Spiritual Reactionaries after German Reunification: Syberberg, Foucault, and Others

Author(s): Diedrich Diederichsen and Peter Chametzky

Source: October, Vol. 62 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 65-83
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778702
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Spiritual Reactionaries After

German Reunification: Syberberg,
Foucault, and Others

DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN
TRANSLATED BY PETER CHAMETZKY

Just as ancient peoples lived their past h

in their imagination, in mythology,

Germans have lived our future hist

thought, in philosophy. We are philoso

contemporaries of the present day w

being its historical contemporaries.

-Karl Marx, "A Contribution to the

Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of

Right,' Introduction"

First initiation, early in 1982: Dietmar

Kamper invites me to Tiibingen. Mattenklott,

Bergfleth, Sonnemann, Gehrke-and Baudrillard. An easy atmosphere, filled with savoir

vivre. Claudia arranged a perfect menu; I'm

allowed to sit next to Baudrillard and recount

my philosophy to him. After a walk, Kamper,

Baudrillard and I inscribe the book in Holderlin's tower. I am happy.

-Alexander Dill, "Franzosen, Franz-

6ssinnen und ich," Tumult 15

When all the intrinsic conditions are fulfilled, the day of German resurrection will be

announced by the crowing of the Gallic cock.

-Karl Marx, "A Contribution to the

Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of

Right,' Introduction"

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66

OCTOBER

In

1990,

the

promised
a
de
that
would
be
neither
to
the
of
Zeev
Sternh
analysis
of
th
book
was
publ
editions
of
Ba
fear
that
her
"cover
for
a
u
de
Sociologie

-as
To

ambiguiti
reach
thi

Bataille
transl
afford
the
lux

We
must
be
encounter
and
thinking
of
t
good
reasons
Bataille,
they
Germany,
wh
of
a
history
f
lessly,
hazard
identity.

On the occasion of Germany's reunification, fashioning a national identity

has become a widespread occupation, taken up by as many former leftists as

rightists. Those who have posed the uncomfortable question as to why one

needs such an identity have been isolated through elaborate press-and

propaganda-efforts. Dissent over which materials can be used to create the

foundations for an identity, and what historical necessity demands that nations
develop identities at all, were by and large outmaneuvered with suggestive but
vague comments. In this operation Syberberg certainly went too far, or too
early, in the determination of the materials and in specifying their function.
That is, at least when measured against what the official West German essayists
could take at the time in terms of specificity, without coming into conflict with
that which could only be hinted at: Germany's new demands for hegemony, its
capacity for action, whether under U.N. auspices, as an economic power, as the

leader of the European Community, or as a bulwark against the storm of

1. Hans Juirgen Syberberg, Vom Ungliick und Glick der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Kriege

(Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1990).

2. Denis Hollier, "On Equivocation (Between Literature and Politics)," October 55 (Winter 1990),
p. 6.

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Spiritual Reactionaries After German Reunification 67

foreigners from Eastern Europe, whose freedom of travel had been deman
for forty years. That the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)
the chorus of protest against Syberberg's Vom Ungliick und Gliick der Kun
Deutschland nach dem Kriege (On the misfortune and fortune of art in Germ
after the war), in a tone whose shrillness departed from its familiar mild ma
led to the suspicion that one of their own had simply come out into the op

Anti-Semitic "passages" were quickly searched out, identified as scanda

slogans, and cited repeatedly in warning. Yet a more careful reading o

book, rather than highlighting the differences in tone and literary manne

would have revealed its common ground with the workaday ideology o

FAZ.

A symposium was quickly pulled together in Berlin. In the following days

all the daily newspapers and even television reported on this pressing matter

of state. Syberberg fans, among them Susan Sontag, were confronted wit

passages that even she found "shocking," although they had no effect on her
evaluation of the value of Syberberg's art.3 Heiner Miiller moderated laconically

while the audience provided occasional right extremist interruptions. Only

Klaus Theweleit attacked Syberberg directly. Syberberg was supported by his

favorite actress, Edith Clever, who lamented the collapse of standards unde
democracy: according to her, everything had become too crude.

It's no news that Syberberg sees himself as a victim of the cultural bureau-

cracy. He already stormed against mass and oppositional culture more than

decade ago, in Die freudlose Gesellschaft (The joyless society), and again in 1984
in Der Wald steht schwarz und schweigt (The forest stands black and quiet), whos
breathless tone no longer even tried to conceal the signs of a sensibility cloude
by paranoia. The most often cited sentence from the "misfortune book": "One
could make a career out of consorting with Jews or leftists, forming bonds tha
had nothing to do with love, or understanding, or even inclination. Jews must
have put up with this since they wanted power."4 This followed immediately o
the formulation about "art without Volk,5 made cheaper, more comfortable, and
disposable, as punk, pop, or junk." The model for this could be read more than
ten years earlier in Die freudlose Gesellschaft, directed there against people who
wore jeans and sneakers, and anyone else whose clothes were not the stuff of
which either a state or a national identity could be made.
Only one review responded in a friendly way to Syberberg in 1990. Bernd
Mattheus published it in the clerical-conservative weekly Rheinischer MerkurChrist und Welt (Rhein mercury-Christ and world). Mattheus is known for his

aphorisms and as an essayist, and wrote a two-volume "Thanatography" o

3. For this and other information I am indebted to an unpublished manuscript by Huber

Winkel, excerpts of which were published in the Hamburg journal Tempo in October 1990.

