Demolition Artists: Icono-Graphy, Tanks, and Scenarios of (Post-)Communist Subjectivity in Works by...

The Germanic Review, 89: 131–170, 2014Copyright c© Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0016-8890 print / 1930-6962 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00168890.2014.917043

Demolition Artists: Icono-Graphy, Tanks,and Scenarios of (Post-)CommunistSubjectivity in Works by Neo Rauch, HeinerMuller, Durs Grunbein, and Uwe Tellkamp

Julia Hell

The author proposes post-imperial analysis as a new research agenda for the study of(post)GDR literature and painting. The article models this kind of analysis with respect toworks by the authors listed in the title, focusing on the representation/destruction of theSoviet tank as an object embodying imperial sovereignty. More specifically, the authorexplores a series of scopic scenarios that dramatize the confrontation with Soviet tanks,drawing on Carl Schmitts 1950s concept of iconographic space for its political theory andtracing the genealogy of this iconographic object, its constitution as aesthetic object, inthe work of Soviet artists. Reading the (textual and visual) demolition of the tank as post-imperial gesture, the article studies strategies that either destroy aesthetic conventions orexplode the object through a process of description.

Keywords: aesthetics of description, Beschreibungslust/Beschreibungswut, Cold War,description/de-scription, dis-articulation of genre/subject, Durs Grunbein, iconic object,iconographic space, iconography, invisible empires, Ernst Junger, El Lissitsky, Kaz-imir Malevich, Heiner Muller, (post-)communist subjectivity, (post-)GDR culture, post-imperial analysis, Neo Rauch, re-staging of iconic object, Carl Schmitt, Soviet tank, UweTellkamp, visual/textual scenarios, Ekaterina Zernova

. . . sooner or later, the tanks will show up.1

Instead of saying I am the one who is looking, it seems better to say that objectsare all trying to catch my eye . . . When I am entranced by something . . . theworld falls away, leaving me in a silent, empty space, alone with the object.2

1Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 87.2James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (San Diego, New York: Harcourt,

1996), 20–21.

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I n a lecture on poetics, Uwe Tellkamp portrayed himself as the commander of a “Schlep-perpanzer” crossing the Elbe River at Torgau as part of a night-time training exercise. As

the water rises and “uns Insassen die Bruhe bis an den Hals [stieg] in dem auf dem Fluß-grund vorankriechenden Panzer,” he begins whispering a Goethe poem, a love poem, to calmhimself.3 Tellkamp does not explain why he did so, leaving us to search for possible answersin the meandering, associative musings on Goethe that accompany his scene of mountingclaustrophobia.4 These lines, he explains were written by the “Augenblicksgoethe,” the poet,whose words still have the power to touch him.5 This poet of the occasional, and of the inten-sities of the occasional, is different from the state poet dealing in universals and dispensingadvice. Without Tellkamp explicitly stating so, we understand that he is referring to theGDR’s so-called bourgeois heritage distinguishing his Goethe, indeed his entire aesthetics,from the GDR’s official version of German classicism.6

Tellkamp’s scenario about the young artist inside the tank thus dramatizes the conditionof the non-communist intellectual in the GDR, seeking refuge in his literature while caughtin an East German tank that, like all East German tanks, once was a Soviet tank. In DerTurm, his novel about a vanished country, Tellkamp describes the same underwater crossing,narrating the accident in great, heart-stopping detail and again concluding the passage withGoethe’s lines. Forcing us into the tank, Tellkamp makes us participants in his protagonist’sefforts not to succumb to his mounting panic. In both cases, Tellkamp’s text operates on theboundary of the literal and the figural, a tightrope walk that subtly shifts the meanings of thescenario while never diminishing its suffocating quality or the urgency of the desire to breakout—out of the Soviet tank, out of the East German state, out of the rules of its language.And in both cases, it is the language of love as the expression of subjectivity, spontaneity,and creativity that stands for the very opposite of everything that the tank represents.7

3Uwe Tellkamp, Die Sandwirtschaft: Anmerkungen zu Schrift und Zeit (Frankfurt a.M.: SuhrkampVerlag, 2012), 18.

4The lines are “Weiß wie Lilien, reine Kerzen, / Sternen gleich, bescheidner Beugung, / Leuchtet ausdem Mittelherzen / Rot gesaumt, die Glut der Neigung” (Die Sandwirtschaft 18). Taken from Goethe’s“Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten” (1827), a cycle spoken by a Chinese mandarin seekingpleasure in his garden away from the duties of “herrschen” and “mude dienen,” http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/3670/421.

5Goethe’s lyrics convey a sense of the “Atemlosigkeit des Wechsels,” of “Verliebtheit” (Tellkamp, DieSandwirtschaft 18 and 19).

6At the same time as he positions himself in opposition to the non-art of the new Germany bycomparing Goethe’s love poem to its contemporary versions (“Heute heißt es: Baby, wir hatten ‘neschone Nacht”), an idiom hard on the ears of “Kunst empfangliche Menschen” (Die Sandwirtschaft 20and 21). This art is defined by its “Nutzen” (22). I will return to Tellkamp’s critique of the AmericanizedWest with its anti-capitalist undertones later.

7There is more than a trace of Romantic anti-capitalism or Romanticism tout court in Tellkamp, away of thinking that characterized many East German artists across the dissident and “dis-engaged”milieus. On the notion of the aesthetics of disengagement, see the dissertation by Seth Howes, PunkAvant-Gardes: Disengagement and the End of East Germany (2012) as well as his “‘Killersatellit’ andRanderscheinung: Punk and the Prenzlauer Berg,” German Studies Review 36, no. 3 (October 2013):579–601.

HELL � DEMOLITION ARTISTS 133

In this article I will explore a series of such dramatizations, visual and textual scenar-ios organized around this particular constellation of the intellectual and the Soviet tank.My explorations will attend to the content and form of these scenarios: the drama of(post)communist subjectivity goes hand in hand with its writing, the textual destructionof the Soviet tank as an iconographic object. I read this act of demolition as a post-imperialgesture that I trace across paintings and texts.8 For an object to be destroyed, or rather, forits representation to be dismantled, the latter first needs to be invented. This is precisely thetask Soviet artists set themselves starting in the 1930s. In the first part of this article, I conse-quently discuss the ways in which painters from Kazimir Malevich to Ekaterina Zernova firstcreated the tank as an aesthetic object in the 1930s, and how it was subsequently displayedas war memorial.

It is this move from art to victory monument that finally transforms the tank frommodern iconic object to iconographic object, from the representation of the Soviet state tothat of the Soviet Empire. I use iconographic in a specific Schmittian sense.9 Analyzing thepostwar global order, Carl Schmitt argued that the Soviet Union created Eastern Europe andthe GDR as an iconographic space, an imperial territory made visible through texts, images,and material objects. As material object embodying Soviet sovereignty, the display of the RedArmy’s T-34 and T-76 tanks are central to this iconography or image-writing. The Ehrenmalin Tiergarten, the former Soviet empire’s westernmost outpost, is one of the most imposingmonuments staging these tanks.10 The entrance to the monumental structure is still flankedby pedestals displaying two of the tanks that rolled into Berlin in 1945.

It is this particular aspect of Soviet iconography that East German artists will attackwith their successive reinventions of scenarios structured around tanks. Their aesthetic laborof destruction starts in the wake of 1989, but Hamletmaschine (1977), Heiner Muller’s anti-drama, constitutes its point of departure. In this Shakespeare adaptation, Muller dramatizes

8For a definition of post-imperial analysis, see Julia Hell and George Steinmetz, “Ruinopolis: Post-Imperial Theory and Learning from Las Vegas,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research38 (2014): 4.

9That is, I am using Schmitt’s concepts in a non-anachronistic move, i.e., as analytical concepts drawnfrom the historical period that we are exploring.

10The Ehrenmal was built with materials from Speer’s Reichskanzlei. Having learned about the installa-tion of a new Soviet victory monument in 1952 (consisting of a Russian T-34 placed on a pedestal), AlbertSpeer recalled a leisurely walk with Hitler through the gardens of the Reich Chancellery three days priorto the invasion of the Soviet Union. Following a gravel path, they passed some sculptures—an originalGreek Poseidon amid some of the massive neoclassical monsters Nazi sculptors liked to produce—andthen a few models of the newly developed Tank IV. See Albert Speer, Spandauer Tagebucher (Berlin:Ullstein Buchverlag, 2005), 280. See also Patrick Wright, Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous WarMachine (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 304. The sight of these tanks prompted one ofHitler’s monologues about his plans for a “Siegestraße” inspired by Mussolini’s Via dell’Impero. Hitlerenvisioned the boulevard lined with Breker’s colossal sculptures and trophy tanks from the wars thatwould found the Germanic Reich. The idea of mixing his neoclassical “Stilelemente” with “Radkettenvon Panzern” and “Kanonenrohre” did not sit well with Hitler’s architect. Tanks, Speer explained in hisdiaries, were by their very nature not “denkmalsfahig” because as industrial products they lacked themythical quality that genuine monuments require (Speer, Tagebucher 280–281). In 1953, the Sovietsmoved the monument from Wannsee to the highway entrance to West Berlin; in 1991, the tank wastaken down.


FIGURE 1. Josef Koudelka, Prague 1968 (Magnum Photos permission).

the dual loyalty of the East German dissident intellectual by inventing a post-68 scenariorevolving around the confrontation between Soviet tanks and anti-Soviet insurgents, a con-frontation famously captured by the Czech photographer Joseph Koudelka (Figure 1). As Iwill argue in the second part of this essay, Neo Rauch’s painting Der Vortrager (2006); DursGrunbein’s acceptance speech for the Buchner Preis, Den Korper zerbrechen (2005); andTellkamp’s novel Der Turm: Geschichte aus einem versunkenen Land (2008) all reconfigureMuller’s post-68 scenario.

But as I already mentioned above, these artists born in the GDR and working in theshadow of Muller do more than merely rewrite the scenario of the dissident intellectualconfronting the Soviet tank. Rauch, Grunbein, and Tellkamp de-iconicize the image ofthe tank. In this study, I am consequently as interested in the stories their mini-dramastell as I am in the ways in which these authors re-present an iconographic object centralto their scenarios.11 As a form of taking stock, the act of description is central to theserepresentations. Rauch, Grunbein, and Tellkamp, I will argue, demolish the iconographic

11With this focus on a particular scenario (specifically, the focus on the problematic the scenario’ssubject and the representation of the object at the heart of the scenario), this article is part of a largerproject on the scopic regimes that emerge with the fall of the Nazi Empire. The following articlesanalyze specific scenarios and the way they structure acts of looking: on the confrontation with imagesfrom the camps and the trope of blindness, see Julia Hell, “Eyes Wide Shut, or German Post-HolocaustAuthorship,” New German Critique 88 (Fall 2004): 9–36; on the confrontation with the images as Orphicscenario, see Julia Hell, “Modernity and the Holocaust or Listening to Eurydice.” Theory Culture &Society 27, no. 6 (November 2010): 125–154; and on the Orphic scenario in the context of the sightof bombed-out cities and the reinvention of realist epistemology, see Julia Hell, “Ruins Travel: Orphic


object by destroying aesthetic conventions or exploding the object into its component partsin an excess of description.

The work of revolutions is destruction, symbolic and real, directed against people andobjects. The Jacobins had beheaded their king and then themselves. Revolutionary crowdshad put the heads of aristocrats on sticks, parading them through the streets of Paris andstormed the Bastille leaving behind a pile of rubble. While such violence against people wasnot part of the protesters’ repertoire in 1989, violence against symbols of Soviet sovereigntywas as widespread as it was creative, leaving behind parks of dismantled statues, imagesof toppled monuments, and echoes of the sound of people attacking the Berlin Wall withhammers or whatever tools they could find. In Prague, a Czech artist painted Tank 23 pink,turning the act into a public performance.12 No such event occurred in the GDR, but wefind traces of this revolutionary exuberance in the work of Rauch, Grunbein, and Tellkamp.Muller’s Hamlet has no choice but to crawl back into his Panzer, performing an act ofself-destruction/reconstruction that leaves the iconographic object intact. In the wake of therevolutionary events that started on the periphery of the “creaky Soviet empire” and endedwith the downfall of the Fourth Rome, these younger artists undertake a form of aestheticlabor that is ultimately post-imperial in nature.13

THE PRODUCTION OF AN ICONIC OBJECT AND THE LABOR

OF ICONIZATION

One of the most widely circulated images of the postwar era is that of the standoff betweenAmerican and Soviet tanks at Checkpoint Charlie in 1961. This global photograph capturesas no other the nature of the Cold War era as a confrontation between two imperial powers;it also hints at the temporalities proper to this geopolitical configuration: the frozen time ofthe standoff, the slow crawl of tanks as they roll through the streets of Budapest or Praguetheir guns pointed at the rebels.14

Journeys through 1940s Germany,” Writing Travel, ed. John Zilcosky (Toronto: University of TorontoPress, 2008), 123–160.

12Tank 23 was the first tank entering Prague in 1945 and was subsequently displayed as a monumentto the liberation from fascism. After the arrest of the artist, the tank was first restored, then takenoff the pedestal and moved to the army museum. See website for exhibit Worte gegen Panzer, http://www.fzhm.at/de/index.php?nav=1523&id=245

13Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 433; Katerina Clark, Moscow: The Fourth Rome:Stalinism, Cosmopolitianism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 2011). As Burbank and Cooper remind us again, Gorbachev did not call on thearmy when the Berlin wall fell (433). See also their “Empire Effect,” Public Culture 24, no. 2 (2012):239–247, for a condensed version of how the empires of the past are shaping our present and a succinctdefinition of empire as one form of sovereignty: “as large political units, expansionist or with a memoryof expansion, [that] maintain distinctions and hierarchy among people even as they incorporate them,forcefully or otherwise” (240).

14In his prehistory of the tank, Oswald Spengler discussed the “Streitwagen” as the introductionof “Tempo als Waffe.” Oswald Spengler, “Der Streitwagen und seine Bedeutung fur den Gang derWeltgeschichte.” Lecture held on February 6, 1934; available at zeno.org.


REPRO CHECKPOINT CHARLIE

By 1961, Soviet tanks already had a history as iconographic objects. And as I mentionedabove, Soviet artists, artists of the avant-garde, and socialist realist traditionalists contributedto the fabrication of this iconography. This production of the tank as a modern iconic object inthe work of avant-garde and socialist realist artists deserves our attention because it constitutesa kind of preparatory labor, laying the groundwork for this iconography long before the RedArmy installed hundreds of tanks on pedestals to commemorate its victory in 1945. Moreover,to comprehend the full range of meanings and, more intriguingly, the stylistic inventions atwork in the aesthetic labor of demolition subsequently undertaken by GDR artists, we needto attend to the specificity of this aesthetic production in the photomontages and paintingsby Russian artists of the twenties and thirties.

If we focus on tanks as iconic objects, we can describe the trajectory of the visualarts in the Soviet Union in the following way: Russian art from the 1910s to the 1940smoves from an attack on religious icons and their reconceptualization in the object-less artand nihilist aesthetics of Kazemir Malevich to a recovery of the object as modern icon inthe (proto-) Stalinist photomontages of El Lissitsky and socialist realist painting by militaryartists such as Ekaterina Zernova. The creation of the tank as iconic object is not merelya question of the referential nature of the image of the tank but requires the invention of astory—or stories—that connect the aesthetic object to the Soviet state.

