Granta 165, page 24
The Trabant was produced in the state-owned car factory VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau in Saxony. It was poorly equipped with a small two-stroke engine. The special oil-and-gas mixture it required resulted in blue smoke exhaust. The true innovation of the Trabant was its body, made from a polymer called Duroplast. This was definitely a step into the future. Metal was in short supply in the GDR: the state enlisted the pharmaceutical industry to supply car production with high-strength reinforced plastics. The classic model series was the Trabant 601 (26 hp), which was produced from 1964 onward. More than 2 million of them rolled off the assembly line until 1990. It was never enough; demand far exceeded output. Automobile deprivation was a constant source of resentment among the population, who saw their dream of mobility, even within the narrow confines of the ‘socialist camp’, disappointed.
Was the Trabant considered a privilege? It was hard to say in a shortage economy. Most people had to join the queue, submit an application, and wait a long time. Fourteen years was not uncommon. Word got around that there were injustices in the distribution of the coveted vehicles. Why had one’s neighbor got his faster? Because he was a party member, an employee of the MfS (Stasi or secret police), an officer in the National People’s Army? Then there was the shame associated with the object of desire: everyone knew that it was not exactly sexy, not like the cool sports cars you saw in films from the West: the Chevrolet, the Lancia, the Citroën, the Austin. The Trabant was the visible sign that East Germans were left behind when it came to car design. A hat box that rattled along like a tractor: the Trabant stank, looked stupid, clumsy; it was a toy car, nothing for a real man. Trabant jokes made the rounds. Question: ‘What do a Trabant and a condom have in common?’ Answer: ‘Both decrease the pleasure of the ride.’
East German government officials did not drive East German-made cars. Standing on the side of the road as a GDR citizen on one of the public holidays, the sight of the leaders of the official youth organizations – the Pioneers, the Free German Youth and other assorted bigwigs – roaring past in foreign cars certainly gave you pause about the principles of state socialism. On television, you watched Erich Honecker, the leader of the GDR, step out to meet the heads of state from a black stretch limousine manufactured by Volvo. Was that him now returning behind the tinted windows? It was enough to make you feel completely at home again in the garage with your Trabant.
For some of my fellow East Germans, the Trabant even prompted a feeling of safety. Maybe this is where nostalgia for the East – Ostalgie – has its roots. I still remember how my father would arrive in terrible pain after the long journeys every summer from Dresden up to the Baltic Sea, hours spent on the motorway. ‘Do you remember?’ asks my mother. ‘He had difficulty getting out of the Trabant.’ But that probably had more to do with his lumbago. Most people managed for their whole lives in the cramped little cage.
When the barriers fell along the inner-German border in 1989, a stream of Trabants poured into the West. I was there at the Bornholm Bridge. The scene was broadcast around the world. The better-off among the Easterners who passed through the Wall demonstrated a self-confidence that may well have astonished contemporary witnesses. Look, they seemed to say, this way we won’t be arriving on foot, but in the armor of our cars. It was as if they wanted to give an ironic twist to the meaning of the brand name (‘Trabant’: a bodyguard or foot soldier). I still have the din of the terrible old crates ringing in my ears: the rattle of the two-stroke engines. My madeleine has the stench of blue exhaust fumes.
In April 1991, a few weeks before the assembly lines came to a standstill and production came to an end, an enterprising Dutch photographer arrived at the Zwickau plant. He set out to record a doomed world. Like August Sander, whose camera scientifically registered the professions and ordinary people of the Weimar Republic, Martin Roemers documented something soon to vanish. He captures the everyday moments of working lives, which the participants could not imagine ending. Yet everything happened very quickly. Here you can see the last bits of manual work, the worn-out faces that hold their own in front of the camera, the individual workers in their different outfits – mechanics, painters and welders, many women among them – people on their breaks, the young woman in the canteen.
