account of the Devastation of the Indies, 1542) stands out among his earlier texts in this regard.¹¹⁵ Describing it as “monstruously contemporary,” he went so far as to compare Las Casas’s treatise to works by Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt that postdate it by centuries.¹¹⁶ With characteristic flair Enzensberger asserted:

 Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 24.  Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 24– 25.  Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 24.  Bartholomé de las Casas, Kurzgefaßter Bericht von der Verwüstung der westindischen Länder, translated by D.W. Andreä; edited and with an afterward by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1966), 124– 150.  Enzensberger, Kurzgefaßter Bericht, 129.

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“The Short Account from 1542 is a look back at our future.”¹¹⁷ Already in the afterward to that text he had remarked on what he saw as a formal similarity of Las Casas’s audience with the Spanish crown to what he called obliquely “the hearings of our day”—in 1966 most likely a reference to the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials—but it was not until writing The Habana Inquiry that he moved beyond comparison of old and new colonialisms to an attempt to translate the pursuit of justice itself, to assimilate it into West German discourses on revolution and the political efficacy of literature.¹¹⁸

Translating discursive systems Enzensberger’s introduction and translation of The Habana Inquiry mobilizes a West German vocabulary over-determined by its fascist connotations. His description of a parasitic elite; use of terms such as liquidation and cleansing; and preference for Gestapo where secret police or non-translation would convey a meaning less redolent with the recent German past are but a few examples. The adjective fascist alternately describes the USA, Cuban ex-patriots, and the prerevolutionary Batista government.¹¹⁹ Enzensberger attributes an alleged US predilection for criminals as co-conspirators to the ease with which criminals are manipulated and blackmailed with the threat of exposure, but also to a deeper, spiritual affinity of the US with specialists in murder.¹²⁰ Mass arrests and deportations are ascribed to the US military leadership of the planned Cuban invasion, but the allusions take on new dimensions when cast in Nazi-fascist language: What is more, these people were indispensable because of their professional experience; the CIA had even set up a special unit within the expeditionary forces whose task would be the liquidation of the entire revolutionary cadre in Cuba. The unit was made up of professionals, in the main former members of Batista’s Gestapo, the notorious SIM. Among them, too, was a man named Calviño. […] In January 1961, it came to open revolt of the re-

 Enzensberger, Kurzgefaßter Bericht, 142.  Enzensberger, Kurzgefaßter Bericht, 150.  Fugilencio Batista (1901– 1973) ruled Cuba indirectly from 1933 – 1940 after leading noncommissioned officers in a revolt against Carlos Manuel de Céspedes’s provisional government, and then as president from 1940 – 1944, and again (following a military coup against the corrupt Carlos Prió Socarrás) as a dictator from 1952– 1958, when he was deposed by Cuban revolutionary forces under Fidel Castro. He fled to the Dominican Republic and eventually to Portugal.  He describes “die innere Geistesverwandtschaft” with “Batistas Mordspezialisten.” Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 11– 16.

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formist against the fascist wing in Guatemalan training camps. The CIA reacted with a purge. ¹²¹

US actions take on near genocidal proportions in Enzensberger’s language, especially if one accepts Eric Weitz’s extension of genocide to ideologically motivated political purges.¹²² The translation onto the US of the language of German fascism and even the genocide of European Jewry peaks in the person of Ramón Calviño; the US becomes the ultimate perpetrator in a global liquidation of revolutionaries, the extorter par excellence and master puppeteer of counterrevolutionaries the world over. Calviño functions as an emblematic node in a matrix of international counterrevolutionary forces. The “specialist” Calviño, a member of the pre-revolutionary Cuban police accused of torture and murder, is more frequently mentioned than any other figure in Enzensberger’s introduction.¹²³ The penultimate section of this ten-part essay is devoted entirely to Calviño: The extraordinary nature of his specialty lies precisely in the fact that he has no intermediary to shove between intention and execution. He is himself the executor of the interests of the ruling class, the last link in a chain of mediations from which he cannot separate himself no matter how hard he tries. He is the last, he is left holding the bag.¹²⁴

The immediacy that Enzensberger ascribes to Calviño again parallels the author’s broader insistence on immediacy in his translation and literary arrangement of the transcripts. Enzensberger routinely rejects similar claims to immediacy in other translative projects or discussions of documentary practice, but something is different here. Only in the figure of Calviño can Enzensberger link what he identifies as twin processes of exploitation and violent repression under a single ideology: “He restores the totality that all of the others seek to dissolve. He alone reveals the logic of the system on which their power rests and which they serve. With the murderer the hidden truth of the whole takes the stage.”¹²⁵  Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 16. Emphasis mine.  Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).  Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 49. Calviño’s description as the specialist may also suggest a comparison to Eichmann, although Calviño held no leadership positions and carried out torture and murder personally.  Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 50.  Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 52.

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Calviño’s singularity makes it urgent that Enzensberger’s translative practice not be seen by the reader as breaking the uninterrupted chain of signification that he narrates, link by link, in his introduction. According to Enzensberger, the local political relations revealed in the testimonies of Calviño and his fellow prisoners mirror international political relations.¹²⁶ Their every rhetorical recourse to freedom and democracy is shown to be purely ideological in light of Calviño’s relationship with the former Cuban ruling class: Calviño’s co-prisoners naturally do everything they can to deny any similarity to him. This requires a double maneuver, since the recent joint military action could not have existed without a much older nexus: precisely the connection between exploitation and repression that they came to reestablish. The past must be “overcome” (“bewältigt”) before they can separate those who gave the orders from their agents. […] Former West German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger was no better acquainted with the Commander of Auschwitz. But in the Cuban situation the collaboration with the professional murderer (from which the functionary distances himself so explicitly) had been reestablished, namely, by the joint landing operation. This renewal of an old alliance is first of all explained as an exception: “Calviño was a special case.” Since the ghost cannot be exorcised with this phrase, another argument must follow […].¹²⁷

The West German comparison is direct; the reference to Nazi fascism and the genocide of European Jewry is more explicit here than at any other moment in the text. Although Auschwitz is named only once, Enzensberger selects and arranges testimony to effect the emphatic repetition of key themes Cuban witnesses hold in common with Nazi defendants at the Frankfurt trials, namely, attempts to limit the scope of their accountability with reference to specialization and compartmentalized divisions of counter- and pre-revolutionary exploitation, violent repression, and murder. They persistently refused to remember acts of violence they supported or perpetrated.¹²⁸ The structure is not unlike the final pages of Weiss’s “Aufzeichnungen von einem Prozeß” (“Notes on a Process,” 1965), a precursor to his play The Investigation. Published in the first Kursbuch, with which Enzensberger as editor was of course familiar, Weiss’s text shows how the weight of the defendants’ denials and indifference are compounded

 Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 38.  Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 50. Kurt Georg Kiesinger (1904– 1988) was affiliated with the Nazi Party from 1933 – 1945. He worked in the Foreign Ministry’s radio propaganda division beginning in 1940, ultimately became its deputy department head, and served as its contact to the Propaganda Ministry. He later joined the Christian Democratic Union and served as Chancellor of West Germany from 1966 – 1969.  Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 33 and 49.

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by the sheer audacity of their repetition.¹²⁹ In Enzensberger’s work, the full force of cultural-discursive translation crystallizes around Calviño’s indisputable position as the “last link in a chain” that Enzensberger extends to West Germany with the fleeting mention of Auschwitz. As the ghost Calviño is said to haunt the proceedings, so, too, do the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials haunt the translation of the Cuban interrogations more generally. From Kursbuch’s inception (notably Peter Weiss’s and Martin Walser’s contributions to its first number, which dealt with modes of refusing memory in the Frankfurt trials) through Enzensberger’s “Commonplaces” essays, Enzensberger stakes his claims about the authority of political literature in large measure on its utility for charting a future that acknowledges but resolutely breaks with concern for the Nazi past, favoring systemic accounts of present-day, neocolonial capital relations. The metaphor of international class struggle replaces metaphors of unmasterable local pasts, but the notion of revolutionary justice (conceived largely as making visible contradictions in pre- and counter-revolutionary ideologies and offering immediate but unspecified accountability to the people) remains a—perhaps the—key tertium comparationis for both. It comprises a set of assumptions that governs available representations of violent histories as surely as any aesthetic solidarity governs the author’s comportment toward a more just future.¹³⁰ In the course of the “Commonplaces” essays, the very nature of the comparison in which Enzensberger grounded the terms of his debate changed radically. No later than in The Habana Inquiry, Enzensberger insisted on immediacy and metonymy (a trope defined by contiguity rather than analogy). The result is an apparently conflicted positioning of the revolutionary subject in the geocultural field of post-World War II internationalism: he suggests an immediate or antimetaphorical approach to language and writing even as the enabling structural conceit of his tertium comparationis continues to be rooted entirely in metaphor. Karl-Heinz Böhrer, among others, condemned Enzensberger’s treatment of revolution as metaphor.¹³¹ Yet even as we acknowledge Böhrer’s sound critique, the tenuous relationship of the material and the metaphoric in any aesthetic representation of the revolutionary subject brooks more questions than it answers. What happens in the space of comparison leading up to the limit of Enzensberger’s aesthetic solidarity?

 Peter Weiss, “Frankfurter Auszüge,” Kursbuch 1 (1965): 152– 188.  See n. 61.  Karl Heinz Bohrer, “Die Revolution als Metapher,” Merkur 22.2 (1968): 283 – 288.

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The question haunts Enzensberger’s translative and comparative project. In the same essay in which he insists on an internationalist perspective, on the materiality of exploitation on a world scale, and the force of metaphor in articulating a revolutionary position, peripheral or otherwise, he asserts the impossibility of European solidarity with the Third World.¹³² But, also in the same essay, he suggests that the revolutionary potential of the Third World’s innovative translation of revolutionary theories remains illegible as such, continuing to be heard only as a deceptively hollow reverse translation. Working against this situation, translation becomes the most consistent way that he undertakes to circumvent the impossibility of solidarity. It is as if what will not be subsumed in this translative operation—its remainder—is literalized in the progression from the “Commonplaces” to The Habana Inquiry, condensed in the movement of the translator’s ghosts from Latin America to West Berlin and back again.

Translation and comparison Enzensberger’s aggressive disidentification with postwar German politics and a literary engagement exemplified by coming to terms with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), in combination with his preference for a Cuban example of revolutionary justice and traditions of Latin American committed literature, motivates and marks the limits of the twin projects of translation and comparison at work in The Habana Inquiry. He addresses his comparative gesture explicitly at the outset of the play’s introduction, calling the interrogations exemplary, at once unique and generalizable. Cuba’s heuristic advantage, so Enzensberger, lies in its potential translatability. His stated aim is the translation of the local Cuban proceedings onto a global stage that potentially encompasses every class society. In Cuba, he sees the possibility of transforming a specific, historical and material instance of revolutionary class consciousness into a structurally transparent example. The principle of aesthetic generalization that underwrites his dramatic reconstruction was eventually incorporated into its West German premiere: The interrogation of the prisoners captured at Playa Girón that took place on four April evenings in the year 1961 in Habana is exemplary. Its meaning outstrips the occasion itself. When I suggest that it should be studied, even reconstructed on the stage or for television, what I have in mind is not its local aspects. As material for understanding Cuban history

 Enzensberger, “Europäische Peripherie,” 162– 163, 170. Teraoka discusses his essay at length in Chapter Two of East, West, and Others.

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these dialogues can’t be confined to the archives. The structure that becomes visible in them reemerges in every class society. What is depicted here is based on a Cuban rather than on a more familiar model, but that is no artifice, no device meant to create an alienation effect. The Habana Inquiry is a stroke of heuristic good fortune to which I can find no counterpart in Europe. There are reasons for this. They are worth mentioning. The uniqueness of the proceedings lies in the characters who appear in them. You can find them in every West German, Swedish, or Argentine city. (This is true, too, of the interrogators, many of whom would certainly have to be released from prison.) In addition, the questions asked and the answers given were not directed at individual actions or characteristics, but instead at the behavior of a collective. They reveal with the utmost clarity the character of a class.¹³³

Enzensberger’s attention in this passage is to historical material that is somehow uncontainable, that exceeds the confines of the archive. Its dramatic reworking and translation highlights specific ideological and institutional structures, and gives us a strong sense of what he means by the use value of poetry, accomplished here through the poetic treatment of historical material with recourse to techniques of aesthetic generalization. At the same time, he distances himself from any concept of the material that might be associated with Brechtian theatrical traditions in the interest of charting a relation to an Other place by means rooted in commonality rather than in alienation (Verfremdung).¹³⁴ Despite Enzensberger’s emphasis on the shared rhetoric of counterrevolutionary classes internationally, the Cuban material at issue in this passage contrasts sharply with the German material under consideration in the “Commonplaces” and his express desire therein to archive (in the sense of storing artifacts, of laying aside) cultural reflections on World War II and the Holocaust.¹³⁵ Where he derided Vergangenheitsbewältigung as counterrevolutionary, he stages the Cuban “self-portrait of the counterrevolution,” and ascribes to it a genuine revolutionary purpose. Some ghosts, it would seem, are more welcome than others. The counterrevolutionary position (according to Enzensberger) opposes generalizations that underwrite the revolutionary potential of geocultural comparison. Consequently, he devotes significant attention to discrediting the Cuban prisoners’ insistence on the uniqueness of their acts: “The insistence of the producer of ideology that one should not generalize leads to a complete taboo against all social processes.”¹³⁶ Enzensberger equates the comparative structural

   

Enzensberger, Enzensberger, Enzensberger, Enzensberger,

Das Das Das Das

Verhör, 21– 22. Verhör, 22. Verhör, 21– 22. Verhör, 45.

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analysis of social processes with social processes as such, lending not just rhetorical but genuine social urgency to his critique. By refusing generalization, the counterrevolution refuses Enzensberger’s enabling, solidary terms of comparison and translation. The revolutionary questioners alone maintain the fortitude to identify the relationships of individual acts to social processes in the face of attempts to isolate and obscure them. Enzensberger’s selection, organization, interpretation, and communication of exemplary comparisons for a broader audience becomes an act of aesthetic solidarity that supplements the Cuban questioners’ revolutionary act of comparison. Enzensberger compares potentially revolutionary justice in Cuba and West Germany. Along with them, he compares politics and literature as modes of communicating revolutionary justice. Seeming to intuit the limits inherent in the comparison, he minimizes them in his introduction to the hearings by admonishing the reader to attend less to what he describes as revolutionary than to that which runs counter to it: the “Self-Portrait of a Counterrevolution.” His unacknowledged struggle with the limits of aesthetic solidarity—in this case the troubled relation between aesthetic generalization and historicity that takes the shape of a ghostly remainder—is the constitutive gesture of the introduction, a prose performance of the very problems presented by the play’s stage performance. As Klaus Hilzinger observes, the play insists adamantly on its own authenticity and renounces so completely any technique that might suggest fictionality that it is unable to function independently of the introduction: The breadth and weight of the introductory interpretation stands in an immediate relationship to attempts to minimize stylization and abstraction in the documentary text; the unity of representation, analysis, and critique that documentary pieces otherwise seek to realize on the stage is present instead in the unity of the book.¹³⁷

While Hilzinger characterizes the resulting text as “unaesthetic,” I see in The Habana Inquiry the cultivation of textual forms that turn on a limit of aesthetic solidarity.¹³⁸ How close can the author come to a unity of representation, analysis, and critique before the failure to reach it becomes unproductive?

 Klaus Harro Hilzinger, Die Dramaturgie des dokumentarischen Theaters (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1976), 131– 137, here 136. Some reviewers shared Hilzinger’s view that the play and its introduction could simply not be separated. See for example Hugo Loetscher, “Die Invasoren der Schweinebucht. Hans Magnus Enzensbergers Kuba-Buch ‘Das Verhör von Habana,’” Die Zeit 24. 25 Jg. (12 June 1970): 20 and Werner Dolph. “Die Szene—kein Tribunal. Zur Enzensberger-Aufführung in Recklinghausen,” Die Zeit 24. 25 Jg. (12 June 1970): 21.  Hilzinger, Die Dramaturgie, 137.

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As I mentioned above, early productions of the play attempted to address this difficulty in no small part through elaborate program design.¹³⁹ In addition to including lengthy excerpts of the introductory essay and photographs already reproduced in the published book as part of the program, some programs also included timelines, maps, or citations from leading international scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank and political figures such as Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro. Their decision to supplement performance with written text was by and large insufficient, and Wolfgang Drews’s negative review, for one, compared the play bluntly to Kursbuch: “Experts would do better to refer to Enzensberger’s journal Kursbuch for information and forget the whole experience: in theater, nothing that has to be communicated by extra-theatrical means can be effective.”¹⁴⁰ Most of the handful of positive reviews accrued to the East German premiere at the Deutsches Theater, under the direction of Manfred Wekwerth, and the West German premiere, a joint production of the Junges Forum der Ruhrfestspiele, the Städtische Bühne Essen, and the Westdeutsches Fernsehen under the direction of Hagen Mueller-Stahl.¹⁴¹ Enzensberger favored the latter. Set designer Erwin W. Zimmer reconstructed the original setting of the hearings, a theater in the headquarters of the Association of Cuban Trade Unions, locating the moderator and questioners in the center, the accused counterrevolutionaries to the right, and a set of West German doubles to the left. Television cameras served the double purpose of recreating the atmosphere of the hearings as a media event and transmitting the performance to a public not in attendance at the Ruhrfestspiele.¹⁴² Enzensberger explains: In the West German premiere we conducted a test by example by questioning randomly selected West German citizens in front of the TV cameras, after every interrogation in the play an interrogation of a real person. We selected people only with an eye to their social posi-

 DLA Marbach, TH: Enzensberger, Hans Magnus/ Das Verhör von Habana.  Wolfgang Drews, “Schauspiel in München. Politisches Theater,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, foreign edition 324, 24 November 1970, 61.  Reinhardt Baumgart’s review discusses both: “Die Konterrevolution, ein Modell und ein Pfau. Enzensbergers ‘Verhör von Habana’ in Recklinghausen und Ost-Berlin,” Süddeutsche Zeitung 143/144, 16 – 17 June 1970, 11. The Ruhrfestspiele is the oldest theater festival in Germany and one of the most prominent in Europe. The festival was a significant choice of venue for a West German premiere: it traces its origins to an act of solidarity of coal miners with theater workers in the winter of 1946 – 1947, and the Confederation of German Labor Unions (Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB) sponsored the first festival in Recklinghausen in 1948. The popular festival, which begins annually on May Day, became increasingly politicized in the 1960s.  For a detailed description of the staging see Jochen Schmidt, “Uraufführung: Cuba libre bei WDR: Enzensbergers ‘Verhör,’” Christ und Welt 23.25, 19 June 1970, 10.

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tion, to their class position. So we juxtaposed a landholder’s son to a landholder’s son, a pastor to a pastor etc. The interviews weren’t arranged in advance. In the process they spontaneously revealed an identity in the thought and even speech patterns of the character in the play and the real person in West Germany. That was a really important experiment for me, because I believe that it actually verified my thesis.¹⁴³

By no means as straightforward as the author suggests, the introduction of West German doubles broke continuities in the scripted text in the extreme. The doubling of would-have-been-installed puppet president Carlos Manuel de Varona’s son with a social democratic politician’s leftist daughter was miscalculated to say the least. The moderate children of parents whose ancestral lands in Eastern Prussia were lost in the war were no match for the Cuban children of dispossessed land barons who aimed to reclaim their family’s holdings by supporting a foreign-backed coup. The decision between the first and second nights of the production to resequence the appearance of cast members and doubles may have minimized the most obvious structural disparities and encouraged the audience to make broad-based rather than specific comparisons, but consolidating the doubles’ questioning into a single block also likely weakened the effect of the juxtaposition. Nonetheless widely regarded as the most successful production of the play, Recklinghausen’s aesthetic strategy for enacting comparison and identifying potentially counterrevolutionary subjects among the West German public did more to approximate the spirit of the introduction than did other productions from roughly the same time. But it came up against its limit harder and faster for it.¹⁴⁴ When Enzensberger’s “spontaneously revealed […] identity in thought and even speech patterns” overstepped the bounds of productive comparison and could no longer take advantage of the translative remainder, the potential aesthetic solidarity that inheres in heterogeneous translation was lost. Thus, the co-production for stage and television not only failed to achieve the imagined commonality that Enzensberger’s aesthetic solidarity sought to capture, but it instantiated an unethical translation latent in the written text. Advocating for the evaluation of translations based on their accuracy, but also in terms of the translator’s ethical responsibility to convey difference, Venuti points to the danger inherent in any process of translation: “The ethical value of this difference resides in alerting the reader that a process of domestication has

 “Interview mit Hans Magnus Enzensberger,” Weimarer Beiträge 17 (1971): 74.  DLA Marbach, TH: Enzensberger, Hans Magnus/ Das Verhör von Habana; DLA Marbach, A: Hans Magnus Enzensberger: 7. Zum Werk /g. zum dramatischen Werk/ 2. zu einzelnen Werken/ Das Verhör von Habana (Schauspiel).

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taken place in the translating, but also in preventing that process from slipping into an unreflective assimilation to dominant domestic values.”¹⁴⁵ In an effort to build West German political literacy, a task Enzensberger identifies as proper to the literary intellectual, The Habana Inquiry fell back on concepts of authenticity, spontaneity, and immediacy incompatible with the cultural labor of constructing alternate geocultural frames for revolutionary solidarity. In the face of existing Cold War geocultures organized to preclude meaningful solidarities across geopolitical worlds, comparison and translation could only circumvent obstacles to solidarity so long as they remained heterogeneous and minoritizing, resisting assimilation to the geocultures that Enzensberger undertook to revise with recourse to aesthetic solidarity. Two final examples illustrate how tenuous comparisons and incomplete translations in the play limit the experience of aesthetic solidarity that Enzensberger might otherwise have made available to his West German public. In effect, the limits of aesthetic solidarity represent the ethical limits of the comparisons that Enzensberger makes, including the ghostly comparisons to the Holocaust and to the absence of revolutionary justice in West Germany. Enzensberger claims that, for fifty years, the existence of a Cuban elite was based on its capitulation to foreign powers, and offers that the material and sensory experience of the hearing reveals the truth of class relations as never before. If capitulation to a foreign power and occupation by the neoimperialist USA constitutes in part or in whole a counterrevolutionary position, the line of Enzensberger’s analysis would (again) point toward commonalities more difficult to find in every Swedish or Argentine city than he suggests. West Germany, on the other hand, can be seen as having attained full sovereignty from the Allied powers no earlier than 5 May 1955, when the occupation statutes were allowed to expire in the interest of continued Western European integration. (Exceptional provisions were made for West Berlin and for the prospect of any future national reunification.) Enzensberger’s reference to Kiesinger and Auschwitz, cited above, suggestively locates a second set of counterrevolutionary relations and their potential contribution to an alleged fascist restoration in West Germany even as it states the opposite—i. e., an empirical lack of relation between the chancellor and the commander of Auschwitz. Taking Enzensberger’s insistence on the generalizability of Cuba to its implied conclusion—namely, that nothing stands in the way of a similar realignment of fascism with neofascist counterrevolutionary

 Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 115.

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forces in West Germany—only Auschwitz marks the difference he rhetorically suspends between Habana and other world cities. How, Enzensberger asks, are the social and ideological contradictions propagated in counterrevolutionary statements sustained by foreclosing generalization and comparison internationally? “The questions are not just directed at the defeated invaders of Habana; wherever the ruling class has yet to appear in the docket—in other words, where we live—such questions weigh still more heavily.”¹⁴⁶ Here he establishes a privileged relationship of West German audiences to Cuban material. The West German ruling class—potentially complicit with unidentified, neofascist forces—is “not yet in the docket.” The trial of Nazi fascists at Nuremberg and Frankfurt, and its public reception, failed to make visible the contradictions between the rhetoric of present-day constitutional democracy and long-standing counterrevolutionary interests that Enzensberger was at pains to identify in Kursbuch. ¹⁴⁷ But what makes it weigh more heavily by comparison to the Cuban case? The ghosts that interpose themselves in the respective hearings, Habana and Frankfurt, may be the only figures that both defy generalization and expose the lies of specialization and feigned ignorance of counterrevolutionary wholes in Enzensberger’s play: “A ghost haunts the Habana Inquiry, interposes himself time and again between the questioner and those questioned and calls forth (ruft hervor) a panicked nervousness in the prisoners. The phantom bears the name of a professional murderer—Ramón Calviño.”¹⁴⁸ As I argued earlier, Calviño is central to Enzensberger’s interpretation of the Habana hearings as a revolutionary event: Calviño provides the author with a figure for the immediate and irrefutable violence of the counterrevolution and an emblem of the immediacy Enzensberger claims for the urgency of his own translation. And so the translator’s ghosts and the calls that traverse Cuba, Europe, and the world come full circle in The Habana Inquiry. Calviño is not of revolutionary Cuba, but of the counterrevolution; he shares in the international counterrevolutionary culture of which West Germany, too, is a part. The literary operations of the revolutionary subject enable the transformation of a historical figure into a metaphorical figure, a ghost. The aesthetic generalization typical of documentary theater allows the metaphorical—and there-

 Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 41. Emphasis mine.  The Nuremberg trials were the military tribunals held in 1945 – 1946 by the Allied forces in which the most high-ranking surviving Nazi officials were tried for war crimes. The choice of Nuremberg, with its symbolic association with the Nazi Party’s annual rallies and the 1935 Nuremberg Racial Laws, underscored the total defeat of the Nazis.  Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 48.

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fore generalizable—specter to intrude on the materiality of language and of history. In this way, the figure of Calviño marks both the belatedness of translation (not 1945 – 1946 but 1961, not Nuremberg but Habana) and the translator’s construction of an image of another culture that always cuts two ways. The revolutionary subject is the author-translator, uniquely equipped to articulate competing modes of witnessing—in this case, tribunal drama and testimonial narrative. Enzensberger’s new authorial subject, constructed via translative affiliation with Latin American literary discourses and generic innovations, is always accompanied by ghosts.

Conclusions Any comparison, structural or otherwise, requires a third term, a tertium comparationis. Making a case for a new network of comparisons, one of Enzensberger’s earliest contributions to Kursbuch analyzes a metaphorical reinvention of international class struggle that would re-place a nineteenth-century European notion of class conflict and the telos of socialist revolution in a twentieth-century, neocolonial world system of struggle between classes of nations: “To speak of international class struggle is therefore a metaphor. It rests on an analogy. The tertium comparationis is to be sought in the revolutionary nature of both conflicts, not in sociological and structural commonalities.”¹⁴⁹ A transfer of meaning from one context to another, resting, as Enzensberger duly notes, on similarity or analogy, metaphor introduces an element of instability into his more frequent recourse to the materiality of language in revolution across his essayistic and documentary works. The third term of comparison in Enzensberger’s revised revolutionary metaphor of international class struggle is constituted in reference to the ghosts circulating around the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, ghosts whose effects far outweigh the frequency of their visitations. Germans’ uncomfortable historical role as perpetrators of genocide is mediated by the ghosts of what Enzensberger suggests were unjust judicial processes and signs of failed revolution. Enzensberger requires comparison and translation with specific reference to Latin America in order simultaneously to imagine subjective and objective positions relative to an incompletely repressed fascist and genocidal German past, and to a revolutionary socialist utopian future.

 Enzensberger, “Europäische Peripherie,” 1.

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Auschwitz serves a mediating function between the categories of revolution and counterrevolution mobilized in The Habana Inquiry. As a rhetorical ghost that haunts Enzensberger’s essayistic work from the “Commonplaces” onward, the crucial third term enables and foils desired comparisons to Enzensberger’s vision of Latin American revolutionary justice. Latin America is important both as a historical site and as a literary historical trajectory; it enables the translation of ghosts across the interlocking material and conceptual contexts outlined in this chapter. Enzensberger’s play tracks new common places of revolutionary justice and injustice by plotting the continued movements of his rhetorical ghosts into expanding fields of international political and moral interest. Their spectral movements across places of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence privilege Latin America as a site for violent revolution and its pursuit of justice. The antecedent corpses invoked at each station of Enzensberger’s route are largely intangible, fleeting presences in his arguments about the specters of revolution, the materiality of language, and potential political change. They exceed his longstanding attention to structures and details, and yet they also mediate between them, enabling the German-Cuban comparison and all that it accomplishes—including the recuperation of the revolutionary subject in West German literature. The form and function of the trial exist in constant tension with their literary rendering. The ghosts of Habana and Frankfurt—as third terms and as the unnamed referents of colonial and traumatic postwar comparisons—lend the aura of authenticity to Enzensberger’s translative project. As the effects of corpses, ghosts bear referents to the facticity Stephan Braese attributes to the juridical instance in his study of literary representations of the National Socialist crimes; as the subjects of scientific and spiritual speculation and of imaginative visions, ghosts have a special affinity to the fictionality that is a hallmark of literary production.¹⁵⁰ Enzensberger’s third term of comparison articulates politics and literature, factual and fictional claims to authenticity, through an emphatic language of felt comparisons and bodily inscriptions: The repressions, defense mechanisms, and projections that emerge are of immediate interest to us. We know them from experience and we recognize them. Here, just when the most salient points begin to emerge from the hearings, the local color of the Cuban atmosphere

 Stephan Braese, “Juris-Diktionen. Eine Einführung,” Rechenschaften. Juristischer und literarischer Diskurs in der Auseinandersetzung mit den NS-Massenverbrechen, ed. Stephan Braese (Göttingen: Walstein Verlag, 2004), 18.

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evaporates. The pattern that becomes visible can be generalized. It is inscribed on the body of our own society, too (unserer eigenen Gesellschaft auf den Leib geschrieben).¹⁵¹

His visceral presentation of experience, recognition, and immediacy as fundamental to a West German social body underscores a pattern somehow deeper than that of the world-capitalist counterrevolution outlined in less emphatic terms some years before in the “Commonplaces.” Enzensberger’s translation of the Cuban process requires the Frankfurt trials as a key cultural-discursive referent to ground his comparison to West German oppositional interests in alternate systems of justice. It advances a literary medium to communicate a legal and political instance of justice, and locates it as exemplary over and against the ghostly comparison to a West German process Enzensberger consistently described as limited by its relation to an ostensibly counterrevolutionary Vergangenheitsbewältigung. If, as Braese argues, literature is seismographic where the law is conservative and often lacks an adequate language for new modes of criminality, Enzensberger’s literary translation of what he declared a revolutionary Cuban process sought to shake the foundations of the ostensibly pure aesthetic lines of belles lettres, as well as conservative West German justice, with recourse to historical and rhetorical comparisons.¹⁵² At a moment when he sought to redefine the role of literature in society and questioned the possibility of a politically committed literature, he nonetheless mobilized literature as a positive medium in the articulation of material contexts internationally, thereby establishing an important point of entry into the international system he saw as key to domestic change. This complex layering of cultural and historical referents brings us back to the first issue of Kursbuch, with its dossier on the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. Seeking to identify the second Kursbuch as a point of origin, some members of the West German New Left deliberately elided Kursbuch 1 and, with it, the beginnings of the influential publishing project in collaborative attempts to interpret the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. Literary historical analyses which continue to focus on one thematic origin at the expense of the other make invisible the role of West German political and psychological investments in constructing relations among US neoimperialism, Third World revolution, and the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. The idealization of revolutionary justice in Cuba is insep-

 Enzensberger, Das Verhör, 28. The language of bodily inscription returns, too, in Müller’s treatment of revolutionary subjects, and will be discussed at greater length in Chapter Four.  Braese, “Juris-Diktionen,” 13.

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arable from West German negotiations of the Frankfurt trials and Enzensberger’s partially concealed references to Auschwitz. Read within this long-obscured trajectory, The Habana Inquiry is squarely embedded in a translative project that pre-dates even the founding of Kursbuch, extending back to Enzensberger’s earliest literary endeavors as a poet and translator of the Latin American avant-garde. Attention to the inception of the Kursbuch project reveals much about the historical and geocultural routes that informed the courses a West German New Left sought to chart toward a utopian future. In Enzensberger’s influential arguments about Latin America’s relevance to West German audiences, Latin American revolution and attempts to marshal revolutionary justice offered important means for him and other West German authors to position themselves relative to a Nazi-fascist past and what some on the left identified as a restorationist, counterrevolutionary politics of the West German state. In the process, some wrote a place for themselves as bearers of hope for a utopian socialist future. Translation and comparison were Enzensberger’s primary vehicles in this project; as a referent, a source text, an object, and a set of experiences to be translated, Latin American socialist revolution enabled Enzensberger to eke out a new position for himself as an author and authority on Latin America. The Habana interrogations in particular offered a window onto an alternate relation between literature and politics that was neither oppositional nor leveling, but inherently translative. “Every translation is an As If.”¹⁵³ So, too, is every concept of subjectivity—an “as if” that underwrites all others: we think and act as if our thoughts and actions have meaning and consequence; we approach history, literature, and culture in its broadest sense as if it can be understood by means of comparison; we align ourselves with other subjects as if solidarity could be achieved. The extent to which solidarity is an effect of translation, or, alternately, the extent to which the limits of aesthetic solidarity are the limits of translation and translatability, bear heavily on Enzensberger’s literary practice and his concomitant reformulation of the relation of literary and political subjectivity. The next chapter brings the limits of aesthetic solidarity among revolutionary subjects further into relief, showing how even literary experiments that rely more on historicity than on metaphor don’t always escape similar binds.

 Enzensberger’s afterward to his 1984 translation of Moliere’s Misanthrope, cited in Cuervo, Der Dichter als Übersetzer, 9.

Chapter 3 Alternative Internationalisms and Literary Historical Inversions: Volker Braun’s Guevara or the Sun State “A new man / Killing the old one really. […] / His flight killing my existence. […] / His sentences killing my sentences.”¹ Volker Braun’s poetic engagement with Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “Material IV: Guevara,” was published after the iconic revolutionary’s death in a collection of poems titled Training des aufrechten Gangs (Training the Upright Gait, or more idiomatically: Learning to Stand Tall, 1979).²

 I have opted for a literal translation rather than alter the text’s meaning to reproduce Braun’s poetic effects. The original reads: “Ein neuer Mensch / Tötend den alten wirklich. […] / Seine Flucht tötend mein Dasein. / […] / Seine Sätze tötend meine Sätze.” Volker Braun, “Material IV: Guevara,” in Training des aufrechten Gangs (Halle-Leipzig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1981), 55 – 58. Volker Braun was born in 1939 in Dresden. He graduated from high school in 1957 and worked in a print shop and, later, as a laborer at the legendary state mining company Schwarze Pumpe. Before studying philosophy in Leipzig (1960 – 1964), he studied to be a skilled machinist. After moving to Berlin (East), Braun worked at the Berliner Ensemble and Deutsches Theater, and rapidly made a name for himself as an author and dramaturg. He was among the authors to be denounced by name at the Eleventh Plenum in 1965 for his critical texts, despite his deep commitment to constructive literary engagement with socialism. He served as a member of the Writers’ Union leadership in 1973. In the same year, he spoke out in favor of new, realist approaches to art and literature in East Germany and, like many authors, expressed his deep solidarity with Chilean socialists in the wake of the Pinochet coup. Braun was among the first signatories of a resolution protesting poet and musician Wolf Biermann’s controversial expatriation in 1976. He became a member of the Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) in 1983. Long-standing concerns in his poems, plays, essays, and novels include the relation of literature to social transformation; a commitment to socialism as a process rather than an outcome; and recurrent engagements with history, hierarchy, and bureaucracy. His work is often philosophical and highly intertextual. He is the recipient of numerous prizes awarded in both East Germany and reunified Germany.  The volume includes a series of notes and citations from Guevara’s writings and interviews that are incorporated into the poem (80 – 81). Most of the poems in the cycle “Stoff zum Leben” (“The Stuff of Life”) were written in 1975, but this poem, numerically last, was written first, in 1974. An appendix of seven short verses “surrounding the Guevara play” [“aus dem Umkreis des Guevara-Stücks”] concludes the volume (81). Jay Rosellini’s monograph includes a concise overview of the poems included in Training. See Volker Braun (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, edition text+kritik, 1983), 114– 122. Guevara (1928 – 1967) was an Argentine Marxist and revolutionary. He traveled throughout Latin America in the early 1950s as a medical student, and later wrote about his experiences with poverty, illness, and political oppression. He continued to develop more radical political

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Questioning the efficacy of writing in a post-revolutionary situation marked by the life and death of a prototypical New Man, the poem reflects on the subjective implications of Latin American revolution for the writer-narrator’s hopes. Literature is reduced to the fragmented, if not meaningless, production of isolated sentences or phrases. Their author muses repeatedly: “Should I / Stay with my words. Should I decamp / From my hopes.”³ Writing nonetheless retains its shape as a spatially and emotionally bounded field; it is a site for the articulation of a hope that shares proximate and contextual referents to both Cuba as symbolic repository for Guevara’s “purest hope” and the narrator’s own socialist homeland. The hope articulated is profoundly personal: it is permeated by a sense of almost existential isolation, which, upon first reading, would seem to have little to do with solidarity, a fundamentally intersubjective mode of relation. Written after the ostensible arrival of the socialist everyday in East Germany of the 1960s and the cultural-political thaw that followed on the heels of Walter Ulbricht’s resignation as Party Secretary in 1971, Braun’s 1975 drama Guevara oder der Sonnenstaat (Guevara or the Sun State) elaborates on the material first articulated in the poem, and represents a new and expansive treatment of solidarity in East German writing.⁴ Widening the field of socialist internationalism to include non-European, non-Soviet socialisms, Braun’s aesthetic solidarity pursues new connections and reinterprets older ones in the wake of East Germany’s second, symbolic state consolidation (with the erection of the Berlin Wall), and a period of relative openness to cultural experiment, but then also in the

views during his time in Guatemala, where the US-sponsored coup that toppled the democratically elected Arbenz government convinced him of the necessity of armed struggle against imperialism in the Americas. He subsequently met Fidel Castro and other members of the 26 July Movement in Mexico, and became a prominent leader of the Cuban Revolution and its government. Other elements of his biography are introduced in the chapter as they become relevant to my discussion of Braun’s play.  “Soll ich / Bleiben, bei meinen Worten. Soll ich aufbrechen / Aus meiner Hoffnung.” Braun, “Material IV: Guevara.”  Thaw is the term commonly used to describe the period following Khrushchev’s promulgation of new social and cultural reforms at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR in 1956, which had far-reaching impacts across the Eastern Bloc. Beginning in 1963, prominent members of the East German Socialist Unity Government began to criticize the thaw. In 1965, the 11th Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party shocked many artists and intellectuals with its harsh criticism of prominent authors and film makers, its blatant anti-artistic tenor, and its repressive and absolutist appraisal of the role of the artist in socialist society. Until Walter Ulbricht’s resignation in 1971, there was no renewed relaxation of cultural policies. Change was ushered in by Erich Honecker’s call at the 8th Party Congress of the Socialist Unity Party for a “literature with no taboos.”

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wake of the stunning reconsolidation of state power vis-à-vis the arts at the Eleventh Plenum (1965), which seemed to portend a different socialist everyday entirely.⁵ Braun’s is a critique of existing internationalist praxis that takes for granted the existence of international solidarity in one form or another; he questions not the sincerity of specific acts of solidarity, but rather the conditions for their success within contemporary geopolitical and geocultural formations.⁶ These included an eastern European socialism that had turned against itself at the latest by the Prague Spring (1968) and an internationalization of revolutionary struggle that could no longer be ingored by European socialists.⁷ Braun consistently argues for a literature guided by and capable of intervening in social realities; he understands literature and politics as complementary arenas for education and social change.⁸ Hope and commitment to socialism dominate even his most critical works. In keeping with the philosophy of hope advanced by Ernst Bloch (1885 – 1977), Braun measures reality against his utopian vision rather than allowing reality to dictate that vision.⁹ Against the backdrop of his broader commitment to the political efficacy of literature, Braun’s aesthetic solidarity is directed at, but not limited to, the relation of subjective and objective conditions for revolution in Latin America; the relation of European to Latin American revolutionaries; and the social production of international-

 I use the term international to denote relationships and exchanges between discrete states; the term internationalist to describe actions or ideas that foster relations between individuals and groups in discrete states. International solidarity refers to a commitment—sometimes abstract, sometimes practical, sometimes both—to furthering those relationships and exchanges. In the texts I analyze, it has a strong historical connection to the socialist internationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As such, it can describe a range of positions encompassing both tactical, political alliances, and emotional attachments or even identifications. The specific nature of internationalist solidarity must therefore be constantly articulated and negotiated.  Arlene A. Teraoka, East, West and Others: The Third World in Postwar German Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 104.  The Prague Spring was the period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia under Alexander Dubček that began in January of 1968, and advanced a liberal, humanist socialism until its military repression by the USSR in August of the same year.  This is perhaps most explicitly stated in Volker Braun, Es genügt nicht die einfache Wahrheit. Notate (Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam jun., 1979).  Verena Kirchner, Im Bann der Utopie. Ernst Blochs Hoffnungsphilosophie in der DDR Literatur (Heidelberg: Winter, 2002), 13 – 15, 48. While she is not the first author to explore Braun’s relationship to Bloch, her study of Bloch’s influence on East German literature distinguishes itself from earlier criticism in that she demonstrates how and when it emerges in literary texts, pursues the aesthetic consequences of Bloch’s influence for individual authors, and offers a systematic analysis of Bloch rather than cursory citations of relevant passages of his work.

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ist subjects in and through structures of feeling that exceed reasoned political solidarity narrowly construed. To the extent that literature is a solitary occupation, the highly personalized disillusionment and profound self-doubt that permeate the play’s precursor, “Material IV: Guevara,” are understandable. Can the narrator intervene meaningfully into the world on which he pins his hopes from a position of relative distance and privilege? His questions are not answered in the poem itself, but neither is the hope of writing negated in the impending death its final line portends. Midway through the poem, Guevara’s sentences kill the narrator’s, but in the end the two achieve unity as the speaking subject ventriloquizes the dead revolutionary: “His last sentence now mine / You will now live to see how one dies.”¹⁰ The narrator’s literary subjectivity is anchored in a notion of revolutionary subjectivity that encompasses a profound dialectical unity of life and death, words and action, flights and holdfasts. Braun stresses writing’s potentially affirmative function simply by including the poem in the cycle “Stoff zum Leben” (“The Stuff of Life”); the writer-narrator’s engagement with Guevara constitutes material that is about life, that makes up life, and that the narrator requires to live— all of these dimensions are at work in the cycle’s title. As the poem makes clear, the unsettling limits of aesthetic solidarity are perhaps nowhere so explicit as in and around the experience of death. But death— like writing—is only solitary to an extent. Countless collective rituals mark its occurrence, countless lives and relationships are touched by an individual’s passing. We face death alone only in an existential sense; we give it meaning because it is embedded in community. The poem situates literature, too, as a communal endeavor. Braun’s questions about the appropriate course of action for a literary subject in the face of a changing geoculture initiate a tendentially urgent discussion about the ethics of reading literary and historical events, and about the possibility of forms of action, emotion, and reflection that we endow with similar meaning in life. Aesthetic solidarity is one way of being less alone.¹¹ As it takes shape around the figure of Guevara, Braun’s expression of aesthetic solidarity presupposes a role for literature in the formation of a self-consciousness that is also a collective, historical consciousness. It is built not on the flawless worker-heroes of official East German cultural politics, but precisely on

 “Sein letzter Satz jetzt meiner. / Sie werden nun erleben, wie man stirbt.” Braun, “Material IV: Guevara.”  My thanks to A. Hunter Bivens for reminding me of the similarity of this idea to Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” a figure who is engaged in creating community across place and time in the act of exchanging experiences (Erfahrungen austauschen).

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the conflicts that ground those heroes’ development.¹² Identifying a tendency in socialist literature toward abstract unities rather than productive contradictions, he pursues a literary efficacy that also would offer a more complete understanding of the socialist personality.¹³ Addressing his concerns to one of the most important concepts for mediating individual and social life in East Germany, Braun’s aesthetic solidarity takes on the New Man as the figure of the socialist personality writ large.¹⁴ His decision to rework “Material IV: Guevara” in such a way as to insist on historicity and contradiction reinscribes into the collective an isolated authorial position robbed of hope. The utopian horizon of communism obscured by the death of the Latin American revolutionary in the poem comes into focus once more in the play. But while thematically similar, Braun’s dramatic recasting of the Guevara material is key to the articulation of an aesthetic solidarity rooted in collectivities and publics rather than in subjective, individual contemplation and reflection. This is true at the level of the poem’s content, in which a narrator who is also an author considers the political efficacy of writing and measures his own hopes, actions, and positionalities vis-à-vis those of the martyred revolutionary, and in terms of the conditions for reception that inhere in the poem’s and the play’s respective forms. (Of course poems can be read publicly, but even then the horizon of expectations is different for poetic and dramatic works.) Jay Rosellini speculates that the apparent ease of the poem’s publication, in marked contrast to the challenges and controversies surrounding the play, might be symptomatic of a genre-specific politics of publishing in East Germany.¹⁵ No doubt this was one factor. Additionally, by the time of the poem’s publication, many of the issues surrounding the thematic material that the two texts hold in common had been extensively discussed in the context of the play and the possibilities for its staging. Six years is none too short a time in the development of cultural politics from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. But there are also key differences in how Braun uses aesthetic means to articulate solidarity, internationalism, and the political subjects of literature in the poem and in the play.

 He develops these ideas, which take literary shape in Guevara, in a series of theses on history and literature prepared for the Seventh Writers’ Congress (1973). Braun, Es genügt nicht die einfache Wahrheit, 133 – 140, here 134– 135.  Braun, Es genügt nicht die einfache Wahrheit, 135.  See, for example, the entry “Persönlichkeit, sozialistische” in Kulturpolitisches Wörterbuch, 2d ed. (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1978), 553 – 554.  Rosellini, Volker Braun, 93.

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As Rosellini, Hörnigk, and others have noted, Guevara was Braun’s first theatrical treatment of historical subjects.¹⁶ The play stages in reverse chronological order the failure of Guevara’s 1966 – 1967 attempt to foment revolution in Bolivia. Tamara Bunke (1937– 1967), the Argentine-born East German turned Cuban and later Bolivian, eventually left her covert assignment in La Paz to join Guevara’s guerrilla immediately prior to the events Braun stages. In addition to stylizing historical material drawn from Guevara’s Bolivian diaries and biographies of Bunke, Braun invents interactions between Guevara and Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader who came to power in the 1959 revolution that overthrew the Batista regime, as well as with his (Guevara’s) executioners to frame the drama.¹⁷ The reverse chronological flow of events is disrupted at intervals by the appearance of Bumholdt and Bedray, parodies of Alexander von Humboldt, humanist, scientist, and explorer of the Americas, and Regis Debray, French philosopher and popularizer of Latin American revolutionary theory in 1960s Europe.¹⁸ Gue-

 Rosellini, Volker Braun, 95; Frank Hörnigk, “Erinnerung an Revolutionen. Zur Entwicklungstendenzen in der Dramatik Heiner Müllers, Peter Hacks’ und Volker Brauns am Ende der siebziger Jahre,” in Tendenzen und Beispiele. Zur DDR-Literatur in den siebziger Jahren, ed. Hans Kaufmann (Leipzig: Philip Reclam jun., 1981), 148. Lenins Tod (Lenin’s Death, 1970) was neither premiered nor published until 1988.  See Marta Rojas and Mirta Rodríguez Calderón, Tania, la guerrillera inolvidable (Havana: Instituto del Libro, 1970); and Eberhard Panitz, Der Weg zum Rio Grande. Ein biographischer Bericht über Tamara Bunke (Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1973).  Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1869) was a noted Prussian geographer and natural scientist who made contributions to the fields of geology, botany, biology, and archeology. He traveled extensively in Europe and the Americas, and wrote both scientific and popular accounts of his studies and experiences. He was granted greater access to the Spanish Americas than any other German of his age. He was widely respected by leaders of the Latin American independence movements, and he is to this day often referred to affectionately as the “second discoverer” of the Americas. Rex Clark’s and Oliver Lubrich’s recent anthology gives a sense of his influence on his contemporaries and his enduring cultural and intellectual legacy on both sides of the Atlantic: Cosmos and Colonialism: Alexander von Humboldt in Cultural Criticism (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013). Debray (1940– ) spent time with the Venezuelan guerrilla and in Cuba, and his early theoretical writing systematized guerrilla practices. In Revolution in the Revolution? (1966) Debray describes the foco theory and elaborates a theory of the rural guerrilla similar to that described by Guevara in his handbook on guerrilla warfare (Guerra de guerrillas: Un método [Guerrilla Warfare: A Method, 1963]). Like Guevara, he believed that urban guerrilla tactics were doomed to failure. He tried to reconcile the Cuban experience with Leninism even as he inverted Leninist principles, insisting that tactics and strategy must precede a comprehensive revolutionary theory; he understood his writings on foco theory to constitute the groundwork for the development of a comprehensive theory of revolutionary warfare. For a discussion of Debray’s thought relative

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vara’s cast of characters thus evokes colonial-era and contemporary European, (East) German, and Latin American discourses on antiimperialism that often overlap and interrupt one another. In the process, the play poses such fundamental questions as: Who can be a revolutionary? What kinds of relationships exist among revolutionaries? How does one feel in revolution? Its most compelling answers take shape around the figure of Tania. As will become clear, Tania’s complex and controversial biography resists attempts to couple place and agency and repeatedly foiled biographers in search of a unified identity beneath the various identities she assumed in service of Latin American revolution. To the continuous speculation about whether she was or was not romantically involved with Guevara, Braun adds considerable attention to Tania herself. His treatment of the young revolutionary highlights the complicated relationship of embodied and desired internationalist subjectivities. Braun mobilizes her manifold legends to generate a new, positively fractured agent of socialist revolution. The Socialist Unity Party (SED) was skeptical of Guevara’s popularity in the capitalist West and uneasy with his criticisms of the Soviet Union. A symbol of resistance tout court, his voluntarism threatened orthodox socialists, who preferred to express solidarity with Cuba in more general, antiimperialist terms rather than with any particular individual. Although Braun was clearly familiar with Guevara’s writings, Guevara reception in East Germany was generally hampered by the relative paucity of translations, biographies, or any official position on the iconic revolutionary.¹⁹ (Braun presumably relied on a poorly translated edition of the Bolivian Diaries published in the West by Trikont-Verlag, as no East German translation was available until 1987.) Guevara presented a unique figure for socialist internationalism’s internal contradictions and challenges.²⁰ In choosing

to both Guevara and Lenin, see Hartmutt Ramm, The Marxism of Regis Debray (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978). Debray was present during part of the failed Bolivian guerrilla, but left prior to its military defeat. He served three years in a Bolivian jail.  As I explain below, those biographical accounts which were available offered carefully circumscribed narratives of Guevara’s life. Jennifer Ruth Hosek remarks: “The Democratic Republic often limited public knowledge of important but politically ambivalent personages by disseminating texts about them rather than their original writings.” Sun, Sex, and Socialism: Cuba in the German Imaginary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 149 – 50. Guevara was no exception. It is important to remember, however, that the border impeded, but never effectively precluded the flow of information and texts from West to East, and vice versa.  Jens Kirsten, Lateinamerikanische Literatur in der DDR. Publikations- und Wirkungsgeschichte (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2004), 215 – 219. Hosek’s work on Cuba also draws attention to the contradictory status of Guevara and Bunke, especially in relation to youth and travel cultures. See

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him as a protagonist, Braun yoked the role of the critical intellectual to that of the critical revolutionary in a socialist state that was profoundly ambivalent about both. Frank Hörnigk has written persuasively about formal and thematic shifts in works by a number of East German authors engaged with Latin America in the mid- to late-1970s. As he demonstrates, the significance of Latin American settings lies not just in their frequency, but also in the pivotal status of Latin America plays in the collective works of individual authors. Hörnigk argues that the plays’ authors reassessed world-historical relationships in light of a new set of revolutionary developments centered in Latin America. Redefining the position of East Germany in a new world-historical constellation, he continues, proceeded in part through exploring relational categories in and to Latin American revolution. Changes in object choice and aesthetic innovation were the necessary outcomes of this process.²¹ Beyond the import Hörnigk ascribes to Latin America dramas, Guevara’s critical purchase inheres in the tension Braun preserves between the historical, political figure and his literary figuration of Guevara. Marked by a series of necessary and impossible relations among real and ideal political subjects European and Latin American alike, Guevara’s refrain “it is so impossible / to struggle that one can only struggle,”²² refers also to the task of the socialist author. The drama of the revolutionary subject instantiates an authorial subjectivity not unlike that asserted by a Jamesonian reading of Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, wherein the hero of the novel is the novelist himself.²³ Of course, Guevara is a drama, not an epic, but it seems to me that the challenge faced by the author is homologous—Braun’s success lies in nothing less than staging the socialist hero’s trajectory of failure and of figuring his particular concept of the real in terms of utopian possibilities asserted at the play’s end. Braun’s choice of form, the inverted Stationendrama¸ quite literally enacts the processes Jameson describes: “Utopia is not won concretely line by line, but established by fiat at the end of the book, which reaches back and transforms the beginning.”²⁴ The impossibility and ne-

Chapter Five, “Touring Revolution and Resistance: Tamara Bunke and Che Guevara,” in Sun, Sex, and Socialism.  Hörnigk, “Erinnerung an Revolutionen,” 167, 173.  The original reads: “es ist so unmöglich / Kämpfen, daß man nur kämpfen kann.”  Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), Chapter Three, “The Case for Georg Lukács,” 160 – 205.  Jameson, Marxism and Form, 178. The Stationendrama (literally station drama) is a genre organized around a central figure who moves through a series of chronological scenes or tableaus

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cessity performed by Braun’s inversion is all the more elegant given the dialectical tension between a form and a literary historical movement that Lukács notoriously vilified in the so-called Expressionism debates.²⁵ Braun’s aesthetic solidarity is one example of broader trends toward critical solidarity throughout the 1970s.²⁶ Manifest in his choice of historical political subject and inversion of historical literary forms, Braun does not so much reject socialist realism and a commitment to drama as an operative, actionable form (although he does acknowledge that with Guevara he departs from more immediately actionable dramas) as reassess the concept of the real itself.²⁷ Faced with the classic opposition of form and content, Guevara approximates a radical, rather than a conservative, reading of Lukács’s socialist real, a realism which was never meant to have been synonymous with the concrete or indexical in any reductive sense, but instead meant to signify a processual movement toward a reality as yet unachieved.²⁸ First and foremost, critical solidarity indicates criticism of the official politics of solidarity in East Germany, not necessarily the political practices of or in the target countries.²⁹ Critical solidarity is directed at, but not limited to, the relation of subjective and objective conditions for revolution in Latin America; the relation of the white European revolutionary to black, indigenous, and en route to a specific end. Particularly popular in medieval passion plays, the relative importance of each scene is largely measured against the final outcome of the sequence, rather than conforming to the conventions of classical forms. The genre experienced a renaissance in the Expressionist period as authors sought to convey the sufferings and passions of modern man.  The so-called Expressionism debates were conducted in 1937– 1938 among Marxist émigrés in a series of published articles regarding the relationship of Expressionism to fascism and specifically to National Socialism. The focal point of the debates was the question of the proper relation of form and content in the arts, and whether allegedly formalist modes of expression lent themselves to political cooptation or might even have fostered irrationalist, anti-humanist political developments. Major participants in the debates included Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács, and Alfred Kurella.  See Teraoka, East, West, and Others.  See Hörnigk, “Erinnerung an Revolutionen,” 173.  Again, this reading stems from Jameson, particularly from his critique of vulgar Marxist readings of Lukács’s category of the typical and a concomitant tendency to oppose form and content rather than recognize the import Lukács ascribes to them as a dialectical unity, a relational pair that demonstrates via a series of historical tropes the challenges of achieving the utopian. There is a strong resemblance between this kind of a Lukácsian real and Bloch’s utopian thinking, despite the highly publicized differences between the two thinkers.  Teraoka also concludes that plays by Braun, Peter Hacks, Claus Hammel, and Heiner Müller “however indirectly, uneasily, or even unwillingly, [question] the party-line dichotomy between imperialist intervention and revolutionary solidarity.” East, West, and Others, 104.