I would like to begin this part with a brief detour into Hans Belting’s discussion of theicon. Derived from eikon, the Greek word for image and portrait, icons claim “to embodyhigher or transfigured beings and to deserve the veneration due to the holy.”15 This claim wasbased on the “accuracy [that] we tend to attribute to a photograph,”16 Hans Belting writes inhis revisionist history of icons, explaining that we should think of icons as a kind of proto-photographic medium. In these religious images, the saint’s “presence . . . [is] condensedinto a corporeal image that had a physical existence as a panel or statue.”17 Manifesting“a higher reality,” they thus did not represent saints but revealed their presence to the eyesof mortals.18 Of particular interest to us are Belting’s reflections on the politics of icons.By late antiquity, he writes, icons were “completely taken into the service of [the imperial]court” (and among the many political functions of Marian icons was that of the victoriousgeneral).19 Equally pertinent to our theme is the fact that by the early nineteenth century,icons were used in Russia as a “means of self-assertion” against Western culture.20

15Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1994), 46.

16Belting, Likeness and Presence 4. Legends attesting to an icon’s veracity often eliminated the painteras intermediary asserting their divine origin, one of the continuities with the theology of pagan images.

17Belting, Likeness and Presence 13–14.18Ibid. 47.19Ibid. 46 and 44. In the political theology of Byzantine emperors, the “mother of God” was the “actual

sovereign, in whose name even the emperor acted” (36).20Ibid. 17. Belting’s second major point has to do with the process of their creation as holy images

icons. That is, they are created not as artistic objects but as images embodying some divine presence.


Belting is not alone in discussing Russian Suprematism in the context of this theo-political regime of the image. Tatlin, Belting points out, began as an icon painter, andMalevich famously called his first black square the “icon of a new art”; the monochromaticsquare was indeed a “new form of icon” expressing a “higher truth,” a new metaphysics.21

Declaring war on painting with his white and red squares, the move to the “objectless pictorialsystem of Suprematism” announced the “overthrow of the old art” and the revolutionarytransformation of the world.22 In “The Last Futurist Exhibit 0.10” (1915), Susan Buck-Morsspoints out, Malevich placed his Black Square in the position normally reserved for a religiousicon, i.e., the upper corners of the room.23 Seeing “the indigenous icon as an alternative tothe tradition of the West,” Malevich’s war against figurative modes of representation thusradically revised the icon as the image of immediate presence.24 No longer the presence of thedivine, this modern icon signifies what T. J. Clark analyzes as Malevich’s nihilist-anarchistmetaphysics.25 Or, put differently, in Malevich’s metaphysics, the square’s blackness signals“that it is Nothing,” and this nothing “is how it is.”26 These “icons of the new non-being”coexist with Malevich’ Suprematist works where forms seem to have settled into some kindof order but yet convey what Clark calls the Malevich effect: “[T]he conjuring of escape,abyss, elevation, excitation, non-existence out of these too-well behaved materials . . . ”27

This claim is established through miracles or legends attesting to their divine origin. (One of the earliestlegends is that of St. Luke the Evangelist having painted Mary during her lifetime. Instead of eliminatingthe painter, Belting argues, it invented a particularly accurate one.) Once the images’ status as iconsis established, processions and other ceremonial displays that involve establishing distance betweenimage and viewer (by the use of veiling and unveiling, for instance) maintain their sacred aura (Belting,Likeness and Presence, 13–14).

21Ibid. 20 and website Hamburger Kunsthalle; exhibit in 2007 Das schwarze Quadrat. Homage anMalewitsch; see http://www.das-schwarze-quadrat.de/home/ausstellung einfuehrung.php

22Maria Gough, “The Language of Revolution,” in Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925, 262 and 263. In1932, he was contemplating to exhibit them as a diptych of black and red squares. See website of theHermitage (http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html En05/hm5 1 55.html). The exhibit was planned totake place in Leningrad.

23Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 48. In a later exhibit, Malevich’s art was still included but located ata “dead end,” characterizing his art as “deviation” from the trajectory of Soviet art. Masha Chlenova,“Staging Soviet Art: 15 Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic,” October 147 (Winter 2014):47.

24Belting, Likeness and Presence, 21.25That is, making a compelling case for contextualizing Malevich as artist of war communism, T. J.

Clark redefines him in philosophical terms as a Russian nihilist and in political terms as an anarchist.See Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 2001), 285–286.

26Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 285 and 281. Anti-materialist in inspiration, Malevich wants his Supre-matist compositions to be read as attempts to escape “the laws of orientation” (284), a representation of“a whirl of cosmic dust” (281); at the same time, this “breakaway from earth” cannot yet be made animage: The forms will only be found on the picture surface (285).

27Ibid. 278.


Fittingly, Malevich’s commitment to the “dynamic condition of forms” comes with a Futuristcelebration of airplanes.28

Socialist realism famously recovered the world of material objects and people, its formof representation ranging from the heroic mode to portrayals of everyday life.29 EkaterinaZernova was one of those painters.30 No longer radical reinventions of the very concept ofthe iconic image, her paintings represent the tank as an iconic object, or, more precisely,attempt to do so. Having spent the years from 1929 to 1931 with tank units of the Red Army,sketching military exercises and tank commanders, she continued her work as a militarypainter during World War II. Her painting Tank (1931) confronts the viewer with the iconicobject drawn in great detail, its massive threatening presence somewhat attenuated by the softpastels of the landscape.31 The slight angle at which the machine is depicted also moderatesthe aggressive force emanating from the canvas, yet this aspect of the composition is notenough to offset the looming presence of an object towering over the beholder.

In Tank, the object is present, massively present, but it is a dead object, one that haslost its life and its soul. Tank lacks Malevich’s metaphysics and it lacks a story, the kind ofstory about the power of the new state told by, for instance, El Lissitsky’s photomontages andinstallations with their aggressively poised tanks (which I will discuss later). In CollectiveFarmers Greeting Tank (1937), Zernova then hints at a story about the tank, a story aboutthe presence of Soviet state power at the time of collectivization.32 In this impressionistversion of socialist realism, we, the beholders, face the tank about to enter the collectivefarm on the dirt path leading toward us. As we saw above, Josef Koudelka shot one of his

28Ibid. 277. “Aeroplane Flying” is the title of one of Malevich’s essays. See Clark, Farewell to an Idea,278. Malevich responded to the pressures of Stalinism with a return to iconographic figuration. In hisSuprematist Madonna from the nineteen twenties, mounted as an icon in a golden frame, Malevich thenrendered the connection between the icon’s power of immediate presence and his form of avant-gardepainting visible, disassembling mother and child into colorful squares, lines, and circles. Accordingto Buck-Morss, his post-Cubist paintings of “dis-figured” peasants were now “clearly echoing theiconography of the church.” This return signals a critical view of collectivization or, Buck-Morss argues,a critique of time itself, including the Communist Party’s teleological time of progress (Buck-Morss:Dreamworld and Catastrophe, 88).

29It is wrong to conceive of this transition from avant-garde to socialist realism as the abandoning ofmodernist aesthetics. For the complication of this argument, see the introduction to my Post-FascistFantasies; for the realm of visual culture, see Christina Kiaer’s excellent “Lyrical Socialist Realism,”October 147 (Winter 2014): 56–77. For the persistence of a realist aesthetic in abstract modernismthat complicates the “Western” story, see Alex Potts, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making,Politics, and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press,2013).

30On Zernova, see Christina Kiaer, “The Short Life of the Equal Woman,” Tate Etc. 15 (Spring 2009),http://tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/short-life-equal-woman.

31Boris Groys and Max Hollein, eds. Traumfabrik Kommunismus: Die visuelle Kultur der Stalinzeit.Dream Factory Communism: The Visual Culture of the Stalin Era (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt: HatjeCantz, 2003), 189. Zernova’s military work was commissioned by the political leadership of the RedArmy (425–426). For a reproduction of Tank, see Groys and Hollein, Traumfabrik 189.

32For a reproduction of Collective Farmers Greeting a Tank, see Christine Kiaer’s article athttp://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/short-life-equal-uoman.


famous photographs about the Prague Spring standing in the path of the tank, positioning theviewer behind his camera. In Zernova’s painting, the composition subtly shifts away fromthe threatening confrontation of viewer and war machine. Here, we are looking through a gapin the group of farmers greeting the tank. While they are standing to our left and right, weare positioned as if we were standing at the end of the path, the tank the object in our line ofsight, our gaze returned by the tank’s commander. And yet, the potential threat embodied inthis constellation of direct confrontation is muted: the Soviet war machine is partly obscuredby trees and a bouquet of flowers held up by one of the women, its threatening presencefurther reduced by the distance between farmers and tank as well as tank and beholder.33 InCollective Farmers, Zernova transformed the iconic object of Tank (1931), connecting it toa state project and, more important, placing it into the context of everyday life.

Starting in the nineteen thirties, avant-garde artists began to contribute to the wareffort with posters showcasing the power of Soviet tanks, suggesting their own storiesabout their objects and the power of the emerging Stalinist state. Nikolaj Dolgorukov’sphotomontages, for instance, combine photographs of endless columns of tanks driving pastthe Lenin Mausoleum with larger-than-life pictures of Stalin.34 El Lissitsky, Malevich’sstudent, also contributed to the iconization of tanks. One of his Stalinist posters from 1943appealed to Russian workers to speed up production. Where Malevich’s anti-materialistaesthetics privileges airplanes as the machines of the new world, Lissitsky’s “materialism”is wedded to the idea of “new Communist foundations solid as re-inforced concrete.”35

Not surprisingly, in El Lissitsky’s photomontages the image of the tank replaces that of theairplane.

A backward glance at Zernova’s Tank will allow us to see another reason why ElLissitsky’s photomontages succeed where Zernova’s painting failed. Icons need distancebetween image and viewer. In order for the tank to function as iconic object, the artist hasto achieve a specific effect, I think: the distance of an involuntary stepping back, a recoilingfrom a destructive force seemingly at rest but ready to be unleashed. Zernova’s paintingdoes not produce this effect, but El Lissitsky’s 1943 poster Gebt uns mehr Panzer! and his1928 photo-frieze do. In an allusion to his earlier constructivist poster, Beat the Whites withthe Red Wedge (in which the wedge represented Bolsheviks), the 1943 poster contained redwedges at both the top and bottom, the slogan Give us more tanks inscribed in the lowerwedge.36 Against the background of a shop floor, El Lissitzky combined the photograph of

33Groys and Hollein, Traumfabrik.34For a reproduction of the poster entitled “Unsere Armee und unser Land werden gestarkt durch den

Geist von Stalin,” see Groys and Hollein, Traumfabrik 58. The title thematizes the nature of the icon (i.e.,the visibility of the invisible)); the poster articulates the relation through a triangular constellation ofspirit—corporeal body—tank. On the iconoclastic crisis and the struggle over “natural” and “articficial”image as political “crisis over the symbolic foundation of authority,” and the impossibility of rulingwithout images (including territorial conquest), see Marie-Jose Mondzian’s lucid introduction to hisImage, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (Stanford, CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 2005): 1–8.

35El Lissitzky quoted in Clark, Farewell to an Idea 288.36Maria Gough, Abstraction 263.


a battle-ready tank placed atop the red wedge with the stylized faces of two workers, manand woman, who might as well be tank commanders.37 The photograph of a tank roaringinto battle was already part of El Lissitzky’s photo-frieze for the Soviet Pavilion of theInternational Press Exhibition in 1928.38 Shot from below and rearing up in front of theviewer, the tank’s aggressive presence and energy is only slightly mitigated by the angle thatturns its gun turrets away from the viewer.

FROM ICONIZATION TO ICONO-GRAPHY: TANK MONUMENTS

AND CARL SCHMITT’S ICONOGRAPHIC SPACE

As I mentioned in the introduction, my argument traces the trajectory from the constitution ofthe Soviet tank as modern iconic to iconographic object, from an aesthetic object representingstate power to the material object representing imperial power, the latter part of the argumentbeing informed by Schmitt’s postwar writing on the new empires and their nomotic spaces.Before discussing Schmitt’s concepts of iconography and iconographic spaces in somedetail, I would like to recapitulate my argument about the process of the tank’s iconizationso far. Belting distinguishes between the “era of images” and the “era of art” (or the erawhen the icon was experienced as “unmediated pictorial revelation” and the era when thisway of experiencing images is lost and replaced by the “mediated meaning of aestheticexperience”).39 The image of the tank in the Soviet art of the Stalinist era is not an icon, butthe aesthetically mediated image of an iconic object. More precisely, it is an object undergoingan intense process of iconization, an attempt to convey iconic status in the modern age thatrisks failure and remains by necessity incomplete. And yet as the representation of a sovereignpower, the image of the tank retains traces of iconicity.

Schmitt’s early postwar articles on the geopolitics of the Cold War essentially representan elaboration on the insights won in the long process of writing The Nomos of the Earth(1950).40 We might summarize Schmitt’s guiding ideas as follows: neglecting the powerof images in favor of texts, the concept of ideology (at least as it circulated at the time ofhis writing) needs to be replaced by that of iconography, or the writing with images. Faced

37Groys and Hollein, Traumfabrik 61.38For a reproduction of the photo-frieze and Clark’s discussion of the exhibit, see Farewell to an Idea

283.39Belting, Likeness and Presence 16. This has been criticized as too neat a break, ignoring the con-

tinued existence of cult images. Belting himself addressed the issue with admirable clarity: “[A]ll suchpresentations of history contain an element of exaggeration. Humankind has never freed itself fromthe power of images, but this power has been exerted by different images in different ways at differenttimes. There is no such thing as a historical caesura at which humanity changes out of all recognition”(Likeness and Presence 16).

40As one of the Nazis’ leading imperial theorists, Carl Schmitt began analyzing the imperial nature ofthis postwar order as early as 1942. On this topic, see Julia Hell, “Katechon: Carl Schmitt’s ImperialTheology and the Ruins of the Future,” Germanic Review 84, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 283–326. Once theNazis’ genocidal experiment in empire-building had collapsed, Schmitt continued publishing articleson the new nomos or global order.


with the new Soviet Empire, Schmitt arrived at the conclusion that all of world history’s“globale Auseinandersetzungen” are fought not in the name of dogmas but in the name ofvenerated images, images such as the “Marienbild” of the Spanish-Portuguese empires.41

But why exactly did this new confrontation between a Sovietized east and an Americanizingwest lead Schmitt to reformulate such central aspects of his imperial theology, such as theimagination of nomotic space, in terms of iconography? The concepts of iconography andthe iconographic space emerged from his critical engagement with Ernst Junger’s essay “DerGordische Knoten” (1953), on the one hand, and his reading of Jean Gottmann, a Frenchgeographer who introduced the idea of iconographie nationale.42

Schmitt discussed this Cold War order as a new stage in world history (a history heunderstood as the contingent series of empires and their nomoi).43 While Alexandre Kojeve,one of Schmitt’s interlocutors, argued in 1957 that the time of (capitalist) “Nehmen” wasover, Schmitt insisted that the United States and the Soviet Union were land-appropriatingpowers.44 The Cold War, Schmitt argued in 1959, represented one of the moments in worldhistory when heightened rivalry and collisions between empires resulted in a “simple globaldualism” (GS 524). Ever-increasing intensity of “geistige Feindschaft” was an inevitableand—to Schmitt, of course, welcome—aspect of this constellation (GS 530 and 524).45

Schmitt, one could say, considered himself a partisan in this “weltweite[r] Kampf,” a partisanfighting against the communist empire of the east and the capitalist empire of the westfrom his home territory, the territory of a Christian Abendland.46 His reactionary politics

41Carl Schmitt, “Die geschichtliche Struktur des heutigen Welt-Gegensatzes von Ost und West:Bermerkungen zu Ernst Jungers Schrift ‘Der Gordische Knoten,”’ in Carl Schmitt, Staat, Großraum,Nomos: Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1916–1969, ed. Gunter Maschke (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995),527, hereafter cited as GS with page number.

42See the editor’s notes to Carl Schmitt, “Die geschichtliche Struktur” 527.43Reiche (or world powers, the word he used after 1945 distancing himself from his role as one of the

Nazis’ theorists of empire) create nomoi, which Schmitt defined in Nomos of the Earth as the articulationof a historically specific act of taking land with a historically specific political, legal, and cultural orderorganized around a sacred center (modeled on ancient Rome).

