Grass mowed down

Sign and Sight has translated Monika Maron's lacerating critique of Günter Grass's diary of German reunification. In the recently published selection, Grass, she writes,

is doing precisely what he accuses others of doing: he is colonising, if only mentally. He decides whose opinions are valid, he knows what's right for those gullible, backwards, Deutsch-Mark crazed East Germans, what they should want and idiotically don't want, and he steps up to intercede in their best interests, as if they were too stupid to articulate them themselves. He decides what succeeded and what failed. And German reunification was a failure for Grass, today and 18 years ago when, on 13 January 1991, finally reunited with his beloved Portuguese cacti he writes. Should, if have time and energy, take stock again next October 3rd in my usual 'dogmatic' way.

And this is exactly what he did. On October 2, 1991 Günter Grass rattled off a speech in Bitterfeld about bargains, victors, the reunification treaty as colonial order, the failure of unification. But the emphasis was on the stupidity of having ignored his, Grass's, suggestions for a cautious rapprochement and a later confederation of the two states. No, this unity is not worth celebrating, Grass said. ...Which of history's devils has ridden us, driving us to botch the gift of a possible confederation, and instead to hammer together a unity that supports nothing but its own ends.

Twelve months after reunification Grass explained to the people of Bitterfeld, who had been catapulted out of all certainties and habits, that German reunification had failed, that they themselves had been betrayed, robbed and colonised and, what's more, they were idiotic enough to have voted for this unfortunate mess.

While it's worth taking exception to some of her later points about the triumph of green capitalism in the "new states" of the re-unified country, Maron's main mark against Grass is a strong one about the rhetoric of "colonialism" doubling back on itself. The sketch of the pitiful East German is an easy one to draw. Certainly the material and systemic power was against them, but any reading of their "passivity" needs to take account of the interplay between individual autonomy and institutional, structural arrangements. (Easy on the Giddens and Castoriadis, mister!) A book like Birgit Müller's Disenchantment with Market Economics - an anthropological study of Ossis and their workplaces, review coming soon - shows the complexity of these negotiations. After reading such a work, it would seem flatly wrong to characterise as "passive" those affective and biographical labours that were entailed in the Wende for many Ossis - and Wessis, too.

Grass seems to get a few things right and his passion is certainly admirable, if a little misguided. If my bodgy Deutsch can stand it, the thing seems worth a look.

The parting of the curtain

The 2009 Berlinale ran a series called After Winter Comes Spring (Winter Adé) in which was shown a selection of films that "presage the Fall of the Wall".

The press release says: "The prints we are presenting are mostly new and have come from Bulgaria, Germany, Poland, Romania, Russia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. They include feature and documentary works, as well as animated and experimental films, all of which were produced between 1977 and 1989, and convey a sense of the radical changes to come."

I say: this was a strong run of films. Given the generally fucked nature of ticketing at the Berlinale—in which, it seems, even a ticket can't guarantee you entry—I didn't get to see all that I wanted to see. Nevertheless, there's only so much cinema a regular human (das ist mir!) can swallow in eight days. There are those professional festival haunters who seem to run from screening to screening with a kind of detached passion—rolling out of their 4-star suite each morning, grizzled yet tastefully attired (recycled-materials shoulder bags, department store jackets, North Face trousers), checking Gmail on their iPhone until the credits roll, eating chain cafe baguettes and slurping over-milked cappuccinos. Long ago they liked movies. Now they just see them. I am not one of these people. Although, y'know, I understand the appeal. I did a Cinema Studies degree, after all...

I present below a few summaries/reviews/reflections/desecrations. A couple of these weren't in the Winter Adé series. But, for some regrettable reason, I decided to only see German or socialist films this year. (Hence the slightly bitter tone at points. Why am I here watching these Romanian dunces when I could be seeing Kate Winselet?) So that, at least, ties them together.