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white creole revolutionaries in Latin America; the social production of internationalist revolutionaries; and the problem of conflicting allegiances rooted in class and racial privilege. In contradistinction to West German documentary writings that tend to position the author as an extra-textual political instance, explored in the previous chapter through the example of Enzensberger’s extended introduction to the The Habana Inquiry, the East German author makes himself the object of radical critique, for example, through the figure of the intellectual in revolutionary conflicts made present on the stage. Against this backdrop, critical solidarity and its attendant aesthetic practices were not the prerogative of any single ideology. Arlene Teraoka rightly observes that East German authors from a range of political and aesthetic positions engaged explicitly Latin American themes, including authors from Claus Hammel (1932– 1990) and Peter Hacks (1928 – 2003) (to whom she devotes her most sustained critical attention) to Volker Braun and Heiner Müller.³⁰ Müller’s Der Auftrag (The Task, 1979, to which I return in Chapter Four) receives extensive attention in Teraoka’s earlier work, and has been subject to broader critical attention than either Hammel’s Humboldt und Bolívar oder der Neue Kontinent (Humboldt and Bolívar or the New Continent, 1975) or Hacks’s Die Fische (The Fish, 1975).³¹ Braun’s play, by contrast, receives remarkably short shrift in her appraisal of Latin American revolution in East German drama.³² Teraoka’s readings of the East German plays illuminate dramatic constellations that feature European intellectuals, who are principally non-revolutionary, and Latin Americans, who appropriate European intellectual traditions for their own ends. At best, Europeans occupy supportive or secondary roles that turn on images of European science and scientists caught up in a dialectic of Enlightenment: “European Science, potentially emancipatory, is simultaneously an instrument of domination […] As plays of solidarity, all of these texts assert not the universal authority or desirability of European science or European politics but rather the limits of their relevance for the experience of the Third World.”³³ While European thought may be of limited relevance to Latin American revolution, Latin America is extremely relevant to Europe. Rather than stylize Latin America(ns) as catalysts for European self-questioning along lines similar to Hacks, Hammel, or, indeed, Braun’s own poem, Braun’s drama foregrounds Latin American thought as such and shows its transformative impact on Europe-

 Teraoka, East, West and Others, 79 – 104.  Arlene A. Teraoka, The Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse: The Postmodernist Poetics of Heiner Müller (New York: Lang, 1985).  Teraoka, East, West and Others, 101, 103.  Teraoka, East, West and Others, 100, 102.

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an socialist traditions. Ultimately, Guevara demands that its public reconsider Soviet-inflected visions of a new humanity that are shown to be incompatible with revolutionary subjectivity. The play also revises literary-historical narratives that contrasted Expressionism’s radical subjectivism and irrationalism with classical humanist inheritance (Erbe) beginning in the 1930s. In a society that prized the cultivation of Soviet ideology, the convergence (Annäherung) of socialist national cultures, and the articulation of their respective popular interests (Volksverbundenheit), cultural politics and international solidarity were inherently related.³⁴ Drawing attention instead to the specificity of national and regional socialisms and their respective intellectual traditions, Braun’s aesthetic solidarity threatens to undermine both. Without meaning to downplay the importance of the national question to Marxism-Leninism, my analysis of Guevara elaborates Braun’s vision of a revolutionary subjectivity predicated not on an objectively necessary evolution and convergence of peoples, but rather on rupture, displacement, and inversion. He portrays revolutionary men and women engaged in subjective, interpersonal struggles for love and self-realization that are inseparable from the broader, internationalist political struggles in which they also take part. My reading of Guevara proceeds in two stages to elucidate the play’s multiple and complex references. I organize the first around the play’s attendant cultural and political histories and the second around a close reading of its key scenes. Following a sketch of how Braun appropriates literary-historical debates on the political efficacy of Expressionist and socialist realist subjectivities, I explore how his choice of form, evoking Expressionist drama, speaks to an East German literary politics that equated Expressionism with formalism, decadence, and even protofascism. These debates provoke the contemporary question of how to consider Braun’s work relative to both Soviet and Cuban concepts of humanity articulated around the figure of the New Man. As I explain, it is with recourse to this figure that Braun relocates German and European debates on revolutionary subjectivity within a larger geocultural frame that includes Latin America to fracture and creatively rearticulate cultured and gendered subjects of revolution. In the chapter’s second stage, my close reading complicates and extends scholarship on Guevara in three ways. First, in reading the largely neglected Bumholdt and Bedray scenes, I argue that Braun’s play culminates in an uneven commingling of humanist and Marxist-Leninist imaginings of der neue Mensch

 Hans-Adolf Jakobsen, “Auswärtige Kulturpolitik,” in Drei Jahrzehnte Außenpolitik der DDR. Bestimmungsfaktoren, Instrumente, Aktionsfelder, ed. Hans-Adolf Jakobsen, Gert Leptin, Ulrich Scheuner, Eberhard Schulz, 2d ed. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1990), 235– 260, here 236.

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with the Cuban revolutionary hombre nuevo. ³⁵ Despite Guevara’s similarity to Braun’s early protagonists, steadfastly and selflessly advancing socialist revolution, Braun adopts a relatively closed, linear form—the reverse chronological staging of the failed Bolivian guerrilla—that represents a departure from the playwright’s earlier penchant for more open dramatic structures. The openings that remain are the intraplay scenes. The most visible breaks in the revolutionary process are thus located in a European intellectual tradition that is not only structurally disruptive, but also strangely irrelevant to the primary plot and staged experiences of the guerrilla. Second, I correct a tendency in the scholarly literature to overlook Tania as a dramatic and historical figure.³⁶ Speculations about the nature of Tania’s relationship to Guevara and to Cuba abound. Alternately represented in historical accounts as a heroine or as a saboteur, as suppressing her own identity for the good of the revolution or simply as deceptive, as politically committed or as a reckless adventurer, the legends of Tania are many and complex. Some describe Tania as the quintessential femme fatal, with Guevara as her unsuspecting prey. Some particularly convoluted accounts accuse her of having reported to the Soviet Union, which, in turn, was said to have deliberately leaked her reports to the USA in the interest of seeing Guevara assassinated and bringing Cuba back in line with Soviet-style communism. At the other end of the spectrum, biographers claim that a profound, almost religious respect was accorded to Tania, a woman so admired for her courage by the Bolivian forces that she was the only member of Guevara’s cell to receive a proper burial.³⁷

 While both terms could be translated into English as the New Man, I will retain the German and Spanish at various points throughout the chapter when my argument requires me to highlight their distinct cultural, historical, and political genealogies. Rather than confuse non-German readers by alternating between its declined and undeclined forms, I use the nominative throughout.  Recent scholarly attention to transnational biographies will no doubt contribute to broader interest in Tania. Notably, Jennifer Ruth Hosek devotes the better part of a chapter to Tania in her recent monograph, already cited above. Her discussion of the Guevara play, however, emphasizes exchanges between Guevara and the Bolivian Communist Party leadership rather than those with Tania that I explore below.  See, for example, Frank Hetmann, “Ich habe sieben Leben.” Die Geschichte des Ernesto Guevara, genannt Che (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz & Gelberg, 1972); Panitz, Der Weg zum Rio Grande; Rojas and Rodríguez Calderón, Tania, la guerrillera inolvidable; Angela Soto Cobían, La muchacha de la guerrilla del Che. Tania: Leyendas y realidades (Montevideo: Casa de la Cultura y la Amistad Uruguay-Cuba, 1999); and José Friedl Zapata, Tania. Die Frau, die Che Guevara liebte (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1997).

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My analysis of gender in socialist revolution reveals how Braun’s Tania anticipates the shift from political internationalism to a transnational construction of the revolutionary subject in the 1980s. Whereas scholars such as Hörnigk focus on the fact of Latin American revolution (practice), my focus on love and betrayal in Braun’s literary rendering of Guevara and Tania reveals the influence of Latin American revolutionary theory—specifically Guevara’s popular formulation of the hombre nuevo—on the East German imagination. Braun attempts to disrupt the enduring opposition of Latin American action to European thought with recourse to its correlates, feminine irrationality and masculine reason. Third and finally, I show how revolutionary subjectivity is relocated in the play’s last scene from masculine, productivist socialization in the factory to gendered, cultural reproduction in Guevara’s and Castro’s relationship to the children of a new socialist society. In Braun’s most marked departure from the historical narrative, he synthesizes impossible, incompatible systems of thought from such disparate thinkers as Guevara, Cervantes, Bloch, and Lenin. The resulting exchange offers a dense network of possible relations within the fields of utopian and practical revolutions. Each is flawed, but none is dispensable.

State solidarity and humanist patrimony Debates about East German cultural politics in the 1970s occurred at a historical and political moment informed by a revised and expanded understanding of socialist humanist internationalism. As Hans Magnus Enzensberger observed in the West German context, Europe found itself not at the center, but rather on the periphery of world revolution.³⁸ Some East German authors were clearly conscious of the perceived shift in world revolutionary fronts and, consequently, sought to address domestic policies that failed to articulate with international political movements. Specifically, they questioned the status of East Germany’s humanist patrimony and the author as its heir and executor. If cultural-political concepts of humanist inheritance (Erbe) and socialization (Erziehung) invested the author with putative political power and authority, how should he or she craft a literary response to domestic and international politics?³⁹ How should

 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Europäische Peripherie,” Kursbuch 2 (1965): 154– 173.  Erbe and Erziehung are glossed in greater detail in Chapter One. For an analysis of questions of power, literature, and politics with a broader reach than can be pursued in this project, see David Bathrick, Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

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he or she reformulate the relation of the domestic and the international at a historical moment when revolution could no longer be located in an East German or even European arena? In reference to these and other questions, expressions of international solidarity became both symptomatic and constitutive of critical assessments of European socialism behind the Iron Cutrain in the wake of Stalinism. East Germans were poorly positioned to pursue a nationally grounded, antiStalinist program given their own official genealogy of antifascist politics and culture, and imposed socialist revolution.⁴⁰ As David Bathrick argues: Whereas other East bloc intellectuals drew upon nationalist and religious discourses to articulate an anticommunist and/or anti-Soviet form of resistance, the coupling of nationalism with the ideology and criminality of Nazism during the Third Reich had effectively foreclosed any move toward such a tradition within German postwar political culture.⁴¹

If the East Germans had no recourse to a national alternative, they did have a tradition of ambivalent identifications with Latin America. Via increased international attention to Latin American revolutionary struggles in the wake of the Cuban revolution of 1959, followed by the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, many East German authors began—at least tacitly—to identify with contemporary Latin American revolutionary subjects.⁴² Increasingly, literature that represented revolutionary violence turned to Latin American locales and struggles for subject-agency in the face of US neoimperialism. This turn was motivated by East German authors’ desire for historical agency in the shadow of the Cold War, but also by identifications with the historical position of Latin America relative to foreign interests and interventions.⁴³ An an-

 See Bathrick, Powers of Speech, 10 – 13; Patricia Herminghouse, “Confronting the ‘Blank Spots of History’: GDR Culture and the Legacy of ‘Stalinism’” in German Studies Review 14.2 (1991): 345 – 365; and Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR, (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuchverlag, 2000).  Bathrick, Powers of Speech, 228.  The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day nuclear standoff between US and Cuban and Soviet military forces in October 1962. Soviet plans to station nuclear missiles in Cuba in response to a US decision to station nuclear weapons in Europe were met with a US blockade of Cuba, which the Soviets regarded as an act of aggression. The conflict was resolved when the USSR agreed that it would not station nuclear weapons in Cuba, and the US agreed not to invade Cuba and to begin dismantling weapons in Turkey and Italy.  Such a self-positioning is in keeping with German colonial texts on Latin America which, as Susanne Zantop showed, are organized around structures of triangulation that enable a flexible positioning of Germans in relation at times to the colonizing powers and at times to the colonized, effectively providing a means of “rewriting one’s own place in history.” Susanne Zantop,

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tiimperialist political project in Latin America thus held strongly intellectual and affective appeal. At the same time as this line of geocultural thinking acknowledges a structural and historical articulation of Soviet, East German, and Latin American conflicts, I should note that my discussion of Braun’s Guevara or the Sun State as a critical work is not intended as part of a body of criticism that assesses East German cultural production wholly in terms of dissidence. Formal innovations in East German texts—including Braun’s—should not be reduced to attempts to evade censorship.⁴⁴ I insist that plays set in Latin America cannot be reduced to allegories of East Germany, and take my cue instead from Hörnigk, whose work convincingly demonstrates that dramatists who took up the idea of Latin America in 1970s East Germany responded to the aesthetic challenges of a fractured unity of time, place, and action in theaters of revolutionary conflict that could no longer be limited to Europe. Their innovations emerged in no small part as an attempt to account for both the European theater of socialist revolution, and ongoing socialist revolutions in Latin America.⁴⁵ Critics’ repeated disavowal of Latin American specificity suggests to me an anxiety about engagement with ideas that fall outside the province of German studies as it has been traditionally demarcated. My reading counters literary historical models in which allegory underwrites the reduction of East German literature to the status of media substitute.⁴⁶ Far from being narrowly focused national allegories, dramas that turned toward explicitly internationalist subjects and locales, and away from logics of productivism and internally-oriented factory genres, held the potential to revise complex geocultural relationships. Antiimperialist political projects in Latin America were supported by an array of long-standing political and cultural institutions in East Germany. Within its broader internationalist program, the East German

“Colonial Legends, Postcolonial Legacies,”A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies, ed. Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 198. Many scholars of postwar Germany have also pointed to more general trends to position Germany as a victim of World War II without recourse to extra-European referents.  For this argument, see Wilifried Grauert, Ästhetische Modernisierung bei Volker Braun (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1995).  Hörnigk, “Erinnerung an Revolutionen,” 150.  See Otto F. Riehwolt’s line of argument about the ersatz-function of theater (i. e., theater’s potential to function as a replacement for a free press). “Theaterarbeit. Über den Wirkungszusammenhang von Bühne, Dramatik, Kulturpolitik und Publikum,” in Literatur der DDR, vol. 11 of Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schmitt (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983), 133 – 86.

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state expressed a special interest in Latin America, as a 1963 memo from the cultural division of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs makes clear.⁴⁷ Humanist patrimony remained a salient theme in East German internationalism long after the problem of diplomatic recognition was resolved in the early seventies. In the case of Latin America, Alexander von Humboldt continued to be an essential figure for articulating historical virtue, cultural patrimony and solidarity in the myriad attempts to represent a genealogy of antifascism in East German literature. In this respect, literature overlapped substantially with an official politics of international solidarity. Minister of Culture Alexander Abusch had affirmed the symbolic importance of von Humboldt’s legacy in the Americas to a generation of antifascist Germans who returned from exile in Latin America to help found a socialist Germany.⁴⁸ Braun pressed the claim to new limits, embedding the independence-era von Humboldt in a contemporary Latin American revolutionary context. The resulting transnational, transcontextual interruptions reposition East Germany’s socialist New Humanitiy vis-à-vis its most enduring Latin American counterpart, Guevara’s hombre nuevo.

Expressionist redux: the New Man and the production of socialism in Volker Braun The new sociopolitical orders envisioned by revolutionary movements often emplot new kinds of subjects; the New Man in German literature represents one such literary-political figuration of potential and change. The New Man constructed in East German socialist literature reprised a longer series of ideologically divergent visions of ideal subjects from Expressionism through National Socialism. As politically different as these visions were, they shared a concern for a capacity for action and for the relationship between the individual and the collective in modern society. East German cultural politics had reason to obscure these commonalities in favor of an alternative cultural genealogy and a revolutionary subject that broke with negatively valued pasts in favor of a utopian future. Strikingly, Braun chose to adopt the formal markings of Expressionist drama in the anti-Expressionist climate of East Germany. Linking Expressionism and humanism in the dramatic space of Latin America threatened the East German  Stiftung Archiv des Schriftstellerverbands, Akademie der Künste, SV969.  Alexander Abusch, “Alexander von Humboldt. Gelehrter—Humanist—Freund der Völker,” in Tradition und Gegenwart des sozialistischen Humanismus (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Marxistische Blätter, 1971), 12– 18; See also SAPMO-BArch DY13/1887.

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doctrine of antifascist humanism as an antidote to a dangerous and unwieldy Expressionism.⁴⁹ Like Expressionist plays, Guevara reduces character to roles or types and uses extensive declamatory dialogue to exaggerate their emotional intensity. Guevara inverts the traditional structure of the Expressionist Stationendrama, which typically focuses on progressive suffering and death punctuated by conflicts between traditional authorities and a resistant hero. The stakes of Stationendramen are high—frequently the fate of humanity itself. Through his choice of form, Braun engages Expressionism’s urgent and emphatic subjectivity. At the same time, however, his inversion of the genre implicitly rejects historical pessimism. Rather than end in death as a marker of opportunity foreclosed, Braun’s inverted Stationendrama ends in unresolved possibility. A departure from his earlier texts about factory production, the Expressionist New Man stands resolutely outside of the productive sphere. The limits of factory genres were apparent in East Germany after Braun’s required revision of Kipper Paul Bauch (Dumper Paul Bauch, 1967) and the production bans on Heiner Müller’s Die Umsiedlerin (The Settler, 1961, based roughly on Anna Seghers’s 1950 story of the same title) and Der Bau (The Construction Site, 1965, based on Erich Neutsch’s novel Spur der Steine [Traces of Stones, 1964]).⁵⁰ These and other controversies prompted authors to turn away from models traditionally afforded by socialist realism, which was already in flux by the 1970s.⁵¹ The extent to which such a turn foregrounded international structures that generate qualitatively different revolutionary subjects only begins to unfurl in Braun’s Guevara. On the one hand, Braun elected a more interior, subjective aesthetic in selectively adopting Expressionist forms and figures. On the other hand, he turned concurrently toward an objective moment that inheres in the documentary character of his drama. Braun exploited the resulting formal tension to reinscribe the geocultural tensions brought to bear on East German revolution by competing con-

 Exemplary of official anti-Expressionism is Lukács’s Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (The Destruction of Reason, 1954). Mandelkow identifies the Expressionism debates of 1937– 1938 as the most important precursor to East German discussions of Erbe. Karl Robert Mandelkow, “Die literarische und kulturpolitische Bedeutung des Erbes,” in Die Literatur der DDR, ed. Hans Jürgen Schmitt, vol. 11 of Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983), 88.  For a brief overview of production dramas, see Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte, 214– 224.  As regards the socialist real, Jameson’s criticisms of western Marxists’ narrow interpretation of Lukács to the exclusion of other possible readings which do not mechanically and prescriptively reduce the real, but instead consider it historically as a mode of narrating the concrete, applies to the term’s commonsensical deployment by some Soviet critics as well. See Jameson, Marxism and Form, 161– 163.

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cepts of individual subjectivity and collective action in actual revolutionary situations. Expressionism’s initially more psychologically and aesthetically driven writing became unambiguously concerned with social and political themes as World War I wore on. The violent extremes to which prototypical New Men had previously been driven by familial conflict were gradually replaced by more public, social, technological, and industrial sites of conflict. They were no less violent for it.⁵² Expressionist authors cast individual transformations undergone by the New Man, whose development brought him into conflict with existing social orders, in a spiritual light; violent confrontations were both outcomes and catalysts of individual redemption.⁵³ The sacralization of conflict consistently underwrote violence as a political imperative.⁵⁴ Scholars such as Douglas Kellner have drawn attention to theatrical ritual as fundamental to Expressionists’ interest in political transformation, describing the theater as a space of “collective, ritualistic aesthetic experience”: “Various Expressionist dramatists and theorists believed that theater could indeed help generate the New Man through the rapt attention and ritualistic social nature of performed drama.”⁵⁵

 Walter Riedel, Der Neue Mensch. Mythos und Wirklichkeit (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1970), 4; Douglas Kellner, “Expressionist Literature and the Dream of the ‘New Man,’” Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, ed. Stephen Eric Brenner and Douglas Kellner (South Hadley: Bergin, 1963), 167– 168 and 73.  Kellner has termed this phenomenon “secularized religiosity.” “Expressionist Literature,” 169. Walter Riedel analyzes the Christian elements of the New Man’s dramatic conflict with the existing social order. Der Neue Mensch, 3 – 4.  Violence and redemption have long been paired in the Christian tradition, and the celebration of the individual that emerges out of biologistic concepts associated with Darwin and Nietzsche reception likewise affirms violence as necessary to preordained progress and natural order. In this vein, Riedel identifies archetypes of New Men that draw on two basic, opposing premises: (1) If Darwin’s assessment of human evolution is correct, then the possibility of further evolution obtains. Men can and must actively intervene in the process of evolution to maximize its outcome; or (2) man is basically good but has been corrupted. A New Man can emerge through a radical change in social and material relations. Each assumption is accompanied by a different set of political imperatives, but each of them requires some form of violent intervention into the existing natural or social order.  Kellner, “Expressionist Literature,” 171. Kellner argues: “Expressionists literally expected liberation—and often salvation—from their writing and were perhaps the last avant-garde movement to believe that writing and the printed word could radically transform the artist and other human beings,” (ibid., 166). I would amend: the last Western European movement to embrace this position. Many theorists in fields from anthropology to performance studies have written on the relation of theater and ritual (including Richard Schechner, Edward Schieffelin, and Victor Turn-

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The rhetoric of redemption in Expressionist drama was curiously a reaction against and indebted to technology and rapid industrialization.⁵⁶ Authors such as Georg Kaiser (1878 – 1945) and Ernst Jünger (1895 – 1998) highlighted the destructive capacity of technology, but also the possibility of redemption emerging from the experience of violence or from the violent failure of industrial capitalism and a romantic return to the land. By contrast, Bertolt Brecht’s Mann ist Mann (A Man’s a Man, 1926) presented a more ambivalent dramatization of Taylorist practices, their extension to socialization, and the production of human subjects that rejected an Expressionist logic of redemptive sacrifice. Productivism, the dominant ideology to which all of these authors spoke, focused on the challenges to and potential of the human subject.⁵⁷ Anson Rabinbach argues that social modernity and social rationalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were articulated around the rationalization of the body itself. But, like Expressionism’s New Man, productivism could— and did—accommodate “liberal, socialist, authoritarian, and even fascist solutions.”⁵⁸ Romantic anticapitalist discourse sought to overcome the increasing alienation in industrial society through a return to pre-industrial forms of community and a retreat from wage labor; by contrast, socialists increasingly figured workers as leaders on the path toward a new society and a New Man.⁵⁹ Nazi in-

er); David Kertzer treats politics itself as ritual and performance in Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).  The relationship of technological development and pre-modern, heroic-messianic traditions has been elucidated by Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).  Anson Rabinbach defines productivism as “the belief that human society and nature are linked by the primacy and identity of all productive activity, whether of laborers, of machines, or of natural forces.” He highlights the utopian appeal of productivist ideology: “The dynamic language of energy was also central to many utopian social and political ideologies of the early twentieth century: Taylorism, bolshevism, and fascism. All of these movements, though in different ways, viewed the worker as a machine capable of infinite productivity and, if possessed with true consciousness, resistant to fatigue. They conceived of the body both as a productive force and as a political instrument whose energies could be subjugated to scientifically designed systems of organization.” Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 3.  Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 272. Kellner makes a similar statement with reference to Expressionism: “As a response to the prevailing norms and values of bourgeois society, the Expressionists espoused a variety of political positions from left-internationalist to right-nationalist,” (“Expressionist Literature,” 4).  See also Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 281. Kellner locates Expressionism in a longer tradition of “extreme individualism” in German culture, and especially to Romanticism as the first

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dustrial initiatives, such as the Amt Schönheit der Arbeit (Office for the Beauty of Labor) and the leisure organization Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy), systematized and promoted an idealized image of the worker and work as a national-spiritual phenomenon.⁶⁰ Laboring bodies also became the most enduring conceit of the postwar socialist New Man, which envisioned labor itself as an instantiation of communitas. The production process rather than revolutionary violence per se assumed the aura of the sacred. Expressionism’s secularized religious narrative is in evidence from the earliest scenes of Braun’s play. His sacralization of Guevara qua Christian redemptive figure troubles objective, productivist ideologies that underwrote East German socialism’s reasoned political narrative. Already an international icon and martyr by the time Braun wrote his play, the cult figure of Guevara bears an uncanny resemblance to the kind of secularized religiosity that prevails in German Expressionist drama.⁶¹ Described by the Bolivian rangers in Braun’s opening scene as “Christ the agitator,” his body is burned and hidden, lest the place of his death become a site of pilgrimage. His untimely end is bound to the possibility of new life—even resurrection—and of revolutionary hope. The play’s reverse chronological structure reinforces Guevara’s desire to create “a New Man, begincultural movement to perceive alienation in social modernity (“Expressionist Literature,” 7– 8). Although romantic anticapitalism often had affinities with collective forms of social organization rather than the kind of individualist impulse Kellner describes, his look back toward nineteenthcentury Romantic traditions that favor creation over production remains highly relevant.  Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 283. From 1933 – 1939, Schönheit der Arbeit was a subsidiary of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Workers Front), which replaced independent unions under National Socialism. It was responsible for worker safety and workplace quality campaigns. Kraft durch Freude (1933 – 1945) promoted organized free-time activities for workers. It, too, was associated with the German Worker’s Front, and aimed to improve productivity by promoting physical activity, national pride, and collective identity in service of a model political body.  Riedel also notes the similarity of Christian and communist visions of the New Man: “Religious revival movements and Marxist movements to transform the world—two fundamentally different movements for world change—agree that no essential change to human beings is required, but rather a reorientation of human thought and action; both human types (the Christian and the communist) share a similar missionary zeal for social good and aspire systematically to develop the new human type. The communist New Man goes so far as to subordinate morality to the class struggle of the proletarian,” (Der Neue Mensch, 3). Ian Wallace argues that Braun’s play and a more general preoccupation with suicide and death in his writing around this time advance an understanding of death itself as an achievement of true life. See “The Pyramid and the Mountain: Volker Braun in the 1970s,” in The GDR under Honecker: 1971 – 1981, ed. Ian Wallace (Dundee: University of Dundee 1981), 43 – 62, here 52. Questioning the relationship between suicide and self-sacrifice in the case of Guevara in particular invokes and significantly revises a Christian condemnation of suicide and celebration of self-sacrifice.

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ning with the end / because he must be killed.”⁶² In the play’s dramatic progression, Guevara’s death is the end with which Braun begins. The secularized religious elements of the Expressionist New Man on which Braun draws complicate any narrowly political reading of Guevara’s dramatic formation or destruction insofar as they call into question the sufficiency of reasoned political ideologies of production and revolution. This is perhaps unsurprising given Braun’s preoccupation with Bloch, whose mystical approach to the material speaks to the inadequacy of reason to address such fundamentally human categories as hope.⁶³ In Braun’s literary rendering of Guevara’s historical struggle, the unfolding drama of socialist revolution ultimately requires the charisma of a redemptive figure, which is to say, a voluntarist subject. The critical implications of adapting Expressionist forms to an anti-Expressionist cultural politics of socialist humanism and internationalism take on revolutionary proportions in Braun’s play, radically refiguring the role of subjective factors in revolution and challenging the compatibility of productivism with socialist revolution. Braun’s voluntarist anti-hero contrasts sharply with official representations of the New Man that closely approximated a Soviet vision of ideal revolutionary subjects. Expressionist visions rooted in the struggle of alienated subjects against alienating institutions were understood to be irrelevant in a socialist society that had overcome alienation and stood in a positive relation to history. The challenges of production were instead thought to provide exemplary historical opportunities for socialist workers to develop new and heroic traits.⁶⁴ And yet in examining the relationship of past and present men to the production of New Men, conflicts among laborers and contradictions within the labor process itself consistently raised questions about the kind of raw human material (Menschenmaterial) that was in fact being used in the production of New Men during the construction years. The discomfort such questions provoked was largely responsible for harsh, official criticisms of a number of Müller’s production plays, including the above referenced The Settler and The Construction Site. A Soviet vision of the New Man posed unique questions in the East German context insofar as the process of forging the New Man could not be seen as identical with revolution per se. Bernhard Greiner explains: “The revolution was imposed by a victorious power; it was not met with a people’s movement after the

 Braun, Guevara, 193.  See n. 9.  Eva Kaufmann, “Vorgriffe: Entwürfe entfalteter Humanität in Literaturen sozialistischer Länder,” in Tendenzen und Beispiele. Zur DDR-Literatur in den siebziger Jahren, ed. Hans Kaufmann (Leipzig: Philip Reclam jun., 1981), 85 – 86.

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defeat of the workers’ movement by National Socialism and the total collapse of Germany.”⁶⁵ The executors of what Greiner calls a “deformed revolution” were confronted with a situation in which their claim to ideological antifascist legitimacy was incommensurate with the subjective positions of the majority of the German population at the end of World War II.⁶⁶ And as their interests were subordinated to those of the Soviet occupiers, Germans in the Soviet Zone experienced an “insufficient identification […] with the processes of socialist revolution instituted by the SED.”⁶⁷ Rather than address potentially contradictory, subjective elements of socialist revolution, party leaders focused on objective relationships and the ongoing revolutionary process out of which the New Man would emerge. They emphasized productive activity and class solidarity, often to the exclusion of the subjective constitution of individuals engaged in production. Gerd Hennig’s Trotskyist terminology captures an important aspect of such discourse when he contends that productivity becomes a typical measure of revolutionary success in “bureaucratically deformed societies.” Imitating Stalinist economic and political forms, he argues, East German socialism deliberately restricted mass activities that might otherwise have allowed East German subjects to understand themselves as subjects of social change. Instead, under Soviet occupation, mass cultural activity was eliminated in favor of administrative directives. This bureaucratic separation of labor from culture and its consequent separation of state from society reinforced an antivoluntarist cultural politics that dated back to the early Soviet rejection of Proletkult.⁶⁸ Rather than encourage popular expression through artistic and more broadly cultural forms, the state redirected social expression toward a quantitatively defined productive sphere: “Culture,” Hennig explains, “becomes a means for economic ends.” ⁶⁹ Insofar as industrial labor’s dominant metric is objective and quantitative, it excludes the individual from a range of possible subjective roles in society. When

 Bernhard Greiner, “Im Zeichen des Aufbruchs: die Literatur der fünfziger Jahre,” in Die Literatur der DDR, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schmitt, vol. 11 of Hansers Sozialgeschichte der Literatur (Munich and Vienna: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983), 337.  Greiner, “Im Zeichen des Aufbruchs,” 337.  Gerd Hennig, “‘Mass Cultural Activity’ in the GDR: On Cultural Politics in Bureaucratically Deformed Transitional Societies,” New German Critique 3 (1974): 39.  A proletarian cultural organization made up of numerous local chapters, Proletkult aimed to create a new, revolutionary art appropriate to the revolutionary experience of the people and was associated with various avant-garde and modernist experiments. Initially funded by the revolutionary government, the group came into conflict with the state when it sought greater artistic autonomy. It was eventually defunded and rejected at the urging of high-ranking Party members, including Lenin himself.  Hennig, “‘Mass Cultural Activity’ in the GDR,” 40 – 48.

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production lags, the bureaucratic state’s only recourse for self-legitimization is to ideology.⁷⁰ Culturally critical forms such as Braun’s pre-Guevara factory dramas, with their enduring hope for a utopian socialism, exposed contradictions between the state’s theoretical claims, grounded in productivist ideology, and real existing socialism.⁷¹ In a 1973 interview, Braun explicitly drew attention to the importance of more expansive notions of production that might account for the subjective: “Production must encompass more than the simply technical, it must be more humane. For me it is about the dubiousness of all production today, about the fact that man is not simply a producer of goods, but of his own personality, of human relationships.”⁷² Even as he approximates the dominant language of socialist personality development in East Germany, Braun’s recourse to the hombre nuevo in Guevara challenges the primacy that East German socialist language grants to the objective determination of conditions for the development of personalities under socialism and, in turn, the communist personality to come.⁷³ He identifies the problems with productivism, and yet seeks to sustain a revised theory of the socialist personality—one that attends to aesthetics not as a means to an end, but as a site of contestation and point of departure.⁷⁴ By shifting the locus and metric of revolutionary success to a world stage, Braun effectively side-steps productivism and Soviet Marxism to foreground subjective experiences of revolution. The primacy of the subjective in Latin American Marxism, underscored in Braun’s choice of form by the primacy of the subjective in German Expressionism, challenges the productivist logics with which both traditions (Latin American Marxism and German Expressionism) engage. The result is a critique that is simultaneously East German and emphatically internationalist.

 Hennig, “‘Mass Cultural Activity’ in the GDR,” 42.  Examples of his earlier industrial texts include Kipper Paul Bauch (Dumper Paul Bauch, 1967); its revised version Die Kipper (The Dumpers, 1972); numerous versions of Hinze und Kunze (1973); and Tinka (1976).  Gerhardt Csejka, “Praktischer Dichter. Begegnung mit Volker Braun,” Neue Literatur (Bucharest) 1 (1973): 54, cited in Jay Rosellini, Volker Braun, 33. Braun makes a similar observation around the same time in his working theses on literature and historical consciousness: Es genügt nicht, 134.  Kulturpolitisches Wörterbuch, 552– 553.  On the role of aesthetics, taste, and humanist Erbe in the development of the socialist personality, see Kulturpolitisches Wörterbuch, 553.

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Productive contradictions with Latin American Marxisms In referencing not just German Expressionism, but also the Cuban revolution and the historical Guevara, Braun offers a related model for thinking the New Man that is rooted in subjective forms neglected, and even suppressed, in East German cultural policy. Guevara did not see the material relations of production as constitutive for revolutionary change; instead, he warned against productivism as a continuation of pre-revolutionary capitalism. The Cuban revolution’s theorists, including Guevara himself, emphasized subjective conditions as key to successful revolution in order to explain the possibility of revolution in a country whose economy was dominated by semi-feudal agricultural relations. A Cuban commitment to proletarianization through revolution also contrasted with an East German insistence on revolutionary subjects already possessed of proletarian class identifications. For this reason, too, Cuban theorists foregrounded subjective rather objective categories of revolutionary consciousness.⁷⁵ The Cuban approach resonates strongly with the historical conditions of revolution in Russia that required a comparable, Leninist reformulation of Marx.⁷⁶ For Guevara, making the New Man entailed unmaking and revalorizing old categories of individual and collective motivations at the same time as it required a redistribution of wealth and a new division of labor. Unlike East German models that presumed a predisposition toward antifascism, and, by extension, anticapitalism, Guevara emphasized how active choices by individuals create subjective conditions that favor revolution. Guevara’s New Man was born of the desire of individuals no longer fettered by old systems of educational and material privilege to measure up to the revolution’s achievements, goals, and social values. In Guevara’s subjective model of proletarianization, education is regarded as part of the revolutionary process. It comprises processual self-development, conscious adjustment to a new society, and the self-reflexive revision of relationships between the individual and the collective. Guevara’s notion of education emphasizes the popular generation of knowledge by and for the Cuban people, and closely resembles independence-era revolutionary and author José Martí’s concept of the natural man (hombre natural). Martí’s emphasis on autochthonous creation in opposition to the imitation or reproduction of European thought in the Americas was itself key to the development of heterodox Marxist traditions

 Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “El socialismo y el hombre nuevo en Cuba,” in El socialismo y el hombre nuevo, ed. José Aricó (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1998), 13 – 17.  The historical and structural relation of Russia and Latin America alike as marginal to European Marxism will be taken up in Chapter Four.

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in Hispanic America.⁷⁷ José Carlos Mariátegui’s remarks on pedagogy in his Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 1928) no doubt also played an important part in Guevara’s thinking, prompting him to relate issues of education and culture to social economy broadly conceived.⁷⁸ With so much emphasis on subjective rather than objective conditions for on-going revolution, Guevara’s hombre nuevo stands in opposition to a productivist neuer Mensch. This extended to his antagonism toward a productivist aesthetics, his term for prescriptive understandings of socialist realism, which he explicitly criticized in “Socialism and the New Man” (1965).⁷⁹ Although Guevara consistently recognized the importance of meeting basic material needs through production (especially in his economic writings), even his assessment of the planned economy emphasizes the subjective experience of labor, placing him squarely in conflict with a genealogy of scientific Marxism that strips labor of its social and cultural dimensions.⁸⁰ The personal and unabashedly emotional experience of revolution conveyed in Guevara’s writings produces a vision of the New Man grounded in feeling as much as if not more than in action: proletarianization may occur in revolutionary activity, but there is no revolutionary activity without love and the capacity to extend that love to social commitment.⁸¹ Braun’s dramatic rendering of identifiable subjects of Latin American revolutions and revolutionary theory incorporates vectors of internationalist solidarity from outside of orthodox Marxism-Leninism to revise socialist humanist tradition. Unlike official East German articulations of international solidarity, the guerrilla’s historical specificity in Guevara destabilizes the New Man’s capacity to function as a universal revolutionary subject and, with it, the role ascribed to the East German state and its humanist tradition in the pursuit of world socialist revolution. The political and the literary subjects of revolution are united in such a way that each is radically contingent on the other. The New Man as an ideal or universal type itself functions as a limit that is both contested and con José Martí, “Nuestra América,” in Cuba, Nuestra América, Los Estados Unidos, ed. Roberto Fernández Retamar (Mexico City: Siglo Vientiuno, 1976), 111– 120.  José Carlos Mariátegui, Siete Ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Barcelona: Red ediciones S.L., 2011).  Guevara offers a lengthy critique of socialist realism that would likely have appealed to Braun in its emphasis on the processual and educational, but also on art as contradictory and thereby productive of new socialist subjects and relationships. See “El socialismo,” 12– 13.  Guevara, “El socialismo,” 15.  See Guevara, “El socialismo,” 15 and Guevara, “Debemos aprender a eliminar a los viejos conceptos,” in El socialismo y el hombre nuevo, ed. José Aricó (Mexico City: Siglo Vientiuno, 1998), 18 – 26.

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stantly reinscribed: the hombre nuevo is no less universal in its conception than the neuer Mensch, but by preserving the dialectical movement between the two formulations, the revolutionary subject of Braun’s Guevara achieves something different than could either figure on its own. Removed from the industrial centers that dominate Braun’s earlier work as sites for the production of goods and of political subjects, Guevara draws attention to external loci of struggle and underscores unsuccessful international solidarity both with and within Latin America. For all that literary treatments of Latin America have been read as allegories of East German domestic politics, Braun’s turn to el hombre nuevo has much greater critical effect than an allegorical reading alone could account for. As even this cursory discussion of competing socialist traditions shows, the figure of el hombre nuevo makes visible relationships between the sites and subjects of revolution located within and beyond the purview of real existing socialism more by virtue of its difference from der neue Mensch than by its similarity.

Transcontextual interruptions The scenes that follow the fictional Guevara’s death (that is, dramatically, not chronologically or historically) correspond roughly to standard reconstructions of the historical Bolivian guerrilla, based on guerrilleros’ diaries and state military documents.⁸² Historical persons known to have participated in and had close contacts with the guerrilleros are present on stage as named characters (Bolivian Communist Party leader Mario Monje Molina; Bolivian Ranger Gary Prado; Bolivian communist and guerrillero Inti Paredo; Juan Vitalio Acuña Núñez, a.k.a. Joaqín; Restituto Flores, a.k.a. el médico), but they are also identified in terms of seven archetypal roles or locales in each scene’s title. These include THE FUNCTIONARY, THE MASSES, THE WOODS, and THE DESK. Despite the clear correspondence of historical figures to characters on the stage, Braun explicitly denied that Guevara was a documentary or even that any of the characters were based on real people.⁸³

 For an English translation of key documents, see Daniel James, The Complete Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara and Other Captured Documents (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000).  “The piece is not documentary. The figures are freely invented.” Volker Braun, cited in materials distributed to actors in the official East German premiere of Guevara, nearly a decade after its writing and seven years after its first publication. Institut Stiftung Theaterdokumentation an der Akademie der Künste, ID453, Blatt 18. In West Germany, the play premiered 12 December 1977 in Mannheim. Rosellini, Volker Braun, 93.

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Ample evidence suggests that Braun’s statement may have been politically motivated. Following the play’s unusually complex vetting by party officials and concomitant debates about where, when, and under whose direction it should be staged, its planned 1977 premiere at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin was cancelled after dress rehearsals were already underway.⁸⁴ Matthias Braun’s careful archival investigations both confirm and complicate long-standing suspicions that the cancellation was at the behest of the Cuban embassy, suggesting that Cuban objections served as a convenient pretext to deflect attention from domestic concerns about the play.⁸⁵ Official documents recommended that a series of changes be made in close consultation with the author, the effect of which might produce one of two outcomes: “Two variations would be possible: 1. Deepen the historical accuracy of the piece. 2. Completely abstract the material from concrete historical circumstances.”⁸⁶ While the poem “Material IV: Guevara” could be published, with its clear, typographical delineation of documentary and literary moments in the text (albe such a distinction tenuous at best), the play’s refusal to draw a clear line between the concrete-historical and the abstract-literary encountered a practical limit to the emplottment of historical, political subjects in East Germany. Legible in the critical and political discomfort produced by rendering certain kinds of revolutionary subjects literarily, the practical limit was itself bound up with a historical limit to aesthetic solidarity and practices grounded in aesthetic generalization broadly speaking. Ulla Hahn coined the term aesthetic generalization to describe how an author represents a specific event or series of events in a new, aestheticized context in order to elicit partisan solidarity with a role that is no longer identical with a historical agent. ⁸⁷ The principles of aesthetic generalization that underwrite so many operative forms are at odds with the regionally and historically divergent

 A 1976 student production at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig should have preceded the official premiere, but was cancelled in rehearsals. Rosellini, Volker Braun, 93 and 172– 73 n1; Matthias Braun, “‘Che Guevara oder der Sonnenstaat.’ Bedenken hatten nicht nur die kubanischen Genossen,” in Volker Braun, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Berlin: Theater der Zeit und Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus, 1999), 125.  Matthias Braun, “Bedenken hatten nicht nur die kubanischen Genossen,” 126. Hosek also confirms this account of events, citing an unpublished phone interview with Volker Braun (Sun, Sex, and Socialism, 121).  ZK der SED Abt. Kultur: Aktennotiz vom 23.7.1976, LAB 900 IV D 2.802/653, cited in Matthias Braun, “Bedenken hatten nicht nur die kubanischen Genossen,” 126. Matthias Braun also cites other, closely related documents to the same effect.  Ulla Hahn, Literatur in der Aktion. Zur Entwicklung operativer Literaturformen in der Bundesrepublik (Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1987), 49.

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articulations of new humanity in Braun’s drama. He upsets the usual dialectical tension of the historical and that which is rendered structurally, and even ethically, generalizable by imposing aesthetic form. His appropriation and adaptation of a literary form that is imbued with both a highly politicized, literary historical resonance and extraliterary political content troubles the very boundaries between the literary and the historical. In Braun’s modified documentary mode, there is no adequation of form to content via aesthetic generalization; instead, Braun confronts the reader or public with the performance of a genre’s inadequacy through its inversion and calculated interruptions of the play’s historical indexicality and—with the inclusion of the intraplay—its formal trajectory. As Matthias Braun makes clear, the scenes featuring Bumholdt and Bedray, and those featuring Tania, consistently provoked concern in high-level cultural deliberations surrounding Guevara. Recommendations ranged from cutting the Bumholdt and Bedray scenes entirely to reworking the scene THE WOMAN such that no romantic relationship between Tania and Guevara was implied.⁸⁸ Ultimately, Braun did neither, retaining both indexical and fictionalized systems of reference whose tensions marked the limits of aesthetic solidarity that his revolutionary subjects relentlessly approached. In addition to interrupting commonsensical notions of history and literature, context and text, the dis-integrating figures of Bumholdt and Bedray interrupt genealogies of humanist patrimony and international solidarity. Braun’s representation of Alexander von Humboldt in the parodic figure of Bumholdt, in particular, complicates narratives of internationalism and the legacy of socialist humanism. In order to recognize the cultural-political reach of reference and parody that are central to the intraplay, it is instructive to recall the state’s official commitment to von Humboldt’s legacy. As already discussed in Chapter One, cultural organizations including the Liga für Völkerfreundschaft and the Deutsch-Lateinamerikanische Gesellschaft (DeuLaG) positioned themselves in a cultural line that extended back to von Humboldt, who was figured time and again as the embodiment of German humanism and antiimperialism. Braun’s dramatic reinvention of von Humboldt highlights the latter’s relationships to leaders of Latin American independence movements and positions him as a precursor to scientific socialism’s contemporary solidarity with Latin American struggles for autonomy.⁸⁹ DeuLaG explicitly and repeatedly criticized West Germany for misappropriating von Humboldt’s legacy in Latin America

 Matthias Braun, “Bedenken hatten nicht nur die kubanischen Genossen,” 125 – 126.  On both the Liga and DeuLaG, see Chapter One.

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as a means to concealed, imperialist economic ends.⁹⁰ Guevara selectively appropriates an image of von Humboldt consonant with DeuLaG educational and cultural materials, but uses it to provide an incisive and potentially inflammatory parody of von Humboldt and, by extension, of East German solidarity itself. Regis Debray enjoyed no similar status in the East; the mere suggestion of some political proximity between the well-known French theorist and von Humboldt would likely have produced discomfort. Parody, according to Bakhtin, both evokes and displaces its referent. Transcontextual repetition is a specific mode of parody in which exact repetition serves an ironic function.⁹¹ This is especially the case in documentary drama, which by its very nature trades more frequently in repetition than most genres, often citing historical documents verbatim. Guevara traverses multiple citational texts and contexts. The play’s transcontextual movements occur across historical constellations (e. g., Latin American independence-era and anti-neocolonial struggles) and seemingly disparate, place-specific political philosophies (e. g., competing concepts of new humanity); they traverse sites of historically documented utterances, their dramatic re-formation, and their theatrical performance. Characters reference specific political and theoretical positions expressed by their historical counterparts, but, stripped of their original contexts and juxtaposed to one another and to the stage guerrilla, they displace the broader systems of thought, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity in which those positions would otherwise have been communicable. Braun’s parody thus highlights the potential pitfalls of a solidarity that attends insufficiently to transnational and transhistorical dimensions of communication. The intraplay capitalizes on serial displacements to underscore a failed or incomplete communication of German and Latin American utopias among European revolutionary subjects. The examples of failed communication between Bumholdt and Bedray, an anticolonial humanist and a contemporary Marxist theorist, are many. From their earliest appearances, the two figures advance competing notions of progress that inform their stage positions and ideological positions in each of three, non-consecutive scenes. Bumholdt measures his progress by the excavation of the past, repeatedly countering Bedray’s insistence that they climb “up” with his own forceful “Down toward humanity!” As Bumholdt descends, Bedray moves upward and out of view of the public. Linguistic mis-

 SAPMO-BArch DY13/2847a; SAPMO-BArch DY13/2847b, “Statut der ‘Deutsch-lateinamerikanischen Gesellschaft in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik.’” See also Alexander Abusch, “Alexander von Humboldt,” 22– 23.  Margaret Rose in Gordon Slethaug, “Parody,” in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 603 – 605.

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steps, too, reveal the characters’ inability to communicate about their respective investigations. Bumholdt corrects Bedray’s question “Has someone happened?” (“Ist jemand passiert?”), assuming that Bedray confuses the French passer (to pass) and the German passieren (to occur): BEDRAY: Hey, Hugo, has someone happened? (ist jemand passiert?) BUMHOLDT: stares into the hole, irritated: Has something happened. Denis, one says— looks up: What’s supposed to have happened? (Ist etwas passiert. Denis, es heißt—blickt hinauf: Was soll denn passiert sein?) BEDRAY: What do you mean something happened? BUMHOLDT: You asked whether something— BEDRAY: What do you mean something? Someone! BUMHOLDT: What do you mean someone? BEDRAY resigned: Nothing is happening at all.⁹²

Apparently unable to fathom Bedray’s formulation as deliberate, Bumholdt’s interest lies in historical transactions and artifacts (what). Bedray’s interest, by contrast, lies in contemporary agents in and of themselves (who) as he waits for new humanity to appear before him in the shape of Guevara’s guerrilla. Never content with a single referent, Braun ups the interpretive ante with an allusion to the Sun State described in Tommaso Campanella’s seventeenth-century utopian depiction of the Incan Empire, Civitas solis (1602). He thereby also evokes Ernst Bloch’s utopian opposition of Campanella and Thomas Moore.⁹³ What does it mean that Bumholdt/von Humboldt, an “enduring example for the progress and liberation of humanity,” according to official East German documents, is intent on excavating a model of ordered utopia (Campanella) that is the opposite of Bloch’s utopia of freedom (Moore)?⁹⁴ The play’s title suggests that the options available to the audience are either Guevara’s impossible struggle or the Sun State excavated by the archeologist Bumholdt, thereby presenting the problem of potentially choosing Latin American revolution over German humanism. At the same time, Guevara’s affinity for the Incan site allows for reading the titular or as linking rather than strictly demarcating utopian visions. Guevara visited the site of the Incan Sun Temple near Lake Titicaca on his 1952 trip across  Braun, Guevara, 182– 183.  Kirchner, Im Bann der Utopie, 115 – 116. Hosek argues that Braun was familiar with the Campanella text directly, as published in a new German translation with a Soviet introduction and commentary in 1955 (Sun, Sex, and Socialism, 122 – 123). Whether his knowledge of the text was direct, indirect, or both, its allusive effect is largely the same.  SAPMO-Barch DY31887, Festschrift “Alexander von Humboldt—Wirkendes Vorbild für Fortschritt und Befreiung der Menschheit.”

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the South American continent. Braun was aware of Guevara’s fascination with Incan culture, and Karl Georg Kayser, director of the play’s Leipzig premiere, included excerpts from Soviet historian Josef Lawrezki’s biography of Guevara— which contained a description of Incan society—in the production materials distributed to actors and reproduced in the play’s program.⁹⁵ Excavating the Sun State, Bumholdt and Bedray underscore the connections between European discourses past and present about Latin America, and link traditional intellectual labor to the work of theorizing revolution. And yet, their immaterial and nonsensical language contrasts sharply with real East German cultural politics relative to Latin America and with Braun’s own extensive use of documentary material. Bumholdt interrupts his own pompous archeological discoursing with tongue-twisting children’s rhymes. Instead of modeling solidarity and his expansive notion of humanity, he steals Bedray’s provisions and blames it on the natives. All too willing to accept Bumholdt’s version of events, Bedray advocates violent retaliation. In the end, the latter resumes his waiting for the already decimated guerrilla, more distracted than dissuaded by Bumholdt’s reproaches.⁹⁶ From an apparent aversion to violence in the first scene, Bumholdt’s increasingly physical violence culminates in murdering and cannibalizing Bedray. Bumholdt’s concern for the excavation of humanity, nature, and a more complete understanding of past violence (notably Incan and Aztec human sacrifice) contrasts with his own lack of practical humanity. Bedray’s intellectual pursuits are no less contradictory. Hoping to interview the guerrilleros, he waits pointlessly rather than seeking them out. An addled dilettante, he cites Castro speeches, Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorf’s Romantic poetry, and Bertolt Brecht, but he can neither synthesize their ideas coherently, nor assess their relevance to different historical contexts for revolutionary thought and action. Braun could hardly have conveyed this more aptly than with Bedray’s remark: “‘We made a revolution that is bigger than ourselves,ʼ said Fidel one day under different circumstances.”⁹⁷ Ideas are evacuated from their contexts even as they are repeated faithfully by the European theorist of revolution.

 Theaterdokumentation an der Akademie der Künste ID453, Josef Lawrezki, Che Guevara, trans. Mathias Moll (Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1974). The biography was already in its third printing by the time of the Leipzig premiere. Braun himself traveled to Cuba and Peru in 1976, and was certainly familiar with Pablo Neruda’s Canto general, if not at the time of the play’s writing then surely by the time of its staging; he references it in the same volume as “Material IV: Guevara.” Braun, “Machu Picchú,” Training des aufrechten Gangs, 32– 33 and 79.  Braun, Guevara, 162– 164.  Braun, Guevara, 183.

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With Bumholdt and Bedray, the intraplay prompts the audience to consider how an old humanist representing past German relations to Latin America can produce or even relate to a New Man. Bumholdt may correctly diagnose Bedray as suffering from Eurocentrism, but he also sees no need for the changed humanity Bedray so desperately awaits. Bumholdt not only contradicts, but ultimately cannibalizes Bedray, a Western European Marxist theorizing the New Man and cannibalizing Latin American revolutionary movements in his own way in the process. Directors’ and critics’ difficulty relating these scenes to the main narrative is symptomatic of a failed relation of two historical concepts that correspond roughly to Bumholdt’s and Bedray’s incomplete communication: the creation of der neue Mensch and el hombre nuevo. ⁹⁸ Theater der Zeit’s review of the Leipzig premiere is revealing in this respect. Comments on the intraplay are not even integrated into the review proper, appearing instead as a postscript: “Postscript: For the intervening scenes with the clownesque figures of Bumholdt and Bedray, already problematic in the play, the Leipzig production found no solution that could have convinced the audience of their necessity.”⁹⁹ Among those unpersuaded by the intraplay’s relevance were apparently also members of the Socialist Unity Party Central Committee’s theater sector. According to Matthias Braun, they suggested eliminating the scenes entirely.¹⁰⁰ But approaching the problematic scenes as transnational, transcontextual interruptions whose relation to the dramatic narrative as a whole is contingent and incomplete rather than reasoned and universal renders them necessary in both dramatic and historical terms. As breaks in a Stationendrama already strained by its inversion, they underscore the tendency of a German Expressionist New Man to self-destruct and a Soviet-inspired New Man to deny the possibility of self-destruction or alienation under socialism. Parodying humanist and Marxist inflections of ideal revolutionary types, the scenes that deliberately interrupt Braun’s primary dramatic narrative also imply that differently located revolutionary traditions disturb and work at cross-purposes with one another in the more immediate revolutionary (and dramatic) context afforded by Guevara and his hombre nuevo.

 See Theaterdokumentation an der Akademie der Künste, ID453, Dokumentation zur 1984 Aufführung Volker Brauns Guevara oder der Sonnenstaat.  Peter Ullrich, “Ein neuer Mensch beginnend mit dem Ende…” Theater der Zeit 39.3 (1984): 50 – 52.  Matthias Braun, “Bedenken hatten nicht nur die kubanischen Genossen,” 125.