44Carl Schmitt, “Nomos – Nahme – Name” (1959), Staat, Großraum, Nomos 582. The essay is thusa critique of Alexandre Kojeve. “[E]ntfesselte Technik” characterizes both nomoi and their leadingpowers (GS 542–543).

45The “ultimate opposition” at the core of this new global order was the “historisch-dialektischeGegensatz von Land und Meer” (GS 544). Corresponding to two “Existenzmoglichkeiten” (“Kultur”and “Zivilization”), this polarity was thus not one of economic interests (GS 542).

46Carl Schmitt, “Die Ordnung der Welt nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg” (1962), Staat, Großraum,Nomos 592. Schmitt visited Franco-Spain numerous times both during and after World War II. Theformer imperial power whose political theology linked conquest and Conquistadora, where anarchistshad “executed” religious images and statues during the civil war, and where Marian icons still signifiedthe power of the state, was Schmitt’s postwar terrain. (On icons and the civil war, see Belting, Likenessand Presence 44.)


notwithstanding, Schmitt thus understood the imperial nature of the postwar order from themoment of its inception.47

To contemporary readers of Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth (1950), none of this wouldhave seemed new or surprising except for the concepts of iconography and iconographicspace. As I mentioned above, Schmitt developed the concepts in a reply to Junger’s 1953essay.48 Meditating on the metaphysical dimension of Europe’s division into East and West,Junger had argued in 1953 that the West is the “Hort der Bilderverehrung” and the East arealm of “Bilderfeindlichkeit” (GS 526–527). Schmitt countered in 1955 that “Ikone undIkonographie” (and thus “Ikonoklasmus”) exist everywhere, proposing to replace the worn-out concept of ideology with that of iconography (GS 527).

Why would this be the case? Sovereignty’s tendency to become visible is of coursea theme that runs through Schmitt’s work.49 Landnahme, Schmitt repeats in 1955, onlybecomes “konstituierend,” (i.e., creates a legitimate new order) when it involves acts of“Namengebung” that render the “Urheber” or author and true “Machthaber” or sovereignvisible.50 Thus with each new nomos or “konkrete Verortung” emerges a new “Art vonSichtbarkeit” (GS 527 and 526). It is this interest in the visible that leads Schmitt to privilegeiconography over ideology, the articulation of text and image over mere text. Iconographycovers “verschiedene Weltbilder und –Vorstellungen” in a way more suited to the presentsituation, Schmitt writes, and more complete than the concept of ideology (GS 526).

What does he mean by this? Let us return to his discussion of Junger’s metaphysics.With his antithesis of Bilderfeindlichkeit and Bildverehrung, Junger stops short of makingit the “Urgegensatz von Wort und Bild, Gehor und Gesicht . . . wobei Wort und Gehordem Osten, Bild und Gesicht dem Westen zugeordnet werden” (527).51 The concept of

47Schmitt’s position of imperial theorist of the Third Reich—first as active participant, then as excludedobserver—constituted the conditions of possibility for this insight into the nature of the new worldorder.

48While the theoretical thrust of his argument asserts the existence of iconography across the wall, hisreply to Junger’s analysis implies that the West lacks a proper iconography. While he does not explainthe reasons for this lack, we may surmise that it has to do with the dichotomy of (economic) civilizationversus (political) Kultur at the heart of Schmitt’s conservative revolutionary analysis. From this vantagepoint, the West and its leading imperial power appear as driven by an economic logic that lacks the willto create the nexus of politics and iconography; in contrast, the Communist-like Catholic Spain, drivenby a powerful political logic, is generating an equally powerful iconography.

49From his essay on Theodor Daubler’s modern epic Nordlicht and the work of myth to The Nomosof the Earth with its emphasis on the visibility of the sacred center of (post)Roman imperial power(revised again in Political Theology II [1962]).

50Carl Schmitt, “Nomos – Nahme – Name” (1959) 584–585. With names, abstraction ceases andsituations become concrete (585).

51Schmitt refers to Junger’s passage contrasting “Orient” and “Okzident.” Ernst Junger, “Der Gordis-che Knoten,” in Ernst Junger, Betrachungen zur Zeit (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002), 397. Arguing thedifference between eastern and western “Fuhrung,” Junger posits the moment of the Byzantine “Bilder-streit” as definitive because it established the distinction between icon and image, “gottgleich” and“gottahnlich” (396 and 397). Following Spengler, he argues: “Der Weg des Abendlanders fuhrt inWeiten” and ultimately, to abstraction creating art as “Denkmal des Unsichtbaren”; in the east “tritt


iconography, Schmitt argues, allows us to go beyond such simplified oppositions becauseit covers word and image, emphasizing the significance of “Bilderwelt” (GS 526). Schmittderives this concept from Gottmann’s thesis that iconography is the “Gordian knot” ofall national communities (GS 526). What are the conclusions Schmitt draws from thisdiscussion? Each of the nomoi constituting the global order represents an “iconographicspace,” its iconic images derived from different “religions, traditions, historical pasts andsocial organizations” (GS 527 and 526). Schmitt calls this work “die Ikonographie einesbestimmten Raumes”—the act of giving meaning and form to a particular space by writingof, and with, icons or sacred images (GS 526).52

Let me conclude with Schmitt’s examples of this territorialized [verortet] and his-torically concrete iconography. In this 1959 essay, Schmitt first glorified the “Helden derConquista” who used the sacred name and image of Mary in order to make their Landnahme“ikonographische Wirklichkeit.”53 Moving to his present, he then polemically praised theiconographic power of the Soviet Union. While Europeans, apologizing for the heroic deedsof their imperialist ancestors, seem to have lost the will “zur Namengebung” the Soviet Unionhas not: “neue Namen wie Leningrad, Stalingrad und Kaliningrad [verkunden] den immernoch aktuellen Zusammenhang von Nahme und Name . . . .”54 To this observation about theSoviets’ iconographic praxis, the former legal adviser to the Nazis adds a personal note: thefact that “das Gebaude des fruheren deutschen Reichsgerichts in Leipzig heute den NamenDimitroff-Haus fuhrt” defines his reality as a German jurist in Germany.55

Schmitt’s analysis of iconography thus includes images (the Marian icons of earlierempires) and words (but words that have a specific power: to evoke, among other things,the image of the person—in this case, that of communist leaders). Writing at a time whenSoviet tanks were still being displayed, Schmitt does not mention but we can safely extendhis analysis to these material objects. The 1943 battle at Kursk was the largest tank battle ofthe twentieth century, involving thousands of tanks on both sides. From this moment on, the

Gott manchmal ganz nah heran . . . wird sichtbar . . . als Gesetzgeber, als Vater” (398). Convinced ofthe power of images, Junger proposes the Gordian knot as “Sinnbild der Erdmacht” or “Weltherrschaft”(382 and 380). He weaves an analysis of the Third Reich into his portrayal of the Cold War (relyingon Schmitt’s concept of Großraum); yet the Spenglerian thrust of this analysis contrasts sharply withSchmitt’s historicized theorizing. Junger opens with a grand Spenglerian panorama reviving the latter’smetaphysics of history as eternal repetition. “Die Volker treten mit stets neuer Spannung auf die alteBuhne und in die alte Handlung ein. Es liegt an unserer Optik, daß sie vor allem den Glanz der Waffenfesthalt, der uber dem Schauspiel liegt” (377). History is a cycle of war, conquest, and peace. Hitlerentered eastern territories, ignoring their nature. “Wiederum gehort zum Bild der Untergang westlicherHeere in . . . Steppen” and “Der Raum wird feindlich” (379). He also ignored the law governing allempires (“grenzenlose Machtentfaltung [erregt] den Zorn der Gotter”) articulated by Greek and Romanhistorians (388). For Schmitt’s critique of Junger’s cyclical history, see GS 532.

52“Geschichtliche Erinnerungen, Sagen, Mythen und Legenden, Symbole und Tabus, Abbreviaturenund Signale des Fuhlens, Denkens und Sprechens, alles das zusammen macht die Ikonographie einesbestimmten Raumes aus” (GS 526).

53Schmitt, “Nomos – Nahme – Name” 585.54Ibid.55Ibid. Schmitt held this particular lecture in Spain.


Red Army went on the offensive, and among the armada of mass-produced Joseph Stalinsheading west was the more idiosyncratically named Amazonkha, driven by a legendarywoman commander.56 Turning actual tanks into the sign of imperial power, the Soviet armythen displayed the new iconographic object after 1945 with their victory monuments andsometimes as monuments, creating a vast iconographic space reaching from Moscow andLeningrad to cities in the GDR, and even beyond this imperial territory, to West Berlin (where,as we saw above, the heroic monument to the Red Army in the Tiergarten has survived the fallof the Wall to this day). One of the East German sites of Soviet iconography was Torgau onthe river Elbe, the city where Russian and American divisions met in the spring of 1945—andwhere Tellkamp crossed the river imprisoned in his tank.

Like the Marian icons of earlier empires, Soviet tanks thus represent the power andsovereignty of the empire across its vast central European territory.57 As I argued above,these iconographic tanks were the objects of a deliberate production process, first as pictorialobjects (representing state power) in the arts and then as material objects displayed withvictory monuments (representing imperial power), displays that established iconic distancebetween viewers and the colossal war machines mounted on massive pedestals.

RESTAGING THE OBJECT I: NEO RAUCH’S DER VORTRAGER

After the wall had fallen and the Red empire had vanished, a group of artists emerged onthe international art market who made communist iconography the very subject of theirwork. The Russian Sots-art artists Komar and Melamid are, of course, the example that firstcomes to mind.58 Marina Abramovic, the artist from the former Yugoslavia who carved thered star onto her own body, is currently the best-known example.59 Another artist working

56On these legendary women tank drivers, see Patrick Wright, Tank 298–299. At this time, Hitler beganpushing for the production of a “supertank,” examining a “full-size wooden model” in May of 1943(Wright, Tank 305).

57Not all sovereignty is based on the analogy of sovereign-father-god, but the imperial theology ofStalinist Russia is one that deliberately kept the theological shadows of political concepts and practicesalive.

58Sots-art has been dismissed as obsolete. See, for instance, Sonja Margolina’s dismissal of Sots-art’s“Entweihung der kollektiven Ikonen” and Neo Rauch’s aesthetic, in particular, as the reductionof painting to “eine andere Art des Erzahlens”; Margolina,, “Was am Ende bleibt, ist Kitsch undParodie,” http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/archive/von-der-ironischen-sozart-zur-neuen-staatskunst–wie-die-russische-kultur-ihre-verflossene-groesse-verarbeitet-was-am-ende-bleibt-ist-kitsch-und-parodie,10810590,9383730.htm; Boris Groys defends Sots-art’s continued relevance using Mondzain’stheory of “iconomy,” i.e., “the icon as the most economical way to display the invisible in the visibleworld.” Boris Groys, History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,2010), 187. Continuing the “Slavophile theological tradition,” this theory places Alexander Kosolapov’s“quotation of the icon of Christ,” for instance, into the capitalist context of the commodity and itscontemplation (187).

59Jovana Stokic, “The Art of Marina Abramovic: Leaving the Balkans, Entering the Other Side,”Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, ed. Klaus Biesenbach (New York: Museum of Modern Art,2010), 25.


FIGURE 2. Neo Rauch, Ausstellung (1997). Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin, David Zwirner,New York/London, Photo: Uwe Walter, Berlin. (Color figure available online.)

on the icons of a vanished country is Neo Rauch, the painter whose astonishingly rapidpost-Wall success includes his 2007 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. One year earlier,EIGEN + ART (Gerd Harry Lybke’s gallery in Leipzig) had organized a show under thetitle Der Zeitraum that included a large canvas prominently staging a tank. Rauch’s paintingsdisintegrate conventional notions of space, stage enigmatic scenes that hint at possible stories,and inscribe a temporality hovering between complete standstill and the moment right before,or right after, the explosion of violence. In Der Vortrager, Rauch condenses three scenes, andin each one of them the tank is present as the iconic object on display.

With his painting Ausstellung (1997), Rauch had already brought the tank into themuseum. The painting shows a room dominated by a single large canvas depicting a tank,the painting all but ignored by the few visitors in the exhibit (Figure 2). Zernova’s Tankand the one in Lissitsky’s poster are shown at a slight angle; Rauch depicts the object fromthe side, its cannon turned toward the outer left-hand corner away from the diegetic viewerand from us. While the object still looms above the diegetic viewer gesturing at its iconicstatus, the menacing force it once possessed is gone. Here, Rauch had gestured at Malevich’smonochrome surfaces, the tank in the painting outlined with thin white chalk lines againsta green background. In this austere painting of a painting, its representation of the tankmoving toward abstraction, the iconic object’s power is waning and the threat has faded.In Der Vortrager, by contrast (Figure 3), Rauch confronts us with the material presence of


FIGURE 3. Neo Rauch, Der Vortrager (2006). Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin, David Zwirner,New York/London, Photo: Uwe Walter, Berlin. (Color figure available online.)

the object, a heavy, menacing presence reminiscent of the tanks in Lissitsky’s posters orZernova’s 1931 painting, Tank.

Organized around the icon of an imperial order, Der Vortrager functions as a triptych,a triptych whose temporality freezes the scenes that it represents.60 We best understand itspeculiarity if we compare it to Max Beckmann’s triptychs, which represent three seeminglyunrelated stories (whose enigmatic nature and relationship to each other is left to the beholderto discover).61 Unlike Beckmann’s post-Cubist triptychs neatly separating the scenes thatmake up its stories (as in Abfahrt or Departure (1932)), Der Vortrager is a single canvaswhose composition at once intimates and disturbs the idea of an ordered ensemble of figures,

60Bergmann points out the staged character of Rauch’s painting with his “Buhnen-Szenen”; see RudijBergmann, “Vertrautheit verweht,” in online catalogue Neo Rauch. Der Zeitraum, http://www.eigen-art.com/index.php?article id=177&clang=0.

61Appropriating a genre of religious art, Beckmann studied the “transforming triptych” of MatthiasGrunewald, the Isenheim Altarpiece (ca. 1509/10–15) with its outer panels focused on the dead body ofChrist and its innermost panels, the story of “the cycle of salvation,” ending with the resurrected Christ,and was attracted as well to the “grim” imagery of Hieronymus Bosch; see Janson’s History of Art:The Western Tradition, ed. P. Davies, W. Denny, F. Fox Hofrichter, J. Jacobs, A. Roberts, and D. Simon(London: Prentice Hall, 2009), 635, 637, and 1031.


objects, and setting and the drama taking place in this space. If this is a triptych, then it isa dis-articulated one, its three scenes staged in an impossible space.62 Yet while Rauch’striptych stages three distinct scenes, the presence of tank is the story.

What, then, are these three scenes or rather, remnants of scenes, staging an iconicobject? Let us begin by tracing what a first glance at the painting perceives. Rauch seems toshow us a crowded scene inside a hangar organized around a basic constellation: a tank thathas come to a halt in front of a set of stairs, its gun barrel directed at a man standing at thetop of the stairway. The man is reading from a book or rather, reciting from the text, ignoringthe tank and its drivers, a woman in a colorful civilian dress emerging from the tank turrethelped by a man in uniform, his upper body covered with explosives. While the woman’sgaze, intense, if not ferocious, seems fixed on the reader, the male soldier’s eyes scan thefar horizon, his demeanor somewhere between the vigilance of the battlefield and the heroicposing after the battle is won. The reader’s pose is relaxed, one hand in the pocket of hispants, the other holding the book from which he is reading, one of many red books, scatteredat his feet next to an open briefcase. This constellation of tank and intellectual opens a spaceof associations that includes the Prague Spring, and which echoes with the many scenes ofconfrontation between Soviet (and East German) tanks and students captured on film anddistributed around the world.

