There are books that can never escape the circumstances of their creation. Suicide is one of them. French artist and author Edouard Levé submitted the manuscript of his novel on October 5th, 2007; three days later his editor at Editions P.O.L. called to tell him that he was utterly captivated by it, and they arranged to meet on the 18th to discuss publication. The meeting was not to be. On the 15th, at the age of 42, Levé hanged himself in his Parisian apartment.

Cover featuring an untitled photograph from Edouard Levé's series "Rugby" (2003). (Image provided by the publisher, Gallimard/Folio.)

Edouard Levé was born on New Year’s Day, 1965. A business school graduate, he soon discovered that he had an artistic vocation and started painting in 1991. A few years later, after a lengthy trip to India, he destroyed most of his work and reinvented himself as a conceptual photographer. At the same time he began to write, under the influence of Raymond Roussel and other practitioners of “constrained writing” techniques. His first publication, Oeuvres (2002), is an imaginary catalogue raisonné, self-defined in its first entry: “1. A book describes the works the author has thought of, but never produced.” There follows a list of a further 532 conceptual projects. Later, Levé brought some of these to fruition. One was Amérique (2006), photographs of small American towns named after great world cities (Berlin, Delhi, Rio, etc.). These seemingly banal portrayals of the American heartland unsettle with their desolate streetscapes, tombstones and war memorials, empty skies. Portraits of residents are all composed with exactly the same mortuary-like poses and expressionless faces. Pornographie (2002), another project drawn from Oeuvres, is a photographic series of men and women wearing office-worker clothing but posed in stereotypical porn positions. In Rugby (2003), the blandly clothed participants are photographed in scrums or reaching out to catch an absent ball. Again and again, Levé’s photography plays the trick of reducing subjects to absurd archetypes, captured within a glacial geometric diorama.

Levé’s penultimate publication, Autoportrait (2005), is a disorientatingly “cubist” autobiography, consisting of 1,500 self-descriptive sentences, organised as non sequiturs. A long sentence on the second-last page describes a boyhood friend who, years later, “told his wife that he’d forgotten something in the house just as they were going out to play tennis; he went down to the cellar and shot himself in the head with a gun he’d carefully prepared.” Suicide begins with this same scenario. On hearing the gunshot, the wife runs back inside and discovers the body. The suicide has “left a comic book on the table, open on a double page. In the emotion of the moment, your wife leans on the table; the book topples over and closes on itself, before she could understand your last message.” (Levé’s body was also found by his wife, but he was more careful with his own last message.) The rest of the book reads something like Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction written with the distance and economy of Camus’s L’Etranger – radiating the same clinical intensity as Levé’s photography. Addressing the unnamed suicide in the second person, the author recounts various episodes from his short life, not necessarily in chronological order (“I remember you haphazardly. My brain resurrects you by random detail, as one digs out balls from a bag.”).

Suicide seems to be a memoir, but after 20 or 30 pages, the reader begins to doubt. There are unlikely moments (the night where the protagonist talks for eight hours straight about Marx and Freud); even more suspicious is the way the author gets inside the suicide’s head, and recounts scenes he couldn’t possibly know about, especially as he doesn’t even claim to have been a close friend (“If you’d lived, you might have become a stranger to me. In death, you are alive, vivid.”). Eventually, it becomes clear that the protagonist is a fiction, a sort of double. Levé – whose only photographic self-portrait is of himself as twins – has split himself in two. There’s the suicidal “tu”, plus the shadowy, observing “je”, of which we learn almost nothing, although the very fact of the book tells us that he’s obsessed with his friend’s suicide. The doubling effect – the fact that, in Rimbaud’s words, “je est un autre” – crops up often in the book. Looking in the mirror while shaving, “you thought you saw a stranger… the absurdity of the situation made you think that you were someone else.” The protagonist walks over to look at a photograph of his wife. At that very moment he hears footsteps, and turns around to see his wife in the flesh. “It was certainly her, you recognised her, but did you know her? She was abstract, like the objects in the background.”

In a Sebald-like sequence, the protagonist spends a few days alone wandering around Bordeaux. His first port of call is a museum, which he has the impression of having visited “dozens of times in other towns”. It contains a 200-year-old panorama of the city stretched out along the banks of the Garonne. Later, walking by the actual Garonne, he realises that he “preferred the old town of the panorama, or even the future town that [his] mind constructed, to the real thing.” His random wandering takes a conceptual turn, when he decides that he’ll follow a pattern of taking a first left then a second right. Eventually he ends up at an art exhibition of austere architecture photography – not unlike, one imagines, Levé’s own Amérique or Angoisse series (Levé had a show in Bordeaux in 2006). Later, he muses that “seeing an island from a boat might be better than actually visiting it.”

Enigmatic suicide is a familiar literary theme. It’s one that Levé sets up only to knock down, since his protagonist is such an obvious case (introspective, evasive, passive in relationships, a perfectionist, dislikes social situations, has bipolar episodes). The enigma lies elsewhere. The fact of Levé’s own suicide irredeemably colours our understanding of his book. Even if Levé hadn’t perceived his suicide as an aesthetic, conceptual act, he must have realised that others would. It is, in any case, what the “je” of his novel thinks: “Your suicide was of a scandalous beauty,” he writes.

Suicide is not a fictionalised account of Levé’s death; in some respects it is a negative image of it. “You didn’t leave any letters for loved ones to explain your death,” he writes, although Levé himself reportedly did. Levé’s art and life nonetheless converge, fuse, and end brutally together. Ironically, Suicide represents a new departure for Levé: his previous books could be considered conceptual conceits, whereas Suicide is something else, a purely literary work. At the end of his life, Levé had by no means exhausted his art. In his last photographic project, Fictions, he abandons the play on established visual codes to portray mysterious, anguished scenes of ceremony, illustrations of a narrative we are never given.

Near the end of this slim work, the protagonist buys an elegant pair of black leather shoes in a second-hand shop. A few days later, at a political meeting, a middle-aged woman’s face collapses at the sight of them. “She was on the verge of tears, her lips trembled. She recognised the shoes you were wearing. She’d given them to her nephew, and her mother had sold them after his suicide.” The faux-memoir concludes with the words: “You didn’t like the selfishness of your suicide. But, on balance, death’s reprieve won out over the painful agitation of life.” There is a puzzling coda, a collection of tercets supposedly discovered in a drawer by the protagonist’s wife after his death. The last of which is as follows:

Happiness precedes me

Sadness follows me

Death awaits me

Edouard Levé: Suicide
Gallimard (Collection Folio), Paris 2009.
ISBN-13: 9782070398621
Softcover, 128 pages, EUR 4.50

Suicide has been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. A German translation is forthcoming with Matthes & Seitz (Berlin). English language rights have been bought by Dalkey Archive Press. All passages above translated by Hugo Wilcken.

Hugo Wilcken is a Paris-based, Australian-born writer and translator. His most recent (2009) novel, Colony, is published by Harper Collins.

 (c) 2010 The Berlin Review of Books.

