Wendebilder: Neo Rauch and Wolfgang Hilbig

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Wendebilder: Neo Rauch and Wolfgang HilbigJulia Hella

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THE GERMANIC REVIEW

Wendebilder: Neo Rauch and Wolfgang Hilbig

JULIA HELL

One must refuse neithei, the vertigo of distance nor that of proximity; one must desire that double excess where the look is always near to losing all its powers.

Jean Starobinski, L ’ O d Vivarw Essais.’

ith Caravaggio’s painting Medusa and Freud’s essay “Medusa’s Head,” W Medusa irrevocably enters the modern imaginary. Embodying a disturbing insight-that a searching gaze might produce overwhelming terror-Medusa has come to displace Clio, as the notion of history as catastrophe has gained ground among historians and philosophers of history and culture. In his magisterial Film Theory, Kracauer evokes Medusa when he discusses the role of film in the representation of the Holocaust. Proposing to think of this particular medi- um as Perseus’s shield, Kracauer expresses his hope that film might deflect the gorgon’s monstrous gaze, screening the spectator from history’s murderous force, while at the same time allowing us to catch sight of that deadly reality.2 But we now also find Medusa in less-likely places, places such as “Ferropolis - Stadt aus Eisen,” the border territory of industrial modernity near Leipzig that architects from the Bauhaiis Dessau have transformed into a vast outdoor museum since 1989. In this ravaged landscape, we find Medusa in a rather unlikely in- carnation: At Ferropolis, one of the five gigantic earth- and coal-moving machines that are the main attractions of the museum is called “Med~sa . ”~

Kracauer’s Medusa obviously has to do with representation. But what about the antediluvian Medusa at Ferropolis, the Medusa Machine, as Heiner Muller would most likely have called her? The Dessau architects justify their use of the gorgon’s name by pointing out that their exhibit of iron dinosaurs symbolizes “Technikfaszination und deren F01gen.”~ But there is another, somewhat odd connection between knowledge and representation that lies buried in the East German prehistory of this particular Medusa. Experimenting with new forms that might satisfy the directives derived from Lukacs’s realist aesthetic, authors of the East German Republic’s (GDR) so-called production novels of the 1950s had

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their protagonists climb to the top of cranes and excavators on the vast industrial construction sites that constituted the central locus of that literature (and stood for the country as a whole and its reconstruction out of the ruined landscapes of 1945). Karl Mundstock’s H e l k Niichte (1952) contains a wonderful example of this literalizing excess: Toward the end of the novel (and the end of her story of coming to consciousness), the female protagonist dreams about standing on top of one of these cranes. From this position high above the site of what will later be the city Stalinstadt, she is able to survey the entire ~ount ry .~ This totalizing gaze from above, pure and unencumbered, most forcefully expresses the (socialist) realist novel’s claim of mastery, its specular realist epistemology, which links knowledge to vision and vision to writing.

I. SUR-REALLY EX-ISTING SOCIALISM

This totalizing gaze is, or rather was, the gaze of the technocratic “Protagonis- ten der Praxis und der Tat”6 who populate Neo Rauch’s postindustrial paintings.’ It is also exactly this gaze that Rauch’s paintings set out to destroy. Rauch paints re- searchers, builders, construction workers, and land surveyors surrounded by an atmosphere of “solid modernity” and engaged in processes of planning and building that require this totalizing gaze. Yet in his paintings, everything is frozen, as if the plan that guided their actions had disappeared, or had simply been f~rgotten.~ And their searching, penetrating, planning gaze-once the very precondition of their activity-has died: These are “Ingenieure mil toten Augen,” as one critic observes.’O

It is already a clichC that Rauch’s Ostmodeme maintains the tension between the traditions of the East and the West, between the figurative painting of socialist realism and the formal conventions of abstraction.’l But this characterization is too easy, not only because figuralism and abstraction are not so easily mapped geographically, but also because the fascination of Rauch’s paintings does not really stem from the painterly qualities of the best abstract art (Jackson Pollack, or closer to home, Gerhard Richter), but rather from the unusual arrangement of objects from (East German) daily life, icons of a socialist mass culture, and from their deeply disturbing de-rangement that betrays a sharp eye trained in the ar- chitectural purity of Demuth and Stella and their multiplying perspectives.

Rauch’s paintings present us with moments of complete standstill in which working men, the GDR’s celebrated “Helden der Arbeit,”I2 are placed in a quietly vibrating landscape of memory that seems to be the result less of the warm glow of nostalgia than of ice cold hallucination. Rauch states that his goal is “[das] Un- bewuBte sehr bewuBt zu inszenieren.”I3 And he also claims-surprisingly, and with an unexpected recourse to romantic conventions-that his landscapes are reflec- tions of subjectivity.I4 Not, of course, the subjectivity of the paintings’ protagonists; nothing could be further from an expressive harmonious relationship between subject and landscape in these awkward and de-centered arrangements of figures and background; but in the sense of an expression of the artist’s inner landscape of re- membered objects and faded icons at home in a reality that no longer exists.


NEO RAUCH AND WOLFGANG HlLBIG 28 1

Harald Kunde aptly calls Rauch’s paintings “Schilderungen eines merk- wiirdigen Geschehens in topographisch benennbaren Landschaften.” Kunde goes even further in his effort to anchor Rauch topographically in the GDR’s “zweite Modeme”:15

Then the sweeping expanse of the Leipzig lowlands-obstructed by chimney stacks, electricity pylons, intersected by pipelines and artilicial basins, disfigured by com- mercial estates, motonvay intersections, airports-rises into the picture. A landscape of the present. left-over and therefore conclusive [proof of the existence of what was there before: East Germany] [. . .] The melancholy of abandoned production and manufacture-power plants, textile factories, open-cut mines resembling stage sets-all washed-out witnesses of an expired age. The wind blows over treeless plains through barracks and garrisons, the soldiers’ cries have died away, the screeching of tank-tracks faded-a dreadful echo is all that remains.I6

Weiche, by Neo Rauch. 1999. Oil on paper. 2 15 cm x 190 cm. WV 280. Collection Deutsche Bank. Courtesy of Galerie EIGEN + ART BerlinLeipLig.


282 HELL

Rauch’s landscape of idle production and aimless action is the landscape of Fer- ropolis prior to its complete devastation, preserved in the faded colors of an East German childhood. It catches the frozen moment before the catastrophe: “zur Katastrophe kommt es (noch) nicht.””

What makes these paintings so unsettling is the promise and simultaneous withdrawal of an ordering perspective: Although they do contain precise per- spectival constellations of different scenes and the objects/protagonists depicted, the scenes do not cohere into a whole that would focus the spectator’s gaze. Caught in a moment of simultaneous presence, the scenes in Rauch’s paintings represent so many obstacles to the viewer’s “illusionistischen Blick.”’* Rauch himself describes this quality of his paintings, their “Stuckwerk- und Kol- lagecharakter”:

Man kann den Eindruck haben, das Bild ware nur eine Moglichkeit, das Inventar zu arrangieren, man konnte die Elemente auch verschieben. Nicht da8 die Komposition leger w&e, aber das Material selbst [. . .] legt den Wunsch nach Greifen und Ver- riicken nahe, auch im Sinne von Ver-Rucktheit.19

What is forever de-ranged is the gaze of the modernizing “maker and planner,” both as the gaze of Rauch’s protagonists and as the gaze of the viewer.20

In Rauch’s landscapes, cityscapes, and factoryscapes, men (rarely women) seem absorbed in a form of activity that leads us to assume an intensely focused gaze. But on closer inspection, this assumption proves wrong, because the protagonists are focused on an activity whose sense we are unable to decipher, thus malung us suspicious of the purposefulness of their gazes.

Or they stand around somewhat aimlessly, with vacant, dead stares; they seem to evade our gaze and are definitely inaccessible to it: There is no gesture of expressive interiority in these tableaux. In both instances, the totalizing gaze that functions as the support of the modernist projectlsubject is broken down, derailed.

Randgebiet, or “border territory,’’ is the title of Neo Rauch’s most recent exhibit in his hometown of Leipzig. Other painters have come from this Saxon bor- derland: Die Brucke was located in Dresden, Max Beckmann worked in Leipzig; in the 1950s, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz. In this article, I am concerned with an author from the same region, an author for whom seeing and writing are inextricably linked: Wolfgang Hilbig. In texts such as Die Weiber (1987), Alre Abdeckerei (1990), or Dus Provisorium (2001), Hilbig’s narrator is obsessed with seeing, with his own gaze and with the gaze of the other. And Hilbig’s texts would be inconceivable without the landscape of the East German industrial border territory; they are, like Rauch’s paintings, descriptions of odd events in topographically namable landscapes.