4. Syberberg, Vom Ungliick und Gliick, p. 14.

5. Folk, racial, national identity.- Trans.

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68

OCTOBER

George
Ich

&

Bata

gestatte

Seitz

Verl

pessimist
aut
Bloy
were
pu
Artaud, Bataille, Carl Einstein, Marcel Broodthaers, and Oswald Wiener. In it
there were also some signal passages from the publisher that conform astonishingly, and not only stylistically, to the tone struck by Syberberg in 1990 and
before. Take, for example, this statement against what Matthes, based on hearsay, referred to as "radical chic": "prestige, stereotypical and mediocre as the
fashion for a heterosexual hairdresser and a lesbian mother. Godard's films

strive for radicality, as do Achternbusch's productions, and the intellectual

chichi, overly rebellious pubescent fantasies of a Rainald Goetz, which is sim
to what I see in the apocalyptic dandyism of late Beuys. The punk poseur yea
for rankings and unambiguous relations just as much as the organization m
And is the computer freak going about his business any different?"7 And aga
the postmodern: "The thesis that only the endless resurrection of the alrea
familiar is possible I take for the argument of the entertainer in a whorehou
society."8 Finally, he comes out against an "anthropomorphic" (where anthr

pocentric is probably what he means) zeitgeist, which has no clue as to t

radicality.

It is a sign of the passage of seven years' time that Syberberg speaks n

only about "pop, punk, and junk," as if he can no longer even take the time
name what he finds diffuse, threatening, dirty, and above all, frivolous. Bef
while not taking the trouble to examine and test the grounds for his hate
the contemporary whorehouse culture under examination, at least the name

of some randomly attacked persons were mentioned-Beuys, Goetz, Goda

Achternbusch-none of whom he was apparently very familiar with, as well

putative signs of the times-punks, computer freaks, heterosexual hairdress
Syberberg does not seem to have noticed the tautology in using terms like p

or junk to criticize people who had already characterized their product

methods according to those same terms.

It is too late to search for other allies among the critics of commodificati
probably because despite the constant conjuring up of a mentality dedicated
empty consumption and dissipation, it is slowly emerging that something e
is really at issue: as opposed to the depressive Matthes of 1985, Syberberg i
the meantime has a new hope. Indeed, his book is not only about misfortun

6. Bernd Mattheus and Axel Matthes, eds., Ich gestatte mir die Revolte (Munich: Matthes & Sei
1990).

7. Axel Matthes, "Achtung vor der Revolte," in ibid., p. 384.

8. Ibid., p. 371.

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Spiritual Reactionaries After German Reunification 69

but also about fortune. But before that can accrue, much has to disappe
fast as possible, that could endanger the new identity.
Syberberg publishes in various normally respected, liberal, mainst
presses. Diogenes was the last one before Matthes & Seitz. His first boo
Matthes & Seitz, as we shall see, shocked even Matthes, a publisher who, af
all, was quite familiar with the tendency. From Syberberg's preface it app
that the press wanted an introductory positioning that would perhaps obs
what, in fact, could not be missed. Syberberg knuckles under and nam
heroes: Anselm Kiefer, Andrei Tarkovskii, Thomas Bernhard; in politics
bachev, Vaclav Havel, and Walesa; then Ernst Jfinger, Heidegger, and
Hannah Arendt, before he loses himself in biblical, mythical, and ancient
ures.9 A year later, a few of these names (Jiinger, Heidegger) show up
when Axel Matthes writes, in his contribution to the Matthes & Seitz year
Der Pfahl (The pole), about the "philistine fellow travelers among Ge
intellectuals," who are described in connection with what had by then
transformed from the "Syberberg Debate" into the "Syberberg Affair."' T
dor W. Adorno received an unexpected place of honor here ("despite hi
malice toward Heidegger, Spengler, and Sibelius, he was an outstandin
arch") among such leading figures of German "neoconservatism" (to p
discreetly) as Carl Schmitt, Spengler, etc. Matthes cited Adorno from
"Stalin just clears his throat and they throw Kafka and van Gogh on the d
heap." This is then applied without adjustment to our own liberal-infe
culture: "In the meantime, a magazine editor only needs to complain a
Syberberg and these combat-league types shun the author, the artist, and
whole publishing house." The particularly comic element is the comparison

Stalin with the man implicated here, the rather harmless Mr. Karasek, an ed
for Der Spiegel who most enjoys providing a genial gloss under a pseudony
writing about Woody Allen, and whose most radical gesture was apparentl

admission more than ten years ago that he could enjoy a James Bond m

This is made worse by Matthes's inflationary false relationships: Karasek is

than Stalin, the crime of shunning Syberberg more dangerous than the du

heap for Kafka and van Gogh. That Adorno suffers for all this is cert
symptomatic.