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Unforgettable guerrillera As I argued above, Braun’s rendering of von Humboldt’s universalist humanist presuppositions contrasts starkly with documentary literature’s radically particularist representation of historical political subjects and common practices of aesthetic generalization. The figure of Tania provides an important and consistently overlooked example in this respect, of note both because of Braun’s attention to biographical detail—excessive by comparison to other characters—and Tania’s role as the most developed of the guerrilleros in both the play and Karl Georg Kayser’s staging. Exceptional in her cultural, political, and military achievements, as well as in her prominence as an international and internationalist subject, Tania is nonetheless part of a longer tradition of German emigration, international solidarity, and commitment to the idea that German and Latin American political developments are related. Born in Buenos Aires to antifascist exiles, Tania and her family returned to the Soviet zone of occupation after World War II. In 1961, Tania illegally left East Germany for Cuba. After years of political and cultural work there, she assumed a series of aliases that culminated in her assignment to Bolivia under the identity Laura Gutiérrez Bauer. Laying the groundwork for the operation that would end in her death, Tania provided intelligence and contacts for Guevara’s guerrilla. In addition to her final assumed identity as Gutiérrez Bauer, Tania’s Cuban agent and militia training included shorter stints as philosophy student Haydée Bidel Gonzáles, then as Marta Iriarte, translator for the Ministry for Education. She served as a youth movement leader in Cuba and East Germany, an educational policy maker, and a highly competent folklorist and self-trained ethnomusicologist. Braun was likely familiar with Eberhard Panitz’s semi-official biography of Tania, written subsequent to Panitz’s participation in an FDJ writers’ delegation to Cuba in 1961, during which time Tania acted as the group’s translator and guide. (The FDJ, Freie Deutsche Jugend, or Free German Youth, was the national youth organization of the the Socialist Unity Party and existed from 1946 – 1990.)¹⁰¹ The text is reinforced by a Party afterward, which is a tribute to Latin American resistance and revolution since the conquest. It repeatedly asserts that revolutionary success lies with the support of the masses, never in individual heroic action. As such, it implicitly criticizes the Bolivian guerilla even as it locates it in a geneal-

 For a brief, historical overview of the FDJ, see “Freie Deutsche Jugend,” So funktionierte die DDR, vol. 1, ed. Andreas Herbst, Winifried Ranke, and Jürgen Winkler (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994), 291– 306.

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ogy of Latin American internationalist struggles that it validates as a whole. Only the last two paragraphs of the afterward speak directly about Tania, concluding: “Tania—our comrade Tamara Bunke—was a young Latin American revolutionary who gave her life for her duty to her class. Her life and deeds have become a symbol of active internationalism in the liberation of her Latin American homeland from imperialist exploitation and oppression.”¹⁰² Like other East German accounts, Panitz emphasizes only Tania’s heroic duty to her class, identifying her neither as German nor even as international, but specifically as a Latin American revolutionary. She can be selectively appropriated as “our comrade,” but her rightful place or home is conveniently elsewhere: Tania’s decision to leave East Germany and become a revolutionary raised the specter of voluntarism already associated with Guevara and had to be carefully managed. After visits to Cuba in 1972, several East German authors remarked on the popularity of the first published account of Tania’s life by Marta Rojas and Mirta Rodríguez Calderón (on which Panitz’s popular account draws heavily). Author Harald Hausner conveyed requests that the German version of Tania, la guerrillera inolvidable (Tania, Unforgettable Guerillera, 1970) be sent to the Casa de las Américas. As Ruth Werner remarks in her account of Cuban publishing more generally: The paper situation here is catastrophic. Bookstores like ours do not exist. There are stores, but almost all books are only distributed according to profession, to professors, teachers, students, engineers, etc. The population as a whole is referred to the libraries. Print runs are 5,000 – 10,000 copies. ‘Tania, the Guerilla’ [sic], the documentation about Tamara Bunke, by contrast, appeared in a printing of one million.¹⁰³

Surely these numbers were either mistranslated or inflated by the East German delegation’s Cuban guides, but the widespread regard for Tania was not. As highly esteemed as she was in Latin America, and as widely known as she was in East Germany, it is surprising that Tania is not accorded more attention as an apocryphal figure in East German dramas about Latin America.¹⁰⁴ In one of

 Panitz, Der Weg zum Rio Grande, 191. Hosek also discusses the Panitz biography (Sun, Sex, and Socialism, 155 – 160).  Archiv des Schriftstellerverbands, Akademie der Künste, SV1029.  As Hosek duly notes, she only became more popular over time: “In a society in which the membership of an organization often influenced its naming, more than 40 East German schools, brigades, youth groups, and other organizations bore her name by 1980. Nadja Bunke’s records indicate that there were more than 200 by 1989. In informal interviews, Eastern German readers, teachers, librarians, authors, and former FDJ functionaries emphasized that inaugurations employing more marginal public figures such as Tamara Bunke more frequently stemmed from

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the few scholarly appraisals of Tania, Unforgettable Guerrillera, Verity Smith describes how Tania’s appropriation as a model of revolutionary Cuban womanhood elided her national particularity: [I]n Tania the intention was to stress the importance of individual sacrifice on the part of internationalists who did revolutionary work in the Third World. More specifically, Tania responded to the need to present her to the Cuban woman as a martyr of the internationalist cause with whom she could identify.¹⁰⁵

Braun ventures to read Tania’s position in the Cuban context against a set of ideal political and intellectual subjects described in East German literature of the 1970s. The range of positions she occupied makes her a useful figure of geographic, cultural, political, and gender mobility. She offers a counter-figure to the East German subject imagined to act in solidarity with a similarly localizable Latin American subject. Braun’s dramatic figuration of Tania takes advantage of the historical Tania’s rich biography to advance an alternate revolutionary subjectivity that uncouples national identity and agency. In so doing, he highlights contradictions between materially embodied and desired internationalist subjectivities. Further, he lends Tania dramatic focus by placing her at the play’s mid-point, a scene titled “THE WOMAN,” though she plays no substantive role in the rest of the play. The scene’s central position demands a corresponding focus on gender difference in the socialist internationalism that Braun elaborates. Braun’s Tania tells us that she was once also Tamara, “born of German parents (eingeborn von deutschen Eltern),” but the birth-identity Tamara is neither associated with a specific place, nor is it given priority in the list of lives that accrue in her monologue.¹⁰⁶ An East German Tamara has paramilitary training, but Tania is forbidden to use it at the site of revolution, where (like the historical Tania) Braun’s Guevara does not welcome her. His reaction prompts her to consider her rapidly disintegrating legend as a revolutionary subject. Braun’s verse can be read to suggest that the resulting biographical fissures constitute her life as much as they disrupt or obscure it:

popular initiative than christenings involving mainstream figures such as Marx or Thälmann,” (Sun, Sex, and Socialism, 155 – 156).  Verity Smith, “La construcción de la héroe socialista: Tania la guerrillera inolvidable,” Letras Femininas 25.1– 2 (1999), 28.  Braun, Guevara, 185 – 186.

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[…] In my head A film that rips and rips, ripping the world The course of my life. I learned to shoot In Germany for peace (im deutschen Friedensstaat) and lie unarmed In this powder keg, Bolivia And cannot fight (kämpfen)¹⁰⁷

A series of allusions to unmasking and betrayal in Brecht’s Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken, 1930), wherein the revealed identity of the young comrade threatens the Party’s work, complements Tania’s language and performance of concealment. Her resulting alienation both motivates and is produced by her participation in the revolution: “Nothing is strange to me anymore except myself,” and: “unknown I was really something / Under all the masks, now known / I am nothing anymore. (Bin ich nichts mehr.) Silence. I’ll throw myself into the ravine.”¹⁰⁸ Syntactically, “Bin ich nichts mehr” could be either a statement or a question put to Guevara in the original German. Is his lack of reply an affirmation of her words as a statement, even a tentative assent to suicide? Only later does Guevara reanimate Tania, recognize her past, and offer her a name. He calls Tania la guerrillera into existence as he hangs his gun around her neck. In answer to her desperate assertion, “I cannot fight if I don’t exist,” Guevara affirms her present and eternal life: “You will exist.”¹⁰⁹ Willing at last to renounce her name and her existence as a singular subject in favor of collective struggle, Tamara is reborn as Tania in a striking reversal of roles. She exclaims:

 Braun, Guevara, 186. Deutscher Friedensstaat presents a number of challenges for translation. It refers to East Germany and contrasts it with an ostensibly aggressive, militarist West Germany. The term was a mainstay of East German political rhetoric.  Hörnigk has pointed to Guevara’s masks in the revolution (“Erinnerung an Revolutionen,” 174), but I am not aware of any sustained analysis of Tania’s relationship to masking. Christine Cosentino briefly mentions anonymity in revolution as symbolic death, but she does not describe Tania’s experience thereof as in any way distinct from Guevara’s. See “Volker Brauns Roter Empedokles: Guevara oder der Sonnenstaat,” Monatshefte 71.1 (1979): 45. This is particularly surprising given Braun’s reference to masking in Brecht’s Measures Taken, in which the revealed face of the young comrade whose identity threatens the work of the Party is replicated in the guerrilla. Braun’s Guevara says: “[…] The unknown / Work, the useful work, once known will be / Useless.” Tania’s concern that, masked, she is no longer herself, but also no longer no one, is contained, too, in the instructions of Brecht’s Party leader. While scholars have written at some length about the importance of Brecht for Müller’s Task (see for example Teraoka, The Silence of Entropy), similar attention has not, to my knowledge, been paid to its role in mediating Braun’s treatment of Latin American revolution.  Braun, Guevara, 187– 188.

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[…] Comrade, you Tremble with desire, are you breaking out in a sweat Because you do yourself such violence, why do you look at Me like a growth (Gewächs) you’ve ripped from yourself Out of your loins, have you paled in the operation.¹¹⁰

Guevara’s pallor suggests the pains of birthing the New Man, who is, in fact, a Woman. Tania is Adam’s/Guevara’s rib: the Christological dimensions of her creation and his self-sacrifice, evidenced in stage directions and dialogue from the outset of the play, resonate with prototypical Expressionist dramas and emphatically advance the sacralization of conflict discussed at the outset of this chapter as a necessary complement to Marxist political ideology. Just prior to her recreation and renunciation of individual love, Braun’s Tania angrily reminds Guevara of the most famous passage of his essay on “Socialism and the New Man.” The historical Guevara’s formulation is as follows: Let me say, at the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality. This is perhaps one of the greatest dramas of a leader; he must combine an impassioned spirit with a cold mind and make painful decisions without flinching one muscle.¹¹¹

Tania’s self-recognition is thus linked both to the historical recognition that Braun’s Guevara promises and to love and desire. Guevara’s desire (“Comrade, you / Tremble with desire”) no longer matters to her: love may move two, she explains, but revolutionary struggle moves the world. Here, Tania suggests that his actions are not in contradiction with his statements about love and revolution, but constitute their necessary extension. In her final assessment, the repression of individual love and desire marks the limits of freedom for those accountable to world revolution. Tania’s self-denial in the name of a greater love is part of her proletarianization through violent struggle. But the proper relationship between love and revolution remains unclear. Guevara’s ultimate articulation of physical need breaks his self-imposed emotional silence, prompting Tania la guerrillera to cry out against his touch. Tania’s move to control material practices of love—specifically her refusal of touch and her critical evaluation of Guevara’s birthing pains—is in keeping with the refusal  Braun, Guevara, 188 – 189.  Guevara, “El socialismo,” 15; translation from Che: Selected Works of Ernesto Guevara, ed. and with an introduction by Ronaldo E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 167.

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of many guerrilleras to bear children in a time of war and their assumption (or refusal to assume) other forms of reproductive labor in the home or the camp. In Latin American women’s political writings, love also represents a refusal to comply with new bureaucratic orders or changes in gender relations following the Cuban revolution’s military phase and, with it, what many regarded as the devaluation of love’s revolutionary potential.¹¹² His own subsequent cry, “We have betrayed ourselves,” (compare The Measures Taken: “Silence! You betray us!”) could refer to the betrayal of their location to the enemy when Tania screams in response to his touch, to a betrayal of their love, or to a betrayal of their commitment to revolution. “Our emotion / Lying in ambush, dead silence (Schweigen im Walde),” is related to guerrilla tactics, but also suggests provocatively that feeling may itself be a site or structure of revolutionary contest—one to which Tania and Guevara are unable to respond.¹¹³ A mobile site of revolution would significantly revise East German concepts of revolutionary subjectivity insofar as it would enable flexible self-positioning within structures of feeling as much as in production processes or the state as expressions of solidarity and revolutionary commitment. It might also constitute feeling in and through literature as a revolutionary act. Braun’s Tania is not a self-evidently revolutionary subject. Her presence is not wanted, but (again like the historical Tania) becomes necessary because she reveals her identity and cannot return to her clandestine work in the city. She allows her name to be liquidated (gelöscht) for a revolutionary cause, but its (possibly deliberate) revelation becomes a liability to that same cause. She does not even know whether to throw herself into a pit where her body, Guevara

 See for example poems by Cuban women in Lovers and Comrades. Women’s Resistance Poetry from Central America, ed. Amanda Hopkinson (London: The Women’s Press, 1989). Karen Kampwirth and Victoria González provide excellent comparative analyses of radical feminists and guerrilleras in Central and South America who began explicitly to link revolutionary love and a critique of patriarchy around the time of Braun’s writing. See Radical Women in Latin America: Left and Right ed. Karen Kampwirth and Victoria González (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). Central American feminists offered creative rereadings of Guevara’s hombre nuevo, and their slogans pointed to the gender inequality embedded within his understanding of socialism and the New Man: “Building the New Fatherland, We Create the New Woman.” See Karen Kampwirth, Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004). Love as a revolutionary practice is of course not limited to women; for example, Sergio Ramírez and Ernesto Cardenal (the former having spent two years in exile in Berlin, the latter being particularly popular in both Germanys) also describe love as practical.  Braun, Guevara, 188 – 189; Brecht, Die Maßnahme in Sämtliche Stücke in einem Band ([Frechen]: Komet, 2002): 255 – 268, here 266.

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soberly observes, would betray the guerrilla (none of The Measures Taken’s lime handy in this play), or whether to die may in fact be to live in the guerrilla. And yet Tania is also the only possible model of a revolutionary, German internationalist subject in Braun’s play: she is not the parody of Europe that are Bumholdt and Bedray, but a complex figure whose occupation of multiple and shifting subject positions both enables and potentially unsettles her ability to contribute to the revolution. Tania la guerrillera ultimately supercedes a masculine, reasoned political narrative already destabilized in the figures of Bumboldt and Bedray, and that is dependent on Guevara as a charismatic supplement to internationalist ideology. Gender difference is constitutive for Tania’s experience of revolutionary love, and marks shifting personal, interpersonal, and social boundaries. As “THE WOMAN,” Tania’s subjectivity is both particular and generalizable within the drama of guerrilla struggle and revolutionary transformation. If the historical Guevara identified love as one of the greatest dramas of revolutionary leadership, Braun leaves it to Tania to invoke, interpret, and act out that drama.

Authoring the New Man Guevara’s identification with Don Quixote in his Bolivian diaries and his use of Cervantes’s novel in guerrilla literacy classes provide documentary and historical touchstones for the play’s final, fictional scene.¹¹⁴ In the East German context, Quixote is redolent, too, with Ernst Bloch’s famous recourse to the literary in general and to Cervantes and Campanella in particular in his writings on the ideal subjects of hope, not to mention Lukács’s extended reading of Don Quixote in his Theory of the Novel. Braun’s self-reflexive engagement with the relationship of utopian and literary thinking thus intervenes into literary historical debates with reference to some of their key protagonists. A vocal participant in the Expressionism debates, Bloch repeatedly contemplated art and literature in his later philosophical work, offering a profound sense of the capacity of aesthetic objects to express and inspire utopian hope. Rather than stage an aesthetics classically defined as a relation of beauty to truth, his approach to the aesthetic better corresponds to solidarity’s move to relate hope to reality. Exemplary aesthetics come to communicate abstract concepts that defy rational analysis. Aesthetic objects express and inspire utopian hope; they serve to bridge intuition,

 See Guevara’s final letter to his father, in which he describes himself as a Quixote about to do battle with giants. Cited in Hetmann, Ich habe sieben Leben, 129.

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morality, and claims to reality.¹¹⁵ Reality, in turn, is measured against utopian art: The “truth” of creative achievement is measured against its utopian content. For Bloch, art is “realist” when it “depicts” utopian possibilities. Artistic fantasy is meant to transcend its particular historical position and gesture toward the possibilities of human self-realization that are anchored in the present but have yet to be realized […] As anticipations of the future, works of art are ascribed socially- and action-oriented functions. In this way they are made to exceed their fictional character. (Sie werden damit ihres fiktionalen Charakters enthoben.)¹¹⁶

Kirchner reads Braun’s play as an expression of Bloch’s utopian theory and attends specifically to the Guevara-Quixote identification as evidence of Braun’s engagement with Bloch’s own discussion of Quixote as an exemplary utopian, undeterred by reality. As convincing as her analysis is, the preceding sections of this chapter reveal that the nature of Braun’s aesthetic solidarity extends beyond the Guevara-Quixote identification as a specific reference to Bloch to encompass an increasingly dense network of geocultural referents cast in poetic terms (Verdichtung). Multiplying documentary, philosophical, and literary referents, Braun’s citations of Guevara’s, Cervantes’s, and Bloch’s respective Quixotes coincide to undo any straightforward opposition of practical and intellectual labor in revolution. As real, historical conflict in Latin America was among the factors that precipitated Braun’s move away from factory genres in favor of a more expansive treatment of the sites and subjects of revolution, so, too, did the historical Guevara precipitate his self-reflexive engagement with literary thinking in the shape of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Typical of Braun’s rich, allusive style and commitment to literature as a form of thoughtful provocation, the play’s final scene affirms an active, political role for literary thinking in revolution. Guevara criticizes some forms and sites of intellectual labor as bureaucratic, asking Castro, “Is it the desk that / bureaucratizes me or me it?” and “Do you want a new economy or a / New Man?”¹¹⁷ Meanwhile, a younger generation waits anxiously outside the door. Guevara and Castro ultimately admit them to the room and play out Don Quixote’s windmill scene. The children’s admission could signal a naturalized trajectory of development toward a mature, post-revolutionary Cuba; their playful interaction with  Kirchner, Im Bann der Utopie, 24.  Kirchner, Im Bann der Utopie, 39.  See Guevara, “Contra el burocratismo,” in El socialismo y el hombre nuevo, ed. José Aricó (Mexico City: Siglo Vientiuno, 1998), 173 – 79; Braun, Guevara, 206.

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the leaders part of a new socialization toward imagination, hope, and the future. In this reading, men’s relationship to gendered social reproduction again displaces a conventional, gendered division of productive and reproductive labor. A parallel allusion is to Lenin’s “‘Left-Wing’ Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality” (1918).¹¹⁸ (Braun would of course have been familiar with Lenin’s writings by 1970 at the latest, when he completed Lenins Tod [Lenin’s Death].) Lenin lambasted the “petty-bourgeois sloppiness that is sometimes concealed by slogans” and that he believed underwrote the Left Communists’ claims “to play a political role” following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and conclusion of Russian involvement in World War I (13 March 1918). The question of who is served by antiimperialist war and under what conditions is highly relevant for the Cuban situation: [U]ntil the world socialist revolution breaks out, until it embraces several countries and is strong enough to overcome international imperialism, it is the direct duty of the socialists who have conquered in one country (especially a backward one) not to accept the battle against the giants of imperialism. Their duty is to try to avoid battle, to wait until the conflicts between the imperialists weaken them even more, and bring the revolution in other countries even nearer.¹¹⁹

Under other circumstances, Lenin argues, war helps the imperialists rather than the antiimperialist forces. Revolutionary action thus constitutes destructive naïveté. A more sinister reading of Braun’s final scene and how the leaders relate to the children emerges as the literary leftist child’s play is followed to its dramatic end: Guevara (unlike Quixote, unlike Lenin’s Left Communist Revolutionaries) recognizes the children as windmills rather than “giants of imperialism.” Still, he attacks them. Are the children objects of Guevara’s and Castro’s misguided vision? What alternatives are available if Guevara is correct in stating: “Yes, it is so impossible / To fight that one can only fight. It is / So senseless that nothing else makes sense.” The tragedy of the untimely revolutionary—Guevara muses: “How does one proceed / with those who know too soon / In all revolutions”—is that he or she is compelled to fight a quixotically necessary and impossible struggle.¹²⁰

 V.I. Lenin, “‘Left-Wing’ Childishness,” Marxist Internet Archive ed. David Walters http:// www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm. (accessed 8 Sept., 2010). Kirchner also identifies the allusion.  V.I. Lenin, “‘Left-Wing’ Childishness.”  Braun, Guevara, 208. For a discussion of Don Quixote as the paradigmatic untimely hero, see Wolfgang G. Müller, “Don Quijote-Figuren als unzeitgemäße Helden in der englischen Liter-

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Guevara’s self-critique employs the language of East German cultural politics and points to the nature of the challenge Braun saw in the historical Guevara. The idea of an arrival at the everyday expressed in the final scene by Braun’s Castro (“After us communism. But / Ahead of us the Everyday”) echoes the literature of arrival (Ankunftsliteratur) of the early 1960s.¹²¹ But Guevara is not content to have arrived in an era of international antiimperialist struggle. While Vietnam bleeds, he finds insufficient: our proud path / of prosperity in the so-called peace / East and West, but alone. / Pressed up against our cowardice, almost abandoned / And the indifference with which we blab / About solidarity. The absurdity / Makes my throat close up. There will be no / Socialism, if we ourselves don’t CASTRO: change¹²²

Guevara’s remarks seem to address both Cuba and East Germany. He shows how certain antiimperialist struggles (i. e., Vietnam) are left out of an equation that seeks primarily to balance East-West relations, and suggests that the language of solidarity is empty so long as it is mediated by a politics of ideological expansion. Cuba cannot fit neatly into the East, even as it is aligned with communist ideologies that place it in direct opposition to the West. If peace brings prosperity, a solidarity that is more than rhetorical requires a commitment to peace that extends beyond any one nation-state. For an East Germany that professes a politics of peace over and against Western militarism, the changes such a solidarity might require could fundamentally revise the self-understanding of its revolutionary subjects. Prominent among them are revolution’s authors. The imposition of aesthetic form on historical material necessarily asserts agency in one way or another; it enacts a set of contexts and practices for viewing and responding to the political figure made literary in its aesthetic presentation. The self-doubt that permeates the poem “Material IV: Guevara” is largely absent in the play. It would surely be an oversimplification to suggest that poetry is the more private genre, more suited to self-doubt and introspection, drama the more public, with the added force of inverting an Expressionist form to highlight a subjectivity, both literary and

atur,” in Der unzeitgemäße Held in der Weltliteratur, ed. Gerhard R. Kaiser (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1998), 97– 113. Müller begins with a relevant introduction to discussions of Quixote by Hegel, Heine, and other important thinkers; the remainder of the article focuses exclusively on Quixote in the British Romantic tradition.  Braun, Guevara, 206.  Braun, Guevara, 207. Earlier editions of the play substitute FRIEND for CASTRO—according to Hosek as “part of the terms of publication,” (Sun, Sex, and Socialism, 124).

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political, that is not typically destructive, but confident, even utopian. Nonetheless, the transformation of common material in and through divergent generic strategies is suggestive for thinking about the limits and possibilities of aesthetic solidarity as articulated around the figure of Guevara. The poem projects an image of a solidary but ultimately frustrated author who momentarily questions and devalues literary language, but it nonetheless culminates in his repetition and appropriation of the historical Guevara as an exemplary theorist and practitioner of revolution. Braun’s dramatic iteration of the Guevara material refuses any similarly subjective gesture without relinquishing a common purpose among differently located revolutionary subjects. In this way, the international changes, but does not suspend, the terms of utopian socialist possibility. The drama refigures the parameters for solidarity as one of socialist internationalism’s foundational categories, inflecting them aesthetically to foreground the theoretically rich imagination of new men and women in disparate socialist traditions rather than imposing an ethical choice between those traditions.

Conclusions Drawing upon the contentious tradition of Expressionist drama and its secularized religiosity; heterodox Latin American Marxisms; German biographies not easily located in a single territorial, linguistic, or cultural tradition; and the production/disarticulation of gender difference in the (failed) constitution of revolutionary subjectivity, Braun’s Guevara ultimately precipitates a three-fold fracturing of reasoned political narratives of socialist internationalism. The visibly incomplete work of political ideology; the transcontextual interruption of historical narrative by aesthetic means; and the social and cultural differences of gender introduce differential, transnational alternatives to the presumptive universal subjects of socialist internationalism. Their performance prompts the public to consider how the redemptive figure of a New Man relied on assumptions specific to culture and gender to mask a more generalized lack of faith in ideologies of reasoned political action in East Germany. Like the USSR, East Germany rejected what it perceived to be the dangerous and unwieldy individualism in Guevara’s cult status. East German political leaders were awkwardly positioned between solidarity with the Cuban revolution and mistrust of the revolution’s popular face in the form of Guevara. Tania might have been made to serve as a more palatable hero, not just because she could be read in a tradition of antifascist internationalism, but also because she could be read in a supportive, solidary role rather than as an individual leader. Officially sanctioned biographies such as Panitz’s The Path to the Rio Grande in-

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voke a kind of anthropological complementarity to narrate Tania’s feminine role relative to the male guerrilleros. By contrast, Braun—and certainly Karl Georg Kayser, director of Guevara’s Leipzig premiere—preserve the tensions that arise from highly gendered and sexualized accounts of the historical Tania and the ambiguity of her political and personal relationship to Guevara. THE WOMAN was one of the most commented upon scenes in the Leipzig production, and images of Tania on a swing in the jungle in a sheer white gown and heels are among the most dissonant the production had to offer.¹²³ The implications of an analysis that accounts for relationships among German and Latin American revolutionary subjects extend well beyond the literature on Braun. His critical deployment of historical political subjects, including von Humboldt, Guevara, and Tania, destabilizes the strong conceptual lines of German and Soviet revolutionary subjectivity rooted in productivism. With recourse to what I have termed transnational and transcontextual citation, Braun foregrounds incomplete and possibly incommensurate modes of relating European and Latin American socialisms, calling into question the very existence of a universal socialist humanist subject of history. The role of utopian thinking in social reproduction and revolutionary change is shown to be similarly contradictory in the play’s final, fictional scene with Castro, Guevara, and the children of a revolutionary socialism. Finally, the play’s main intervention lies in its attention to how gendered dimensions of der neue Mensch that emerge through the neglected figure of Tania contribute to creating a layered, positively fractured, transnational model of revolutionary subjectivity. The linguistic tension between Soviet-inflected East German visions of der neue Mensch, on the one hand, and anticolonial and antiimperial Latin American visions of el hombre nuevo, on the other hand, underscores one dimension of socialist solidarity’s incompleteness vis-à-vis gender. Der neue Mensch is ostensibly gender neutral, even if other, gender-specific permutations of the New Woman leave its practical neutrality open to question. To confront it with the masculine hombre nuevo and advance Tania as the New Man generates the productively jarring assertion: “The New Man is a woman.” Braun opens the door to gender ambiguity in the poem’s modification of Guevara’s supposed last words from “Now you will see how a man dies,” (“Sie werden nun sehen, wie ein Mann stirbt,”) to “Now you will live to see how one dies,” (“Sie werden nun erleben, wie man stirbt,”).¹²⁴ But only in the play and with Tania is its potential actualized. Difference is not overcome, but embraced—literally—by the male

 Ullrich, “Ein neuer Mensch, beginnend mit dem Ende…” 52.  Braun, Training des aufrechten Gangs, 58 and 80 – 81.

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revolutionary; it is left to Tania la guerrillera as the primary subject of revolution to decide if and under what circumstances she is willing to accept that embrace. In Tania, Guevara’s “greatest drama of the revolutionary leader” is actualized as a labor of love that is not reducible to masculine, productive labor. Braun’s documentary and anti-productivist aesthetics suspend hegemonic East German cultural narratives—including narratives of labor, antifascism, and humanist inheritance—and their underlying ideologies. Against this complex set of critical interventions, it is not the claim to New Humanity itself so much as the inability of a range of subject-agents to communicate their related claims to one another that Braun highlights as the primary limit to his own aesthetic solidarity. All parties on the stage hope for a New Humanity, but they find themselves at an impasse in their revolutionary labors. Practically, that impasse is manifest in the entrenched political and military conflicts in Latin America (specifically, Bolivia and Cuba). Theoretically and literarily, the impasse resides in the tension between points of socialist arrival (Ankunft) and departure (Aufbruch), alternately located in an (East) German tradition, a Cuban revolutionary tradition, and an unspecified revolutionary struggle beyond the socialist administration of state and society. For the Guevara of the play’s final scene, as for the narrator of “Guevara Material IV,” specific, historical solidarities unsettle overarching theoretical commitments to solidarity en route to a socialist utopia. Honing in on the socialist personality as a key mediating concept of the cultural and the political, the personal and the historical, Braun asks difficult questions about what impossible struggles lie beyond the socialist everyday, questions to which neither Soviet nor Cuban socialisms hold clear answers. At a moment when formal reflexivity and the reflexivity of the political subject of literature coincide in East German dramas about Latin America, Braun demonstrates a keen awareness of the representational, ethical, and political questions at stake in writing the revolutionary subject, systematically relating impossible forms to impossible political struggles. It is a strategy well suited to the historical project Jameson has in mind for a dialectical criticism, “to translate apparently literary disagreements back into the ultimate reality of the conflicting groups in the historical world.”¹²⁵ But the appearance of the literary implies another kind of limit: in the same way that we have no unmediated access to “ultimate reality,” so, too, do we lack unmediated access to an ultimate literariness; there is only the “apparently literary” unfolding of (and in) historical social conflict.

 Jameson, Marxism and Form, 390.

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Braun successfully uses literature to push the limits of the real and the utopian through the generation of highly mobile, subject-based sites of revolution; fracturing the reasoned political narratives of socialist internationalism by revealing the incomplete work of political ideology; instantiating transcontextual interruptions of historical narratives; and foregrounding the realities and paradoxes of gender in revolution. Nonetheless, significant limits to his aesthetic solidarity push back. Paradox relies on its own, internal limits to function, and it is paradox that rules the play’s utopian refrain: “Yes, it is so impossible / to struggle that one can only struggle. It is / So senseless that nothing else makes sense.” The impossibility and necessity of the revolutionary subject’s struggle is located at a geopolitical limit (Second World/Third World) that Braun seeks to confront with a geocultural alternative that takes shape on the shifting ground between German traditions in utopian thinking and Cuban revolutionary thought. Neuer Mensch / hombre nuevo is the name I give to this impossible opposition for whose synthesis Braun’s aesthetic battle is well worth fighting. Braun’s deployment of a revolutionary aesthetic unity/disunity of the literary, the political, and the real stands in sharp contrast to the truncated notion of the real in West German literature around the same time, one Hahn describes as deploying a frequently mechanical, direct notion of referentiality that ultimately reduces realism to documentary.¹²⁶ Her account of a socially critical literature that focuses on its functionalization and a concomitant disregard for its own aesthetic potential is rooted entirely in West German material; and despite some common impulses in, for example, the West German Gruppe 61, Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt (Working Group on Literature of the Working World), and the East German Bitterfeld Path, it would be inaccurate to suggest that her analysis is straightforwardly transferable to the East.¹²⁷ That being said, it is Braun’s refusal of any comparable abbreviation of the real that seems to have made Guevara a troubled and troubling object for East German criticism. Having refused both the suggestion that he make the play more abstract and

 Hahn, Literatur in der Aktion, 198.  Gruppe 61 was initiated in Dortmund and, much like the Bitterfeld Conference in the East (already mentioned above in Chapter One, n. 44), sought to bring together professional authors and worker-authors to promote more realistic representations of industrial life. It enjoyed some success in drawing attention to the contradictions of industrial capitalism and especially to poor and dangerous working conditions in an ostensibly affluent society. Max von der Grün and later Günter Wallraff were the group’s most successful representatives. Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt was founded in 1970 in the tradion of Gruppe 61 for the promotion of worker’s literature.

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the suggestion that he craft a more strictly documentary play, Braun uses the aesthetic to create alternative internationalisms that favor expansive notions of the real and of referentiality. His approach to aesthetic solidarity contrasts sharply with Enzensberger’s. Enzensberger addresses the possibility of literary efficacy via a series of translative practices and generic innovations; Braun does so by plotting political subjects at the boundary of the literary and the historical. For Braun, it is precisely the ways in which political subjects are not structurally generalizable that is important, the places where biography is unique (e. g., Tania) that demonstrate the obstacles to solidarity as both an internal, subjective disposition and an intersubjective relationship among differently located subjects. Where Enzensberger’s translative practices aimed to generate new conditions for authorial agency understood largely in terms of the political efficacy of literary forms, Braun deliberately avails himself of anterior forms and their attendant political entanglements, as inefficacious as these may in fact be in the East German context. His gesture at once locates the literary subject in the text and foregrounds its separateness from the political subjects who inhabit his literature. Indeed, this is a constitutive gesture of what I characterized in Chapter One as a tendency of West German authors to present themselves as extratextual, or, minimally, paratextual instances, where East German authors tended toward different mechanisms of self-reflexivity and critique internal to the literary texts they produced. This broad tendency aside, the next two chapters will continue to map out the range of aesthetic and political positions that East and West German authors occupied in their approaches to revolutionary subjects. Like Enzensberger and Braun, Heiner Müller relies extensively on the force of historical and intertextual reference, but there the similarity ends: The Task departs from documentary modes entirely. In keeping with the spirit of Walter Mignolo’s repeated insistence that we do not even know which questions to ask, let alone answer, within the confines of the modern/colonial world system, Müller’s text requires new strategies for relational reading that push the boundaries of the literary and the historical still further.¹²⁸ Radical as it may seem by comparison to Enzensberger’s aesthetic solidarity, and even given Braun’s expanded notion of the real as a measure of both the concrete and the utopian, as we shall see, his approach still privileges a more indexical notion of history than is retained by Müller.

 Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Maldon, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

Chapter 4 The Task of Decolonial Thinking: Second World Authorship in Heiner Müller’s The Task Heiner Müller’s Der Auftrag: Erinnerung an eine Revolution (The Task: Memory of a Revolution, 1979) opens with the delivery of a letter from one revolutionary subject, Britannian farmer Galloudec, to another, the tutor Antoine, who is anxious to hide his past revolutionary affiliations in Napoleon’s France.¹ The letter’s delivery precipitates the first of many subjective breaks in Müller’s play rendered visible as discrete theaterbodies.² Written on Galloudec’s deathbed in a Cuban prison hospital, the letter explains that Galloudec was unable to complete an unspecified revolutionary task in Jamaica. The erstwhile revolutionary Antoine experiences a dramatic memory of the incomplete task and the fates of those assigned to complete it: Galloudec, Debuisson (creole oligarch and doctor), and Sasportas (former slave), often understood to be three aspects of a dreaming Antoine. Linking dramatic conflicts in and among bodies on stage to geopolitical divisions and the cardinal revolutionary values of liberté, egalité, and fraternité,

 Heiner Müller was born in 1929 in Eppendorf and died in 1995 in Berlin. He was conscripted into the paramilitary militia (Volkssturm) after a so-called werewolf-training at the end of World War II, and briefly imprisoned after surrendering to US American forces. He worked with the Writers’ Union beginning in 1954, but was expelled in 1961 following the controversial premiere of Die Umsiedlerin (The Settler). With Braun, he was denounced by name at the Eleventh Plenum in 1965 for his critical texts, and he was also among the first signatories of a resolution protesting poet and musician Wolf Biermann’s highly publicized expatriation in 1976. From 1970 – 1976 he was a dramaturg at the Berliner Ensemble. From 1990 – 1993 he served as the President of the Akademie der Künste. Müller is widely regarded as the most important postwar German dramatist, and indeed by many as the most important postwar European dramatist. His long career was marked by path-breaking formal innovations, an incomparable depth and breadth of intertextual engagement, and his provocative recourse to the dark and unsettling language of cruelty, sacrifice, and death. Müller’s work queries the place of the intellectual in society and specifically in revolution. He is known for his repeated engagement with German and European history and memory in the face of what he famously called the shameless lie of posthistory in his 1987 Büchner Prize acceptance speech. He was the recipient of many prestigious prizes in East and West Germany.  Hans-Thies Lehmann uses the term “theaterbody” to describe the postdramatic reduction of the body on stage to its most basic roles or functions, and distinguishes it from dramatic theater’s treatment of the body as a vehicle for the representation of abstract ideas. I elaborate on the significance of the concept for Müller’s The Task in the next section of this chapter. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater, 2d ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 2001).

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Müller’s differently worlded subjects are both antagonistic toward and mutually dependent upon one another. Antoine’s single, repressed memory of a revolution is almost immediately contested. Though seemingly specific, it raises a series of questions about what is being remembered, by whom, and under what circumstances. Is the revolution in question the French Revolution, the aborted revolution in Jamaica, or a revolution of consciousness? The theaters of revolution—recalling both the dramatic and the military dimensions of the term—are opened and closed by agents who move fluidly among disparate revolutionary locales as quickly as they change masks. By expanding the sites and agents of revolution, Müller challenges the singularity of European referents, and suggests the need to look beyond Europe in order to understand the constitution of European subjects, politics, and agency broadly speaking. He confronts the limits of aesthetic solidarity manifest in texts by both Enzensberger and Braun, limits shown in the preceding chapters to be translative and historical, respectively. But he also encounters new limits of his own. Prominent among them are the enduring reach of coloniality and the Cold War, world-systemic and intersubjective limits pushed to breaking on the body. In rendering the material limits of bodies visible on the stage, Müller’s postdramatic theater enacts the dissolution of the intact, humanist subjects who underwrite East German cultural policy’s humanist inheritance (Erbe) to challenge its assumptions about the social and political role of literature, and the possibility of internationalist solidarity. Among those subjects broken and only tentatively reformed is the Second World author himself. The French Revolution may serve as a dramatic frame for The Task, but I argue that the play has another pivotal referent: the Russian Revolution. A series of textual references to the Soviet revolutionary project support my reading of a Second World subject of revolution (in the figures of Galloudec and the Man in the Elevator to Peru). Intervening into a critical literature on The Task that neglects the role of Second World subjects in favor of the dramatic exchanges between the presumed First and Third World figures of Debuisson and Sasportas, my analysis prompts a reconsideration of the oft-cited line: “The theater of the white revolution is over!” with reference not exclusively to race, but also to the White Revolutionaries of civil war-era Russia.³ In the latter parts of this chapter, I speculate as to what happens when the Russian Revolution is regarded as another point of historical departure to which accrues a very different series of references, associations, and philosophical trajectories.

 Heiner Müller, Der Auftrag, in Werke 4: Die Stücke 2, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 11– 42, here 26.

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This alternate reading has consequences for understanding not only the play, but also Müller’s broader, critical reformulation of Second World authorship, which I characterize as antisystemic and decolonial. It is antisystemic in the sense that sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein characterizes interventions against the modern capitalist world system (notably national and social movements) that seek to redress inequalities and obstacles to liberty rooted in the exploitation of difference or particularity (notably race and sex); the play is decolonial in the sense that cultural critic Walter Mignolo characterizes the establishment of paradigms of knowledge and action excluded from the logic of the modern/colonial world system.⁴ Decolonial thinking entails not a shift in perspective or content, but a profound challenge to the very terms of our conversations about the world and our place in it. Second World authorship as it operates in The Task requires Latin America and the Caribbean in order to rewrite its own place in world revolution. At stake is a reevaluation of who and what constitute revolutions and revolutionaries, and, by extension, whether (and if so where) there exists a potential for literary intervention into the revolutionary project. Rather than focus on any single place or time of revolution, as do some of Müller’s earlier plays that struggle with the role of the socialist intellectual, The Task confronts the artificial division of the world according to both political ideologies and the knowledge-value domains described by Carl Pletch and outlined in Chapter One. In those divisions, the Second World is cast as modern, technically sophisticated, rational to a degree, authoritarian, repressive, inefficient and impoverished by contamination with ideological preconceptions, and, finally, burdened with an ideologically motivated elite. Its analysis is associated first and foremost with the study of economics; its politics with the revolutionary virtue of economic equality.⁵ By foregrounding the articulation of revolutions across place and time, my relational reading shows how Müller unsettles these dominant narratives of political modernity, rewriting their attendant touchstones of progress and developmentalism in terms that do not permit us to separate Second World equality from Third World frater-

 Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Maldon, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), xvii-xx and Chapter Three. Mignolo advanced the concept already in his earlier work, often in different but closely related terms such as border gnosis and post-Occidental reason. See for example Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).  Carl E. Pletch, “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950 – 1975,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 23.4 (1981): 574; Immanuel Wallerstein, “1968: Revolution in the World System,” Geopolitics and Geoculture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 81.

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nity. A paradigm of co-existence replaces a paradigm of progress, and a new geography of knowledge is mapped in which the totality of the revolutionary project exceeds the sum of its colonial referents.⁶ Müller’s aesthetic solidarity takes shape in the spatialization of developmentalist time through a commentary which joins disparate revolutionary situations, writing geopolitical and geocultural maps into relation with one another. Three main interventions structure this chapter, each rooted in the commingled discourses of embodied subjects, places, and times of revolution. First, I show that the location, masking and unmasking, as well as the formation and deformation of embodied subjects on the stage and in a modern/colonial world system undergird Müller’s decolonial critique of socialist humanism. Second, I argue that the Caribbean and Latin America function simultaneously as theatrical sites for the production of revolutionary subjects and as historical, geopolitical sites. Finally, I argue that Müller’s disarticulation of intact humanist subject-bodies operates in tandem with temporal and geographic disarticulations of First, Second, and Third World revolutions to produce a new possible role for Second World authorship. In keeping with the decolonial practice of changing the terms of our critical conversations, Müller imagines in Galloudec an author who is not an author. The Second World subject Galloudec writes the letter that precipitates the play’s main action and thereby the critical dismantling of the three worlds cast as theaterbodies on the stage, but it is the First World Antoine and Debuisson who are the play’s intellectuals. Galloudec, by contrast, remains an intellectual in that other sense described by Antonio Gramsci: All men are intellectuals, but it is not all men’s social function. Changing the terms of what it means to occupy the position of the Second World au-

 Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America. Mignolo advanced the concept of co-existence with reference to Waman Puma de Ayala (also Guaman Poma de Ayala), a sixteenth-century indigenous intellectual (possibly of mixed ancestry) in what was Tawantinsuyu and became the Viceroyalty of Peru. Mignolo credits him with the inauguration of “double critique” as a mode of decolonial practice. Double critique entails a “simultaneous critical theory and epistemic decolonization” that was directed at both the Spanish colonizers and the Incas (117). Waman Puma de Ayala was an important forerunner of interculturality, a mode of thinking collaboratively in multiple languages and logics and so distinct from liberal multiculturalism, which thinks the same logic in more than one language (118). Mignolo juxtaposes a paradigm of co-existence to a paradigm of progress, associated with the roughly contemporary Bartolomé de las Casas and with the Occident more broadly. Mignolo first formulated the paradigm of co-existence in Local Histories/Global Designs, 313 – 338.

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thor, Müller gestures toward the possibility of a socialist revolutionary subject that escapes (self)betrayal.⁷

The theaterbody and its subjects The effect of the body in Müller’s theater defines the shifting terms of his aesthetic solidarity. Where Müller’s first, poetic engagement with Anna Seghers’s Licht auf den Galgen (Light on the Gallows, 1960), “Motiv bei A.S.” (“Motif in A.S.”), retains in the traitorous Debuisson a largely intact and singular subject, his theatrical return to the material two decades later departs from individual experiences of seduction, fear, pain, and betrayal.⁸ In Müller’s postdramatic theater, the focus is on the aesthetic and physical processes at work on the body rather than processes enacted and negotiated among bodies.⁹ According to Hans-Thies Lehmann, as the body is reduced to basic roles or functions (Sinnlichkeit), i. e., is no longer a representation of abstract, rational, and teleological concepts (Sinn), the audience is confronted with the decomposition of the subject rather than its dramatic formation or development.¹⁰ Consequently, Müller’s theater also and necessarily presents alternate notions of real and potential intersubjectivity. If every theaterbody is many, if the body is a vehicle for masks or roles, it is on the body

 In the context of Müller’s work, I opt for the notation (self)betrayal in order to underscore the instability of any line between betrayal of a revolutionary cause and betrayal of the self. The same is true of (counter)revolution, in which every revolution is at once potentially its own betrayal.  Frank Hörnigk accounts for the difference between the poem and the play, and between Seghers and Müller, with particular attention to the authors’ respective experiences of subjectivity in radically different world-historical contexts. “Erinnerungen an Revolutionen. Zur Entwicklungstendenzen in der Dramatik Heiner Müllers, Peter Hacks’ und Volker Brauns am Ende der siebziger Jahre,” in Tendenzen und Beispiele. Zur DDR Literatur in den Siebziger Jahren, ed. Hans Kaufmann (Leipzig: Philip Reclam, Jr., 1981), 148 – 84. Hörnigk—and, indeed, every reference to the poem I can find—dates its writing to 1958, but as that pre-dates the publication of Seghers’s story in Sinn und Form by two years, I assume that either the actual date was later, or that Müller had access to a version of Seghers’s story prior to its publication.  Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater, 366 – 367. At its most basic level, postdramatic theater denotes a shift from traditional Western theater’s linear enactment of successive events toward a theater characterized by simultaneity and multiple perspectives (11). Lehmann is careful to differentiate between the postmodern and postdramatic, underscoring that the postdramatic is a negation not of modernity and its aesthetic forms tout court, but of specific dramatic forms and their underlying historical-ideological premises (27– 32).  Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater, 367.

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that we should expect to see the effects of masking as a multiplication of incommensurable roles and even (self)betrayal.¹¹ The corporeality and manifest multiplicity of Antoine’s memory of a revolution makes possible the rearticulation of histories and theaters of revolution kept apart by conventional historical and political narratives. As Lehmann puts it: “Theater does memory work for the body.”¹² The multiple constitution of Müller’s dramatic subjects and their concomitant transformation into theaterbodies emerges as a—perhaps the—leading formal, aesthetic, psychological, and thematic marker of aesthetic solidarity in the play. The theaterbody’s multiplicity and transformation cannot be separated from the tripart, world-systemic divisions of the Cold War and the contested embodiments of liberty, equality, and fraternity across those divisions on the bodies of Debuisson, Galloudec, and Sasportas. It is therefore with the theaterbody as building block that we must begin. Socialist humanism, with its emphatic pursuit of unalienated modes of social relation (including not only labor, but also art), requires an integrated subject-body. Violent revolutionary conflict, too, relies on embodied subjects, but it proceeds in part through breaking those bodies. By foregrounding the body as a site of (counter)revolution, Müller privileges an understanding of revolution as the cumulative effect of subjectivity localizable to embodied subjects of violent conflict over the abstract terms of socialist revolution understood as world-historical progress. The resulting concept of revolution is radically place-specific and perspectival, an accretion of subject-bodies alienated in the very pursuit of revolutionary ideals. Intervening in a tradition of representing revolutionary subjects that extends well beyond the theatrical forms and instantiations of the New Man that were discussed in Chapter Three, Müller’s contribution to thinking a new political subject diverges from earlier socialist realist literature roughly around the construction period, notable for circumscribing the possibility of reader identification with a positive, socialist hero. Even in the most conservative formulations of the New Man, the potentially changing German subject is frequently deemed unstable or threatens to become unstable in moments of personal and historical crisis. The subjects of Müller’s work after the production plays exceed this basic tendency, abandoning the integrity of the body itself.¹³ Concrete bodies in various states of de-formation contradict a preferred national discourse on bodies

 Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater, 362.  Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater, 347.  The production plays include Der Lohndrücker (The Scab, 1957), Die Umsiedlerin (The Settler, 1961), Die Bauern (The Farmers, 1964), Der Bau (The Construction Site, 1965), and ZEMENT (CEMENT, 1972).

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principally as embodied ideals integral to the public’s own formation (Bildung). Even Brechtian alienation did not fundamentally challenge the integrity of the subject-body, but instead showed it in tension with ideological masks and material truths. In the immediate postwar and construction periods, the Marxist understanding of the New Man recognized the difference between the creation of socialist character and socialist economic institutions, but nonetheless avowed that such institutions were required in order to socialize (erziehen) subjects of class struggle who would actively reshape their own environment.¹⁴ Socialization required the correct articulation of individual and social interests to create a new human consciousness that would be characterized in large part by the ability to order hierarchically different collective and individual, primary and secondary, as well as long- and short-term interests.¹⁵ Interests were considered objective: they depended on production relations and the nature of subjects’ individual and collective needs.¹⁶ Collectivism and solidarity were not supposed to limit, but rather to provide the conditions for achieving individuality and authentic character development.¹⁷ For all the insistence on material understandings of competing interests, these defining characteristics and conditions did not emphasize the material body or even experienced psychological forces. Müller, by contrast, shows how interest recognition tout court deforms subjects in ways that are physically manifested on what Lehmann terms the theaterbody. The deformation of the revolutionary subject qua theaterbody in Müller is, in effect, more material than any dialectical materialism that could be pursued in a dramatic theater of embodied ideals. The theaterbody is not only material; it is political. The aesthetic presentation of the body upsets the possible with recourse to the utopian, the revolutionary. Reading Müller, Gaetano Biccari writes, “Compared to politics, art is a concrete-utopian praxis: ‘Politics is the art of the possible, art has to do with the impossible.’”¹⁸ The moment when a utopian relation manifests physically is  G.J. Gleserman, “Das Verschmelzen der gesellschaftlichen und der persönlichen Interessen und die Formung des neuen Menschen,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 15.4 (1967): 418 – 434.  Gleserman, “Das Verschmelzen der gesellschaftlichen und der persönlichen Interessen,” 424– 425.  Gleserman, “Das Verschmelzen der gesellschaftlichen und der persönlichen Interessen,” 431.  Gleserman, “Das Verschmelzen der gesellschaftlichen und der persönlichen Interessen,” 434.  Gaetano Biccari, “Politische Stellungnahmen,” Heiner Müller-Handbuch, edited by HansThies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2003), 30 – 39. Heiner Müller, Gesammelte Irrtümer. Interviews und Gespräche, vol. 2 (Berlin: Verlag der Autoren, 1996), 64.

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marked by its translation into political terms.¹⁹ Müller’s theaterbodies suspend the translative crossing from ideal-aesthetic to physical-political. The body as aesthetic object is utopian in its very impossibility; it cannot be reduced to a single term in the creative, physical space of postdramatic theater. Elements of postdramatic theater radicalize the experienced gap between the politics and positions of bodies on stage and in the audience. The action of postdramatic theater occurs not between actors’ bodies, but rather on the body as such; bodies do not signify abstract ideals (love, envy, anger), but are instead present in their “blind materiality,” unlike any pictorially or narratively fixed body images.²⁰ Postdramatic theater works against notions of embodiment that are central to my reading of Braun and a politics of East German solidarity articulated around such figures as Tamara Bunke (Tania), Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and Alexander von Humboldt in Chapter Three, because in postdramatic theater the body always exceeds the subject’s ideological work, even as ideas have material consequences for the subject. In Müller’s words, “Bodies and their conflict with ideas are thrown onto the stage. As long as there are ideas, there are wounds; ideas inflict wounds on bodies.”²¹ Their materiality does not preclude their mutability:

 Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review 25 (2004): 43 – 44.  Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater, 367. He explains: “Out of the body’s overcoming semantics, the theater of the modern and the postdramatic theater acquire new strengths. A curious principle of the theater comes into its own: for theater, sensuality evades sense. One can illustrate this condition by comparing a theatrical scene and a painting. Fixing all sensual information in a painting offers the moment qua aesthetic construction such that each detail, ‘eternalized’ by dint of its stillness, can keep its abundant sense, even if it is familiar—in David’s picture ‘Marat á son dernier soupir,’ for example, the knife, the letter, the quills, the water, the posture of the dying man etc. Whereas a painting realizes the metamorphosis of sensuality into sense, it is entirely different when it is assumed by the moving, lively theaterbodies and transformed into a scene, when Peter Weiß [sic] and Peter Brook gather the players in their staging of ‘Marat,’ citing the sunken figure of Marat from David’s painting. Immediately, even the most meaningful ‘tableau’ is carried beyond all interpretability into blind materiality, sensual play, into the ephemeral fireworks of theater action,” (365, emphasis in original). See also Patrick Primavesi, “Theater des Kommentars,” Heiner Müller-Handbuch, edited by Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2003), 45 – 52. Primavesi makes his argument with reference to Benjamin’s concept of allegory, foregrounding a break between meaning and image analogous to Lehmann’s description of sense and sensuality. On the abstraction of the body in dramatic theater, see Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater, 362– 363.  Heiner Müller, Gesammelte Irrtümer. Interviews und Gespräche, vol. 1. (Berlin: Verlag der Autoren, 1996), 97. See also Joachim Fiebach, Inseln der Unordnung. Fünf Versuche zu Heiner Müllers Theatertexten (Berlin: Henschel, 1990), 41– 49.

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Every body is multiple: workbody, playbody, sportbody, public and private bodies, body of flesh and blood and skeleton. The cultural imagination of that which is “the” body underlies “dramatic” changes, and theater articulates and reflects those imaginings. It represents the body and at the same time takes the body as its primary signifying material. Yet the theaterbody is not exhausted in this function: in theater it is a value sui generis. ²²

Müller’s insistence on a bodily remainder, identified by Lehmann as characteristic of postdramatic theater, is remarkably like the dialectic of revolutionary subject formation, in which the subjective and the objective are not always resolved, but exist in painful tension between the liberatory effects of revolution’s reason and the repressive effects of reason’s instrumentalization.²³ If the subjective is understood to lag behind the objective in this process, how are we to evaluate the physical body that a subject occupies and the status of the body as a nexus of the material-objective and the ideological-subjective? The bodily remainder is the most persistent reminder of the possibility that, at the level of specific, unique bodies, these theoretical distinctions are at best tenuous and may themselves represent a moment in which—to use Müller’s language— “ideas inflict wounds on bodies.”²⁴ But the bodily remainder goes further: as specific, unique bodies on the stage, Müller’s figures refuse to be known in straightforwardly humanist terms; with the dissolution of an ideal, universal human subject in favor of discrete, material bodies, his theater effectively undermines an East German cultural policy with humanist cultural patrimony at its core. Although Müller’s postdramatic approach stands at odds with socialist humanism’s ideal political subject, he retains the established frame of the relationship of the individual to the collective. (It is worth noting here that individual and collective do not correspond to particular and universal. Müller’s collective subjects and the forms they assume are highly particularized even—perhaps especially—when they are fractured.) Rather than elucidate the positive creation of political subjects, he concentrates on how the physical and psychological com-

 Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater, 362.  Gleserman, “Das Verschmelzen der gesellschaftlichen und der persönlichen Interessen,” 419. In defining the dialectic of revolution, Dietmar Goldschnigg explains: “Analogous to the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ and bound up with it, the ‘dialectic of revolution,’ that is, the contradiction between its humanistic ideals and its inhumane praxis, gets worked out. The negative dialectic consists in the revolutionary, liberatory Reason that is made into its opposite through instrumental Reason.” See Goldschnigg, “Utopie und Revolution. Georg Büchner in der DDR Literatur: Christa Wolf, Volker Braun, Heiner Müller,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philologie 109.4 (1990): 571– 596.  Müller, Gesammelte Irrtümer, vol. 1, 97.