2nd of December, 2009: National Day in the United Arab Emirates. To mark the occasion, Dubai is offering fitness events and family entertainment, local musicians perform alongside folklore ensembles from Syria and Andalusia, another highlight are Egyptian show horses: all attractions courtesy of the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Community Development. Only Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building at 811 metres, was not completed in time for the festive occasion. Its opening had to be postponed until early 2010.

Who knows what else is in the offing for Dubai. At the end of November, government-owned holding company Dubai World asked its creditors for an extension on debt re-payment, citing its 60 billion dollar debt as the reason. Hotel and real estate prices plummeted immediately, along with stock markets in the Gulf region. The one-time wonderland seemed to turn into one giant yard sale.

Bubble within a bubble: Dubai airport. (c) BRB

Michael Schindhelm is one of many who has left. In March 2007, the luckless former director of the Berlin Opera Foundation (which runs the German capital’s three opera houses) arrived in Dubai. As Cultural Director of Dubai’s Culture and Arts Authority, he was supposed to spearhead the construction, from March 2008 onwards, of an opera house and a Museum of World Cultures. Leaving Berlin, whose coffers were empty, Schindhelm was hoping to be able to draw on Dubai’s abundant financial resources. Surrounded by ten-lane highways, artificial islands, and towering skyscrapers, his new employers nourished dreams of, amongst others, a new multiplex theatre for entertainment and music, with a dozen or so stages and a supersized museum complex attached to it. In the summer of 2009, Schindhelm threw in the towel; he now lives in Rome. Whereas construction of the Louvre’s Abu Dhabi branch is well underway and I.M. Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art has just celebrated its first anniversary in neighbouring Qatar, Dubai’s cultural bubble has burst.

Is this a case of visionary turned disillusionist? 49-year-old Michael Schindhelm – trained as a chemist in East Germany, and active since as a translator, dramatist, artistic director at the Basel Opera House, arts manager, and writer – has always been reinventing himself and his career; perhaps because of this he fits well into Dubai with its artificiality and allure to fortune-seekers. Fortunately, during his stint in Dubai, Schindhelm was vain enough to keep a diary of his adventures as one among the many well-off ‘new nomads’ that used to flock there. In fact, ‘vain enough’ may be an understatement. As a reader one does not really care which brand of car Schindhelm drives in Dubai, how he copes with the heat, which swearwords he uses when he gets into a tussle over a parking spot, and what he feeds his two tortoises (the female, in case you are wondering, is called ‘Europa’). In other respects, Schindhelm’s vanity is to the benefit of the reader. ‘Dubai Speed’, Schindhelm’s chronicle of his year-long stay in this ‘bay of paradise’, offers an insightful view from inside the bubble.

Schindhelm does not bother with the pretense of understanding. His attitude is one of wonder. He allows himself to lower his guard, and simply describes his experiences in the mega-construction site that is Dubai: The sudden changes in scenery, from desert to highway, from idyllic beach to the synthetic world of shopping malls. Artificiality, kitsch, hubris, simulation, conspicuous consumption. “This city is a case of total mobilization”, Schindhelm writes. It embodies “not merely a race against time, but an objection to time itself”. And yet, he still sees in Dubai “a tiny nucleus of hope” – the promise of a multicultural existence, in the face of political and religious radicalization among such neighbours as Iran, Saudi-Arabia, or Jemen. The final image of the book is a pavilion by the beach, a temporary exhibition hall under the scorching Arabian sun: a happy end, wrung from adverse circumstance, and quite possibly spurious.

Schindhelm hopes for a portion of the global flow of capital to be diverted to cultural projects and purposes. He wants to transmute the greed of the financial markets and turn it into a sense of curiosity; he imagines an opera house whose programme would include Così fan tutte, Lebanese dance theatre, the Cirque du Soleil, Chinese opera, and a Bollywood musical.

More interesting than Schindhelm’s visions for the future, however, are his run-ins with an understanding of ‘culture’ that equates art and commerce without so much as a flinch. None of Schindhelm’s interlocutors gets his point that a musical theatre with a capacity of 3000 is hopeless, simply because of the bad acoustics this would entail. In the eyes of his business partners, anyone who believes that for a museum to be successful it need not yield a high return on investment, is simply stuck in an obsolete European mindset. Dubai, an “imagination of a world made purely by humans”, also wants to redefine culture: as a means of profit maximization, which drives up real-estate values. Culture becomes just another show horse.

Schindhelm’s eventual failure is not so much due to overt confrontations of this sort, but is the result of inscrutable hierarchies of men of some importance, and of strange forms of non-communication that characterize the meetings and discussions he holds with the Cultural Council. Who is really in charge? When is a concession merely an instance of stonewalling, whose handshake is binding?

Schindhelm takes exception to the accusation that he is ignoring the existence of censorship in the Arab world. Instead he portrays himself as a victim of the “Idomeneo” affair, in which a controversial, modernist production of the Mozart opera, to be staged by Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, was cancelled, for fear of reprisals by Muslim groups. Schindhelm pokes fun at the “three generals” – the overeager Heads of the State Museums of Berlin, Dresden, and Munich – who visit Dubai in their quest for cooperation. He notes, with a tone of bemusement, how translating a catalogue for the exhibition “Muslim Faces” (the only project Schindhelm completed while in Dubai) led to problems, because of uncertainty about the attributes of prophet Muhammad. Schindhelm accuses the West of arrogance – and yet he himself embodies it. His zest for action, coupled with good intentions, is a phenomenon that is typical of the West.

As a result, the scintillating bubble that is Dubai becomes a bizarre reflection of our modern age. Schindhelm hints at a number of parallels and comparisons: between the construction from scratch of a modern megacity, the square layout of the city of Mannheim (conceived during absolutist rule), and the imported Florentine style of architecture found in St. Petersburg: “The city is a product of genius coupled with savage contempt for human life. In some sense this is probably true of all cities… Who built Babel? Who St. Petersburg? Who Dubai?”

The plot of land that was reserved for Schindhelm’s opera house, in the meantime has been sold on. The new investor plans to build a car park.

Michael Schindhelm: Dubai Speed. Eine Erfahrung
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2009.
ISBN-13: 978-3-423-24768-9
Softcover, 256 pages, EUR 16.90

Christiane Peitz is a journalist and head of the cultural section of the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel.

The German version of this article first appeared in Der Tagesspiegel, 2 December 2009 (original article); translated and reproduced with permission. Translation: The Berlin Review of Books. All rights reserved.

By Theodor Fontane

Snow like powder from the sky softly falls,
When before Djelalabad a rider halts.
“Who’s there” – “A cavalrist from Britain’s army
A message from Afghanistan I carry.” 

Afghanistan. So weakly he’d said.
Half the town around him had met;
The British commander, Sir Robert Sale,
Helped to dismount the man whose face was so pale. 

Into a guard-house they guided him
And made him sit at the fire’s brim;
How warm was the fire, how bright was its shine,
He takes a deep breath, and begins to explain. 