We must cite a further source, the anthology published in 1978 by

Berlin Merve Verlag called Das Schillern der Revolte (The shimmer of revo
which stood not only at the beginning of the reception of recent French th
among the (former) German left, but which also introduced the rather re
able career of the concept of revolt that finds its provisional end in Syberb

9. Syberberg, Vom Unglick und Gliick, p. 17.

10. Axel Matthes, "Spiesser und Mitliufertum bei Intellektuellen," in Der Pfahl-Jahrbuc

dem Niemandsland zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft, no. 5 (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1991).

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70

OCTOBER

heroic
rebellio
Merve
describ
Besides
Sohn-R
were
referred

ogy

were

pub

scripts
from
Foucault,
Alth
still
variously
Foucault
and
D
group
of
spec
its
many
foot
tari's
Anti-Oe
work
for
the
types
as
the
f
along
with
Di
derived
from

became

"ca

Tumult-Zeitsc
theory);
Dietm
and
the
Fouca
from
the
"Kar
whose
symbol
wall
slogans."
Actually
the
that
was
not
p
in
Germany
i
banned
in
195
the
Godesberg
see
a
Brecht
p
in
the
wake
o

KPD/ML
seem

KBW

repetit

discipline
wer
believed
they
class.
Characte
line
that
decla

as

lesser

11.

Frank

13.

Walter

ev

B6ckel

Ulrich
Raulff,
Wa
12.
Sozialistischer

p. 85.

Seitte

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Spiritual Reactionaries After German Reunification 71

important enough that young comrades would join the anti-Soviet West G
military rather than making the bourgeois-pacifist gesture of resisting obli
military service. The other part of the movement, meanwhile, either "ma

through the institutions" or carried on an "armed struggle."4

Around the end of the 1970s, the K-Groups began to break up, and th
former members in many cases filtered into the ranks of the Spontis, ci

action groups, and other "autonomous" or "micropolitical" movement

same time saw the beginning of the German reception of a new French t
whose texts, however, were generally then about a decade old. The "liquid
of one's own past in a K-Group seems to have gone on at about the sam

and with the same smoothness as the late 1980s transformation of theorists

from orthodox Marxism or Critical Theory to Systems Theory. In that a French

theory was used that already stood in opposition to the orthodoxy of the

established left, some fought to exorcise their own Stalinism and that of the K
Groups as if it had had a meaning either to the individuals or the groups that
it never really did. This Stalinism itself had been a hysterical answer to the lack
of a history of communism in Germany. As such, the fight against it was a farc
without force that possessed some charming aspects of youthful scout's-honortype clannishness, which aside from a few small psychodramas has no real blood
on its hands. Its "genesis anamnesis" would have sufficed to accomplish a kind
of Protestant self-flagellation, if in this act of contrition about the arrogance of
assuming political importance a new nostrum had not swept everything under
the rug: that we all have skeletons in the closet and need to transform ourselves
as quickly as possible into responsible and compromising democrats, whethe
in the Green party or somewhere else.
Such a past for Seitter is indeed not known. But that one had to perceive
May '68 totally differently was a message warmly greeted all over at the begin
ning of the 1980s: suddenly it was a totally different May, not the May of the
enrages and the Situationists, not the May of Maoists and the General Strike;
instead it was the May of poetry and Cohn-Bendit, the May that led directly to

Ariane Mnouchkine and Jerome Savary, and no longer to Guy Debord or

Jacques Mesrine or Malcolm McLaren. Colorful, carnivalesque fantasies vied

everywhere for power.

The texts in Schillern can be explained in relation to their historical context
in that they make arguments against a left-wing common-sense approach that

had, in its time, become frigid and made peace with the social democrati
cultural bureaucracy. The changes of 1977/78 also play into the fact that th

14. The "march through the institutions" was an emphatically proclaimed battle cry of the project
of altering society from within, announced around the time of the dissolution of the SDS and APO

(Auflerparlementarische [extra-parliamentary] Opposition), which actually turned out to be a euphemism

for career building in the culture industry and cultural bureaucracy. "Armed struggle" means the
Red Army Faction.

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72

OCTOBER

social
democra
way.
Indeed,
e

Red
Army
Fa
plained
his
co
belated
Comm

the
self-punis
cization
was
d
democratic
po
of
punk
rock.

antithesis

of

intellectuals
w
readings
of
M
stone
of
polit
publishing-ho

Matthes
&
Se
together
in
t
solitaire,
if
n

correct
attitud
on
the
cover
o

beloved

piece

Federal
Repub
against
the
gr
not
to
be
fobb
"It's
a
type
o
thology
of
th
wrote
Robert
now
supposed
was
not
only
i
Germany,
but
state
of
stude
"identities"
th
wing
homilies
World
that
pr
identified
and
this
a
"subver
name
of
the
m
exciting
quota
was
still
prett

15.
16.

BKA,
Bundes
Robert
Mull

Schillern,

p.

19.