The Scarecrow (Tschutschelo)

Decent Soviet two-parter in which a girl is ostracised by her peers in a primary school. A new pupil in an established group, the twelve year-old is immediately tainted by association with her eccentric uncle. More than that, she is an upstanding citizen, willing to be moral and true to her sense of self. She is cast out by a particularly mendacious girl who leads the rest of the class in their physical attacks and verbal taunting. Willingness of boys to beat the shit out of a girl shows the success of Soviet egalitarianism. Equality for all in schoolyard beatings!

Made between 1983 and 1986, there is an obvious thematic core, overlapping with other children's narratives (Lord of the Flies etc) but of immediate importance for an audience in a Soviet state sliding toward its end: dissent, moral fibre and the folly of blind support for leaders. Many of the children it was made for, of course, were to reach adulthood under a new system—where these lessons were of just as much use.

Experimentalfilme

A suite of seven experimental films made in or about communist countries.

-In-Sight (Ein-Blick)
A camera is set-up in the window of a West Berlin apartment abutting the Wall. It films one frame a second for twelve hours. Shot in 1987, Ein-Blick shows indolent border guards, lovers breakfasting, gymnastics groups and schoolchildren playing. Whenever a subject looks directly at the camera, the movement freezes. "This GDR," I think to myself, "looks OK."

-From My Window (Z mojego okna)
Similar to the above in concept, but different in form and content: Polish guy—Józef Robakowski—films the square in front of his Łódź apartment each day for thirteen years. In voiceover, he tells the stories of those we see on screen—not bored automatons (a grey mass) but characters full of life.

The film is an illustration of everyday Polish life: he underscores this through the narration, which was clearly done after the events but is told with an immediacy. He inadvertently charts the fall and rise and fall of May Day marches, in sympathy with the fortunes of the State and Solidarity. He reflects ironically and negatively on post-socialist Poland in his "postscript". The square, he notes, is now a "parking lot," emphasising the strangeness of these words. The language changes in train with the economic system. (This can be watched in full at Robakowski's website. Click into the "videography" and find either Z mojego okna or From My Window. No subtitles, unfortunately—and his flat delivery won't make it obvious where the gags are. See it with a Polish friend.)

-Trabantománia
Hungarian film of marginal merit. Shows Hungarian bohos—nomenklatura children?—making post-punk music and childlike, outsider art. The point of its inclusion seems to be: Hungary had bohemian, post-punk, outsider-art making people. Ergo, the fall of socialism was inevitable!

-The Severe Illness of Men (Schestokaja bolesn muschtschin) & Woodcutter (Lessorub)
Two offerings from the planet of Soviet Parallel Cinema. Bizarre, strange, funny. Various humanlike corpses are thrown around and ravaged. A man is chased through the woods. Plot is ostensibly missing. Jerky and discontinuous, like early silent cinema. Illness of Men is available to download and stream at Ubu.

-Sanctus, Sanctus
Shot in the GDR in 1988, this is one trick over twelve minutes. Public political ('ideological'?) celebrations are filmed on the street, then overlaid with religious choral music. To wit: the similarities between real-existing-socialism institutions and religious institutions. The idea is an old one with plenty of analytic scope (for instance: is it merely appealing because the religious narrative is such a familiar one to us, that the content of this political belief can so easily fit the form given to religious belief?), but only the surface is touched here. As a visual representation of that core idea, it works. As twelve minutes of cinema, it is twice its needed length. Generously, one could add that it gestures in a more complex direction: the way rituals become rote over time, the similarity in a distance between the mouthed beliefs of parishioners/subjects and the enaction of those in everyday lives. Or perhaps it might push towards another thought, something about the instrumentality of belief in both settings—say this, get that. My future film project: put a socialist song—bold brass, strident lyrics, amassed voices—over a religious ceremony. What would happen then? If only I had research assistants to do this kind of leg work for me...