You sense the workers at the Zwickau plant know that the writing is on the wall. The man reading the newspaper, Auto Bild, with the headline a new mercedes every year; the woman in the apron dress, leaning against the pipework; the woman holding the drill, a tattoo on her right forearm; a man with his lunch in his hand; one in the smoking corner; another lost in the assembly room, behind him a wall plastered with pin-ups opening up like the jaws of the future, symbols of the counter-culture – that of the hyper-sexualized West. The longer you look, the more you become suspicious of any idea of authenticity. It’s as if the scenes have been staged for one last performance. The details are what count, the little things that reveal more than the photographer (and the viewer) could have known at the time. The scrapyard with the excavator grab hanging menacingly in the air burns itself into your memory, as does the slogan on the factory gate: have a good trip with trabant. Black-and-white pictures that capture the mood of an end-time. It’s the gaze of a Western photographer fixed on another continent, as distant as Africa. A document of recent colonial history. How else to view the ruins?
* * *
NOTEBOOK 2021 | PETER HANDKE
‘Author’ as a myth of days gone by? – No, actually not.
‘Sit!’ he said to the troubling interior part of himself – and so he sat there, the dog, he sat and sat.
What’s your favourite thing to do? – Keep a lookout. – But you mostly look at the floor?! – So?
An entirely different Big Dipper: swarms of migratory birds in the heights of the sky, now southward, now northward, and in between again and again turning and shearing off elseward.
Looking over one’s shoulder: inexhaustible. – So long as it doesn’t turn into a method? – And if it does: a good method, for once.
The untranslatable German language, time and again: ‘to have the after seeing’ [das Nachsehen haben] ‘to have the before love’ [vorlieb nehmen]; every language nearly untranslatable? – So translate! (Saludos a Miguel de Cervantes)
This too is company: ‘in the company’ of a fingered glove spread on the backrest of a stone bench at the edge of a village green. Is it really necessary to speak in such detail of a ‘fingered glove’? Yes, it is necessary, and to add that the woollen fingers, frosted white, glitter in the sun of the new year. (Picardie)
Ambition, yes, but at the same time: descend from the one you look up to.
Ideal: cheerful negligence.
In the old dictionary the right verb for the sound of the ‘lonely chirper’ on winter nights, often hours before first light: minyrïzo. Onomatopoetic? Onomaphonetic.
So many seem respectable, even briefly wonderful, from a distance, but are diminished by diminishing distance? No, they remain respectable, even wonderful. It’s you who are diminished by the distance you diminished.
Morning raindrop on the bare early-spring branches, gleam for me.
Two types of epic narration: in one, life plays along with someone and everyone, and the other? – How life plays, somehow, anyhow.
I managed to leave a mess be – and see: it wasn’t a mess at all.
‘The very first epic’: the pain and joy of letting existence seep, hardly noticeable at first, and then all the more perceptibly word for word into the depths, the deeper depths, the deepest depths of our existence. – Our collective delusion? – Beautiful delusion.
‘Order is half of life’ – and the other half? – You get one guess.
Misfortunes, at least the little ones, the quotidian ones, also resonate. Listen; pay attention.
‘Every drawing is a triumph over the disorder of the world.’ (Maria Lassnig, 1992)
‘You continue to receive proofs of love.’ (daily horoscope)
‘Let’s lose our way together!’ (declaration of love)
A single distant passer-by on the Sunday-morning street. With the light of the sun playing around him, he seems to be greeting me, continuously, while walking incessantly.
A kind of duty: to let seriousness turn into ‘serious play’. (G)
‘Love isn’t loved.’ – Yes, and we can’t quit quitting.
‘You can row your boat where you please.’ (daily horoscope)
The occasionally surging feelings of gratitude for those who have ever been close to me, and who have since ‘faded away’. The compulsion to pay some tribute to them, now, and now. – To ‘pay tribute’? – To pay tribute.
I’m not going anywhere today. Tomorrow either. – A laudable plan!