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Spiritual Reactionaries After German Reunification 73

evidenced by Agnoli and Bruickner.) At the end of their text Muiller and
ropoulos quoted a bon mot or aphorism of a certain Gerd Bergfleth, p
in poetic form. A few years later a text by Bergfleth appeared in an ant
published by Matthes & Seitz called Zur Kritik der palavernden Aufkliirun
tique of the palavering Enlightenment), which for the first time brought

charges of anti-Semitism against a Matthes & Seitz book-charges leve

the Hamburg journal Spuren, among others." Authors who up until th

published with the press, such as Elisabeth Lenk, who had worked on sur

and provided the first Bataille edition for Matthes & Seitz, withdrew
manuscripts." Matthes & Seitz was at the time the German press that

with Merve, most thoroughly and partisanly published long-neglected Fr

texts in Germany. Bataille, Artaud, Laure, Leiris, and Barthes were br

out by Matthes & Seitz. When Baudrillard's Symbolischer Tausch und d
(Symbolic exchange and death) appeared in 1982, the publisher Matthe

vided the book with a long afterword by Bergfleth (against the author's w

and proceeded the same way again when Die Gattliche Linke (The hol

appeared.19 This time one afterword did not suffice: in addition to the R
art theorist Boris Groys, two authors were included who hardly required
posure as members of the radical right wing in Germany. One is Hans Di
Sander, editor of the right extremist journal Staatsbriefe (Letters of stat

author of such texts as "The National Imperative-Plans and Componen

the Remaking of Germany" and "On the Spiritual Bondage of the Ge

and Its Possible Alleviation." The other is Giinther Maschke, a slippery fi

who originally went to Cuba as a leftist, took part in a putsch attempt ag
Castro, and returned as a right-wing theorist and philologist. He has d
much work to Carl Schmitt, the constitutional lawyer who provided a jus
tion for Hitler's Enabling Act, and who is now enjoying a widespread
sance.20 Today, Maschke is editing the work of Schmitt's Spanish prec

Juan Donoso Cortes. That Maschke and Sander publish with Matthes &

hardly troubles those intellectuals who all these years have gotten their B
and Oswald Wiener, their Baudrillard and Panizza from the same source. O
Baudrillard himself is troubled, since he has to read his afterwords.2'

17. Gerd Bergfleth et al., Zur Kritik der palavernden Aufklirung (Munich: Matthes & Seitz,

18. See note 3.

19. Jean Baudrillard, Der Symbolische Tausch und der Tod (Munich: Matthes & S

20. It remains to be shown, however, whether or not parts of his work are

investigating. Some of the Maoists of the 1970s read Schmitt solely for his idea of

called him an "exceptional German political thinker" in 1991.

21. Maschke published once more in 1988 with Matthes & Seitz, in the press yea
no. 2. From the publication information one learns the astounding fact that his es

Geste des Untergangs-Drieu La Rochelle-ein faschistischer Decadent" (The b

of decline-Drieu La Rochelle-a fascist decadent) had already appeared in the Fr

meine Zeitung in 1980.

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74

OCTOBER

Excerpts
fro
him
from
his

"committed
German
adhe
1991
contribu

from Foucault:22

The people (Volk) have achieved what only Beethoven's Ninth has
before: they have rocked the world. All the stigmas affixed to them

have been erased, all their supposed servility overcome. . . . The

German Democratic Republic's popular movement represents the real
Germany, which has been betrayed by West Germans in favor of the
capitalist, liberal economic epidemic that eats away the collective body
(Volkskiirper) of the people.23 Betrayed to a cult of technology that is
laying waste to the land, and to cosmopolitan contradictions that are

designed to achieve the destruction of Germany's folk character

(Volkscharakter). Liberalism is the vanguard of European/Atlantic

nihilism.... Lifting the occupation on both sides, together with an
armed, independent, unified Germany is the minimum required ...
because rebirth requires a popular, racial (volkmdfiige) renewal that
still lies ahead for West Germans. Only when this deracinated populace (Unvolk) rises up against its technological, American servitude
will it be ready as a free people to unite with the free people the
GDR. The popular uprising in the GDR is the first act of a national
uprising of all Germans, at the end of which will result unity for the
nation, the German Reich.24

Four years earlier Rolf Grimminger had confronted Axel Matthes with

passages such as this one from Bergfleth, an author in whom Matthes had
shown such an interest." Grimminger: Your author Bergfleth published an
essay in which pernicious untruths glide by, restoring volkisch national myths

that approach those of National Socialism. How do you as publisher react to

this scandal? Matthes: Your reading, which you share with others of leftist

22. Gerd Bergfleth, "Finis Mundi," in Der Pfahl, no. 5, p. 8.

23. The German word used here, Volksk6rper, constitutes the populace as collective, racially
homogenous body, as opposed to the English "body politic." An unabridged dictionary defines the
masculine noun Volksk6rper, a term little used since the Nazi period, as "the Volk thought of as a

living organism" ("Das Volk als lebender organismus gedacht"). Deutsches Worterbuch vonJacob Grimm
und Wilhelm Grimm, V. 12/2 (Rudolf Meiszner, ed., Leipzig: Hirzel 1951, Munich: ETV, 1984, p. 486).

That the author quoted here uses the term Volk-people, folk, nation, race-repeatedly and in

many different forms clearly betrays his reactionary ideological position. -Trans.