-Konrad! The Mother Said... (Konrad! Sprach die Frau Mama...)
An odd student film, made in the last year of the GDR. Someone is on the run from someone in the GDR. Beyond that, the rest of it simply flew past me. Escape. Commitments. Etc. It was the last film. I was hungry.

Little Valentino (A kis Valentinó)

"The band kept playing on the Titanic, even as it was sinking..."—these are the final words of this 1979 film from Hungary. This little gesture—which seemed slightly at odds with the film—seems to have bestowed upon it a prescience that makes it worthy of inclusion in the Winter Adé series. In my notebook afterwards, the best I could muster was: "aimlessness as metaphor? Valentino as state—spending your way out of trouble?"

Nevertheless, it is one of the better films in the series. The narrative is the tale end of a heist movie, what would happen if the credits rolled and the crooks had gotten away: a sullen teen boy (or is he 20?) attempts to find high-price kicks in Hungary with a wad of money, only to meander aimlessly from one to another, finding mere sugar-rush excitement and an inevitable ennui. It's an unlikely cross between You, the Living and Richard Linklater's slacker films: Little Valentino is strong on surrealist imagery and scenarios—plus strange surrealistic poems are projected on screen as kind of "chapter headings"—but equally at ease with long stretches of banal action.

The Grass is Greener (Überall ist es besser, wo wir nicht sind)

The title gives away the thematic concern: the lure of elsewhere, an oasis always just out of reach, the elusiveness of happiness. A Polish guy travels to West Berlin and then New York, in search of contentment. He continues running into another young Polish exile—a discontented young woman, running through the same circuits, ending up in the same towns. Romance sparks. Romance dies. Bags are packed. Romance returns. The film uses a simple but effective conceit which avoids suggesting quietism (i.e. the argument that would run: unhappiness is everywhere, forget about leaving home or acting otherwise) but suggests a critical approach to the appealing fantasies of 'elsewhere...'. At only 70min, the story thankfully gets in-and-out quickly.

How's Work on the High-Rise Block, Ion? (Ioane, cum e la constructii)

Short, well-shot documentary about a young Romanian couple who are both construction workers. They await—and then get—their own apartment. Although there is a lot of unspoken material here, suggesting dissatisfaction, the film was made with the approval of Romanian communist authorities. So it delivers an optimistic, happy-ending version of high-rise living...

Panelstory

...which isn't quite delivered in Panelstory. This is a less rosy portrayal of high-rise living, set on the outskirts of Prague. A great film, worthy of more attention. It blends Tati-esque elements—a devilish child and a freewheeling, dissatisfied grandfather—with the energy of some 1970s Western avant-garde films. Slapstick. Free jazz. Dolly camera. It depicts a chaotic, barely functional new estate. Construction workers and middle-class residents rub shoulders and trudge through the same mud patches.

Like Tati, there's a critique of new individualism and commercialism here—the grandfatherly figure injects reminders of old values into a scene where modern practices and technology have exploded any strong sense of solidarity and community. A pregnant woman and an old woman (who appears to be dead) are left aside by others as they seek to furnish their new apartments.

Memory (Der Tag, an dem ich meinen toten Mann traf)

Soporific, repressed drama in which a soporific, repressed German woman finds a replacement husband. (The translation of the German title is: "The day I met my dead husband.") A new film set among the concerned middle classes (hydro-power, 20^th-century classical music), this airless piece mistakes tension for silence and overwrought 'stillness'. And doppelgangers for Hitchcock-style suspense. Like Lantana, a ponderous Australian tale of leafy-suburb professionals committing adultery, this lets clichés (woman cries desperately in shower after holding it together in public) and self-conscious cinematography (shallow depth of field [see above] and dim lighting) assume the weight of gravitas. 90 minutes felt like 120. Audience members left, heads were held in hands, there was a slow exhaling of breath. Even with the director in attendance. Ouch.

