Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance

Inside/Outside Europe

Marilena Zaroulia, Philip Hager, Marilena Zaroulia, Philip Hager

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137379375
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

Discussing crises through diverse examples, including the UK's National Theatre, public art installations, Occupy LSX, repatriation ceremonies and performances of the everyday, this book asks how performance captures and resists what is considered (politically, ideologically, culturally or socially) 'inside' or 'outside' Europe.

Part I

Returns

1

The Weimar Republic and its Return: Unemployment, Revolution, or Europe in a State of Schuld

Giulia Palladini

A spectre is haunting the post-2008 economic crisis – the spectre of the Weimar Republic. This spectre is polymorphous: it appears in a range of different forms and circumstances, and inhabits a transnational space.

First of all, it comes as a powerful image: the synthetic, quintessential image of the ‘crisis’. From the pictorial archive of world history, Weimar Germany has made its way into Western collective imagery as the most recognisable visual repertoire of social malaise. Photographs shot in Germany during the period of hyperinflation (1919–23) – those portraying children building paper castles out of packs of worthless banknotes, or the long lines of unemployed workers waiting for the dole at the beginning of the 1930s – offer themselves as familiar references to a recognisable history. In its excessively iconic quality, in its intrinsic memorability, such a history is nevertheless unknown: the phantasmatic past of the economic crisis, a past that was evoked more and more often in newspapers, on television and on the internet as the depression established itself as a social reality, is less an index of historical accuracy than a memento – a way to turn memory into a warning.

The spectre of the Weimar Republic, in fact, is not evoked accidentally: its resurfacing acquires specific political connotations according to the different contexts in which it is invited to operate. Returning to the start of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto, we could suggest that most ‘powers of old Europe’ seem to ‘have entered into a holy alliance’ (2012: 33) regarding this spectre, but this time not in order to exorcise it (as was the case with the spectre of communism in 1848), but rather to establish it at the centre of a common discursive arena.

How come?

A starting point in understanding this scenario may be the visual repertoire mentioned above. On closer observation, we notice that recognisable images of Weimar Germany are themselves haunted. They are, in fact, not only a visualisation of the crisis in its distant yet tangible reality, grounded in bodies and spaces other than ours. They are also, and inevitably, images pregnant with a future that today has already happened: a future in which the materiality of poverty, social malaise and unemployment constituted the basis of the takeover by National Socialism in Germany. Such a future haunts the past of these images, which, for their part, unwittingly provided a prelude to it. Similarly, that future haunts spectators who encounter the images and, for whatever reason, decide to return to them.

Hence, the spectre of Weimar Germany returns not only as an immediate signifier of ‘crisis’. It brings with it a peculiar temporality: one of anticipation, and – seemingly – of an ineluctable fall towards the future. That is, from the standpoint of the future, the Weimar hyperinflation of the early 1920s appears to be always already a prelude to the 1929 Wall Street Crash: the climax of the biggest financial crisis of the twentieth century. Likewise, the fragile democracy of the Weimar Republic survived in the collective memory first and foremost as a prelude to the rise of a populist, anti-democratic force, and eventually to the establishment of Hitler’s dictatorship, which made its way into the Reichstag during the final Weimar years and grounded its consensus in the crisis that Germany’s first democracy had proved unable to solve.¹

In the following pages, I shall interrogate the phantasmatic return of the Weimar Republic in light of the peculiar temporality that it calls forth: a projective temporality par excellence. I suggest that the logic according to which the Weimar Republic ‘returns’ today is one that establishes a tension between the present and an imminent future: a future to which the present necessarily seems to be a prelude. As I hope to demonstrate, it is precisely on the terrain of this projective temporality that different politics of use, for this return, are taking place.

Which projective temporality?

In a sense, the projective temporality that the spectre of Weimar brings into the discursive arena of the post-2008 crisis doubles the intrinsic temporality of crisis itself: a time dispossessed of a future and yet projected towards – and marked by – a horizon of potential, forthcoming failure and collapse. Alternatively, this horizon has recently been termed ‘state bankruptcy’, ‘ultimate credit crunch’, or exclusion from majoritarian economic and monetary unions (such as the Eurozone). According to this logic, the ‘return’ of the crisis functions as a vector of the definition of time, doubling and validating the present.