24. Cited in Wolfgang Schneider, "Deutsche Manifeste," in SPEX 5/90 (Cologne: SPEX Verlag,
1990), pp. 8, 74f.

25. Rolf Grimminger, Die Ordnung, das Chaos und die Kunst (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), p. 267f.

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Spiritual Reactionaries After German Reunification 75

origins who write in the press, is incorrect. Comparisons were made with
senberg and Streicher. One does not read what one reads, one reads wh
is. Grimminger: Just a moment, I'll cite Bergfleth in the original: "That en

ened Jewry in the rule has no sense of... the special German charact
romantic aspirations . . . recollections of the pagan Germanic past." Or
worse: "So the new Enlightenment breeds a nonperson . . . a Germ

European, an American, Jew or whatever, anything but himself. Then, th

to the liberal reeducation that was completed after the defeat in the War,
becomes a guest worker in his own country . . . who is charitably cultivat

the left-wing master cynics of the Enlightenment mafia." That's en

Matthes: I know, Bergfleth challenges our self-assured Zeitgeist, break

West German taboo, especially among intellectuals, to whom, as a publishe

also belong. I can understand my own agitation, since I was raised intellect

on a diet of Benjamin and Adorno. Bergfleth is no philo-Semite, and i

Federal Republic, there exists a philo-Semitism that is just as unfree a
hypocritical. But Bergfleth . . . is not a racist anti-Semite. No more
Nietzsche! ... Adorno came out sharply against Dvorak, Rachmaninoff,

kovsky, but does that make him anti-Slavic?

And again, Adorno. It's not only that their early intellectual diet no lon
seems so healthy that these spirits laden down by too much philo-Semitism

bringing him up. It's also of course because of his critique of the cu

industry, his disinclination for jazz and American popular culture, about w
he had vague conceptions similar to those Syberberg has about junk and pu

and Matthes about Godard and computer freaks. And because he was m

by turn-of-the-century bourgeois artistic taste, to which the reactionary

lover can always warm. As in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where general ch
teristics of the culture industry are supposed to be discussed, the discussio
on the one hand, only about the New Deal films, with frequent references
Frank Capra plots or, on the other, to Cecil B. DeMille extravaganzas, altho
by the time the book was written conclusions based on this aspect of the cu
industry were already becoming obsolete. So, too, the whole agitation of S
berg, Bergfleth, and Matthes is directed against cultural productions and e

that are seen as threatening because they defy orderly comprehension

poststructuralist and deconstructionist aesthetes, freed from left-wing posi

make increasingly seductive offers to dispose of the waste products lying o
cultural slag heap by sorting out the culture industry and its supposed pro

into-depending on their degree of right wing radicality-"American,"

eign," "artificial," and all the way to "Jewish." Only a gigantic clean-up ef
seems to make possible the reconstruction of the identity promised by the
on the Syberberg cover (undoubtedly by Matthes). According to Syberberg
have been taken over by the plastic world. When we climb into a car, a pla
aboard ship, when we purchase today's kitchen, let ourselves into today
world, from the studio and substance to the image of the world, we enter

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76

OCTOBER

world

of

art

substance,
and
Syberberg's
a
ness
and
auth
harmless
com
from
silicon,
of
the
success
in
Mediamatic
in
the
same
y
wart
(On
the
a
kind
of
cult
obscuring
me

discourse,
punk

Steiner

with

"r

(Syberb
and

electro

unstable art world. So the call for a return to the Authentic can count

on public approval. The overkill, however, which is real, is a logical

consequence of the new media's phase of introduction onto the market. This will regulate itself via restraints and bankruptcies, irrespective of the authenticity wrapper. The drumroll of the oaken sticks on
tightly stretched pig's bladders which can be heard at fetes and street

festivals (amplified or not) is at present passing before us in the

media's consolidation phase, followed by an authentic tape of 60s
music and the latest technodisco. It is for lack of a primary media
theory that Syberberg and Steiner can not only lash out so naively
and conservatively, but on top of it get discussed as ground-breaking
thinkers. If enough were known about the connections and technical
possibilities of the media (and its history), such contributions would
instantly be lost in the everyday multicultural shuffle.27
It is precisely this "shuffle" that is Syberberg's biggest concern. The evil
scent of an overly powerful villain, the multicultural society, wafts through the
book. Syberberg smells the clear morning air for the first time in the last part
of the book, written after the opening of the Wall. "And suddenly it became
clear why it all had to disappear: the center, the consciousness of unity and of
collapse triumphed up to the catastrophe, to which it had to lead, like furies of
the European disappearance from the center of its life force with pop neuroses,