11. AUTHORSHIP AND GAZE

Hilbig is a writer, not a painter, but one known for the power of his visual prose. His most recent publication, a collection of poems from 2001, takes up


NEO RAUCH AND WOLFGANG HlLBlG 283

this obsession in its very title, Bilder vom Erzahlen; it contains a marvelous poem that thematizes just that, the making of images in language:

Mittug Balance der eingelegten reglos ruhenden Ruder von denen blendend weil3e Tropfen fallen auf den zitternden Spiegel der See in der unwirklichen Stille des lotrechten Lichts - wahrend in der Tiefe die Nacht sich walzt mit ihrem Gewurm - o dieser Augenblick im Gleichgewicht der den Atern anhalt bevor das Bild kentert.**’

Like Rauch, Hilbig comes from the Leipzig region, more precisely from Meusel- witz, one of the dreary towns in Saxony’s former strip-mining region. The ruined landscapes there provide the background for Hilbig’s breathtaking prose and his capsizing images, from Die Weiber, to Alte Abdeckerei, to Provisorium.

Although Provisorium turns into an intense self-reflection on the production of visual prose, his earlier texts center on protagonists driven through landscapes of destruction, romantic figures in search of identity and truth, melancholics, not “mechanics of progress.”** These men wander restlessly through dark, slimy ruins-desolate landscapes closer to Tarkowski’s imagination than to that of Hopper, Stella, or Demuth, painters with whom Rauch has been compared.23 Nevertheless, in both Rauch and Hilbig, we find the same moment of utter paral- ysis, standstill: relentless movement without goal in Hilbig, industrious practice without plan in Rauch. Both artists are involved in tracing the failure of two of modernity’s central projects: the projects of construction and of self-construction, or self-exploration striving for self-recognitiodidentity. Both projects are thwarted. And both revolve around vision.

The subjects engaged in these projects in Rauch’s paintings and Hilbig’s novels are subjects striving for precise vision. This precision of vision, “genaues Hinsehen,” is the topic of one of Hilbig’s texts from 1987.24 Introducing a book of photographs about the Leipzig Tugebuu entitled “Der triigerische Grund,” the text is preceded by a photograph from the book. The picture directs our gaze toward one of the earth-moving machines that are now on exhibit in Ferropolis. We see it from a distance, framed by an old wrought iron gate, whose doors are dan- gling from its hinges. What is important about this short text is Hilbig’s emphasis on a particular kind of gaze when confronted with this “Abbruchland- schaften.”2s Hilbig characterizes the vision that sustains his effort to accurately describe Leipzig’s wastelands as the need to “genau hinsehen.”2h This notion of a “precise gaze” is an integral element of Hilbig’s modernist poetics and its GDR-specific refraction.

In an interview from 1994, Hilbig situates his writing in the gap, the abyss, between language and reality in the GDR. The key word in this interview is “Entwirklichung,” de-realization. as the fundamental condition of writing in

*Reprinted by permission of S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt, Germany.


284 HELL

the GDR. Hilbig explains that this condition resulted from a “Geflecht von Sprach- und BewuBtseinsherrschaft.” The GDR’s linguistic dictatorship, he explains, functioned according to official “Beschreibungsrituale” that had lost their power to capture reality. Alienation is not an adequate term for this condition: “‘Entwirklichung’ war das Kunst-Wort, das die Differenz zwischen der Wirklichkeit und dem Ausdruck der Wirklichkeit am deutlichsten bes~hr ieb .”~~ This difference between reality and language, Hilbig then continues, also characterizes the West, which has its own peculiar “Ideologiesprache,” the language of commodities: “Fortschreitend hat auch diese Sprache die Tendenz, sich von Wirklichkeit zu entbinden.”** What “binds” language to reality is the precise gaze, the act of seeing/writing that breaks down ideological “Beschrei- bungsrituale” through the most precise acts of “Beschreib~ng.”~~

In Die Weiber, one of the last stories that he wrote before leaving East Ger- many, Hilbig links his visual writing to the protagonist’s desire to see. The opening of the text works with one of the most conventional tropes of postwar Euro- pean modernism, the trope of voyeurism, of the secret watching of the desired object.30 This is the trope that structures Robbe-Grillet’s novels (recall Jalousie), the trope that Bataille, in L’Histoire de L’Oeil (1928), condensed into the infa- mous image of the dead priest’s eyeball in Shone’s ~ a g i n a . ~ ‘ But Hilbig takes great pains to locate the trope of voyeurism in his particular East German context with its own conventions of representation. Die Weiber is the story of an East German workedwriter searching for the women who, he suddenly realizes one day, have all left the GDR. The opening pages of the text demonstrate how Hilbig’s narrative voice is structured by the gaze of his protagonist and driven by his scopophilia: “Es strengte mich endlos an, den Kopf dauernd in den Nacken gelegt, starr durch das Gitter ins Licht zu blicken, immer in der Hoffnung, dort oben die Frauen uber die Maschen des Rosts hinwegschreiten zu ~ e h e n . ” ~ ~ With this voyeuristic scenario that yields but a tiny “dicht durchkreuzten Blickwinkel” (DW 9), Hilbig, like Robbe-Grillet or Bataille before him, taps into the specular economy that informs nineteenth-century realism. As Peter Brooks has so elo- quently argued, the ultimate object that nineteenth-century novels, “reflecting mirrors” in the minds of their creators, tried to capture was Cezanne’s (famously lost and famously recovered) L’Origine du Monde: as the encounter of “epis- temophilia” and “s~opophilia,”~~ realism, Brooks writes, established the secret of woman, that which was hidden from view and needed to be revealed, as the locus of truth and the ultimate object of representation as mimesis.34 In Hilbig, this project always fails: In Die Weiber, the voyeuristic passage breathlessly sustained over several pages works toward a moment that is a moment of not-seeing: “[Ilch sah nichts [. . .] was ich hatte sehen wollen, war uberschwemmt, vom Wasser verwischt und verzerrt” (DW 14).

Hilbig thus inscribes core concerns of modernism into an East German context: the precise gaze or close inspection that guides his narration on the one hand; the link between writing-vision-and desire on the other. Moreover- and this takes us back to the topic of cranes, of construction sites, and of


NEO RAUCH AND WOLFGANG HILBIG 285

Medusa-Hilbig insistently works with a gaze from below. His protagonists are workers buried deep in the basements of their decaying factories-the stoker in Die Weiber comes to mind, or later the Stasi agentlauthors in Ich (1993) holed up in the underground tunnels of Berlin.35 And there is a fourth dimension to this problematic that also refers us back to Medusa’s gaze: Hilbig’s texts portray protagonists in search of a pure, unencumbered gaze-but they always fail in this search. Hilbig’s texts of visiodon vision maintain a productive epistemological tension, which we should understand as an effect produced by the particular political context of his writing. On the one hand, his statement that language and reality are radically split testifies to an implicit belief in the “visibility” and the “truth” of reality behind the “Beschreibungsrituale” that distort it. In this respect, we find an adherence to the political avant-garde and its idea that literature and the visual arts ought to de-familiarize, or estrange, the “real” of everyday life to gain access to the “truth” of social relations. In this respect, Hilbig subscribes to the anti-empiricist epistemology of the political avant-garde, from Brecht, to Barthes, to Kluge-we need only to recall Brecht’s famous statement regarding the photograph of the Kruppwerke and the necessity of the “estranging glance””-and at the same time remains wedded to his belief in “laying bare” another truth. Yet there is also a more radical strand in Hilbig’s writing, a reading that seems born out by his emphasis on the difference between estrangement and de-realization: There is “nothing to see” because reality-that which lies behind the official Beschreibungsrituale-has been destroyed by them, or rather, our ability to perceive the reality has been shattered. Finally, there is an even more radically skeptical view present, closely related to the tradition of modernism most deeply influenced by Nietzsche: On this level, reality is never accessible, whether through empiricist epistemology or any other epi~temology.~’ And yet, Hilbig puts his trust in precise description, all the while fully aware of the “Ohnmacht der Beschreibungen.”3*

111. DIE WEZBER4EEING FROM BELOW

Die Weiber immediately makes “seeing” central to the text. Pressing his face against the grate in the factory floor, the protagonist waits for a particular moment, “da der Saum des Kittels [. . .] iiber die geroteten Hinterflachen ihrer Schenkel hoch hinaufzugleiten schien.” He waits for the moment “in dem die schweren, leicht aufklaffenden GesaBhalften sofort sichtbar werden muBten.” That exact moment when magic will unveil “in einer unwagbaren Sekunde, gleich, sofort, den Punkt eines unsichtbaren Dunkels” (DW 13). The object desired so compulsively by this Augen - Blick is thus Irigaray’s “nothing to be seen”-that which funclions in the specular economy of sexual difference as an invisible darkness.39

The story’s protagonist is a most abject figure afflicted by a repulsive sickness, which even, or especially, affects his eyes. The protagonist’s eyeballs emit a foul smell, the text’s very first sentences inform us, and seem covered with slime (DW


7). His physical decay mirrors that of the city he inhabits. M. is a dreary industrial town located in the ravaged landscape of the strip-mining region that is by now familiar to us. Hilbig’s protagonist is a worker, banished to the factory’s barely lit basement because of his repellent smell, who uses his worker’s fist (“mein[e] ermiidetre] Faust” (DW 8)) to masturbate for hours with no apparent pleasure. His all-consuming desire is to see. He spends hours waiting for a woman to walk across his grate, but they almost never enter even the tiniest “Winkel meines Blickfelds” (DW 12). When he finally believes himself close to his goal+atching a glimpse of the “invisible darkness” from beneath-some- one throws a bucket of water at the woman, “haargenau zwischen die Schenkel der Frau” (DW 14), and the desired object disappears from view: “[Ilch sah nichts, ich sah den Schwall des Wassers spriihend abprallen, was ich hatte sehen wollen, war iiberschwemmt, von Wasser verwischt und verzerrt” (DW 14). His vision is not precise then, but a vision that yields an image that is almost erased, blurred, and distorted.