Jadup and Boel

Based upon a GDR book I have not read (Jadup), this late period East German film was banned until 1988. It is a tale of small-town life in the GDR, understandably banned (y'know, within the context) for its depiction of bumbling officials, disregard for authority and general slapstick hi-jinx. It's a pleasant film, which seemed to be something of an old favourite with audiences. A love story. A small town. Touches of Hitchcock (a church belltower, an old love, domestic tensions). Like much else in this series, it is thought remarkable because it presages the imminent collapse of European communism. But the narrative template here is so utterly generic, that I wonder if a decent film—telemovie?—has been overinflated for political significance. Much more interesting, I thought, were the gasps of "Eric!" from the audience when Herr Honecker's portrait appeared in a Buro office.

Berlin Playground (Hans im Glück)

As already mentioned here, this film is a documentary about post-Wall life in Berlin. Its singular focus is Hans Narva, a 40 year-old musician who spent half his life under socialism and half under capitalism. The well-handled documentary manages to convey something of Hans then and now. His punk days in bands on the wrong side of the regime—notably, Herbst in Peking—and his sombre new musical work suggest a discomfort under both economic and political regimes. As does his incarceration in both periods. Often, director Claudia Lehmann lets Hans wander around the city and tell stories as they walk. This is an effective way to get him talking—where he is somewhat uptight in talking head mode, he relaxes and narrates easily as he walks. Wandering into the prison-cum-apartments, he lays out the terrain—the yard where he once used to exercise, the cells where he spent solitary time. He hates "The New Berlin," as it is always called, for the stupidity of its planning, for the way old sites have been so quickly erased. His school is razed—for what new purpose is never exactly clear. "It could've been a cultural centre," he suggests. The Palast der Republik is the least of it. Yet, equally, the "Old Berlin"—the GDR one, the one seemingly beyond the scope of heritage marketing—is somewhere he never wants to revisit. For its value alone in illustrating this viable, ambivalent position, Berlin Playground is a worthwhile documentary.

Material

A stunning montage documentary film by former GDR resident, Thomas Heise. Playing out over an expansive 166 minutes, Heise lets the tape—and it mostly is VHS tape—run on some extraordinary events in East and West Berlin, circa '89: subjects boo speeches as GDR apparat attempt to quell the coming end of the regime; police turn their hoses on protests in Kreuzberg; far-right goons smash up a small screening of a documentary about Ossis shortly after reunification; prisoners and prison wards criticise GDR amnesties and prison systems in front of official organs; Müller debates the staging of a new play. By far the best film I've seen about the GDR near and after its end. Barebones in its presentation—the film is framed by minimal contextual information ("Kreuzberg, 1989") and no voiceover. The virtue of this is the presentation of material that accumulates explanatory power together—each segment supports the other in a way that is not immediately clear. Avoiding the usual footage of Berliners clambering upon the Wall, Heise manages to convey more than others about the criticism, hope and nastiness of the Wende. It is complex and deeply informative—a single viewing is not enough.

A Cell of One's Own

In London Orbital, Iain Sinclair writes vividly of the way former prisons and asylums have been turned over to developers. In Hans im Glück—Berlin Playground, a recent Berlinale premiere, we see the same thing happening. The protagonist visits a former GDR prison in which he spent quite a few months. It’s now a row of apartments. (Why do my fingers move automatically to type “luxury apartments”—has the advertising seeped into us that much, their catchphrases actually catching?)

Or, rather a “campus”. Berlin Campus. University. Creativity. Esteem. Cloistered?

Asylum seekers were here last. The walls still bear their wallpaper. The homely touches of the hopeful itinerants. Floral wallpaper and crumbling walls. Asylum seekers have taken over the asylum. A grotesquery in the months after the fall of the Wall, before this place was packaged up, marketed and sold—by the devilish Treuhand, I suppose.

There is a striking similarity in this to the developments Sinclair (and, earlier, Ballard) details in London. See it in the brochure puff: “the area offers a wide variety of attractions for residents, including trendy bars and restaurants and the famous parks of Treptow...”