“Thirteen thousand men we had been,
When our outset from Kabul was seen –
Now soldiers, leaders, women and bairn
They are betrayed, and frozen and slain. 

“Dispersed is the entire host,
Who is alive, in the darkness is lost.
A God to me salvation has sent –
To save the rest you may make an attempt.” 

Sir Robert ascends the castle wall,
And soldiers and officers follow him all,
Sir Robert speaks: “How dense the snow falls,
How hard they may seek, they’ll never see the walls. 

“Like blindfold they’ll err and yet are so near,
The way to their safety, now let it them hear,
Play songs of old, of the homeland so bright;
Bugler, let thy tune carry far in the night.” 

And they played and sang, and time passed by,
Song over song through the night they let fly,
The songs of their home so far and so dear,
And old Highland laments so mournful to hear. 

They played all night and the following day,
They played like only love made them play;
The songs were still heard, but darkness did fall.
In vain is your watch, in vain is your call. 

Those who should hear, they’ll hear nevermore,
Destroyed, dispersed is the proud host of yore;
With thirteen thousand their trail they began.
Only one man returned from Afghanistan. 

Translation by Gabriele Campbell, 2010;
All rights reserved. 

Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) is widely regarded as the first master of modern realistic fiction in Germany. The present poem, Das Trauerspiel von Afghanistan, was written in 1847/8 and refers to the massacre of Elphinstone’s army, suffered by the British in January 1842, during the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-1842). The return of the sole survivor, William Brydon, an assistant surgeon, is also depicted in the above painting, The Remnants of an Army (1879), by Elizabeth Thompson (photo: Wikimedia Commons).

Gabriele Campbell has an MA in Literature, Scandinavian Studies, Linguistics and History, and is a writer of historical fiction and an occasional translator of poetry. She blogs at The Lost Fort.

In one of his perfect narratives, Heinrich von Kleist tells the sad story of two secret lovers separated and condemned to death just before the earthquake that was to destroy Santiago de Chile in 1647. Having miraculously survived, they enjoy for a few days the mercy of an enchanted social atmosphere. Their judges and executioners, transformed by the tragedy and the ensuing chaos, multiply gestures of altruism and generosity. The blissful mood persists for a short while, but soon the rules and norms of civil life are being reinstated and a Mass is celebrated during which the crime of the two poor lovers is denounced as the cause of all the evil. The lovers, unable to escape the fury of collective condemnation, are clubbed to death. The reciprocal altruism and the disinterested society that the cataclysm had spawned turns out to be ephemeral, unnatural, as if the ferocious end were a way to compensate for the uncanny sense of self that the people had experienced when acting in such a disinterested manner.

Jon Elster’s latest book, Le désintéressement, based on his Collège de France lectures in 2006-2007, discusses the very possibility of disinterested action. Is it possible for a human being to act in a truly disinterested manner? Do disinterested actions have a psychological unity or are they the mere product of circumstances? Is disinterestedness an individual or a collective phenomenon?

From a strictly rational point of view, that of utilitarian economic rationality, to the critique of which Elster had devoted an important part of his work, disinterestedness looks irrational. It violates the rules of maximisation of utility. As if human action without the kind of rational and interested motivation that optimise the individual utility was bereft of justification, irrational or at least arational. Elster’s aim, in this first volume of a trilogy that will be dedicated to the critique of the classical theory of Homo Economicus, is precisely to combine a critique of the motivational model of interest with a methodological individualistic approach, and not to go along with holistic explanations in terms of superstructure characteristic of other social science traditions such as Marxism and structuralism. Pierre Bourdieu for instance reduces the possibility of disinterested action to the social mechanics of distinction, assuming that it only occurs as a means of increasing one’s symbolic capital in an economy where not all exchanges are material. Elster, on the contrary, seeks individual motivations for disinterested acts, disinterested reasons to act that are moreover independent of the social superstructure.

There are two defining features of Homo Economicus that disinterested actions may undermine: rationality and interested motivation. Elster’s approach saves rationality at the expense of interested motivation. Actually, if classical economic theory insists on the univocity of interested motivation, it is first and foremost for reasons of simplicity and elegance. Leaving out interest, the theory gets lost in a thousand directions since, writes Elster paraphrasing Tolstoy, “if all interested agents are interested in the same manner, disinterested agents are so each in its own way.” Still, rational choice theory is so equipped that, while it could not do without the presupposition of rationality, it could do without interested motivation.

So Elster, equally familiar with French XVIIth century moralists and with current experimental research in behavioural economics, gives up on a univocal explanation and sketches a taxonomy of disinterested motivations that are, all the same, rational. Altruistic and disinterested action is typically suspected of having in fact other motivations: self-pride, desire for the approval of others, awareness of the benefits of a good reputation. To these essentially ‘allocentric’ social motivations that could be reduced to a form of indirect egoism, Elster adds motivations that are not egoistic but that may be ‘egocentric’, for instance: 1) disinterested consideration for others’ welfare (altruism, egalitarianism, everyday Kantianism), and 2) internal approval of disinterestedness, that is, the desire we have to appear, in our own eyes rather than in the eyes of others, as motivated by disinterested consideration of the interest of others. For Elster, these motivations are independent of the mechanisms of social recognition and intrinsically disinterested.

A series of case studies complements conceptual analysis: the mechanisms of disinterest are being brought to light in behavioural economics experiments on cooperation and reciprocity, and people are shown not to maximize their own utility in exchanges, in intergenerational donations, in reparation among countries, in decision processes in assemblies, and in the motivation of kamikaze terrorists, all cases that Elster had analysed in previous work.

The wide range of phenomena analysed and of explanations is typical of Elster’s style, who, to reductionist social sciences that aim at being “exact”, opposes a model of vectorial explanation that proceeds by articulating a variety of causal mechanisms. There remains a doubt regarding the unity of the phenomenon: if so many forms of disinterestedness are possible, and so many different motivations may underlie it, are we still talking about one and the same thing? Is there then a unitary theory, a mechanism that explains in an integrated way this “ivresse du désintéressement,” and that provides the phenomenology of this ecstatic freedom from our egoistic drives, that Kleist illustrated so clearly with a few strokes.

Jon Elster: Le désintéressement. Traité critique de l’homme économique (tome I)
Seuil, Paris 2009
ISBN-13: 978-2020965903
Paperback, 376 pages, 23 EUR

Gloria Origgi is a philosopher and a researcher at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Her most recent book is on the issue of trust as a philosophical problem (Qu’est-que la confiance? Vrin, Paris 2008).

A version of this article, with minor modifications, was first published on the website www.cognitionandculture.net under a Creative Commons Licence (which also applies to the present article); reproduced with permission of the author.