Die Weiber tells the story of a crisis generated by a loss: “[Sliimtliche Weiber waren aus der Stadt verschwunden” (DW 16; italics part of the text). Meander- ing through the dark streets of his city in search of women, Hilbig’s protagonist turns into a “hohlaugige, fieberglanzende Ruine” (DW 20), decomposing with the landscape that surrounds him. But remember that Hilbig does not want us to understand this existential crisis, this de-composition, in the familiar language of alienation: Rather, for him this loss of identity results from a loss of reality that, in turn, results from the destruction wrought by a particular (state) language. Only a radically different language could reconstitute this identity and the subject’s distorted gaze. Hilbig thus brings together the thwarted desire to see, the disappearance of the object of the protagonist’s scopophilia, and the core theme of all of his texts: the writing subject that hopes to (re-)constitute itself in “another language,” and the obstacles it encounters in a society that actively with- holds recognition from exactly that kind of worker it proclaimed as its ideal: the worker who uses his fist to write.40 In Die Weiber, all of these themes are linked to the issue of the gaze-from below.

Hilbig’s protagonist fears that his own “Gier” (DW 19) to see might have driven the women out of East Germany. At the end of the story, he rediscovers them in a Berlin prison. Hearing voices from the prison, the narrator climbs on top of an adjacent building. From this vantage point, he can finally see them again- from above, hidden behind a chimney. This gaze climaxes in an act of rebellion: “[Elin paar von ihnen hatten den Daumen zwischen Daumen und Zeigefinger hindurchgeschoben.” The protagonist understands, he tells us, that the women signaled to him with a “schmutziges Zeichen, das schmutzigste, das moglich war.” And this “dirty sign” is a sign against the “pure” state (DW 107-8). This re- bellious moment does not last long, for as he turns around he looks directly into the eyes of a Stasi agent who is watching him from a window across the street.

Some critics read Die Weiber as a text directed against East Germany’s taboos, understanding sexuality (the protagonist’s disease) as the central signifier of that



which is/was repre~sed.~’ Undoubtedly, that reading captures one of the story’s layers; however, what I would like to point out is the fate of the gaze in this text, the movement from a (desiring) gaze from below to the resumption of the gaze from above. The structures of seeing that inform the story are more complicated than they seem “at first glance”: obviously, the gaze that the subject assumes at the end is the classical gaze of the voyeur (the gaze at a desired object from a position that hides the looking subject). But Hilbig puts a twist on the story: It is, after all, the gaze of the state, the “Staatsmacht . . . die ein Auge auf mich hatte” (DW 27), that the protagonist is hiding from. Moreover, although the protagonist hides from the gaze of the Other, he at the same time assumes the very vantage point of the Other, the point of view from above. Yet, as we just saw, the recov- ery of the totalizing unobstructed gaze from above does not last: Realizing that he is being observed, the protagonist quickly climbs back down, seeking refuge in the heating plant (DW 108).

Die Weiber concludes on a strikingly lyrical note that takes the protagonist out of his world of squalor and doom for a brief moment. The women “waren blitzend in meine Augen zuriickgekehrt” (DW 108), and the text concludes: “Ich wuBte nun, wo sie zu finden waren, ich hatte sie wiedergesehen und in meinem Herzen bewahrt” (DW 109). The image of the lost object ends up being incorpo- rated, swallowed-as the precondition of visual prose, of a writing process that produces images? For the most intriguing aspect of Die Weiber is, after all, that it generates the most detailed descriptions, nauseating, crystal clear images of the decay of both a landscape and a subject.

It also produces images of another kind-of a past that can still be “seen.” In Die Weiber’s last scene, hair signifies feminine beauty. Earlier in the story, hair functions as a “dirty sign.” Hilbig’s first description of the landscape around M., which 1 quoted above, suddenly veers from its mimetic mode-evoking the region’s industrial decay--into an eerily haunting image: “[UJnd ich hatte den Ein- druck, es wurde Haar in ungeheuren Mengen iiber die Halden gesturzt [. . .], oh, ich sah, wie das Haar in der Ebene rauchte, wie Wolken” (DW 24). The reader’s suspicion that this hair might have something to do with the country’s past-and with Celan and Kiefer’s Margarere-is soon confirmed: “schwarze Fahnenfet- Zen, Fahnen der Klage uber die morderischen Traditionen meiner Heimat” (DW 24). With Die Weiber, Hilbig begins a form of writing that produces what I would like to call visual palimpsests. The precise look of Hilbig’s protagonist “sees” and makes us “see” East Germany’s ruined industrial landscapes; it also makes us “see” them as historical landscapes still carrying traces of the past.

The gaze of the voyeur is always fraught with danger, running the risk of turning into the gaze of the fetishist subject: a gaze that is threatened by blindness. In Die Weiber, Hilbig alludes to this threat evoking in a truly surrealist passage Freud’s image of the son straining to catch a glimpse of the mother’s sex: “[ilns Knie gebrochen, unfShig zu schauen mit der narbenbedeckten Netzhaut, sterbend die Pforte nur von Ferne zu ahnen” (DW 99). The passage culminates in a kind of vaginal cityscape, an urban bodyscape that is overshadowed by the fetishist


288 HELL

subject and its gaze-both seeing and blind. “Ja, sehe ich denn diese meine Stadt wirklich nur durch den Ring einer Fotze,” the protagonist wonders, as “[ulnge- fullte Leer.” To then realize, “Bis eine medusenhafte Grenze mich, den Blinden, erinnert, daI3 die wirkliche Existenz meiner Stadt nur durch den Geruchssinn zu erfahren ist” (DW 99). Not only the fetishist himself, the very trajectory of his gaze is part of this picture: “Und befand sie [the city] sich wirklich dahinter, hinter jenem Spalt von Fleisch, den ich zuletzt sah [. . .] hinter jenem [. . .] Mund aus Haut und Haar, den meine halbgeoffneten Augenlider bilden” (DW 99). Mouth and eyes, speaking and seeing-the key elements of Hilbig’s Bilder- schreiben, of his visual aesthetic.

At this point, I would like to return to the book’s opening scene of defeated voyeurism. The view from beneath is not only the perspective of the worker banished to the basement, it is also the perspective of the fetishist subject. As I said above, Hilbig’s protagonist is utterly familiar with the ambivalent relationship of this subject to the real, the oscillation between wanting to see and refusing to see. And he is familiar with the moment of danger. In Freudian theory, this is the moment of the Oedipal subject’s encounter with the Medusa. This encounter produces a gaze that replaces “nothing” with “something,” both acknowledging and disavowing reality at once. However, what I am interested in is not so much the act of substitution involved in this encounter than in the very structure of the fetishist’s gaze, or rather, the different structural po~sibil i t ies.~~

In his essay on fetishism, Freud famously traces the trajectory of this gaze, as- serting that it preserves the memory of this trajectory as it gets closer to the sight that disrupts the particular act of vision. Freud begins his essay with the analysis of a particular case of fetishism, the famous glance on the/at the nose. The analysis reveals a diversion of the gaze from penis to nose and the displacement from glance to G l u n ~ . ~ ~ However, Freud’s most classical example is foot fetishism. The structure of vision in this example is familiar: an “approach to the woman’s genitals from below.”44 In his Three Essays, Freud foregrounds the interrupted trajectory of the pleasurehowledge-seeking gaze: “[I) has been possible to show that the scopophilic instinct, seeking to reach its object (originally the genitals) from underneath, was brought to a halt in its pathway by prohibition and repre~sion.”~~ The key passage in Fetishism is the following:

[In fetishism], some process occurs that reminds one of the stopping of memory in traumatic amnesia. As in this latter case, the subject’s interest comes to a halt half- way, as it were; it is as though the last impression before the uncanny and traumatic one is retained as a fetish.46

Fetishism, Freud proposes, involves two possibilities: either the gaze from below is deflecteddiverted along a chain of unpredictable, arbitrary associations-or it is re-directed to what it has seen before. In either case, the subject remains suspended between two objects, two signifiers, two images: the image of what he does not want to see and the image to which he returns-the image before the catastrophe. And he is both blind and seeing4’