...with their triumphant Soviet monuments and detailed anti-capitalist friezes.

“This area is developing a reputation as the leisure and media centre for Berlin. The new headquarters for Universal and MTV are located in this area in addition to the new O2 Arena. The project is less than 20 minutes from Schoenefeld International Airport which is being redeveloped into one of the most impressive modern airports in Europe.”

So don’t worry, there are bars and restaurants. (Has anything worth anyone’s time ever been spruiked as “trendy”? Is there anything less trendy than the word “trendy”?) Sports. Leisure. Global media headquarters. An enormous airport. A global somewhere. A node to call your own. Node sweet node.

Where am I, again?

“All the apartments have been completely re-developed from the original 19th century red-brick buildings.”

All the inmates have been completely re-developed and renovated, repurposed and reassigned.

“This is a unique opportunity to invest in a prestigious building, charged with history in a vibrant district of one of Europe’s greatest cities.”

Mysterious—charged and vibrant, prestigious and 19^th century. History. Softly. Sells. Buy yourself a padded cell.

Delicious

Quadrant magazine, the local grey brigade fighting the neocon culture wars, has been hoaxed! Yum. The story of the hoax was published today in Australian newsletter and website Crikey.

Keith Windschuttle, the editor of the conservative magazine Quadrant, has been taken in by a hoax intended to show that he will print outrageous propositions.

This month’s edition of Quadrant contains a hoax article purporting to be by “Sharon Gould”, a Brisbane based New York biotechnologist.

But in the tradition of Ern Malley – the famous literary hoax perpetrated by Quadrant’s first editor, James McAuley – the Sharon Gould persona is entirely fictitious and the article is studded with false science, logical leaps, outrageous claims and a mixture of genuine and bogus footnotes.

In accepting the article, Keith Windschuttle said in an email to “Sharon Gould”:

I really like the article. You bring together some very important considerations about scientific method, the media, politics and morality that I know our readers would find illuminating.

“Gould’s” article, which is blurbed on the front cover of Quadrant and reproduced online, (subscribers only) argues for the insertion of human genes in to food crops, insects and livestock. [...]

Windschuttle asked for some changes, which involved cutting a lengthy explanation of the Sokal hoax from the first paragraphs – which the hoaxer had intended as a clue.

The hoaxer, thankfully, has kept a public diary of the experience. (It was taken offline recently, but is now being mirrored by Crikey.)

Margaret Simons has printed more detail on her media blog. As she writes,

This is a good story, in journalistic terms. Not earth shattering, not life and death, but within intellectual Australia a significant and serious piece of mockery.

Quadrant is a significant part of our intellectual life, with several claims to an important history and present. [...] Keith Windschuttle is a significant person and public figure.

The sting of this hoax as I understand it is to establish that despite its attacks on post-modern slackness, and despite Windschuttle’s nitpicking of other people’s research, despite the fulminating against academic slackness from the right, it is possible for Quadrant and Windschuttle to publish pseudo-scientific nonsense, so long as it appears to fit in with their ideological view.

For those outside Quadrant's small circle, Simons provides a nice summary of the magazine's place in Australian life -- as explained by former conservative prime minister John Howard.

Quadrant is an historically important conservative magazine, praised by John Howard when he was Prime Minister as his “favourite” magazine and as a forum for "fine scholarship with a sceptical, questioning eye for cant, hypocrisy and moral vanity" and a "lonely counterpoint to stultifying orthodoxies and dangerous utopias that at times have gripped the Western 'intelligentsia".” Howard said Quadrant was: "Australia's home to all that is worth preserving in the Western cultural tradition". Howard described Windschuttle’s articles on Aboriginal history as particularly close to his heart.

[Windschuttle, too, is not above using retro, gay-baiting euphemisms: "Windshcuttle replaced the controversial Paddy McGuiness as editor of Quadrant early last year. When his appointment was announced, Windschuttle was quoted as saying that he would campaign against decadence in the arts." Decadence!]