If we shift our gaze away from this constellation of tank and reader to the figure inthe lower left, a woman pushing a pram looking down at child (bearing Rauch’s face), thescene and the story it tells shift into a new constellation: the woman walking alongside thegarlanded tank might be attending one of the many military parades in Moscow or EastBerlin. And finally, if we let our eyes be caught by the man in the very center of the painting,holding what appears to be a shovel or pickax, and follow his instruction to look at thecityscape beyond the hangar, the scene and story changes again. Something was built here,we think, a city with sixties-looking high rises, a city park—and, as we try to decipher theelements of this scene, we recall the GDR’s stories about Aufbau or reconstruction.63

How does the tank fit into this third story, and what exactly is the story that this part ofRauch’s post-GDR triptych might be telling? We might find the answer if we pay attentionto the painting’s spatial discrepancies. At first glance, the tank and the figures surrounding itseem to be located inside a large hangar-like hall, its roof held up by a beam resting on twoclassical columns and its entryway opening onto a cityscape located behind a park. Yet atthe same time, the tank is positioned in front of a dilapidated house located along the streetor path leading out of the city and ending in a circular space. A heavy iron sculpture (a badcaricature of a Richard Serra sculpture?) occupies the left edge of the green space outsidethe bright blue hangar, and we begin to wonder whether this tank, too, is a monument placed

62We might think of this dis-articulated space using the concept of “assemblage” (Potts, Experiments inModern Realism 253). That is, each of the three scenes creates “the unified picture space of traditionalrepresentational art,” but these spaces do not cohere into one coherent space (Ibid.).

63The man being one of the constructors, engineers, inventors who populate his early paintings.


in the middle of the circle into which the street widens. Is this then a scene organized aroundthe tank-as-monument erected to mark East German space as Soviet territory?64

We need to spend a little more time on the discrepancies of space, in particular on thenature of the space that I designated as a hangar. In the upper-left corner, the space of thehangar is breaking up as we discover the roof of a burning house above the woman’s headand to the right of the soldier. Here, what we had first perceived as the hangar’s back wallstops, leaving a gap between burning house and the sky-blue walls of the hangar throughwhich we see what seems the bright blue color of the “real” sky. Noticing the thin slice oflight blue wall that takes up two thirds of the painting’s left edge, we might now start to seethe walls of the hangar as fragments of the Berlin Wall—a wall covered with colorful graffitifirst on the western side and then, after November 9, 1989, on the eastern side as well.65 Wethus find ourselves in front of a space seen from the perspective of the post-Wall present.Focused on the Soviet tank and resonating with scenes of the remote and not-so-remotepast, Rauch’s triptych thus retrospectively constitutes the history of East Germany as aniconographic time-space.

Let us return for a moment to Carl Schmitt’s thoughts on iconography. The metaphorof the Gordian knot implies, Schmitt argues, that all iconographies will one day be “zerhauenoder gelost oder abgelost” (GS 526). The “Bilderwelten” of the world’s nomoi are thus subjectto change.66 In the spirit of his conservative critique of modernity, Schmitt detects threedestructive forces at work in the nomoi of the present: “[industrielle] Technisierung im Ostenund Westen,” and psychoanalysis and modern art in the West. The latter combines, Schmittwrites, “mit der Zerstorung einer alten Bilderwelt und Vorstellungsweise den Versuch einerNeuschopfung” (GS 526).67 Rauch’s paintings problematize Fordist modernity’s investment

64At this point, the structure that informs Rauch’s triptych starts to look like a combination of Beck-mann’s three separate scenes with Francis Bacon’s three-panel paintings depicting the same object inthree different ways, for instance, his Three Portraits of Lucian Freud (1969). On Bacon’s triptych withits deformations and distortions as a meta-reflection on perception itself, see Ernst van Alphen, FrancisBacon and the Loss of Self (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 41ff.

65Is the scene of tank and reader we earlier connected to the iconic photographs from the Prague Springthen perhaps also an allusion to the famous event on Alexanderplatz (on November 4, 1989) takingplace a mere four days before the wall collapsed into fragments? Or is this an allusion to the eventson Tiananmen Square in the fall of 1989, to the standoff between a lonely man, Wang Weilin, and aChinese tank? Or is this scene located in a time after the wall collapsed? I am referring to the firstofficially sanctioned demonstration taking place at a time when protesters in other East German citiessuch as Dresden or Leipzig were still facing tanks where Christa Wolf read “For Our Country,” callingfor a new democratic-socialist state. See Wolf’s melancholy account in her Stadt der Engel oder TheOvercoat of Dr. Freud (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010), 25.

66Not only is it wrong to assume that the image belongs to the east, Schmitt continues his critique ofJunger—it is equally simple-minded to assume that iconoclasm does not exist in the West.

67Schmitt based these cursory reflections about modern art on an article by Walter Warnach, whoconnects abstraction to icons, analyzing this new “Akt des Malens” as “Durchbruch zur Existen-zphilosophie.” Walter Warnach, “Das Andere und die Zeiten: Versuch uber die abstrakte Malerei,”Wort und Wahrheit 1 (1951): 844. Warnach defended abstraction on theological grounds. The “steileWunsch der modernen Kunst nach Uberwirklichkeit” is a sign of its “religious character.” Kandinsky


in “Neuschopfung” and revel in the destruction of its Bilderwelt. As I wrote above, in DerVortrager Rauch recreates the GDR as an iconographic space defined by the presence of theSoviet tank. Rauch’s real existing socialism and its iconographic space have a surreal quality,and like his surrealist predecessors, Rauch practices the “cult of the object,” preservingits integrity.68 That is, the iconic object is not taken apart but restaged, and through thisrepetition—and the dis-articulation of its staging frame, the triptych—the iconicity of theobject is both pointed out and erased.

What Rauch restages here is Zernova’s dead object. Unlike the bleached-out surrealismof some of Rauch’s earlier paintings, Der Vortrager uses strong colors. Yet despite this,the image of the tank—or any other objects/figures in the painting—never reaches the“psychically charged associations” of the surrealist object. Nor does it acquire the “vividiconic immediacy” that characterizes Andy Warhol’s mimicry of the “rhetoric of consumerimagery,” a Bilderwelt from a different iconographic space and its devilish commodityfetishism.69 Instead, like Zernova’s tank, this is a dead object, one sitting in a dead landscapeinhabited by dead souls.

Rauch’s Vortager was part of an exhibit entitled Zeitraum, and his post-imperialiconography also represents the temporality specific to the Sovietized space of East Germany.Condensing history’s after-images, Rauch’s triptych depicts this specific temporality as a timeof stillgelegte Geschichte or decommissioned history—the tanks have come to a standstill,and the time when the Soviets ruled East Germany is over. Moreover, in Der Vortragermoments of violence belong to the past, to the Cold War and its confrontations, and timestands still. Let’s briefly take another look at Zernova’s Collective Farmers Greeting a Tank(1937). As I wrote above, the painting’s spatial arrangement obeys a central axis of tank,path, and beholder. The tank is situated at the end of the path, which is also the ground onwhich we are standing, positioned slightly behind the farmers greeting the tank commander.In other words, Zernova made us part of her story, the act of welcome. In Der Vortrager, weare no longer part of the story. The circular space at the end of the path leading out of thecity on which the tank rests constitutes the painting’s ground floor and, ultimately, also theground that we, the beholders, occupy. A kind of proscenium, the circle seems to invite us tostep into the image-space, to join the actors and participate in their drama. But everything,figures and tank, is turned away from us, and the space right in front of us is too crowded forus to enter the diegetic Bildraum. We are outsiders, observers, frozen in place like the figuresin the painting. And yet the tank’s menacing presence leaves us in a state of uncertainty as to

is Warnach’s example, an artist whose transcendent art remained inextricably bound to Russia’s icons:“[I]n ihm [lebte] seiner slawischen Herkunft zufolge noch ein ganz elementares Bewußtsein fur dasAn-wesen des Heiligen im Bilde, der Ikone”; the “Form der Selbstgegenwart im Bild die Kandinskyerstrebte” was a form of “sakularisierte Ikonenwirklichkeit” (845). Searching for “reine Wirklichkeit,”Russian abstract artists needed the “Abstand zur Wirklichkeit des Gegenstandlichen” while their artremained inextricably bound to Russia’s icons (Ibid.).

68Stephen Bann, “The Sense of the Past and the Writing of History: Stephen Bann in Conversationwith Karen Lang,” Art Bulletin 95, no. 4 (December 2013).

69Potts, Experiments in Modern Realism 239.


whether this violence might not erupt again. After all, the intellectual is still facing the tank,still reading.70

The temporality depicted in the painting is the moment when everything has come to astandstill, the temporality that Rauch imposes on the beholder best described by the Germanneologism, Entschleunigung or deceleration.71 This temporality emerged in the wake of thecollapse of the Soviet empire as an aesthetic mode of resistance to the West.72 Designating aform of standstill that has both negative and positive meanings, this Ostzeit refers to a timeof stalled tanks and stalled reforms and a time of contemplation.73

STAGING THE OBJECT II: HEINER MULLER’S HAMLETMASCHINE (1977)AND DURS GRUNBEIN’S DEN KORPER ZERBRECHEN (2005)

Remobilizing memories of confrontations between Soviet tanks and protesters in his Ham-letmaschine, Heiner Muller put “Stagnation” on stage.74 As Rauch explodes the conventionsof the triptych, so Muller demolishes the conventions of drama. Leaving us with a text di-vided into five acts, Muller abandons story and dialogue in favor of minimalist stage picturesand monologues.75 The scene that rewrites the scenario of confrontation with Soviet tanksnarrates the dismemberment of the subject and functions as the mise-en-abyme of Muller’s

70Celia Gaissert reads the painting as representing looming danger, the moment right before the battleerupts (Gaissert, “Gewalt im Blick: Der ‘Zeitraum’—Zyklus von Neo Rauch,” http://www.eigen-art.com/files/cigaissert nrauch.pdf). I think that we might also be looking at the moment after the battle,the moment after the end of the Cold War—with the intellectual still confronting the tank.

71For a fine-grained analysis of the reconfiguration of time and temporalities after 1989, see KerstinBarndt, Layers of Time. Exhibiting History in Contemporary Germany, forthcoming, and her essay“Industrial Ruins and Exhibitionary Temporalities,” PMLA 125, no. 1 (2010): 134–141.

72OSTZEIT: Geschichten aus einem vergangenen Land / Photografien von Bergemann, Hauswald,Mahler, Mahler, Weiss. Texte von / Texts by Marcus Jauer, Wolfgang Kil, Alexander Osang, IngoSchulze, eds. Jorg Bruggemann, Annette Hauschild, Ute Mahler, and Werner Mahler (Osterfildern:HATJE CANTZ Verlag, 2009). Unification is experienced as “Sprung von einer gemachlichen undreflektorischen in eine rasante und innovationssuchtige Zeit” (Wolfgang Kil, “Ostzeit—The Director’sCut,” in OSTZEIT 269). Kil’s ideal is a precise, because patient, mode of narration (269).

73Arresting time Marina Abramovic’s “contemplative sitting,” I would argue, is the manifestation ofthis Soviet/eastern time in the very center of an empire whose temporality is that of ever-increasingacceleration. Klaus Biesenbach, “Marina Abramovic. The Artist Is Present,” Marina Abramovic: TheArtist Is Present 15.

74Heiner Muller, Krieg ohne Schlacht: Leben in zwei Diktaturen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch,1992), 295. The play was conceived during one of his stays in Bulgaria, widely performed in the Westand never on an East German stage. An extreme act of “resistance to the theater,” Muller’s anti-dramauses Shakespeare’s play as a kind of quarry, a source of quotes that survive in capital letters. JonathanKalb, “On Hamletmaschine: Muller and the Shadow of Artaud,” New German Critique 73 (Winter1998): 66.

75This was a time, Muller explains in his autobiography, when dialogue no longer existed, a lacksymptomatic of political stagnation. Robert Wilson exploited this tendency toward a “theater of images”putting “stillness” on stage, working against the teleology of Hamlet’s drama. In The Life and Death ofMarina Abramovic (2011), Robert Wilson transformed her life into a series of stage pictures, a practice


attack on the Aristotelian remnants in Brecht’s theater. Dis-articulating the subject, Ham-letmaschine leaves the tank intact. Or, put differently, the text works on the subject’s bodywhile taking the representation of the tank as a given.

Muller’s version of Hamlet addresses the condition of the East German intellectualafter the failure of the Prague Spring. Hamlet’s monologue dominates Act 1 (Familienalbum)and Act 4 (PEST IN BUDA SCHLACHT UM GRONLAND).76 Act 1 begins the translationof the play into “the world of so-called really existing socialism-Stalinism.” 77 Combininga line from one of Muller’s early Aufbaustucken with Shakespeare’s text, this act writesShakespeare’s father/son problematic into the symbolic order of the GDR (where the state’slegitimacy rests on the anti-fascist father and the son’s identification with this figure).78 Thescene ends with the son’s rebellion against this order, an Artaudian scene of blood, guts, andbody parts. Act 4 retells this act of rebellion, this time not as a revolt against the GDR’spaternal order but as a spontaneous uprising that culminates in the image of Hamlet as “Soldatim Panzerturm” (H 19).

Condensing the events in Berlin in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Prague in 1968, thefirst part of Hamlet’s monologue rushes into the story of an uprising that might but did nothappen. The first lines again situate Act 4 historically, alluding to the October revolution andMuller’s adaptation of Gladkov’s novel Cement. Then “the actor playing Hamlet” takes offhis mask declaring: “Mein Drama findet nicht mehr statt” (H 17).79 Nothing is left of 1917and the attempt to repeat the Bolshevik revolution on East German territory but petrifiedhope. Now drama can be thought only in the subjunctive: “Mein Drama, wenn es nochstattfinden wurde, fande in der Zeit des Aufstands statt” (H 17). And Hamlet’s drama is nolonger merely the story of the inability to act but the story of the dissident communist’sposition on the side of the insurgents and the side of the communist state.80

Here Muller’s tank scenario begins as the text of his anti-theater suddenly turns intoa monologue narrating action, the events turning from a leisurely walk into a spontaneousdemonstration. Tanks are sent in, and the story turns into the drama of the dissident intel-lectual, a drama imagined in the irrealis: “Mein Platz, wenn mein Drama noch stattfindenwurde, ware auf beiden Seiten der Front, zwischen den Fronten, daruber” (H 19). Hamletfights with the crowd attacking the tanks and stands on the balcony of a government building,immobilized by fear. It is here, at the moment when Hamlet’s narration of the uprising beginsto slow down, that Muller brings in the image of the soldier in the tank: “Ich bin der Soldat

honed to perfection during his years of collaborating with Muller (whose Hamletmaschine he staged in1986). Jonathan Kalb, “On Hamletmaschine” 64.

76Heiner Muller, Die Hamletmaschine, in Heiner Muller, Die Hamletmaschine. Heiner Muller’s End-spiel, ed. Theo Girshausen (Cologne, Prometh Verlag, 1978), 11, hereafter cited as H with page number.

77Heiner Muller, Krieg ohne Schlacht 294.78“ZWEITER CLOWN IM KOMMUNISTISCHEN FRUHLING / SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN

THIS AGE OF HOPE” (H 11). On this topic of post-fascist sovereignty and the role of the father, seemy Post-Fascist Fantasies.

79“Ich bin nicht Hamlet. Ich spiele keine Rolle mehr. Meine Worte haben mir nichts mehr zu sagen.Meine Gedanken saugen den Bildern das Blut aus” (H 17).

80Christa Wolf describes this position in her recollections of the 1953 uprising: “Und wie du entsetztund erleichtert warst, als die Panzer fuhren” (Wolf, Die Stadt der Engel 199).


im Panzerturm, mein Kopf ist leer unter dem Helm, der erstickte Schrei unter den Ketten”(H 19).