The Execution of Peter Stumpp (Cologne, 1589). (cc) Wikimedia Commons

June 5, 1573. “Leonardt Russ of Ceyern, a thief. Executed with the rope at the city of Steinach. Was my first execution.” So begins the sixteenth-century journal of Nuremberg’s Frantz Schmidt (1555-1634), who during 45 years of professional activity personally put to death 361 individuals and tortured, flogged, burned, or disfigured hundreds more. Legally empowered to torture, maim, and kill suspected or convicted criminals, the professional executioner is one of the more evocative and charged symbols of pre-modern Europe’s otherness. A ubiquitous and integral part of the European social fabric well into the modern era, these human “weapons of justice” were simultaneously viewed with suspicion and disdain by the very communities they served, formally marginalized as members of the “dishonourable trades”, a delimited menagerie that included slaughterhouse workers and gravediggers. And yet “Meister Frantz”, as he was popularly, endearingly known, remained a revered member of the local establishment, widely respected for his piety and steadfastness.

The dichotomy begs to be reconciled, or, at least, interrogated: How did early modern executioners square their unsavoury occupations with aspirations to social respectability and Christian morality? Was Schmidt a rare anomaly, or was he an indication of something of broader social significance underway, perhaps laying a foundation for modern rationalizations of the use of state violence?

Schmidt maintained his personal journal between 1573 and 1617, recording and describing each and every execution and corporal punishment he administered in Bamberg and Nuremberg. Although the original volume is no longer extant, several manuscript versions of it circulated during the subsequent two centuries. Three published versions appeared during the hundred years after that, the last in 1928. While relatively well-known among German early modernists, the journal itself has appeared curiously resistant to in-depth analysis, perhaps due to its seemingly disaffected chronicle format. There are no introspective crises resulting from extended torture sessions, nor lengthy philosophical discourses or even brief musings on the meaning of life.

Excerpt from Schmidt's diary.

But just below the surface, beyond the facticity of all the deaths caused by his very hand, the journal of Meister Frantz opens up a rich source for topics ranging from early modern concepts of identity and social status to notions about the human body and the development of both the picaresque and autobiographical genres. As Schmidt grows in both professional and storytelling experience, his accounts of the various unfortunates he encounters become both more colourful and more revealing of his inner world. Consequently, the journal unveils not so much a detailed portrait as a vivid sketch of the moral cosmology of a sixteenth-century executioner.

Frantz Schmidt considered himself first and foremost a professional, a master in the guild sense. And as in other crafts, the trade of the executioner was often passed from father to son, with Frantz following his own father, the hangman of Bamberg, into the family occupation, at the age of 18. After five years’ work as a journeyman, he secured a permanent appointment at nearby Nuremberg, succeeding his future father-in-law as the city’s official executioner – a position he would hold for a remarkable 40 years. Throughout this period Schmidt enjoyed a life of bourgeois respectability with his wife, Maria, and seven children in their spacious Nuremberg residence, boasting an annual salary that put him on a par with the city’s wealthiest jurists. After his retirement, in 1617, Schmidt began a lucrative career as a medical consultant, exploiting his extensive knowledge of human anatomy – now to the end of saving lives. Upon his death, in 1634, Schmidt enjoyed a state funeral and burial in the city’s most prominent cemetery, a few paces away from other famous sons, Albrecht Dürer and Hans Sachs. Schmidt’s life, in virtually every respect, had been a great social success, although the dishonourable nature of his profession consistently precluded his open participation in patrician and craftsmen circles alike, placing him and his family in a unique kind of social limbo.

Excerpt from Schmidt's diary.

Forty-five years of personal entries reveal a good deal about Meister Frantz’s internal reconciliation of apparently sincere personal piety and hunger for respectability with the violent acts he regularly performed – torture by various methods, flogging, cutting off of fingers or ears, as well as judicial execution by hanging, beheading, burning, drowning, live burial, or breaking on the wheel. Two aspects of his professional identity emerge most consistently, both of the moral and religious in a broad sense, rather than in a more constricted denominational or even evangelical sense. The first is, unsurprisingly, his self-identity as a restorer of social order, a kind of moral accountant, who, in his own words, “did his duty and made things right again”. As if making entries in a ledger, Meister Frantz carefully lists all known offenses committed by each individual, including full itemization of all stolen property, and numbers all of his punishments, capital and corporal, providing annual totals of each.

While Schmidt’s tone is almost always dispassionate, the relative length of the entries and other clues reveal his implicit hierarchy of social values. Violent crimes, particularly the outrages committed by vicious robber gangs, were clearly the worst and required the most severe punishments to restore justice. Abuses of trust, however, were nearly as grievous in Schmidt’s eyes, including treason, the murder of a relative (especially a child), the rape of a young girl, or audacious financial fraud, such as the one-legged “treasure finder” Elizabeth Aurholtin (a.k.a. “Scabby”), whose schemes amassed a considerable personal future, or the master forge and con-man Gabriel Wolf, who defrauded nobles across Europe of huge amounts. Crimes against property in general required strict rectification, often including hanging for theft. But most such offenses – except when they directly abused people’s good will or hospitality – did not arouse Schmidt’s ire. His complacency was even more evident in a variety of “victimless” sexual offenses (not rape), typified more by exasperation at the defiance of recidivist prostitutes and their pimps than by any evangelical fervour.

Excerpt from Schmidt's diary.

The other self-image that appears prominently is that of a healer-priest, likewise evident in his pervasive concern with full accounting of each individual’s crimes and sins, no matter how small, and Schmidt’s own active role in reconciling the sinner with God. Strikingly, his approach is much less overtly doctrinaire than that of his colleague, prison chaplain Johannes Hagendorn, who also kept a personal journal of criminal cases. Rather, Schmidt seeks to create in the elaborate spectacle of public death a sort of preliminary last judgment that provides the condemned the opportunity to achieve “a good end” or “fine death”, and in his journal he comments extensively on his own success or failure in ensuring that they did not part the world “godless” or “with no hope of salvation”. Above all, the journal entries and supplemental legal sources portray a man steeled to the use of torture and other violence on the offenders before him but also consistently attentive to avoid unnecessary cruelty. Schmidt, for example, successfully leads a pioneering campaign to abolish the drowning of female felons and execute them by what he considered the more humane method of decapitation. He also regularly persuades his magisterial colleagues to behead those condemned to die by fire or being drawn and quartered.

Meister Frantz’s style and thinking evolved over the course of his long career as did his reactions to the range of individuals he encountered during his professional duties, alternately evoking his pity, disgust, indifference, bemusement, and, occasionally grudging admiration. His matter-of-fact recitation of hundreds of state killings, including some horrendous punishments, cannot fail to jolt our modern sensibilities. At the same time, his work ethic, commitment to restoring civic order, and attempts at personal redemption are immediately familiar, perhaps to an uncomfortable degree.

Joel Harrington is Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and a fall 2009 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. His most recent book, The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans, and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany, has just been published by The University of Chicago Press.

This article first appeared in The Berlin Journal, no. 18; reproduced with permission.