The debate about the importance -- or not -- of the hoax will continue over coming days. Windschuttle has responded. Simons is blogging regularly. And the Australian broadsheets are all knocking up stories for tomorrow's papers.

For those aware of Windschuttle's form, the hoax has a delicious flavour to it.

Keith Windschuttle is a leading cultural warrior. In recent years he has accused senior historians of falsifying and inventing the degree of violence against Aborigines. He has also accused academic historians of exaggerating the racism involved in the White Australia policy.

He notoriously went about searching through the footnotes of previous histories.

The nub of the Sharon Gould hoax is a play on Windschuttle and Quadrant’s advocacy of empirical research as being divorced from social and political consequences, and therefore beyond question.

~

And nice to see that George W. Bush is in the mood for a jolly old hoax too, with news that he is awarding beloved ex-PM John W. Howard the "freedom medal". This is a hoax, yes?

A sentimental education

First in the US, now here: the fronts of the neocon culture war passing over the universities seem (surprise!) to be misguided.

An Australian Senate committee has turned up little evidence of left-wing bias in the academy.

The committee found Liberal student organisations were the main agitators for the inquiry and their submissions had a strongly "undergraduate" tone.

"Indeed, the committee believes that the case that Make Australia Fair [the Young Liberal group] makes for the existence of a leftist conspiracy in education faculties and schools borders on the farcical," it said.

Farcical!

This is not surprising. Having worked for a year side-by-side with these polo-shirted young idiots, they lack a coherent sense of their own politics, let alone an ability to coherently criticise (or characterise) someone else's politics.

It may be an optimistic position, but it seems like the mood has passed for this kind of thing. In Australia, that seems to have happened with the removal of John Howard from office. In the US, with the imminent departure of Bush. It has always been wrong to claim that these culture wars were a mere distraction from another, more important branch of the neoliberal-neoconservative family tree. But we now see a version of neoliberalism without the culture war tendencies. A version not without its own campaigns to be waged against neoliberal, managerial approaches to education. (Victoria University is out on strike and picket at this very moment, campaigning against the announced 270 job losses.)

Another barometer of a new mood might be Bryan Cooke's striking article on questions of education, history and politics—"Another Country"—in Traffic journal:

In what follows I would like to show how thinking about some of the different attitudes to the two different kinds of ‘countries’—those from which we are separated by space and those from which we are divided by time—can illuminate some of the assumptions that underlie many debates about the role of history in education. Comparing different modern attitudes to history and travel, I will discuss the question of why we might teach history in the first place, and why we might think it worthwhile to do so. In addition, I will use this comparison to try to show how attempts to ensure that teaching achieves certain outcomes (almost irrespective of what those outcomes are) can ironically end up preventing students from having any real encounter with the past, by imposing a kind of prophylactic between them and the historical material upon which they are supposed to be reflecting. In referring to a ‘real encounter’ I am not naively suggesting that the goal of history should be historical simulations of sufficient verisimilitude to fool a real Cathar or an actual Victorian chimney-sweep. The only necessary (although obviously not sufficient) condition for such an encounter to take place is that any confrontation with historical
materials is not totally subordinated in advance to the function of flattering one of the prevailing ideologies of the age. Such flattery can be directed at any number of contemporary prejudices, the prejudices of the ostensible left as much as the putative right; the vanity of the students as much as the designers of curricula. But history cannot, I argue, be history without entailing a risk—which can never be completely eliminated without turning teaching into ‘management’, as the corporate world uses the term. Such a replacement would itself be an unfortunate step towards the substitution of democratic and humanistic ideals for technocratic/managerial ones; a process that may be going a little too smoothly of its own accord without making
peremptory concessions.

And, while you're there, you can also find a publication of mine in the very same issue: it is concerned with ostalgie and German film. (But who isn't, I ask you?)