26. Syberberg, Vom Ungliick und Gliick, p. 114f.

27. Geert Lovink and Basjam Van Stam, "The Souring of Old Art," Mediamatic 2/3 (Amsterdam,
1991). English in original.

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Spiritual Reactionaries After German Reunification 77

freak decadence, punk randomness, realism of decline, or existentialism af

the false liberation of 1945, and with the Socialist Realism of the East, the b

and soilless art of the power eunuchs. Where a new beginning can only be
an archaic origin from the center of losses, if the truth of feelings regul
reason, where true tears and laughter banish everything unnatural."28
Walter Seitter deals with the new conditions more soberly, and in bet
German. His lectures on the Nibelungenlied appeared regularly in the 1980
Merve Verlag, after he had already written on Lacan and translated and ed
Foucault.29 In these he regularly recommended the reading of the Nibelun
as an example of Foucault's "ethnology of one's native culture" (Ethnologie
eigenen Kultur). One would certainly find that strange upon realizing that
cault's sketch of an ethnology, one which "instead of defining itself in the

place-as it has done until now-as the study of societies without histo

deliberately . . . seek[s] its object in the area of the unconscious processes t

characterize the system of a given culture,"30 could hardly have meant th
Nibelungenlied would provide insights in this sense into the unconscious pro
that characterize the system of the given (German) culture. And this not

because the Nibelungenlied has behind it a whole reception history as a

mythology, which Seitter is much less interested in illuminating than its "po
wisdom." In principle, though, rash applications such as this are attractive,
they at least oppose the lame cult of admiration that prevails among acade

Seitter, born in 1941, is himself an idiosyncratic special case (inde

solitaire) whose lecture style is just as unique-he articulates every syllable

it has a magical power-as his surprising couplings among things traditi
kept separate. Both Nibelungen books are decorated on the interior cover w
photographs by Helmut Newton, one of Seitter's personal aesthetic obsessi

The others are Anselm Kiefer and ... Syberberg. His method was consp

early on for its admixture of philological thoroughness and original simpl

cation. Seitter believes in precision, in thorough analytical work ("not theo
not speculative summarizing, instead work").31 He believes in finding the
correct expression for an idea, just as he does in clarity of articulation. The
one can also assume that the use of the word "right," connoting both a pol

and a correct position, can not be an accidental ambiguity in the title

essay "On the Right Use of the French."32

28. Syberberg, Vom Ungliick und Glick, p. 169.

29. Walter Seitter, Das politische Wissen im Nibelungenlied (Berlin: Merve, 1987), and Verspr

Versagen-Frauenmacht und Frauenaisthetik in Krimhild Diskussion des 13. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: M

1990).
30. Michel Foucault, Die Ordnung der Dinge (Les Mots et les choses) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974),
p. 454. Translation from The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 379.
31. Seitter, Versprechen, cover text.
32. Seitter, "Vom rechten Gebrauch der Franzosen," Tumult 15 (Vienna, 1991).

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78

OCTOBER

There
is
mu
argument.
Se
southeast corner." He recommends to Germans an "ethnocentrism," which he

again ennobles as the application of a Foucaultian "ethnology of the native

culture." The models he offers for this are his own work on the Nibelungen and
Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama. German ethnocentrism is certainly blooming on every level. And it is certainly questionable whether Germany
can serve as a proper subject for an ethnology of native culture, since who can
draw the distinction between what is "native" and what "foreign"? And to what
end? Above all, what will have to be cleared away and shut out before starting
on the "native"? Certainly the "multiculture" so suspect to Syberberg, certainly
also oppositional, mass, and pop culture. Probably also the internationalism of
the established arts. (Seitter is more circumspect here: "I am not referring to
contemporary artistic production. I do not want to pronounce a global judgment, but allow me the remark that for me neither the internationalism of the
cult of state opera stars, nor that of Viennese avant-gardism, are of interest.")33
A development preceded such political positionings: in the afterword to
the anthology of Foucault interviews that he edited, Vom Subversion des Wissens
(On the subversion of knowledge), Seitter still approved of Foucault's friendship
with Althusser and grounded Foucault's departure from the Communist party
emphatically in its "support for the state."34 Now not only does he give the new
German state advice on its internal structure, he plays off Foucault as a friend
of the Germans against the less "German-friendly" Gilles Deleuze, using Eribon's
Foucault biography and the description in it of the split between Foucault and
Deleuze, which had to do with their assessments of the Red Army Faction and

whether one should give them unqualified support or only make sure that
members got political asylum in France. Foucault had, according to Seitter,
praised Erhard's "social market economy" and allowed himself an "anxious
optimism" as regards Germany. Finally, in passing, Seitter takes care of the
second most famous Frankfurt School belief, from Horkheimer: "He who would
discuss fascism must also discuss capitalism."35 He buries the lapidary unmasking
of Germany's mistaken anticapitalism in a footnote: "Classic anti-Semitism is

33. Seitter, Versprechen, p. 13.

34. Michel Foucault, Von der Subversion des Wissens, ed. and with an afterword by Walter Seitter

(Munich: Hanser, 1974).

35. Rendered as "he who does not wish to speak of capitalism should be silent about fascism" in

David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,

1980), p. 52, with the source given as Max Horkheimer, "Die Juden und Europa," Zeitschrift fiir
Sozialforschung,
vol.issue
8, no.
(1939),Seitter
p. 115.-iTrans.
In the latest
of1/2
Tumult,
even speaks of the "antifascist consensus (Adorno/
Honecker)," which clearly refers to the duo Adorno/Horkheimer, and goes on to praise Helmut
Newton, of all people, as "the only morally correct German intellectual" because he hasn't been
part of this German postwar antifascism (Tumult 16 [Vienna, 1992], p. 119).