(cc) Wikimedia Commons

By Hans-Dieter Gelfert

The favourable reception that Safranski’s book met with from critics as well as from the reading public seems to justify his title. Romanticism as he defines it was and is indeed a German affair. Germany’s most characteristic contributions to nineteenth-century world culture, music and speculative philosophy, are so thoroughly romantic that they alone would give the whole movement a German flavour. But in Germany romanticism did not stay within the boundaries of art and philosophy, it gave momentum to political nationalism, to an irrational Lebensphilosophie and to a fatal departure from the path of the Enlightenment. All this, as Safranski narrates in detail, added to the ideological powder-keg that eventually exploded in Hitler’s Germany. Safranski traces the fatal development, but does not condemn the movement as such. On the contrary, he defend its creative energy and arrives at the conclusion that a “romantic excess of unworldliness” is not only desirable, but necessary for counterbalancing the rationality of the modern world.

Scholars of German literature traditionally date the beginnings of Romantik either on the year 1798, when Friedrich Schlegel published his programmatic definition of the new concept, or two years earlier with the publication of Wackenroder’s Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar), the first instance of full-fledged romanticism in German literature. Safranski is more generous and traces the beginning back to the year 1769 when Herder embarked on a voyage at sea to France, during which according to Safranski the first truly romantic ideas germinated in his mind.

Like most German scholars, Safranski is blind to the fact that almost all these ideas had already been propounded by English writers in the first half of the eighteenth century. If there is any one person the origin of the movement can be traced back to it is the third earl of Shaftesbury, in whose essays the new view of divinized nature shows through an enlightened dressing. Shaftesbury’s influence on German writers and thinkers was so profound and long-lasting that half a century after the appearance of his famous ‘hymn to Nature’ Herder turned this piece of enthusiastic prose into verse. Safranski, strangely enough, doesn’t even mention this, nor does Shaftesbury’s name appear in his index. All the other English forerunners of romanticism – James Thomson, whose Seasons triggered the new nature poetry; Thomas Gray, whose Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard made the common people a worthy subject of poetry; Edward Young, whose Night Thoughts were hailed all over Europe as the expression of a new irrationality; and MacPherson, whose Ossian-fakes boosted the German craving for sublimity, which lasted throughout the nineteenth century – they all are conspicuously absent from Safranski’s book. He even ignores Bishop Percy, whose Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) gave Herder the idea of collecting folk songs.

This blindness to the early history of the movement is typical of how Germans understand romanticism. They see in it a reaction against the Klassik of Goethe and Schiller. But if these two had died as young as Byron and Keats, there would have been no Klassik, and then, most likely, German scholars would realize that the age of Empfindsamkeit and the Sturm und Drang were equivalent to what in English literature is called ‘preromanticism’ and ‘early romanticism’. They would also realize that long before German philosophers and musicians enriched the world with their creations, England had already delivered a contribution to the movement certainly not less romantic, which in Germany goes by the name Englischer Garten. Of course, the difference between Capability Brown’s landscape gardens and Wagner’s operas is so great that one hesitates to see the two as expressions of one and the same set of ideas and ideals. But the hesitation is due to a shortsighted view of the whole movement. Romanticism was not, as Germans commonly believe, a reaction against the rationality of the Enlightenment, it was from the beginning of the eighteenth century a concurrent ideological alternative to the ideas prevalent at the time.

When, after the Glorious Revolution, the English middle classes began their social and political ascent, they needed an ideologeme that would legitimize their breaking away from the traditional order. The Enlightenment offered them a set of values based on reason. Reason operates on the same principles in every human mind. Thus, it justifies the claim for equality. But reason needs schooling, learning, and cultivation, which only the well-to-do could afford. Therefore, the set of neo-classicist key values such as reason, judgment, learning, taste and beauty would only appeal to the upper middle class. For those who had no access to academia – either for financial or religious reasons – a value system based on nature was far more appealing. Nature gives to each human being individuality, originality, feelings, intuition, imagination, and in exceptional cases, genius. These were the key concepts that began to seep into the intellectual discourse in Britain from 1700 onward, until at last they surfaced as full-fledged romanticism.

The social and economic dynamics that fed the romantic movement are hardly ever mentioned, let alone discussed in Safranski’s book. His is the traditional German approach that used to be called geistesgeschichtlich. Had he gone back to the first dawn of romantic ideas in England he would have been faced with the challenging question why German romanticism went ‘over the top’, as it were, whereas its English counterpart stayed on the ground. The two parted company already in the eighteenth century, when the English refused to opt for either the beautiful or the sublime and instead chose the picturesque for their aesthetic ideal. Picturesque is something that consists of individual elements that are neither fused into a sublime whole nor shaped into beautiful harmony, but are left to please by their disparity. German culture in the nineteenth century opted for awe-inspiring sublimity, which found its most conspicuous expression in speculative philosophy and in the music of Beethoven, Bruckner and Wagner.

The social and political reasons for this are obvious. The English insisted on individual freedom because, as dwellers on a sheltered island “set in the silver sea” and armed with political power, they could afford to do so. The Germans, on the other hand, were yearning for political unity and for a powerful state to protect them. Not individual freedom, but collective security was their first priority. The key concept that haunted the minds not only of their romantic poets, but those of the whole nation, goes by the untranslatable word ‘Geborgenheit’. The word evokes the feeling of a pristine state of complete and utter security. The yearning for metaphysical totality, for political unity and for ethnic wholeness and haleness was the driving force of the development Safranski describes so well without ever discussing the reason why. His book, though fascinating in its own way, exhibits the kind of cultural parochialism that for generations has given German ‘Germanistik’ a peculiarly provincial flavour. On the other hand, it is the combination of provincialism and cosmopolitanism at the expense of an undeveloped urbanity which fascinates foreign observers in German culture and appears to them as an exotic otherness. In this respect, Safranski’s book is an excellent travel guide into Germany’s heart of darkness.

Rüdiger Safranski: Romantik. Eine deutsche Affäre
Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2007
ISBN-10 3446209441
ISBN-13 9783446209442
Hardcover, 416 pages, EUR 24.90

Hans-Dieter Gelfert was Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Free University of Berlin until 2000, and, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, is ‘one of the most prolific and most widely read Anglicists in Germany’. His most recent book, on the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, is published by C.H. Beck (Munich).

Sonja Neef, a lecturer in European media and culture at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, devotes her study ‘Imprint and Trace’ to the topic of ‘Handwriting in the Age of its Technical Reproduction’. In much the same way that Walter Benjamin, to whom the subtitle obviously alludes, did not object to photography as such, but only to the photographic reproduction of original works of art, so Sonja Neef does not lament the disappearance of handwriting. Whether the practice of handwriting will indeed ever disappear completely is, of course, an open question. If today’s continued presence of, say, vinyl albums – hastily written off as outmoded by many a commentator only a few years ago – is anything to go by, then there would seem to be little reason to be pessimistic about the future of handwriting. (After all, he who writes by hand may be said to demonstrate character, in that he writes against the tide of the zeitgeist.) On the contrary, what Neef sets out to show is that our current standardised typographies and digital substitute worlds remain indebted to handwriting as their ancestral predecessor. Cultural techniques may be everchanging, but they remain latently ever-present. Even the latest flat-screen technology is not left untouched by the history of handwriting. Neef makes it clear that traces of handwriting are to be found everywhere. What is important is ‘to contemplate the Manual within the Digital: the fingerprint on the touchscreen, the stylus on the writing pad of a tablet PC; in short, to consider handwriting from [the perspective of the] screen’ (p. 29).