Having drawn us into the drama of Hamlet’s uprising, the text now veers into a seriesof disconnected statements, one-sentence scenarios of identities and body parts. First takingthe concept of double loyalty to its extreme, these scenarios then deconstruct the very conceptinto unrelated fragments:

Ich bin die Schreibmaschine. Ich knupfe die Schlinge, wenn die Radelsfuhreraufgehangt werden, ziehe die Schemel weg, breche mein Genick. Ich bin meinGefangener. Ich futtere mit meinen Daten die Computer. Meine Rollen sindSpeichel und Spucknapf Messer und Wunde Zahn und Gurgel Hals und Strick.(H 19)

Then Hamlet puts a stop to the rebellion in the subjunctive, announcing, “Mein Drama hatnicht stattgefunden” (H 19). What did happen is another Artaudian scene, the disintegrationof the dissident Marxist into bits and pieces left in the tracks of the Soviet tank. He was thesoldier in the tank; he now is “der erstickte Schrei unter den Ketten” (H 19). And yet, by theend of Act 4 Hamlet has stepped back into his “Panzer”/armor (H 23).81

Recalling the history of revolts crushed by Soviet tanks, Muller thus portrayed thecondition of the dissident East German intellectual in 1977 as one of being both outside andinside the tank. In this rewriting of the tank scenario, we find traces of two different stories.First, Muller’s text resonates with a passage in Ernst Junger’s Paris wartime diaries in whichthe author-officer recalls the reaction to a German Wochenschau showing columns of Ger-man tanks.82 There was something specific about the mere sight of these war machines—”IhrAutomatisches, das Gleiten der stahlernen Schuppen bei den Tanks . . . ”—that provoked theaudience to cry out in fear.83 Demonstrating the transition from “propaganda into terror,”Junger writes in 1941, this newsreel celebrated the arrival of a new politics and a kind of hu-man being:84 Nazis, the author of Der Arbeiter discovered, were turning “Maschinentechnik”into politics, and men were becoming one with their war machines: “Die Ringe, Scharniere,

81Writing in the wake of the 1953 uprising, Brecht used the same metaphor of “gepanzert”: “Panzere-inheit, ich freue mich, dich schreibend / Und fur den Frieden werbend zu sehen / Und ich freue mich,daß ihr schreibend / Und fur den Frieden werbend, gepanzert seid.” Bertolt Brecht, Panzereinheit, ichfreue mich (1953), in Die Gedichte von Bertolt Brecht in einem Band (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag,1981), 1028.

82In the 1980s Junger became increasingly popular with artists such as Heiner Muller, Wolfgang Hilbig,and Neo Rauch—who, like Hilbig, read Junger’s Marmorklippen (1939).

83“Der bloße Anblick der Vernichtungsmittel rief Schreie der Furcht hervor” (Ernst Junger, Das erstePariser Tagebuch, in his Samtliche Werke: Tagebucher II, Strahlungen I (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979),238.

84Junger, Das erste Pariser Tagebuch: 238. In his account of the German army’s march on Paris, Jungermythologizes the tank driver (175) and, watching one tank after another lumbering past, wonders whetherthis new movement requires a new prose. On the eastern front, Junger’s tone changes. Recalling his“Fahrt in die ostlichen Gegenden” (Kaukasische Aufzeichnungen, in Samtliche Werke, Tagebucher II,


Sehschlitze, Panzerglieder, das Arsenal von Lebensformen, die sich verharten wie Krusten-tiere . . . .”85 Second, reviving the topos of soldiers being crushed by tanks, Muller both grindsthe insurgent subject into the ground and reassembles it as a being akin to Junger’s humanwar-machine.86 But he never demolishes the tank—the object whose image he evokes in thereader’s mind with the sparest of allusions to its component parts: Panzerturm and Ketten.Soviet tanks are still stationed in the GDR, and the time for demolitions has yet to come.

Muller’s drama of double loyalty was also part of the events that took place onTiananmen Square.87 In the wake of Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Wall, DursGrunbein will begin this labor of demolition by reconfiguring Muller’s scenario of doubleloyalty, first in a prose poem titled “Aus einem alten Fahrtenbuch” from Falten und Fallen(1994) and then again in his acceptance speech for the Buchner-Preis, titled Den Korper

369), he mentions Joseph Conrad’s Outpost of Progress (1896; Ein Vorposten des Fortschritts); he callsit the “ouverture zu unserem Zeitalter” (365). His report is a journey to the zone of “Schinderhutten imOsten” (315). In Junger’s view, the communists kept vast parts of the Russian population in a state ofbarbarism, and he depicts Nazi plans for colonial expansion in a positive light. It is the form in whichthis is done, not the substance, that he portrays critically.

85Junger, Das erste Pariser Tagebuch 238. In these passages, his relationship to this emerging bio-technik is more than ambivalent. This was politics without ethics, Junger writes, as barbarian as thework of Soviet commissars. Being inside the tank brings out the tensions around this “[m]odern warmachinery” (Justus Fetscher, “Portrait of the Poet as a Dead Man: Ernst Junger’s Writing in the SecondWorld War: Strahlungen,” 101). Inside the tank, the “modern warrior” becomes an “anachronisticknight” (Ebenda): “Ich kroch hinein und mußte . . . feststellen, daß mir in diesen Dingern, in denenes nach Ol, Benzin und Gummi riecht, nicht wohl zumute ist” (Junger, “Garten und Strassen,” inTagebucher II. Strahlungen I, 150).

86Curzio Malaparte, who accompanied the German army into the Ukraine as a war correspondent,famously reveled in the description of what German tanks did to Red army soldiers. The title of Skin(1949) refers to two incidents he describes with cynical detachment: the Italian run over by Shermantanks rolling into Rome on the Via dell’ Impero and the memory of “the carpet of a human skin” in theUkraine. Curzio Malaparte, Skin (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013), 298–299, translatedand introduced by Rachel Kushner. See also Wright’s chapter on Malaparte in his Tank, 308–315.Junger also writes the scene of tanks rolling across dead bodies, as does Anna Seghers: “Sie waren nachRußland hineingerollt; vor ihnen her Staubwolken fliehender Menschen . . . Und Tanks, die schnellerwaren als alle . . . ” and then: “Die eigenen Leute wurden von eigenen fliehenden Tanks zermalmt.” DieToten bleiben jung (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1967), 485 and 496.

87This double loyalty was part of the very real drama that took place on Tiananmen Square in 1989, adrama that ended in the disappearance and most likely, death of the student confronting the tank and ofthe soldier commanding the tank. We are all familiar with these photographs of the standoff betweena lonely man, Wang Weilin, and a Chinese tank (which was once a Soviet tank). Yet the iconic globalphotograph that we know does not tell the entire story, leaving out the way the leading tank is faltering,coming to a stop, veering to the right and left, until the tank commander finally gives up and startstalking to Wang Weilin. The photograph also remains silent about the disappearance and likely deathof the actors in this drama of resistance and divided loyalty. See Patrick Weight, Tank 5–13.


zerbrechen (2005).88 The former includes a paratext framing the poem as post-imperial, amanuscript discovered after the “Untergang des Sozialistischen Reiches,” buried in a box“im Sand eines militarischen Ubungsgelandes in Sachsen.”89 Grunbein positions the poem’slyrical I in the tank narrating a scenario that hovers between material iconicity and themetaphorical equation of language and war machine hints of which were already presentin Muller’s piece when Hamlet crawls back into his armor/Panzer. In “Aus einem altenFahrtenbuch,” both language and tank are a “kriegstechnisches Meisterwerk”: “ . . . sitzendim Panzer der Sprache, fahrend bis an die vordesten Linien des Draußen, dorthin wo dasGemetzel beginnt” (F 83). Unlike Muller’s Hamlet, Grunbein’s subject seems to feel atease inside the tank: “Der Panzer beschutzt mich, er ist rundum vernietet, aus stahlernenPlatten gebaut, stabile Grammatik,” he writes, and then continues: “Innen ist geraumig, mitausreichend Platz fur viele von meiner Sorte . . . ” (F 83). At ease or, rather, calmly resigned:

Worte wie Aufruhr und Bosheit, so sehr ich sie liebe, sie gehoren dazu undumgeben mich ungefragt. Das konnte mich wutend machen, doch nichts davon.Keine Panik, keine Platzangst, kein Gefuhl von Eingesperrtsein, ich habe michfruh schon hier eingewohnt. (F 83)

He briefly allows himself a question that resonates with Junger’s and Muller’s theme of theman having become war machine or war language: “Fur wie viele Jahre, frage ich mich,bin ich hier eingeschweißt, heiliges Buchsenfleisch” (F 83). And another one that hints atthe possible end of his existence as the war machine of language: “Kommt irgendwann eineZeit, da er einfach verschrottet wird?” (F 83). But then his journey in the tank ends againin fatalistic resignation: “Wind und Wetter kommen hinzu, Sperren und Hinterhalte, Straßenin denen man leicht in die Klemme gerat und auffallt mit seinem Panzer, nicht zu vergessendas Gewirr von Gerauschen, es konnten andere Sprachen sein, ich verstehe sie nicht, machtnichts, das ist es was uns geschieht” (F 83).

This passage ends with a scenario reminiscent of Tellkamp’s nighttime crossing withGoethe’s love poem:

Doch was immer mir in den Weg kommt, ich bleibe im Panzer der Sprache, hierbin ich geschutzt, einzigartig bewehrt. Hin und wieder singe ich vor mich hin,

88Grunbein’s title is a veiled critique of Volker Braun’s Marxism that informs the title of his speech:“Die Verhaltnisse zerbrechen: Rede zur Verleihung des Georg Buchner-Preises, 2000 (Frankfurt a.M.:Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000). On Braun’s post-89 poetry, see Karen Leeder, “‘After the Massacre of Il-lusions’: Specters of the German Democratic Republic in the Work of Volker Braun,” New GermanCritique 39, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 103–118.

89Durs Grunbein, “Aus einem alten Fahrtenbuch,” in his Falten und Fallen, 82, hereafter cited as Fwith page number. Advancing toward Paris in 1941, past the “Brennpunkte” where tanks “verknaueltstanden” (183), Ernst Junger rummages through a burned-out, tank finding love letters and secret files(Ernst Junger, Das erste Pariser Tagebuch 183 and 205). Grunbein finds a poem: “Die einzelnen Blatterlagen, an den Randern verkohlt, zwischen den Seiten eines Fahrtenbuchs, vermischt mit technischenund anatomischen Zeichnungen, einer Maschinenabschrift der achten Duineser Elegie Rilkes und demApothekenrezept fur ein schmerzlinderndes Mittel” (F 82).


schlafe ein mitten im Larm, strecke mich gahnend im Schweigen aus oder rufezum Spaß wie wild ein paar Zahlen und Kategorien heraus. (F 83)

Subjectivity is but a faint memory, not of voice and words but of laughter: “Schon das Echo derletzten Worte hore ich nicht mehr, ganz zu schweigen vom Eigenklang meiner Stimme, derPanzer hat beides mit seinem Motorenlarm uberdrohnt, mit seinem Kettenrasseln versohnt.Selten erinnert mein schnellfeuerhaftes Gelachter mich an mich selbst” (F 83).

In his 2005 speech, the scenario does not narrate the tank commander’s ride on itspredetermined, unstoppable course but a moment that breaks the course of time, a momentof respite in the history of war and violence. Buchner’s “politische Leidenschaft,” Grunbeinmused, might have been fueled by “Fatalismus” born out of the insight that we live “ineinem ewigen Gewaltzustand.”90 With Buchner in mind, Grunbein reflects on the violenceof history, leaving “die Leiber zermalmt am Wegrand [zuruck]” and the precarious natureof human life, drawing the lesson that all conceptions of society need to include Buchner’s“Bewußtsein von der Zerbrechlichkeit dieser traurigen Korper” (K 19).

Both before and after the fall of the Wall, Muller consistently performed the role of theMarxist intellectual and post-Brechtian playwright keeping alive the memory of revolutionsand their victims. He shared this view of history as “Schadelstatte” but chose to remainon the battlefield at once inside and outside the tank (K 19).91 In his text about Buchner,Grunbein describes a different position, one that is available only for a brief moment andonly in the shadow of a Soviet tank. Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan (1965) helps us makesense of this difference between Muller and Grunbein. Schmitt defined the partisan with thehelp of three criteria: first, in the practice of the partisan, the political (as the constellationof friend/enemy) reaches its highest intensity—the partisan is the most ideological fighter;second, the partisan defends his or her home territory; and finally, while the partisan dependson the regular army, he or she operates independently, carving out his own terrain of battle.Muller’s Hamlet operates on his own terrain, yet never severs his ties with the regular army.Grunbein’s Buchner text is the text of the non-partisan, the artist tired of choosing sides andlonging for a space outside of history, outside of politics.

As I wrote above, this space exists but for the briefest moment, in the shadow of aSoviet-German tank whose commander might have fled the battlefield. The encounter withthis tank or what Grunbein calls “die Maschine der Burgerkriege” is the scene with whichhe concludes his speech (K 19). I am as interested in the politics of this story as I am inGrunbein’s description of the scene taking place on the first day of the “Demonstrationswelle,die das andere Deutschland hinwegspulte” (K 19). In other words, the scene is set at the be-ginning of the end of the East German state. Let me stay with the details of the text: on his

90Durs Grunbein, “Den Korper zerbrechen. Dankrede” (2005), http://www.deutscheakademie.de/PREISE/Buechner t93-00htm, hereafter cited K with page number of printed text.

91In one of Muller’s 1994 poems “Besiegte” confront “Sieger” “Aus meiner Zelle vor dem leeren Blatt/ Im Kopf ein Drama fur kein Publikum / Taub sind die Sieger die Besiegten stumm / Ein fremder Blickauf eine fremde Stadt / Graugelb die Wolken ziehen am Fenster hin / Weißgrau die Tauben scheißen aufBerlin”; Heiner Muller, “Fremder Blick: Abschied von Berlin,” in his Werke, ed. Frank Hornigk, vol. I,Die Gedichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), 287.


way home from the demonstration on Alexanderplatz, his sense of euphoria just beginningto fade, Grunbein suddenly finds himself “staunend vor einer ungeheuren Maschine wieder”:“Auf dem Mittelstreifen . . . stand da, aus dem Nichts aufgetaucht . . . ein russischer Panzer”(K 19). Covered with the emblems of the East German army, the tank’s “Geschutzturm . . .

war eingedreht,” its cannon pointing in the direction of Alexanderplatz where the demon-stration had taken place on October 7, 1989 (K 19).

In contrast to Muller, the iconic object is vividly present in the text, the enumeration ofits component parts inciting the reader/listener to assemble a mental image of it; in contrast toRauch, its threatening aspect is foregrounded. Having described this unexpected encounter,Grunbein then tells his audience about a puzzling experience that he will try to explain forthe rest of the long paragraph: his sudden desire “mich niederzulassen, dort im Schattendes Panzers, an seine stahlernen Ketten und Rader gelehnt, minutenlang mit geschlossenenAugen” (K 19). Two things characterize what follows: the repeated description of thissituation (his leaning against the tank’s tracks with his eyes closed) and repeated attempts toexplain the desire to do so. Before he even narrates the situation for the first time, Grunbeintells his audience that he does not recall whether it was the “das Tonnenschwere seinerErscheinung” or “die (asiatische) Ferne, uber die er so leicht zu gebieten schien” that madehim want to sit down next to the “drohende Fahrzeug” (K 19).