Translated from the German by Peter Kuras
* * *
Opposite: suhrkamp
Images taken from Peter Handke’s Vor der Baumschattenwand nachts: Zeichen und Anflüge von der Peripherie 2007–2015
Next spread: suhrkamp
Images taken from Peter Handke’s Die Zeit und die Räume: Notizbuch 24. April – 26. August 1978
REUNIFIED GERMAN IMAGES
Fredric Jameson
Aesthetic debates invite political investment. Before Stalinism, Adorno claims, modernism in the arts was more than compatible with revolutionary politics. In the Cold War, abstract expressionism became a weapon in US foreign policy, to the chagrin of the henceforth marginalized WPA muralists, social and magical realists, storytelling painters of all kinds. In Germany, Günter Grass, himself no mean draftsman, complained bitterly about this tyranny of the abstract in his autobiography. An intense German polemic over figuration, however, had to await reunification, when the most interesting East German production – the so-called New (or Second, or Third) Leipzig School – became caught up in this already fraught symbolic quarrel. So it is that the most prolific of these figurative painters, Neo Rauch, a veritable Balzac of the storytelling image, has run aground of attacks reading him alternatively as ‘East German’ (that is, communist) or national-fascist, inviting his own unnecessary (political) self-defense of what Thomas Mann called an ‘unpolitical man’.
Political or not, the element Rauch works in is certainly what we call History. This is rare enough in an ahistorical late capitalism in which only the extremes of Left and Right retain a keen sense of historicity. The pieces of the past that drift down into Rauch’s canvases, however, are too fragmented to bear much in the way of a political charge. He tells us that they come to him at night, imperiously soliciting expression; and what they preeminently express is the fragmentation of German history, which, at the center of Europe, experienced war on many fronts, from the Roman Empire to the Thirty Years War, and on into the long and bloody twentieth century. Their representations demand a reunification they can only find on the canvas and through the energetic interpretations of their beholders.
Rauch’s canvases may be oneiric, but we must be careful, however strong the temptation, not to assimilate them to surrealism, which was marked, I would like to say, by a quintessentially French, and even Parisian, unconscious, however worldwide its later diffusion, and despite illustrious German adherents such as Max Ernst (Rauch’s daytime self, an eloquent commentator and theorist of his own works, parries with the more Germanic figure of Max Beckmann).
What Rauch has in common with surrealism is a rigorous method paradoxically called ‘free association’, a practice which aims to release a flow of images otherwise blocked by Freud’s ‘reality principle’. Rauch also retains the practice of the surrealist image as Reverdy defined it: ‘a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be . . .’ In Rauch this ‘juxtaposition’ – far too mild a word for his crashes and dissonances, his Ovidian metamorphoses and his inexplicable gaps – is the crack through which a genuinely historical contradiction seeps like radiation.
Saxony and its capital Leipzig – almost as distant from GDR Berlin as from the multiple West German cultural centers – bequeathed the painter a stock of raw materials: the images of defeat. The very landscape – a non-Rust Belt terrain of the undeveloped rather than the overdeveloped, not the exhaustion of Detroit so much as the vacant lots of forced abandonment – is shaped and defined by projects arrested in midcourse: graveyards of appliances which did not have time to be worn out by the daily life of a successfully industrialized society: unfinished houses, incomplete electrical grids, pipes, tools, excavations for never-erected buildings. This essential historical incompleteness now releases all the ghosts of an unrealized past, who wander through the paintings in their outmoded (generally Romantic) costumes, alongside survivors whose unoccupied gazes betray their lack of connection with one another. Instead we find disembodied clashes, disinterested thwartings, a violent dramaturgy of the distracted and the uninvolved, rebus, caricature, cartoon, historical pageants, the dramatic opera of enigmatic encounters, a staged charade of the freeze-framed moments of a past that went nowhere. Chekhov offered us a stage full of characters talking to themselves rather than each other. Here we have whole historical periods which have nothing to say to one another, and yet just as strangely fight it out.