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Neef’s observations are informed by the conceptual vocabulary of such figures as Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Kittler, and consequently the study as a whole accentuates the cultural-philosophical more than media-theoretic aspects. To be sure, dogmatic adherence to any particular methodology – what Paul Feyerabend used to call ‘Methodenzwang’ – is not something one accuse the author of. What one might wish to criticise is the overambitious scope of the historical trajectory, which the author sets out to chart: Neef’s observations concerning the development, the significance, and the destiny of the technique(s) of handwriting go all the way back to the evolutionary origins of hand-like extremities “from fish to homo sapiens”, and span the whole breadth of cultural evolution, from human prehistory to the ancient world, the medieval period, the modern age and digital postmodernity. Thus, the author takes her readers on a tour de force from hieroglyphics to screen-savers, from cuneiforms to corrective fluid.

Neef, however, sees no difficulty in going back in history – or, for that matter, in extrapolating into the future. Her goal is to subvert the seemingly clear-cut distinction between the techniques of handwriting and the printing press: ‘My thesis is that there is no final dichotomy […] between, on the one hand, printing as a mechanical, technical, or digital way of writing and, on the other hand, handwriting as an individual, unique, and singular trace; instead, the two principles of “imprint” and “trace” are always already intertwined, both historically as well as systematically’ (p. 25). In other words, whatever the future may bring, handwriting survives safe and sound.

The individual chapters of the book span a wide range of topics and are refreshingly brief; in general, Neef writes succinctly and avoids long-winded sentences. As a result, her writing tends to be more intelligible than that of her theoretical role models. Nevertheless, it seems that writing in an accessible manner continues to be a professional risk within German-language academia. At the level of terminology, Neef pays heed to the expectations of her academic peers: The average reader will likely need a dictionary in order to make sense of such learned chapter headings and phrases as ‘Manus ex machina’, ‘Exergum’, ‘Dactylography’, ‘Currere’, ‘Ceci tuera cela’, ‘Infra-mince’, and the good old ‘Paralipomena’ (especially given that classics scholars are presumably not the main target group of the book).

Texts in the humanities, especially when they are (as in this case) reworked versions of an earlier PhD or Habilitation thesis, are often meant to demonstrate the author’s originality and independence. However, there is such a thing as too much originality – as Walter Benjamin found out the hard way when his Habilitation was at first rejected by the University of Frankfurt. Perhaps in order to avoid such a painful experience, Neef also dutifully goes over much secondary material. What emerges from this is a thoughtful and plausible assortment of important thinkers (Heidegger, Derrida, various anthropologists), who pondered the significance of hands and hand-writing. In outlining their views, Neef often develops her own theoretical positions, forges new connections, and delineates her argument from the views of others. As a result, the reader is spared the déja-vu experience of thinking that somewhere, somehow, one has read all this before.

Neef’s intellectual tour de force from antiquity to the present comes to a stop already half-way through the book. The remaining chapters are for the most part revised versions of previously published papers on such varied topics as graffiti, Anne Frank’s diary, and tattooing. While these chapters are nicely illustrated with photos and graphic images, thus inviting the reader to browse among them, they do not, as a whole, fit very well with the first half of the book. Towards the end, the book reads more like a collection of essays. All in all, however, Neef’s book not only conveys valuable insights into the cultural-philosophical significance of the ‘old’ medium of handwriting, but also whets the reader’s appetite to dig out that old fountain pen again – irrespective of whether one intends to draw precise block letters on a page or indulge in the magnificent swirls of ornate calligraphy.

Sonja Neef: Abdruck und Spur. Handschrift im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit
Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 2008
ISBN-13: 978-3865990372
Softcover, 360 pages, EUR 24.90

Frank Berzbach teaches psychology and social sciences at the Ecosign Academy of Design, Cologne University of Applied Sciences (FH Köln).

The 64-year-old German filmmaker Werner Herzog has long been as famous for his statements about film and culture as he has been for his actual movies. In speech and in writing, he inclines to aphorism rather than argument, issuing dicta with a hermetic self-containment bordering on the inscrutable. The 300-page Herzog on Herzog (2002) reads this way, as does his 12-point “Minnesota Declaration”, an impromptu manifesto delivered at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis in 1999. Herzog’s aphorisms teeter between the visionary and the bizarre, as these two points of the “Declaration” attest:

    5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

    10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life.

Herzog has become an object of cinematic fascination in his own right. Director Les Blank has made two documentaries starring his colleague: Burden of Dreams (1982) follows the making of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) features Herzog cooking and devouring a leather boot while delivering pronouncements on the near-extinction of imagination, the need for artistic daring, and the difference between fact and truth. The collective word count of Herzog’s pronouncements about art and culture probably exceeds the words spoken by his characters onscreen (despite a prolific 55-film career). A master of elegant strangeness, Herzog has profited by this canny ability to expound and practice an artistic philosophy.

Werner Herzog at a press conference in Brussels (photo by Erinc Salor; Wikimedia Creative Commons licence)

Once again, Herzog has managed to have his shoe and eat it, too. In Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog publishes the diary he kept from 1979 to 1981 while shooting (or, more often, waiting to shoot) his acclaimed film about a bombastic anti-hero in the Brazilian jungle. Thanks to Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, the plagued history of Fitzcarraldo already holds a notorious place in filmmaking mythology: assistants died; actors became injured and ill; some of the local extras plotted to kill hot-blooded star Klaus Kinski. Typically, Herzog took these incidents as cosmic portents, telling Blank: “The trees here are in misery. The birds here are in misery – I don’t think they sing; they just screech in pain.” The essence of the jungle is “fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away”.

A darling of cineasts and prize committees, Werner Herzog is savvier than the humorless neurotic he sometimes plays on-screen and in his journals. He is fully aware of the cartoonishness of his morose Weltanschauung, but seems to relish situating himself at the juncture of comedy, melodrama, and nihilism. Of Conquest of the Useless’s 320 pages, this sort of vague cosmological pessimism probably accounts for some 50. The book finally shifts from being very funny (though we are never sure whether Herzog is an accomplice or an object of our laughter) to slightly dull.

That said, Conquest of the Useless is a singular book, so strong at many points that it could be read and appreciated by someone who had never seen a single Herzog film. In Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, Herzog says: “Our civilization doesn’t have adequate images… That’s what I’m working on: a new grammar of images.” Without them, he says, we are doomed to “die out like dinosaurs.”

In contrast with this “new grammar of images”, Herzog sets the false images offered by television and advertisements. These “kill us” and “kill our language” because they lull instead of provoke, working within a familiar spectrum of wonder, desire, and repulsion. Herzog’s films can be interpreted as antidotes to this deadening complacency, and the countless strange moments in Conquest of the Useless as yet another curative, this time through the medium of language.