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Spiritual Reactionaries After German Reunification 79

also a form of anticapitalism-a particularly dumb one. This preliminarily

applies also to antifascism." With that Seitter comically draws on a well-traveled

bon mot by the founder of German Social Democracy, August Bebel: "Anti-

Semitism is the fool's socialism." To repeat this after 1945 is not only odd: all
over the world, and certainly in Germany, there is flagrant racism to which no
anticapitalist sentiments can be ascribed. Is anti-Semitism then a special case of
racism, a historical "mistake" of the same magnitude as anticapitalism? Is the
observation that racialism as a result of a capitalist mode of production differentiates itself from all earlier "racisms"-to an extent that one can speak of the

same phenomenon only when speaking in the most general terms-only a

mistake of confused late Communists, all evidence to the contrary? A racialism

that also survives unchallenged in liberal German writings: Spiegel can only
manage to write about the events in Los Angeles as "racial unrest" and "race

riots," without even using the quotation marks. And is antifascism, which indeed
usually also conceives of itself as anticapitalism, finally in truth closer to antiSemitism than to its opposite?
We are likewise amazed when, in a relatively inconspicuous place, Seitter
defines politics as: "Apartheit: the installation of relations among foreign peoples."36 Is the near homonym of this newly invented German word, Apartheit,
supposed to connote that the "Apartheid" with which one is familiar is really

not so bad-in fact, only politics? And it becomes clear that only Foucault's

name remains from the rejection of ceremonies supporting the state and sympathy for the black flag, since Seitter now thinks that Bonn lacks "the classic
minimum for political authority," a "statesman." In the social democratic 1970s
in Germany, Foucault still stood for the left, whether or not it was anarchistic:
today he delivers models for "genealogy," "archaeology," or "ethnology" to the
nation born anew again.
But one could, if interpreting generously, take all this for the eclectic slips
of an independent scholar, whose leaps among references and preference for
surprising borrowings were once an engaging method, and whose citations still
reveal just as much of a debt to essays by such left radical authors as Wolfgang
Pohrt.37 But it is rather sadly telling that this essay dedicated to the theme of
"Frenchmen," which opened number fifteen of the journal Tumult, edited by

Seitter, B6ckelmann, and Kamper, had already appeared in number six of

Etappe. Etappe is an organ that hides its radical right-wing positions no better

36. In 1989 Seitter translated two Foucault lectures that were published by Merve under the title
as Das Licht des Krieges (The light of war). There Foucault labels primary uprisings against sovereignty
as "racism," but differentiates this term from the "state racisms" of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries. This volume was also well-received by Etappe.

37. All quotations derive from the Seitter essay cited in note 32. Wolfgang Pohrt has recently
emerged as a sharp critic of all the bluster about Germanity and of the more or less latent anti-

Semitism of the left.

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80

OCTOBER

than
does
its
spersed
with
about
the
wo
the
Karoling
Langendorf.
own
press
am
book
that
cl
than
its
caus
"certain
phil
doing
in
a
pl
Ernesto Laclau wrote in 1990:

An initial reaction to this new intellectual climate has been to become

entrenched in the defence of "reason" and attempt to relaunch the

project of "modernity" in opposition to those tendencies considered
"nihilistic." The work of Habermas is perhaps the most representative
of this attitude. Our position, however, is exactly the opposite: far
from perceiving in the "crisis" of reason a nihilism which leads to the

abandonment of any emancipatory project, we see the former as

opening unprecedented opportunities for a radical critique of all

forms of domination, as well as for the formulation of liberation

projects hitherto restrained by the rationalist "dictatorship" of the

Enlightenment.38
In 1978 it might have been possible in Germany to write this; by 1990 it no

longer seemed so. The connection of a critique of reason with projects of

emancipation has at best contributed to a depoliticization and at worst to the
right-wing radicalization of an intellectual generation. The old Marxist diagnosis
of Germans' philosophical contemporaneity without historicity proves valid once
again. In the 1980s not a single minority, counter-cultural, feminist, or antiracist
movement of the type that would have moved beyond Green enviro-kitsch or
simple peacenikdom could get a foothold, let alone link up with an emancipatory

concept grounded in a critique of reason. The "nihilistic" three P's (punk,

poststructuralism, postmodernism) erased from experience and memory what
they once wanted or were supposed to correct and bring up to date: a frigid
and rigid culture of emancipation, as well as its origins. But their precursors
were not at all socially grounded: one political hysteria could be easily exchanged
for another; one didn't even need to change philosophies. Today professors in
Germany wonder how and why in the United States Derrida and Foucault can
be used in the struggles of feminists or African Americans.
Hubert Winkels has uncovered in his research a wealth of personal con38. Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London/New York: Verso, 1990),

pp. 3-4.