Like one of the mine-dogs trained to attack German tanks, Grunbein seeks sheltercowering in the shadow of the Soviet tank.92 Grunbein explains this as his longing for“eine Pause im Fortgang,” an archaic desire for a moment of reprieve. Like all of history,revolutions use up bodies, tearing them apart. Grunbein moves back and forth between thesephilosophical reflections and the particularity of the historical moment, the breakdown of theEast German state. A bodily memory is flaring up, stronger than thoughts (which had alwaysbeen “fluchtbereit”) and born of the experience of having been imprisoned that producesthis longing for sleep. The body wanted to rest “inmitten des Minenfelds” and go to sleep“angelehnt an dieses schwere Kettenfahrzeug” (K 19). Grunbein then brings the speech to aclose with a last evocation of the scene: “Es war, als hatte ich, im Rucken den Panzer, dieseseine Mal die Geschichte verschlafen wollen, minutenlang, bevor alles in Fahrt kam . . . ”(K 20). In “Aus einem alten Fahrtenbuch,” Grunbein reimagined Muller’s scenario of thecommunist intellectual fighting both inside and outside the tank as the East German artistsride in the language-tank. In this speech, the journey is history’s inexorable and inexorablybloody march, and the scenario of intellectual and tank does not narrate a time of stagnationakin to Muller’s petrification of hope; instead, it narrates a “Lucke im Ablauf,” to use anexpression from one of Muller’s later texts, a short break in the course of time—a few minutesbefore war begins again.93

Representing this scene and its non-act in its various repetitions, Grunbein accumulatesideas, explanations, and stories, piling them up around the tank. There are many reasonsfor this desire to sleep, huddled against the tank. When he once more tries to explain

92On mine-dogs, see Patrick Wright, Tank 297. Instead of exploding under German tanks, the panickeddogs often crawled under Soviet tanks.

93Heiner Muller, Bildbeschreibung, in Heiner Muller’s Shakespeare Factory I (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag(1985), 13.


this enigmatic act, he rushes into a sentence listing what made life in the country that isabout to vanish so unbearable: the “Straßen breit wie Landebahnen,” the “Friedensplatze[]und Todesstreifen,” the “einfaltigen Sprachen,” and, finally, “diese[] lange[] sozialistische[]Dammerung” (K 19). Muller chose to live in the GDR, and Hamlet choses the tank. ToGrunbein, the GDR was “eine riesige Falle” in which he had been caught by the accident ofhis birth (K 19).

The uprising that Muller’s Hamlet imagined in the irrealis is thus finally taking placein Berlin.94 Grunbein is on the side of the protesters and the Soviet-German tank has doneits work, intimidating the demonstrators. Abandoned by its commander and his crew, thetank now stands in the center of the city as the monument to a state about to collapse.95

Throughout the entire paragraph, Grunbein simultaneously executes two moves: he takes thetank apart and keeps the image of the tank before the reader’s eyes by insistently naming itsconstitutive parts—the gun turret, the cannon, the wheels, the caterpillar tracks, all made ofsteel. The tank is heavy, an apt metaphor for a dictatorial state and its language wars. ButGrunbein does more than produce this weighty metaphor; he also stages this object one moretime, making it present in its iconic materiality. It is as if Grunbein, by moving from theevocation of the object in its totality (“ein russischer Panzer”) to the listing of its parts andthen back again, to the image of the object as a whole (“dieses schwere Kettenfahrzeug”),wants to draw attention to the labor expended in the process of producing this iconographicobject of Soviet imperialism.

AESTHETIC RESTORATIONS: UWE TELLKAMP’S POST-IMPERIAL

STORIES FROM A VANISHED COUNTRY

The nine-hundred-something pages of Tellkamp’s novel are divided into two books, DiePadagogische Provinz and Schwerkraft. Its large cast consists of members of the non-communist intelligentsia and Dresden’s old bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and the orthodoxand critical party members, ex-Moscow exiles or younger cadres educated in Moscow thatrule the city, on the other hand. And between these two camps, we find a few lapsedcommunists and the children of communists yearning to leave for the West and the East,Germany and the Soviet Union. Beginning with Brezhnev’s funeral in 1982, Tellkamp’s“Geschichte aus einem versunkenen Land” famously concludes on November 9, 1989 with

94Muller’s Hamlet steps back into his Panzer, ready to continue fighting the civil war between eastand west. In contrast, the “I” that Grunbein recalls in 1995 wants to escape politics altogether. Hewants to forget about “Ost und West” and refuses the “unselige[] Verklammerung des Gespaltenenaller Verhaltnisse und Gehirne”—tries to escape the hopelessly entangled fabric of words produced bythis division into east and west that affects all subject positions, making them seem like impossiblyreductionist constraints (K 19).

95The military support on which it rested was gradually withdrawn by Gorbachev’s reforms.


a colon instead of a period.96 In this final chapter, most of the novel’s protagonists join thewaves of demonstrators converging at Dresden’s train station.97

Like Rauch and Grunbein, Uwe Tellkamp served in the National People’s Army,and a tank slowly crawling forward might be an apt metaphor for Tellkamp’s massivenovel about the last decade of the GDR. Scenes or entire chapters involving all kinds oftanks—fascist tanks rushing into Ukraine, Soviet tanks on parade in Moscow and Berlin-Eastor rolling through the streets of Prague, and, finally, Soviet-German tanks in military trainingexercises—are part of the novel’s polyphonous architecture. Before I analyze Tellkamp’sspecific versions of the scenario of (post)communist subjectivity in more depth, I first want toaddress the post-imperial politics of the novel.98 More precisely, I want to discuss Tellkamp’spolitico-aesthetic project of restoration, his reassembly of the other East German literatureunder the sign of Mannian Kultur, and Tellkamp’s mapping of the GDR as an iconographicspace.

Tellkamp’s novel is excessive—excessive in its epic ambition, in its descriptions, andin its intertextual practice. This more or less explicit rewriting of other novels has a post-imperial dimension, one that requires a dual lens.99 With respect to the GDR, Tellkamp’sproject amounts to a post-imperial gesture directed at the Soviet Union or what the novelconstitutes as an eastern empire with the GDR as its colonized periphery. With respect tothe post-Wall era, the novel’s post-colonial demand for recognition is addressed to the westand to a post-unification culture that is “kunstfremd,” shallow: “Manhattan Mundraum.”100

“Mundraum” is a quote from a poem by Thomas Kling, whom Tellkamp praises as a“deutscher Dichter” who accepted “die Tradition in der er stand und aus der er kam, diedeutsche Kunst und Kultur mit ihren Wurzeln aus der Antike” adding: “Das machte mir ihn

96“ . . . aber dann auf einmal . . . / Schlugen die Uhren, schlugen den 9. November, “Deutschlandeinig Vaterland,” / schlugen ans Brandenburger Tor:” Uwe Tellkamp, Der Turm: Geschichte aus einemversunkenen Land (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008), 973, hereafter cited as DT with pagenumber.

97Tellkamp tells this story as the inevitable outcome of years of humiliation and Entmundigung,effects of the GDR’s “Padagogisches Großprojekt” (DT 271). It’s a story of pent-up rage and finallyliberation. In his lectures, Tellkamp advances the Mannian claim that the modern novel (at least in theform of “‘avantgardistischen,’ sprich: Vorausexemplaren”) tends to revert back to the genre of the epic,thematizing “Uraltthemen” and aiming once again for totality (Die Sandwirtschaft 154). The story ofhumiliation exploding into rage is one of these “archaic” themes.

98Given the constraints of this article, I cannot address this politico-aesthetic project (or the novel’sform in general, its oscillation between realism and modernism) in any depth. This is the subject ofanother article, provisionally titled “The Post-Imperial Aesthetics of Uwe Tellkamp’s Modern Epic.”

99The chapter on the restoration of the ruined Semper Oper functions as a meta-reflection on thisaesthetic restoration, and the statement on the Turmer’s restorative desire is programmatic: “Turmerwollen immer nur zuruck in die Vergangenheit—ihr Stil ist zusammengestohlen, eklektisch, nicht primar. . . und doch hat er etwas Eigenes im ganzen . . . Vielleicht ist das die Kunstausubung der Zukunft.Etwas noch einmal machen, wenngleich der Zeit Tribut zollend, wodurch das Gewesene ein HeimlichNeues wird, womoglich auch in seinen Tiefen erkannt und somit gewurdigt werden kann” (DT 584–585;italics are mine).100Tellkamp, Die Sandwirtschaft 44 and 105.


lieb, denn auch ich bin hier geboren und nicht in Amerika, bin aus dieser Erde genommen. . . .”101 There is a German Kultur, and it is not Americanized like that of the west, which,Tellkamp believes like many of his contemporaries, ruthlessly colonized the former GDR.102

Thus where Grunbein vacated the position of the partisan, Tellkamp reoccupies it, constitutingGerman Kultur as his home territory, a territory beyond east and west.103

Let me sketch this intertextual practice in its broadest outlines. In 2008, Tellkampreceived the Uwe Johnson Prize, a decision that makes sense if we remember some basicfacts about Johnson’s novel Jahrestage: Aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl (1970–1983).This four-volume novel consists of a diary covering a single year, starting on August 19,1967. The diarist is Gesine, a former GDR citizen now working as an editor in New York.104

The novel ends on August 19, 1968, the day before Gesine is scheduled to arrive in Pragueand the day before Soviet and East German tanks roll into the city, crushing the uprising.105

Tellkamp rewrites this story of crushed rebellion as successful revolution, telling the storyof the events in Dresden as prehistory of November 9, 1989.106 In Der Turm, Meno Rohdetakes Gesine’s place as diary-writing editor, his italicized diary-manuscript running like ared thread through the entire novel.107

Jahrestage is not the only novel that Tellkamp takes hold of for his sprawling novelabout the end of the GDR. On the contrary, as I wrote above, the text is a dense palimpsest, andmore than any other novel it exhibits the intertextual practice at the root of its composition. Thetext’s final lines—with their Mannian story of the long-postponed but inevitable explosionof the historical event that signals the end of an era and the possible beginning of a newage—is but one of the moments when the text gestures at this intertextual work.108 Like Der

101Ibid. 102.102Tellkamp “Es wird wieder marodierende Banden geben,” interview with Tellkamp (2012); ZeitOnline, http://www.zeit.de/2012/39/Uwe-Tellkamp-Der-Turm-Fernsehverfilmung.103From a global perspective, this is a move that locates German Kultur at the heart of European culture,recreating a Eurocentric narrative for the present.104The book interweaves memories of her life in the GDR with reflections on her present, in particularthe events surrounding the Prague Spring.105As readers of the novel, we know what happened to the Prague uprising; we do not know what willhappen to Gesine.106In other words, Der Turm “picks up the narrative thread . . . at the exact point where Uwe Johnson’sJahrestage . . . broke off” (T. J. Reed, “In That Dawn . . . ’: Revisiting the Wende,” Oxford GermanStudies 38, no. 3 (2009): 264).107The text’s different narrative strands (as well as styles) are held together by Meno Rohde’s diaryentries and a narrator who tends to disappear behind his characters until the last third of the novel, whenhis brief and repeated interjections indicate the acceleration of time (“ . . . aber dann auf einmal . . . /schlugen die Uhren”; DT 970). The novel’s Ouverture that, touching on all the novel’s themes, startsthe circulation of its many metaphors is part of Rohde’s text written in a style that crashes through allof the barriers erected by the “realist” conventions dear to East German censors.108Tellkamp never directly claims Johnson’s Jahrestage, but he does refer frequently to Mann’s novelabout a “sunken” world (Tellkamp, Sandwirtschaft 57) with its grand narrative arc, the story of thepolitico-cultural stasis of turn-of-the-century Europe, and then the explosion of World War I. Discussinga passage in Zauberberg (1924), Tellkamp observes that the cloth (of Hans Castorp’s suits) is layered


Zauberberg (1924), Der Turm is a novel about the “unberechenbare, gewaltfiebernde Kraft”of time (DT 944). Into this Mannian fabric, Tellkamp weaves his canon of GDR authors, acanon consisting of authors such as Wolfgang Hilbig, Brigitte Burmeister, Angela Krauß,or Franz Fuhmann as well as Uwe Johnson, the East German exile I mentioned above.109

Tellkamp does so not only by rewriting the structure of other novels, their basic storylines, orappropriating their themes but also by imitating styles.110 As a thickly layered palimpsest, thenovel thus represents a project of restoration, an aesthetic project that is eminently politicalin nature. The core around which this literary restoration coalesces is a concept of GermanKultur. Mannian in its genealogy, it represents Tellkamp’s ironic reply to one of the centralgambits of the SED’s cultural policy, the critical appropriation of the “literarische Erbe” ofthe so-called enlightened bourgeoisie (DT 851).111 And through his intertextual work on thecensored or exiled GDR authors, Tellkamp locates the site of Kultur in the former East.112

In a previous section, I discussed Rauch’s creation of East German history as an icono-graphic Zeitraum. What is truly unique about Der Turm is the way it portrays East Germanyas part of the iconographic space of the Soviet Union with its very own temporalities.113

Londoner, a dissident intellectual and one of the many protagonists with biographical links

in such a way that it becomes both “one and double”—becomes “Textus.” Der Turm is not one anddouble, but one and multiple (Tellkamp, Sandwirtschaft 58).109Postwar German literature always included a third space, constituted by texts written by exiles suchas Johnson or Peter Weiss addressing both Germanys, a space that Tellkamp’s canon reoccupies. Myview differs from Wolfgang Emmerich’s neater separation into East and West German literature; see his“Zwischen Chronotopos und Drittem Raum: Wie schreibt man die Geschichte des literarischen FeldesDDR?” Nach der Mauer der Abgrund, ed. Norbert Otto Eke (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 43–64; and“Cultural Memory East v. West: Is What Belongs Together Really Growing Together?” Oxford GermanStudies 38, no. 3 (2009): 243–253.110I already discussed his revision of Johnson’s overarching plotline. Tellkamp also imitates Mann’srecreation of the experience of time; for instance, once Tellkamp begins to narrate the events of 1989,the text accelerates. As to the imitation of styles: the near-apocalyptic depiction of the industrialborder zones with its allegorical overtones mimics Wolfgang Hilbig’s style and themes (DT 640); thesections in which Altenberg remembers his time as Wehrmacht soldier in Russia echo Franz Fuhmann’snovels; other sections revive Brigitte Burmeister’s nouveau roman or Angela Krauß’s surrealist realism.Rohde’s italicized manuscript rewrites Mannian reflections on time in the idiom of Hilbig’s maniacalprose. Tellkamp pushes these rewritings to their extremes, producing texts that would not have beenpublished before 1989.111On the importance of Mann as the “bourgeois” author for Gerhard Richter, see Gerhard Richter:Early Work 1951–1972, ed. Christine Mehring, Jeanne Anne Nugent, and Jon L. Seydl (Los Angeles:Paul Getty Museum, 2010), 57. See also Uwe Tellkamp, “‘Vielleicht bin ich ein giftiger Lurch,”’interview in Der Tagesspiegel (October 12, 2008): “Die DDR war eben nicht nur Karl Marx, sondernauch Goethe, Kleist und Eichendorff—ein humanistisches Projekt.” http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/literatur/schriftsteller-im-interview-uwe-tellkamp-vielleicht-bin-ich-ein-giftiger-lurch/1345430.html.112Not unlike Mann, who in his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1921) used the Spenglerian di-chotomy of Kultur and Zivilisation to celebrate a central European aesthetic sensibility.113This presence of the Soviet Union characterizes early GDR Aufbauromane and Produktionsstucke.This genuinely revolutionary German-Soviet culture disappeared as the GDR ossified and the SovietUnion imperialized.


to the Soviet Union, bluntly states at some point: “Wir sind ein Teil der Soviet Union” (DT747). Like other members of the nomenclatura, Londoner lives in “Ostrom,” a part of Dres-den whose access is controlled by guards in a “Kastell” that reminds Rohde of “ein antikerTriumphbogen” (DT 106). On their walks through Dresden, Tellkamp’s protagonists registertraces of this urban iconography, rushing past the “Lenin-Denkmal” on “Leninplatz,” cross-ing the “Juri-Gargarin-Straße,” or noticing neon signs in the “Leningrader Straße” (DT 877).When they venture outside the city, they encounter Soviet military transporting weaponsacross the country (DT 586).