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ponents of emergent political subjects are repeatedly broken and refashioned in revolution. Müller’s texts enact aesthetically and formally the material articulation and disarticulation of subjects through their relationships to collective and institutional ideologies and their attendant practices. But unlike the Lukácsian subject whose reification and fragmentation can ultimately be overcome through class consciousness, Müller’s subjects have no agency outside of alienation and (self)betrayal. Antoine, presented first as a unified subject-body, is shattered into three bodies which are, in turn, destroyed through (self)betrayal, mutilation, and execution. There is no unity of subject and object, consciousness and body, but only a relentless reduction of subject-bodies to their materiality as theaterbodies. Theaterbodies, in sum, are not humanist subjects, but roles (functions in Lehmann’s terms). As such, theaterbodies simultaneously enable the revolutionary modes of intersubjectivity that Müller articulates and threaten to undermine any individual articulation of revolutionary subjectivity that requires an intact, humanist subject. Any agency that might correspond to subjectivity does not exist in the bodies made present on the stage. Rather, it is constructed relationally and in the act of interpreting those bodies. Müller’s radical reduction of intact, humanist subjects to bodily remainders instantiates a much broader tendency in revolutionary rhetoric to approach subjects as bearers of masks and, first and foremost, as roles. Indeed, the threat of counterrevolution has been broached in terms of masks and a need to unmask traitors since the earliest days of the Russian Revolution. (And, as Müller makes painfully clear, so long as the modern/colonial world system endures, counterrevolution is inseparable from revolution itself.) As Sheila Fitzpatrick notes in her study of identity and imposture in twentieth-century Russia, civilization requires masking to the extent that social practice involves role-play. Revolutions, however, suspend masks as markers of existing social roles: “Successful revolutions tear off masks; that is, they invalidate the conventions of selfpresentation and social interaction that obtained in pre-revolutionary society. […] Yet in revolution, even as the millions of people that comprise society are necessarily engaged in self-reinvention, the revolutionary militants tend to be obsessed with authenticity and transparency.”²⁵ The obsession with self-reinvention, authenticity, and un-masking is a defining contradiction of revolutionary society. It is a contradiction that Müller took up already in his earliest dramas of revolution, perhaps most notably Mauser (1970), whose very title opposes natural transformation (molting) to the eponymous weapons manufacturer and the

 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 3.

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violent unmasking or exposure that the play recounts. The social consequences of this contradiction, according to Fitzpatrick, include the establishment of selfcritical and denunciatory practices, generalized suspicion, and anxiety surrounding questions of identity.²⁶ The consequences of self-criticism, denunciation, and suspicion lie at the heart of intellectual and revolutionary (self)betrayal in Müller’s plays. Identity in any meaningful sense is suspended in the figure of the mask. Indeed, in the terminology of the Russian Revolution, they (identity/the mask) are inseparable: In early Soviet discourse, the closest equivalent of the term “identity” was litso (literally, face). […] Discussion of identity was closely linked with questions of disguise and concealment, since the Revolution had made certain social and political identities dangerous handicaps and thus fostered concealment. A disguised identity must be “unmasked” (razoblachno), a very common term in early Soviet discourse. Double identity or duplicity (dvulichie, dvurushnichestvo), the latter defined as “behavior of a person ostensibly belonging to one group but acting on behalf of the opposing side,” was regularly excoriated in the Soviet press. […] In the Soviet case […] it is impossible to discuss identity adequately without dealing with the question of imposture.²⁷

All of The Task’s figures engage in masking and imposture; all are subject to the slippage of self/identity and face/identity. Sometimes their roles are in service of the revolutionary ideals of liberté, egalité, and fraternité; sometimes they are in service of counterrevolutionary goals or concealment of past revolutionary identities, as with Antoine. Revolution itself is a mask of, and is masked by death, a fact repeatedly remarked by Debuisson and conveyed most prominently in the text block with the repeating phrase “REVOLUTION IS THE MASK OF DEATH DEATH IS THE MASK OF REVOLUTION.”²⁸ Masks are fearsome and alienating, but also required for the completion of revolutionary tasks. Debuisson insists on the necessity of masks and role-play from the beginning, but also fears his mask more than any other figure in the play, imploring Galloudec: “Don’t leave me alone with my mask.”²⁹ Sasportas’s mask, written on his body, is both the most authentic and the most performative. Galloudec remarks at intervals on the ease and the difficulty of Sasportas’s impending performance: “It

   

Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! 4. Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! 10 – 11 and 18 – 19. Müller, Der Auftrag, 20. Müller, Der Auftrag, 41.

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shouldn’t be difficult for you to play the slave, Sasportas, in your black skin,” and later: “I know you play the hardest role. It’s written on your body.”³⁰ For Müller’s theaterbodies, there is no unified identity revealed in the process of unmasking. Unmasking itself is not definitively revolutionary, but it is constantly enacted and reenacted in the context of revolution. (Self)betrayal may involve masking, but unmasking is not necessarily its opposite. Significantly, it is the Second World subject Galloudec who repeatedly falls out of character and is cautioned against the possibility of self-destruction that may accompany any attempt to destroy or remove his mask. His deception is necessary to the revolution and to his integrity as a subject. Difficult as it is to discern which masks are revolutionary and which counterrevolutionary, the danger lies as much in losing track of what is mask and what is face. The White Revolution was simultaneously a revolution and a counterrevolution, an entrenched reaction to the Red, Bolshevik Revolution, and an ostensible return to the Occidentalizing Tsars.³¹ Countless soldiers fought subsequently on both sides; were they both victors and vanquished? Revolutionaries and traitors? Some scholars consider the end of the civil war to be the successful end of the Russian Revolution; others consider it the beginning of the Revolution’s betrayal. Most notable among the latter was Trotsky, whose military leadership enabled the defeat of the Whites, but who argued that the victorious Bolsheviks initiated a process of self-betrayal, and especially the violent betrayal of the individual within the collective.³²

 Müller, Der Auftrag, 19.  This range of connotations reflects popular historical narratives of the Red/White division, inscribed in no small part by the victorious Reds: “In Soviet historiography, all the White generals were depicted as fervent monarchists. However, Kornilov, Deniken and some others did not want to see the restoration of the Romanov dynasty, and adopted the idea of not prejudging the question.” Most scholars of the Civil War period now agree that the White Armies were internally diverse and engaged in pragmatic military alliances with deliberately general political programs in the interest of not alienating the Cossacks or other ethnic nationalist groups vital to the White Armies. As Evan Mawdsley concludes: “There was a Red Army, but no such thing as a single White Army. […] And yet, after November 1918, the organized counterrevolutionary movement did have much in common. What was similar were all-Russian pretensions, conservative politics and military rule.” See Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, “The White Generals,” in: Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution. 1914 – 1921, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 206 – 217, here 208; and Evan Mawdsley, “The White Armies,” in: Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution. 1914 – 1921, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 468 – 478, here 476.  Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, trans. Max Eastman (Dover, 2004). The Revolution Betrayed is rife with the language of the French Revolution, in particular with the key words “Ther-

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The end of the White Revolution so understood initiates a dialectic of revolutionary (self)betrayal that marks all revolutionary subjects in Müller’s work, most dramatically around figures of the traditional and technical intelligentsia. As early as the conclusion of the military phase of revolution in 1920, with its initiation of complex social reorganization and mass processes of self-reinvention, and at the latest with Stalin’s so-called revolution from above and the proletarian cultural revolution, new masks were donned and new biographies crafted to obscure past participation in the White Armies.³³ To what extent these historical modes of self-reinvention constituted self-betrayal is certainly subject to debate. Their equivalent practices in The Task intimate that unmasking is no less problematic for the revolutionary subject of literature. Out of the play of roles and masks that accompanies and itself entails the defeat of the White Revolution in The Task, there emerges a new (counter)revolution, a new (self)betrayal and attendant reconfiguration of revolutionary masks. Müller’s intellectuals are marked by insecurity, weakness, and susceptibility to betrayal: “All of the intellectual figures in Müller’s dramatic work have taken up residence between the poles of fulfillment of a historical task and failure or betrayal.”³⁴ What is unique to their positions is the frequency with which self-betrayal is coupled with the intellectual’s betrayal of the revolution and its ultimate failure or inevitable lapse into counterrevolution. Antoine’s (self)betrayal—first in denying his past, then in revealing it against his will under the influence of drink, his wife, and the (possibly identical) angel of despair—is a historical (self)betrayal that takes the form of a memory at odds with his public personae. Cut adrift by the liquidation of the French Revolution, Debuisson denounces his revolutionary past and resumes his place as a creole oligarch on his parents’ Jamaican plantation. Debuisson’s “fear of the beauty of the world,” which he knows to be a “mask of treason,” can be read as both a fear of temptation and betrayal, and a fear of what his appreciation of

midor” and “Bonapartism.” Trotsky’s work was widely received by Latin American socialists well into the 1960s; his personal connections to the Communist Party leadership in Mexico are well known. See for example Osvaldo Coggiola, El trotskismo en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Magenta, 1993); Osvaldo Calello, Trotsky y la revolución en América Latina ([Argentina]: Ediciones de la Izquierda Nacional, 2002); and Ronaldo Munck, “Marxism in Latin America/Latin America in Marxism,” in Twentieth-Century Marxism: A Global Introduction, ed. Daryl Glaser and David M. Walker (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 154– 177.  On practices of self-narrative in and around the revolution, see Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks!  Christian Klein, “Der Intellektuelle und die Intelligenz,” in Heiner Müller-Handbuch, ed. Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2003), 27– 30, here 27– 28.

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beauty may conceal.³⁵ Both of the play’s traditional intellectuals write and rewrite their memories and allegiances, and Müller as a literary intellectual seems to implicate himself in their choices, motivated at intervals by fear and desire. For if the literary intellectual concerns himself with an aesthetics traditionally conceived (i. e., as a study of the relation between beauty and truth), how should the play’s reader or audience receive the author who lends form instead to a beautiful mask of truth? Alternately, how could a refusal to engage the world in aesthetic terms be other than an authorial self-betrayal? In this sense, The Task could be read as critical not of masking or betrayal as such, but of a solidarity that demands (or generates conditions that demand) the self-betrayal of subjects with apparently incongruous interests. In its specifically aesthetic mode, solidarity can expose its own limits, tearing at the beautiful masks of truth that attempt to pin their bearers to a singular identity at the expense of their capacity and even desire for mutual and multifaceted relationships to other revolutionary subjects. Other scholars have elaborated on the status of masks and role-play through useful comparisons to Brecht’s The Measures Taken (1930) and Georg Büchner’s Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death, 1835).³⁶ Consider the following example from Dietmar Goldschnigg: When, in Danton’s Death, in light of the Jacobins’ virulent role-play, the order is given to tear the masks off of the faces of the Roman Republicans, Danton answers: “Then their faces will go with them.” This theme is picked up and varied in The Task. For the Negro Sasportas the French Revolution’s slogan of equality is not realized “until we’ve skinned each other.” The end of the intervening “theater of the white revolution” alludes to his suspicion that the skin, the face, will come off with the mask when it and the makeup are removed, which is in fact true for Sasportas. Because his mask as Negro-slave is identical with his face.³⁷

Much has rightly been made of Sasportas’s black mask. First treated dismissively by Galloudec as an “easy” part, the Second World revolutionary almost immediately recants, speaking one of the play’s best known lines: “I know you play the hardest role. It’s written on your body.” And yet it is ultimately Galloudec, not Sasportas, who is cautioned that his face might come off upon unmasking: “Our play is over, Sasportas. Watch out when you remove your makeup, Gallou-

 Müller, Der Auftrag, 40 – 41.  Goldschnigg, “Utopie und Revolution”; Teraoka, The Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse: The Postmodernist Poetics of Heiner Müller (New York: Peter Lang: 1985), Chapter Four; 147– 148.  Goldschnigg, “Utopie und Revolution,” 591.

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dec. Perhaps your skin will go with it. Your mask, Sasportas, is your face. My face is my mask.”³⁸ The frequent (mis)interpretive redirection of Debuisson’s cautionary remarks to Galloudec toward Sasportas, coupled with the shift from skin to face, is striking. It is not only Sasportas’s black skin that is at issue, but also, and in this passage more explicitly, Galloudec’s destructive relation to his own white face. His face is itself a mask of equality that can be attained only through the violent erasure of particularity, a marker of fraternity: “We are not equal until we have skinned each other.”³⁹ The nature of equality (a value that sets equal, universalizes) and its difficult relation to fraternity (a value that underscores positive relations among particulars) is taken up below; suffice it to say for the moment that The Task’s aesthetic solidarity cordons off an imaginative space in which the danger and the exhilarating possibility of skinning as a dramatic gesture can be thought and even experimentally literalized on the theaterbody. Any change to Galloudec’s face-identity jeopardizes his skin, a guarantor of bodily integrity or, as a protective membrane, minimally of equilibrium between interior self and exterior face. Manifested on the theaterbody, Müller’s stage solution is provisionally expressed corporeally. Frantz Fanon, on the other hand, advances a concept of the mask that oscillates relentlessly between the corporeal and the ideological, between something closely approximating the Russian revolutionary self-identity and face-identity. The reference to Fanon requires us to think against the straightforward unmasking of single-party dictatorship in the shape of a single correct revolutionary line and in favor of growing new skins, concepts, and subjectivities in reference to both European and pan-African revolutionary rhetorics. The violence entailed in both masking and unmasking is key to understanding The Task’s complex layering of Russian and Caribbean revolutionary trajectories and their attendant masks. In relation to the White Revolution as a particular formation within the Russian Revolution, those masks are figured in historical and ideological terms. In the case of Fanon, who radically refigures class as a category of revolutionary analysis, the masks are racial and existential, and their violence all the more physical for it. Reading beyond the historical and literary analysis of Black Skins, White Masks (1952), Fanon’s final and most influential text, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), extends the connection of masks, skins, and the political ideologies of single-party states. Fanon writes: “The single party is the modern form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, without mask, without make-up, unscrupulous, cynical,” and: “For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, com-

 Müller, Der Auftrag, 34.  Müller, Der Auftrag, 18.

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rades, we must grow a new skin, develop new concepts, try to create a new man.”⁴⁰ Wallerstein references both of these passages in his discussion of Fanon’s unique redeployment of class as a category of social analysis and of his position in debates internal to the Left since the 1950s. Wallerstein’s essay makes clear that in speaking of the single-party state Fanon was not concerned with Europe or with the Eastern Bloc states per se, but with developments in anticolonial African nationalism. Fanon was widely attacked by other Third World theorists for raising questions about the relative investment of various classes— including some anticolonial nationalists—in the existing system.⁴¹ Wallerstein explains: It is precisely on questions of class structure in the world-system, and the class alliances that are essential for a revolution, that Fanon looked for “a new skin,” and “new concepts.” Far from rejecting European thought, in which he was deeply embedded himself, he took the title of his book from the Internationale, and he took his starting point from the Communist Manifesto: “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” He simply said, let us look again to see who has how many chains, and which are the groups who, having the fewest privileges, may be the most ready to become a “revolutionary class.” The old labels are old skins, which do not correspond fully with contemporary analysis. […] The key tactical issue is how the sides [i. e., the national bourgeoisie and what Fanon called the revolutionary peasantry—JHT] line up in the world struggle, and Fanon was in this matter skeptical of certain received truths.⁴²

There is ample reason for the Second World author to be attracted to Fanon’s critical analysis of the national bourgeoisie, which shares at least three concerns with Müller’s own critical program. These are: (1) the relationhip of the technical intelligentsia to developmentalist and modernizing impulses in the socialist state; (2) the capacity of the traditional intelligentsia (including artists and intellectuals) to position themselves relative to cultural inheritance and revolutionary vision; and (3) the legitimacy of a single party that, once unmasked, appears cynical rather than revolutionary. A reading of The Task that seeks to account for the density of these referents needs simultaneously to attend to the Russian Revolution’s appropriation of French Revolutionary slogans; Brecht, Büchner, and a legacy of German reception of both the French and Russian Revolutions; the dialectical relation of the French and Haitian Revolutions, with its own complex history of reception in  Immanuel Wallerstein, “Fanon and the Revolutionary Class,” in The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press, 2000), 14– 32, here 25 – 26.  Wallerstein, “Fanon and the Revolutionary Class,” 15 – 25.  Wallerstein, “Fanon and the Revolutionary Class,” 26.

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German-speaking cultures; and the radical physicality of masking and unmasking the self-betraying revolutionary subject made present as theaterbody. As even my brief analysis of Russian revolutionary history, as well as Caribbean and pan-African revolutionary theory, suggests, provocative possibilities emerge when we read two sets of masks at once, namely, the language of masking and imposture in the Russian Revolution and Frantz Fanon’s material and psychological account of the (post)colonial condition, laid out most fully in Black Skins, White Masks. This double reading and the intersection of revolutionary histories it entails are not self-evident; they require geopolitical and geocultural explanation. I offer them, first, with reference to Mexican philosopher and intellectual historian Leopoldo Zea’s re-positioning of the Americas, Iberia, and Russia as non-Western in historical terms and, second, in the subsequent section, with reference to the competing logics of universal and particular values in revolution, of which Zea and Immanuel Wallerstein provide substantially overlapping accounts. I am seeking a mode of reading and presenting arguments that respects the simultaneity of postdramatic theater and that refrains from forcing a plot or analogous linear structure onto The Task; for this, I require the reader’s patience as I move through arguments which are likewise meant to be simultaneous and overlapping, but are, inevitably, presented sequentially here. Suffice it to say for now that my apparent detours through Zea and Wallerstein effectively ground the role of geocultural comparison in decolonial thinking. Looking to Müller’s tentative relation of Latin American and Soviet revolutionary traditions, which I read through the twin lenses of Zea and Wallerstein, makes it possible to see the points at which those revolutionary lines intersect and diverge in ways that have been obscured by the territorialization of revolutionary values.

Latin America and the Caribbean at the intersection of revolutionary histories Already linked in its historical marginality and particularity to Latin American revolutions, the Russian/Soviet revolutionary tradition that Müller invokes in a language of masking and unmasking, and via the White (Counter)Revolution, coincides with references to and citations of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, key theorists of Caribbean and pan-African subjectivities and revolutionary potentials. References to Fanon and Césaire have been explored in great detail by Arlene A. Teraoka.⁴³ My argument for attention to the other White Revolution does

 See Teraoka, Silence of Entropy, Chapter Four.

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not oppose hers, which reveals crucial links among literary and theoretical engagements with race, revolution, and coloniality in East Germany and the Caribbean. Rather, I hope to situate her work within a still broader field of revolutionary referents and to make clear the limitations of a critical literature that would pursue one reading at the expense of another. Teraoka’s treatment of The Task is part of her broader inquiry into the status of the Third World in Müller’s writing. In particular, she attends to “the issues of cultural colonialism and the exportation of revolution, the role of the intellectual in the revolutionary process, and, specifically, the role of the European socialist intellectual in contemporary Third World struggles.”⁴⁴ Like Frank Hörnigk in his roughly contemporary analysis of Latin American revolutions’ impact on East German drama, summarized in Chapter Three, Teraoka accounts for the ways in which Third World material realities cannot be reduced to metaphor, even as they may have consequences in the realm of the metaphoric, and visa versa. Teraoka demonstrates that Fanon as much as Brecht or Büchner is a key intertext for any careful reading of The Task. ⁴⁵ She identifies a preponderance of references, beginning with one to “the blinding sun of torture” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth almost immediately upon the trio’s arrival in Jamaica. She goes on to delineate larger revolutionary logics that underwrite Sasportas’s transformation of revolutionary consciousness along lines suggested by Fanon’s examination of the construction of Black-White oppositions and their destabilization in violent revolution, as well as to identify Müller’s seemingly direct quotation from the final, gripping passages of Black Skins, White Masks. Fanon’s theory of revolution, violence, and subjectivity provides a compelling psychological corollary to Antoine’s trifiguration as Debuisson-GalloudecSasportas in the play’s main action. “In ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders,’” explains Joan Cocks, “[Fanon] shows that violence shatters human subjectivity.”⁴⁶ Antoine’s shattered subjectivity vividly assumes positions that correspond to each of the Cold War’s three worlds as he struggles with his memory of violence and betrayal in the revolution. The status of revolutionary violence

 Teraoka, Silence of Entropy, 11. This project is by no means a small one: “The importance of the Third World in Heiner Müller’s work cannot be overstated,” (31).  Teraoka, Silence of Entropy, 43, 125, 137– 138, 157, 160 – 162.  Joan Cocks, Passion and Paradox: Intellectuals Confront the National Question (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 64. See also Teraoka, The Silence of Entropy, 137– 138. Here Teraoka uses different passages of Fanon’s work to make a similar argument, suggesting that the breakdown of the poles black and white figures prominently in Sasportas’s relation to his fellow revolutionaries.

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in The Task, in which a specific site of revolutionary violence (France at the turn of the nineteenth century) expands outward to encompass other local and historical instances of violence as revolutionary agents come into relation within a variety of contexts (e. g., nineteenth-century Haiti and Jamaica, twentieth-century Peru and the USSR), remains ambiguous. Rather than present his audience with a static opposition of acceptable revolutionary violence to unacceptable counterrevolutionary violence, Müller explores the experience of violence in the formation of individual consciousness, radicalizing the psychological dimension of Fanon’s analysis by literalizing revolution’s subjective effects on the theaterbody.⁴⁷ Within an extended monologue that functions as commentary, a block of self-reflexive text within a larger aesthetic structure, Debuisson states explicitly: “We are three worlds.” Sasportas suggests a competing conceptualization of geopolitics, refusing Debuisson’s enveloping plural in favor of a reconsolidated singular: “I, that is Africa. I, that is Asia. Both Americas am I.”⁴⁸ His proclamation invokes the 1966 Tricontinental Congress convened in Havana to great international attention. Literary references reinforce the historical. Sasportas’s appeal in the same speech to the “Negroes of all races” and impending “war of the landscapes” refers to Césaire’s dramatization of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, Une saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo, 1967; translated by Müller for the Deutsches Theater in 1968.)⁴⁹ Sasportas thus strengthens the Caribbean’s role in the play as a place for articulating Latin American and pan-African identity. Latin American and Caribbean locales—even in the presence of allusions to Africa and Asia—retain their specific historical and theoretical positions as sites

 On this point, I differ somewhat from Teraoka. She argues: “The lack of commas separating the names and identities of the three figures (‘unsre Namen Debuisson Galloudec Sasportas’) creates a single name of three. The three roles do not represent independent characters who interact within a dramatic world, but serve only to articulate the changing constellations within the contradictory consciousness of their Auftraggeber Antoine,” (Silence of Entropy, 136). By contrast, the existence of three discrete theaterbodies, which in their radical materiality exceed any strictly psychological notion of consciousness, is key to my analysis.  Müller, Der Auftrag, 39 – 40.  Müller, Der Auftrag, 40; Herbert Uerlings, Poetiken der Interkulturalität. Haiti bei Kleist, Seghers, Müller, Buch, und Fichte (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997), 139; Heiner Müller, Saison im Kongo in Werke 7: Die Stücke 5/Die Übersetzungen, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 167– 247. Lumumba (1925 – 1961) was a prominent pan-Africanist, leader of the anticolonial Mouvement National Congolaise, and the first prime minister of the newly independent Republic of Congo. He was deposed, imprisoned, and executed following a Belgian-backed coup headed by Joseph Desiré Mobutu within months of taking office. News of his death was met with street protests around the world.

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for redefining the relationship of First and Third World thinking in The Task. As Robert Young explains: [The] Tricontinental Conference of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America, held in Havana in January 1966, in many ways represents the formal initiation of a space of international resistance of which the field of postcolonial theory would be a product. […I]t gathered together representatives from the entire non-western world, the three continents, and […] it aligned itself with a radical anti-imperialism located firmly in the socialist camp, though emphatically independent from any direction from the Soviet Union or China. […] In the pages of the Tricontinental we find for the first time the conjunction of tricontinental social, theoretical and cultural political thought: Guevara, Cabral, Fanon, Ho Chi Minh, and many others are for the first time brought together into a coherent body of political work.⁵⁰

Notably, Müller does not incorporate earlier anticolonial alliances—for example, the 1955 Bandung Conference of African and Asian states—but just this specifically tricontinental thought enunciated in the Caribbean; the geopolitical world Sasportas represents would be incomplete without Latin America. But so, too, would a reading of the play’s geocultural constellations that neglects the figure of Galloudec, the “one in the middle” (“der Mittlere”) and subject of the Second World. Teraoka’s insistence on the fundamental identity of Antoine, Debuisson, and the Man in the Elevator, each engaged in a dialectical struggle with Sasportas as the remembered figure of the Third World, is compelling; indeed, it opens up a range of possibilities for considering the relation of the individual to the collective, the role of memory and forgetting in revolution and (self)betrayal, and the First and Third Worlds. Like any reading, however, it requires us to suspend another set of questions outside of its interpretive parameters. In this case, it grants structural and thematic priority to a black-white conflict alternately figured as a conflict between two geopolitical positions (First and Third World) and two historical alternatives (past and future, French and impending anticolonial revolutions). The exclusion of a third term in the shape of the Second World subject or of the Russian Revolution does more than reinforce Fanon’s explication of the Manichean world view that underwrites the existential experience of blackness, a world view that cannot be sustained in the revolution of consciousness he outlines as a precursor to any revolution in the material world.⁵¹ In observing that Sasportas continues to pursue his revolutionary task “without the white man De-

 Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 231.  Teraoka, Silence of Entropy, 137– 138.

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buisson,” for example, we fail to observe: “with the white man Galloudec.”⁵² The tendency to deprioritize the figure of Galloudec finds its corollary in the foreclosure of an interpretive space for the other White Revolution. Neither Müller’s evocation of Fanon’s binaries nor his repeated disruption thereof in the figure of Galloudec need be privileged. The multiple and simultaneous perspectives of postdramatic theater require a similarly multiperspectival reading strategy. Introducing the other White Revolution as a tandem referent is a step in this direction. The theoretical groundwork for a geocultural comparison of Latin America and Russia has been at least provisionally laid by the Mexican philosopher and intellectual historian Leopoldo Zea, who re-positions the Americas, Iberia, and Russia as non-Western in historical terms. Zea’s fascinating work lays the foundation for thinking alternative spatial economies of revolution and development.⁵³ Most importantly for the purposes of my reading, Zea encourages approaching revolutions in Russia and Latin America as deliberate barbarizations of European thought (always recalling that he understands Iberia and Russia as non-European). Barbarism, along with concrete humanity, is a key concept in his understanding of the theoretical and ethical import of peripheral cultures in the modern world. Zea derives his concept of barbarism from the Greek discourse on language, civilization, and belonging, and it acquires a special status for Zea insofar as language (logos) is a metaphor for all thought. The barbarian is one who cannot speak Greek well, who stutters or stumbles; his ability to speak fluently in his own language is of no consequence within the network of relations posited by the civilized Greek. He brings difference to the language of the center, and it is only in difference that humans find commonality. Difference, in turn, is con-

 “Specifically, the play treats the failure of the white revolution, the revolution of the European man of reason and Enlightenment, of Danton and Robespierre. For there are two ‘protagonists’ in the play: the demise of the traditional hero, the Debuisson-Hamlet figure who has betrayed the Ophelia, the mission of revolution, within himself, is accompanied by the rise of a new hero, the Sasportas-Ophelia who rejects all there is of the Hamlet, the white European, in himself. Here Auftrag develops certain issues suggested by the quotations in the last scene of Hamletmachine: Ophelia, speaking with the words of Joseph Conrad and Frantz Fanon, calls for the uprising of the Third World against the domination of the White European; in Auftrag, the ex-slave Sasportas continues his mission without the white man Debuisson. ‘It is,’ to quote Fanon, ‘a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man.’” Teraoka, Silence of Entropy, 125.  Leopoldo Zea, The Role of the Americas in History, trans. Sonja Karsen, edited and with an introduction by Amy A. Oliver (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992); Discurso desde la marginación y la barbarie (Barcelona: Editorial Anthropos, 1988).

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stitutive for concrete humanity, which Zea defines in contradistinction to a universal, Hegelian concept of the human subject. Zea’s subjects—like Müller’s theaterbodies—are more material than those imaginable within dialectical materialism conventionally understood; he seeks to remove all traces of idealism from the philosophy of history insofar as ideals are abstractions that do not attend to concrete humans in their material and cultural diversity. Only in barbarization qua authentic dialogue (the convergence of two logi) can Zea’s alternate understanding of history be realized. Zea studiously avoids any discussion of sublimation within the dialectic he posits, preferring instead the notion of stuttering or rendering difference in and through the language of the center. Zea’s argument proceeds through what is at once a territorialization of history, with an emphasis on the constitution of central and peripheral cultures, and a critique of those territorializations that are implied in Occidental philosophies of history, for which Hegel’s serves as his chief exemplar. Zea (like Fanon) is both indebted to Hegel and antagonistic toward his idealism, which he sees as continuing untroubled in Western Marxism. He develops instead a dialectic of concrete humans (hombres concretos) to replace abstract and universalizing notions of a spirit of history.⁵⁴ Zea was the first thinker to connect Fanon and other French Caribbean thinkers systematically to Spanish American philosophy and social realities.⁵⁵ In so doing, he laid the groundwork for inclusive, decolonial lines of thought capable of attending to the complexity internal to the idea of Latin America, the dynamic relation of the Americas to the world, and, ultimately, their contribution to world-historical thinking.⁵⁶ An affinity with Fanon is especially clear in Zea’s re-

 While I cannot say for certain whether the concrete human is derived from the Hegelian concrete universal, Hegel reception among Caribbean thinkers with whom Zea was in active dialogue did attend to Hegel’s formulation of the relation between universality and particularity. See n. 57.  This is most explicit in his essay on indigenismo and negritude in Dependencia y liberación en la cultura latinoamericana (Mexico City: Editorial Joaquín Moritz, 1974) and is well summarized by Robin Fiddian, “Latin America and Beyond: Transcontinental Dialogue in the Work of Leopoldo Zea,” interventions 5.1 (2003): 113 – 124.  Although Mignolo makes only passing reference to Zea in The Idea of Latin America, he engages critically with his work in “Occidentalización, imperialismo, globalización, herencias coloniales y teorías postcoloniales,” Revista Iberoamericana 170.1 (1995): 27– 40 and “La razón postcolonial: herencias coloniales y teorías postcoloniales,” in Postmodernidad y postcolonialidad. Breves reflexiones sobre Latinoamérica, ed. Alfonso de Toro (Frankfurt: Vervuert; Madrid: Iberoamericana, 1997), 51– 70. His criticisms notwithstanding, Mignolo (and Wallerstein) pursue work in a line with what Zea, recalling the inheritance of independence-era thinkers, called simply the emancipation of the mind.

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cursive approach to consciousness and concrete experience, where consciousness is not a Hegelian end, but a necessary point of departure for history as human action in and on reality.⁵⁷ Where man the abstract, universal subject is located squarely in an Occidental civilization defined in opposition to peripheral cultures viewed as barbarous or semi-barbarous, concrete man, or man barbarized, is particular. If Antoine is one such abstract, universal, and Occidental subject, Debuisson, Galloudec, and Sasportas occupy variously particularized roles in a Latin American theater of revolution. For all of his wealth and privilege, Debuisson belongs to a creole elite always marked as different from (and inferior to) a European-born elite; Galloudec may well be the revolutionary peasantry; Sasportas is most obviously particular as a Black man cast in the role of a slave, but he is not alone in his particularity. Antoine’s apparently involuntary recuperation of their memories, his violent coming to consciousness of their concrete experiences, suggests that the barbarity of their struggles is constitutive for even the most universal of Müller’s revolutionary subjects. Antoine moves through the particular to become universal, but at what cost, and to whom? This brings us to Zea’s primary rhetorical conceit in developing a positive concept of barbarism, his recurrent reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest— one of the most enduring motifs in Latin American and Caribbean cultural thought since the nineteenth century.⁵⁸ As the figure of the barbarian par excel-

 On Zea’s reformulation of Hegelian terms, see Amy A. Oliver’s introduction to The Role of the Americas in History, xxxvii-xxxviii. Citing Nick Nesbitt in the context of her work on Hegel and Haiti, Susan Buck-Morss observes that Caribbean thinkers Césaire and Senghor may have shared such a reading of Hegel: “Césaire recalled to Nesbitt personally his youthful excitement in discovering Hyppolite’s new translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology (1941): ‘When the French translation of the Phenomenology first came out, I showed it to Senghor, and said to him, ‘Listen to what Hegel says, Léopold: to arrive at the Universal, one must immerse oneself in the Particular!’” In this light, Zea’s work seems less idiosyncratic and more prescient, able to read imaginatively against the grain of most European and US American scholars of Hegel. Susan BuckMorss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 15 – 16.  For a sketch of the debate and its cultural-political resonances in English, see translated excerpts from Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Caliban: Notes toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America,” in The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Ana Del Sarto, Alicia Ríos, Abril Trigo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 83 – 99. The original essay was published in Casa de las Américas 68 (1971): 124– 151. Retamar attends not only to the inauguration of the discussion among indepentistas, but also to its resumption in the 1960s by Caribbean thinkers including Aimé Césaire, Edward Brathwaite, and himself. Valeri Zemskov argues that Zea effectively anticipated the work of these Caribbean thinkers by decades: “Sobre las relaciones históricoculturales de América Latina en el Occidente: el conflicto de Calibán y Próspero,” Latinoamérica 13 (1980): 115 – 178. Amy A. Oliver adopts the same position (“Introduction,” xxiii-xxv).

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lence, Caliban (an anagram for cannibal, a figure associated with the Antillean Caribs from its earliest use) conforms to the original Greek meaning of barbarian as one who cannot express himself well in Greek, who stumbles, stutters, or misspeaks in a language which is not his own.⁵⁹ Unlike some Latin American and Caribbean cultural critics, Zea positively valorizes Caliban’s barbarization of Prospero’s tongue.⁶⁰ It is Caliban’s curse that initiates a dialogue with the civilized Prospero: The dominant logos transforms itself somehow in dialogue, the logos of two, as soon as it can be replicated, spoken ill, ill spoken (maldecido, mal dicho), already in another relation that is no longer that of its creator. Discourse from marginalization and barbarism, from the discourse imposed by various forms of the domination of man; from a history that has been marking the limits of all of the history that isn’t seen as barbarous. But at the same time a conscious barbarism that does not consider itself as such because it no longer aspires to repeat or imitate the imposed word, but rather to make it an instrument of its own particular form of being human.⁶¹

Zea views Latin American particularism and its barbarous history not as isolating, but rather as transformative. It is a situation that he believes imparts a special, world historical responsibility to articulate the ways in which Latin American history is exemplary or, as he writes, valid for other peoples.⁶² Latin America is hardly alone in its barbarity, but it is deeply entrenched in it as result of European contests for universalizing identities. Historically, Zea argues, Russia and Iberia were marginal to Europe from its consolidation under the Roman Empire onward, separated at once by geographical barriers and by the conceptual opposition of civilization and barbarism. The metaphor of dialogue across linguistic fields encapsulates relations that are spatial, philosophical, and political.⁶³ Each struggled in its own way to be recognized by Europe— Russia in its nineteenth-century debates over Westernization versus Panslavism, Spain in its repeated attempts to reassert itself as an heir to European Christianity and thereby relevant to European identity and civilizational discourse. The sense of marginalization experienced by Iberia was translated to Hispanoamerica, which experienced analogous problems of identity and history in the face of  “Cannibal,” in Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 29 – 31.  See for example Hugo Achugar, “Local/Global Latin Americanisms: ‘Theoretical Babbling,’ apropos Roberto Fernández Retamar,” reprinted in The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Ana del Sarto, Alicia Ríos, and Abril Trigo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 669 – 685.  Zea, Discurso, 35.  Zea, The Role of the Americas, 1– 2.  Zea, Discurso, 21.

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western Europe.⁶⁴ In the encounter between civilized Europe and the barbarous empires at its eastern and southern extremes, respectively contaminated by Mongol and Arab cultural contacts, Zea argues that the barbarian will always win out.⁶⁵ Marxism-Leninism in Russia was a barbarization of western Marxism, as were the diverse expressions of Leninism in Latin America and the Caribbean.⁶⁶ Each refused the teleology of history mapped out by Hegel and assumed by Marx: mongolized Russia would not retain Asian qualities; Latin America would not wait for its role in an unspecified future revolution.⁶⁷ Instead, each adapted Marxism to its specific revolutionary context: Confronted with the disjunctive between civilization and barbarism—Slavs, Iberians, and many other peoples situated at the margins of the European-Occidental world alike—the supposedly barbarian does not become civilized, but rather it is the civilization that becomes barbarian, that is, it adapts to the language proper to the peoples who adapt it to their own needs and destinies.⁶⁸

Barbarizing Marx, Soviet Russia and Latin America tendentially expressed their concrete humanity, rejecting abstract promises of future social rewards in favor of concrete, social and individual needs in the present. (Whether this was in fact successful is debatable.) Consequently, Zea argues, not the Europeans, but those on the periphery of history succeeded in implementing socialism: In the readaptation of Marxism to realities never contemplated by its creators, interpretations such as those of the Russian Nicolás Lenin, valid for Russia and for non-Occidental peoples, have emerged. Among these peoples one doesn’t simply speak of Marxism, but rather of Marxism-Leninism. In keeping with the Occidental point of view it could be said that it has been barbarized, the language of Marx and Engels transformed, but in reality it has been enriched and given a more authentically universal dimension.⁶⁹

Zea ascribes a special historical and ethical responsibility to the authentic (i. e., particular) universality of marginality and barbarism; the experience of the Americas in history exceeds the American experience proper because it is potentially relevant to the experiences of other structurally and historically marginal-

 Zea, Discurso, 76.  Zea, Discurso, 95.  Zea, Discurso, 93 – 95.  Zea, Discurso, 100; 240 – 241.  Zea, Discurso, 95.  Zea, Discurso, 240 – 41. I retain Zea’s Spanish Nicolás rather than translate as Nikolai or Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in order to preserve Lenin’s reception in Spanish translation and his appropriation by heterodox Marxists in Latin America.

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ized peoples. Chief among Latin America’s contributions is to expose the limits of any philosophy derived from abstract universals as opposed to concrete experiences of individuals. (It exposes the limits of aesthetic solidarity, too.) Struggling to relate the concrete experience of Latin America to the abstract political ideals of the Occidental world, for example, independence-era thinkers such as José Enrique Rodó, José Martí, and Simón Bolívar demonstrated the complex ways in which a liberation of consciousness necessarily precedes any form of political liberation. Zea goes a step further to alter the terms on which they wrestled with the idea of an authentic and original Latin American thought, insisting instead on “diversity in relation to the whole of which it is a part.”⁷⁰ Latin American thought is original in the most basic sense of the term: its concrete point of origin at the margins of history gives it a privileged and differential perspective on western culture.⁷¹ Its concrete humanity reveals that what is common to all humans is their diversity: “Marginalization and barbarism as new and ineluctable centers of expression of the human that, in this manner, negate that very marginalization and barbarism. The supposedly marginal and barbarous are nothing but expressions of the peculiarities proper to all humans.”⁷² All humanity: to generate a socialist humanism that can accommodate such a vision requires that the Second World author undertake a similar, conscious process of barbarization. For a Second World author to engage in some historically specific version of Zea’s “mental decolonization,” to locate in his own situation what is peculiar, to imagine a universal particularity grounded in the historical experience of Latin America and the Caribbean in dynamic relation with the Second World subject of revolution: these are in effect the formidable tasks Müller sets for himself as a Second World author, not to mention for his readers and audiences. Galloudec cannot complete the task; he must ask that it be conveyed to others in the hope that it may yet be accomplished. An intermediary in the Caribbean and European theaters of revolution, all he can do is write. The man who stands “between men” in the elevator to Peru is marked out, like Galloudec before him, as “the one in the middle.”⁷³ Within the conceptual and geopolitical space of the Second World, East Germany was uniquely positioned to imagine the intersections of revolutionary traditions in aesthetic terms particular to Second World authorship. Located politically at the geographic periphery of the Soviet Bloc that had—since the end of    

Zea, The Role of the Americas, 4 Zea, The Role of the Americas, 4. Zea, Discurso, 24. Müller, Der Auftrag, 27.

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the White Revolution—established its own universalizing center and sought to repress its barbarous history, East Germany was nonetheless also located squarely in a German (i. e., Occidental) cultural tradition. Emblematic of the cultural and military-strategic lines drawn (literally and figuratively) in the Cold War, East Germany was also one possible node of civilization and barbarism. It was a place from which to write that could benefit from Latin America’s heuristic advantage—what Zea calls its validity—as a prompt to uncover that which was barbarous in the Second World’s own revolutionary heritage dating back to the Russian Revolution (that is, to the extent that traditions reliant on socialist internationalisms can ever be treated separately). It is from this Second World position that Müller’s Task appropriates the barbaric with recourse to Latin America and the Caribbean, and recuperates a barbarous impulse at the root of the Russian Revolution itself. Indeed, Müller demonstrates that the barbarous is always constitutive of the universal in his attention to the dialectical relation of slave revolutions in the Caribbean and bourgeois revolution in France. In so doing, he generates an alternate geocultural constellation obscured by Cold War discourses the world over. Müller’s aesthetic solidarity makes visible the division of the globe into three worlds, but it also reveals how such a division is incongruous and unsustainable, in part because of its reliance on a related division of revolutionary ideals among those worlds: liberty in the First, equality in the Second, and fraternity in the Third. The relative discursive weight each world grants to three cardinal revolutionary ideals that are in fact interdependent is rendered on the stage as theaterbodies. Their breaking is the conceptual equivalent of Antoine’s own subjective break made manifest on the theaterbodies of Debuisson, Galloudec, and Sasportas. Each of these figures struggles with masks which, once donned in struggle and ostensibly revolutionary solidarity, can scarcely be separated from their faces. Revolution requires new skins and new conceptual orderings of the world. Gesturing beyond his sweeping historical consideration of civilization and barbarism to consider contemporary Latin American struggles and Latin America’s place in the world, Zea, too, considers the conceptual-historical division of revolutionary ideals in a philosophical project that spans nearly the entire duration of the Cold War. While the French and US American Revolutions are generally associated with liberty, the Soviet and Cuban with equality, Zea insists that both values are two sides of the same coin, only presented as if they were incompatible.⁷⁴ Just as Zea’s ideal revolutionary subject exceeds the opposition civilization/barbarism, so must he ultimately exceed the opposition liberty/equality.

 Zea, Discurso, Chapter Ten, “Más alla de la marginación y la barbarie.”

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The disjunctive civilization/barbarism and its corollaries dominant/dependent, center/periphery, bourgeoisie/proletariat, Occident/Orient are not resolved or assimilated, but stutter and curse their way to a relationship of supplementarity and positive interdependence.⁷⁵ Russian, Latin American, and Caribbean revolutionary trajectories, as well as their attendant masks—in one case ideological and historical, in the other existential and racial—yoke the Second and Third Worlds as embodied by Galloudec and Sasportas, respectively. If we think of Zea’s barbarous Marxism-Leninism as offering a philosophical counterpoint to dependency theory’s socio-economic perspective on history, with its central, semi-peripheral, and peripheral societies, we see some astounding parallels. The Task offers an aesthetic counterpoint to the narratives of development (visible particularly in the Peruvian scene and its over-determined metaphor of the wrecked train of modernity). Indeed, Müller points beyond structural similarity to a complex interconnection of the Second and Third Worlds set in Peru. As a locus of what Eduardo Galeano succinctly described as “Peruvianizing Marxism,” Peru is a literal site for the reinscription of “local histories” and theories onto “global designs.”⁷⁶ It attained theoretical prominence in Latin American accounts of the intersection of differently worlded knowledges in José Carlos Mariátegui’s classic adaptation of European Marxism to the Andes, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 1928).⁷⁷ Mariátegui concerned himself with developing a Marxist analysis that accounted for specific histories of Peruvian cultural dependency since the conquest. He was widely republished and translated in the 1960s and 1970s; I can only speculate on whether Müller would have been familiar with the basic contours of Mariátegui’s argument or if he had read Seven Interpretive Essays when he chose Peru as a site experienced as hostile to Soviet Marxism. Regardless, relational reading does not require intentionality on the part of the author so much as on the part of the reader.

 Zea, Discurso.  These terms are of course Mignolo’s: Local Histories/Global Designs. Global designs refer to broadly hegemonic projects on a planetary scale, macronarratives of the modern/colonial system; local histories describe micronarratives. While Mignolo allows that hegemonic relations can also obtain at the local level, his analysis tends to privilege the local as subaltern and, therefore, inherently resistant.  José Carlos Mariátegui, Siete Ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Barcelona: Red ediciones S.L., 2011). Eduardo Galeano gracefully captures a complex history of Andean and European intellectual exchange when he coins this term in Memoria del fuego: III. El siglo de viento, vol. 3. (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 2000), 67.

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Rearticulating the so-called Indian problem in class terms, Mariátegui suggested the revolutionary potential of vast peasant classes, and asserted that Incan civilization represented an advanced form of communism, thereby broadening the scope of Latin American indigenistas’ focus on cultural resistance by selective, elite appropriation of indigenous forms (e. g., by well-known communist figures such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Mexico). Zea, too, saw Peru as a geocultural key, and it was with reference to its complex histories that he became the first Latin American philosopher to fuse Hispanophone and Francophone Caribbean thought. He seized upon what he saw as affinities between indigenism and negritude with reference primarily to the history of Peru, to Mariátegui, and to Fanon and Césaire; both Fanon and Mariátegui advanced alternate and expansive notions of race and class and addressed the role of the revolutionary peasantry. (The latter is all the more appropriate to Müller’s figuration of Second World Galloudec as a farmer and then as a bureaucrat, a member of the technical elite who nonetheless continues to occupy conflicted positions within a revolutionary situation.) In part because of its rich history of heterodox Marxisms, in part because of the ongoing interplay of indigenous movements and the production of Other knowledges, the task of interpreting Peruvian reality continues to challenge the very stability of the idea of Latin America and the modern/colonial world system.⁷⁸ The structural and historical articulation of the Caribbean and the Soviet Bloc in nowhere less than Peru provides an impetus for rethinking the legacy of civilizational discourses in socialist cultures and, by extension, their dominant ideas about history. Zea’s philosophy of history is a mode of consciousness, not a chronology; Mignolo’s and Waman Puma de Ayala’s paradigm of co-existence affirms and extends Zea’s move away from a paradigm of progress and toward the concrete experience of marginalization and barbarism. Lending aesthetic form to that mode of history as consciousness, the plurality of revolutionary sites and subjects that Müller adopts reveals the shortcomings of a solidarity grounded in equality but not fraternity. Fraternity highlights the incomplete work of equality. It reveals the ways in which certain unidirectional expressions of solidarity in fact reproduce inequality (e. g., technological and developmental aid). To achieve fraternity would require a sustained and reflexive engagement with particularity that eludes Soviet socialism as represented in Müller’s theaters of revolution. To this end, Müller’s Peruvian commentary suspends developmentalist time, and with it, the civilizational discourses that structure the liberal, conservative, and socialist scripts

 Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, Chapter Three; compare n. 6 above.

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alternately at play in the historical revolutions of the modern world system. The cultural labor marked by fraternity is also incomplete, but the formal gesture of commentary constitutes a step toward its consolidation. Once again, it marks the limits of aesthetic solidarity that reside in reader responsiveness and creative contemplation as much as in any aesthetics that inhere strictly in the text.

Commentary and relational reading The conceptual and material-political shifts from colonial oppositions of civilization and barbarism to Cold War oppositions of developed and less developed countries, from the colonial-era French and Haitian Revolutions, the Russian Revolution, and on to a post-World War II Soviet and US American contest for empire are nowhere clearer than in The Task’s commentary, the so-called elevator monologue.⁷⁹ As a formal innovation, commentary destabilizes historical referents and perspectives. It provokes and disrupts genre norms, temporal flows, spatial contiguity, and distinctions between poetic and theoretical texts.⁸⁰ A commentary may or may not be assigned to a particular speaker or role. It thereby pluralizes speaking positions, the authorial position (i. e., someone besides Müller must assign the text to a speaker or speakers), and the public (the terms of address will be dependent upon different potential speakers’ relationships to its members).⁸¹ Müller positions his commentary on the heels of a renewed articulation of histories of (counter)revolutionary masking and unmasking. The commentary follows on a French Revolutionary play within a play staged by Sasportas (as Robespierre) and Galloudec (in the role of Danton). Cutting off one another’s heads in The Task entails both a historical material reference to the reign of terror and to the annihilation of distinct political and ideological positions represented by the fake heads of Danton and Robespierre. And since the specific boundary between mask and face is repeatedly questioned, one might add the real heads of Galloudec and Sasportas, who sport them. Danton, Robespierre, and the legacy of the French Revolution were already inscribed in the rhetoric of the Russian Revolution; the Bolsheviks notably compared their own use of the Cheka to

 Müller, Der Auftrag, 27– 33.  Primavesi, “Theater des Kommentars,” 45 – 52.  Primavesi, “Theater des Kommentars,” 47– 48 and 51.

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the French terror, and Jacobin was a frequent epithet in Red and White infighting.⁸² In the commentary, an unspecified speaker finds himself in an elevator on the way to be assigned a task from his boss, NumberOne. Both his watch and the elevator malfunction, confounding the speaker’s intense desire to arrive at the correct time and place. The speaker imagines that upon his arrival his boss has committed suicide, placing the task forever beyond his reach. Leaving the elevator, he finds himself on a village street in Peru. Anxious of any interaction with the village inhabitants, he decides to flee. Ultimately, he discards his clothes, a final, external marker of civilization, and awaits the arrival of THE OTHER and the life and death confrontation that he imagines will ensue. When Müller brings multiple spheres of revolutionary reference together in a no-place that begins in the Second World and opens onto Peru, the man in the elevator is unable or unwilling to communicate his predicament. He does not see the men he encounters as potential agents of a revolutionary task, nor does it occur to him that they might have a different task in mind than the one which was to have been delegated by the Second World: “How do you accomplish an unknown task. What could my task be in this wasteland on the other side of civilization.”⁸³ Considering the description of Peru as “no man’s land” in military terms, one might read the setting as another reference to the theaters of the Cold War in which Peru is seen as unclaimed, empty territory in the stand-off between the First and Second Worlds.⁸⁴ The Cold War order eclipses past and future alternatives: the Incan capital’s location in pre-colonial Peru goes unacknowledged in the man’s perception of the village as without civilization; that what is now Peru was a hotbed of indigenous resistance to colonialism as late as 1780 is similarly absent from his first impression of potentially hostile villagers as “two gigantic natives”—a description that more closely resembles the Patagonian giants of German colonial lore than present-day Andean villagers.⁸⁵ The collapsing of anthropological models of development with economic and technological models of development grounds the man in the elevator’s

 Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914 – 1921, 189, 192, and passim; Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 1917 – 1932 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 69 and 109.  Müller, Der Auftrag, 32.  Müller, Der Auftrag, 31.  Müller, Der Auftrag, 31; see Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770 – 1870 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 55 – 58 and 81– 97.

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(lack of) relationship to the Peruvian villagers. Reflecting spatial and colonial difference, it is intimately connected to the man’s experience of anachronism.⁸⁶ The commentary’s stark introduction of a differential locus of enunciation attempts to account for a re-placement of knowledges in the postcolonial world, displacing a concept of Reason as universal in favor of specific and contingent knowledges. The differential is fundamentally relational—there is no difference in isolation or as an absolute value. To use Teraoka’s terminology, The Task’s entropic movement in structural and aesthetic terms and the anti-teleology of the elevator are mutually reinforcing elements of the play. Second World civilizational knowledges—specifically technologies—are presented as incommunicable to a Third World subject, but they are also incommunicable among subjects located in a common, Second World cultural frame (i. e., NumberOne and the man). Nor is an alternative advanced that would make room for a locally inflected concept of revolution along the lines of Mariátegui’s Peruvianizing Marxism or of Zea’s barbarizing Marx. Confronted upon exiting the elevator with a wrecked train (trains being a Leninist metaphor for civilization organized around scientific and technological development toward communism), the man must question the inevitability, indeed the very possibility of progress: “I European see at first glance that their labor is wasted: this vehicle is never going to move, but I don’t tell the children, work is hope […]”⁸⁷ The man’s cynical observation “work is hope” signals an assumed hope for participation in a development discourse (the tracks directing technology, here derailed) which identifies work with progress, and may even associatively link capitalist development theories to the Nazi slogan infamously in Young, Postcolonialism, 53. Mignolo derives his concepts of colonial difference and differential thinking primarily from (1) Homi Bhabha’s treatment of loci of enunciation as constitutive for knowledge and meaning production and (2) Enrique Dussel’s engagement with modernity as a regionally specific project. See Local Histories, 93 and 115 – 124.  Heiner Müller, A Heiner Müller Reader: Plays, Poetry, Prose, trans. Carl Weber (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2001), 96. Translation modified. See Manfred Lötsch, who summarizes: “The development of qualitatively new technology undoubtedly represents in its essence progress of historical proportions. Such profound change is taking place in essential fields (e. g., informatics, automation) that one is justified in defining the process as a ‘scientific-technological revolution.’ Given that Marxist theory considers the connection between production relations and productive forces to be of central importance, a Marxist approach to the issue of technological change must logically presume corresponding social change and, no less logically, an analogous relationship between the objective contradictions of the modernization process and basic patterns of social attitudes and behavior.” Manfred Lötsch, “Technological and Social Change in the GDR,” trans. Margy Gerber, Studies in GDR Culture and Society 9. Selected Papers from the fourteenth New Hampshire Symposium on the German Democratic Republic (Langham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), 21.

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scribed above the gates of numerous concentration camps, “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work will make you free”). The idea of technology as progress underscores the role of socialist revolution not exclusively as an ideological formation, but as a concrete development strategy in Marxism-Leninism and its Third World iterations.⁸⁸ In The Task, labor is no longer the fundamental category that it was in Müller’s production plays. Intervening commentaries pioneered in earlier works are no longer mythical, but now technological. Intellectuals (technical and traditional alike) remain problematic figures, but they are no longer held in check by workers’ power; at best, they are accountable to a defunct bureaucratic instance. Perhaps most importantly, where commentary in earlier plays such as CEMENT (1972) generated a mythic, transhistorical reading of the 1917 revolution, commentary and its attendant shifts in place and time undermine any such transhistorical instance in The Task. The relationships Müller builds between text and commentary persist, but, in the context of Latin America and the Caribbean, they are contingent rather than categorical. While Müller suggests players for intervening commentaries in CEMENT, the elevator commentary in The Task, with its deliberately unassigned subject, generates relationships that require the reevaluation of roles, speaking positions, and interpretations in the midst of what is already a complex monologue within a play within a dream and therefore another simultaneous occupation of multiple dramatic roles, which may or may not be roles for the subjects who play them. So Müller: The commentary as a means of bringing the reality of the author into play is drama, not description, and should not be delegated to a narrator. […] The repertoire of roles (positions) that the commentary offers (viewer voyeur overseer reporter mc whipper sparing partner wailing woman shadow doppelgänger ghost) are available to everyone who articulates the text/keeps the text silent. No monopoly on roles masks gestures text, making epic not a privilege: to each the chance to alienate himself.⁸⁹

Depending upon which authorial reality is brought into play in a given staging, any one of the three figures or even another figure entirely could occupy the selfalienating position of the man in the elevator. I prefer to suggest that Galloudec

 Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 5. On the broader separation of the technological and the philosophical modern in and since the European Enlightenment, see Immanuel Wallerstein, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (New York and London: The New Press, 2006).  Müller, “Einheit des Textes,” appendix to Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome. Ein Shakespearekommentar, in Werke 5: Die Stücke 3, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 100 – 193, here 192.