It was not always so. Rauch belongs to the younger Leipzig generation that began by experimenting with strange sci-fi constructions, and a minimum of human inhabitants (whether operators or victims). In his early work planes of repressive material intersect: constellations of objects that contradict social physics, while a sci-fi robotic space asserts its primacy. All these expressions of ‘dissidence’ preoccupied Rauch and his generation in the early years, in an appeal of willpower to generate new styles and new gestures. At some point, around 2000, Rauch found the more congenial path of narrative – of characters and incomprehensible stories and interactions – preferable to playing with spaces that recede into backgrounds of stage direction and scenery.
The older generation did not know this kind of release. In the twilight years of the GDR, one of Rauch’s elders, the great historical painter Werner Tübke, commemorated the history of Germany’s revolutionary defeats in a memorial to Thomas Müntzer and his peasant army, crushed in 1525 at the battle of Frankenhausen. There, an immense circular building houses Tübke’s well-nigh encyclopedic Renaissance-style fresco worthy of Diego Rivera, nothing less than a history of the world, whose religious elements alienated the party which so generously financed it. (Erich Honecker refused to attend its inauguration.) Isolated in an East German landscape where it remains difficult to access, this impossible tourist attraction is yet another remnant left behind by an abandoned future, like the Hindu and Buddhist caves scattered through India. Tübke thereby authorized a representational style which would entitle Rauch to claim an apolitical indifference.
Panorama Museum. Bad Frankenhausen, Germany. Shutterstock
Do we then find in Rauch’s work a ‘surrealism without the unconscious’? Not exactly. But I would argue for a form of the ‘unconscious’ which Derrida, following Freud on melancholy and the later theorists Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török, called ‘encryption’ – the formation of a kind of cyst or crypt within the self of unliquidated entities, in which historical traumas bide their time, unassimilated, unincorporated, prepared at any moment to reemerge as fresh ghosts demanding their representation on the painted surface. The process indeed may be compared to reality itself, when a wealthy West Germany annexed its socialist sibling without any genuine assimilation, leaving the latter as the source of violent drives and impulses incompatible with the Americanized culture of an officially reunified Germania. Here, if anywhere, we may situate the allegorical temptation that threatens Rauch’s work.
This work, after the youthful period described above, which one can scarcely characterize as ‘dissident’, may be divided into episodes and scenes: the simpler but not necessarily smaller works, organized around what looks like a single theme, and the monumental paintings in which a whole variety of thematic groupings are scattered across the canvas, at their best in a kind of orgiastic spectacle which the viewer is called on to unify – but not too quickly! – so as not to lose the dissonances and the quintessential fragmentation. Indeed, with Rauch, it is always best to see a roomful of these productions in order to register their common populations and their family likenesses rather than to commit one’s viewing to the discipline of a single ‘masterwork’.
The war between representation and abstraction presupposed, at least among the adherents of the latter, that you could simply peel off storytelling and its accoutrements from art and attain a purer and more intense relationship with the fundamentals: oil paint, colors, geometrical shapes. The result would achieve that stunned fascination called aesthetic pleasure. But this is to ignore a different kind of dynamic of formal ‘separation’ within Rauch’s ‘storytelling’ itself. His characters rarely look at one another, each lost in a world apart; the groups are isolated from one another and from their surroundings; even the often monstrous evolution of ominous objects takes place in isolation. Yet all this is also happening to the raw materials of representation as such. In an episodic painting like Krönung I (Coronation I, 2008) – particularly if you have the good luck to see it in reality – the colored paint of the costumes, the brownish yellow of the ‘pretender’, the gray and red of the officiant, rise off the garments which appear to glow from the inside with their own inner being. The recurrent combinations of these autonomous colors – midnight blue, indigo, rust red, purple, a strident yellow – blot out the air and light of an open sky, and seem to make of our contemplation of the painting a kind of grotto. The yellow in particular becomes a character in its own right, like a kind of shriek: it is given the honor of its own portrait in a painting like Paranoia (2007), where an anxious couple await the opening of a yellow curtain, while the completed revelation – an almost wholly yellow canvas – hangs on the wall behind them.