In Die Weiber, Hilbig inextricably entangles scopophilia and writing in the ser- vice of a political-aesthetic project, whose ultimate aim it is to “see through,” to pierce the GDR’s Besdireibungsrituale of the present and of the past. This project encounters the horror of not seeing anything-because the real has been destroyed, because the real cannot be seen, because the real is too horrible to con- template? And yet seeing/writing produces layered images, palimpsestic images of past and present that make us “see”-but not from above, and not through an unencumbered gaze. In Alte Abdeckerei, Hilbig again thematizes the gaze, its blurring and potential blindness. More important, he also deliberately works with the structures of the fetishist gaze, yet this time without any explicit sexualiza- tion of the text. In this Wendetext, Hilbig’s prose is informed by the indirect, the deflected gaze that the fetishist subject learns to assume once it has suffered the catastrophic encounter with the blinding object. In a public discussion, Neo Rauch describes his gaze as a “Perspektive aus den A~genwinkeln.”~~ This perspective, this looking “sideways” out of the comer of one’s eye, bears striking similarities to Hilbig’s textual practice of a fetishist gaze. We encounter an echo of this structure in Anselm Kiefer’s famous painting of railroad tracks Eisen- Steig (1986) that haunls Hilbig’s Alte Abdeckerei the same way that Gunther Eich’s radio play Truunre does, or Tarkovsky’s Stalker ( 1979).49

IV. ALTE ABDECKEREZ-LOOKING INTO THE LIGHT

Alte Abdeckerei announces itself as a memory project: “Ich besann mich auf ein FliiBchen hinter der Stadt [. . .] das ich kilometenveit verfolgt habe, einen Herbst lang oder noch langer, vielleicht nur, um einmal hinauszukommen aus einem Territorium, das, wenn ich es endgiiltig sagen soll, von den Grenzen meiner Miidigkeit eingeschlossen war” (AA 7). It does not take long for the reader to succumb to the nightmarish atmosphere of this territory and to willingly follow the protagonist into the dark and utterly quiet landscape, soon expecting, as he does, a “markerschutternden Schrei” (AA 7), which of course is never heard.

What the roaming “1” of Alre Abdeckerei does hear is the crackling of the leaves under his feet and from far away the sound of a rolling train, a rumbling noise that will accompany him throughout the story. The insistently recurring sound is an allusion to ’I‘arkovsky’s Stalker, and territory is a version of the latter’s Zone. Hilbig’s protagonist orients himself not by sight but by the less precise senses, hearing and smell. On his first walk, we witness a moment of complete dis-orientation that the narrator attributes to a lack of vision. The text’s “IEye” then reflects on the inevitable gap between writing and the “Nuancen des Sichtbaren” (AA 13). Coming to a halt at an old, crumbling bridge, the narrator tells us that this object, although utterly familiar to him, is “nicht beschreibbar” (AA 9); the nouns at his disposition seem treacherous: “[Slie hielten mir unaufhorlich die Ohnmacht aller Beschreibungen vor Augen” (AA 12-1 3).

Yet the old bridge does become the object of a sharply focused act of looking that does catch the nuances of the visible. Climbing to the top of the embankment


of the railroad tracks, the narrator at first has trouble discerning the object before him; yet “genauerers] Hinsehen” (AA 13) allows him to discern the ruined frag- ments of a concrete base, which he calls “die Rampe” (AA 14; italics in text). We would expect that this elevated position would produce a moment of visual mastery. Instead, it results in a violent vertigo as the narrator looks down into the water and not up across the landscape at his feet. He then recalls a childhood incident, a precipitous fall into a bombed out industrial terrain. What really fright- ened him was, he tells us, the repulsive slime that caused him to slip up, making him feel as if he had come into contact with “der blanken Materie des Todes” (AA 18). The narrator “describes” the incident, making us “see” what he remembers, only to then question the status of the image. For the narrator suddenly moves from his childhood memoryldream to a reflection on the very word “Rampe.” This is a badly damaged signifier, he writes, “einre] Erinnerung noch weit friiheren Ursprungs” (AA 15). We then return to the present and to the protagonist’s walk.

This vertiginous change from present to past, from dream, or memory, to reality and back, characterizes Hilbig’s story from this point on, and this modernist uncertainty remains the shadowy effect of the text’s obsession with descriptive detail-to state that Hilbig knows Kafka, re-writes Kafka, is a commonplace, but no less accurate for it. The reflection on seeing and writing, image and word, and on the production of textual images now opens the text toward the past. What the narrator “sees” and makes us “see” when his gaze is turned toward the past radically changes the landscape from uncanny to dead, from strangely haunting to putrefying: poplars dying under soapy odorous slime, “Leichengift” (AA 47), and decomposing flesh constituting the ground on which he walks (AA 39-40). Like Tarkovsky, Hilbig draws on a particular aesthetic tradition, the representation of ruins. In Tarkovsky’s Zone, everything falls back into nature, but in Hilbig’s territory, nature is death, industrially produced death.50

Before I pursue this narrative turn toward the past, I would like to draw your attention to another topic, the protagonist’s adamant refusal to let himself be re- duced to the self “das mir vorgesehen war” (AA 29). He insists on the incom- mensurability of self and the description of that self, resisting an identity that is nothing but the effect of the Other’s gaze (AA 58). This narrative of resistance- how could it be otherwise-is intimately linked to the question of language. Like Tarkovsky’s film, Hilbig’s story works like a perfectly lit stage, divided into realms of darkness and light, outside and inside, the territory and the narrator’s home. Every night, the narrator’s family gathers around a table bathed in a bright circle of light. And at the very center of the text/the narrator’s territorium, there is another building, a ruin bathed in glaring light, but that will concern us later. Expected to take the father’s seat at the head of the table, the narrator keeps vanishing into the night. Instead of the realm of things that are vor- gesehn, he prefers the realm of shadows, where he becomes “unsichtbar” (AA 31) and finds a different language that allows him to escape the “Schattenreich der Deskriptionen” (AA 32).


NEO M U C H AND WOLFGANG HILBIG 29 1

“Ich war mir meiner Wege immer unsicherer geworden” (AA 60). With this sentence the text approaches G e m n i a ZZ, which the narrator calls one of the “Schauplatze alter, mir noch ungekliirt vorkommender Geschichten” (AA 60). This Schau - Platz is located deep inside of the desolate temtory strewn with “In- dustrieruinen, die wie sturmverfallene Felseninseln gen Himmel zeigten” (AA 62). This uncanny site that suddenly emerges as the goal of the narrator’s wan- derings, the object of his fascination, is an old knacker’s yard at the periphery, “wo der Aussatz der Stadt bliihte, die Metastasen der Industrie” (AA 66). In contrast with Die Weiber, Alte Abdeckerei never thematizes scopophilia, or the fetishist gaze-but it enacts it amid these industrial ruins. For Hilbig’s Wendetext, text moves toward a central scene of seeing, an act of witnessing that encounters the glaring gaze of the Medusa. Driven by a sudden interest in his country’s origin, the narrator one day follows the old railroad tracks, finding himself again at the ramp:

[Ilch hatte gesehen, wie Tierkadaver ausgeladen wurden, vermutlich waren es Tierkadaver, denn der Lichtkegel eines Scheinwerfers blendete mich, welcher die Verladerarnpe beleuchtete, auf die ich aus einem toten Winkel blickte, und ich sah nur der Geschaftigkeit schattenhafter Unformen zu, die das Getier unter gepreatem Befehlsgeschrei aus dem klaffenden Gehause eines dreckigen Viehwaggons schleiften [. . .] bis ich endlich Vieh urn Vieh in der Nacht hinter dem Scheinwerfer- strahl entschwinden sah auf einer langen schmierigen Bahn mitten zwischen die Ru- inen der alten Kohlefabrik hinein. (AA 68-69)

The knacker’s yard, Hilbig tells us earlier, is Schau-Platz der Geschichfe. Of interest to us is not the allegory itself, history as slaughterhouse?’ but the structure of the narrator’s gaze. For this is, after all, a scene of insistent looking, of straining to see against a blinding light. The story’s “VEye” desperately wants to see what is happening despite the light shining directly into his eyes. And he does so from a position where he cannot be seen himself. He has withdrawn, he tells us, into the blind spot of the Other’s gaze. Whose gaze? We do not know.

What we do know is that Alte Abdeckerei revolves around a mise-en-sdne of the fetishist gaze. The protagonist does not see the actual killing; he does not enter the slaughterhouse. Let me remind you of a quote from Freud that I mentioned above: [In fetishism], Freud writes, “some process occurs that reminds one of the stopping of memory in traumatic amnesia.” And he continues: “As in this latter case, the subject’s interest comes to a halt half-way, as it were; it is as though the last impression before the uncanny and traumatic one is retained as a fetish.” It is this process that tells us something about the production of textual images in Hilbig’s prose, or more precisely the production of visual palimpsests. Products of a gaze suspended between first and second image, between the image of the present and the image of the past, they are above all the effect of a desire to see against all odds--an aesthetics of seeing/writing from the periphery, almost blind but not quite.