The book’s images of grotesque surrealism arrive abruptly amidst more mundane descriptions of weather or squabbling actors. In a sudden, peculiar flash they suggest whole worlds abutting Herzog’s, yet with utterly different codes of behavior, stores of knowledge, and interpretations of reality. In “Iquitos” a tiny boy named Modus Vivendi earns a living playing the violin at funerals. Children steal a bit of sound tape from Herzog’s crew and tie it between two trees, so tight that the wind makes it “hum and sing.” At festivals men shoot each other with bows and arrows, the recipient catching the shaft midair before it hits its mark. A large moth sits on Herzog’s dirty laundry and “feasts on the salt from [his] sweat.” In the crew’s shipment of provisions they order kilos of arrow-tip poison, which serves as local currency. “For a spoonful of this black sticky mass, you can get yourself a woman to marry, I was told in a respectful whisper by a boatman as he cleaned his toes with a screwdriver.” Such surprises exemplify the newness to Herzog’s “grammar of images”, a newness that is not simply indicative of their shock value but illustrative of a voracious curiosity about how other beings survive, and sometimes enjoy, their passage through the world.

In Conquest of the Useless, Herzog may have stumbled across the genre to which his writing is best suited. The journal form provides an inherent structure, in which seasons change, personalities clash and reconcile and clash again, and budgets dwindle. All Herzog has to do from time to time is log the current conditions of all these factors, and the drama writes itself. This single linear structure is steady and comprehensible enough to accommodate a great deal of eccentricity and divagation, and the reader never feels mired in the wash of surreal imagery and quasi-philosophic musing. With entries averaging three or four paragraphs, few feel overstuffed with detail.

When Herzog simply shows what’s there, the result is breathtaking, and even a reader unacquainted with Herzog’s work could imagine why Francois Truffaut called him “the greatest film director alive”. What spoils some of these images, however, is Herzog’s occasional habit of glossing or interpreting them for us. This can result in cringe-worthy purple prose: “In its all-encompassing, massive misery, of which it has no knowledge and no hint of a notion, the mighty jungle stood completely still for another night, which, however, true to its innermost nature, it didn’t allow to go unused for incredible destruction, incredible butchery.”

Fitting this “grammar of images” into an argument or philosophy is often misguided. Herzog’s attempts at articulating a convincing credo fail, but his rendering of the world’s strange particulars achieves the “ecstatic truth” which for him is both the aim and the content of art. Herzog scholars will perhaps read Conquest of the Useless with the goal of supplementing their understanding of his astonishing films. Doing so risks overlooking the value of Conquest as a work of art itself. The pleasures of the word are different from the pleasures of the camera. Herzog’s strange and original voice, by mediating a place and mood through language rather than footage, provides yet another new grammar by which imagination speaks.

Werner Herzog: Conquest of the Useless. Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo
Ecco: New York 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0061575532
Hardcover, 320 pages, US$ 24.99

 Laura Kolbe is an MPhil student at Jesus College, Cambridge, where she is studying American Literature.

This article first appeared in The Oxonian Review, issue 9.2; reproduced with permission.

It has been some time since the phenomenon of rave disappeared from the perception of the general public. Nowadays, when one speaks of the ‘techno movement’, one typically does so in the past tense. The images of Berlin’s ‘Love Parade’ are but faint memories, documenting how a carnivalesque subculture has been absorbed by the mainstream of a ‘fun-driven society’ (Spaßgesellschaft). That great musical current of the 1990s, it seems, has turned into a mere trickle.

Tobias Rapp, in his book Lost and Sound, objects to this scenario of decline and attempts to show that, despite its reduced ‘surface visibility’, the culture of techno music in Berlin is alive and well. After the end of the hype, about ten years ago, the techno scene – this is one of Rapp’s central theses – withdrew from everyday culture and went underground, where it went through a period of renewal. One might think that Rapp is dealing with a niche phenomenon, which would be at best of local interest. But the author – who recently moved from being editor of pop culture at the Berlin daily Tageszeitung to a position at news-weekly Der Spiegel – argues convincingly that the clubs of Germany’s capital have shaped how German culture as a whole is perceived at an international level.

View of the 'Berghain'. (Photo: Bart van Poll; Creative Commons License BY-SA 2.0)

Tobias Rapp combines subjective first-person reports from Berlin’s nightlife with other passages that are written in a sober, more analytic mode. At both levels, he describes the astonishing attraction that Berlin has been exerting on DJs, producers, and weekend ‘Easyjet ravers’. Rapp estimates the number of techno tourists, who arrive each weekend on budget flights headed for one of Berlin’s airports, to be (‘not implausibly’) around 10,000. As a main cause for this boom, Rapp identifies not only the emergence of budget air travel, but also the oversupply of real estate in the German capital. Thanks to low commercial rents, a relatively egalitarian clubbing scene has emerged, which – ‘unlike in other major cities’ – does not target the celebrity and luxury segment of the market.

One can read Rapp’s study from different perspectives. As a book about Berlin, it may not provide touristic advice on the city’s hottest night spots, but it provides a well-researched survey of the clubs along the river Spree. To be sure, the author sometimes writes with the passion of a true aficionado, but for the most part he manages to keep a professional distance between him and his topic. Nonetheless, he hardly hides his satisfaction when he recounts, for example, the observation of a female club-goer, who describes ‘Techno in Berlin’ as ‘just like Reggae in Kingston’.

Rapp did not intend to write a music book that would describe the evolution of house, techno, and related genres of electronic music (although his recommendations of recordings, given in the appendix to the book, provide an excellent starting point). Rather, his interest is more in cultural-sociological findings: such as the ‘commune model’ that is being practiced at ‘Bar 25’ (‘Hippie de luxe’), or the only partial visibility of the clubs. Thus, at the ‘Berghain’, the leading club in its segment, a strict ‘no photos’ policy is in place, which not only gives the place an aura of exclusivity but also allows for an element of egalitarianism: what counts is ‘the celebration of a collective subject without celebrities’.

That Rapp’s concern is with general conclusions, not merely with Berlin-specific observations, is especially noticeable in his discussion of online communities. He describes in detail how ‘an authentic local subculture … becomes the topic of discussion in global networks’. This provides a good insight into the structure of a wider public of pop culture, which constitutes itself via the internet with its global reach. For example, in a relevant internet discussion group, Rapp encounters one 17-year old from Toronto who has never been to Europe, but knows everything about the current preferences of the DJs at ‘Berghain’, the place of his longing. One of the interesting aspects of the book is how it makes tangible – via the example of Berlin’s club culture –  the much discussed notion of ‘glocalisation’.