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is the speaker, because it is his turn to speak in the alternating dialogue between Galloudec and Sasportas and because of his structural and symbolic role in the play as a mediating force between the poles occupied by Debuisson and Sasportas. The suicide of NumberOne (generally read as Stalin), immediately following as it does Sasportas’s orders that Galloudec kill and bury Debuisson, suggests a structural parallel internal to the monologue: Debuisson (suicidal, (self)betraying, intended object of assassination) is to NumberOne as Galloudec is to the speaker trapped in the elevator.⁹⁰ Debuisson is no longer in a position to direct Galloudec’s revolutionary task; the man is ordered by an unspecified third party to retrieve a task that can no longer be assigned by the defunct revolutionary leader NumberOne. Neither the contingency of the text nor the genre of the commentary require or even allow any definitive identification of the speaker. The commentary’s introduction of a contemporary authorial reality is not simply an interruptive or juxtapositive instance in the dramatic text, but one in which reflection on deep relationships can generate possibilities not immediately in evidence. Reading the commentary and surrounding text as fundamentally relational opens up the possibility of a political coding that works in tandem with the more commonly understood racial coding of the white revolution, i. e., Bolshevik Reds against anti-Bolshevik Whites, and presents the Second World author with densely layered revolutionary lineages within and outside of orthodox Soviet Marxism. The White (Counter)Revolution was effectively put down under the leadership of staunch internationalist and later anti-Stalinist Trotsky. (Trotsky, like Lenin, is fundamental to a barbarous Latin American reception of Marxism.) The end of the White Revolution so read would mark a partial victory at best, bringing with it continued Russian imperial politics and creating the conditions and willingness to practice extreme violence and political repression in defense not of concrete humanity, but of abstract revolutionary principles. The end of the White Revolution as the beginning of Stalinism; White (Counter)Revolutionary betrayal that becomes self-betrayal among the victorious Reds. According to Fitzpatrick, the Bolshevik’s first experience of ruling during the civil war was formative, militarizing political culture, establishing a tradition of coercion, summary justice, and rule by administrative fiat. Attention to this constellation of factors, she argues, provides a better explanation of the origins of Soviet and ultimately Stalinist authoritarianism than what she classifies as the  Genia Schulz first suggested this now common reading of NumberOne as Stalin in Heiner Müller (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980), 162– 163. Müller himself later suggested that the reference is to Erich Honecker: Heiner Müller, Krieg ohne Schlacht. Leben in zwei Diktaturen (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1992), 297– 298.

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traditional Western interpretation, which stresses instead “the party’s pre-Revolutionary heritage and Lenin’s advocacy of centralized party organization and strict discipline.”⁹¹ With Stalin’s death, one could point to a succession of “NumberOnes,” a function variously inhabited by individual Soviet leaders, structurally interchangeable even as they were historically specific: Khruschev assumed the role only to take the suicidal step of issuing his 1956 report on the crimes of Stalinism, eroding the credibility of NumberOne as a role or function within the Soviet Bloc; Brezhnev attempted an equally suicidal reversal and reinscription of power, tightening his grip on the satellite states; the list is easily extended. The overlay of Cold War geopolitical divisions on the French Revolution illustrates Müller’s geocultural vision of revolutionary time and space as an eternal dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution, self-realization and self-betrayal, solidarity and betrayal of the Other. While the French Revolution has been treated by the historical social sciences and revolutionary thinkers alike as the prototypical revolutionary event, Müller writes the Russian and Caribbean Revolutions back into the drama of history. The Russian Revolution and subsequent consolidation of the Soviet Bloc mark the continued struggle for liberty, equality, and fraternity first initiated and betrayed by the French Revolution. He demonstratively reclaims the French Revolution as part of a socialist revolutionary inheritance: even as Fanon declares that his history is not only San Domingue, so Müller gestures to a more expansive and explicitly spatialized history (as consciousness, not chronology) than the rhetoric of socialist Erbe traditionally admitted.⁹² Even so, critics including Mignolo and Anthony Bogues have argued against the Eurocentrism of both 1789 and 1917 as referents in left political history and theory.⁹³ Müller’s expansive treatment of revolution may indeed retain traces of

 Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 64.  “I am a man, and I have to rework the world’s past from the very beginning. I am not just responsible for the slave revolt in San Domingue. / Every time a man has brought victory to the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to enslave his fellow man, I have felt a sense of solidarity with his act. / In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and my future.” Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 201.  Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 23. Mignolo criticizes Wallerstein’s periodization of the emergence of the modern world system and the priority it gives to France, the French Revolution, and 1968. In fairness, Mignolo’s reading of Wallerstein may not be the most generous: while Wallerstein locates the emergence of a coherent geoculture around the French Revolution,

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Eurocentrism, but, minimally, it reintroduces the Caribbean into the French Revolution and broadens the sites and ciphers of socialist revolution and Cold War conflict further still via the Peruvian commentary, situating the historical task of revolution at the intersection of decolonial and antisystemic treatments of each of those revolutionary touchstones. Paralleled formally by the commentary, positioned at the juncture of White Revolutions and their respective place-times, Müller’s novel articulation of aesthetic solidarity goes a long way toward addressing the asymmetries of power that make all expressions of solidarity necessary to begin with. Attention to the White Revolutionary antecedents of Müller’s Cold War play does not limit its epistemic reach to European traditions narrowly construed. Wallerstein has gone so far as to argue that the Cold War in fact begins with the Russian Revolution in 1917; cultural critic Jean Franco has made a compelling case for a second Cold War in Latin America in the 1970s.⁹⁴ To each of their timelines accrues a unique spatialization of history and elaboration of a cultural framework within which political relations are negotiated. By no means mutually exclusive, both Cold Wars share a tripart division of the geopolitical world in which liberty, equality, and fraternity correspond roughly to the First, Second, and Third Worlds, respectively. It is a spatial and conceptual division that Müller denaturalizes by projecting it back historically onto the era of the French Revolution and the person of Antoine, a subject shattered by the incompatibility of the three ideals embodied in Debuisson, Galloudec, and Sasportas. In short, Müller’s aesthetic problem is at once a world-systemic problem and an epistemological problem. As Wallerstein puts it: The slogan of the French Revolution is familiar enough to us all. It seems to refer to three different phenomena, each located in the three realms into which we are accustomed to di-

he, like Mignolo, looks to the sixteenth century and the colonial experience for the emergence of the modern world system. See “The End of What Modernity?” The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press, 2000), 454– 471; Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003), cited in Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, 96.  Wallerstein, “Introduction: The Lessons of the 1980s,” in Geopolitics and Geoculture. Essays on the Changing World System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 6. I would like to emphasize that neither Wallerstein’s argument nor my appropriation thereof should be confused with claims of conservative historian Ernst Nolte to the same effect. Whereas Nolte attempts to reperiodize the Cold War in an effort to reframe World War II as a war against communism, Wallerstein bluntly rejects the notion of a truly oppositional relationship between Western liberalist capitalism and Leninist communism, pointing instead to their symbiotic relation within the world system. Franco, Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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vide our social analyses: liberty in the political arena, equality in the economic arena, and fraternity in the socio-cultural arena. And we have become accustomed as well to debating their relative importance, particularly between liberty and equality.⁹⁵

Both Wallerstein and Zea conclude that liberty-equality must ultimately be treated as a single concept, but fraternity presents a more difficult challenge.⁹⁶ In overlaying the French and Russian Revolutions, Müller already attempts to unite the terms liberty-equality, but it is no coincidence that while Galloudec’s mask is equality, his death is fraternity: “Your death is liberty, Sasportas, your death is fraternity, Galloudec, my death is equality,” says Debuisson.⁹⁷ It is fraternity as the corollary to the particular, the barbarous, the concrete human— and the difficulty the Second World subject faces in recognizing the particular not as an obstacle to, but a guarantor of equality—that Müller renders aesthetically in The Task. Müller generates contradictions that enable the Second World, a place most readily associated in the social scientific division of labor with equality, to recognize that it needs the Third World, a place similarly associated through anthropological or cultural study with fraternity, for any authentic expression of solidarity. But the Second World author stops short of staging solidarity’s achievement. Instead, he retains the tensions among the three worlded positions and their respective revolutionary attributes. It is in and through commentary that the conditions for the recognition of inequality are set in motion. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are embodied and betrayed first and foremost at the French Revolution’s limits; accordingly, the unified periphery, the Tricont, most directly challenged revolutionary internationalism’s hierarchies. While Wallerstein demarcates a key period of the capitalist world system with the dates and symbolic events 1789 (which includes 1791, 1803, and even 1815) and 1968 (itself a cipher for a broader constellation of events extending back into the late 1950s), Müller demonstrates their radical co-temporality. At the same time, the marginalized Caribbean expresses the key theoretical impulse of a new particularity marked by 1968 and the possibility of a far-reaching critique of orthodox Soviet socialism.

 Wallerstein, “1968: Revolution in the World System,” 81.  Wallerstein, “1968: Revolution in the World System,” 82; Zea, Discurso, Chapter Ten, “Más alla de la marginacíon y la barbarie.” Their common conclusion is less surprising when we recall that Zea laid the philosophical groundwork for what became dependency theory, which itself gave way to world-systems analysis.  Müller, Der Auftrag, 37.

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The Task’s staging of revolutionary subjects is an instance of aesthetic solidarity that gestures toward its own limits and suggests a specific mode of relation within the three worlds of the Cold War and in the wake of two of the most significant anti-systemic movements since the French Revolution: anticolonial liberation movements and 1968. Wallerstein explains that anti-systemic thought surrounding 1968 turns not just against the First World—here in the figure of Debuisson—but with particular vituperation against the Second World— here in the figure of Galloudec—, which was associated with the betrayal of revolutionary possibility.⁹⁸ Antoine’s disavowal of the Second World Galloudec is swift and adamant; he accedes to knowing him only upon hearing of Sasportas’s execution. The play’s originary subject of revolution, Antoine must acknowledge particularity before any reconstruction of the task can commence. In sum, Müller’s treatment of the three worlds forms a geocultural complement to a historical, political constellation: the aftermath of anti-systemic movements surrounding 1968 and their collective reassessment of fraternity and culture in capitalist and socialist discourse. The anti-systemic thinking most closely allied with the social transformations connoted by 1968 is evoked in references to its Third World theoretical forebears (e. g., Fanon and Césaire) and political outcomes (e. g., the Tricontinental Congress) in the Caribbean as a quintessential site of particularity. Müller’s reassertion of particularity, or fraternity, into the Cold War dyad liberty-equality is the necessary condition for the reception of a revolutionary writing and the recuperation of an equality understood by the anti-systemic movements around 1968 largely to have acquiesced to liberalist hegemony.⁹⁹

The Second World intellectual and writing from the middle Ultimately, Galloudec’s function as intermediary in both the dramatic action and the commentary positions him as indispensable to the geopolitical constellations that emerge out of a failed revolution. A catalyst for betrayal and destruction, writing takes the stage early in the dramatic action (albeit chronologically late) in the form of Galloudec’s letter. It is first and foremost as the play’s writing subject that the Second World revolutionary Galloudec contributes to the disintegration of a singular European revolutionary position and, with it, the possibility of privileging any one revolutionary ideal over another. His impetus to write,

 Wallerstein, “1968, Revolution in the World System,” 68 – 70.  Wallerstein, “1968, Revolution in the World System,” 65 – 68.

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the letter suggests, is physical discomfort; by contrast, Antoine will not hear from Debuisson because, in Galloudec’s estimation, he is well. Galloudec’s literal remains constitute a surfeit of meaning in his dryly formal composition, and apparently either require no signature or themselves function as his signature: “I remain (verbleibe) […] with republican greetings.”¹⁰⁰ The physical decomposition of the body marks the written text internally at the same time as it precipitates the decomposition of its object of address, another subject of revolution, Antoine. Here the bodily remainder persists as a marker even of those theaterbodies no longer present on the stage. The Task figures writing both as a concrete practice and as a metaphor for authorship. Teraoka argues that Seghers’s Light on the Gallows treats writing and exchanging written messages as so central to the task of revolution that they are themselves revolutionary acts. Müller’s reworking of Seghers’s text, on the other hand, denies the revolutionary function of writing.¹⁰¹ In its place, a fundamentally different notion of writing emerges that privileges physical inscription: Sasportas’s social role is described as “written on his body,” and he literally carves a new banner of revolution into his palm.¹⁰² Similarly, Galloudec’s handwriting is cramped with fever.¹⁰³ The level of physicality in and of writing resonates, too, with Fidel Castro’s notion of writing history in blood, and approximates the level of physicality ascribed to writing at moments by Brecht. (His revolutionaries in The Measures Taken are “One and all […] nameless and motherless, blank pages on which the revolution writes its instructions.”)¹⁰⁴ In staging conflicting German literary texts on revolution and violence, Müller

 Müller, Der Auftrag, 13. Emphasis mine.  Teraoka, East, West, and Others: The Third World in Postwar German Literature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 23. In a later assessment, Sigrid Weigel credits Müller with nothing less than rejecting a broader group of European texts: “While [Seghers’s] stories project abstract concepts of Enlightenment and revolution onto the historical scenery in Haiti and embody a concept of intentionally ‘internationalist’ liberation in the revolt of the blacks, also in the interest of reinforcing her own political history with the tradition of an ethos of liberation, Müller’s text thematizes violence in precisely the kind of European writing practices that write their ideals on other cultures’ bodies.” Sigrid Weigel, Bilder des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Beiträge zur Gegenwartsliteratur (Dülman-Hiddingsel: tende, 1994), 175. Early work by Hörnigk and Teraoka continues to inform discussions about intertextuality in The Task. Hubert Uerlings’s study of Haiti in German literature is a comprehensive analysis of literary representations in this line.  Müller, Der Auftrag, 39 – 40.  Müller, Der Auftrag, 13.  Bertolt Brecht, Die Maßnahme in Sämtliche Stücke in einem Band ([Frechen]: Komet, 2002): 255 – 268, here 258; Bertolt Brecht, The Measures Taken, in The Jewish Wife and Other Short Plays, trans. Eric Bentley (New York: Grove Press, 1965): 75 – 108, here 81– 82.

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presents the reader, or public, not with definitive interpretations of literary texts in this tradition, but with a set of contingent relationships among those texts. His characters’ bodily and psychological experiences of revolution thus draw simultaneously on canonical literary treatments of revolutionary conflict and reject that tradition at key moments in the pursuit of new revolutionary tasks. The limitations of Galloudec’s missive, its mode of delivery, and the conditions for its reception by Antoine are many. The intended recipient conceals himself; the bearer—though ultimately successful—might just as easily have given up in the face of so many obstacles. Antoine has receded from public life, and his private reception of the sailor cuts short the further, public transmission of any revolutionary task. Nor is the verbal transmission of the letter necessarily identical to its reception; Antoine receives the returned task through a physical, unconscious memory relayed to the viewing public in the ensuing enactment of what we assume to be his dream. He may or may not act consciously on its content upon waking. The dramatically first and only completed task of the play, the arrival of the sailor at Antoine’s Paris home after his travels through the Caribbean and Europe, positions Galloudec, author of the letter that the sailor carries, as the initiator of the play’s main dramatic action.¹⁰⁵ Galloudec’s writing brings about First World recognition, reflection, and response to the revolution’s course in the Third World and its relationship to First World revolution. It falls to Galloudec, surrounded by Sasportas and Debuisson—Müller describes him as “the one in the middle”—to record, report, and evaluate revolutionary action and, ultimately, to redirect a world historical task.¹⁰⁶ Galloudec commits himself to the written word, but whether out of conviction or necessity is unclear. He hedges his bet: the sailor must also memorize the text, lest the written word be destroyed. Is the Second World author Müller undertaking a similar task? Does his writing, itself memorized and recited on the stage, underscore the urgency for a broader field of analysis and action in the face of a real existing socialism no longer capable of dispensing compelling tasks, even revoking tasks previously dispensed? Does Müller’s resumption, after Hamletmachine (1977), of a Fabel

 Inauen writes that the record of the sailor’s path is itself important to how he completes the task insofar as it describes a topographical memory of “how history can be retained spatially.” Yasmine Inauen, Dramaturgie der Erinnerung. Geschichte, Gedächtnis, Körper bei Heiner Müller (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2001), 34.  Heiner Müller, Rotwelsch (Berlin: Merve, 1982), 181. As Teraoka has noted, this is also an allusion to Brecht’s poem “Der Kommunismus ist das Mittlere” (“Communism is the Middle Thing”), where middle indicates the most straightforward, even course. Teraoka, Silence of Entropy, 167.

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—seen by some critics as a formal regression—mark a similar urgency to convey a message, something akin to Brecht’s resumption of a more traditional approach to character and other mechanisms of identification in the face of National Socialism? Or does it mark a radical possibility, a break with revolutionary time based on progress, staging instead an opportunity to think relationally, that is: decolonially? Latin America once disrupted and multiplied the East-West binary, producing an Occidentalist discourse in the sense proposed by Zantop. As scripted by Müller, Second World action in and with Latin America disrupts the FirstThird World binary. The multiplication of subjects, presented on stage in the multiplication of bodies (i. e., out of Antoine Debuisson, Galloudec, and Sasportas) extends earlier Occidentalist discourses and re-figures them in light of newer geocultural epistemologies even as it revisits older ones, most notably Soviet discourses on identity and imposture. Galloudec’s function as intermediary in both the dramatic action and the commentary ultimately positions him as indispensable to the geopolitical constellations that emerge out of failed revolution. Müller’s account of (counter)revolutionary relations in the Cold War disarticulates humanist subjects and geopolitical worlds, producing in the process a place for Second World authorship (Galloudec’s letter). By foregrounding the relation of socialist revolutionary thought in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Soviet Russia, Müller unsettles dominant narratives of modernity, introducing coloniality and rewriting their attendant touchstones of progress, civilization, and geographic difference. Commentary disrupts the performance of the French Revolution, understood as the prototypical and universal revolution, but dialogue in the sense Zea posits is never achieved. Müller advances no locally inflected concept of revolution along the lines of Zea’s barbarizing Marx. Writing from the middle remains more disruptive of the universal than authentic to concrete humanity; it is a precursor to consciousness as a point of historical departure, but remains trapped in the structural opposition of collective to individual rather than achieving any synthesis or new consciousness as a point of departure for a fraternal revolution. One must nevertheless ask whether an absolute departure from the universal subject of socialist revolution does not in itself constitute a universalizing gesture—not only in Müller’s text, but perhaps more broadly within a field of Left-inflected approaches to identity and difference that emerged as part of late twentieth-century antisystemic movements.¹⁰⁷ This is not to contest the importance of Müller’s intervention into socialist humanism at its most basic level

 Uerlings makes the same argument (Poetiken der Interkulturalität, 133).

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(i. e., the intact subject), but rather to point to one limit of a critical solidarity in East Germany that took writing as a primary strategy. The play’s catalyst remains the written missive composed by the European male subject. Müller’s exploration of individual-collective relations as constitutive of violent revolution obscures other options that might not understand the individual and the collective as oppositional at all, or even assume them to be operative social, political, or psychological categories. In this sense, locating the Latin American revolutionary subject as individual may already be an imperial gesture that Müller does not or cannot escape in his critique.¹⁰⁸ Even as Müller invokes the traditional language of Enlightenment thought, foundational for liberal notions of modernization and development in capitalist and socialist economies and cultures, he challenges the emergence of European philosophical systems and their production of knowledge as predicated upon an exploitative international division of labor: “Who sweats for your philosophies?” demands Sasportas.¹⁰⁹ The reproductive labor that supporting philosophies entails is related to a regionally specific division of intellectual labor. Recalling the division of social scientific labor mapped out by Carl Pletch, discussed in Chapter One and reasserted in Wallerstein’s more recent work, whereby the Third World is excluded from the production of theoretical knowledge, Mignolo suggests that literary procedures provide an important means of deconstructing and reallocating labor. If, as Mignolo argues, literary production is considered theoretical (i. e., not exclusively cultural), it has the potential to destabilize the Three Worlds model as an epistemological norm by extending the categories theory and culture to the Third and First Worlds, respectively.¹¹⁰ Eliding the distinction between theory and culture, The Task does precisely that. Müller’s vision of Second World socialism explicitly negates a teleology of material and ideological development that underwrote both a Marxist philosophy of history and Soviet claims on the Third World throughout the Cold War. Where the economic and technological (presumably universal) are superimposed on the cultural and historical (as particular), Müller’s aesthetic solidarity intervenes to spatialize developmentalist time through commentary, shifting theaters of revolution, and overlaid geopolitical and geocultural maps. Müller’s Second World is a subject-place from which to write rather than a developmental time from which to evaluate. His writing unsettles national and more broadly Eu-

 In effect, this is also the question Wallerstein poses in asking after the possibility of a truly universal universalism, and that Buck-Morss pursues under the sign of universal history. Importantly, both of them do so with reference to Latin America.  Müller, Der Auftrag, 27.  Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 114.

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ropean historical narratives, rewriting their assumptions of progressive, linear development. His aesthetic intervention is in keeping with the disruption of the post-Yalta equilibrium in the world system that is generally connoted by 1968, a world phenomenon that reasserts the non-unity of time-place-action on the world revolutionary stage. It does so under radically different conditions than the French Revolution in the Caribbean, but to similarly dramatic effect. Writing from the middle, Galloudec nonetheless remains apart from any center. Galloudec’s writing is barbarous, like Russia and Latin America in Zea’s terms; one might even suggest that it serves to barbarize other expressions of socialist modernity that have—in the context of the Soviet satellite system—become their own civilizational norms. The tasks set for the project of alternative modernities are remarkably similar to those Müller advances for Second World authorship in the wake of the other White Revolution: “To think through and against,” to “think with a difference that destabilizes universalist idioms,” and to stage the pluralization of the experience of modernity.¹¹¹ Müller’s decolonial thinking does more than reassert the multiplicity of revolutionary visions within the modern world system, more than highlight the importance of what Zea terms the diversity of the particular in relation to the whole of which it is a part. The very form Müller’s thought takes enables a new, relational reading practice that allows us to imagine the possibility of a universal that is particular, grounded in the historical experience of Latin America and the Caribbean and in dynamic relation with the Second World subject of revolution. I began this chapter with a sketch of Lehmann’s theaterbodies as the aesthetic building blocks of Müller’s postdramatic theater. Lehmann can help us still further: his account of postdramatic theater’s response to classical western theater shows that the concept of linear progress that underwrites dominant historical narratives also underpins the form and historical-philosophical implications of classical drama. Zea critiques Hegel’s concept of progress; Lehmann looks to Hegel’s account of theater. Drama is itself a privileged metaphor and narrative model for history, and classical tradition would have us understand that actors performing ideals come into conflict with one another only to be resolved before the curtain falls. As Lehmann puts it: “Drama promises dialectics.”¹¹² Postdrama, by contrast, suspends the dialectic, refusing the embodiment of abstract ideals in favor of the body as such. Built around the theaterbody that can no longer locate itself in time as a continuum, let alone a teleology, Müller

 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 15.  Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater, 59 – 61. Emphasis original.

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offers an aesthetic of decolonial thinking that insists all revolutionary times, places, and actions are co-constitutive, but not unified. He offers us more than critical content or alternate perspectives; he assigns us the task of decolonial thinking, a task which can only be accomplished in an unabashedly relational reading or viewing. Two key types of limits govern the antisystemic and decolonial thrust of Müller’s aesthetic solidarity. They are, first, the physical, material limits of the body and, second, the epistemic limits of worlds and worlding within the hegemonic geoculture of the Cold War—limits so intimately related to the first in The Task that they manifest almost exclusively on the theaterbody. Together, the two sets of limits are rendered visible as the transformation of subjects into bodies on the stage. Müller’s aesthetic solidarity treats the body as a site of revolution and counterrevolution as it undertakes to show how its Second World author contributes to the disintegration of a unified European subject position. It is an aesthetic that disarticulates humanist subjects and geopolitical worlds alike. Müller subjects both to a Fanonian logic of explosion, fragmentation, and reassembly first articulated in Black Skins, White Masks: “I explode. Here are the fragments put together by another me.”¹¹³ There are limits to what can be reassembled, and certainly traces of the process always remain, seams or fissures that may not be visible to the naked eye. In The Task, Antoine must explode into three in order to reassemble or recuperate the fractured roles of Debuisson, Galloudec, and Sasportas. The painful work of explosion and reassembly of the theaterbody is akin to the idea of being skinned alive formulated by Eduard Glissant in his description of the young Frantz Fanon and taken up by Anthony Alessandrini in his study of solidarity and singularity in Fanon’s work.¹¹⁴ To Glissant, Fanon’s sensitivity was that of a man flayed and utterly exposed; it is palpable in the cruelty of Fanon’s own language in Black Skins, White Masks and its account of a violent process of “epidermalization,” a racial fixing painfully imposed from without.¹¹⁵ Alessandrini concludes: “Fanon demands a similar sensitivity from us; his legacy demands that his reader also become an écorché vif (one who is skinned alive). Encountering his work, and his example, leaves us no room for relaxation; it is, as they say, unsparing.”¹¹⁶ The écorché vif is a figure literalized in Müller’s play; whether by coincidence or citation I cannot definitively say, but that is beside the point. From Sas-

 Frantz Fanon, cited in Anthony C. Alessandrini, “Fanon Now: Singularity and Solidarity,” The Journal of Pan-African Studies 4.7 (2011): 53.  Alessandrini, “Fanon Now: Singularity and Solidarity,” 52– 54.  Alessandrini, “Fanon Now: Singularity and Solidarity,” 53.  Alessandrini, “Fanon Now: Singularity and Solidarity,” 54.

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portas’s bodily inscription (“I want to carve a new [flag] out of my black hide”) to Debuisson’s cautionary remarks to Galloudec against accidentally removing his skin along with his mask, to the flayed and burning black slave under the hot sun of torture, even the reader unfamiliar with Fanon’s own writings could not overlook the tropic effects of a Fanonian sensitivity to cruelty that Müller stages.¹¹⁷ The literal and conceptual effacement of particularity in The Task’s figures, roles, and speaking positions is presented as a precondition for an ideal solidarity of likes with likes: we will not truly be equal until we have skinned one another alive. On the stage, this is the prerequisite to meaningful reciprocity, the nodal point at which the particularity of bodies meets the universality of solidarity as a form of fraternité. Sasportas’s line draws Galloudec’s attention to the impossibility of equality as principally dictated by a bodily limit that is also a limit of aesthetic solidarity. Only the reader who gives him or herself over completely to the task of relational reading that is required by decolonial thinking is skinned alive by proxy. It is the impossibility of physical coherence that prompts Müller’s prospective audience to address problems fundamental to theatrical representation and to see in these probems an approach to philosophy and history. Susan Buck-Morss observes: “The less we see historical actors as playing theatrically coherent roles, the more universally accessible their human dilemmas become.”¹¹⁸ Suspending the movement between the particular and the universal, Müller’s antisystemic and decolonial thinking does precisely that. It is the fundamental incoherence of twinned historical and theatrical roles that allows us to imagine revolutionary subjects worthy of the name. Reading The Task in terms of world-systems theory and social scientifically inflected approaches to culture should not be understood as an attempt to impose coherence where there is in fact none, but as a means to demonstrate the ways in which Müller’s aesthetic solidarity rests on a solidarity of readers and a willingness to engage in the process of generating a multiplicity of possible orders from the disorder of world-systemic transition.

 Were it not for the dominance of the reference to Fanon and to Caribbean thought, one might be tempted to read cruelty largely with respect to Artaud’s theater of cruelty, widely acknowledged as influential for Müller. For The Task, the explanation would be partial at best.  Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 145.

Chapter 5 A Rhetoric of Walking Around: F.C. Delius’s Adenauerplatz If 1968 indicated “the limits of possible political change in the two power blocs,” 1973 indicated the violent destruction of a third, emergent power in the shape of a socialist utopia that seemed, however briefly, to have found a topos in Chile.¹ A key moment in what Jean Franco has called the second Cold War in Latin America, 1973 demanded a rethinking of geopolitical and geocultural formations. The foundations of the Latin American “lettered city” were shaken more thoroughly than they had been since the defeat of the Spanish Republic and the Spanishspeaking world’s first experience of twentieth-century fascism.² Salvador Allende’s death and the disappearance and/or murder of tens of thousands within days of the 11 September 1973 coup propelled some 200,000 Chileans—2 % of the country’s population—into exile. To many, the death of Pablo Neruda later the same month seemed further to portend the symbolic death of a larger imaginative endeavor in Latin America, as well as of the prospect of a peaceful transition to democratic socialism internationally. As I showed in Chapters One and Two, Latin American economic and political thought influenced the West German extraparliamentary opposition and, more specifically, the sustained literary articulation of oppositional politics over two decades. Enzensberger’s Kursbuch is the best known of numerous fora for the reception of Latin American ideas in West Germany of the 1960s and 1970s, but it was hardly the only publication to take note of the political prestige historically accorded to literary authors in Latin America. It was no co Keith Bullivant, ed., After the Death of Literature: West German Writing in the 1970s (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1989), xiii.  Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 12. For an international political approach to complement Franco’s cultural approach, see Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Interamerican Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). The term “lettered city” is Angel Rama’s: La ciudad letrada (Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1984). At its most basic level, Rama’s analysis details the privileged place of the highly literate in Latin American states and societies since the colonial era. Outside of Latin American studies Rama is better known for his work on narrative transculturation, an attempt to imagine a positive, even symbiotic relation between urban men of letters and indigenous cultures that has been criticized by many Latin Americanists (including Franco, John Beverley, and Neil Larsen) as fantastic, but is oft-embraced in its decontextualized form by those unfamiliar with its history. Angel Rama, Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo Vientiuno, 1982).

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incidence that German literary intellectuals were drawn to Latin America as a place for rethinking the political possibilities of literature in their own countries. Franco convincingly demonstrates that “fiction and poetry [in 1960s Latin America] left their mark on political thinking […]. The prestige of literature derived, in part, from the alternative reality it represented.”³ Neruda, whose popularity continued to rise internationally after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, was one of the foremost representatives of the Latin American literarypolitical ideal. Surely, Franco shows, “[i]t was not the realist novel but poetry that came to represent the utopian hopes of the communist Left [in Latin America]. There is a strong tradition of visionary poetry in Spanish in which the poet assumes the role of the prophet or seer.”⁴ Even while the West German Left settled increasingly into modes of political realism in the 1970s, the potential of lyric was not without its attractions. In this chapter, I argue that F.C. Delius successfully combined political realism and visionary poetry in his 1984 novel Adenauerplatz, which I read through the thematic and rhetorical lens of Neruda’s poem “Walking Around.”⁵ Delius mobilizes what I term a rhetoric of walking around to couple interior and exterior places across national boundaries and imaginative traditions in Europe and Latin America. Attentive to Neruda as both a poet and a theorist, a rhetoric of walking around builds upon Michel de Certeau’s “rhetoric of walking” to more aptly capture the spirit of Delius’s aesthetic solidarity with Latin America.⁶ One result is that West Germany emerges as subject rather than place bound, a cultural and political imaginary that engages the lived and remembered experiences of subjects who may or may not find themselves at home in a West German state.

 Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, 7.  Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, 72.  Pablo Neruda, “Walking Around,” in Residence on Earth, Bilingual ed., trans. Donald D. Walsh (New York: New Directions Books, 1973), 118 – 121. The poem is printed in full as an appendix. Friedrich Christian Delius was born in 1943 in Rome and grew up in Wehrda, Hesse. He began his publishing career as a poet before completing his studies in German literature in 1970 in West Berlin. He went on to work as an editor at Wagenbach Verlag for three years before leaving to become a founding editor of Rotbuch Verlag. His poetic, documentary, and novelistic work is overwhelmingly concerned with questions of contemporary history and often turns on ethical questions and reflective critique of political commonplaces. Stylistically, his work ranges from meticulously researched satire such as Wir Unternehmer (We Entrepeneurs, 1966) and Unsere Siemens-Welt (Our Siemens-World, 1976) to deeply personal, imaginative, and atmospheric texts such as Bildnis der Mutter als junge Frau (Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, 2006).  Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 93.

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In the context of Revolutionary Subjects, Adenauerplatz exemplifies a transitional moment in representations of Latin American revolution, exploring specifically transnational forms of relation where once internationalist frames of reference were the norm. It also marks an aesthetic and a historical transition. A handwritten note on an early version of the manuscript insists: “The ‘plot’ isn’t so dominant that it forces the various contemporary themes into the background.”⁷ Delius was at pains to navigate the interstitial waters of plot (Handlung) and contemporary history (Zeitgeschichte), to find aesthetic strategies that refuse to privilege one over the other. The effect can be a flattening out of the text, a convergence of background and foreground, a propensity for interior monologue at a third person remove, and an accumulation of temporal and spatial dissolves that have found almost no critical appreciation. But at its most successful moments, contemporary history in fact becomes plot and visa versa. It is precisely these moments that I seek to recuperate for what they tell us about manipulating form in time in a way not unlike that pursued by Fredric Jameson in his reflections on Marxism and Form, an excursion into the “comparative differential mode of […] literary perception.”⁸ The comparison at the heart of Adenauerplatz is manifold and multifocal: it circulates among national and migrant histories as well as colonial and postcolonial spatial and cultural practices to highlight the relationship of economic and cultural practices in a contested world system, taking recourse to literary histories and their political approximations of the real. “Such sequences,” Jameson tells us, “and such comparisons, largely transcend traditional questions of the personal influence of one writer upon another.”⁹ It is in this spirit that I am interested in approaching Delius’s novel and its rhetoric of walking around, not as an influence study but as a kind of nodal point, a place where a conversation might commence, where texts might shake hands or nod, each to the other, as they walk around a space of increasingly dense social and poetic referents. Taken together, the problems that shape this chapter are linked roughly by the question: How are transnational networks made increasingly dense via recourse to specifically aesthetic strategies, and how do those strategies open tendentially new spaces of solidarity? To do justice to Delius’s move to hold plot in abeyance, to give equal weight to text and context, I have to move toward my answers on multiple planes. Neruda’s “Walking Around” is as much a theoretical

 DLA Marbach, Handschriftenabteilung. A: F.C. Delius. Delius, F.C./Prosa/“Adenauerplatz. Roman” Adenauerplatz: Konvolut/Notizen. Rohfassung vom Februar 1983.  Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 315.  Jameson, Marxism and Form, 315.

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and tropological impulse as a point of literary historical reference per se. Its use for unpacking Delius’s practical experiment with redefining political realism provides the first of many possible points of entry into the novel. From there I proceed to examine how the rhetorical movement at issue in Adenauerplatz emerges in tandem with references to actual patterns of movement and intersubjectivity in the increaslingly globalized economy of the 1970s. Most prominent among them are migration and economic exchange. The articulation of material and emotional economies of exchange in the West German Third World solidarity movement in the chapter’s third station confronts the limits of solidarities, aesthetic and otherwise. Desire is one complicated node of the protagonists’ “solidary sentiments,” satisfied and frustrated by turns. It characterizes the highly personal nature of solidarity that is always a counterpoint to its unfolding at the level of a political movement.¹⁰ In the novel, desire is a force of and against a commodity culture that anchors unequal exchange writ large, and drives both the accumulation of capital and the agglomeration of antifascist memories. One of the first literary texts to approach the specificity of Latin AmericanGerman relationships from the perspective of the historical circulation of people, capital, and commodities, Adenauerplatz draws attention to German émigrés and Latin American exiles, their dynamic cultural and political allegiances, and to the relationship of German cultural institutions and practices to military and economic conflicts in Latin America. Through a network of stated and implied comparisons, the novel revisits literary-political debates surrounding early twentieth-century fascism internationally in 1970s West Germany. It goes on to challenge the priority of economic explanations of fascism relative to other modes of thinking and articulating memory, history, and antifascist resistance in the Third World movement. While significant critical attention has been paid to the globalization of Holocaust memory, I argue for attention to the globalization of memories of fascism more broadly.¹¹ Fascism and the discourse of antifascism pose similar challenges for critics and may overlap more explicitly with economically inflected, social scientific frames for the study of the global, notably world-systems analysis and post-Marxist explanations of the global as manifest in what

 Delius, Adenauerplatz, 108.  In particular, I am thinking of Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), but also much earlier work, such as Peter Novick’s account of the Americanization of Holocaust memory internationally, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), and, more recently, Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), which attends to the complex interaction of local memories with the now global signifier of the Holocaust.

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Jameson terms the becoming economic of the cultural and the becoming cultural of the economic.¹² Histories of migration and direct investment punctuate Delius’s story of assistant night watchman Felipe Ramón Gerlach Hernandez, narrated largely in a series of flashbacks and critical reflections over the course of Felipe’s seven-hour shift around the Adenauerplatz at the center of an unnamed, West German city, possibly in the Rheinland or Hesse. Felipe’s story is interspersed with the narrative perspectives of his German girlfriend, Anke Hennig, and the financial planner (Steuerberater) Kurt Ellerbrock. Unable to obtain a teaching position, Anke is employed in a city archive, mechanically clipping and filing articles from the local paper. Her job is characterized by a lack of any clearly defined context for the work of local reporting and archiving: “Perhaps a commentary, but no contexts, as usual.”¹³ Meanwhile, Ellerbrock makes a lucrative living selling Chilean land and cattle through his so-called cattle credit union (Rindersparkasse) and the subsidiary firm he suggestively names Eldorado, destroying Mapuche lands, bankrupting small creole and mestizo farmers, and helping rich West Germans evade paying taxes to the welfare state in the process. Shorter interludes describe German members of a Latin America Group and Felipe’s young, Turkish neighbor Kemal. The text builds toward the Latin America Group’s plan to break into Ellerbrock’s office, steal files, and organize a public campaign against German direct investment in Chile. Felipe agrees that he will not report them when he passes on his rounds and will ensure that they are not interrupted. In the course of a single night, these story lines collide around a place known only in its most local form: Adenauerplatz. Amid the shadows cast by neon signs for insurance companies and advertising agencies, the dominant mood of Adenauerplatz is fear. Senior watchman Vogelsang, who began working nights to avoid the nightmares that have troubled him since the Second World War, is convinced that only by securing the square’s commodities can the Russians be kept at bay. Felipe, who took up the night watchman’s mantle to avoid his own traumatic dreams of escape from Chile, fears the commodities themselves: he wonders how long the glass panes of the display windows could possibly withstand the pressure of the mountains of commodities that threaten to overflow the square.¹⁴ A “bad consumer,” Felipe

 Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Myoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 54– 77, here 60.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 55.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 25. Vogelsang and Gerlach were even more closely linked in an earlier draft of the manuscript: Delius jettisoned the family name Geiger in favor of Gerlach. The mu-

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is nonetheless charged with securing the city’s commodities and, by extension, the capitalist order.¹⁵ His relationship to commodities offers a point of entry into questions of an aesthetic that is economically grounded, but that refuses the economic determinism characteristic of large swaths of the solidarity movement and typified in Delius’s novel by the Latin America Group. Commodity fetishism and its subjective logics link the local and the global throughout Delius’s novel. The commodity reveals the overdetermination of the subject by introducing the political and the cultural into economic processes of production and exchange; its value is a magnitude not simply of labor, but of socially necessary labor—a distinction that economists Jack Amariglio and Antonio Callari credit with introducing “the complexly combined effectivities of all social processes (noneconomic as well as economic) in the constitution of value categories.”¹⁶ The significance of the distinction is amplified in the concept of commodity fetishism, which implies a consciousness of objectification as historically produced.¹⁷ Only if we acknowledge the overdetermination of the subject, or its historical specificity as “a changing ensemble of qualities and influences […] effected partly by the historical transformation of capitalist social relations,” can we be assured of retaining for our analysis the possibility of subject agency.¹⁸ sical link would otherwise have drawn further attention to a connection between the World War II veteran and the veteran of antifascism. DLA Marbach, Handschriftenabteilung. A: F.C. Delius. Delius, F.C./Prosa/“Adenauerplatz. Roman” Adenauerplatz: Konvolut/Notizen. Rohfassung vom Februar 1983.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 119, 248.  Jack Amariglio and Antonio Callari, “Marxian Value Theory and the Problem of the Subject: The Role of Commodity Fetishism,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 186 – 216, here: 198.  “The concept of commodity fetishism plays a crucial role in a nondeterminist reading of Marx’s discourse. Economic determinists have viewed it as an expression of the ability of the economy to structure the consciousness of the social agents of commodity circulation and, thus, to shape cultural and political relations. The nondeterminist view, in contrast, treats the concept as a sign—a strategically located sign—that the relations between economic and noneconomic processes are neither unproblematic nor unidirectional. The very location of the concept of fetishism in the chapter on value argues for our view that value relations do not exist independently of a consciousness of objectification—an objectification that is a determining trait of the social constitution of individuals. The key to the concept of value lies not in any universal law of value, but in the historical conjunctures that reproduce that objectification of human relations which is the content of bourgeois consciousness and which Marx began to theorize with the concept of commodity fetishism. Far from being proof of the closure of Marx’s discourse at the level of the economy, the concept of commodity fetishism is Marx’s way of overturning the discursive privilege of the economy.” Amariglio and Callari, “Marxian Value Theory,” 202.  Amariglio and Callari, “Marxian Value Theory,” 197.

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The capitalist subject’s overdetermination limits and enables the revolutionary subject of literature. It limits—or perhaps more accurately acknowledges limits on—the nature and scope of literary interventions into a subject formation that is embedded in complex systems of symbolic and material exchange; yet no such interventions could be conceived absent the conceptual power of overdetermination to explain the semi-autonomy of cultural and political processes. In Adenauerplatz, a rhetoric of walking around uproots commodities as recurring figures of economic determinist understandings of fascism and, by extension, antifascism. Its apparently aimless movement is the coming together of poetic and economic categories that Delius’s engagement with the commodity form reveals to be mutually imbricating. The relative autonomy of Delius’s revolutionary subject manifests connections among culturally saturated sites of exchange, connections fundamental to his aestheric solidarity. Equivalence and exchange are categories central to economics in general and to the logic of commodity fetishism in particular. They are also key rubrics for comparative analysis. Classical economics naturalizes forms of equivalence that are revealed in a critical, Marxist analysis to be produced, not given. The nature of exchange is not objective, but profoundly intersubjective: “Commodity fetishism […] summarizes the qualities of individuals that transform the unequal exchange of actual labor time into an exchange of equivalents.”¹⁹ Like the individual subjects who enter into social realtionships that can be described by the concept of commodity fetishism and the consciousness it engenders, the subjects of comparison are first produced as equivalent by degree or quality in the process of analytic exchanges. Out of the critical concept of the commodity fetish, Delius fashions a figure and a form: mountains of commodities punctuate the nocturnal landscape of his abandoned city center, and Felipe’s perambulations reproduce the complicated paths traversed by commodities, their producers, and their consumers. The unstable display windows erected to separate them are “Speichern”—containers, but in verb form also the act of saving, committing to memory.²⁰ Delius details the windows’ contents in terms resonant with both dimensions of the word: they contain commodities redolent with the remembered residue of the dead labor that those commodities bear. Adenauerplatz’s commodities are not easily placed, but instead circulate, connecting and reconnecting unwitting subjects of desire. The connections that this chapter draws out are likewise chosen from many that circulate in and around the text. They are generated in and through reading

 Amariglio and Callari, “Marxian Value Theory,” 204.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 25.

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rather than given in the text. I am asserting both as a point of argument and of critical practice that there is an affinity between comparison and solidarity, and that their respective limits are remarkably similar. The comparatist’s problem is first and foremost one of establishing meaningful connections among historically overdetermined objects in a field limited only by expertise. To reprise Saussy’s assessment of comparative literature, already referenced in Chapter One, “Comparative Literature link[s] together sets of examples whose mutual coherence is not obvious in advance of their combination. […] The willingness to tolerate readings that produce, rather than discover, meaning brings a risky, experimental quality to comparative literature and shows why its virtues are inseparable from its questionable legitimacy.”²¹ Similarly, solidarity cannot be reduced to the straightforward recognition of shared interests that results in strategic coalitions or sustained alliances, which would in any event presume (problematically, I think) a particular kind of individual defined by liberal economic rationality. Instead, practitioners of solidarity actively seek out and produce historically specific affinities as much emotional as rational. Any materialist theory of solidarity is necessarily concerned with overcoming what Amariglio and Callari describe as the split in Marxist theory that revolves around the relative priority of theories of value and the subject.²² If the subject is specifically constituted in relations of capitalist exchange, what alternate networks of exchange and equivalence might open onto a form of subjectivity necessary not only to the functioning of markets, but of solidarities? How does the act of comparison itself instantiate relations of exchange that may (or may not) constitute reading and writing subjects as subjects of solidarity? In comparison as in economics, exchange is not a given, but a problem: exchange is “not simply a site of an economic process, but also one of the key locations within capitalism where a symbolic order is partially constituted and learned.”²³ As such, exchange offers a point of entry into a social-symbolic order. How its aesthetic presentation can unsettle economic and literary categories in equal measure, preparing the ground for new antifascist solidarities, is the focus of this chapter. Unorthodox as the layering of economic exchange and aesthetic practice may seem in methodological terms, it is not unfounded. Indeed, the juxtaposition of Latin American poetry and economic analysis was part and parcel to the reading and publishing practices of the Third World movement in West Ger-

 Haun Saussy, “Comparative Literature?” PMLA 118.2 (Mar. 2003): 339.  Amariglio and Callari, “Marxian Value Theory,” 190.  Amariglio and Callari, “Marxian Value Theory,” 215.

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many. Poems and interviews with Neruda, Ernesto Cardenal, Sergio Ramírez, and Eduardo Galeano, for example, were routinely printed alongside educational materials, calls to action, and exposés on West German direct investment in Latin American dictatorships. Editors of solidarity publications favored poems with explicitly political content over poems whose success turned on their specifically literary qualities or formal innovations. The effect of the poems’ inclusion was to convey that literary translation was integral to the political and economic solidarities that publications sought to cultivate. Delius extends and intensifies the relation of the poetic and the economic intuited by solidarity publications, merging two modes of reading and presentation. His novel reveals alternative poetic filiations: the poetic and the economic are only seemingly discrete; each is overdetermined in the sense described by Amariglio and Callari, that is, in a mode of interrelation that is not multiply but mutually determining.²⁴ Where solidarity publications overwhelmingly juxtaposed poetry and political economy, Delius’s aesthetic solidarity interposes them.

A new political realism? By comparison to Enzensberger’s The Habana Inquiry (Chapter Two), Braun’s Guevara or the Sun State (Chapter Three), or Müller’s The Task (Chapter Four), Delius’s Adenauerplatz stands out both as a prose text and as the only text of the four whose main action unfolds in East or West Germany. As such, the novel must be placed in a longer trajectory of 1970s political realism, West German authors’ emergent concerns for domestic minority perspectives in the early 1980s, and the trend away from the documentary modes of the 1960s and early 1970s. The fractured, internationalist subjects who populate the literature of the early 1970s yield in the 1980s to more efficacious, transnational subjects, figured by Delius in the person of Felipe. Delius’s attention to subjective experiences of historical problems may be read as an outcome of student-popular movements around 1968 and a broader trend toward rethinking how “subjectivity may in fact render commitment more concrete by reflecting personal response to political or social experience […]”²⁵ Delius’s assumption of a German Chilean per-

 Amariglio and Callari, “Marxian Value Theory,” 187– 188, 199 – 200.  Moray McGowan, “‘Neue Subjektivität,’” in After the “Death of Literature”: West German Writing in the 1970s, ed. Keith Bullivant, 53 – 68 (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1989), 58. Feminist critics have long drawn attention to the political nature of women’s writing from the period. See for example Barbara Kosta, “New Subjectivity,” in The Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature, ed. Frederike Eigler and Susanne Kord (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 364– 366.

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spective that is not easily localizable in a single cultural tradition troubles the collapse of political subjectivity and authenticity that underwrote earlier East and West German literary engagements with Latin America as a site of socialist revolution.²⁶ I speculate that the generic transition from documentary drama to poetry and prose may be symptomatic of the shift from physical movement on the stage through roles supposed to be authentic to a more imaginative, aesthetically mediated political epistemology that was less reliant on notions of revolutionary authenticity derived from the experience of violent conflict. The terms of authenticity, subjectivity, and experience were redefined post-1973 to articulate local political actors into economic and cultural networks in terms that exceed earlier West German definitions of realist writing that were more starkly influenced by Weimar-era reportage and factory literature revived in the early 1960s. Specific, transnational solidarities cultivated within the global order of the 1970s and early 1980s proceeded in no small part by rethinking these and other socialist literary debates and traditions from a Latin American perspective. Greg Dawes points to a political and aesthetic internationalist rift in the 1940s (surrealism vs. socialist realism), and identifies how Neruda chose an alternate path in the form of spontaneous realism.²⁷ Delius invokes Neruda’s literary practice in the form of a surreal “walking around” that intersects with—perhaps even occasions—a rethinking of how and where one treads in terms more like Neruda’s materially-inflected Canto general (1950) and Odas elementales (Elemental Odes, 1954). In this respect, Adenauerplatz tracks not just material and imaginatively remembered paths of cultural movement, but a literary trajectory of the Latin American avant-garde. Delius employs what is simultaneously a trope and a rhetoric of walking around to craft a solidarity of readers and a careful balance of intertexts to complicate notions of solidarity and political subjectivity in West Germany and the world. The importance of authors who straddled the conceptual divide between avant-gardism and realism in the 1930s to authors who revisited a similar set of questions in the 1970s—albeit under dramatically different historical circumstances—is undeniable.²⁸ Delius, who had experienced his greatest literary suc-

 See also Bullivant, After the Death of Literature, xiii.  Greg Dawes, Verses against the Darkness: Pablo Neruda’s Poetry and Politics (Lewisberg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), Chapter Two.  Bullivant provides a concise summary of these developments, including the renewed interest in the Expressionism debates and debates in the Gruppe 61 and Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt (36 – 37). Helga Gallas’s now standard account of Marxist literary theory in East Germany charts East German engagements with 1930s avant-gardism and antifascism. Vera Stegman’s overview of Neruda’s relationship to antifascists in Mexican exile provides an instructive com-

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cess of the decade with documentary satire, sought meaningful ground between what Enzensberger famously identified as dead literature’s surrogate, reportage, and experimental and fantastic literature by contemporaries such as Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (1940 – 1975).²⁹ Both approaches have antecedents in Weimar-era movements and organizations such as the Bund Proletarisch-Revolutionärer Schriftsteller (Union of Proletarian-Revolutionary Authors, 1928 – 1935) as well as Dada and Surrealist movements associated with the international avantgarde. Some attention has been paid to US American and British influences on postmodern impulses in German literature of the late 1960s; markedly less has been paid to specifically antifascist traditions within the avant-garde internationally.³⁰ Nonetheless, literary and political expressions of antifascism clearly appealed to West German authors who embarked on an anticapitalist, antifascist critique of post-Godesberg West Germany’s place in a neoimperial order. Delius’s recourse to strategies associated with the avant-garde complements a field of possible German referents from interwar internationalism, antifascism, postwar criticisms of a perceived restoration under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1876 – 1967; Christian Democratic chancellor from 1949 – 1963), and the decline of oppositional party politics in the Social Democratic Party. His choice of Latin America as a point of political and literary reference is especially appropriate given early twentieth-century German and Latin American authors’ broad commitments to Spanish antifascism. Spain was arguably the most important nexus for the articulation of literary and political antifascism internationally throughout the 1930s. The effects of the Spanish Republican cause were more immediate and of far greater literary significance in Latin America than in Germany, but there can be little doubt as to the symbolic import of Spanish antifascism for German authors.³¹ In the 1970s and 1980s, antifascism in

plement to Gallas’s account. Helga Gallas, Marxistische Literaturtheorie (Neuweid and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1971); Vera Stegmann, “Pablo Neruda and the German Literary Exile Community,” in The Lion and the Eagle: Interdisciplinary Essays on German-Spanish Relations over the Centuries, ed. Thomas K. Wolber, Conrad Kent, and Cameron M.K. Hewitt (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), 423 – 441.  Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Gemeinplätze, die Neueste Literatur betreffend,” Kursbuch 15 (1968): 187– 197.  See Ralf Bentz, Sabine Britnik, Christopher König, Roman Luckscheiter, Ulrich Ott and Brigitte Raitz, eds., PROTEST! Literatur um 1968. Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Literaturarchivs in Verbindung mit dem Germanistischen Seminar der Universität Heidelberg und dem Deutschen Rundfunkarchiv im Schiller-Nationalmuseum. 9. Mai bis 30. November 1998 (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schiller Gesellschaft, 1998), 201– 240.  German authors were the best represented national group in the brigades. See Conrad Kent and Thomas K. Wolber, “Introduction,” in The Lion and the Eagle: Interdisciplinary Essays on

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Spain resurfaced as an important example of an idealized resistance to fascism in German literature. It was most explicitly thematized in Enzensberger’s Der kurze Sommer der Anarchie. Buenaventura Durrutis Leben und Tod (The Short Summer of Anarchy. Buenaventura Durruti’s Life and Death, 1972) and in the first volume of Peter Weiss’s mammoth Ästhetik des Widerstands (Aesthetics of Resistance, 1975, 1978, and 1981), which tracks the participation of a German antifascist in the international brigades with particular attention to his experience of antifascist, avant-garde aesthetics. In Latin America, the premier poets of the twentieth century were committed Republicans, and many spent time in Spain prior to the outbreak of civil war in 1936. Close personal and aesthetic ties cemented the political commitment of Latin American authors to the Spanish avant-garde, including Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, and Luís Cernuda. Some literary historians have gone so far as to trace the emergence of a committed literature in Latin America to the Spanish Civil war, more specifically to Neruda’s España en el corazón (Spain in My Heart, 1937) and Tercera Residencia (Third Residence, 1947).³² Together, Neruda’s Residencias (Residences) span ten years and three continents. The first Residence on Earth (1933), written between 1925 and 1932 during his ambassadorships in Burma, India, Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka), and Java (present day Indonesia), was followed by a second collection written roughly between 1933 and 1935 in Chile, Argentina, and Spain. “Walking Around” first appeared in Residence on Earth II (1935) and conveys overwhelming isolation. The sense of global dislocation Neruda first expressed in the Far East carried over into this Buenos Aires poem.³³ The English title itself suggests an openness to poetic wanderings beyond the Latin American metropolis and the Spanish language.³⁴ The narrator’s labored movement is neither that of the flaneur nor of

German-Spanish Relations over the Centuries, ed. Thomas K. Wolber, Conrad Kent, and Cameron M.K. Hewitt (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2000), 27.  Saúl Yurkievich, “Introducción general. Pablo Neruda: persona, palabra y mundo,” in Obras Completas. Pablo Neruda, ed. Saúl Yurkievich, vol. 1 (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg: Círculo de Lectores, 1999), 41– 43, 49.  Yurkievich speaks of “exile (destierro)” and “existential desolation.” “Introducción general,” 35.  A number of critics, including Briones, have suggested that the choice of title may be related to Neruda’s work on a translation of Joyce’s Chamber Music around the time of the poem’s composition. But for the despairing dream of lost love in Joyce’s last stanza, one might hardly imagine a poem less like “Walking Around”; nonetheless, I find no more convincing explanation for the choice of an English-language title. Edmundo Olivares Briones, Pablo Neruda: Los caminos del mundo. Tras las huellas del poeta itinerante. vol. 2 (1933 – 1939). (Santiago: Editorial LOM, 2001), 62.