In contrast to Die Weiher, which attempted to re-appropriate the gaze from above and failed, Alte Abdeckerei leads toward a fundamentally different ges-


292 HELL

ture: It transforms the story’s “VEye” into a truly omnipotent gaze at the world. On the last pages of his text, Hilbig stages a violent apocalypse, a baroque descent into hell as Germania ZZ, and with it the entire landscape of ruins, death, and decay disappear from the face of the earth. At first, the narrator still regis- ters-“ich gewahrte”-the beginning of the end, but then the text assumes an omniscient gaze that revels in the destruction, euphorically tracing the “Triim- mer und Zeichen” that the descent into hell left behind, “verstreut wie Lei- chenteile auf einem Schlachtfeld” (AA 105-6). At the end, Hilbig’s text erupts into a mad celebration of language, turning the industrial territory into a surre- al underwater world where dreaming fish swim past the “Prismen der Kohle, durch die Stadte der Kohle, iiber die Dacher der Kohle,” gliding past the “Floz[e] aus Gebein” (AA 116). For a brief moment, the text then dissolves completely into a chain of unmoored signifiers (“alte Abdeckerei . . . Altdeck- erei . . . Alteckerei” (AA 116)) before it produces its very last textual image: “Und endlich vorbei an einigen untergegangenen Ruinen voriiber, an Germania I1 voriiber, wo in der Flut die Sternenbilder spielen, wo die Minotauren wei- den” (AA 117). A beautifully melancholic and deeply problematic image of the ruins of industrial modernity-of the ruin of industrial modernity?-in a mythopoetic landscape: Auschwitz as locus amoenus?

The end of Hilbig’s Alre Abdeckerei is thus a mad and furious celebration of the end of (German) history as the end of nature-under the deeply satisfied and deeply narcissistic gaze of an artist, who reasrms the power of art, of the modernist avant-garde, over the destruction of language and over a past that threatened to kill this language: “[Olh, in einem Land [. . .] auferstanden aus Ruinen iiber den Massengrabern [. . .] dunkles Stolpern der Worte und dunkler Fall toter Vokale [. . .] Vokalschadel, Konsonantenknochen, Kieferkonsonanten, Becken- vokale, Knochelinterpunktionen” (AA 82-83). Alte Abdeckerei, finished in the fall of 1990, as HiIbig informs us, represents a tabula rasa fantasy, a kind of melancholic ecstasy, that for one brief moment abandons the fetishist gaze for visual omnipotence-of the narrator and of the reader.

At the beginning of this discussion of Alte Abdeckerei, I briefly mentioned Anselm Kiefer’s painting Eisen-Steig, the large canvas from 1986 of railroad tracks diverging at the horizon, with thick, rough texture and muted colors typi- cal of Kiefer’s style.52 Pointing to the techniques that pull the spectator into the picture (the “radical one-point perspective” and idiosyncratic foreshortening of the tracks) with its simultaneous emphasis of a flat, heavy surface (produced by the arrangement of objects and materials), Matthew Biro argues that the painting produces a specific, rather violent effect: “a strong sense of movement and, then, of sudden impact with a surface that both stops and receives” the spectator. The anonymous landscape, Biro writes, is suddenly filled with “our own unwilling corporeal presence.”53 According to Biro’s brilliant reading, this strategy involves the (German) spectator in the position of the perpetrator. For Eisen-Steig recalls, he continues, one of the central images in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoa (1985): a frontal and radically foreshortened tracking shot of moving landscapes and



empty rails leading to various death camps. Like Lanzmann, Kiefer puts the spectator literally “in the position of the train engineer.”s4 There is, I would propose, more at stake in such a positioning: I am inclined to read the viewer’s sudden impact with Freud’s trajectory of the fetishist gaze and its brutal, unexpected stop in mind; in addition, the painting makes the viewer oscillate between this “forward’ perspective and another-potential-view from above: Kiefer at- tached climbing shoes to the paintings surface of the kind that were once used “by repairmen to ascend and descend telephone and electrical poles.”ss What would we see if we were to climb up the poles? Would we see anything?

V. DAS PROVISORIUMSEEING NOTHING

In Die Weiber, the protagonist at one point states “Du bist tot. Deine Augen haben das Beschreiben aufgegeben” (DW 85). Das Provisorium, Hilbig’s most recent novel, is about this death-of vision, of writing, and of the writing subject. In the novel, Hilbig returns to his story of voyeurism and fetishism, leaving the story of the German past behind, but not very far behind. Again, journeys structure the novel: the narrator’s walk toward his apartment in Nurnberg, where he lives after having left the GDR on a one-year visa: his incessant rail journeys back and forth between East and West, an expression of his writing block and slow disintegration: his many public reading tours through the capital cities of Western Europe; and his obsessive wandering through the red light districts of the capitals of Amsterdam, Berlin, and Vienna.s6

Hilbig’s protagonist C. is a writer, who left the GDR for the West on a limited visa because his hatred of the system paralyzed him, making it impossible to write and to make love. C. wants to change countries, political camps, and women. Yet what he had sought as liberation, a kind of “Ubergang~zeit”~’ between East and West, now turns into an existential crisis. Provisorium tells the story of C.’s writing block in great detail. His Lesereisen in the West regularly end in a private catastrophe as C. sinks into a drunken stupor in his hotel room, staring in a mixture of fascination and disgust at any available pornographic video. He tries to hide from his audience, experiencing the ever widening gap between himself and his public image as dissident East German author as more and more ~nbearable.~*

The book traces an ever growing sense of loss of reality. C. slowly comes to suspect that he was only able to write in the cities of the East. He feels more and more cut off from his “origin,” which for him always means the “origin” of his writing: the psychic terrain behind the wall has become inpenetrable (P 24-25). During his first year in the West, he would still regularly escape back East, but he would then soon discover that there too, he was no longer able to write. Nev- ertheless, C . clings to this “Phantasie von Ruckkehr und Neubeginn” ( P 3 2 ) until the opening of the wall on 9 November 1989 puts a definite end to this fantasy-and to the very possibility of living in between the two states, between their histories.


294 HELL

C. now longingly remembers the time before he became an “offentlicher Schriftsteller” (P 9 3 , writing only for himself. The more C. disintegrates, the more his thoughts turn toward his past life as a stoker in the GDR. One particular image from this earlier period haunts him, the image of a young man walking across a hill at dusk. It is a tembly romantic image, an “Idealfigur aus der Ver- gangenheit” (P 282), standing atop a windswept hill at night, his coat flying around him as he looks “in die Tiefe zu seinen FiiBen” (P 280-281). This lonely “Phantom” (P 282) surveying his surroundings from above does not correspond to C.’s reality in the East; neither does it correspond to his reality in the West. For in the West, what he experiences is a slow loss of his vision.

In Provisorium, Hilbig’s protagonist is obsessed with peep shows, knowing all the while that he will never see “was er sehen wollte” (234): As he would be anx- iously waiting for that special moment when he would be able to see everything, C. imagines as he stands in front of the peep show, the curtain would descend. Evoking the nexus of knowledge and pleasure, knowledge and vision, that sustains pornography as a genre, Hilbig ironically calls his protagonist’s quest an “Ausschau [. . .] nach einem Geheimnis” (P 238). With considerably less irony, he also asks us to read the scene in the peep show as a form of looking for his “Herkunft” (P 239). Reflecting on his obsession with the elusive climax of these shows, C. reflects that he does not know “wie er angefangen hatte [. . .] nicht wie (und wann und nicht warum) er angefangen hatte zu schreiben”; all this, he thinks, is buried in a dark wilderness (P 239).

Hilbig repeats this failure of vision, C’s inability to see what he is so deeply invested in seeing, at the end of the novel. However, although the first failure is farce, the second is tragedy, a catastrophic moment of blindness caused not by the untimely fall of a curtain, but by the failure of C.’s eyes. Having just escaped from his public reading to Vienna’s red light district, C. buys yet another ticket for a peep show. But something is not working, something goes badly wrong:

Er sei nicht hier, urn ihr Gesicht anzusehen, dachte er, den Blick auf ihren Korper richtend [. . .] doch er glaubte plotzlich, nichts mehr zu sehen. Tatsachlich, er sah nichts [. . .] er starrte zwischen ihre offenen Schenkel, und er konnte nichts sehen, nein sie war fur ihn nicht sichtbar, diese Frau, der Tod hielt ihn bei der Kehle gepackt. (P 299)

Turning woman into Medusa, the scene narrates a symptomatic failure of vision at the very moment when “das Ding an sich,” the “thing in itself,”59 is about to be revealed: “[Elr hatte in dem Augenblick, auf den alles ankam, unter einer Art Erblindung gelitten” (P 300).