Lost and Sound is not a political book in the narrow sense. However, Rapp’s reference to the asymmetrical perception of techno culture – ‘hardly any in Germany, a lot of attention abroad’ – is nonetheless relevant to cultural policy-makers. With respect to the role of local politics and economic development, Rapp argues that the current boom of medium-sized clubs and venues was only possible against the backdrop of the failure of wholesale urban redevelopment policies in the 1990s. In a detailed and sophisticated manner, he describes how popular criticism led to a referendum against the large-scale redevelopment plans that had been drawn up for the bank of the river Spree. The fact that the controversy about the MediaSpree plans culminated in the slogan ‘place for clubbing or location for investors?’ may well be due to the specific conditions in Berlin. However, looking beyond the political sensitivities within the German capital, this case study may well contain general insights into the relation between, on the one hand, alternative culture with its hedonistic outlook and, on the other hand, institutionalised politics.

Not least from a creative industries perspective, the book is a worthwhile addition to the literature. Rapp describes the change in significance of record labels, which, in times of a crisis-like decline in record sales, have become an integral part of strategies of self-marketing, by DJs who team up with producers (and vice versa). He also explains how it is that certain record shop are able to maintain their economic and cultural function, even in times of crisis, because they cater to a specialised audience. Part of Rapp’s study is also concerned with the interdependence between club culture, fashion, tourism, and technology: for example, DJ software from Berlin is now being exported to the U.S. for use during church services. 

Regarding the clubs themselves, the author arrives at an upbeat conclusion: ‘With a bit of good will and some idealization one could say: the house and techno scene in Berlin has retained the good aspects of independent culture – economic independence, artistic integrity, and an unwillingness to compromise – while simply having done away with the bad aspects: simplistic anti-capitalism, glorification of self-exploitation, and lack of professionalism.’ In times of a global economic crisis, that is not a bad result.

Tobias Rapp: Lost and Sound. Berlin, Techno und der Easyjetset.
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 2009.
ISBN-13: 9783518460443
Softcover, 268 pages, EUR 8.50

Norbert Niclauss works on music and cultural policy at the German Federal Government’s Commission for Culture and the Media (BKM), Berlin.

The German version of this article first appeared in Berliner Republik, No. 2/2009; translated and reproduced with permission. Translation: The Berlin Review of Books.

Intellectual voyeurism is alive and well, especially when it is permitted to intrude into the private life of a classically repressed personality like Max Weber. Joachim Radkau’s biography accomplishes the task of scholarly snooping well, and will satisfy even the most prurient curiosity. In this 700 page work we are informed in detail of Weber’s emissions “in his sleep”, of which his wife used to keep a detailed record to be carefully reported to Helene, Weber’s mother. The latter, as in the most typical Oedipal circumstances, was Weber’s greatest misfortune and dream, for she instilled in him the “horror of sexuality” while forcing him at the same time to “make young women happy”.

Courtesy of Polity Press

It is through the motif of Weber’s “sexual misery” that we are led to explore his scientific interests, political concerns and difficulty in reconciling the two. The theme is not new, as there have been other attempts to trace Weber’s mental weaknesses and breakdown (which occurred at the action-packed turn of the 20th century) back to his struggle with his father for his mother’s love: from Marianne Weber’s first biography, to Arthur Mitzman’s depiction of Weber’s religious background. Nonetheless, Radkau’s biography goes further and takes great advantage of the archive documentation and of the family correspondence made available by Guenther Roth’s enormous 2001 effort, Max Weber: A Family Portrait 1800–1950.

By means of these new materials, Radkau attempts to answer a perennial question: what role does personal life play in theoretical and public life? Does it influence the formulation of problems and hypotheses? Does it shape their specific configuration? We might be tempted to respond affirmatively when reminded of the legitimate association between Kant’s clockwork routine and maniacal ego-centrism and his philosophical subjectivism, or when we think of Hegel’s Spirit running through history in 1807 (the year of the publication of the Phenomenology), while his son Ludwig – not precisely the fruit of great love, according to biographers – was bursting into life.

Though neither a Weber scholar nor a biographer of intellectuals, Radkau’s psycho-clinical approach is to be framed within his documented interest in the depressive social atmosphere of early 20th century Germany, and the various expressions of intellectual ennui, to paraphrase Fredrick Jameson’s portrayal of Weber. Radkau’s previous book from 1998, entitled The Age of Nervousness: Germany between Bismarck and Hitler, is an extensive examination of the discourse and treatment of “nervous disturbance” under the Second Reich. Here the Bielefeld-based historian argues that it was the failed resolution of this social illness that played a not insignificant role in the Nazification of Germany.

The inquiry into Max Weber’s work and life, “paradigmatic figure in the torments of bourgeois culture” as efficaciously portrayed by Antonio Negri, provides Radkau with a further key to the understanding of German society between the Wilhelminian Era and the Third Reich.

With this driving thesis in mind, Radkau’s main argument revolves around the notion of “nature”. Weber’s work appears as the battlefield of an unresolved tension between an original “nature” and theories of the social. Moreover, the emphasis Weber seems to put upon the concept of “nature” (which appears almost 3,600 times in the digitalised version of Weber’s work) leads Radkau to draw out the intimate link between private struggle and the theoretical work, between society, the individual and nature. “Until now,” Radkau argues, “Weber has been thought of as an enemy of nature … this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding.” Thus, we can reconsider Weber’s most influential theoretical categories, such as “charisma”, “rationalisation”, “understanding” and “value freedom” by means of a focus on Weber’s fixation on human nature and on the centrality of passion. Above all, Radkau’s concern is the passion of conviction and thought, as the subtitle of the German edition of the book suggests (Die Leidenschaft des Denkens – the passion of thought).

Radkau’s journey into Weber’s life and the attempt to reconcile the self and his work by bringing to light unknown details has the merit of remaining very readable, despite its length. Nonetheless, other interpretations could be explored, beyond the focus upon “nature”. After all, the work of Weber was particularly sensitive to current events and his social background and political consciousness was explicitly rooted in and committed to a very specific political agenda: namely, a struggle against both feudal residues and radical leftism, particularly the Marxism of his time.

Weber’s political commitment can also be explained in relation to his personal life. Son of Maximilian Weber senior, prominent member of the National Liberal Party (NLP) and civil servant, Max jr. was profoundly influenced by the nationalist and class demands promoted by his familial environment. Weber’s subsequent academic career, in constant tension between social concerns, a certain fascination for social-democracy and a vicious imperialist conviction, were mixed in a peculiar cocktail that indeed led to path-breaking results in the intellectual and scientific fields, but which were a failure on the political level. Thus, the son of the enlightened German bourgeoisie, hostile to the agrarian-aristocratic block, could engage in patriotic outbursts for German grandeur during the First World War, as well as making passionate calls for a united front between the workers’ aristocracy and the industrialists. His scientific output, in a more complex and intriguing way, develops on this terrain and has made Weber an advocate of agency against the tyranny of the structure. These remarks, it must be said, do not deprive Radkau’s work of any of its importance and originality, though they suggest that one should retain a certain dubious attitude towards solely “naturalistic” explanations.

Joachim Radkau: Max Weber. A Biography
Polity Press, London 2009
ISBN-13: 9780745641478
Hardcover, 700 pages, 25GBP/US$35.00

Sara R. Farris is a research fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht.

This article first appeared in The Philosophers’ Magazine, issue 46; reproduced with permission.