The iconographic space of Der Turm is a space of ruins; the decaying crumblingarchitecture of Dresden, of the entire country, is a major topic of the book.114 The novel isfull of densely descriptive passages, representing Dresden in ruins and enacting the processof the country’s decay as a stalling of narration.115 Tellkamp takes writing strategies to theirextremes, and the description of the Red Army’s “Sanatorium” is one instance where thenarrator’s ruin-text turns excessive, piling detail upon detail (DT). This space is the rotten,decayed heart of the Soviet colony. Here, description is the story, the story of imperialdecline.116 In these dense, hyper-detailed descriptions of objects in the process of decay, thenarrator heeds Meno Rohde’s aesthetic-epistemological principles of a sharp, attentive gazeand precise description: “genau hinsehen” and “prazise beschreiben” (DT 553).

Der Turm thus does not merely map the city of Dresden (where much of the action takesplace) but a geopolitical order in which the GDR figures as a Soviet colony, as the westernperiphery of an eastern empire. It is on this western periphery where the fall begins, whereslow decline suddenly veers into rapid fall. Genau hinsehen – prazise beschreiben—this isadvice that Meno Rohde himself follows in those diary entries where he describes what heobserves and what he observes is the decay of a country, and then, its final, sudden fall: thecountry’s “Zusammenbruch” (DT). Tellkamp thus translates the trope of decline and fall intothe sequence of deceleration and acceleration: “Zeit fiel aus Zeit und alterte . . . / aber dann

114Commenting on the events in the fall of 1989, one of the rear-guard communists summarizes whatis happening as “der Aufstieg und Fall der Reiche,” adding a Nietzschean twist, “die Immerwiederkehrdes Immergleichen” (DT 969). One of the Dresden Theatres announces Heiner Muller’s Anatomie TitusFall of Rome (DT 878). A group of Turmer later obsessively immerse themselves in the study of thefall of Pergamon, Babylon, and other ancient empires of a “langversunkene[] unter Sand und Sintflutverschutteten Zeit” (see DT 871). Like Mann’s Zauberberg, the SED’s Leninist analysis of imperialismas the last stage of capitalism works with metaphors of decay, and so does Tellkamp. Nostalgia is notresistance but disease, the city and its architecture are in a state of “Verfall” and “Verwesung” (DT 241);the “Korper[] der Republik” is “siechend” (DT 867).115See the excellent articles on this topic by Anne Fuchs, who discusses Der Turm as a revitalization ofnineteenth century “poetic realism,” enriched by a “heightened sense of self-reflexivity” in “Psychoto-pography and Ethnopoetic Realism in Uwe Tellkamp’s Der Turm,” New German Critique 39, no. 2(Summer 2012): 119–132; and her “Topographien des System-Verfalls. Nostalgische und dystopischeRaumentwurfe in Uwe Tellkamps Der Turm, Germanistische Mitteilungen 70 (2009): 43–58.116See Mieke Bal on description as the “motor of narrative,” in her “Over-writing as Un-writing:Descriptions, World-Making, and Novelistic Time,” The Novel, Volume 2: Forms and Themes, ed.Franco Moretti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006): 573.


auf einmal, schrieb Meno, schlugen die Uhren . . . ” (DT 890).117 Tellkamp thus combinesiconography and chronography, the representation of an imperial space and its time.

SOVIET TANKS IN PRAGUE OR “SCHREIB ES AUF, HAT HANNA GESAGT,VIELLEICHT KOMMST DU DANN DAVON LOS”

The tension between decline and fall, between deceleration and acceleration, the slow andagonizing death of time and its sudden unexpected rebirth—this tension is part of MenoRohde’s text throughout the entire novel. On the one hand, Rohde’s text, the aestheticheart of the novel, participates in the staging of the “Anderzeit” of the “Rote Reich” andits “Archipel” by stalling narration (DT 7). On the other hand, in his breathless passagesfull of neologisms, unexpected associations, comparisons, and analogies, Meno Rohde putslanguage in motion—accelerates its course, lets meaning break down, and reassembles it.

Der Turm is a novel about nostalgic longings, and when Tellkamp thematizes theseattachments he always does so with critical distance and a certain amount of indulgence. Inother words, in this “VEB Zauberberg” almost everyone is obsessed with the past:118 thebourgeoisie with Dresden’s glory before World War II; the lapsed communists or skepticalmelancholics with 1968 and the events in Prague—or what one character calls “liegenge-lassene[] Traume” (DT 361); and the orthodox communists, politicians and artists, Moscowexiles, or former Nazis re-educated in the anti-fascist camps reliving the October revolution,gathering to watch Eisenstein’s Panzerkreuzer Potemkin.119 Meno Rohde calls these variousforms of nostalgia (the longings for a better past or for the lost expectations of the past) “diesuße Krankheit Gestern” (DT 11), analyzing them as the symptoms of a stagnant society. ButRohde, the child of Moscow exiles who recalls the military parades in front of Lenin’s Mau-soleum with “Panzern, die . . . voranschleichen” (DT 941) has his own nostalgic attachment

117As I wrote above, Tellkamp’s intertextuality takes themes and stylistic characteristics of the texts hemimics to an extreme. One of these examples is his elaboration on Mann’s observations on the natureand experience of time. Der Turm is full of watches, clocks, and bell towers. Starting with chapter 52(and the era of Gorbatchov’s “Beschleunigung”; DT 756), Rohde and the narrator begin to repeat aphrase that Rohde introduces in his ouverture: “ . . . aber die Uhren schlugen” (DT 7, 722, 732, 751).With this repetition, Tellkamp marks the acceleration of time, the change from a time when “[d]ie Zeigerauf den Uhren . . . die Stunden vor sich her [walzten]” (DT 586) in the “Verfallsjahrzehnten” (DT 853)to a time when clocks are starting to work again. In Rohde’s italicized texts, the Mannian conceptionof time in terms of standstill and acceleration produces a whirlpool of metaphors; time as a stagnant,barely moving river and then a racing, uncontrollable stream is one of them.118Andreas Stirn, “VEB Zauberberg: Uwe Tellkamp’s großer Endzeitroman.” http://friedlicherevolution.de.119Fixated on the Russian revolution, the former exiles also recall the terror of their nights at the hotelLux, listening for the arrival of the NKVD. See the very successful entanglement of stories of NSsoldiers and communist exiles and their hallucinatory memories in chapter 70 and 71 (especially DT917–935).


to the Prague Spring (and its echoes in the 1960s counterculture of the GDR).120 Like Gesine,Rohde’s friend Schevola once traveled east to be part of the revolution but now believes thatPrague was nothing but “[e]in Traum,” a dream “[v]on Panzern uberrollt” (DT 678). UnlikeMuller or Grunbein, Tellkamp never puts his protagonist inside the tank. Rohde belongselsewhere, to Neo Rauch’s iconographic spaces and their protagonists. Forever captured bythe memory of Prague, Rohde is the narrator who traces the country’s ruination in his unau-thorized texts, frantically inventing new ways of writing and, in the process, euphoricallykilling the authorized languages of a state about to disappear.

DER PANZER-TURM: DE-ICONIZATION AND DE-SCRIPTION

In my discussion of Rauch and Muller, I analyzed their tank scenarios in the context of theirsubversions of a particular genre (the triptych in Rauch’s, post-Aristotelian, post-Brechtiandrama in Muller’s case). Tellkamp’s work on the genre of the modern novel is best describedas intensification of certain features of the novel, for instance, the deliberate intertextuality ofDer Turm. In this part, I will engage more closely with Tellkamp’s extensive use of descrip-tion. The world-making ambitions—either referential or self-reflexively non-referential—ofthe modern novel involve description as its most basic mode of writing. As Mieke Bal ar-gues, separating descriptive and narrative registers is a mistake, and the nature of Tellkamp’swriting is best defined as narrating by describing.121 Tellkamp recreates what has ceased toexist, making the reader see this lost world and its objects. Few authors have achieved theevocative if not hallucinatory density of Tellkamp’s descriptions of Dresden and the vanishedworlds of its communist, dissident-communist, and non-communist protagonists.122

120His memories of Ernst Bloch’s visit to Leipzig, the animated conversations about Sartre, Brecht,Beckett, and Yevtushenko are still vivid. Following Hanna’s advice (“Schreib es auf . . . vielleichtkommst du dann davon los,” Rohde knows that this “loskommen” is impossible (DT 237). November 9,1989 might be the fulfillment of Rohde’s nostalgic longing for the expectations of the past. Being sweptaway with the demonstrators, Rohde shares their “Angstgluck” (DT 954), observing everything “inZeitteilen halluzinatorischer Wachheit” (DT 954). He decides not to leave Dresden for the west—”Ichbleibe hier . . . Ich will (‘mit eigenen Augen’) sehen was hier geschieht” (DT 954)—and observes theassault of the “anwalzende Staatsmacht” (DT 956), but, unlike 1968, the Soviet tanks stay away and thestate collapses.121On Bal, see footnote 131.122Like Mann’s Lubeck or Joyce’s Dublin, Tellkamp’s Dresden has become a city that readers nowexplore with Tellkamp’s novel in hand, often puzzled by the fact that real and fictional topographydiverge. This realist project of making the world visible, I would argue, is driven by a fierce desire totake hold of the world as a world of visible material objects. (In philosophical terms, these works ofart are informed by an empiricist-realist epistemology, a deep investment in the world as visible andobservable—as opposed to the idea of a world governed by invisible structures.) Or, put differently,at the heart of this descriptive mode of writing operates a desire to get hold of the world by seeing itthrough the act of looking and then describing what is seen in the most exacting detail and with thegoal of the utmost vividness or energeia. A response to the experience of worlds vanishing, this urgentscopic desire to see what has vanished, then reconnects language and world, words and objects, through


Tellkamp’s story from a vanished country thus recreates lost ground, a home terri-tory that no longer exists, and he depicts it in the process of ruination. As I argued above,description plays a central role in the representation of decline and fall as the sudden andunexpected move from deceleration to acceleration.123 In particular, the thick exacting de-scriptions of objects—of houses, cities, and entire landscapes—going to ruin represent andperform a specific temporality decline as deceleration. However, Tellkamp’s aesthetics ofdescription reaches its greatest density in the segments of Schwerkraft devoted to Christian’stime in the East German army, his training as tank commander, his accident during one of themilitary exercises, and then his time as inmate-worker in the chemical factories of the “Ori-ent” around Leuna, Schopkau, and Bitterfeld (DT 827). Here narration through descriptioncreates three effects: some scenarios de-iconicize, others demolish the Soviet tank, whilesome passages instantiate the slowed-down time of tanks as the specific temporality of theCold War.

I will begin with an analysis of Tellkamp’s de-iconicizing descriptions. In Book II ofthe novel, Tellkamp rewrites Muller’s constellation of being both inside and outside the tank.Christian is now a commander in charge of a tank—he is “in Kommandostellung” (DT 755).The tank driven by these East German soldiers is the T55, a Soviet tank. At the beginningof his training as “Panzersoldat,” Christian experiences a sense of power as he participatesin the first exercises looking down from his “Kommandoturm” (DT 649). But then afterthe training, he is pulled out of his bed, tied into his blanket, and put down in front a tankthat slowly rolls over him (DT 652). After an accident during a nightly crossing of the Elbeat Torgau, during which the driver of his tank dies, Christian is sent to a military prison.Locked up in a cell, Christian thinks that he has now arrived “im Innersten des Systems” (DT827).124 He has arrived, has found his place and his name: “Nemo. Niemand” (DT 827).125

As prisoner, he then works in the chemical factories of the southwest, in a zone knownas “Samarkand” after the central Asian city on the very edge of the former Soviet Union(DT 827). This periphery of the periphery is described as hell on earth and the place whereChristian’s will to resist is finally broken.126

description. Jenny Erpenbeck’s vignettes Dinge, die verschwinden (2009) and her novel, Heimsuchung(2008) share this realist desire; in Dinge, the narrator’s gaze clings to the contours of objects as theyare vanishing; the essays are essentially phenomenological experiments trying to invent a language thatmight capture this vanishing. Where Erpenbeck’s style is austere, Tellkamp’s oscillates between sparedescriptions and passages of baroque excess.123Hans Castorp vanishes on the battlefields of World War I; Christian Hoffmann disappears in theunderworld of the military and industrial landscapes of the “Orient” until he is discharged in the fall of1989.124The cell is the center of a country that has a “befestigte Grenze und eine Mauer” (DT 827).125In this situation, a remnant of resistance forms: “Er mußte noch mehr sein als nur angekommen: Ermußte, dachte Christian, er selbst sein. Er mußte nackt sein, das bare, blanke Ich . . . ” (DT 827).126“Hier, an diesem Ort, dem von Braunkohletagebau und vergifteten Fluessen zerfressenen Chemie-Reich, war . . . sein Platz . . . Warum kampfen” (DT 840).


Tellkamp thus rewrites Muller’s tank scenario with its conflict of double loyalty as thebrutal crushing of subjectivity,127 and the title of the novel takes on a second meaning. TheGoethean associations of Der Turm operative in Die padagogische Provinz, Book I of thenovel (the desire to withdraw into a realm of autonomous bourgeois culture, or what GDRintellectuals referred to as the GDR’s “bourgeois heritage,” on the one hand, and on the other,the pedagogical project of German classicism) are replaced by associations linked to the EastGerman army’s pedagogical mission and the “Turm” of its Soviet war machines.