As C. leaves the show, he suddenly notices his face on a number of posters an- nouncing the public reading from which he just managed to escape. C. stares at the posters, desperately trying to figure out whether it is really his face: “[Ejr erkannte sich und erkannte sich nicht” (P 301). He walks away thinking that the image on the poster was “das Bild eines Toten” (P 301). In these scenes, we thus encounter a moment of failed vision, a disturbance of vision, followed by a mo-


NEO RAUCH AND WOLFCiANG HILBIG 295

ment of symptomatic inis-recognition, the fundamental structure of fetishism: the structure of seeing and not seeing, of knowing and not knowing, and of remembering what was seen and not remembering what was seen. It is this fetishist gaze that, I would argue, constitutes the condition of possibility of writing Pm- visorium as the project announced at the very end of this crucial scene: “Und ich muB die Geschichte beenden, es hat mir ihr keinen Zweck mehr,” C. thinks as he walks away from his own image pasted to the wall: “Ich muB mit dieser Geschichte sofort aufhiiren” (P 301).

In a previous article. I traced this moment of not-seeing, this “death” of the male gaze, to the encounter with the post-fascist subject’s traumatic “origin.”@ This moment is deeply overdetermined: Provisorium also narrates another catastrophe, the disappearance of a third space, the fantasy of a space outside of the German states’ prehistory, in between East and West.61 This space collapses in 1989 together with the Berlin Wall. Discussing texts by Kurt Drawert, Barbara Kohler, and Christian Lehnert, Erk Grimm observes: “[Zlur Entdeckung des An- deren [stoBt] die Wiederkehr des Vergangenen.”62 In my view, this also holds for Hilbig, despite the fact that he had already left the GDR in 1986. Alte Abdeckerei is written at the moment when German history floods the fantasmatic space between East and West. Responding to the sudden implosion of this space, Hilbig produces violent images of decay, dense visual palimpsests of Germany’s histories, whose blinding power generates a particular gaze, the gaze of the fetishist. Provisorium returns to this catastrophic moment when the fantasy of a space between East and West vanishes for good. The novel begins in September 1989 and ends sometime in November or December of that same year. The momentous political events of 1989 are situated on the very margins of the text. Hilbig narrates as if these dramatic events were perceived out of the comer of C.’s eyes, glimpsed for a brief “Augenblic[k],” and then lost out of sight (P 313). Yet 9 November is an absolutely crucial event for this text, by definitively putting an end to the hopes that C. once invested in his year in the West. As the space that constitutes the foundation of the fetishist gaze gives way, Provisorium rushes toward the cli- mactic moment when the fetishist goes blind: only to tell us that it is from this position that the text will be told-has indeed been told.

VI. WENDEBZZBER-IMAGES OF THE PAST, IMAGES OF THE PRESENT

The scopic regime of modernity and of the modernisms that it generated is marked by a tension between the totalizing gaze that technological and industrial modernity needs and that other gaze, the gaze of modernism that is a de-ranged gaze, often blurred, often blind, and always longing for pure, unencumbered vision: the gaze of Haussmann and that of Baudelaire’s flaneur. In this article, I have been trying to attract your attention to the ways in which Rauch and Hilbig engage this scopic regime, how they work with ways of seeing and not seeing in their specific cultural context. Rauch de-ranges, I have been arguing, the totalizing gaze of


296 HELL

both his technocractic protagonists and his viewers. Hilbig responds to the gaze from above with a view from below: to the GDR’s Beschreibungsrituale with a gaze that pays close attention, and to the blinding power of German history with the gaze of the fetishist. Hilbig’s protagonists are blinded, their vision is blurred- but they never, ever renounce the desire to see, genau hinzusehn. What Hilbig proposes is a fetishist gaze-and the gaze itself becomes the fetish of a writing informed by vision. I traced the structures of the fetishist gaze through Hilbig’s prose from Die Weiber to his latest novel, drawing attention to the scenarios of watching that produce what is unique about the prose, that is, its visual palimpsests: the view- ing subject’s suspension between two images, between present and past, and between what it wants to see and what it does not want to see. And let us not forget the moment when C. is no longer able to see, because the space that allowed him to see no longer exists, is flooded by a history that is deeply traumatic-Medusa’s history. Let me also briefly remind you of Neo Rauch’s “Perspektive aus den Au- genwinkeln.” Rauch, I would argue, also confronts this traumatic history; he, too, produces palimpsests. For who is to say whether these cold images of technological modernity have their origin in the 1960s or the 1930s? Whether the scenes of meaningless production are located in the GDR or in the Third R e i ~ h ? ~ ~



In the work of Rauch and Hilbig, we encounter an exciting production of visual and textual images, capsizing images, from the border territory of industrial modernity. Their work does not represent a form of “nachholende Moderne” (to appropriate Habermas’s phrase), but an aesthetic practice that is at once anachro- nistic and up to date? both continue to work in aesthetic media deemed obso- lete by the reigning cultural discourse of postunification Germany, that is, (figural) painting and literature (high, not lowbrow, literature); indeed, they are both deeply rooted in classical modernism and its Seh-Sucht.6s In Alte Abdeckerei, Hilbig executes his most stubborn move, rescuing language, “Vokalschadel” and “Konsonantenknochen,” from the apocalypse and detailed images from the GDRs Beschreibungsrituale.66 And Rauch retrieves figural painting from socialist realism’s unbearable naturali~m.~’ Both artists insist on their own images- against the aesthetic norms of the former East and the postrnodern preferences of the actually existing West. Like other artists from the GDR, Rauch and Hilbig have been identified with a particular philosophical and aesthetic tradition, romantic anticapitalism.6R Yet although romantic anticapitalism may indeed be bad social theory, I would argue that it does produce good art. As Rauch and Hilbig- or Heiner Miiller and more recently W. G. Sebald-demonstrate. it creates un-

Allenburger Fenster I , by Neo Rauch. 1997. Oil on paper on canvas. 125 cm x 300 cm. WV 170. Collection Deutsche Bank. Courtesy of Galerie EIGEN +ART Berlideipzig.


298 HELL

forgettable images, visual and textual images of loss and destruction that serve as useful reminders. They do not simply remind us of destruction, but in lingering on what is lost-and so utterly useless-they disrupt the whole discourse and cir- culation of use. Yet most significant, these images are always already “Bi1dbeschreibung”-a particular form of ekphrasis that traces the fate of the modernist’s gaze.69

As I have been arguing, these are images of the past, but also of the present- images of a past that will not go away and of a present that is changing overnight. In “The Disturbance of Vision in Vienna Modernism,” Andreas Huyssen argues that fin-de-si2cle modernism should be understood as the expression of a crisis of identity that is at the same time a crisis of language and of visuality. If we want to understand the significance of visuality in modernism, Huyssen argues, we need to take into account among other things the radical changes that accompa- nied the rapid urbanization at the end of the nineteenth century, producing an “invisible and uncanny city space.”7o Huyssen thus historicizes the “crisis of vi- ~ i o n ” ~ l that we find, for instance, in the visual metaphors of Hofmannsthal’s texts. If this holds for the turn of the last century, it also seems to apply to the period since 1989. Twelve years after the fall of the wall, Michael Schindhelm reminds us of the radical transformation in the East:

Die Ruinen der DDR sind planiert, der Dreck des Sozialismus ist fortgekehrt. Die Jahre nach 89 lassen sich als ein akzelerierter Zeitraffer begreifen: Buch- stablich wurde die Hardware einer Epoche-in Gestalt halb verfallener Urban- itat-weggerafft.’*

In the former GDR, Fordist modernity died abruptly, visibly and before our very eyes, while in the West it slid imperceptibly into post-Fordism, creating a whole new postindustrial landscape, a new “hardware” that carries the traces of the earlier age on its margins, where heavy industry continues to coexist with a new post- fordist aesthetic of industrial ruins.73 Rauch’s and Hilbig’s preoccupation with the de-centered gaze finds its historical context, I would propose, in these radical trans- formations. Their image-palimpsests are images of transition, Wendebilder, reflecting on Germany’s pasts and its presents. In the industrial border temtory of Ger- many, Rauch and Hilbig thus turn the project of modernity into a landscape of ruins. In Hilbig’s texts, the ruins are taken over by nature; they are part of a modernist aesthetics of abject romanticism. On Rauch’s canvasses, we encounter a decidedly nonromantic representation; he creates another kind of ruined landscape, dis-func- tional and cluttered with de-ranged elements. His Altenburger Fenster (1997), for instance, invites us to look-from an elevated position-through a window frame across a landscape of highways that consists of an utterly confusing array of different vanishing points, thus producing a radically de-ranged field of vision.

Altenburger Fenster stands out among Rauch’s paintings, because it confronts us with an empty landscape of (re-)construction, devoid of any human presence. Unless, of course, we take into account the painting’s beholder, this spectator, whose controlling gaze Rauch so successfully destroys. In his magisterial study



of the modernist past as “a ruin,”74 T. J. Clark also reflects on this gaze of technological mastery. Clark lists three “exemplary” works of modernist art: Adolph Menzel’s Moltke ’s Binoculars ( 187 l), John Heartfield’s A New Man - Muster of a New World (1934), and Kasimir Malevich’s Complex Presentiment (Half-Fig- ure in Yellow Shirt).75 His reading of modernism is deeply melancholic, as is his reading of Heartfield’s photomontage, which focuses our gaze on one of those heroic planners of whom Rauch’s protagonists are but pale after-images. What Clark points out is that Heartfield’s New Man, who looks into the future, surveying the militaryhndustrial project of (Soviet) modernity, does so with tears in his eyes.76 Field Marshal Moltke, we may safely assume, did not have tears in his eyes as he surveyed the battlefield?’ But let us not assume the same of the Medusa, as she looks across that other battlefield of modernity, the city of iron, Ferropolis.