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the tourist; it is compulsive, cyclical, highly localized and simultaneously foreign.³⁵ It is a kindred walking around that Delius mobilizes to delineate a path across nationally defined spaces of readership that emerge in the context of international solidarity movements of the 1970s and 1980s as a new ground for contemplating historical fascisms and modes of cultural relation through the long and only sometimes circular paths of migrants and exiles. “Walking Around,”—indeed, the entire second Residence on Earth—marked a critical moment in Neruda’s work, on the brink of what Hernán Loyola describes as a “passionate affirmation of an outside” by a subject of alienation and dependency: The simultaneous experience of alienation and dependency—with respect to exteriority and to himself—steers him toward an attitude […] that, supported by a “desolate confidence,” aspires to (re)discover the relation with the outside—the meaning of existence— and to integrate it practically into his own life.³⁶

It is a moment in which, for Neruda, poetic vision crystallized around subjective experience and material world as never before; not expansive Chilean nature (as in Crepusculario [Twilight Book, 1923] and Tentativa del hombre infinito [Attempt of the Infinite Man, 1926]), but urban grit and unsentimental cosmopolitanism characterized a new focus on commodities, relations of exchange, and estranged subjects of labor. It was also a moment of radical formal experimentation and the height of his aesthetic avant-gardism, often compared to Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York, 1930) and heralded, together with works by César Vallejo and Vicente Huidobro, as a foundational text of the avant-garde in and beyond Latin America.³⁷

 Briones advances the same argument about cyclicality and compulsion (Pablo Neruda, 62– 64).  Federico Schopf, “Prólogo,” in Residencia en la tierra (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1992), 21. Internal quotation from Hernán Loyola, “Residencia revisitada,” Cuadernos Americanos, 142 (1985): n.p.  Commenting on Neruda’s place in the historical avant-garde internationally, Yurkievich argues: “Residencia en la tierra is generated in an intercontinental travesty, in the long run out of a transcultural and translinguistic periplus. It grows in relation with realities that are not localized, but generalized experiences of modern life, and is situated aesthetically with reference to an international state of world literature. Residencia en la tierra cannot be recuperated by a vernacular path, nor can it be comprehended by a reading limited to the national,” (“Introducción general,” 40).

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Although critics often oppose the Residences to Neruda’s later, Marxist works, a strong emphasis on the material was already legible in his earlier texts. As Yurkievich observes: Anything could be occupied by subjectivity, become a metonomy of the lyric I that expresses itself by means of those heterogeneous inventories that are chaotic enumerations. […] The Nerudian real is material that can be extended and deformed, that leaves open the possibility of creating new wholes. Exterior and interior reality, interpenetrated, constitute a single inconstant, disparate, changeable mixture.³⁸

Delius mobilizes a trope and a rhetoric of walking around to similar effect, creating new, subjective wholes or constellations in and through intersecting imaginative and material worlds. Unmistakable procedural affinities with “Walking Around” and other poems from Neruda’s Residence on Earth II, but also those subsequently gathered in Spain in my Heart and Third Residence, epitomize the way of seeing Delius ascribes to his German Chilean protagonist. A surrealist, avant-garde poetics of walking around ultimately led Neruda toward a more resolutely material and popularly accessible aesthetic in later works such as the Elemental Odes and Canto general; Felipe’s night rounds lead him to practice his own meditations on the testimonial power of objects and commodities. Like Neruda’s anti-flaneur in “Walking Around,” Felipe is haunted by the ghosts of dead labor in the shop windows he himself is paid to guard. The night watchman composes poetic, testimonial accounts of the circulation of commodities in the new international division of labor, taking on the narrative role Neruda once ascribed to the national poet in a transnationalized context of structural globalization and local cultural fragmentation.³⁹ Where once the poet declared: “I come to speak through your dead mouth,” Delius’s night watchman composes evocative and impressionistic critiques of international economies of exchange with recourse to the undead subject-producers of lifeless commodities.⁴⁰ In his work as an economist (formerly an agronomist and land reformer, in West Germany an expert on the international sugar market), Felipe once gave voice to death in emphatically anti-interpretive forms and fora. But his commitment to the supposed monovalence of economic documents is complicated by his pre-conscious dream-life, a permanent, psychic residence in both postcoup Chile and post-Adenauer West Germany. The paths that connect them ap-

 Yurkievich, “Introducción general,” 39 – 40. Emphasis mine.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 240.  Pablo Neruda, “Alturas de Macchu Picchu,” in Canto General (Mexico City: Ediciones Oceano, 1950); Delius, Adenauerplatz, 256 – 261.

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proximate Neruda’s own preference for poetic impressions over interpretations during the period in which he wrote the Residences. ⁴¹ Attention to what Yurkievich calls the pre-formal modalities in “Walking Around” makes for the most provocative engagement with the poem’s meditations on connection, movement, and alienation. Read this way, Delius’s rhetoric of walking around evokes not so much Neruda’s text as its dizzying effects.⁴² A great admirer of the Residences, Enzensberger flatly criticized Neruda’s later socialist realist verse.⁴³ Delius, by contrast, captures something more closely approximating Neruda’s critical and aesthetic range, drawing out potentially fruitful contradictions across the poet’s work, many of which emerged around internationalist political commitments and transnational aesthetic affinities that have characterized Spanish American poetry at least since Rubén Darío and modernismo and were certainly evident during the Spanish Civil War.⁴⁴ Delius’s rhetoric of walking around integrates his own political realist style with short, recurring sections not unlike Neruda’s anti-interpretive or pre-conscious poetics in Residence on Earth II. Delius’s rhetoric of walking around in Adenauerplatz, most prominently the numbered rounds and nocturnes attributed to Anke and Felipe, as well as Felipe’s fantasy of murdering not a Nerudian notary or a nun, but an accountant, receives sustained attention below.⁴⁵ Suffice it to say for the moment that if Dawes is correct in identifying Neruda’s poetic development as parallel to his political commitments and stances in larger aesthetic debates of the historical avantgarde, Enzensberger’s and Delius’s divergent receptions of Neruda’s work at critical aesthetic turning points represent competing assessments of how West German authors articulated aesthetics and contemporary political commitments. Dawes outlines the rift between left-wing poets’ critiques of the Soviet Union that alternately looked to surrealism (André Breton, Octavio Paz) and to a more sophisticated critical realism (Georg Lukács). He ultimately locates Neruda’s “spontaneous re-

 During this period, Neruda’s correspondence emphasizes a preference for a sense of physical and psychological absorption in objects over and against their interpretation. See Yurkievich, “Introducción general,” 25.  Yurkievich, “Introducción general,” 32.  Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Der Fall Pablo Neruda,” in Einzelheiten II. Poesie und Politik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 316 – 333.  I use transnational rather than international to describe Latin American modernismo because I believe it is best understood as a continental phenomenon; internationalism, on the other hand, better describes various Latin American political solidarities with the Spanish Republic, which were mindful of discrete national-political communities through which to channel political efforts.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 270 – 275.

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alism” as conforming to neither. In Neruda’s memoir Confieso que he vivido (I Confess That I Have Lived, 1974), he affirms the right of poetry to be antirealist, but also the importance of its being dialectical: poetry should be both radically independent of and responsive to popular interests. Already in Dawes’s account of leftpoetic positions in relation to the then emergent geopolitical and geocultural lines of the First and Second Worlds, one can see the appeal of Neruda’s second Residence as a kind of aesthetic saturation point of the political real: “From Spain in My Heart onwards he wrote in a realist yet experimental style, and thus did not abandon his formal innovation or his creative spontaneity.”⁴⁶

From trope to rhetoric, from internationalist to transnational antifascist solidarities Delius devoted literary attention to Chile, the West German solidarity movement, and Neruda himself already in his 1975 volume of poetry, Ein Bankier auf der Flucht (A Banker on the Run). His poem “Wie ein Volkswirt zum Gedichtelesen kam,” (“How an Economist Came to Read Poems,”) recounts an economist’s tentative steps from a demonstration against fascism in Chile to reading Brecht and, ultimately, Neruda in the space of a month.⁴⁷ The arrangement of poems in the volume places Neruda’s appearance as a synecdochial figure for political poetry internationally in close proximity to another, imagined appearance of the poet, in “Selbstporträt am Stuttgarter Schlossplatz,” (“Self-portrait at Stuttgart’s Schlossplatz,”): “There / walks a man / who looks like Neruda, / Neruda looks like a Swabian and talks like one.”⁴⁸ The poem posits relationships among state terror in Chile, a battery of state responses to West German domestic terrorism, and West German direct investment and development aid. Neruda’s proximity to other recognizable figures in the mind of the narrator locates acts of West German resistance and state and police violence in an international context. That the narrator believes he sees someone who looks like Neruda as he scans the square for people who stand out against Stuttgart’s serene and prosperous city center is meaningful primarily in the context of the narrator’s other visual associations with Ian McLeod, a British citizen shot, naked and unarmed, by Stuttgart police in connection with a 1972 search for Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorists, and with Marianne Herzog, arrested in 1971 in connection with the RAF.  Dawes, Verses against the Darkness, 78.  Friedrich Christian Delius, Ein Bankier auf der Flucht. Gedichte und Reisebilder (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1975), 36 – 37.  Delius, Ein Bankier auf der Flucht, 40.

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In his tired and unwashed paranoia, the poetic persona fears that he might share their violent fates and meditates on his situation as a political author during what one can only read as a break from the trial launched against Delius and the Rotbuch Verlag in the wake of his documentary satire Unsere Siemens-Welt (Our Siemens-World, 1976).⁴⁹ Through Siemens’s unsuccessful lawsuit against Delius from 1972– 1975, the book achieved a circulation of 40,000 copies and was widely understood as a testament to the political efficacy of contemporary literary writing. At the same time, some deemed the verdict the effective end of documentary satire in West Germany: the judge ruled that factual and fictional elements must be clearly identified as such, and that all claims must be proven. The ruling motivated Delius to seek out new literary modes that would be “less subject to juridical attack and better literarily.”⁵⁰ As an example of committed literature in Latin America and of the historical avant-garde internationally, Delius’s imagining Neruda’s proximity to a legally embattled political literature in West Germany may thus also be read as a hopeful moment in the poem’s otherwise desperate landscape. “Venceremos oder Hindernisse beim Einschlafen” (“Venceremos or Trouble Falling Asleep”) sustains concerns about police violence and fascist terror in connection with Chile.⁵¹ Thoughts of Chile haunt the poem’s West German narrator, escalating from uneasy distraction by day to guilt and fear by night. The violent language used to describe events surrounding West German protests and solidarity conveys a sense of urgency, shared abuse, and violation.⁵² At the same time, the poem maintains a stubborn hope, declaring “venceremos” in the face of dictatorship and terror that the narrator implicitly locates not only in Chile, but also in West Germany. The poem’s emphasis on remembering violence as an obstacle to forgetful sleep (“How much terror must we forget / to be able to sleep […]”) subsequently links fear of German state terror and industrial collusion with dictatorial governments past and present to Chile under Pinochet. The narrator tentatively channels his restlessness into productive politi Friedrich Christian Delius, Unsere Siemens-Welt. Eine Festschrift zum 125jährigen Bestehen des Hauses S. Erweiterte Neuausgabe mit einem Anhang über den Prozess, über die Kunst der Satire, die Menschenwürde des Konzerns, Bierpreise und den verlorenen Kredit des Hauses S. (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1976). Among the most controversial elements of the satire was Delius’s attention to the relationship of German industrial capital to National Socialism.  Gustav Zürcher, “Friedrich Christian Delius,” in Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartsliteratur (2001): 4.  Delius, Ein Bankier auf der Flucht, 12.  Delius, Ein Bankier auf der Flucht, 12. These include words such as “Rückschläge” (set-backs, but, in this poem, with a sense of being more literally beaten back) and “treiben” (to drive, but with force, like an animal).

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cal work in the poem’s concluding lines. Nearly a decade later, Delius resumes the theme, this time working out the links between violences at a historical, geographic, and ideological remove from one another in the figures of night watchmen Gerlach and Vogelsang. Personal and collective memories remain at the forefront of Delius’s literary negotiation of local and global fascisms in Adenauerplatz. As Andreas Huyssen argues, “The past is not simply there in memory, but must be articulated to become memory.”⁵³ Delius undertakes such a historical articulation through the rhetorical operation of walking, described by Michel de Certeau as a process of the spatial expression of meaning and memory in the urban landscape. In his reliance not just on walking per se, but on walking around, Delius places at least some of the hope expressed in “Venceremos” in the hands (or perhaps more aptly feet) of an emergent, transnationally oriented readership. It is a readership he both requires and cultivates through his innovative rhetoric, able to recognize and foster deliberate, politically invested literary strategies for thinking about antifascist and potentially revolutionary forms of subjectivity in a violent global order. Attending to the rhetoric of walking around constitutes the difference between reading Adenauerplatz as a passé repetition of 1970s political realism in the early 1980s and reading it as a reassessment of spontaneous realism’s potential to communicate more than—or at least differently from—historical or documentary fictions by articulating cultural systems and subjects deemed not properly German. It is difficult to imagine that Delius, who himself began as a poet, would not have known “Walking Around,” one of Neruda’s most widely anthologized and discussed poems, with any level of familiarity with Neruda’s work. After Neruda’s 1971 Nobel Prize and with the increased reception of Latin American authors in Germany following the 1976 Frankfurt Book Fair, Delius could count on an audience more receptive to the thematic and structural development of Latin American literary allusions—in tandem with a somewhat longer standing familiarity with historical or economic touchstones—by the time of Adenauerplatz’s publication in 1984.⁵⁴ I take Neruda’s poem as a literary and theoretical touchstone. Furthermore, in tandem with de Certeau’s “rhetoric of walking,” I am able to develop a conceptual vocabulary for describing the relationships among and within urban

 Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3.  For a study of the popular West German reception of Latin American literature in the 1980s, see Meg Brown, The Reception of Spanish American Fiction in West Germany 1981 – 1991: A Study of Best Sellers (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994).

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spaces in Adenauerplatz. To treat both the poet Neruda and the philosopher de Certeau as theorists is also a deliberate acknowledgement of literature as a mode of producing theoretical and practical knowledge. A brief detour through de Certeau’s rhetoric of walking will provide the basis for exploring how Delius’s novel more precisely engenders a rhetoric of walking around, an exponentially intensified form of walking and an exemplary form of Verdichtung in the sense of the term elaborated in Chapter One. De Certeau begins his essay on walking by identifying it as “an elementary form” of experiencing the city, wherein pedestrians, as “practitioners of the city,” navigate “an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it.”⁵⁵ He highlights the elusive quality of intertwining paths and intersections unrecognizable but from a bird’s-eye view of the city: “The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poem in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility.”⁵⁶ Walking tells a story in fragments and partial trajectories, an account of spaces altered by their very traversal. Modifying de Certeau’s rhetoric of walking to analyze what is less walking per se than a rhetoric of walking around enables me to trace the imagined and imaginative footsteps of a historical encounter between Germans, Chileans, and others in the locality of Adenauerplatz. The “fragmentary trajectories” de Certeau ascribes to the practice of walking converge with the violent interiorization of the modern urban experience of Neruda’s alienated anti-flaneur in Delius’s narrative; indeed, Delius goes out of his way to ironize the figure of the flaneur as misplaced in any reading of Adenauerplatz, referring to Felipe as a flaneur for hire and repeatedly invoking the opposing figure of the Biedermeier night watchman as a literary historical counterpoint.⁵⁷ The reader of these paths cast in prose is privy to multiple views: the “bird’s eye” of the composite narrative; the individual, walking perspectives of unnamed West German soldiers, Felipe, Anke, Ellerbrock, and Kemal; and, should the reader recognize other walking texts—for example Neruda’s—a further multiplication of paths and walkers across cityscapes and times.

 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93.  de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 197, 35. In addition to evoking a retreat from the political in a postrevolutionary situation, the Biedermeier references have the added virtue of underscoring cultural anachronism among emigrant communities. Felipe’s own image of the watchman is in keeping with his great grandparents’ German books—the same books that the reader later learns furnish an array of fantastic colonial images more powerfully suggestive than his first-hand experiences in the former colonial territories (Adenauerplatz, 252). These passages are discussed at greater length below.

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Pedestrian mobility “[outlines] itself against the visible”; the attention is to surfaces and alternate configurations of space (e. g., non-geometrical or unplanned spaces, which include a temporal dimension in de Certeau’s terms). It is illegible to individual walkers. According to his rhetoric of walking, “[a] migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.”⁵⁸ De Certeau argues that “optical knowledge” is an ambition of city rationalization, security a principle justification for planning initiatives. Felipe Gerlach, who dismissively refers to urban planning initiatives as “uglification initiatives,” is in the curious position of providing security and reporting exterior, “optical knowledge” back to his private employer even as he practices pedestrian movements that evade rationalized knowledge, walking a beat constituted through spaces of memory that coincide with, but are not exhausted in, his physical movements. Absorbed by surfaces that are anything but planned “administrative circuits,” Gerlach’s rounds are highly personalized visualizations of memory and experience that are invisible to other night watchmen and passersby. They bear a striking resemblance to Neruda’s elemental ways of seeing. A jeweler’s display window, for example, occasions an elegy to raw materials, to the relationships jewels cement and the relationships they destroy, combining hallmarks of Neruda’s Elemental Odes and Canto General. ⁵⁹ The pedestrian movement de Certeau describes as “a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation” responsible for the shape of a space and—most importantly for my analysis —for weaving places together, operates in tandem with Felipe’s internal visions of labor, history, and memory.⁶⁰ His movements echo the interiorized modernity of “Walking Around.” It is simultaneously more and less localized than the city celebrated by high-modernist works in that it moves in and with the subject of modernity.⁶¹ Briones’s reading of “Walking Around” in his monumental account of Neruda’s extensive travels and literal residences on earth, combined with conjectures on the experiential dimensions of Neruda’s poetry, coincides with de Certeau’s insistence on pedestrian mobility, spatialization, non-touristic movement, and lack (de Certeau: “To walk is to lack place. It is the indefinite process of being absent in search of a proper.”⁶²):

    

de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93. Delius, Adenauerplatz, 240 – 241. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 97. Yurkievich, “Introducción general,” 34. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 103.

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[…] it is interesting to note that this walker—this incisive wayfarer—is not one who circles like a tourist, leaving with a hasty impression of what he has seen or merely glimpsed. He is more like a forced actor-spectator who discovers that the paths a city offers him are like this—always like this—and that something irresistible condemns him to walk the same streets time and time again, to pass the same shops and the same houses, tired, and to discover this reality from the first time, to tire of himself and of everything when he thinks that the next day will be the same. Things being as they are and given the particular context, the word “around” in its meaning of taking turns, in its purpose of signaling something that gyrates and repeats its movement, is decisive in the cadence and in the oppressive intentionality of the poem.⁶³

“Walking around,” in this sense, differentiates itself from walking in its circularity, its turns and repetition, its “oppressive intentionality,” a weight and deliberation that is felt in every step: “I walk around with calm, with eyes, with shoes, / with fury, with forgetfulness,” writes Neruda.⁶⁴ Delius pays similarly prominent attention to the physicality of Felipe’s walking around: he narrates the deliberate, steady movement of the night watchman’s body, of all twenty-six bones in each foot, the movement against the memory and the fear of forgetting his home, a walking disturbed by visions of what lies behind shop windows, navigating a territory of Nerudian “origins and ashes.”⁶⁵ The articulation of body and place through the rhetoric of walking around is not only physical, but operates, too, in terms of the circularity in time and history implied in Felipe’s coupled routes and rounds, tracing historical German and Chilean fascisms temporally and spatially against the grain of received history. Felipe’s meditations on the visible—akin to Neruda’s “walking around with eyes”—serve as points of entry into memory and history; it is first via commodities (Leica cameras), then scenes (life in the Southern Chilean town of Pemuco), and only then narratives of events that first tentative and then more explicit connections between German and Chilean fascisms are made. Cameras as material and metaphorical means of capturing the then and there, and as catalysts for Felipe’s psychic experience of the here and now of Adenauerplatz, make visible—if still not legible in de Certeau’s terms—the walking path Felipe creates. Delius’s persistent recourse to the photographic is not exclusive to Adenauerplatz; it is  Briones, Pablo Neruda, 62– 63.  Pablo Neruda, “Walking Around,” in Residence on Earth, trans. Donald D. Walsh (New York: New Directions Books, 1973), 118.  In the Latin American literary context of Neruda’s poem there would likely be stronger resonance with his perverse but hopeful play on Rubén Darío’s (Nicaragua, 1867– 1916) modernist swan on the ashen waters it navigates: “[…] like a felt swan / navigating a water of origins and ashes.” In a German literary-historical context, ashes are most readily associated with the Holocaust, especially in tandem with what Felipe imagines as mountains of corpses.

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present in his poetry since Die unsichtbaren Blitze (The Invisible Flashes, 1981).⁶⁶ But in Adenauerplatz it serves a function that is more than evidentiary: Delius attends to a process of development that is about exposing—perhaps more accurately double-exposing—the negatives of localized memories to create new depth where there was only surface, to enter into objects captured on film and to explore their relationships as constitutive of Felipe’s own interiority and his subjective experience of the city outside. Photographic development tells the reader much about Felipe’s critical eye for social relations there and here, then and now, as Delius narrates Felipe’s childhood experiments with photography and adult reconstruction thereof through the medium of the display window and through the rhetoric of walking around. The latter creates a literal and constant shifting of the most basic terms of spatial relation in the there and here of Delius’s narrative map of German-Chilean paths: In the framework of enunciation, the walker constitutes, in relation to his position, both a near and a far, a here and a there. To the fact that the adverbs here and there are the indicators of the locutionary seat in verbal communication—a coincidence that reinforces the parallelism between linguistic and pedestrian enunciation—we must add that this location (here—there) (necessarily implied by walking and indicative of a present appropriation of spaces by an “I”) also has the function of introducing an other in relation to this “I” and of thus establishing a conjunctive and disjunctive articulation of places.⁶⁷

The here and there of Felipe’s walking around are more explicitly coupled with a now and then than de Certeau’s linking of place and memory in walking alone could explain. At various times, they are contained in the here and there themselves. The then and there of Chile is, loosely, the time before exile, before fascism, before adulthood, even before Felipe’s birth, in the era of early German settlement; the here is also the now of post-exile Germany, Adenauerplatz by night and, more generally, West Germany after Adenauer. As the terms of locality shift, so, too, do the terms of time and memory. Delius’s protagonist walks around rhetorically through the figures of “mountains of commodities” (Warenberge) on display in Adenauerplatz’s shop windows and, by way of interior wanderings, among “mountains of corpses” (Leichenberge). The protagonist’s heres are also theres, images experienced in Chile as documents of German fascism and narratively linked to fascist killings in Chile (e. g., a preponderance of German and Chilean military uniforms, Nazi flags displayed at German schools in Chile).⁶⁸  Friedrich Christian Delius, Die unsichtbaren Blitze. Gedichte (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1981).  de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 90.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 8, 17, 33, 35 – 36, 41, 148, 276. The similarity of German and Chilean military uniforms historically, though not described by Delius, offers another possible point of

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So intense is their mutual imbrication that Felipe is repeatedly surprised by their non-identity, as in the moment when his remembered watchfulness as a member of the Chilean opposition is transformed into the watchfulness of the night guard: The rules of behavior engrained once and for all, never stand with your face to the wall, always watch your back, keep your eyes wide open, look to the sides. It isn’t easy to comprehend that the battlefield isn’t on German ground, not his. But the faces of the wounded don’t disappear, not even wandering under German beeches. […] Sometimes the photos of mountains of corpses slip back into focus and ask the same old questions.⁶⁹

Even as Felipe is recalled to his current, physical location, which mountains of corpses pose which old questions is only rendered less clear by the emphatic emendation “not his.” Visions of the disappeared and dead victims of fascism would seem not to respect the national proprietary boundaries that his walking remembrance also cannot maintain. At once they mark the lingering guilt of the exile and the ironic inversion of German and Southern perspectives on travel: Goethe’s observation that no one wanders unpunished under palms is transformed into Felipe’s disappointed expectation that one might do precisely that under German beeches. His battlefield is not German, but surely Buchenwald as a site of the Holocaust is at least a battlefield invoked in this passage. What Felipe experiences in walking around differs from the modes of inventing and reinventing spaces that de Certeau attributes to travelers as walking rememberers of places that are no longer locally contained in their home towns: What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one’s own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic, like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, of being the effect of displacements and condensations. As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces. From this point of view, their contents remain revelatory, and still more so the principle that organizes them.⁷⁰

In Adenauerplatz, that principle is a rhetoric of walking around. Felipe’s forcible removal from his first places of memory literalizes what for de Certeau’s rhetoric

convergence among images of German militarism and Chilean dictatorship: Not only were Chilean military officers trained in a Prussian-staffed Chilean military academy beginning in 1885, but they wore surplus German military uniforms for decades.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 127.  de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 106 – 107.

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of walking remains a metaphor of “countless tiny deportations.”⁷¹ Without the external direction of or toward places of memory, a new rhetoric of walking around emerges to fill a place (or Platz) that is not here, but that constantly evokes a here through its pedestrian figures. Felipe’s persistent, circular movement around Adenauerplatz in the name of longed-for security in the flagging city center meets his own need for employment and distracts him from his fear of sleeping nights filled with dreams of violence in Chile. His fear of remembering is rivaled only by his apparent fear of forgetting; his brooding, interior re-placement of family memories is the counterpoint to his dis-placement of German spaces physically central to his daily existence. His childhood fascination with Adenauer, like his childhood fear and awe of his authoritarian uncle Ernesto, “the chief Nazi of the family,” has long since faded. Adenauerplatz is “no place to stay.”⁷² The “sixteen-year-old Adenauer adherent (Anhänger)” has turned his adult attentions away from anti-communist reconstruction and consumer capitalism to other concepts of development and democracy that more closely approximate the slow circles of his walking around, earnest but referred to at times dismissively as Lauferei (running or walking around).⁷³ The weather, the flora, the feeling of walking around Adenauerplatz all emphasize temporal as well as physical displacement or deportation (verschoben sein). It is a temporality that reverses the developmentalist trajectory agrarian → urban, reaching back to Felipe’s childhood on his family farm in the German-settled territories of southern Chile: He failed to reconcile himself to time. The chestnut, it was the one from home, from the realm of the grandparents Gerlach. Winter here, summer there, that much is certain. […] Memory was displaced, time twisted. As the summer ends, spring begins. He climbs trees, time is unending. What was does not end, not today.⁷⁴

The temporal misalignment of solidarity is similarly at issue in Felipe’s attempt to forge meaningful connections with the students and young professionals he refers to as his “comrades in sneakers” (Turnschuhgenossen). They raise awareness of German investment in Latin American dictatorships, but have no critical understanding of shared German-Chilean cultural pasts to speak of.⁷⁵ Felipe’s in-

    

de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 103. Delius, Adenauerplatz, 63, 25. Delius, Adenauerplatz, 166, 27. Delius, Adenauerplatz, 81– 82. Delius, Adenauerplatz, 80.

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terest is less in their linear, developmentalist narrative of capitalist expansion than in an account of co-extant, transnational relationships that function in cultural and linguistic as well as international economic registers. Felipe’s Adenauerplatz remains invisible to the members of the Latin America Group that he has long since ceased to attend, but also obliquely defends vis-à-vis other, more sharply critical exiles.⁷⁶ In stark opposition to the group’s calls for an economically grounded politics of international solidarity, Felipe’s experience and memory of fascism operates within the parameters of a transnational historical and cultural imaginary. From his critical vantage, transnational structures emerge as both catalysts and effects of the displacement (Verschiebung) of people, memories, and time, and the instability (Verrücktheit) of spaces and borders. (Verrücktheit denotes both insanity and, more literally, a state of having been decentered.) It is only the advent of Chilean fascism and his West German exile that produces Felipe’s physical and mental sense of instability: In a tone as if nothing had happened the pilot reports that they have flown over the country’s border. […] The border is unrecognizable in the landscape below, mountain against mountain, bald brown and snow. […] From now on, everything’s place is unstable. Catapulted out of the country at nine hundred kilometers per hour and caught up by the Germans. […] Germany, it lies (liegt) in his head, lies closest, sits in his head, sleeps, stands, lies (liegt), lies (lügt) in his head, betrays his head, plows through his head, wises up his head, beats his head, stop it.⁷⁷

The closest Germany, the Germany in his head, is subject- rather than placebound. Its relation to Felipe’s German language itself evokes the violence of capture, deception, and abuse. Despite his ability to manipulate language, Felipe’s German is nonetheless received as “Auslandsdeutsch,” foreign German.⁷⁸ His attempt to master the escalating metaphorical violence of language (here manifested in his rhythmic progression of increasingly negative consonant, assonant,

 E.g., Delius, Adenauerplatz, 190 – 192.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 92– 93. In German, the final sentence reads: “Deutschland, es liegt im Kopf, liegt am nächsten, sitzt im Kopf, schläft, steht, liegt, lügt im Kopf, trügt im Kopf, pflügt den Kopf, klügt den Kopf, prügelt den Kopf, hör auf.”  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 111. Various South American forms of Auslandsdeutsch are relatively well documented by linguists, but there is nothing in Delius’s text to mark Felipe’s speech as conforming to them. For a brief overview, see Peter Rosenberg, “Deutsche Minderheiten in Lateinamerika,” in Particulae particularum. Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Harald Weydt, ed. Theo von Harden and Elke Hentschel (Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 1998), 261– 291.

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and alliterative verbs) is also an attempt to master milieu. His family, we are told, spoke and whispered in German, but commanded in Spanish.⁷⁹ Figures of spatialization and memory, here or there, now or then, are destabilized in his social and migratory movements. They retain meaning through the circumlocution of walking around, which opens the locus of walking and its subjective enunciation to re-articulate meaningful relations of other spaces and times with the here and now of West Germany after Adenauer. Repetition, memory, and circular movement highlight how structures of allusion and intertextuality might themselves operate as figures (in de Certeau’s sense of walking and speech as homologous figures). They add yet another dimension to Delius’s rhetoric of walking around, articulating a solidarity of readers and writers that extrapolates the historical avant-garde to a new, transnational context through literary practices that are anything but pedestrian. Walking around, Felipe’s historical oscillations become continuous: “What was does not stop, not today.”⁸⁰ Today vibrates between the today of Felipe’s mother’s burial in Chile, the today on which Felipe has agreed to act as a look-out for the solidarity group, and the broader today of Chile under Pinochet and of German neoimperialist practices that echo earlier, informal (i. e., nonstate) colonial relationships. What was and what is converge around today’s transnational memory of fascisms. Fascism and exile are the primary catalysts for Felipe’s interest in his grandparents’ transatlantic routes. After safely boarding a plane out of Chile, he muses: Millions have passed this way, sometimes this direction, sometimes the other. The great grandparents are traveling, too, old Philipp Gerlach, Felipe’s namesake, and his Elisabeth, née Lotz, in flight, in search of asylum like their great grandson. He sees them up close, he waves them on. The old folks and he, high above the Atlantic they approach one another. They have time, they travel with him for a while, the direction doesn’t matter. In a few hours he covers the stretch that takes them a few weeks. […] The two were never before so close to him.⁸¹

The two directions converge narratively around a section titled “Die deutsche Spur,” (The German Trail, but also potentially clue, trace, or even the more ominously animalizing spoor) in which Felipe finds and visits his ancestral village and “the German Gerlachs,” proprietors of a hog farm near Marburg.⁸² The visit is recounted on the heels of a walking memory of his childhood introduc   

Delius, Delius, Delius, Delius,

Adenauerplatz, 62. Adenauerplatz, 82. Adenauerplatz, 95. Adenauerplatz, 168 – 176.

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tion to the Holocaust and attempt to question his Chilean family about Germany under the Nazis, in which they dismissed photographs of the concentration camps as misinformation and contrary to what they called the real experience of fascism. (“It wasn’t just all murder and camps with Hitler […],” they chided him.)⁸³ But Felipe’s attempt at a straightforward return to a site of “Germany under Hitler” is among the least productive movements narrated in Adenauerplatz. Instead, it is his movement around alternative geographies of memory that offers him insight into how a fascist past might be turned into an antifascist future.

“Hinter dem Faschismus steckt das Kapital…” Felipe’s associative and personal temporality is also linked explicitly to political economy, for instance through his research on the world sugar market (a typical example of world-systems theoretical work from the late 1970s and early 1980s).⁸⁴ Research in this vein investigated the connections among political and economic conditions that facilitated large-scale migrations, militant nationalism, and political positions ranging from tolerance to open support of fascism in Germany and Chile in the 1930s through the 1940s and again in the 1970s. The dense networks of historical, cultural, and economic exchanges repeatedly call attention to the fact that Felipe’s night musings generate connections that extend beyond the imaginative to encompass social and structural relationships. Any survey of Chilean—or for that matter Argentine—policy during World War II reveals strong economic, political, and cultural commitments to Nazi Germany, and West German renegotiation of Chilean debt immediately following the coup and its establishment of military dictatorship offered compelling evidence at the time of the enduring influence of economic interests in diplomatic relations.⁸⁵

 Delius, Adenauerplatz, 167.  Already widely translated and popular was Eduardo Galeano, Las venas abiertas de América Latina (The Open Veins of Latin America) (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1971). Crop-specific studies were also in the air for international economists at that time: Sidney Mintz’s monumental study of the sugar trade and colonialism was published only two years after the publication of Delius’s novel. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986).  See Víctor Farías, Los Nazis en Chile, 2 vols. (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Planeta Chilena, 2003).

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Without understanding the priority given to economic analysis in West German solidarity movements of the 1970s, Delius’s literary intervention cannot be fully appreciated. By foregrounding historical cultural relationships of the (West) German and Chilean states, he complicates the economic and ethical claims of West German solidarity with Chile. Knowledge of the political situation in the Southern Cone was relatively widespread in 1970s West Germany, and with it came increased reception of the basic tenets of popular Latin American dependency theories and their reinterpretation of European Marxisms with an eye to local conditions. By 1976, a double issue of the solidarity periodical Dritte Welt Materialien (Third World Materials) was devoted entirely to Latin American dependency theory. Countless other publications on the Third World, Latin America, and Chile devoted sustained attention to the topic.⁸⁶ Published accounts of Chilean socialism and the putsch routinely referenced dependency theory; literature on Chile in effect served further to popularize Latin American economic analysis already circulating in West Germany.⁸⁷ Delius narrates the appropriation of Latin American theories by West Germans who position themselves as theorists of revolution and understand Latin America as a site of practical experience. In one instance, German students aggressively question Felipe: “And what did you do? asks an impatient one with glasses.”⁸⁸ Even among once admiring economics students, Felipe senses first pity, then impatience: There are days when he realizes the bonus of being a political refugee is long-since used up. The terror in other countries, the shots in other cities around the world have made him a

 Circulation statistics for many solidarity publications are difficult to ascertain, but Werner Balsen and Karl Rössel estimate that one of the most important, Chile Nachrichten, went from a circulation of only 200 prior to the putsch to 4,800 by the end of 1973. See their Hoch die internationale Solidarität: zur Geschichte der Dritte Welt-Bewegung in der Bundesrepublik (Cologne: Kölner Volksblatt-Verlag, 1986), 323. In addition to periodicals devoted to the Third World and especially Latin America, other publishing and distributing initiatives were devoted to print literature and educational films, including the Entwicklungspolitische Buchgesellschaft (Development Policy Book Society), with some 2,500 titles devoted to the subject. Theoretical engagements with dependency theory were of course also important to social scientists in West Germany at the time. See Albrecht von Gleich and Germán Kratochil, eds. Denkanstoße aus Lateinamerika: Theologen, Soziologen, Politik- und Wirtschaftswissenschaftler berichten (Hamburg: Insitut für Iberoamerika-Kunde, 1976). Of particular relevance are the contributions of Heiko Körner, “Zur Rezeption der ʻdependenciaʼ-Theorie für die Erforschung der Probleme der Entwicklungsländer” and Alfonz Lemper, “Ökonomische Theorie—Entwicklungshilfe aus Lateinamerika.”  These included publications by Rotbuch. See for example Fernando Mires, Die Militärs und die Macht. Thesen zum Fall Chile (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1975).  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 145.

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man of yesterday. […] Why are you still living here? they ask. No, they don’t ask, they arrange their faces as if to ask. Why do you take our jobs? Haven’t we provided for you for long enough? Why don’t you go back over there and join the revolution? Why are you still studying instead of fighting? Your continent at arms, and you’re still sitting around here? You’re made to fight, we’ll take care of the theory! They don’t say that, but they think it, Felipe sees it clearly and ever more frequently. The colleagues with the fighting spirit fight, too, but for work.⁸⁹

Their approach to solidarity, defined primarily in economic terms, is inadequate to the more differentiated historical, cultural, and aesthetic structures of Delius’s novelistic account of German–Chilean relationships and transnational dislocations. But neither does Felipe exempt himself from reproach as he considers the implications of advancing his career on the backs of economic victims. Research that obscures them under the “burial shroud of statistics” contains what he can only describe as too much truth to be of any academic use—except, perhaps, to the solidarity movement.⁹⁰ And yet it was in the wake of just such economic analyses and antiimperialist rhetoric that historical relationships between Germany and Chile first became visible in solidarity publications of the 1970s. Knowledge of German heritage communities in the Southern Cone emerged out of attempts to identify German participation in multinational investment and other practices broadly defined as neoimperialist. Attention to German Chileans and, shortly thereafter, German Argentines, developed relatively late in the movement’s educational campaigns, and even then only focused on the most conservative elements of the countries’ respective German communities.⁹¹ Rather than dismiss as strictly rhetorical the solidarity movement’s identification with the Third World, we need to query the nature of its solidarity and the kinds of relationships engendered (in part) via economic analysis and argument. The emotional and political valence of identification with Chile specific to different groups and their members, including German citizens, foreign students and workers, and Latin American exiles, is at odds with any narrowly psychological approach, which would obscure the various theoretical agendas and political criticisms within the West German solidarity movement that Delius highlights in his novel. In short, the psychological dimension of German identification

 Delius, Adenauerplatz, 145.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 131.  See Rosenberg, “Deutsche Minderheiten in Lateinamerika,” 276 – 281. Mount also provides a brief overview of German nationalist organizations: Graeme S. Mount, Chile and the Nazis: From Hitler to Pinochet (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2002), 16, 34– 47.

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with the Third World, and especially with Chile, was itself profoundly historical.⁹² Pressing the relation of historical to contemporary guilt and responsibility, solidarity groups in the later 1970s began to publish occasional pieces on Nazis in the Southern Cone. By 1977, Amnesty International and even the mainstream news magazine Stern had already published detailed reports on the now infamous alliance between the German expatriate community in Valdivia—the ill-named Colonia Dignidad under the thrall of unrepentant Nazi and evangelist cult leader Paul Schäffer—and Pinochet’s DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, National Intelligence Office, which was principally responsible for anti-Leftist political terror).⁹³ Schäffer and his West German support organization, the Siegburg Private Social Mission, filed libel charges to suppress the dissemination of Amnesty International’s findings in a court battle that dragged on until as recently as 1997. The West German court’s injunction against press coverage was routinely ignored by the activist press, but may well have influenced Delius’s decision to refer to the Valdagena Germans rather than the Valdivia Germans in the passage of his novel that describes Felipe’s friend and fellow exile’s experience as a witness in a similar West German court case. The account of court proceedings in Adenauerplatz precisely matches the testimony of Luis Peebles, Adriana Bórquez, and others that German nationals were involved in the detention, torture, and disappearance of Chilean political prisoners beginning in 1973 and proceeding at least until 1977—testimony that was eventually confirmed by independent journalists and Chile’s National Committee on Truth and Reconciliation.⁹⁴ In the face of legal constraints on the media, such a straightforward act of solidarity on Delius’s part was at least as important as the more subtle acts of aesthetic solidarity that my analysis pursues.

 This historical dimension is too easily missed in many contemporary, first person accounts of Chile solidarity. See Balsen and Rössel, Hoch die internationale Solidarität, 320 and passim.  Amnesty International, “Colonia Dignidad: Deutsches Mustergut in Chile—Ein Folterlager der DINA” (Frankfurt am Main: Amnesty International, 1977); Gaby Weber devoted an entire section of her book to the community, including detailed references to the legal proceedings in Bonn: “Folterzentrum oder deusches Paradies in Chile? Die Rolle der Colonia Dignigad,” in Krauts erobern die Welt. Der deutsche Imperialismus in Südamerika (Hamburg: Libertäre Assoziation, 1982), 221– 238.  Harald Gesterkamp, “Colonia Dignidad: Ein Ende der unendlichen Geschichte?” Amnesty International: AI-Journal (Oct. 1997) accessed 19 Sept. 2012, http://www.amnesty.de/de/j9710/colonia1.htm; Harald Gesterkamp, “Colonia Dignidad: Amnesty gewinnt vor Gericht” AI-Journal (Dec. 1997), accessed 19 Sept. 2012, http://www.amnesty.de/ umleitung/1997/deu05/078; Bruce Falconer, “The Torture Colony,” The American Scholar (Autumn 2008) accessed 19 Sept. 2012, http://theamericanscholar.org/the-torture-colony/.

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Even among the small solidarity publications that flouted the legal constraints around the Valdivia case, most articles stopped short of asking whether all capital was a fascist contagion or whether German capital bore some particular taint of fascism that required public disclosure. By and large, solidarity groups chose not to focus on broader cultural formations that might have linked European and Latin American fascisms (e. g., large German and Italian immigrant populations in Chile and Argentina, creole racism and anti-Semitism, a culture of German military training of Latin American forces dating back to the wars of independence), let alone query their interrelationship with contemporary West German direct investment. While participants in solidarity movements were strongly influenced by Latin American thinkers whose dependency theory introduced complex economic and cultural links that encouraged transnational, historical reflection on neoimperial economies and the spatialization of inequality, the implications of those links remained largely unexplored so long as economic determinism ruled the day. Where authors such as Enzensberger focused their critical attentions mostly on US American neoimperialism (see Chapter Two), the Latin America solidarity movement looked more explicitly and self-critically at West Germany’s own place in a neoimperial world order. Delius, for his part, took advantage of the movement’s democratic impulse (anyone can be a fascist!) to pursue a more self-reflective engagement with Latin American and German histories of violence. West German direct investment provided a key impetus of and object for rethinking the relationship between fascism and capital in the solidarity movement. Delius’s complex literary allusions allow him to take their work a step further, elucidating real histories of fascism that crystallize around the imagined figure of Felipe Gerlach. While the activists had a more obvious impact in West Germany and Chile, Delius offers a more subtle and intellectually compelling way of thinking solidarities and enduring transnational connections in and through literature for the future.

Transnational walking around and the globalization of fascist memories The temporal arc of walking around Adenauerplatz is as winding as Felipe’s night beat. His present-day involvement in efforts to expose economic ties between West German capital and Chilean fascism occasions the tangled recurrence of spatial and temporal paths between Germany and Chile in his mind’s eye, providing an imaginative historical consciousness that facilitates meaningful connections between the economic and the political. The core members of a

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Latin America group Felipe attended before donning his night watchman’s uniform are determined to reactivate German interest in Chile nearly a decade after the coup, establishing new contexts for solidarity work by exposing financial planner Ellerbrock’s cattle credit union to broad public scrutiny. Ellerbrock takes advantage of enduring colonial fantasies of the vast pampas, selling a dream of driving herds a continent away with each signature to his carefully prepared investment contracts. As the narrator sardonically notes, these men don’t just drive cattle, but also the world economy. Ellerbrock is quick to elaborate on the details of the land and highly mechanized breeding practices. He reassures his prospective investors that the properties are “all Indian-free, of course, no minority problems.”⁹⁵ But another, unspecified fantasy lures the middle-class investors: “He had founded a few investment firms and knew the hearts of the class-conscious income tax payers. He showed the way westward across the Atlantic and into a niche of freedom and stability. […] It would fulfill the customers’ wish for a piece of land far away, a few safe square meters in times of crisis, maybe their salvation someday.”⁹⁶ The allusion to salvation in flight plays on his clients’ fears of prospective domestic political scandals and economic crises, as well as the historical flight of Nazis to South America at the end of World War II.⁹⁷ Ellerbrock sees himself as a pioneer with no need of machete or compass so long as he commands capital.⁹⁸ Different as his economic and political perspective may be, his colonial fantasy of the endless pampas differs only marginally from Felipe’s own childhood fantasies of missionary work among the Indians, inspired by his mother’s protestant zeal and that of the German medical missionary, theologian, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer. But Felipe is forced to admit that the long-since converted Indians in Osorno don’t hold the lure of “real indios, deep in the forests of the Amazon.”⁹⁹ Osorno’s indigenous population inspires more pity than hope or fear since they were pressed into servitude by “the Spaniards and by the great grandparents […] broken and impoverished with the pathetic hope of the Virgin Mary […] they look old, beaten down and tired, not attractive to the eleven-year-old missionary.”¹⁰⁰ Felipe also recalls

 Delius, Adenauerplatz, 47. Indian warfare was not part of the collective experience of German settlement, but it did motivate the Chilean government’s desire to support German settlement of Araucan territories. See Mount, Chile and the Nazis, 4.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 28 – 31.  See Farías, Los Nazis.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 30.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 252.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 251– 252.

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woodcuts of naked women in his German grandfather’s books. Timeless as the wild Indians deep in the Amazon, the nineteenth-century German colonial images continue to circulate within the culturally, linguistically, and geographically isolated ethnic German communities of Southern Chile. His early finger-tip journeys through South America and Africa in the family atlas gradually give way to new scientific ambitions to become a cartographer, and, later, an agrarian economist. Ultimately, Felipe worked against his family’s entrenched economic interests to implement land reform under Allende. The same cultural isolation that magnified lingering colonial memories in the German Chilean community generates a twin effect on memories of fascism.¹⁰¹ Felipe’s family memory of Nazi fascism bleeds into his personal experience of Chilean fascism in terms that resonate with his introduction to the Holocaust while attending his German-language school.¹⁰² His childhood in a “German world at the edge of the Andes” is unmistakably part of his German world in Germany, mirrored in the reflective display windows he secures nightly: To the child the perfectly intact German world at the edge of the Andes did not seem the least bit displaced (verrückt), the landholders idyll near the Mapuche huts, the most beautiful grazing lands on the 41st parallel south. Memory casts a long shadow, forces its way through years and walls and picture tubes, mirrored as of late in a Nazi film on German television that, in front of the bars at a furniture store, was projected again in front of Felipe in time-lapse. […] The Nazi propaganda film shows Felipe’s childhood in the country, or what he remembers of it. The different German worlds, despite many thousands of kilometers separation, fit together. He and his cousins in Pemuco and Osorno could have been nimble Hitler Youth even in the fifties.¹⁰³

 The linguistic and cultural isolation of German settler communities in Southern Chile accrued through what was in many cases purposeful geographic isolation. Nationalist settlers were more likely to prefer remote regions in order to facilitate cultural continuity. The high level of linguistic prestige enjoyed by German-speaking immigrants minimized external pressures to conform to Chilean creole national norms. Protestant Germans also avoided assimilation through Chile’s overwhelmingly Catholic religious institutions, which were key to the assimilation of other major immigrant groups (e. g., Italians).  Mount, Chile and the Nazis, 46 – 47. Incentives were once routinely offered to German nationals to teach in German schools abroad, thereby maintaining political and cultural alliances through an ethnic and linguistic nationalist allegiance to the German state. The practice, initiated by earlier German governments, was expanded and intensified by the National Socialists. The postwar assignment of Felipe’s German teacher to Southern Chile—presumably from West Germany—marks a continuation of earlier curricular and cultural politics in Germany and German schools abroad, even as the teacher’s anti-nationalism marks a departure from the conservative narrative within the ethnic German community.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 67– 68.

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Felipe’s night rounds return him to Osorno, filmic images of Nazi camps, and personal premonitions of Chilean concentration camps. Delius’s rhetorical circling extends the language of anti-Semitism, fundamental to the Holocaust, to fascist violence more broadly. Felipe walks around imaginative landscapes in an effort to come to terms with his own location as a German Chilean who secured refuge from fascism in a nation whose recent past was defined largely by fascism: Walk on, ten thousand kilometers, a misty autumn morning, back to the lesson when a new teacher from Germany passed a book around, full of pictures of the horrors of the concentration camps, back to the unforgettable terror in black and white, back to this Herr Krüger, who was punished as a liar by the other teachers, the parents and uncles of the whole German colony, and back to the unforgettable school principal who reprimands the teacher for showing the pupils unbelievable, disgusting, one-sided things. The director, with his enlightening arguments. These mountains of corpses, they don’t have anything to do with objective information. And: it wasn’t all murder and camps with Hitler, otherwise the Germans would never have elected him and stood by him for so long. The director, who attracted the word mummy, which began to circulate among the few rebellious students. It’s the time many thousand kilometers away, when a mummy wants to be president and points at everyone from every poster with a punishing look and promises mercy only on those who give him their votes with no ifs ands or buts.¹⁰⁴

Mountains of corpses appear in his visions of Chile at least as frequently as in his visions of the German genocide of European Jews, and such over-determined words as exterminate (ausmerzen) recur throughout the text. In the authoritarian person of the school principal, Delius crafts a link between racialized hierarchies and affinities for fascism in the German and Chilean contexts. The “mummy” (a derogatory word for a wealthy, white creole), however, extends his unforgiving finger, his punishing gaze, not at the Mapuches or poor mestizos, but at all those who dissent ideologically.¹⁰⁵ Earlier drafts indicate that Delius initially planned to make the connection mummy-German Chilean-fascist even more emphatically, underscoring in the process the emigrant community’s failure to engage in any critical reflection about the Nazi past akin to that undertaken by broad segments of the West German population. In one version, the teacher goes so far as

 Delius, Adenauerplatz, 167.  The election poster described was for the conservative president Jorge Alessandri, who governed from 1958 to 1964 after defeating Allende’s unified left by a narrow margin. Alessandri later returned to government under Pinochet. The reference to the powerful businessman and politician is more direct in an earlier draft of the novel. DLA Marbach, Handschriftenabteilung, A: F.C. Delius, Delius, F.C./Prosa/“Adenauerplatz. Roman,” Adenauerplatz: Konvolut/Notizen, Rohfassung vom Februar 1983, page hand-numbered 5.

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to rent a public theater at his own expense after the school forbids him to show Erwin Leiser’s documentary Mein Kampf (My Struggle, 1960). In the same version, Felipe also hears the word mummy for the first time not from his fellow students, but from the new teacher.¹⁰⁶ Fragmented childhood memories about the German community in Chile come into focus in the loop of Felipe’s dream rondo and nighttime walking around. His adolescent snapshots of life on the family farm give way to his present-day contemplation of photography and the controlled production and consumption of photographic memory during his nightly inspection of a camera shop. As a child in Chile, Felipe’s early photographic endeavors were accompanied by a new awareness of class and a sense of guilt by association with his wealthy, white, landholding family. Chief among his shortcomings was an inability to judge distances that anticipated his later obsession with distance, connection, and the visibility of the laborers that he photographed from afar but was always too frightened to approach: Much later he understands that the camera that he held between himself and reality was only a means, a last attempt at holding the world from which he came together. An attempt to mend the tear, to drive out the fears, to roll up his home again in 6x6 format. When the attempt failed because everything was distorted and small, harmless, stiff and lifeless, he blamed it on the cheap camera. He longed for a better, more refined 35 mm camera. He did his homework and revised his wishes to include a reflex camera—it had to have a telephoto lens, long focal lengths, distant images, unlimited contrast and depth, zoom lens, the unfulfilled Leica-dream. Grandiose pubescent fantasies: hypertrophic systems of photographic accessories with which he would finally be on to the truth.¹⁰⁷

A new fear of becoming rather than defining the photographic object first emerged when police destroyed Felipe’s camera at a political protest that he observed as a student in Santiago. The event marked a shift in his ideal of documentation and his reflections on truth in the direction of transnational memory. The technological superiority of the German Leica approximates an eerie homophone of the recurrent corpses (Leichen) throughout Delius’s novel. Felipe even

 DLA Marbach, Handschriftenabteilung, A: F.C. Delius. Delius, F.C./Prosa/“Adenauerplatz. Roman,” Adenauerplatz: Konvolut/Notizen, Rohfassung vom Februar 1983, pages hand-numbered 4– 5. Mein Kampf/Den blodigen tijden, 35 mm, 111 min., Minerva Film AB Lidingö, Dir. Erwin Leiser. Sweden/Germany. 1960. The film, which made liberal use of original Nazi propaganda footage with voice-over commentary, was frequently used in the context of school history instruction in the 1960s. In all likelihood, Delius struck the passage from the final version because the film’s release slightly post-dated what would have been the years of Felipe’s school attendance.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 76.

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imagines himself struck down by Leicas, captured, processed, and regurgitated, but marked as a potential subversive.¹⁰⁸ Gradually recalibrating distances he once could not gauge, Felipe articulates a transnational circulation of German and Chilean fascisms and antifascist solidarities in which mountains of corpses link the Holocaust, fascism, and consumption. Popular linkings of Nazism, anti-Semitism, and Chilean fascism relied not just on comparisons, but, more specifically, on a rhetoric of equation. As they derived their affective force within the solidarity movement from elaborate systems of identification (a psychological corollary of economic equation), so too does a critical approach to the popular link favored by activists derive its explanatory power from identifying the cultural labor required to transform the difference (or inequality) of historical relationships into an exchange of equivalents. Only with an eye to such transformations can the underlying economic models offer privileged insight into the emotional economies of solidarity, condensed around the objectification of Adenauerplatz’s mountains of corpses and mountains of commodities. The exchange of equivalents that underwrites commoditization relies on what is only ever a “notional state of equilibrium” in supply-demand relations, an ideal state that never obtains in fact; the treatment of historical fascisms and antifascist solidarities as equivalent is similarly notional, and similarly necessary to Adenauerplatz. Can we articulate aesthetic solidarity meaningfully without generating structural and/or figural equivalencies? If Amariglio and Callari are correct in identifying commodity fetishism as a concept designed to resolve the contradiction of an impossible equilibrium, can its casting in aesthetic terms resolve the contradiction of a solidarity that requires objectification (which itself requires the recognition of difference) and, simultaneously, subjective identification?¹⁰⁹ The Southern Cone and West Germany functioned as nodes in a comparative operation by no means unique to Delius or to German subjects. Among Delius’s notes and drafts is an editorial by Argentine exile and intellectual Osvaldo Beyer, published in the news daily tageszeitung. It sounds the key themes of Adenauerplatz in tones at least as rhetorically strident as those struck by many West Germans engaged in solidarity work. Addressing the responsibilities and privileges of exile, Beyer called upon exiles from the Southern Cone to integrate not into West German society per se, but into West German solidarity. He instructed his compatriots to bring poetry to the streets of their new home and to reduce the

 Delius, Adenauerplatz, 9 – 10.  Amariglio and Callari, “Marxian Value Theory,” 203 – 209.