Christian now belongs to a tank battalion named after Karl Liebknecht, and Tellkampputs his tank commander inside the tank (DT 654):

Macht. Wenn die Panzer ansprangen, wenn der Fahrer sein Luk zuzog mit derlinken Hand, den Hebel nach unten klinkte, um das Luk zu arretieren, die schiereKraft, die man fur diese Bewegung brauchte, - in der Unteroffiziersschule hattensie es, taubgebrulltvom Fahrlehrer oben im Kommandoturm, mit beiden Handenund unter Aufbietung des ganzen Korpergewichts kaum geschafft -, wenn dieOlpumpe zu horen war, der Fahrer den Anlasserknopf druckte, das Wettern vonStahl, dann drohnte der Zwolfzylinder auf, ein finstres angriffsbereites Tier;wenn die Gleidketten die Erde zum Singen brachten und sie uber Stock undStein, durch Matsch und Gruben riemten: das war Macht. (DT 649)

In this brief scenario, Tellkamp describes the tank by evocing its component parts, whichin turn belong to a sequence of simple, functional acts. Opening and closing with the wordpower, this description functions on two levels: on the one hand, it is part of an allegory ofsubjection and its ambivalences; on the other hand, this description of an iconic object fromthe inside de-iconicizes the tank by turning it into an everyday object.128

This is one aspect of Tellkamp’s story about this particular tank commander and histank. Chapter 55, titled “Unterwasserfahrt,” has a more interesting story to tell. Focusedon the tank unit’s military exercise with their Russian counterparts (recently returned fromAfghanistan), the chapter narrates two accidents, one of which involves the underwatercrossing of the Elbe at Torgau at night.129 The way Tellkamp represents these two accidents

127This brutalization in the core of the system erupts into a desperate act of rebellion. When his unitis deployed to Dresden, to the train station in October 1989, he witnesses his mother being beaten andresponds with a desperate act (DT 961–962). He is then discharged from the army a few days beforeNovember 9 (DT 971–972), and we lose sight of him as we lose sight of Hans Castorp on the battlefieldsof World War I at the end of the Magic Mountain. The play on words—Meno/Nemo—and Tellkamp’sfamous colon on page 973 leave us with the faint possibility of Christian returning as the author of thenovel’s sequel, which Tellkamp announced for the fall of 2013. The thoroughly conventional televisionfilm based on Der Turm (shown in 2013) ends with a dumbass scene in which Christian happily walksoff after taking leave from his mother—a kind of Eichendorffian Taugenichts or Reitzian Weggeher.128The sinister beast is less a metaphor than an expression belonging to the register of the everyday, thesoldiers’ macho admiration for their machines.129These exercises are part of a series of “legendare ‘Waffenbruderschaft’ Manover” and thus part ofTellkamp’s text about the Soviet presence in the GDR (DT 654).


repeats the overall structure of the novel moving from deceleration to acceleration. Myreading will focus on the depiction of the tank, its description through the enumeration of itscomponent parts that is part of the story of both accidents. In particular, I will explore thepassages in which Tellkamp asks us to pay attention to the minutest details of the tanks—theircomponent parts, their functioning, and then the story of the accidents themselves. In the firstcase, the slow, ponderous narrative of the accident, again filled with a wealth of technicaldetail, in the second case, the slow intrusion of the water into the “Kampfraum” and then thedeath of one of the soldiers, a death not narrated but remembered in a brief flashback (DT772).130

In both instances, Christian narrates from inside the tank; in both instances, he barelyescapes being crushed by the tank; and in both instances, the articulation of rudimentarynarrative and excessive description mimetically enacts the slow, lumbering but inexorablemovement of tanks, the temporality specific to the Cold War—or what I discussed in thecontext of Rauch’s painting as Ostzeit and what Rohde calls “Anderzeit” (DT 7). The firstaccident occurs as Christian drives the tank onto the train transporting soldiers and tanksto the training ground. Narrowing the distance between protagonist and reader, Tellkampmakes us live through the accident with Christian, an event that he first takes to a momentof suspension akin to Grunbein’s “Pause im Fortgang” and then to its dramatic climax. Thepassage begins with Christian pulling “die Lenkhebel in die “zweite Stellung” and thencontinues:

der Panzer aber blieb nicht stehen, wie es jetzt hatte sein mussen, ein altesRussending, dachte Christian,Und: Reinas Brief, vielleicht kann ich ihn gar nicht beantworten,Und:Was sag ich Mam?Und:Das Ding kippt ja—

At this point, the story of the derailing tank stops, and for about two pages the text switchesto a different narrative strand (the story of Richard’s attempt to build an airplane). Tellkampthen resumes the story, making us again live through the accident with Christian, putting usin the tank at the very moment when it capsizes:

[der Panzer] kippte, und Christian sagte “Neinnein,” schrie: “Nein”

and making us feel the slow inexorable movement of the tank the way Christian does:

spurte, wie der Panzer die tonnenschwere Wanne aus Stahl, sich langsam senkte,so langsam, daß es wie Bequemlichkeit aussehen mochte und Christian in der

130A few days after the accident, a memory crashes unbidden into Christian’s thoughts: “Burre’sschlaffer, noch in der Luke steckender Korper, wahrend der Bergepanzer schon zog” (DT 783).


unsicheren Beleuchtung an der Rampe genug Zeit hatte, sich alles einzupragen:die verstorten, aber interessiert zuschauenden Soldaten, einige Offiziere, dieaufmerksam geworden waren, Pfannkuchens Gesicht . . . die Scheinwerfer, dieflachen Waggons, uber die er hatte fahren sollen

And then the tank’s unstoppable slide continues, and we stare with Christian at the sun’sgolden reflection on a puddle:

Der Panzer schlug auf die Kette, die sich ins Erdreich neben den Gleisen wuhlte,da der Motor immer noch lief, Christian sah einen Goldklecks auf einer Pfutze,vielleicht ein Reflex vom Turmscheinwerfer, der Panzer blieb auf der Seitestehen, die Kanone wies in Richtung Stadt . . . (DT 761)

When Christian is finally pulled out of the tank, one of his fellow soldiers observes, “DerTurm hatte den glatt zerquetscht” (DT 762). Like the ruination of the country that suddenlyturns into an inexorable collapse, the story of the old decrepit Soviet tank ends with its fall,staging the sudden change from one temporality to another in a passage merging narrativeand descriptive registers.

The narrative of the second accident does not include the dramatic moment, thesuspension of the story as the tank is about to tumble off the ramp. The telling of this accidentduring the nighttime crossing of the Elbe takes much longer, beginning with Christian’sassociative reverie about the river Elbe as he drives the tank off the train ramp.131 The storytakes longer not only because it returns to Christian’s disconnected thoughts and interruptsitself by taking a detour through letters addressed to Christian—it expands because Tellkampspends even more time detailing Christian’s preparations inside the tank:

Er zwang sich, systematisch zu denken, Schritt fur Schritt alles durchzugehen.Dichtungen an den Luken gegen die aus Moosgummi ausgetauscht? Richt-und Ladeschutze hievten als scharf umrissene Schatten das verpackte Flag-MGauf den Turm . . . Christian horte das Aufsingen des Kursanzeigers . . . Erkletterte in den Kampfraum, schloß den Wasserablaß der Walzenblende, prufteob der Verschlußkeil der Kanone geschlossen war. Zurrte den Turm und spanntedie Dichtung des Turmdrehkranzes . . . Uberprufte und schloß den Filterlufterneben der Kanone. (DT 767)

And Tellkamp keeps on going, inundating us with details about Christian’s preparations and,in the process, accumulating a mass of technical details about the tank.

When Christian and his crew finally set out to cross the river, Christian starts usingthe tank’s “Periskoprohr” (DT 768), barely able to see where they are going.132 Once they

131This part takes up Rohde’s metaphor of the river of time, here stalled time again (“Die Elbe beiTorgau war ein kaputter Fluß”; DT 766) and Dresden as “gestrandetes Schiff” (DT 765).132The encumbered sight through the tank’s periscope contrasts with the farsighted view of Rohde, theliterary editor who scans the horizon for new continents looking through his telescope like Magellan


are under water, Christian’s thoughts briefly stray: “Hier bei Torgau hatten sich die Russenund Amerikaner die Hande gereicht; die Elbe schwieg von dem, was vorher gewesen war”(DT 773). When the tank gets off track and the water keeps seeping in, Christian beginsto recite Goethe’s lyrics (DT 777). Again, the allegory—Christian in the tower of the tankand the tank as Soviet-German prison—is hard to miss, its production rather heavy-handed.More intriguing than this allegorical layer is the excessive amount of detail, a kind ofBeschreibungswut that the power of this particular iconographic object provokes and thatperhaps expresses the passionate attachments that it evokes—Beschreibungswut both in themetaphorical and literal sense, as manic description and descriptive rage.133

These descriptive passages, with their excess of technical details, achieve three things:first, they topple the Soviet tank from its pedestal, so to speak, by making it an everyday objectto be handled, its functioning intimately understood; second, listing the tank’s componentparts takes the object apart, the text performs a kind of demolition through de-scription—thisis the effect of what I called above Tellkamp’s Beschreibungswut. We encountered a similardismantling of the tank in Grunbein’s text, but never taken to the extremes of de-scriptionthat we see in Der Turm. After all, in Die Korper zerbrechen the tank remains whole andavailable to be restaged as a monument to the fall of the East German state.

Yet de-iconizing description and demolishing de-scription does not tell the wholestory; there is something else at work in these passages. Tellkamp’s de-scriptive work attainsan aesthetic quality that is the effect of two things: first, like Rohde’s italicized texts with itsflood of neologisms and metaphors, it liberates words, breaks them out of the prison houseof language (the prison house that GDR culture had become after all attempts to rescuethe indigenous modernism of the early 1960s had failed).134 Second, the peculiar aestheticquality of these passages accumulating arcane technical details has to do with the visualclarity, the sharp-eyed view of the world and its objects that Tellkamp’s extreme precisionpromises.

What is the nature of this promise? Is this the promise of the centralizing modernistperspective of the Planer und Leiter, a characteristic of the Fordist modernity of the earlyGDR?135 The details’ technical nature, the list of component parts or, rather, componentwords might lead us to make this connection. And yet, there is an air of excess, of excessive

standing at the edge of the known world (an allusion to Holderlin’s poem about the Portuguese explorer).Rohde, driven by this “Lust am Entdecken” tells us that he sometimes manages to smuggle the rare“Karavelle” (products of “westliche[] Dekadenz”) among the many mediocre East German books or“Phalanx von Schlachtschiffen” (DT 850).133I would like to thank George Steinmetz for the idea of Beschreibungswut as the aspect of Tellkamp’smanic description caused by the very power of the object and the strength of the cathexis.134As we know, the decisive caesura was 1965. Tellkamp—like Neo Rauch—prides himself for his“genaues Hinsehen” and equally precise description. Directed at the GDR’s linguistic rules, this poeticsof precise destruction has been the raison d’etre of the Prenzlauer Berg poets since the early 1980s, aswell as the aesthetics informing the work of authors such as Brigitte Burmeister, Wolfgang Hilbig, GertNeumann, Reinhard Jirgl, and Jenny Erpenbeck.135A perspective celebrated in the so-called Aufbauromane, novels such as Brigitte Reimann’s Ankunftim Alltag (1961) or Christa Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (1963). On this topic of the dis-articulation ofthis centralizing perspective in the work of Wolfgang Hilbig and Neo Rauch, see my “Wendebilder:


luminosity hovering around these descriptive sentences as they dissect the tank, taking itapart bit by bit and leaving behind component words—words liberated and newly availablefor use. The pleasure conveyed by this rush of words far surpasses the satisfaction that thescopic desire of techno-modernism pursues so relentlessly. This moment of excessive detailis different; it stages a Beschreibungslust that has rediscovered the power of language toredescribe the world.136

The object of this Beschreibungswut and this Beschreibungslust is a powerful one.Signifying an imperial order, the Soviet tank was first made visible as iconographic objectand then destroyed in its very iconicity. Like Rauch’s de-spatialized restaging of the tankor Grunbein’s simultaneous de- and reassembly of the object, Tellkamp’s manic descriptionamounts to a process of de-iconization. The particular form that Tellkamp’s aesthetics ofdescription takes in this chapter, the modernist excess that pushes his descriptive passagesbeyond referentiality (and, paradoxically, does so to recover referentiality), is an act thatcelebrates the end of an empire, or of what Carl Schmitt theorized as an iconographic space.This celebration was also a discovery, or rather, rediscovery about the connection of wordand world.

Looking back at the collapse of the Soviet Union, Alexander Kluge wrote in 2000:“Reiche zerfallen durch Implosion, d.h. sie zerfallen im Innern des Menschen.”137 In 1947,Thomas Mann praised Nietzsche for having foreseen the future of Europe. “Das Heraufkom-men Rußlands als Weltmacht ist ihm vollkommen klar,” Mann told his PEN Club audiencein Zurich, and proceeded to quote Nietzsche: “‘Die Gewalt geteilt zwischen Slawen undAngelsachsen und Europa als Griechenland unter der Herrschaft Roms.”138 In the more thanfifty years that separate these two statements about the global postwar order, something waslost, the knowledge that empires had not simply disappeared with decolonization.139 This

Neo Rauch and Wolfgang Hilbig,” Germanic Review 77, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 279–303. For an excellentnew reading of Reimann’s novel, see John Griffith Urang, “‘Everything Has Its Limits!’ The BerlinWall and the Problem of Desire,” Konturen IV (2013): 108–145.136In her classic on the aesthetics of the detail, Naomi Schor discussed Hegel’s ambivalence towardthe “prosaic detail” and the possibility of its transcendence (“as something produced by the spirit”) inRomantic painting; see Schor, Reading for the Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (London: Methuen,1989), 35. This removes the detail from referentiality; I see Tellkamp’s aesthetics of the detail onthe contrary as a celebration of the rediscovery that words may be made to refer to the world after thecollapse of the GDR’s authorized languages. For a different reading of Tellkamp’s excessive descriptionsof objects, see Andrea Geier’s essay, “Mediating Immediacy: Historicizing the GDR by Bringing ITBack to Life in Postmillennial Works of Fiction,” Twenty Years On: Competing Memories of the GDR inPostunification German Culture, ed. Renate Rechtien and Dennis Tate (Rochester, NY: Camden House,2011), 101–113.137Alexander Kluge, Die Chronik der Gefuhle, vol. II (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000), 149.138Thomas Mann, “Nietzsche’s Philosophie im Lichte unserer Erfahrungen,” XIV (Congress PEN Club,1947), 705. With his (self-serving) vision of the Eurocentric culture of the new American empire (akinto the neoclassical Hellenism of Augustan Rome), Mann accepted American hegemony. Schmitt, ofcourse, did not, ranting against the loss of German sovereignty.139For an example of the new revisionist history, see Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell, eds., Uncertain Empire:American History and the Idea of the Cold War (London: Oxford University Press, 2012).


changed, of course, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the UnitedStates as world hegemon, a global transformation that gradually brought the Cold War’s im-perial architecture back into visibility.140 What Kluge described as the optimist expectationof the 1990s that the world was nearing an “augusteisches Zeitalter” of peace ended withthe shock-and-awe interventions of the Bush era.141 Now imperial anxieties are replacingimperial triumphalism.142 The world of invisible empires has thus vanished, the wall is downand the mirror is broken, but it is still a mirror. Rauch’s, Grunbein’s, and Tellkamp’s scenar-ios nudge us to cast a gaze, a Shklovskyan, estranging glance back at the arts of the formerGermanies and to decipher the faded signs of empire.143

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to dedicate this article to George Steinmetz and the long conversation about modern art thatstarted in Paris in 1977 in front of a painting by Jackson Pollock. The smart, constructive feed-backof my colleague and long-time co-editor Johannes von Moltke is greatly appreciated. Seth Howes,Germanic Review’s most capable editorial assistant, did not only bring Durs Grunbein’s firstPanzer-Text to my attention but has taught me much about the fate of aesthetic (dis-)engagementin the GDR. Finally, I would like to thank the participants of the 2013 graduate conference onpost-dissidence studies at Harvard for their feedback on an earlier version of the article.

140On the United States as informal empire, see George Steinmetz, “The New U.S. Empire,” The NewSocial Theory Reader: Contemporary Debates, ed. Steven Seidman and Jeffrey C. Alexander (London:Routledge, 2008).141Alexander Kluge, “Rede. Buchner-Preis 2003,” www.deutscheakademie.de/PREISE/Buechnert93-oo.htm.142There is no better document drawing out the specificity of this neoliberal imperial project than 24,the series focused on Agent Bauer, the stone-cold killer who has to overcome his reluctance to killand torture, again and again; and a man who himself is tortured over and over again, his naked scarredbody exhibited as the series progresses. Bauer’s story of excruciating pain and suffering parallels that ofPavel Korchagin, the hero of Nicolai Ostrovsky’s autobiographical novel, How the Steel Was Tempered(1928). This classic about the civil war and the first years of the Soviet Union ends with Korchaginin a wheelchair, “doomed to a life far from the battlefront”; see How the Steel Was Tempered: ARevolutionary Novel, trans. R. Prokofieva (London: Red Star Press, 1978), 690.143As Alexander Semyonov et al. put it so compellingly, thinking in terms of empire has a Shklovskyaneffect. That is, it enhances the perception of an object’s deeper meaning, thus “produc[ing] the picture ofa strikingly strange, indeed, an unfamiliar and alien world”; Ilya Gerasimov, Sergey Glebov, Jan Kusber,Marina Mogilner, and Alexander Semyonov, “New Imperial History and the Challenges of Empire,”Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire, ed.Gerasimov, Kusber, and Semyonov (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), 3. This imperial analytics is not tobe confused with anti-Americanism but instead takes anti-Americanism as its object of inquiry. Second,it is not based on a strict equivalence of Soviet and American empire. As Burbank and Cooper remindus in their Empires in World History, empires take many shapes.

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