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Spiritual Reactionaries After German Reunification 81

nections between the open and the cultural right.39 To repeat them here
vidually would be tiresome. Actually, in spite of everything, it is not my in
to place Seitter on the same level as Syberberg. One can still hope that th
from a poetic interpretation of May to publishing along with the commo
Semites is a dangerous wrong turn taken by this right-wing Foucaultian,
is typical for disoriented, displaced times. Syberberg, on the other hand, d
off long ago into a zone where he can no longer be reached by the crowin

the Gallic cock. In the confrontation with these specters one is throw
upon positions that one had thought to be either superfluous or self-evid
is certainly irritating, though, that this expedition takes one into a time l
the beginning of which there was great hope. Around 1980 it actually see
as if it would be possible to stage or weave together a worldwide synchro
"patchwork of minorities," as Lyotard called it so optimistically.
When I published an earlier version of this text I often heard the ch
coming from well-intentioned postmodern corners, that I was giving voi
an outmoded differentiation of right/left that belongs to the same syste
terroristic binarisms as white/black, man/woman, and so forth. Now then:

lines and formations that emerge from a sketch of the German fate of s

"poststructuralist" and "francophile" thought perhaps deserve a new

denoting this specific cultural pessimism, the components of which are d

of originality (Urspriinglichkeit) and authenticity, along with a disinclinat
ward electronic, multicultural, and "foreign" arts. If Seitter, in the n
Foucault, commends a "rational, stable and flexible relationship to pow

he only sees "criminal regimes" in the former East and desires a re

fashioned "statesman" in Bonn, he stands to the right of more than just

left-oriented journalists who want to see a country normalized and with
mercial capacities (even if those economic and other interests promise no
for the rest of the world). However, the whole economic dimension, exce

an old text by Kojeve, is miraculously suspended from consideration

entire Tumult issue.

As the diminished children of a Germany limited to economic action, my

generation had the chance to perceive ethics (and what it forbids: crime) primarily on a global scale, even if the connections among global exploitation were

still so "complex" that this could obscure the perception of global crime. A
capitalism that is on the whole no longer even capable of exploitation, and
which has therefore become inconspicuous, can be well used, in the name of
Dumezil and Foucault, by German ethnocentrics and those who decree the
"reasonable contribution of [Germany] to the creation of a world power called

Europe." The basic idea is simple and has been propagated in every type of

recent German writing: Germany's problem is not self-interest, nationalism,

39. See note 3.

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82

OCTOBER

desire
for
he
mans
tend
to

politically

anything-wo

have been derived from a difference and a distance that have become our

"own." The new writing, however, wants to hear as little about German

grants as the German politicians and the normal reactionaries want t

about immigrants, to whom they react as if they can hardly be accomm

anymore. This is the response, whether it is to the writing of emigrants
thought was formed while fleeing from the Nazis, or to the few more-acc

figures in postwar German literature, such as Hubert Fichte or Rolf

Brinkmann, who sketched a German literature in flight from the "Germa

Germany's state theater writer, Botho Strauss, who not long ago

published with Matthes & Seitz, wrote the afterword for the German edit
the Steiner essay, and in it he repeatedly confessed allegiance to the "spi
reactionary" (a self-evaluation) Nicolas Davila, whose name is dropped oft
Etappe and Pfahl. Tracing connections in this manner might be reminisc
the way a district attorney traces suspects, and all too often we got to k
at the time as punk rockers-the methodology of social democratic sociolo
powers: suspicious reading finding the Fascist suspect. But as long as the "
hides behind ambiguities, there is nothing else to do. In Germany, unlik
America, Bataille and Foucault have not been authors whose work has been
socially grounded and fruitful for "emancipatory movements," or whatever one
wants to call them. Their reception made possible, in favorable cases, a depoliticization, and in the unfavorable ones, as has been discussed here, a rehabilitation of right-wing positions. Bataille did not make Syberberg, but a left that

gave him over to Matthes & Seitz cleared the way for the creation of an

atmosphere in which Syberberg's publication could profit. In this new front,

connections to fragmentary remains from Adorno have also been forged, while
Derrida, for example, remains a scandal. The "de Man case" could be celebrated
with pleasure by the right-wing FAZ as a "scandal of the leftists" and their
"fashion," deconstruction. With the latest revelations about de Man, Der Spiegel
has felt justified in its opinion that "deconstructionists" are the type of people
who don't pay their rent on time. Meanwhile Adorno and the Frankfurt School
have ascended to the level of stylites in the Frankfurt paper, where they are
reduced to pure culture critics. Much maligned control mechanisms, such as

those used by the "p.c." movement in America, are revealed as something

Germany could well have used. Syberberg is someone who has always been

somewhat off balance, and he would have therefore been viewed with suspicion
by those who now form ranks in which he is accepted. This comes after years
of having not been criticized by those who had their hands full clambering to
the heights of postmodern reflection. The Gallic cock could crow itself hoarse.

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Spiritual Reactionaries After German Reunification 83

We have arrived at only this: we want our own beautiful culture and history, so

we write our own little Foucaultian books about German odds and ends and

cultivate our own Batailles. Seitter himself called this usage "right." Sylv

Lotringer said, in a recent interview in Artscribe, that Baudrillard is no long

interesting to him since he "has been so taken up by the new right."40 Pleas
send definitions of "left" to the appropriate addresses.

40. Matthew Collings, "Interview with Sylvere Lotringer," Artscribe 88 (London, September 199

p. 41.

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