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distance between countries.¹¹⁰ Delius’s rhetoric of walking around does precisely that. Particularly arresting for a West German audience were no doubt Beyer’s explicit equation of contemporary Latin America with Nazi Germany and the Argentine’s evident frustration with what he regarded as a crippling German selfcritique that threatened to spill over into the folkloric idealization of other lands and other struggles, sentiments to which I shall return shortly. Exiles and West Germans alike invoked German experiences of fascist violence as central to their case for antifascist solidarity. West German solidarity organs published news items on “neofascists” and “old Nazis”; anti-Semitism in Argentina; and the discovery that Walter Rauff, a prominent Nazi, was also a major architect of Chilean concentration camps. At the same time, they frequently retreated from real, historical connections in favor of generating rhetorical connections between the fascist military dictatorship in Chile (and later Argentina) and the “CDU Puchists” in West Germany.¹¹¹ Several articles suggested a German national affinity for fascism, citing German Chilean immigrant organizations such as the German Chilean Union and Chilean German League, and arguing that they must be countered with a stronger campaign of antifascist action from the West German Left.¹¹² Next to economic analyses of fascism and

 Osvaldo Beyer, “Exil,” die tageszeitung, 11 June 1982, 8. Originally delivered as a speech at the HORIZONTE festival in West Berlin, 6 June 1982. The article was included with a series of Delius’s personal press clippings about solidarity with the Third World in DLA Marbach, Handschriftenabteilung, A: Delius, F.C./Prosa/“Adenauerplatz. Roman,” Adenauerplatz: Konvolut, Stichworte, Notizen, Material. Beyer’s exact language is: “One must integrate oneself into solidarity,” and “One must attempt to reduce the distances between countries.”  The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is a conservative German political party. Major solidarity publications including the Chile Nachrichten (Chile News) and COSAL (Comittee zur Solidarität mit Argentinien und Lateinamerika [Committee for Solidarity with Argentina and Latin America]) consistently collapsed “neofascists” and “old Nazis,” reintroducing the Holocaust indirectly via discussions of generic fascism and Nazism. Anti-Semitism in Chile and Argentina was reported in ila (Informationsstelle Lateinamerika [Latin America Information Post]). In drawing attention to the rhetorical, I do not mean to downplay the actual anti-Semitic and racist elements of detainment, torture, and disappearance under fascist regimes in the Southern Cone, though it was not a primary, popular motivator of fascist violence there. See Sandra Deutsch, Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890 – 1939 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999).  “Die chilenische Wirklichkeit des ʻDeutsch-Chilenischen Bundes,ʼ” Chile Nachrichten 9 (1973): n.p.; “Die chilenisch-deutsche Liga,” Chile Nachrichten 8 (1973): n.p. A more careful survey of immigrant political affinities shows a different picture: Only a relatively small number of German citizens in Chile were NSDAP members (11.1 %), although this number is high when compared to party membership among German populations in other areas of the Southern Cone (2.4 % in Argentina and 3.3 % in southern Brazil). Rosenberg, “Deutsche Minderheiten

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capital, affectively constructed arguments for a special German responsibility to practice solidarity were the second principal pillar of West German antifascist solidarity with Chile. Pascal Bruckner’s popular and controversial assessment of white guilt in the Third World solidarity movement, The White Man’s Tears (1983), makes clear that the phenomenon of guilt and ethical responsibility vis-à-vis the Third World was hardly exclusive to the West German solidarity movement. Delius was familiar with the book and the debate it engendered in West Germany in particular, but, rather than uncritically reproduce its central themes in and around his portrayal of the Latin America Group, he attends to how its specifically West German inflection was simultaneously economic and affective.¹¹³ The group members and the broader solidarity circle described in the novel seem unable, even uninterested, in coming to grips with the contradictions that inhere in a solidarity articulated in terms of determinist economic analysis and a non-determinist concept of responsibility that acknowledging guilt implies. Their situation is marked by the problem of translating the discursive privilege that Marxist analysis grants to historical economic processes into an ontological claim.¹¹⁴ In the context of solidarity with Latin America, a perspective critical of economic determinist theories of fascism and the formulation of antifascist imperatives reveals that ostensibly objective, economic analysis and highly subjective, affective components of Third World solidarity in West Germany are in fact complexly interrelated. At the same time, an apparently critical framework for the analysis of neoimperal economic relationships renders historical guilt structurally, and so forecloses the possibility of a genuine antifascist subjectivity, revolutionary or otherwise. But the relation of economic determinism and historical guilt is only apparently contradictory: by focusing on structural relationships rather than on relationships among individual subject-agents, members of solidarity movements both acknowledge and contain guilt. The responsibility that guilt would imply is ascribed to abstract institutions or to their particularly nasty representatives, in Lateinamerika,” 276. Mount also addresses the lack of political unity among German populations in Chile (Chile and the Nazis, 34).  DLA Marbach, Handschriftenabteilung, A: Delius, F.C./Prosa/“Adenauerplatz. Roman,” Adenauerplatz: Konvolut, Stichworte, Notizen, Material. Handwritten notes headed “3.W.-Debatte” include material on Bruckner, along with annotated press clippings of reviews and an excerpt of the book published in German translation in the taz: “Dritte Welt, Schuldgefühl, Selbsthaß. Die Reue des weißen Mannes.” Pascal Bruckner, trans. Marianne Karbe, taz. 11 May 1983, 15; Jürg Altwegg, “Abscheid von der Dritten Welt. Die Krokodilstränen der Intellektuellen—Französische Autoren rechnen ab,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2 Nov. 1983: n.p.  Amariglio and Callari, “Marxian Value Theory,” 194.

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such as Ellerbrock. Minimally, economic determinism as a mode of engagement with fascism generates distance between agents of solidarity, who lay claim to a perspective outside of the structures that they critique, and the structures proper. Economism is both an explanation and a temptation, because it holds out the possibility of release from responsiblity for fascisms past or present. Thus it is naïve to think of solidarity as disinterested or without personal referents; it is dangerous to accept solidarity as expiative. Through his rhetoric of walking around, Delius effectively engages an emergent popular interest in Nazi ties to the Southern Cone and expands its metaphorical vocabulary to include more dynamic, transnational flows of people, capital, and ideas that extend beyond economism’s substitutive logics. Where economism generates distance, a rhetoric of walking around generates connections via real and imagined proximities— and with them the potential for new forms of solidarity. Felipe is—for the most part—able to shake off the temptation of guilt, reminding himself time and again that a guilty conscience does not improve a research agenda.¹¹⁵ Felipe writes to give himself a sense of purpose in the face of his severe depression, but he rejects connections that function on the inhuman scale of the world economy in favor of smaller-scale personal and even sentimental contacts. As he tries to link the mountains of sugar (Zückerberge) he studies to real people and places, he senses the first stirrings of dead laborers that come into their own in the connections he constructs around Adenauerplatz after abandoning his career as an agrarian economist. Against this background, Delius’s literary, historical, and political contextualization of solidarity, transmigration, and exile moves beyond readings of fascism as a necessary outcome of a capitalist world system. In his rhetoric of walking around, the circuitous path past shop windows—already linked to Felipe’s early ideas about German democracy and consumer culture—retains a historical referent to the Adenauer era’s political and economic policy as much as to Felipe’s own nightly transformation of Adenauerplatz into a site of transnational solidarity and imagined resistance. He brings these associative and material strands together, allowing each to complicate the other. The mountains of corpses Felipe sees in his mind’s eye are linked to capitalist relations of labor and consumption, most explicitly through their lexical proximity to mountains of commodities, the description of luxury commodities (e. g., precious metals, jewels), and the physically and structurally violent production and exchange relations between low-wage countries and West Germany. But the commodity mountains of Adenauerplatz are also a metaphor for the repression of memory and the

 Delius, Adenauerplatz, 132.

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acknowledgement of fascism in Chile nearly a decade earlier; his country has been distorted, even disfigured (entstellt might also be more literally read as dis- or un-placed): “You won’t recognize it, your disfigured country (entstelltes Land), you’ll rub your eyes at the new pedestrian malls with overflowing window displays, whitewashed, glimmerglass Adenauer Places grow wild there, too, only the misery behind the facades comes up more garish, more sinister.”¹¹⁶ Delius’s exploration of an economically grounded vision of fascism includes a constellation of economic, military, and state political interests and institutions widely seen by members of antifascist solidarity organizations as imbricated in a neofascist, capitalist world order. Narratives of capitalist exploitation and violence became popular in the solidarity movement’s periodical press within a few years of the Chilean coup.¹¹⁷ Brigitte Heinrich’s D-Mark Imperialismus (1971) anticipates this trend: off-putting Marxist Leninist-verbiage aside, she documents the roots of the so-called economic miracle in foreign direct investment practices dating back to 1945, thereby undermining popular arguments that development aid and direct investment in the 1960s and 1970s were a secondary outcome of domestic economic growth and the successful politics of Western integration (Westbindung).¹¹⁸ Her economist account of West German direct investment as an engine of domestic “social fascism” was read in solidarity circles and advertised in publications concerned with Latin America. The significance of cultural attempts to explain fascist violence by way of commodified histories and historical images is linked inextricably to economic accounts of fascisms past and present through the rhetoric of walking around and through one of its preferred figures—synecdoche—in the shape of mountains of corpses.¹¹⁹ As I remarked earlier, “[T]he act of exchange is not simply the site of an economic process but also one of the key locations within capitalism where a symbolic order is partially constituted and learned.”¹²⁰ Delius’s figural deployment of exchange in aesthetic solidarity with Chilean antifascism

 Delius, Adenauerplatz, 229.  For the most detailed example, see “Wirtschaftswunder durch Multis? Privatinvestitionen in der Dritten Welt,” in Information Dritte Welt 35 (Dec. 1976): n.p.  Brigitte Heinrich, D-Mark-Imperialismus. Deutsche Industrie und Ausbeutung der Dritten Welt (Berlin: Edition Voltaire, 1971), 6 – 28. Delius cites this text by name in Bankier auf der Flucht, the same volume in which he repeatedly references Neruda. Delius, Bankier auf der Flucht, 65.  de Certeau identifies synecdoche and asyndeton as the most important figures of pedestrian spatialization, relying on the walker’s expansion of a local detail to represent the totality of a place and the elision or suppression of steps that link places. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 101– 102.  Amariglio and Callari, “Marxian Value Theory,” 215.

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draws on the privileged status of exchange in the symbolic order to call into question both economic and literary categories. Indeed, his narrative relocation of fascist violence proceeds through the circulation of commodified images, memories, capital, and labor to generate an account of violence that cannot be confined to any single site. The economic vision of commodities haunted by the residue of dead laborers extends spaces once imagined as local to the transnational. As fetishes, Delius’s synecdochial mountains of corpses and mountains of commodities condense subjectivity. Recalled to their subjective dimension, the objects of exchange Felipe guards are turned against the processes of objectification in which they are embedded, against a determinist account of fascism that minimizes social agency even as its proponents’ sense of guilt would seem to require them to acknowledge responsibility. By attending to the role of commodity fetishism and logics of exchange in the production and retrieval of memory, and the transnational placement and displacement of the national subject, Delius repositions his revolutionary subjects in a uniquely literary form. His rhetoric of walking around opens its own shop window onto a subjectivity that is personal even when it is not individualist, one that exists in and for a particular form of solidarity perceptible in objects of memory. The rhetoric of walking around can neither be divorced from what Huyssen describes as the “haunted space and spatial imaginaries” of “history and its representations” in recent German memory discourses, nor from what Michael Rothberg calls an “archaeology of comparative imagination” that emerges when we consider memory as a force that is both multidirectional and productive.¹²¹

 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 10; Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 21. While Rothberg’s phrase is apt here, I would hasten to add that Delius’s novel does not conform to the logics of multidirectionality in any strict sense. Rothberg and Yildiz’s more recent work on migrant archives of memory comes closer to addressing issues of transnationalism and memory that circulate in Delius’s novel: Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz, “Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany,” Parallax 17.4 (2011): 32– 48. Among the titles Delius considered was Adenauerplatz oder Der letzte Versuch einer Einbürgerung (Adenauerplatz, or: The Last Attempt to Become a Citizen), which would presumably have coupled Felipe’s application for citizenship with the legal complications posed by the murder of the accountant Ellerbrock; both elements are eliminated from the published version. But even barring this revision, the notion of migrant archives draws much of its critical purchase from the disarticulation of ethnicity and remembrance, and could not easily accommodate Felipe’s identity as both an ethnic German and a migrant. DLA Marbach, Handschriftenabteilung, A: F.C. Delius. Delius, F.C./Prosa/“Adenauerplatz. Roman,” Adenauerplatz: Konvolut/Notizen, Rohfassung vom Februar 1983, page titled “Mögliche Titel.”

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Huyssen’s insightful work on the globalization of Holocaust memory provides a useful analytic and historical counterpoint to Delius’s literary articulation of fascism and antifascism. Huyssen speculates that a new “hypertrophy of memory”—identified at different points in his argument as emergent in the 1970s and in the 1980s—evolved at least in part in reaction to economic globalization, effectively affirming the national and not the “post-national or global” as the “political site of memory practices” over and against the political sites of world economic practices.¹²² Writing before the popularization of discourses on globalization, but with an eye to the systems-theoretical accounts on which most theories of the global rest (e. g., Eduardo Galeano, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Falletto, Raúl Prebisch), Delius intervened at a moment prior to what Huyssen identifies as the unmooring of Holocaust discourse to focus more broadly on a memory of fascism that contains but is not delimited by images of the Holocaust.¹²³ Huyssen writes: “In the transnational movement of memory discourses, the Holocaust loses its quality as an index of the specific historical event and begins to function as a metaphor for other traumatic histories and memories.”¹²⁴ Huyssen elucidates the Holocaust’s metaphoric deployment in debates about memory and forgetting globally as a function of the hypertrophy of memory within the changing temporality of globalization. He thereby demonstrates the importance of temporally inflected analyses as critical counterpoints to largely spatial theories of globalization.¹²⁵ His adaptation of a literary trope to historical analysis serves to address both the spatial and temporal dimensions of memory as well as imagination in a global age:

 Huyssen, Present Pasts, 11– 16. An alternate account of the globalization of Holocaust memory is offered by Levy and Sznaider, but with key differences. Perhaps most importantly, Huyssen’s account of Holocaust memory acknowledges the extension of the Holocaust beyond its original historical referent and addresses the role of media in a complex overwriting of places and memory, whereas Levy’s and Sznaider’s notion of cosmopolitan memory presumes a largely uniform referent with a multiplication of local articulations. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, “Memory Unbound. The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory,” in European Journal of Social Theory 5.1 (2002): 87– 106.  Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America in particular was widely read in West German solidarity circles, and anticipated Mintz’s classic study of the sugar economy in important ways; as stated in my introductory chapter, dependency theorists were reviewed and discussed at length in the movement’s so-called “grey literature.”  Huyssen, Present Pasts, 14.  He cites Jameson as paradigmatic of the shift toward spatial rather than temporal logics, but, curiously, offers no examples from the realms of postcolonial theory or cultural studies, despite identifying them closely with a spatial analytic. See Huyssen, Present Pasts, 11– 12.

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[T]he same space cannot possibly have two different contents. But an urban imaginary in its temporal reach may well put different things in one place: memories of what was there before, imagined alternatives to what there is. The strong marks of present space merge in the imaginary with traces of the past, erasures, losses, and heterotopias. […] The trope of the palimpsest is inherently literary and tied to writing, but it can also be fruitfully used to discuss configurations of urban spaces and their unfolding time without making architecture and the city simply into a text.¹²⁶

Analytically, the trope of the city cum palimpsest circulates in both Huyssen and de Certeau, reinforcing—albeit to different effects—a notion of urban space as peculiarly linked to collective histories and memories that unfold in social processes analogous to writing.¹²⁷ For de Certeau, they amount to the reinscription of personal memory on public, geometric, anti-memory; for Huyssen, the constant rewriting of public memory and the accompanying forgetfulness that occurs through more deliberate, collective processes. Delius’s novel anticipates the critical drive to link historical and spatial narratives of fascist violence, world capital, and transnational movements of people and memories. The economic vision of commodities haunted by the residue of dead laborers extends spaces once imagined to be radically local to the transnational.¹²⁸ What in Huyssen remain largely localizable spaces that are detached only to put down roots in a newly circumscribed and imagined space (e. g., the use of the Holocaust as a metaphor in the former Yugoslavia) are in Delius transnational in their movement and import. Aesthetically, his decision to adopt a rhetoric of walking around enacts in literary (and, by extension, epistemological) terms a historical and geographic condensation of more and less successful antifascist solidarities. Felipe’s movement through nights of silence works against state violence and fear underwritten by transnational capital interests to imagine a transnational future no longer dependent even on the medial conveniences of travel and communication. With each step, his walking around articulates multiple presents and localities:

 Huyssen, Present Pasts, 7.  A neglect of rural spaces in both accounts is, I speculate, related to the city as a geographically and metaphorically privileged site in discourses of the modern and the postmodern that often underwrite historiographies and philosophies of the national and post-national or even global narratives of history, memory, and culture. In the memories ascribed to Felipe in Delius’s novel, the rural agricultural communities of Southern Chile remain places of impressionistic memory, urban locales (Santiago and the unnamed West German city), places where memory acquires a narrative structure and thereby meaning. While this unevenness seems important to note, it remains outside the scope of my argument at this time.  Huyssen, Present Pasts, 10.

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[…] each step a movement against being driven out, a curse against the house arrest, the nightly curfew at home is still in effect, between twenty-three hundred and zero-five hundred hours on your old streets, each step a protest, a demonstration of thousands, of forty thousand steps each night. He wished he could step over every ban as he walked, could resist all temptations. With every step movement came into the world. He walked past a mailbox and would have liked to drop a letter in, airmail. Next to it a phone booth, he would have liked to send a few words through the cable on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. He saw how beneath his footsteps the continents edged closer together, he just had to walk further and further to see the other shore, the approaching shore of America, he just had to walk further and further to reverse the great continental drift. With the lonely footsteps the voices started up again, the voices from the country of the banned, the conversations from yesterday and the day before and the day after tomorrow […] from the still, night ocean, transmitted directly into his eardrums.¹²⁹

At moments such as these, Delius’s rhetoric of walking around comes close to treating Beyer’s challenge to decrease distances and bring poetry to the streets as prescriptive. Felipe wishes to literalize Beyer’s programmatic call to reduce the distances between countries, to find a means by which to be an exile in the heroic mold Beyer lays out as a responsibility and a privilege relative to those murdered and those left behind, and in the face of his own daily fear and resignation, despairing sentiments that Beyer and others publicly dismissed as betraying the revolution.¹³⁰ In adopting a rhetoric of walking around characterized by the articulation of interior and exterior realities that create new perceptual wholes where once there was only inventory and enumeration, Delius avoids the potential pitfalls of Beyer’s all or nothing logic.¹³¹ In fact, Felipe’s depressed and isolated wanderings are more integrative than the solidarity actions that Delius narrates. Unlike the West German economics students who assert that Felipe must choose a heroic return to Latin America, Delius’s sensitivity requires Felipe to be neither a hero nor a traitor. A rhetoric of walking around expresses an aesthetic solidarity in part by refusing the priority of plot in a heroic model of conflict and brave resolve. Delius emphatically relativizes the plot, repeatedly making narrative choices that privilege current events (Zeitgeschichte)—the stuff of the conversations to which he imagines having unmediated access.¹³² Felipe, a revolutionary subject, is not a hero; he is a lens, an itinerant subject who, in “walking around with eyes,” makes connections visible to readers. Some reside in commodities,    

Delius, Adenauerplatz, 221– 222. Beyer, “Exil,” 8. See n. 38. See n. 7.

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some in memories, some in the migratory movements he experiences and imagines between Chile and (West) Germany. All are embedded in the interposition of the poetic and the economic at the heart of a rhetoric of walking around as one expression of a revitalized and visionary political realism. Through Felipe’s eyes, the reader sees the impossible reality of a figure unfolding from a single locality to inhabit multiple places and times, each with its own hypertrophic inscriptions of fascism and antifascism.

Solidary sentiments¹³³ The “walking exile,” the “countless tiny deportations” of Felipe’s nightly movements resonate with the mood of Neruda’s expatriate experiences cast in verse. Delius picks up the tiredness, the absorption in thought, the enumeration of sites of exchange, the slow, rhythmic movement of the poem to reflect on a tiredness of being human—“it happens that I tire of human being” (“sucede que me canso de ser hombre”).¹³⁴ It precedes the tiredness of a specific identity, and is a residence on earth rather than in a specific place. Critical and literary historical accounts of the Residences consistently remark on a painful sense of exile (destierro, more literally an unearthing than the alternative exilio would express), a sense of isolation that is cultural, linguistic, social, and even existential during Neruda’s time in the Far East. Walking around, Felipe wrestles poetically with the fact of Chilean deportations and exiles. In contrast to Neruda’s movement away from the formal and toward a pre-formal, stream of consciousness verse in “Walking Around,” Delius chooses to formalize his rhetoric of walking around by coupling Felipe’s constant stream of observation, contemplation, association, and memory with the rigorously structured musical round. Contrastive dream narratives titled “Rondo” and “Nachtstück” recur at numbered intervals throughout the novel, expressing Felipe’s and Anke’s dreams, respectively. The “Rondo” passages most closely approximate their musical namesake as small sections “separated by contrasting material” and organized around a principle of “alteration or digression and return.”¹³⁵ Neruda’s own preoccupation with Joyce’s “Chamber Music” reinforces a·round’s musical resonances, though Neruda’s poem itself contains none of the standard patterns associated

 The phrase “solidarische Empfindungen” occurs most prominently as a section title in the novel. Delius, Adenauerplatz, 108 – 112.  Neruda, “Walking Around,” 118. For a characterization of the period and resulting work, see Yurkievich, “Introducción general,” 35.  “musical form,” accessed 22 January 2006, http://www.eb.com/eb/article-27877.

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with the rondo (i. e., abacaba or abaca).¹³⁶ The “Nachtstück,” a German nocturne, derives its musical resonance and dreamlike quality largely from its stylistic contrast to the walking prose of Felipe’s rounds. I have already outlined a rhetoric of walking around that structures Delius’s novel rhythmically and aesthetically in weightier ways than either Felipe’s rondo or Anke’s nocturne; but these unconscious interludes serve, like dance in de Certeau, as a stylized walking, exaggerating the figures of walking around at play in the novel’s main action. The walking round poses similar challenges to the reader of urban spaces; it is without direction and hence less readily attributed meaning.¹³⁷ Meaning resides more in its form than in its purpose, its repetition and circularity, its mood or psychic effect within a larger, more purposive narrative plotting of Felipe’s and Anke’s paths. While de Certeau’s rhetoric of walking focuses in large part on a destruction of urban memory through ordered, geometrical space characterized by renamings, erasures, and a drive toward surveillability, a rhetoric of walking around is instead characterized by the creation of memory. It recalls a particular history of political literature via the Latin American avant-garde, and uses the techniques of that re-membered tradition to visualize and articulate memories where previously there were none. Anke’s memory of Adenauerplatz as Wilhelmplatz typifies a rhetoric of walking and its fragmentary recovery of memories (e. g., around what used to be a department store or where one used to walk with father on Sundays); the rhetoric of walking around, by contrast, is what enables Felipe’s creative articulation of spaces through his internal stories and external pedestrian practice. It allows him to generate modes of filiation apparently inaccessible to Anke, who longs for connections she cannot find. Felipe’s Adenauerplatz, with its alternate account of economic dependencies, histories, and memories of German and Chilean fascisms, as well as antifascist solidarities that resonate with and respond to national, internationalist, and transnational histories of culture and political economy, can effectively be read as an anti-museum to official accounts of Adenauer’s place in history.¹³⁸

 See n. 34.  “The relationships between the direction of a walk (le sens de la marche) and the meaning of words (le sens des mots) situate two sorts of apparently contrary movements, one extroverted (to walk is to go outside), the other introverted (a mobility under the stability of the signifier). Walking is in fact determined by semantic tropisms […]” de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 103.  According to de Certeau, “memory is a sort of anti-museum: it is not localizable,” (The Practice of Everyday Life, 108). Andreas Huyssen has analyzed what he terms the increasing musealization of history incisively in Twilight Memories.

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In fact, Anke’s unconscious night wanderings take her to a different Adenauer Place, the Adenauer museum in Rhöndorf, where she dreams that she and Felipe shock and scatter the other visitors by rolling passionately throughout the exhibit rooms with Adenauer’s voice as their perverse mood music. Public sexuality figures prominently in Anke’s imagination of a critical relation to West German restoration. Her oppositional movement with Felipe through state history underscores the ways in which her particular antifascist solidarity proceeds through sex. Their nakedness alone silences the former chancellor and the sense of self-righteous propriety that, in Anke’s mind, marks his constituency: “Immediately the warning, grating, singing old man voice in Cologne dialect became quieter, but it was struck dumb only when we were naked, both of us.”¹³⁹ For Anke, like Felipe, Adenauer is an overdetermined signifier of a place and a time, an era’s political culture; her sense of political disorientation and desire for Felipe (and, eventually, her implied decision to leave Felipe in order to ease his eventual return to Chile) is simultaneously a desire for meaningful alternatives to social relationships characterized by the conservatism of her childhood. Internationalism appeals to her desire to move beyond the narrow rooms and authoritarian supervision of the local archive where she is employed and toward a broader world. Her cliché German Fernweh is heavy-handedly symbolized by a world map displayed prominently in her modest apartment. (A play on homesickness or Heimweh, Fernweh describes an any-place-but-here mentality, a longing to be far from home.) Eventually, Anke comes to reflect that it is somehow mis-placed—as are, implicitly, many assumptions of the West German Third World movement: Above the table the world map. How pretentious! Anke Hennig claims to grasp the world at a single glance! The world map was embarrassing to her, it [or: she—JHT] was misplaced (fehl am Platz), recalled nothing but mistakes, trips not taken, relief programs cast out, the many small, scalar lies of geography. Anke decided to put the map away.¹⁴⁰

Her desire to be in the right place—initially, in a supportive role at Felipe’s side —is opposed to the mis-placed world system of the map. The rather lame attempt to offer a feminist perspective through Anke’s silent musings on both Felipe as a man and the West German military as a masculine institution might have contributed to an alternate vision of a gendered social place were it sustained throughout the novel. Instead, a much more straightforward search for

 Delius, Adenauerplatz, 151.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 101. Die Karte / sie leaves open the possibility of treating either the map or Anke herself as the intended antecedent.

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contexts and a sense of being in the right place and time is limited to the expression of desire in solidarity groups, where, the reader learns, Anke first met Felipe. Group meetings are marked by an erotic desire for political subjectivity and authenticity. The West Germans’ fascination with the Chilean antifascist opposition is coupled with a solidarity that functions more as an ideological sympathy than a personal commitment, constituting what Felipe sardonically calls the “sympathy bonus.”¹⁴¹ The “solidary sentiments” of which he initially takes advantage are never far removed from what he perceives to be his companions’ subtle disappointment at his own proximity to things German. He observes it in the faces of those who he is convinced see him as “half a refugee at best” and “not a real latino. They want to direct their solidary sentiments toward someone dark-skinned, preferably Mapuche Indians. They have to settle for a white man, of German descent at that.”¹⁴² These dehumanizing moments within what are intended as humanitarian events to foster solidarity are repeatedly referenced by Felipe and his fellow countrymen, who never feel German solidarity is with them as individuals, but who also, to varying degrees, agree that it is important to continue working with German groups, “[e]ven if they don’t do it for him, but for international solidarity.”¹⁴³ Felipe’s diagnosis of the “sympathy curve” in West Germany is in keeping with many leading activists’ own retrospective criticism of the movement—namely, that too many people were interested in the idea of solidarity with the most current revolution and too few in developing long-term systems of informed critique and engaged support.¹⁴⁴ Felipe’s would-be comrades express interest in the latest violent conflicts, the revolutionary potential of which is marked by a striking disregard for the range of non-violent activities change entails: On Saturday evenings, in the quieter corners of strangers’ apartments, in kitchens next to hunks of cheese and loaves of bread, Felipe grants his interviews standing. […] He looks into questioning, curious faces that want to hear something from him. He takes on the role, the expert speaks, the expert with experience. He would like to be taken seriously, to gather up the solidary looks, while in the background the Stones roll through the speakers and the first guests begin to dance. […] Felipe senses that it’s not regarded as up-to-date, what he has to say [about agricultural reform]. There’s nothing heroic about his experiences. On the wall of the kitchen a poster advertises a guerrilla organization in Central America. […] On the poster lie corpses.

   

Delius, Delius, Delius, Delius,

Adenauerplatz, 40. Adenauerplatz, 110 – 111. Adenauerplatz, 112. Adenauerplatz, 111, 33.

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Four bodies, murdered, black and white. Felipe doesn’t understand why they bring pictures of corpses into their kitchen. […] It disgusts him, he turns away.¹⁴⁵

Despite these unpleasant encounters, Felipe does not reject the possibility of solidarity. Instead, he looks to different conversations: “better to talk about soccer or the new Kluge film.”¹⁴⁶ These two options may be read as moves away from the political or—as I prefer to read them—toward new conversations about solidarity and social possibility within and through popular and entertainment media. The most widely remembered Chile-solidarity action in West Germany was undoubtedly the disruption of the 1974 World Cup in West Berlin, when protesters took to the field and broad public information campaigns referenced the legitimizing function of sports in fascist governments, specifically connecting the Nazis’ propagandistic staging of the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the brutal torture, murder, and detention of tens of thousands in the stadium in Santiago less than a year prior to the West Berlin World Cup.¹⁴⁷ Anke also bears a certain resemblance to Alexander Kluge’s fictional history teacher Gabi Teichert (Die Patriotin, 1979). Felipe’s desire to dance with Anke keeps him talking in the vein he believes his audience expects of him as a political exile, despite his frustration with the role so familiar to him: “He knew what people wanted to hear from him, he resisted it or didn’t resist it, depending on his mood. The blonde put him in the mood.”¹⁴⁸ Through Anke, Delius attends to sexual and emotional desires around the solidarity movement less readily visible in publications of various Latin American solidarity groups in West Germany. I have elsewhere explored West Germans’ emotional and even physical identifications with Latin American revolutionaries and people of color engaged in acts of resistance globally.¹⁴⁹ What is distinct in Delius’s novel is how consistently he identifies and reinscribes the terms of solidarities rooted in emotional identifications in a political-economic frame of reference. Here, too, the reinscription of German and Chilean histories proceeds through the figuration of fetishism, which, as Emily Apter and

 Delius, Adenauerplatz, 145.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 145.  See Balsen and Rössel, Hoch die internationale Solidarität, 323 – 340.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 147.  Jamie H. Trnka, “The West German Red Army Faction and its Appropriation of Latin American Urban Guerilla Struggles,” in Countercultures in Germany and Central Europe: From Sturm und Drang to Baader-Meinhof, ed. Steve Giles and Maike Orgel (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003), 315 – 332.

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William Pietz have noted, connects “human desires, material objects, and social power.”¹⁵⁰ Not coincidentally, this is a constellation of relations that fetishism shares with solidarity. Articulated around shop windows, intimate relationships, or fantasies of public sex, looking, witnessing, and wanting are not easily gendered or attributable to a single character; expressions of guilt and desire that may be characterized as consumerist or sexual cannot be straightforwardly explained by Bruckner’s psychoanalytic framework for thinking white guilt in the Third World movement. Symbolic dimensions aside, there is nothing in Felipe and Anke’s relationship to indicate that sex as one form of intimate contact was not itself widely regarded as a form of solidarity by Germans and exiles alike.¹⁵¹ Sexual desire, as portrayed by Delius, is neither unidirectional nor uniformly exploitative; rather, in amplifying fetishism as a trope, Delius uses it to reveal commonalities in and across different and sometimes divergent modes of desire and circulation at play in his transnational walking around. Emotional attachments to histories and memories of German fascism fueled the debate around whether Chile was in fact fascist, but the economic also served to subordinate certain kinds of feeling to a logic of capital connections and historical change that had its own appeal. I am not interested here in inverting the terms of economism to advance a psychoanalytic reading of antifascism as the return of a repressed violence or failed resistance. (Others have tried with results of limited utility.) More productive within the rhetoric of walking around is attending to the work that the economic terms of solidarity performed in articulating West German subjects within a larger world system and what were variously inter- and transnational political projects. For all of their political and literary differences, Delius’s novel performs a task set by Heiner Müller when he asserted: “Historical consciousness is the prerequisite for economic and political categories no longer being separated.”¹⁵² One might add: emotional categories. Preserving separations along the lines of economy, politics, and emotion; theory and practice; guilt and obligation; even Europe and Latin America appears increasingly suspect as the novel progresses. Felipe’s friend and fellow

 Emily Apter and William Pietz, preface to Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), x.  At the same time as I acknowledge the possible positive valences ascribed to international sexual encounters in many literary texts, I by no means seek to separate them from the power relationships that inhere in all sexual relationships, here most notably via the language of machismo, racism, and erotic othering.  Heiner Müller, Zur Lage der Nation. Heiner Müller im Interview mit Frank Raddatz (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990), 17.

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exile Pedro attributes the most glaring tendencies to separate politics and economy to “Third World fanatics.”¹⁵³ Insisting explicitly on the depravity of life in Europe even as they implicitly assert the superiority of European thought, it is clear (to Pedro) that they wish to be in solidarity not with exiles who praise Europe’s practical freedom, but with an imagined ideal of Latin Americans intent on returning to the guerrilla fronts in the Southern Cone or “at least” to Central America.¹⁵⁴ Not only does Pedro play at rejecting revolutionary praxis in favor of theory, he taunts his German interlocutors with their own prescriptive, determinist shortcomings and failure to communicate across difference: “So then I provoked them by saying I’m only interested in two things right now, the theory of value and the chemical language of insects.”¹⁵⁵ As Amariglio and Callari argue, commodity fetishism is key to addressing the contradiction between the priority of a Marxist theory of the subject and a Marxist theory of value on which Pedro’s provocation plays. Felipe, whose character we have seen to be linked to the trope of the commodity form and its rhetorical figuration as walking around, is well positioned to respond to such a contradiction. While he sympathizes with Pedro’s exasperation, he is quick to add: “Luckily they’re not all like that.” He categorically rejects the idea that all Germans act out of a guilty conscience or in an attempt to rectify the “sins of their fathers and grandfathers,” and he even asserts that no German who lacked a sense of national self-criticism could reasonably be engaged on behalf of Latin America.¹⁵⁶ (Both friends leave unmentioned that the German forebears in question are also Felipe’s father and grandfather.) The tension at the core of their discussion mirrors the tensions among sometimes conflicting material and emotional claims within the solidarity movement. The meandering practice of aesthetic solidarity emerges as an obstacle to the linear narratives offered by economic accounts of fascism, and it is through walking around rather than marching inexorably forward that Delius’s revolutionary subject can appreciate the need to look back, to tarry. It is precisely in this that Felipe moves to counter obstacles to revolutionary change posed by determinism and guilt masquerading as a progressive politics of solidarity. In place of the substitutive logic of an economism which requires us to transform differences into equivalences, Delius elaborates the figure of the commodity fetish, preserving the transactional character of economic exchanges that mediate social relationships, but also and importantly shifting attention to the power of commodities to    

Delius, Delius, Delius, Delius,

Adenauerplatz, 190. Adenauerplatz, 190. Adenauerplatz, 190. Adenauerplatz, 191.

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intervene in the symbolic order of which literature, too, is a part.¹⁵⁷ Through a rhetoric of walking around, Delius writes the coming together of poetic and economic categories, facilitating the emergence of qualitatively different networks of exchange and equivalence.

Conclusions Both Delius’s notes and his finished manuscript make clear that he questioned the possibility of solidarity deeply, even as he labored to produce the novel as an act of aesthetic solidarity. A handwritten sketch of a dialogue dealing with essentialism and the idealization of indigenous peoples indicates that Delius might as easily have attributed more of Pedro’s criticism to Felipe, portrayed in the unpublished passage both as weary and frustrated with fashionable Third Worldism, indigenism, and revolutionary mythology in an exchange that ends with the cynical comment: “Everyone should just project his hope where he wants.”¹⁵⁸ But solidarity is more than hope; it requires reciprocity and a proximity that, as Pedro reminds us in the published text, are limited at least to the extent that they are conferred collectively. The only “North-South Dialogue” named as such in the novel is a travesty of solidarity, bitterly recounted by Pedro.¹⁵⁹ Nor is it only the collective conferral of solidarity on the South that is questioned: amid Delius’s notes on the Third World debate and on Pascal Bruckner’s critical assessment of white guilt and the Third World movement is the note: “you can’t be in solidarity with the Third World any more than you can be with camp victims or prisoners in the gulags.”¹⁶⁰ Yet each time the author gives narrative space to the idea that solidarity may not be possible, he also allows his protagonist to defend its possibility; his decision to attribute broad criticisms not to Felipe but to the supporting figure of Pedro underscores the importance of Felipe’s unflagging efforts at solidarity, whatever their limits. The tension between (often unsuccessful) dialogue and (often self-absorbed) monologue goes to the heart of Adenauerplatz’s conception. A single, handwritten note on an otherwise blank page among Delius’s notes and materials reads: “The dialogue never takes place. All monologues. Everyone gives their own

 Amariglio and Callari, “Marxian Value Theory,” 215.  DLA Marbach, Handschriftenabteilung, A: Delius, F.C./Prosa/“Adenauerplatz. Roman,” Adenauerplatz: Konvolut, Stichworte, Notizen, Material.  Delius, Adenauerplatz, 190 – 192.  DLA Marbach, Handschriftenabteilung, A: Delius, F.C./Prosa/“Adenauerplatz. Roman,” Adenauerplatz: Konvolut, Stichworte, Notizen, Material.

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monologue, everyone talks to themselves. Make this a theme.”¹⁶¹ The problem of dialogue versus monologue cannot ultimately be separated from the problem of solidarity itself; it constitutes a limit both substantive and aesthetic, a limit closely related to his rejection of a hierarchy of plot over context. Even as the paths of Felipe’s physical walking around and winding, interior monologues intersect with the paths of the other characters around Adenauerplatz, their walking perspectives remain their own. There is an ideal state—a dialogically constituted solidarity—but it is not, perhaps cannot be, reached by any constellation of characters introduced in the novel. This limit is rendered aesthetically by a rhetoric of walking around, which is pointedly a walking without a final destination. In the case of Delius’s novel, I would suggest that representing and in fact performing a limit to aesthetic solidarity is itself a solidary act insofar as it rejects the presumption into which such a novel could easily have lapsed had it advanced Felipe Gerlach Hernandez as a concrete embodiment of German-Chilean solidarity. At the outset of the chapter I asked: “If the subject is specifically constituted in relations of capitalist exchange, what alternate networks of exchange and equivalence might open onto a form of subjectivity necessary not only to the functioning of markets, but of solidarities? How does the act of comparison itself instantiate relations of exchange that may (or may not) constitute reading and writing subjects as subjects of solidarity?” Considering these questions with an eye to the complex exchanges instantiated in Delius’s rhetoric of walking around, we can begin to see how, as an account of social relationships that seeks to resolve the contradictory nature of equal exchange in a society predicated on inequality, commodity fetishism figured as mountains of corpses and mountains of commodities marks an important node of emotional, historic, and economic exchange. Adenauerplatz’s comparative elaboration of ChileanGerman cultural exchanges and the transnational circulation of people, capital, and commodities interpolates the revolutionary subject of literature into an analogous process. It marks an intense desire for what is at the very least a notional state of equality among subjects engaged daily in attempts at its production. Solidarity involves a consciousness of the unmet conditions of equality and justice, even when specific expressions of solidarity are implicated in social relationships that are part and parcel to those conditions (racism, exoticism, various forms of projection—in short: power). The limit of aesthetic solidarity most evident in Adenauerplatz is also its most consequent mark of solidarity: the produc-

 DLA Marbach, Handschriftenabteilung, A: Delius, F.C./Prosa/“Adenauerplatz. Roman,” Adenauerplatz: Konvolut, Stichworte, Notizen, Material.

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tion of consciousness that begins to break with the illusion of internationalist dialogue and that opens instead onto the more productive space of Adenauerplatz as a highly localized site of geocultural contestation.

Chapter 6 The Limits of Aesthetic Solidarity This is not a conclusion: it is a challenge to proceed. As a starting point for future inquiry into what I have termed aesthetic solidarity, this chapter attempts to bring the authors whose texts I have considered into dialogue with scholars who have approached issues surrounding aesthetics and solidarity separately and from a range of disciplinary perspectives. I have endeavored to treat literature as itself theoretical in the sense that it is a mode of organizing our thoughts and feelings about the world and our places in it, often, I believe, with greater acuity than more conventionally theoretical writings can. Beyond even the widely accepted idea that the literary complicates the sociological, literature is its own form of knowledge production.¹ It bears substantively on contemporary debates in and beyond the academy, most notably on debates about transnationalism, representation, and rights. These debates are frequently articulated in terms of the cosmopolitan and in complex relation to the global. Thus, a special issue of Public Culture raises both substantive concerns about and draws attention to the potential utility of the term cosmopolitanism.² The editors outline their approach to the cosmopolitan in opposition to scholars who place it in a historical line from the Stoics through Kant and would as soon treat cosmopolitanism as an admirable philosophical tradition we have yet to live up to.³ They propose instead an approach that is both richly historical and fundamentally indeterminate. It is historical in that it considers as cosmopolitan a wide range of practical formations across places and times that “ground our mutuality in conditions of mutability,” that address how we relate to one another at precisely those moments of historical transition that find us at our most vulnerable; it is indeterminate in that is has not yet come into being, and no vision worthy of the name is reducible to the singular, rationalist, and universalist idea frequently cast in terms of world citizenship.⁴ Cosmopolitanism in this latter sense too often preserves the logic of the nation-state even as it transposes that logic onto a global scale, a strain of thought that the Public Culture editors term “the myth of the nation writ large in the figure

 See for example Jonathan Culler, The Literary in Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).  Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Cosmopolitanisms,” Public Culture 12.3 (2000): 577– 589.  Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 577, 585.  Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 580 – 585.

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of the citizen of the world.”⁵ This figure of the world citizen requires revision of the sort that might be enacted by a counter-figure in the shape of the revolutionary subject, already shown in the proceeding chapters to reflect critical positions, actions, and intelligibilities rather than place-based forms of subjectivity (as in the figure of Tania in Chapter Three). This subject is engaged in comparisons that are “translational” rather than “transcendent,” (as in the comparisons around which the translator’s ghosts circulate in Chapter Two).⁶ Solidarity represents a mode of intersubjectivity that is not contingent on specific forms of state recognition and inclusion. It is also a way of situating subjects in a critically internationalist frame. As such, it offers a meaningful response to dominant cosmopolitan imaginaries. Of the theorists of cosmopolitanism referenced by the editors of Public Culture, Martha Nussbaum stands out in part because of her explicit attempts to link world citizenship and literature. Jonathan Culler has already identified the most salient elements of her argument as revolving around the literary structure of exemplarity.⁷ Literary texts are treated as objects that can teach readers to cultivate rational but sympathetic judgments of their characters and situations. Characters lend individual faces to what are often broader social phenomena, perhaps not directly experienced by readers, but undoubtedly imaginable by them. Culler sees her approach as “excessively optimistic.” It also reflects a broader theoretical trend to locate the distinctive features of literature not in particular qualities of language or framings of language but in the staging of agency and in the relation to otherness into which readers of literature are brought. Nussbaum stresses above all the ways in which literary works bring readers to see characters as individuals, in the sense of individual people one might know, but arguably literature undercuts this concept of the individual. The effects of literature here depend on the special structure of exemplarity in literature—an issue she does not address.⁸

Instead, Nussbaum valorizes what she alternately terms sympathy, compassion, and literary or narrative imagination, practices closely related to the idea of solidary sentiment, but with none of Delius’s self-conscious irony.

 Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 582.  My language approximates that used by Pollock et al.: “Transdisciplinary knowledge, in the cosmpolitan cause, is more readily a translational process of culture’s in-betweenness than a transcendent knowledge of what lies beyond difference, in some common pursuit of the universality of human experience,” (“Cosmopolitanisms,” 582).  Culler, The Literary in Theory, 33 – 37.  Culler, The Literary in Theory, 32– 33.

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Delius’s use of the term solidary sentiment illustrates how solidarity may not be sympathetic or exemplary in any positive sense. A willingness to accept solidarity might reflect a desire to forget rather than consider violence and injustice, a desire to let physical connections overwhelm the intellectual or the emotional. (The trope of the male exile sexually manipulating or exploiting a local woman’s desire to make a political gesture is hardly exclusive to Delius’s novel; it surfaces repeatedly in works of fiction by Chilean exile authors including Carlos Cerda and Omar Saavedra Santis.) An offer of solidarity can be motivated by a desire to establish political authenticity by association; it can manifest itself in the disturbing practices that Delius’s narrator Felipe describes as “bringing corpses into the kitchen,” in the form of posters or conversations at a party, pushing the boundary of a sympathetic imagination to the point of voyeurism.⁹ Delius renders obstacles to the cultivation of solidary sentiment visible both at the level of individual interactions and via his attention to the commodity fetish, placing them within a broader system of transnational walking around that resonates almost uncannily with Pollock et al.’s language linking fetishism, individualism, and cosmopolitanism: “All the derring-do between the local and the global in the dialectic of worldly thinking should not conceal the fact that neoliberal cosmopolitan thought is founded on a conformist sense of what it means to be a person as an abstract unit of cultural exchange [, or] that the fetishization of liberal individualism has, in the past few years, created a cosmopolitan imaginary signified by the icons of individual personhood.”¹⁰ Aesthetic solidarity shifts the focus away from the exemplary and the individual both, toward intersubjective relationships premised neither on the capacity for reader identification nor on the propriety of individual, sympathetic judgments. It attends to process networks that cannot be fully grasped by appropriating the literary for a rationalizing project. Why must we insist on literature as rational in order to find a place for it in imagining justice? Are the anti-systemic and irrational literary texts produced by Heiner Müller less valuable to the practice of imagining a diversity of social experiences than are texts which participate in the imagination of a more rational order, or those that advance protagonists with whom an ideally rational reader wishes to identify? Does Müller’s substitution of the theaterbody for the emotive character make his work irrelevant to the pursuit of respect and concern in our extraliterary relationships? The literary has the capacity to go beyond the cultivation of judgment through the presentation of exemplary individuals; it can help us imagine “minoritarian”

 F.C. Delius, Adenauerplatz (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1984), 145.  Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 581.

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cosmopolitanisms “yet to come.”¹¹ Linking literature to forms of subjectivity and political agency need not be limited to literature’s capacity to model well-reasoned compassion (as, for example, in Nussbaum’s figure of the liberally educated, world citizen). As Culler points out, “if the literary can function as exemplary representation of agency for theory, it can also be a source of agency in theory, as literary works provide leverage for theoretical argument.”¹² Aesthetic solidarity takes these challenges of representation head on in its treatment of revolutionary subjects, who struggle for (and often fail to find) new ways of knowing themselves and others in a moment of world historical transition. If we attend to the density of poetic and social relations within and beyond the two Germanys rather than isolating the interests of individual world citizens, we will come closer to meeting the demands of aesthetic solidarity. Müller’s The Task shows us more vividly than any strictly sociological account the extent to which interest recognition is itself a deformative process. Rather than imagine geocultural solidarities predicated upon common interests, we might imagine forms of intersubjectivity that do not require interest- and risk-based theories of community, grounded perhaps in little more than what Chandra Mohanty terms “common differences.”¹³ In this respect, literature can help us to explore not only what is exemplary, but what is not—and why we should engage with difference for its own sake. In calling for attention to solidarity as an alternate way of conceiving mutuality and transition, I am not speaking against the important and pragmatic work of rights, but speculating instead on complementary approaches. Solidarity has an important role to play in how we think about intersubjectivity on a world scale, and aesthetic solidarity in East and West German literatures of the Cold War can and should serve as one of the many archives that the Public Culture editors argue must be “brought to bear on the analysis of cosmopolitanisms.”¹⁴ Their aim, they write, is “to discover whether the historical, and, what is equally important, the geocultural perspective on the problem could be extended beyond the singular, privileged location of European thought and history.”¹⁵ Even within Europe, there is much we have left to recover from such an archive. In the case of the authors analyzed here, we recover something of how Latin American thought and action are present in meaningful ways within European

 Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 582, 587.  Culler, The Literary in Theory, 36.  Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 225, 244.  Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 585.  Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 585.

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internationalisms. But one might also look productively to the work of Roberto M. Dainotto, whose Europe (in Theory) (2007) makes a compelling case for reconsidering the genealogy of the idea of Europe from a subaltern perspective. His work serves as an example of the need to interrogate rather than dismiss Europe as a principal source of universalisms, to submit it to decolonial thinking similar to that which Mignolo applies to The Idea of Latin America (2005).¹⁶ In subsequent sections of this chapter I review the utility of geoculture and Verdichtung as terms for the analysis of revolutionary subjects and aesthetic solidarity in and since the age of three worlds. I defined Verdichtung at the outset of this book with reference to Faist’s account of an increasing density of social relations across state borders and to my own move to trace how those relations are cast in poetic terms.¹⁷ Here I move on to specify the meaning and critical import of aesthetic solidarity at the intersection of philosophical, historical, and social scientific literatures on solidarity. Finally, I will propose that it is in fact at the limits of aesthetic solidarity that we can best envision the work that remains in transforming relationships of representation.¹⁸ In reflecting on aesthetic solidarity and its limits, we are constantly reminded that solidarity’s primary critical ultility is not as a systematic rubric for understanding or prescribing a particular politics of representation. Instead, its limits are critical in at least two senses. First, they are necessary reminders of the incompleteness of any analytic project; second, they are a means to spur us on toward alternatives each time less limited. Far from undermining the possibility of aesthetic solidarity as an expression of revolutionary subjectivity, limits precipitate those moments from which the utopian can be imagined. To cite Mignolo: “Dialogue today is utopia […] and it should be reconceived as utopistic: a double movement composed of a critical take on the past in order to imagine and construct future possible worlds.”¹⁹ Of all the limits under which the authors here considered labored, the limits to a utopian ideal of dialogue may well have weighed the heaviest on aesthetic solidarity’s would-be interlocutors. Consider the forms of equivalence and ex-

 Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).  See Chapter One, n. 90.  I refer to these relationships of representation in the sense most thoroughly developed in the writings of Stuart Hall. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak of course addressed the distinction between vertreten and darstellen as complexly related political and artistic forms of representation in her remarks on Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 257– 260.  Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, xix.

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change that structure Delius’s rhetoric of walking around and challenge economic accounts of fascism and antifascist solidarities. They document what Miguel de Unamuno would have termed a monodialogical script. A conversation in which one interlocutor does not speak, but without whose presence no monologue would take place, a monodialogue entails an exchange that is as complex as it is asymmetrical.²⁰ In German documentary theater, the transmission of written scripts, ranging from transcripts of the Bay of Pigs tribunal in Havana to Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s Bolivian diaries, underwrote staged dialogical exchanges which might never have been enacted through synchronous cultural conversations, but nonetheless generated uniquely syncretic fields in German literature. In other words, Latin America was central to the articulation of both East and West German revolutionary subjects in the Cold War. The texts in which revolutionary subjects are central and the authors who imagined them as such responded to contemporary transstate relationships, relationships that Thomas Faist characterizes as increasing in density since the 1970s to connect spaces physical, social, and symbolic alike.²¹ These verdichtete Beziehungen comprised novel forms of connection that enabled authors to rethink the role of the imagination in society and prompted a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the problem of literary efficacy. As revolution’s authors cast transstate forms in poetic terms, a process I have termed Verdichtung, they, too, engaged in a monodialogics whose limits, marked by asymmetrical power relations, also indicate a complex moment of possibility. Their revolutionary subjects sought more egalitarian forms of intercourse and readied the ground for solidary sentiment. Of course, cultural responses to transnational social forms and structural realignments may not themselves merit the designation transnational. Even as each of the texts I analyze participated to varying degrees in a geocultural shift from inter- to transnational subjectivity, they remain at least partially legible within a more narrowly German cultural framework, and the majority of readers will no doubt continue to receive them outside of anything like what Faist characterizes as a transstate interpretive frame (Deutungsmuster).²² Although Delius’s Adenauerplatz moves closer than some other authors toward a genuinely transnational cultural dialogue that might approximate transnational social forms by emplotting a rhetoric of walking around, its German author cannot but be a decidedly more vocal partner in the imagined German-Chilean dialogue. The notion of monodialogue may therefore have greater analytical pur Cited in Angel Rama, Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo Vientiuno, 1982).  See Chapter One, n. 92.  See Chapter One, n. 94.

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chase than the transcultural as a corollary to the Verdichtung of transnational relations insofar as it reflects critically on the asymmetry of cultural semiosis even—or perhaps especially—in literary writing that more frequently follows Delius’s lead beginning in the 1990s. A philosophical-historical counterpoint to Unamuno’s monodialogics, Leopoldo Zea’s notion of solidarity requires that the subject of solidarity recognize its Other, but does not require that that Other respond. For Zea, whose ideas I introduced in Chapter Four, solidarity is about hope rather than the formation of new collectivities. Zea’s definition of solidarity is not material in the traditional internationalist sense, although it heralds the possibility of material change, which Zea argues is a condition for the elimination of dependence and the realization of any authentically humanistic vision. What might the aesthetic articulation of solidarity so defined entail? A monodialogic solidarity may have an important role to play in the development and aggregation of the visible in aesthetic knowledge, which is to say in the production of knowledge within the frames of what is understood as art at a given historical moment. It could contribute to the interruption of earlier revolutionary subjectivities in which the fact of revolutionary activity outside of socialist Europe problematized both traditional concepts of solidarity predicated upon like individuals with clearly defined, common interests and the aesthetic strategies historically deployed to represent their respective struggles. Even if this is not the utopian reciprocity of dialogue, monodialogue still remains an important facet of a new, relational political insight.²³ And yet monodialogue is far from the whole story behind any of these texts. Nor, despite its critical potential, does it offer anything approximating a satisfying aspirational or political category. As is evident from this book’s chapter on Enzensberger, many German authors were engaged in actual conversations with Latin American thinkers that clearly informed one-sided and sometimes monodialogical recastings of revolutionary subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. Braun and Müller went to some lengths to incorporate the words of revolutionary Latin Americans and Caribbeans Guevara, Franz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire into the exchanges they brought to the East German stage. How, then, can we craft

 In the context of a broader, civilizational dialogue, Mignolo also argues that dialogue is utopian insofar as the terms of conversation themselves are unequal. He goes so far as to insist: “Dialogue can only take place once ‘modernity’ is decolonized and dispossessed of its mythical march toward the future.” While I agree, the standard he sets remains quite a way in the offing; what change can move us closer to this ideal condition if the revolutionary subject makes no move to imagine and act otherwise? (The Idea of Latin America, xviii-xix).

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a meaningful distinction between the expression of solidarity by one party and its acceptance by or potential acceptability to another? In some ways, this question is related to older debates about Eurocentricity and Europe’s self-referential construction of its own revolutionary subjects. Its specific, Latin American permutation threatened to tip over into what Carlos Rangel described as the transformation of the noble savage into the noble revolutionary. Rangel’s pioneering study (1976) identified continuities in imagining colonial and revolutionary subjects in Spanish-speaking America, but, equally importantly, it attended to Latin Americans’ own sustained participation in shaping and reshaping these mythical figures in tandem with Europeans.²⁴ In other ways the question of international solidarity’s possibility is a question that seeks to address or even redress the asymmetrical power relations that underpin all expressions of solidarity, be they intensely local, internationalist, or transnational. Subjects who extend and accept solidarity often occupy radically different geocultural positions. In light of this apparent impasse, I again take up the fundamental problem of the intersubjectivity that any revolutionary subjectivity entails. While specific limits of aesthetic solidarity are evident in the previous chapters’ treatments of works by East and West German authors from the 1960s through the 1980s, my case studies nevertheless contribute in important ways to a working definition of aesthetic solidarity. Such a working definition has critical purchase beyond the study of individual texts and authors insofar as it resides in the notions and operations of geocultural comparison and Verdichtung. The geocultural formations that emerge in and through the processes of Verdichtung explored in the preceding chapters lend specificity to the relation of an aesthetics of solidarity to its component terms aesthetics and solidarity. Approaching a German affinity for Latin America as a site and cipher for revolutionary subjectivity in geocultural terms enables me to attend to aspects of representation that hinge on the political and the cultural without collapsing the two. A geocultural analysis is attuned to the simultaneous and conflicting processes at work in negotiating the cultural framework of the modern/colonial world system; it is open to broad sets of cultural interactions, as well as to their political contexts and consequences. Few other frameworks can attend sufficiently to the ways in which international solidarity intervenes into global relations in terms that are at once symbolic, discursive, and material. As a term, geoculture retains the advantage of accommodating myriad articulations of knowledge in cultural forms and relationships. It is a sign under

 Carlos Rangel, Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1982).