University of Michigan

NOTES

1 . Quoted in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Cen- fury French Thought (Los Angeles: U of California P, 1993) 20. I would like to thank my very dear colleague George Steinmetz for his lucid discussion of troubled perspectives in Rauch‘s paintings. I would also like to thank Sarah Beckwith, Johannes von Moltke, and Jon Beasley-Murray for their interest, ideas, and sometimes, even formulations.

2. Siegfried Kracauer discusses films made about concentration camps in 1945; see his Theory of Film (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997) 305-6.

3. See <http://www.ferropolis-online.de>. Ferropolis is part of a project entitled “In- dustrielles Gartenreich’ organized by the Bauhaus Dessau together with the state of Sach- sen-Anhalt. It is located in a region of the former GDR devastated by strip mining.

4. Quote from Ferropolis Web site: <http://www.ferropolis-online.de>. 5. Karl Mundstock, Helle Nachte (HallelSaale: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1952) 35. 6. Harald Kunde, “Die Ruhe vor dem Sturm,” Neo Rauch. Randgebiet, ed. Klaus

Werner (Gallerie fur zeitgenossische Kunst Leipzig, 2000) 36. 7. Some of Rauch’s paintings are accessible at the Web site: <http://www.davidzwirn-

er.com/artists/Neo-Rauch/>. 8. Bernhart Schwenk, “Nachtarbeit zur Verteidigung von Rot, Gelb und Blau,” Neo

Rauch. Randgebiet 20. Most of the essays in this catalogue are printed in both German and English. I will quote from both versions, sometimes supplying my own translations.

9. See, for instance, Nachtarbeit (1997). in Neo Rauch. Randgebiet 57; or Weiche (1999). in Neo Rauch. Sammlung Deutsche Bank (Neo Rauch: courtesy Galerie EIGEN + Art, BerlinLeipzig, 2000) 35.

10. Birgit Sonna, “Schon gekammte Proletarier. Zwischen Agit-Prop und sachsischer Melancholie: Neo Rauch im Haus der Kunst,” Suddeutsche Zeitung, 15 Mar. 2001: 4.

1 1. Thomas Wagner, T i n Stuck Antarktis auf dem Heimflug,” Neo Rauch. Randgebiet 15. 12. Eduard Beaucamp, “Schattenboxen im Randgebiet,” Frankfurter Allgemeine

Zeitung, 6 Jan. 2001: 41. 13. Eduard Beaucamp, “Schattenboxen im Randgebiet,” Frankfurter Allgemeine

Zeitung, 6 Jan. 2001: 41. 14. He uses metaphors of heavy machinery, earth moving equipment: “Das Gewesene

wuhle ich in betrachtlichem zeitlichem Abstand hinter mir auf, verwirble Schichtungen,


300 HELL

suche nach Partikeln meiner Sozialisation,” in “Plotzlich in Nebenwelten geraten. Ein Gesprach mit dem Leipziger Maler Neo Rauch uber Heimat, die Tradition und das Uber- leben im Kunstbetrieb,” Die Zeit 50 (6 Dec. 2001): 55.

15. Michael Schindhelm, “Der Terror der Zeit. Warum die Nostalgie um sich greift - in Ost wie West,” Die Zeit 45 (2001).

16. Harald Kunde, “Die Ruhe vor dem Sturm,” Neo Rauch. Randgebiet 35. My transla- tion. Rauch’s paintings thematize modernity as technology and militarization. See, for instance, Manover ( 1 997) and Baracken ( 1997) in Neo Rauch. Sammlung Deutsche Bank 32.

17. Harold Kunde, “Die Ruhe vor dem Sturm,” Neo Rauch. Randgebiet 37. 18. Bernhart Schwenk, “Nachtarbeit zur Verteidigung von Rot, Gelb und Blau,” Neo

Rauch. Randgebiet 2 1. See also Ulrich Clewing, Frankj+iu-ter Allgerneine Zeitung 2 I Apr. 2001: BS8.

19. “Plotzlich in Nebenwelten geraten” 55. 20. Compare, for instance, Werner Tubke’s monumental narrative of the Peasant Wars,

Friihburgerliche Revolution in Deutschland (1979-81) in the Panorama Museum Bad Frankenhausen, whose narrative structure guides the spectator’s gaze despite the overwhelming detail of the historical painting.

21. Wolfgang Hilbig, Bilder vom Erzdhlen. Gedichte (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer Ver- lag, 2001) 32.

22. Thomas Wagner, “Ein Stiickhtarktis auf dem Heimflug,” Neo Rauch. Randgebiet 17. 23. Thomas Wagner, “Die Welt erscheint im Heckfenster,” Neo Rauch. Randgebiet 13 1.

On Tarkovsky’s aesthetic of “melancholy allegorism,” see Hartmut Bohme, “Ruinen - Landschaften: Zum Verhaltnis von Naturgeschichte und Allegorie in den spaten Filmen von Andrej Tarkowskij,” Natur und Subjekt (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988) 334.

24. Wolfgang Hilbig, “Der triigerische Grund,” Zwischen den Paradiesen (Leipzig: Reclam-Verlag, 1992) 19498.

25. Wolfgang Hilbig, “Der triigerische Grund’ 194. 26. Wolfgang Hilbig, “Der triigerische Grund’ 194. 27. Wolfgang Hilbig, “Zeit ohne Wirklichkeit: Ein Gesprach mit Harro Zimmermann,”

28. Wolfgang Hilbig, “Zeit ohne Wirklichkeit: Ein Gesprach mit H m o Zimmermann” 17. 29. In this sense, Hilbig is also part of postwar literature. See, for instance, Klaus

Scherpe on Alfred Andersch’s “radikale Beschreibungspoetik” in his Die rekonstruierte Moderne: Studien zur deutschen Literatur nach 1945 (Koln, Weimar, Wien: Bohlau Ver- lag, 1992) xvi.

30. Dorothy Kelly, Telling Glances: Voyeurism in the French Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992) 7ff.

31. Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987) 84. And don’t forget the eyeball in Bunuel’s Chien Andalou.

32. Wolfgang Hilbig, Die Weiber (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 1987) 9. From now on, I will reference this text as DW with a page number.

33. Peter Brooks, “The Body in the Field of Vision,” Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993) 96.

34. Peter Brooks, “The Body in the Field of Vision” 97. 35. Wolfgang Hilbig, 1CH (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 1993). 36. See Andreas Huyssen on Brecht’s heir, Alexander Kluge, and Brecht’s aesthetics of

realism in Andreas Huyssen, “An Analytic Storyteller in the Course of Time,” October 46 (Fall 1988): 12Off.

37. See also Marie-Luce Collard on Hilbig’s oscillation between a postmodern aesthetic of the sublime and a modernist aesthetic of suffering. In her “Die Fiktion der Macht und die Macht der Fiktion,” Peter Weiss Juhrbuch, vol. 9 (St. Ingbert: Rohrigs Univer- sitatsverlag, 2000) 153.

38. Wolfgang Hilbig, Alte Abdeckerei (Frankfurt a.M.: S . Fischer Verlag, 1990) 13.

Text + Kritik (123) 16.


NEO RAUCH AND WOLFGANG HILBIG 30 1

From now on, I will refer to this text as AA with a page number. On the “fate” of vision as privileged access to knowledge, see Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes (note 1) and Thomas Kleinspehn, Derfliichtige Blick: Sehen und Identitat in der Kultur der Neuzeit (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989).

39. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 50. 40. On Hilbig’s relationship to the GDR’s official cultural politics, see Uwe Schoor,

“Heraustreten aus selbstverschuldeter Mudigkeit. Zwei unaufgefordert schreibende Ar- beiter: Wolfgang Hilbig und Gerd Neumann,” Zersammelt. Die inojjiiielle Literaturszene der DDR nach 1990, eds. Roland Berbig, Birgit Dahlke, Michael Kemper-van-den Boogaart, and Uwe Schoor (Berlin: Theater der Zeimecherchen 6, 2001) 56-70.

4 1. See Paul Cooke, “Continuity and Taboo: Sexual Repression and Vergangenheitsbe- waltigung in Wolfgang Hilbig’s Die Weiber,” Easr Germany: Continuity and Change, eds. Paul Cooke and Jonathan Grix (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), German Monitor 46: 3-14.

42. On the “displaced image” in fetishism, see Hal Foster, “The Art of Fetishism: Notes on Dutch Still,” Fetishism as a Cultural Discourse, eds., Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993) 262.

43. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” The Standard Edition ofthe Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1999) 152.

44. “Editor’s Note,” to Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” 150. 45. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition

of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1999) 155.

46. The quote continues: “Thus, the foot or the shoe owes its preference as a fetish- or a part of it-to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up.” Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” 155.

47. On this faulty, “hallucinatory” vision, see Joyce McDougall, Playdoyer pour une certaine anormalitb (Paris: Gallimard, 1978) 54-55.

48. Peter Guth, “Eine geistvolle Stunde des Nachdenkens mit groRer Fan-Gemeinde: LVZ-Kunstpreistrager Neo Rauch im Galeriegesprach,” Archiv Leipziger Volkszeitung.

49. Eich’s Traume worked with the sound of trains in the background evoking depor- tations. Gunther Eich, 15 Horspiele (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973) 53-88. “Wir sehen irgendwo Eisenbahngleise und denken an Auschwitz. Das wird auf lange Sicht so bleiben.” Anselm Kiefer, quoted in Matthew Biro, Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1998) 277.

50. There is a strong affinity between Hilbig and W. G. Sebald, especially the Sebald of Rings ofSaturn (1995).

51. Genia Schulz reads Hilbig’s texts as “Bestandteil der (deutschen) Gewalt(geschichte)” Genia Schulz, “Postscriptum. Zum Erzahlband Der Brief,” Wolfgang Hilbig. Materiulien zu feben und Werk. ed. Uwe Wittstock (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994) 150.

52. Another visual layer of Hilbig’s palimpsest is Rembrandt’s paintings of slaughtered oxen. See Mieke Bal, “Dead Flesh, or the Smell of Painting,” Visual Culture. Images and Interpretations, eds. Nonnan Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1994) 365- 83.

53. Matthew Biro, Arr.selm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (Cam- bridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 89.

54. Matthew Biro, Anselm Kiefer 89. 55. Matthew Biro, Anselm Kiefer 87. 56. For a reading of Klavierspielerin, another novel that intertwines the story of a na-

tion and the story of a (voyeuristic) subject, see Beatrice Hanssen, “Elfriede Jelinek’s Language of Violence,” New German Critique 68 (Spr./Sum. 1996): 79-1 12. Like Je- linek’s protagonist, C. mimics Freud’s “uncanny” walk through the red-light district of an Italian city. See Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Complete Psychological Works of


302 HELL

Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press, 1999) 237. 57. Wolfgang Hilbig, Das Provisorium. (Frankfurt a.M.: S . Fischer Verlag, 2000) 96.

From now on I will refer to this text as P with a page number. 58. The novel’s epigraphs gesture toward an autobiographical text, thematizing the

specula constitution of the subject. The story of C.’s crisis thematizes the fundamental alienation involved in being an object in the field of vision of the Other. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981).

59. See Linda Williams, Hard Core: Powec Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible (Los Angeles: U of California P, 1989) 49. One could also read this as a form of symbolic death, the subject’s disappearance in the vanishing point (see Norman Bryson, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” Vision and Visualtry [Dia Art Foundation, 19991 89).

60. See my “Was bleibt? Wolfgang Hilbig’s Provisorium, or The Disappearance of the Author in the Blind Spot,” Zeitsrhriftfur Literuturwissenschafr und Linguistik 124 (Dec. 2001): 91-1 14.

61. I am currently working on the outlines of this third space of memory. The argument represents a critical engagement with Jeffrey Herfs thesis in his Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies (Harvard University Press, 1997) pointing out that he ne- glects the realm of culture in which a third space of memory production opens up period- ically. For a condensed version of the argument, see my conference paper ‘‘Holocaust and Antifascism: Peter Weiss’s Ermittlung in East Germany” (l999), available at: <http://www.lsa.umich.edu/german/gs-fac. htmb.

62. Erk Grimm, “Go West? Literaturbetrieb und ‘ostdeutsche Identitat’ in den neun- ziger Jahren,” Glossen 10: <http://www.dickinson.edu/departments/germn/ glossenheft1 O/grimm.html>.

63. See Harald Kunde, “Die Ruhe vor dem Sturm” 36. See also Birgit Dahlke on the palimpsests of another author from the former GDR, Annett Groschner, in “Die beteiligte Chronistin - Annett Groschners Wahlverwandtschaft mit Uwe Johnson,” forthcoming in Johnson - Jahrburh 2000.

64. In 1993, Frank Schinmacher criticized Hilbig for his refusal to narrate and asked him to develop a literary critique of modemism. Frank Schinmacher said, “Wir waren der Schatten des Lebens, sie waren der Tod. iiber ein literarisches Meisterwerk und seine Ver- hinderung durch den Geist der Moderne. Anmerkungen zu Wolfgang Hilbigs Roman ‘Ich,”’ in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 5 Oct. 1993. I agree with Vormweg’s rather acerbic comment that modernity may be “zweifellos langst gealtert[],” but is “geschichtlich nach wie vor real[].” Heinrich Vormweg, “Literaturzerstiirung. Zur Fort- setzung des sogenannten Deutschen Literaturstreits,” in Vergangene Gegenwart - Gegen- wartige Vergangenheit. Studien, Polemiken und Laudationes zur deutschsprachigen Liter- atur 1960-1994, eds. Jorg Drews (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 1994) 314.

65. See Christoph Tannert, who writes about “Seh-Suchts-Anfalle,” in Neo Rauch. Randgebiet 13 1 .

66. Wolfgang Hilbig, Alte Abdeckerei, (Frankfurt a.M.: S . Fischer Verlag, 1990). On the visual power of this novel, its “Vergegenwartigung[en],” see the excellent essay by Ralph Rainer Wuthenow, “Verwerfungen, Verwesungen. Zur Prosa von Wolfgang Hilbig,” Text + Kritik 123 (July 1994): 28-36. See also Werner Jung’s essay on Hilbig as an author resisting “Bildefflut und Sprachmull.” Werner Jung, “”Welch eine Simulation war doch diese Wirklichkeit!” Wolfgang Hilbigs literarische Verklbng des Gewohnlichen,” Text + Kritik 123 (July 1994): 39.

67. See Rauch’s Unertraglicher Naturalismus (1998) in Neo Rauch. Randgebiet 77. 68. See, for instance, Richard Herzinger, “Raubziige im Burgertum. Funfzig Jahre nach

der Griindung der DDR wird hitzig uber die Stellung ihrer Kunst in der Modeme diskutiert. Wie aber sieht es mit der Modemitiit der DDR-Literatur aus?’ Die Zeit 22 July 1999: 36.

69. Thomas Wagner, “Ein Stuck Antarktis auf dem Heimflug,” Neo Rauch. Randge-



biet 16. See also Hartmut Bohme on Tarkovky’s pessimism and his aesthetics, “Ruinen - Landschaften” 324; and Tess Lewis on Sebald’s Essui Noir in her “W. G . Sebald: The Past Is Another Country,” The New Criterion online: <wysiwyg://24/http://wwww. newcriterion.com/archive/2O/dec0 1 /tess.htm>. Sebald’s “schwarze Geschichtsphiloso- phie” (Michael Rutschky, “Das geschenkte Vergessen: W. G. Sebalds ‘Austerlitz’ und die Epik der schwarzen Geschichtsphilosophie,” Frankfurter Rundschau 21 Mar. 2001) does, of course, go beyond romantic anticapitalism wedded as it is to a baroque meta- physics of nature.

70. Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Disturbance of Vision in Vienna Modernism,” Mod- ernisdModernity 5.3 (1998): 38.

71. Andreas Huyssen, “The Disturbance of Vision in Vienna Modernism” 35. 72. Michael Schindhelm, “Der Terror der Zeit. Wmrn die Nostalgie um sich greift -

in Ost wie West,” Die Zeit 45 (2001). 73. In the Western border temtory of industrial modernity, one of Europe’s largest steel

mills has been turned into a museum, its colossal body of rusted steel cleaned up, the set- ting evokes the austere aesthetic of high modernism (see “Das Ensemble der Saurier ros- tet,” Der Tugesspiegel, 27 May 2001: RI); the former Hufenanlagr Suarbriicken, the very heart of this once central mining and steel region, is now a city park complete with romantic ruins weighed down by ivy and climbing roses (see New Yurk Times 10 Feb. 2000: B 10).

74. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Cam- bridge: Cambridge UP, 19) 2.

75. T. J. Clark, Farewell to un Ideu 1 . 76. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea 1. 77. Discussing the emptied technological gaze of war photography, Bernd Huppauf

emphasizes the tendency to shoot from an elevated position, providing an “unrestrained field of vision.” “Emptying the Gaze: Framing Violence through the Viewfinder,” New German Critique 72 (Fall 1997): 27. See also Martin Jay on the ‘“high altitude’ thinking characteristic of [modernism’s] scopic regime,” in his “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” Vi- sion and Visualiry, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 1988) 10.


Wendebilder: Neo Rauch and Wolfgang Hilbig

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