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which I mean to unify the social and the aesthetic in a way that the geopolitics of knowledge (Mignolo) does not strictly accomplish, being a category that is both much more expansive and much more specific than geoculture. In the term geoculture I see the opportunity to attend to the uneven layering of geopolitical and cultural negotiations. The resulting disagreements produce new collective subjects and modes of intersubjectivity. Geoculture does not designate a space exclusive of geopolitics or of the geopolitics of knowledge, but rather a specific inflection of them, a space of imagination, action, and perhaps even of experimentation toward concrete utopias. It is in the space of the geocultural that verdichtete Beziehungen take on their fuller character, as an increasing density not only of social relations, but also of poetic relations that offer distinct ways of knowing and inhabiting social realities. Fastening upon the multiple valences of Verdichtung allows me to foreground the articulation of social and literary analyses in the texts at hand. Verdichtung is, in that sense, a natural object for any inquiry into aesthetic solidarities on a global scale, and one which makes clear the need for more developed methodological and terminological clarity if we are to trace the cultural and theoretical labor in which texts, their authors, and their readers engage. Each of the literary texts discussed in the preceding chapters offers its own intricate language for what I have termed aesthetic solidarity. Consequently, any synthesis or even résumé requires that I turn more sustained attention to aesthetics, solidarity, and the critical work they perform together. The following sections explore aesthetic solidarity’s constituent terms and their derivation from theorists variously identified as sociologists, political scientists, historians, and philosophers, as well as my motivation for combining them. Further, I shall elaborate on the specificity of my title’s reference not to aesthetic solidarity as such, but quite deliberately to its limits. The concept of the limit, at once metaphorical and mathematical, serves as a reminder and a challenge; it recalls the revolutionary subject to its place within a geocultural order that can be defined by no single realm of thought or action. It is, in that sense, a mark of humility and of continued obligation; the work of aesthetic solidarity is never complete. Neither in the case of internationalism nor, later, of Delius’s transnational attachments is Verdichtung a simple ground against which the figures of aesthetic solidarity and its limits unfold. Rather, aesthetic solidarity is generated as a set of relations in and alongside each text. It participates in the process David Featherstone describes in his history of internationalist solidarity when he characterizes internationalisms less as fixed ideas that create connections than as modes of “contesting and attempting to change the terms of already existing

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connections.”²⁵ Internationalist solidarities participate in dynamic political and spatial relations governed by much the same logic as Roland Greene’s process networks, in which texts are visible as literary only in relation to other texts. In the very gesture of articulating political and aesthetic representations, revolutionary subjects express and at times unwittingly frustrate aesthetic solidarities.²⁶

Aesthetics, solidarity, and the political Aesthetics and solidarity have a common touchstone in the political. In speaking of aesthetic solidarity, it is essential to account for the specific ways in which each of its constitutive terms denotes a range of expressive, imaginative possibilities for ordering material and symbolic spaces in the twentieth century. At the time each of these works was written, the political nature of solidarity was as taken for granted as the political nature of the aesthetic was contested. The East and West German authors considered here do more than reinscribe the long-standing debates on literature and politics referenced in the first chapter; indeed, they do much to reframe them entirely, and that was one way in which they revolutionized the idea of the writing subject as much as they wrote about the subjects of revolution. Jacques Rancière confirms that “aesthetic acts […] induce novel forms of political subjectivity” in their reconfiguration of experience.²⁷ His theory of the aesthetic grounds my own usage and therefore bears quoting at some length.²⁸ Rancière defines the aesthetic as encompassing both a “regime of visibility and intelligibility of art,” and art’s interpretive discourse, the tools and frames

 David Featherstone, Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (London and New York: Zed Books, 2012), 56 – 67. “[T]he ways in which internationalisms envision and construct relations between places are not a fixed backdrop to internationalist politics. Rather, they are generated and can shape the character of political relations envisioned through internationalism in significant ways. I refer to the terms on which these processes are constructed as spatial logics of internationalism,” (Featherstone, Solidarity, 57). Certainly these spatial logics are part of the broader, geocultural logics under consideration here.  See Chapter One, n. 25.  Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 9.  What follows synthesizes ideas variously presented in Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics; Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009).

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we use to understand and evaluate it as such.²⁹ The “necessary junction between aesthetic practices and political practices” is localizable to “the distribution of the sensible,” a term that indicates what is and is not held in common as visible or intelligible to a given community.³⁰ The distribution of the sensible is at once common and exclusive; only some of its parts are seen to act and speak in the political realm, just as only some of its parts are commonly constructed as art. Rancière takes care to distinguish his notion of an aesthetics of politics from frequently invoked arguments about the aestheticization of politics or the politicization of aesthetics.³¹ He explains: From this perspective, it is possible to challenge a good many stories about artistic “modernity” and vain debates about the autonomy of art or its submission to politics. The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily postures and movements, functions of speech, the parceling out of the visible and the invisible. Furthermore, the autonomy they enjoy or the subversion they can claim credit for rest on the same foundation.³²

Which is also to say: limits are inherent in any aesthetic, not only in an aesthetic solidarity. Rancière turns to early twentieth-century German debates about the relation of politics and art that were also primary points of reference in East and West German attempts to reexamine the efficacy of literature in the Cold War era. He refers specifically to German Expressionist painting as a much-debated instance of the historical avant-garde’s failure to develop a formal “criterion for establishing a correspondence between aesthetic virtue and political virtue.”³³ Beyond the example of the historical avant-garde, Rancière’s observations have critical purchase for any revolutionary art. Art is not political because it represents political figures or events already visible to a community, nor because it participates in certain formal conventions or innovations. It is political because of its place in the distribution of the sensible, and because of its capacity to re-

 Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, 11n6.  Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13.  Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13; see Aesthetics and its Discontents, 25.  Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 18 – 19.  Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 61. He continues: “There are no criteria. There are formulas that are equally available whose meaning is often in fact decided upon by a state of conflict that is exterior to them.”

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frame what is visible as art in terms of who and what are available to occupy the space so designated.³⁴ The configuration of space that Rancière describes in approaching the aesthetic as a distribution of the sensible is key to understanding what can and cannot be expected of literary interventions into geocultural orders in and beyond Cold War internationalisms: “Politics, indeed, is not the exercise of, or struggle for, power. It is the configuration of a specific space, the framing of a particular sphere of experience, of objects posited as common and as pertaining to a common decision, of subjects recognized as capable of designating these objects and putting forward arguments about them.”³⁵ Intervening into the distribution of the sensible is one way to incorporate previously unheard speaker-subjects into a political community and make audible their dissent from existing political forms and relations.³⁶ “This,” according to Rancière, “means that art and politics do not constitute two permanent, separate realities whereby the issue is to know whether or not they ought to be set in relation. They are two forms of the distribution of the sensible, both of which are dependent on a specific regime of identification.”³⁷ Their relational character reminds us of at least one good reason why aesthetic solidarity (or an aesthetics tempered by solidarity) cannot draw on anything like a Kantian tradition; it is not about the relationship of any one subject—revolutionary or otherwise—to a work of art. It is always and self-consciously in relation to an Other, more specifically, to a community or communities of Others. The subject of aesthetic solidarity is irrevocably plural. Even if we accept an apparently singular definition of solidarity as “the achievement of collective agency by individual agency,” an individual agent remains in a relation of reciprocal dependence with other agents who will make up a collective.³⁸ Revolution’s authors are subject to a similar relationship. Minimally and invariably they require the complicity of the reading (or viewing) subject. Their dependence marks the first in a series of limits of aesthetic solidarity, and opens onto at least two challenges that we face in defining any solidarity qualified by an aesthetic such as that which Rancière describes—an aesthetic that exists in common with the political and relies on a distribution of the sen-

 Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, 23 – 24. On his critique of the historical avant-garde and avant-gardism more generally, see The Politics of Aesthetics, 10 and 29 – 39, and his interview for the English edition with Gabriel Rockhill, 47– 66.  Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, 24.  Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, 25.  Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, 25 – 26.  Avery H. Kohlers, “Dynamics of Solidarity,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 20.4 (2012): 368.

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sible that can never fully be disentangled from the political. The first challenge is to recall that acting in political solidarity is not the same as acting in political unison, and to temper our expectations accordingly. Action in unison is not only bound to be a relationship of smaller numbers, but can be and often is predicated on suppressing dissent within a group. The second challenge is to recall that the historical relationship of solidarity and reciprocity has never been simple. Where acting in unison implies political agreement among subjects who can be identified as a community prior to collective action, acting in solidarity implies neither agreement nor communal identification.³⁹ If acknowledging that different parties to solidary action have different motivations and different stakes in that action’s success seems obvious, it is worth recalling that not all classical definitions of solidarity accommodate the distinction. (I am thinking in particular of scholars who draw—often incompletely—on Durkheim.⁴⁰ Similarly, more recent attempts to define what are variously termed cosmopolitan and transnational solidarities rely on a notion of communities of risk whose quantitative bent all too frequently renders differences opaque. They shall be discussed shortly.) Distinguishing between acting in unison and acting in solidarity frees up much-needed space for disagreement and for the dynamism of intersubjectivities formed in and through solidarity, but it may still not account sufficiently for the second challenge, namely, that of reciprocity. Most social scientific definitions of solidarity include some form or expression of reciprocity, be it articulated in terms of shared interests and group formation (notably among theorists of international relations or in recent histories of European solidarity such as Steinar Stjernø’s or Hauke Brunkhorst’s) or in terms of discourse ethics and recognition (notably among more philosophically-oriented thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Nancy Fraser).⁴¹ But recognition alone does not suffice for solidarity. Consider again the work of Zea, whose writings on world consciousness and the decolonization of

 Kohlers, “Dynamics of Solidarity,” 366.  For a good overview, see Peter Thijssen, “From mechanical to organic solidarity, and back: With Honneth and beyond Durkheim,” European Journal of Social Theory 15.4 (2012): 454– 470.  Lawrence Wilde provides an excellent survey of literature on the concept of solidarity across fields, with particular attention to the theorists named above: “The Concept of Solidarity: Emerging from the Theoretical Shadows?” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9 (2007): 171– 181; Steinar Stjernø, Solidarity in Europe: The History of an Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Hauke Brunkhorst, Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

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thought itself prompted me to explore how a possible epistemic affinity of Second and Third World positions at the margins of Europe has consequences for rethinking systemic and historical revolutions in Müller’s The Task. Zea’s concept of solidarity is not aimed at concrete political action, but it can be broadly understood as a shared hope. As participants in a dialogue whose starting point is recognition of inequality and consciousness of modernity’s alienation, we can begin to negate relationships of dependence. Solidarity causes people to recognize their common humanity and, by extension, to recognize their interdependence and to behave charitably toward one another.⁴² Zea aspires to interdependence, but his philosophical definition of solidarity does not require reciprocity in its fullest sense. In fact, his reliance on a Christian notion of charity as co-constitutive of solidarity strongly suggests that inequalities of power and other resources persist in utopian dialogue. Even if we accept the tenuous premise of Zea scholar Amy Oliver that Zea’s Christianity is cultural rather than doctrinaire, it would bring us back to the troubled questions of Eurocentricity and universalism.⁴³ Consequently, we need to consider carefully how the alternative that critical thinkers such as Zea represent within Latin American thought might reproduce the kind of persistent theoretical and ethical challenges most frequently associated with European subjects. Political solidarity must be distinct from charity at the very least in its critical thrust, its aim not only to alleviate social inequalities, but also to transform society in such a way as to eliminate them.⁴⁴ In this sense, there is always a tension in solidarity between the needs of specific subjects and their respective relationships to generalized structures, incomplete reciprocity, and networks of universal claims. Any expression of solidarity necessarily makes some critical claims on the universal. No form of intersubjectivity can be evacuated of power differentials; to be sure, solidarity’s ideal of reciprocity can become unbalanced when it takes shape around a real, subjective urgency to arrive at the universal by way of singularity. In reference to Fred Halliday’s notion of complex solidarity, Alejandro Colás puts it this way: “An intelligent defense of universality recognizes the diversity of its manifestations.”⁴⁵ Approaching aesthetic solidarity through

 Amy A. Oliver, “Editor’s Introduction,” in The Role of the Americas in History by Leopoldo Zea, ed. Amy A. Oliver, trans. Sonja Karsen (Savage, MD: Rowman and Little Publishers, 1992), xxvii, xxxi-xxxiii, xxxix.  Oliver, “Editor’s Introduction,” xxvi.  On this distinction see Carol Gould, cited in Kerri Woods, “Whither Sentiment? Compassion, Solidarity, and Disgust in Cosmopolitan Thought,” Journal of Social Philosophy 43.1 (Spr. 2012): 37.  Alejandro Colás, “Taking Sides: Cosmopolitanism, Internationalism, and ‘Complex Solidarity’ in the work of Fred Halliday,” International Affairs 87. 5 (2011): 1063.

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the endless potential variation and repetition of verdichteten Beziehungen ensures that we do just that. How are claims made about revolutionary subjects in each literary work, and how must each aesthetic object be interpreted with regard both to the specificity and the generality of the aesthetic solidarity it manifests? In the spirit of the limit, it is an answer that we can only try to approximate: an ideal solidarity may never be reached, but each of the revolutionary subjects we consider moves us incrementally closer. Clearly, solidarity is no less complicated a term than is the aesthetic that modifies it in this book. As Featherstone’s history of international solidarity movements illustrates, the creation of solidarities has seldom been other than problem-laden, a fact that by no means negates their indispensability to political struggles for positive social change. All solidarities, he reminds us, are “constructed through uneven power relations and geographies,” and must navigate both inter- and intragroup differences shaped by racism, classism, sexism, geography, and other inequalities.⁴⁶ Featherstone opts for a deliberately open definition of solidarity as “a relation forged through political struggle which seeks to challenge forms of oppression.”⁴⁷ Among his most important contestations of classical definitions of solidarity is his attention to solidarity not as static, but rather as a “transformative relation.” He explains: “This can involve the cementation of existing identities and power relations. It can, however, as frequently be about the active creation of new ways of relating.”⁴⁸ Although aesthetic solidarity is a specific inflection of solidarity and deviates substantially from the case studies of militant, direct action that Featherstone reconstructs, it nonetheless confronts many of the same principle challenges he identifies in framing international histories and their subjects. Aesthetic solidarity shares in the difficulty of thinking through solidarity within the existing national and disciplinary structures and categories that Featherstone outlines. His commitment to thinking about solidarities as active, creative, and dynamic is relevant to any consideration of literature and literary subjectivity that addresses itself to similarly dynamic revolutionary subjects. Revolutionary subjects make claims on material and imaginative worlds in ways that intervene into our understanding of place relations and politics more generally, an understanding pushed to its limits by a subject such as Felipe Gerlach Hernandez, who constructs new connections out of everyday sites and

 Featherstone, Solidarity, 6.  Featherstone, Solidarity, 5.  Featherstone, Solidarity, 5.

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objects. Rancière’s consideration of the everyday in the aesthetic, too, suggestively links photography’s “ordinary” objects and commodity fetishism: [T]he ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true. And the ordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric figure. This phantasmagoric dimension of the true, which belongs to the aesthetic regime of the arts, played an essential role in the formation of the critical paradigm of the human and social sciences. The Marxist theory of fetishism is the most striking testimony of this fact: commodities must be torn out of their trivial appearances, made into phantasmagoric objects in order to be interpreted as the expression of society’s contradictions.⁴⁹

Rancière notes that the aesthetic treatment of the ordinary entered into art well before the technologies of photography and film, so often the objects of debates about the indexical and the spectral, and that the photographic became visible as art only once it, too, appropriated the ordinary.⁵⁰ The coincidence of commodity fetishism and the photographic in Adenauerplatz likewise disrupts everyday relations of exchange around the flagging commercial center, revealing phantom relationships intuited at the edges of sight, behind surfaces flattened and distorted by shop windows. Under the sign of antifascism, Delius’s aesthetic solidarity renders labor, history, and emotion available to interpretation in the recurrent figures of mountains of corpses (Leichenbergen) and mountains of commodities (Warenbergen) across time and space. Revolutionary subjectivity can be condensed around these fetishes as instances of verdichteten Beziehungen, figures of the increasing density of spatial and imaginative references central to his antifascist aesthetic solidarity. Linking desire, material objects, and social power, commodity fetishism offers a socio-economic explanation of the often problematic transformation of difference into equivalence; it allows us to see both the possibilities and limits of comparative practices that underwrite all forms of solidarity and to which Rancière’s aesthetic regime of the arts also directs our attention.⁵¹ The similarity of Rancière’s language to Featherstone’s in respect to place and politics offers another striking place where aesthetic and historical solidarities might overlap. It suggests the compatability of the two theorists for thinking about how the political underwrites aesthetics and solidarity, their respective

 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 34. Emphasis mine.  Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 32– 33.  Pietz and Apter identify the capactity of fetishism to link these three fields. Preface to Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), x.

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objects of inquiry. Rancière attends to the distribution of the sensible as key to envisioning and revising political relationships; Featherstone remarks on the role of solidarities as “produc[ing] new ways of configuring political relations and spaces.” Feathersone attends to the parts they play in imagining “placebased politics,” and even in determining “what counts or is recognized as political.”⁵² The reliance on spatial categories of analysis in each theorist’s work is crucial, too, to situating aesthetic solidarity in geocultural terms. I am interested in adopting Featherstone’s definition of solidarity not only because of its openness to thinking and enacting imaginiative connections geoculturally, but also because of what he pointedly does not do. Featherstone destabilizes a vocabulary that might invite the reader to assume commonalities with the contemporary theoretical discussions of cosmopolitan solidarities or human rights referenced at this chapter’s outset, yet his rigorous historicism leads him to reject notions of solidarity rooted in a common or essential humanity (Kant and neo-Kantian theorists) as well as lines of thinking associated with Durkheim’s mechanical solidarity.⁵³ In this way, he distances himself from a strand of cosmopolitan thought premised on the rational recognition of shared interests or essential (rather than produced) similarities that culminates in the assessment of social risk and subjects feeling to an ends-means logic ill-suited to the humanity it purports to defend.⁵⁴ I see his differential perspective as closely aligned with my own rejection of approaches that define solidarity with victims in terms that may be more instrumental than critical. Aesthetic solidarity should also not be confused with the solidarity manufactured by a sentimental cosmopolitanism grounded in notions of shared vulnerability to suffering.⁵⁵ It takes up forms of critical sentiment without falling back

 Featherstone, Solidarity, 6 – 7.  Featherstone cites Richard Rorty’s strong critique of Kant (19). I deliberately refer to “a line of thinking associated with Durkheim” rather than to Durkheim himself because I agree with Peter Thijssen that the relation of mechanical and organic solidarity in Durkheim has too often been misunderstood. See Thijssen’s novel, dialectical reading of Durkheim with Axel Honneth, in which he brings the latter to bear on the former as a means of addressing the problematic relation of structures and individuals and of an implicitly evolutionary trajectory in Durkheim’s work, ultimately arriving at what he terms a “cyclical model” that might account for “interacting processes of inclusion and individualization,” (“From mechanical to organic solidarity, and back,” 455).  Featherstone, Solidarity, 19 – 36; Ulrich Beck, The Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992).  Featherstone, Solidarity, 30. The problem is taken up in greater detail by Kerri Woods. She acknowledges the aim of sentimental cosmopolitanism as a counterbalance to rationalist mod-

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onto identification, instrumental sentiment, or a form of sentiment easily recuperable by the rational. Lawrence Wilde speculates that the “conceptual neglect” of solidarity in the social sciences is at least partly attributable to just such subjective and emotional elements involved in developing any meaningful definition of the term.⁵⁶ While political scientists including Wilde have made important steps toward rectifying this problem, they tend to address either the emotional bonds that constitute individual, often national, groups (i. e., not dynamic processes that generate solidarities among or across groups); or to focus on the relation of globalization to traditional, local solidarities. The former approach does not adequately account for international solidarities; the latter is inattentive to concrete action and is, for the purposes of my analysis of texts dating back to the 1960s, anachronistic and therefore methodologically limited. By contrast, the limits of aesthetic solidarity provide meaningful entry into the analysis of literature as a middle-ground phenomenon for exploring subjective sympathies and imagined mutual responsibilities. The literary and its specific distribution of the sensible are well positioned to pick up the question of emotion where the social sciences have too often left off in dismissing the emotional as private and so implicitly apolitical, or even explained it away in cognitive terms.⁵⁷ As I hope the exploration of specific articulations of aesthetic solidarity in the preceding chapters has shown, Verdichtung accounts for a spatial and an imaginative density of relationships and can help us to think through the forms and regimes of visibility at play in new and creative solidarities. Broadening the scope of existing analyses, aesthetic solidarity moves to address the potential pitfalls of focusing on solidarity exclusively within the political realm. Craig Calhoun, summarized aptly here by Wilde, identifies “two problems with adopting a ‘purely political’ conception of human beings; first, it misses out on the myriad forms of solidarity achieved outside political organizations, and second, it overestimates the mobilizing potential of grand institutional ideas.”⁵⁸ Theorists including Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, on whose work I touched briefly above, are well known to have claimed a role for literature in cultivating sympathetic imagination, albeit within often contradictory frameworks for reimagining humanist or cosmopolitan solidarities and human rights.⁵⁹ There is no need to pursue their eth-

els, but does well to explore the problems that inhere in moving too far toward either pole of an emotion/reason binary.  Wilde, “The Concept of Solidarity,” 171.  Wilde, “The Concept of Solidarity,” 171.  Calhoun summarized by Wilde, “The Concept of Solidarity,” 186.  Wilde, “The Concept of Solidarity,” 177; Woods, “Whither Sentiment?” 37– 39; Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Martha C.

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ical claims on human solidarity—claims grounded in cosmopolitan rights discourses that would in any event be anachronistic with respect to the internationalist literary texts I consider here and incompatible in key ways with Rancière’s attention to the situational, contingent, and historical account of politics and aesthetics that I adopt—to recognize the important steps they make toward expanding notions of solidarity and of literary efficacy.⁶⁰ But it would be a mistake, too, simply to ignore how the treatment of the literary in the service of the political presents at least as many problems as it solves; the idea of rationally martialed sympathies of citizen-readers could well be seen as shackling the very sentiment that literature is seen to offer the well-formed mind.

Limits The active production of aesthetic solidarities that proceeds through a solidarity of readers should not be mistaken for the valorization of literature and of reading evidenced, for example, in Nussbaum’s or Rorty’s theories of sentimental cosmopolitanism. Instead, my aim has been to describe the effects of practices that facilitate relational reading as one component among many within a geocultural field. The critical character of aesthetic solidarity is intimately related to what Rancière hits upon in observing: “The question of fiction is first a question regarding the distribution of places.”⁶¹ We need not exclude non-fictional works of literature (e. g., The Habana Inquiry) from similar consideration. Aesthetic solidarity offers a sustained account of the relation of aesthetics and solidarity to the political. It develops a historically grounded approach to political internationalism and its diverse cultural manifestations in the age of three worlds. Finally, it attends to the construction of literary subjects of revolution in a period of acute geohistorical transition. Yet for all that it enables, aesthetic solidarity has its limits. Solidarities, cosmopolitan or otherwise, can and often do “entrench the position of some groups and further marginalize others […] Engaging with the power relations through which solidarities are crafted and conducted is a necessary condition for foregrounding the contested processes through which

Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).  Colás, “Taking Sides,” provides a sound genealogy of both cosmopolitanism and its reinvention since the mid-1990s, and of internationalism.  Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13.

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solidarities are generated.”⁶² The distribution of the sensible at play in aesthetic solidarity is one such contested process. Solidarity implies a commitment to action that, in the scope of this book, includes writing itself.⁶³ The limits of aesthetic solidarity are in this sense always the limits of action in the aesthetic regime as a particular distribution of the sensible brought to bear upon other forms of political action. As Rancière reminds us, the arts only lend to political programs what they can lend, what they share with the political itself as a distribution of the sensible.⁶⁴ The study of limits, determined not only by authors or texts, but also by their readerships, and the visibility or legibility of their aesthetic solidarities within the specific aesthetic regime any reader inhabits, must be part and parcel to any reflexive, scholarly analysis of aesthetic solidarity. Featherstone concludes that “[l]ocating solidarities as world making processes, […] tracing the geographies they shape, contest and rework, […] makes a significant contribution to understanding their productiveness and agency.”⁶⁵ Productiveness and agency are both attributes and effects of solidarity’s authors. Their aesthetic practices contest and remake geocultural orders. At the same time, they are limited by both the distribution of the sensible under which they labor even as they work to generate new ways of seeing and by the willingness of readers to participate in their world-making processes. But limits by no means render aesthetic solidarity meaningless. Müller’s aesthetic solidarity knows its own limits, but still it pushes profoundly against the limits of a social scientific literature that seeks to define solidarity. Decolonial thinking refuses to separate the poetic from the theoretical. As such, it guides us well on our way toward challenging definitions of solidarity that call for identification with those who suffer or of potentially shared interests in eliminating that suffering. For Müller’s revolutionary subjects, interest recognition is itself a deformative process that suppresses difference and dissent in and among groups. Featherstone understands solidarity as a world-making process; Müller’s aesthetic solidarity inverts that logic to take up the task of decolonial thinking by showing that solidarity can also unmake worlds that have been naturalized. The epistemic order of the three worlds is thus rendered visible and pushed to exploding. In an astounding variety of ways, the limits that mark each author’s expression of aesthetic solidarity hold open a genuine space for disagreement among    

Featherstone, Solidarity, 21. Woods, “Whither Sentiment?” 39. See n. 33. Featherstone, Solidarity, 16.

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revolutionary subjects in their ongoing negotiation of agency. They affirm Rancière’s conception of the aesthetic as a social process. Limits reveal when and why aesthetic solidarity requires complex forms of mediation and representation that challenge our existing distribution of the sensible. Solidarities need not preexist action or reside in the commonalities that exist within our current aesthetic regime; they can be produced in and through collective action. Because aesthetic solidarity assumes the efficacy of literature and other arts to intervene in both the distribution of the sensible and the political relationships it engenders, its particular collective actions reside in both writing and reading subjects. To stop there would be a vast oversimplification. Despite assertions to the contrary by such provocative thinkers as Zea, it is always the prerogative of solidarity’s objects to refuse entry into a relationship of solidarity. This is one limit that the revolutionary subject cannot account for independently. It marks the radical contingency of all the texts considered in the preceding chapters and serves as a cautionary reminder that there is no universally acceptable expression of solidarity. Aesthetic solidarity cannot be a solidarity predicated on sameness or on interests presumed to be held in common. It must be a solidarity that is intimately bound to what Chandra Talpade Mohanty—in language remarkably close to Zea’s—has termed common differences, differences that allow us to think the universal in more meaningful ways because they allow us to theorize connections.⁶⁶ The revolutionary subject in and of literary writing is never above or outside of the asymetrical power relations that mark those connections. In various ways, each of the literary texts examined in the preceding chapters acknowledged that cultural, economic, and political processes in the meantime associated with globalization have been a source of both exploitation and of new potentials for international solidarity.⁶⁷ Not infrequently, authors developed aesthetic strategies that addressed themselves first and foremost to those very limits. Our critical analyses must push them still further. Here, again, it is worth recalling Featherstone’s admonition that solidarity can entrench power relations or close off avenues of connection as easily as it can open them.⁶⁸ There are “no guarantees” in Featherstone’s solidarity, as there are

 Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 225, 244. Her term is referenced and discussed by both Colás (“Taking Sides,” 1061 and 1061n34) and Featherstone (Solidarity, 20 – 21) and will surely continue to shape the discussion of international solidarities.  Colás makes a similar claim in defining complex solidarity, arguing that any theory of “universal interdependence” of agents within a global system must acknowledge the role of global capitalism as a source of both interdependence and solidarity, as well as global inequality. Colás, “Taking Sides,” 1064.  Featherstone, Solidarity, 16.

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none in literature or other arts that, after all, require the notoriously unreliable cultural labor of reception.⁶⁹ The limits of aesthetic solidarity can only be descriptive, not formulaic. They describe both the set of verdichteten Beziehungen that is specific to any literary text and the challenges posed by the categories at our disposal for interpreting them according to some aesthetic form. The limits of aesthetic solidarity are at the same time shaped by their constant re-iteration within and redistribution of historical aesthetic regimes. They present a variation on a problem of form and content that is as old as aesthetic criticism. Jameson’s analysis makes clear that the problem of form and content is itself always about the limits of representation: [F]or Marxism the adequation of object to subject or of form to content can exist as an imaginative possibility only where in some way or another it has been realized in social life itself, so that formal realizations, as well as formal defects, are taken as signs of some deeper corresponding social and historical configuration which it is the task of criticism to explore.⁷⁰

We encounter the limits of what has existed in the past and what might be caused to exist in the future—limits akin to the problem of literary efficacy, which posits its own ideal relationship of literary texts to social life. In the case of aesthetic solidarity as a special mode of criticism and action, we approach limits hopeful for social and historical configurations that have yet to be realized. There is no such thing as a perfect adequation of content to form because—for now—we ourselves limit their realization in the material world. I nonetheless hope that in the act of critical engagement with revolutionary subjects we come closer to finding and imagining a politics and a social form that is adequate to the lofty ideals and emotional resonances of solidarity. The beauty, the elegance of a limit as a mathematical expression of an ideal is that we can approximate it by infinitely smaller units even as it is never, can by definition never be reached. It gives direction, but comports itself toward something as yet unreachable. Can we be materialists and yet comport ourselves toward an ideal? This may be the only kind of materialist worth being. Ideal or otherwise, there is always change over time. I for my part would like to work to direct that change toward the positive. Is this the trap of a paradigm of progress reeling back the paradigm of coexistence against which Müller’s theater of commentary works, or trying to compress and unify the layered temporality of Delius’s rhetoric of walking around? Not necessarily. We need to come to a real

 Featherstone, Solidarity, 16.  Jameson, Marxism and Form, 331.

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and equitable agreement about categories and change if we are to pursue them in a dialectical fashion that is other than what the logics of modernization and developmentalism have become. Is there a way to formulate this as a logic or criticism that is not proscriptive? I think so, if we keep in mind Bendetto Croce’s admonition to treat Marxism as a canon of historical interpretations rather than a philosophy of history in any metaphysical sense. And it is a canon, I would add, shaped as much by feelings as by facts, in which the notion of historical necessity marks not a lack of contingency, but the necessity of hope and sentiment more broadly as guiding forces in historical thinking.⁷¹ Just as a historical event can only be said to have been necessary after the fact, aesthetic solidarity can only describe a work that has already come into expression. Consequently, we need to develop an approach to texts that seeks to formulate revolutionary subjects in and of literature both after the fact and with an eye to the future. In pursuit of an aesthetic of solidarity that is part of a critical rather than a systematic philosophy, the preceding case studies have aimed to do just that.⁷² Each author encounters his own principal limit, each contributes to the project of aesthetic solidarity in ways that push up against the boundaries provisionally set by that limit. It is up to us as readers to learn from them what we can. Each of the literary works considered comes up against limits to aesthetic solidarity. Some they hold in common, as for example the limit of reciprocity or dialogue, the limit of dependence on a reading subject to take up the challenge of relational reading, or the generic, discursive, and epistemic limits at play in attempts to cast historical texts and contexts in literary forms without privileging one over the other. Some are more pronounced in one work than another, making the limits of translation, utopian thinking, decoloniality, or equivalence and exchange stand out in one expression of aesthetic solidarity rather than another. In art as in life, we face the real challenges of overcoming the specific obstacles that mark each approach. “The real,” according to Rancière, “must be fictionalized in order to be thought,” and in a sense the greatest act of solidarity that revolution’s authors can perform is in introducing solidarities lived, felt, and fought for into a new order of the sensible.⁷³ Literature’s capacity to generate new political subjectivities via new representational strategies requires that we attend to aesthetic solidarity with an eye to its role in contesting and reconfiguring the geocultural.  Bendetto Croce cited in Jameson, Marxism and Form, 362– 363.  Again, I have in mind Jameson’s usage of critical versus systematic philosophies. See for example Marxism and Form, 366.  Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 38.

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Each limit we recognize as such is simultaneously a new approximation of a revolutionary intersubjectivity. It is an invitation to consider ways of imagining and realizing solidary relationships more rather than less symmetrical.

Appendix “Walking Around” by Pablo Neruda, with a translation by Donald D. Walsh¹ Walking Around Sucede que me canso de ser hombre. Sucede que entro en las sastrerías y en los cines marchito, impenetrable, como un cisne de fieltro navegando en un agua de origen y ceniza. El olor de las peluquerías me hace llorar a gritos. Sólo quiero un descanso de piedras o de lana, sólo quiero no ver establecimientos ni jardines, ni mercaderías, ni anteojos, ni acensores. Sucede que me canso de mis pies y mis uñas y mi pelo y mi sombra. Sucede que me canso de ser hombre. Sin embargo sería delicioso asustar a un notario con un lirio cortado o dar muerte a una monja con un golpe de oreja. Sería bello ir por las calles con un cuchillo verde y dando gritos hasta morir de frío. No quiero seguir siendo raíz en las tinieblas, vacilante, extendido, tiritando de sueño, hacia abajo, en las tripas mojadas de la tierra, absorbiendo y pensando, comiendo cada día. No quiero para mí tantas desgracias. No quiero continuar de raíz y de tumba,

 Pablo Neruda, “Walking Around,” in Residence on Earth, trans. Donald D. Walsh (New York: New Directions Books, 1973), 118 – 121.

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de subterránio solo, de bodega con muertos ateridos, muriéndome de pena. Por eso el día lunes arde como el petróleo cuando me ve llegar con mi cara de cárcel, y aúlla en su transcurso como una rueda herida, y da pasos de sangre caliente hacia la noche. Y me empuja a ciertos rincones, a ciertas casas húmedas, a hospitales donde los huesos salen por la ventana, a ciertas zapaterías con olor a vinagre, a calles espantosas como grietas. Hay pájaros de color de azufre y horribles intestinos colgando de las puertas de las casas que odio, hay dentaduras olvidadas en una cafetera, hay espejos que debieran haber llorado de vergüenza y espanto, hay paraguas en todas partes, y venenos, y ombligos. Yo paseo con calma, con ojos, con zapatos, con furia, con olvido, paso, cruzo oficinas y tiendas de ortopedia, y patios donde hay ropas colgadas de un alambre: calzoncillos, toallas y camisas que lloran lentas lágrimas sucias.

Walking Around I happen to be tired of being a man. I happen to enter tailorshops and moviehouses withered, impenetrable, like a felt swan navigating in a water of sources and ashes. The smell of barbershops makes me wail. I want only a respite of stones or wool, I want only not to see establishments or gardens, or merchandise, or eyeglasses, or elevators.

Appendix

I happen to be tired of my feet and my nails and my hair and my shadow. I happen to be tired of being a man. Nevertheless it would be delightful to startle a notary with a cut lily or kill a nun with a blow to the ear. It would be lovely to go through the streets with a sexy knife and shouting until I froze to death. I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark, vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep, downward, in the soaked guts of the earth, absorbing and thinking, eating each day. I do not want for myself so many misfortunes. I do not want to continue as root and tomb, just underground, a vault with corpses stiff with cold, dying of distress. That is why Monday day burns like petroleum when it sees me coming with my jailbird face, as it passes it howls like a wounded wheel, and it takes hot-blooded steps toward the night. And it pushes me into certain corners, into certain moist houses, into hospitals where the bones stick out the windows, into certain shoestores that smell of vinegar, into streets as frightening as chasms. There are brimstone-colored birds and horrible intestines hanging from the doors of the houses that I hate, there are dentures left forgotten in a coffeepot, there are mirrors that ought to have wept from shame and fright, there are umbrellas everywhere, and poisons, and navels. I walk around with calm, with eyes, with shoes, with fury, with forgetfulness,

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I pass, I cross by offices and orthopedic shoestores, and courtyards where clothes are hanging from a wire: underdrawers, towels and shirts that weep slow, dirty tears.

Archival Collections Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (DLA) Handschriftenabteilung: A: Delius Mediendokumentation: Delius, Friedrich Christian Mediendokumentation: Enzensberger, Hans Magnus Theaterprogramme der Mediendokumentation: TH: Enzensberger, Hans Magnus Suhrkamp Verlag Correspondence with Hans Magnus Enzensberger Bundesarchiv Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganizationen der DDR (BA-SAPMO) DY 13: Liga für Völkerfreundschaft der DDR Akademie der Künste (AdK) Stiftung Archiv des Schriftstellerverbands der DDR Institut Stiftung Theaterdokumentation an der Akademie der Künste Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart (WLS) Dokumentationsstelle für unkonventionelle Literatur

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Index Abusch, Alexander 27, 136 Adenauer, Konrad 26, 225, 228, 236, 238, 240, 253 f., 260 f. Adenauerplatz 9, 58, 60, 216 – 219, 221, 223 f., 229, 232 f., 235 – 239, 241, 244 f., 250, 266 f., 274, 284 aesthetic generalization 16, 99, 109 – 111, 115, 147, 153 aesthetic solidarity 1, 3 f., 7, 9, 11, 31, 33, 37, 42 f., 49 – 53, 59 – 61, 66, 70, 72 f., 78, 82, 96, 99, 101, 108, 111, 113 f., 119, 122 – 125, 129, 131, 147 f., 160, 163, 165 – 167, 170, 172 – 174, 183, 194 f., 198, 204, 206, 210, 212 f., 216, 223, 244, 250, 254, 258, 265 – 267, 269, 271 – 273, 276 – 280, 282 – 291 age of three worlds 3 f., 6 f., 10, 19, 31, 39, 273, 287 Albert Sauvy 5 Alberti, Rafael 226 Alessandrini, Anthony 212 Alfaro Siquieros, David 27 Allende, Salvador 22, 215, 247 Amado, Jorge 21 Amariglio, Jack 220, 222 f., 250, 265 Amnesty International 244 Andersch, Alfred 65 Andreä, D.W. 104 anti-Semitism 245, 248, 250 f. antifascism 26, 28 f., 52, 60, 85, 87, 89, 136, 144, 165, 218, 221, 225, 254, 256, 259, 264, 284 Appadurai, Arjun 49 f. Apter, Emily 7, 72 f., 101, 263 area studies 3, 7 f., 30, 37, 39 f. Arendt, Hannah 104 Der Auftrag see The Task Auschwitz 54, 82, 87, 90, 99, 105, 107 f., 114, 116 – 118 Ayala, Waman Puma de 197 Bachmann, Josef Bahr, Egon 22 Bakhtin, Mikhail

87 149

Balsen, Werner 18 barbarism 189, 198 Barnet, Miguel 20, 53, 67, 77, 90, 93 – 98 Basch, Linda 32 f. Bathrick, David 134 Batista, Fugilencio 105, 126 Becher, Johannes R. 14 Benjamin, Walter 65 Berghahn, Klaus L. 100 Berman, Nina 40, 43 – 45 Berman, Russell 42 f. Beverly, John 40, 99 Beyer, Osvaldo 250 f., 258 Bidel Gonzáles, Haydée see Bunke, Tamara Bitterfeld conference 18 Bitterfeld Path 18, 166 Bloch, Ernst 123, 133, 141, 150, 159 f. Blumer, Arnold 100 Bogues, Anthony 203 Böhrer, Karl-Heinz 108 Bolívar, Simón 194 Borges, Jorge Luis 77 Bórquez, Adriana 244 Braese, Stephan 117 f. Braun, Matthias 147 f., 152 Braun, Volker 1, 3, 9 f., 12, 18, 31, 41, 49, 51, 55 f., 68, 121 – 133, 135 – 137, 140 f., 143 – 153, 155, 157 – 167, 170, 176, 223, 275 Brecht, Bertolt 57, 62, 96, 139, 156, 182, 184, 186, 207, 209, 230 Breton, André 229 Brezhnev, Leonid 203 Briegleb, Klaus 15 Brinkmann, Rolf-Dieter 225 Bruckner, Pascal 252, 264, 266 Brunkhorst, Hauke 281 Büchner, Georg 182, 184, 186 Buck-Morss, Susan 213 Bunke, Tamara (alias Tania la guerrillera, Laura Gutiérrez Bauer, Marta Iriarte) 28, 55, 126 – 127, 132 f., 148, 153 – 159, 163 – 165, 167, 176

314

Index

Cabral, Amílcar 188 Calhoun, Craig 286 Callari, Antonio 220, 222 f., 250, 265 Calviño, Ramón 105 – 108, 115 f. Campanella, Tommaso 150, 159 Cardenal, Ernesto 223 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique 256 Casa de las Américas 70, 95, 154 Castro, Fidel 18, 55, 75, 77, 102, 112, 126, 133, 207 Cerda, Carlos 271 Cernuda, Luís 226 Cervantes, Miguel de 133, 159 f. Césaire, Aimé 185, 187, 197, 206, 275 Chari, Sharad 36 Cocks, Joan 186 Colás, Alejandro 282 Cold War 2, 4, 7, 9, 11 f., 14, 21, 23, 30 f., 35, 37, 39 – 42, 46, 48, 50 f., 57, 60, 68, 81, 84 f., 114, 134, 170, 174, 186, 195, 198 f., 203 f., 206, 209 f., 212, 215, 272, 274, 279 f. colonial fantasies 1, 43, 45, 48 – 50 colonialism 19, 29, 31, 35 f., 40, 42 f., 45 f., 48, 70, 186, 199 commodity fetishism 60, 220 f., 250, 255, 265, 267, 284 compromiso 20, 66 Cortázar, Julio 20, 75, 77 cosmopolitanism 227, 269 – 272, 285, 287 Croce, Bendetto 291 Cuban missile crisis 134 Cuervo, Aristizábal 92 Culler, Jonathan 270, 272 cultural studies 2 – 4, 7, 9, 12, 33, 39 f. Dainotto, Roberto M. 273 Damrosch, David 7 Darío, Rubén 229 Dawes, Greg 224, 229 f. de Certeau, Michel 59, 216, 232 – 237, 240, 257, 260 Debray, Regis 55, 126, 149 Delius, Friedrich Christian 1, 3, 9 f., 12, 31, 49, 51, 58 – 60, 68, 216 – 221, 223 – 225, 227 – 233, 235 f., 240, 242 – 245, 248 –

260, 263 – 267, 270 f., 274 f., 277, 284, 290 Denning, Michael 3 f., 10, 36, 38 f. dependency theory 23, 58, 196, 242, 245 Desnoes, Edmundo 75, 77 Deutsch-Lateinamerikanische Gesellschaft 29, 148 f. Don Quixote 159 – 161 Dorfman, Ariel 20 Drews, Wolfgang 112 Durkheim, Émile 281, 285 Dutschke, Rudi 86 f., 89 Engels, Friedrich 13 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 1, 3, 9 f., 12 f., 20 f., 23, 31 f., 49, 51, 53 f., 63 – 119, 130, 133, 167, 170, 215, 223, 225 f., 229, 245, 275 Erbe 17 f., 131, 133, 170, 203 Eurocentrism 8, 35, 42, 73, 78, 152, 203, 276, 282 Expressionism 17, 56, 129, 131, 136, 138 – 140, 143 f. Expressionism debates 129, 159 Expressionist drama 131, 136, 139 f., 163 Faist, Thomas 33 f., 273 f. Falletto, Enzo 256 Fanon, Frantz 23, 57, 75, 77, 104, 183 – 190, 197, 203, 206, 212 f., 275 fascism 4, 11, 26, 58 f., 70, 85, 87, 106 f., 114, 215, 218, 221, 226, 230, 236 f., 239 – 241, 245, 247 f., 250 – 256, 259, 264 f., 274 Featherstone, David 277, 283 – 285, 288 f. Fitzpatrick, Sheila 57, 178 f., 202 Franco, Jean 30, 204, 215 f. Frank, Andre Gunder 112 Frankfurt Auschwitz trials 54, 82, 105, 107 f., 116, 118 f. Fraser, Nancy 281 French Revolution 57, 170, 181 f., 198, 203 – 206, 209, 211 Fuentes, Carlos 75, 77 Galeano, Eduardo 20, 196, 223, 256 García Alonso, Aida 77

Index

García Lorca, Federico 226 f. García Márquez, Gabriel 77 geoculture 2, 7, 34 f., 46, 50, 124, 212, 273, 276 German studies 2, 7 f., 11, 39 f., 49, 51, 135 ghostliness 53, 72 see also: translator’s ghosts Glick Schiller, Nina 32 f. Glissant, Eduard 8, 212 globalization 4, 9 f., 32, 34, 39, 58, 60 f., 218, 228, 245, 256, 286, 289 globalization studies 9, 39 Godesberg Program 26 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 88, 237 Goldschnigg, Dietmar 182 Gramsci, Antonio 4, 18, 172 Greene, Roland 9 f., 278 Greiner, Bernhard 141 Gruppe 47 15 f., 85, 91 Gruppe 61 166 Guevara, Ernesto “Che” 18, 55 f., 95, 121 f., 124, 126 – 128, 132 f., 136, 140 f., 144 f., 148, 150 – 154, 157, 159 f., 162 – 165, 176, 188, 274 f. Guevara oder der Sonnenstaat see Guevara or the Sun State Guevara or the Sun State 9, 55 f., 122, 126 – 129, 131, 135, 137, 143, 145 f., 148 f., 163 f., 166, 223 Gutiérrez Bauer, Laura see Bunke, Tamara The Habana Inquiry 9, 54, 68, 70 – 73, 90 – 93, 96, 98 – 101, 104 f., 108 – 111, 114 f., 117, 119, 130, 223, 287 Habermas, Jürgen 281 Hacks, Peter 130 Hahn, Ulla 16, 147, 166 Haitian Revolution 184, 198 Halliday, Fred 282 Hallstein Doctrine 29 Hamm, Peter 78 Hammel, Claus 130 Harootunian, Harry 39 Hausner, Harald 154 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 190 f., 193, 211 Heinrich, Brigitte 254

315

Hennig, Gerd 142 Henze, Hans Werner 66, 93, 100 Herder, Johann Gottfried 37 Herzog, Marrianne 230 Hilzinger, Klaus Harro 52, 111 Ho Chi Minh 188 Holocaust 31, 49 f., 60, 98, 110, 114, 237, 241, 247 f., 250, 256 f. hombre nuevo 132 f., 136, 143, 145 f., 152, 164, 166 Honneth, Axel 281 Hörnigk, Frank 55, 126, 128, 133, 135, 186 Huidobro, Vicente 227 Humboldt, Alexander von 28 – 30, 55, 126, 136, 148 – 150, 153, 164, 176 Huyssen, Andreas 60, 232, 255 – 257 internationalism 2, 13, 18, 23 f., 28, 30 f., 34, 56, 61, 91, 108, 122 f., 125, 127, 133, 136, 141, 148, 154 f., 163, 166, 205, 225, 277, 287 Iriarte, Marta see Bunke, Tamara James, C.L.R. 18 Jameson, Fredric 128, 165, 217, 219, 290 Janka, Walter 27 Jesús, Carolina María de 77 Jones, William 37 Joyce, James 259 Jünger, Ernst 139 Kahlo, Frida 27, 197 Kaiser, Georg 139 Kant, Immanuel 36, 269, 280, 285 Kayser, Karl Georg 151, 153, 164 Kellner, Douglas 138 Khruschev, Nikita 203 Kiesinger, Kurt Georg 107, 114 Kipphardt, Heinar 99 Kirchner, Verena 160 Kisch, Egon Erwin 27 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 91 Kluge, Alexander 263 Kulturbund see Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands 14

316

Index

Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands Kursbuch 23, 54, 66, 68 – 70, 72 – 78, 81 – 83, 86, 90, 92 f., 97, 100, 107 f., 112, 115 f., 118 f., 215

Müller, Heiner 1, 3, 9 f., 12, 18, 31, 49, 51, 56 f., 62, 68, 130, 137, 141, 167, 169 – 191, 194 – 199, 201, 203 – 213, 223, 264, 271 f., 275, 282, 288, 290 Myoshi, Masao 7

Larsen, Neil 8 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 20, 53, 70, 97, 104 f. Lasalle, Ferdinand 13 Lawrezki, Josef 151 Lecercle, J.-J. 71 f. Lehmann, Hans-Thies 173 – 175, 177 f., 211 Leiser, Erwin 249 Lenin, Vladimir I. 133, 161, 193, 202 f. Lennox, Sara 78 f. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 88, 90 Liga für Völkerfreundschaft 23, 29, 148 limits 52, 277, 283, 287 f., 290 Luden, Heinrich 88 Lukács, Georg 128 f., 159, 178, 229 Lumumba, Patrice 187

National Socialism 31, 136, 142, 209 nationalism 11, 58, 134, 184, 241 neocolonialism 70 Neruda, Pablo 20 f., 27 f., 53, 59, 63 – 65, 70, 96, 100, 215 – 217, 223 f., 226 – 235, 259, 293 neuer Mensch 131, 145 f., 152, 164, 166 Neutsch, Erich 137 New Man 122, 125, 131, 136 – 141, 144 f., 152, 157, 159 f., 163 f., 174 f. New Woman 164 Nirumand, Bahman 23, 93 Nussbaum, Laureen 98 f. Nussbaum, Martha C. 62, 270, 272, 286 f.

Mao Zedong 112 Mariátegui, José Carlos 18, 56, 145, 196 f., 200 Marmulla, Henning 66 f., 97 Martí, José 56, 75, 95, 144, 194 Marx, Karl 13 masking 57, 172, 174, 178 – 180, 182 f., 185, 198 masks 57, 156, 170, 173, 175, 178 – 183, 185, 195 f., 201 Mbembe, Achille 44 McLeod, Ian 230 Meinhof, Ulrike M. 93 Melas, Natalie 8 Michel, Karl-Markus 97 Mignolo, Walter 6, 35, 46 – 48, 167, 171, 197, 203, 210, 273, 277 Miyoshi, Masao 39 Mohanty, Chandra T. 5, 272, 289 Mohanty, Satya 95 monodialogue 51, 274 f. Montejo, Estéban 53, 66, 77, 93, 95 f. Moore, Thomas 150 Mueller-Stahl, Hagen 112

Occidentalism 45 f., 48 Oliver, Amy 282 Onetti, Juan Carlos 77 Orientalism 43, 45 f. Ortiz, Fernando 93 Padilla, Heberto 75 Panitz, Eberhard 28, 153 f., 163 Parra, Nicanor 75, 95 Paz, Octavio 77, 229 Peebles, Luis 244 Pietz, William 264 Pinochet, Augusto 231, 240, 244 Piscator, Erwin 98 Pletch, Carl E. 37 – 39, 171, 210 Poiger, Uta 40, 43 Pollock, Sheldon 271 postcolonial studies 2, 30, 35, 39 f., 42 – 45 postdramatic theater 170, 173, 176 f., 185, 189, 211 Pozas, Ricardo 77 Prashad, Vijay 5 Prebisch, Raúl 256 productivism 135, 139, 141, 143 f., 164 Public Culture 269 f., 272

Index

Rabinbach, Anson 139 Raddatz, Fritz J. 15 Ramírez, Sergio 223 Rancière, Jacques 61, 278 – 280, 284 f., 287 – 289, 291 Rangel, Carlos 24, 276 Rauff, Walter 251 Renn, Ludwig 27 f. rhetoric of walking around 59 f., 216 f., 221, 224, 228 f., 232 f., 235 – 237, 240, 251, 253 – 255, 257 – 260, 264, 266 f., 274, 290 Richter, Hans Werner 15 Rivera, Diego 27, 197 Rodó, José Enrique 194 Rodríguez Calderón, Mirta 154 Rojas, Marta 154 Rorty, Richard 286 f. Rosellini, Jay 125 f. Rössel, Karl 18 Rothberg, Michael 60, 255 Rothe, Wolfgang 16, 21 Russian Revolution 57 f., 170, 178 – 180, 183 – 185, 188, 195, 198, 203 – 205 Saavedra Santis, Omar 271 Said, Edward 45 f., 49, 78 Saussy, Haun 9, 222 Sauvy, Albert 5 Schäffer, Paul 244 Schmid, Carlo 15 Schneider, Rolf 99 Schriftstellerverband 23, 29 Schweitzer, Albert 246 Seghers, Anna 23, 27, 137, 173, 207 Sickingen Debate 13 Smith, Verity 155 socialist humanism 174 Sommer, Doris 99 Spivak, Gayatri C. 35 – 37, 39 f., 42 Stalin, Josef 181, 202 f. Stalinism 31, 50, 134, 202 f. Stationendrama 128, 137, 152 Stjernø, Steinar 281 stoicism 269 Suhrkamp, Peter 64 Szanton Blanc, Cristina 32 f.

317

Tania la guerrillera see Bunke, Tamara The Task 9, 56 – 58, 130, 167, 169 – 171, 179, 181 – 188, 195 f., 198, 200 f., 205 – 207, 210, 212 f., 223, 272, 282 Teraoka, Arlene A. 40 – 43, 57, 130, 185 f., 188, 200, 207 testimonio 21, 54, 66, 69, 79, 90, 93 – 97, 99, 101 Teufel, Fritz 93 theaterbody 169, 172 – 178, 180, 183, 185, 187, 190, 195, 207, 211 f., 271 Third World movement 218, 222, 252, 261, 264, 266 Tibi, Basam 34 translation 8, 30, 52 f., 63 – 65, 68 – 74, 76, 78 – 80, 82, 90 – 93, 96, 98 – 106, 108 – 111, 113, 115 – 119, 127, 176, 223, 291, 293 translator’s ghosts 52 f., 63, 65, 68, 70, 72 f., 82, 92, 98, 100 f., 109, 115, 270 transnationalism 2, 9, 32, 35, 72, 269 Trotsky, Leon 18, 180, 202 Uhse, Bodo 27 f. Ulbricht, Walter 122 Unamuno, Miguel de 51, 274 f. universalism 43, 282 Unseld, Siegfried 64, 77, 94, 97, 100 Vack, Klaus 22 Vallejo, César 20, 53, 65, 70, 100, 227 Vargas Llosa, Mario 22, 77 Varona, Carlos Manuel de 113 Venuti, Lawrence 69, 71 – 73, 76, 79 f., 82, 113 Verdery, Katherine 36 verdichtete Beziehungen 34, 51, 274, 277, 283 f., 290 Verdichtung 2, 34, 50 f., 60, 73, 160, 233, 273 – 277, 286 Das Verhör von Habana see The Habana Inquiry Wallerstein, Immanuel 34, 36, 38 f., 171, 184 f., 204 – 206, 210 Wallraff, Gunter 93 Walser, Martin 108

318

Index

Walsh, Donald D. 293 Weiss, Peter 99, 107 f., 226 Weitz, Eric D. 106 Wekwerth, Manfred 112 Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt 166 Werner, Ruth 154 White Revolution 57, 180 f., 183, 185, 189, 195, 202, 211 Wilde, Lawrence 286 world-systems theory 2, 38, 213

World War I 138, 161 World War II 2, 19, 40, 49, 98, 108, 110, 142, 153, 198, 241, 246 Young, Robert 188 Yurkievich, Saúl 228 f. Zantop, Susanne 40, 43, 45 – 50, 209 Zea, Leopoldo 58, 185, 189 – 197, 200, 205, 209, 211, 275, 281 f., 289 Zimmer, Erwin W. 112 Zweig, Stefan 27