We shall consider this temporality as a form of political temporality, insofar as it affects both the individual and the collective body by imposing a continuity of time perception: defining the present as a perpetual falling towards its end. In another respect, it is a political temporality in that it propels political consequences: namely, projecting on the present ‘the end of the story’ (the economic collapse, the advent of political terror, the danger of the war, and so on) is a way of making the present more responsible for its own events, and at the same time subject to political fatality. It is a way of affirming that it is necessary to reach compromises with the present, if we do not wish the future to return. As we shall see, in the wake of the European debt crisis, the projective temporality of the Weimar Republic is employed in conservative discourses precisely to foster or to defend political choices, in the present, as the only possible way of preventing the reappearance of the past.

Weimar’s projective temporality, however, can also be regarded as a different form of political temporality. A projective temporality, in fact, is also one of the defining features of revolution: revolution conjures a time yet to come, to which the struggle will lead and for which the struggle shall endure. The temporality of revolutionary songs, for instance, is projective, encouraging the listener to persist in the struggle and moving her to action, imagining another world yet to come – and, in so doing, starting to construct this different future, to establish its rhythm.² Bertolt Brecht’s political ballads, in this respect, are exemplary: their tune expresses a projection towards the future of the possible in the actuality of the struggle. They inhabited theatre – but also film, or the written page of poetry – as the space of this struggle, looking forward to revolution.

Interestingly, the years of the Weimar Republic, in which Brecht composed his most famous political songs, are also pregnant with images of revolution. The Republic itself was born out of a revolution – the revolution that, between November 1918 and August 1919, put an end to Germany’s imperial government. Furthermore, from the start, the history of the first German Republic was marked by the memory of aborted socialist revolutions: the Spartacist Uprising in January 1919, followed by the murders of the two political leaders Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht, as well as the attempt to establish a socialist republic in Bavaria that had been instigated by, among others, Kurt Eisner, Ernst Toller and Erich Mühsam (1918–19). Overall, the intense twelve years of the Weimar Republic are profoundly informed by the horizon of a revolution ‘about to come’: the socialist revolution in Germany that Soviet Russia thought would follow the 1917 Bolshevik one; the revolution that the German Communist Party (KPD) kept preparing until its final defeat with the advent of Nazism; the revolution that we find conjured up in many political pamphlets, songs and intellectual and artistic works from the Weimar era (see Willett 1996).

Returning to these works, to that horizon of revolution, is also a form of haunting: it is a way to conjure the potentiality of a revolution that never happened in the 1930s, but was conceived as possible. It means welcoming in the present reflections and forms of solidarity long forgotten, and that may be called upon to sustain the struggle in the present, in a different projective temporality, in a new logic of anticipation of the future. As Simone Weil noted insightfully in an article written in summer 1932, early 1930s Germany was a nation in a state of waiting: the crisis had precipitated its population into a state of suspense that opened up the potentiality of questioning the very structure of society, looking forward to the future. The future, as it were, had not yet been determined; on the contrary, ‘the situation’, according to Weil, ‘seemed to perfectly meet the definition of a revolutionary situation’ (1960: 104), although revolution, in the final stages of the Republik, remained latent and never actualised. If history repeats itself, however, this time the ‘end of the story’ might be imagined as being different: in other words, it is licit to imagine a future in which the hopes of revolution, and the forms of solidarity experienced in the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s, may also return.

Hence, the return of Weimar might indeed be regarded as a more complex phenomenon than it seems at first glance. Or at least I am interested in suggesting that alongside the slanted employment of the Weimar spectre on the part of conservative political parties, there is also a possibility of mobilising this spectre, and the projective temporality it embodies, and reclaiming it for a radically different politics of use – one in which the anticipatory logic of revolution inhabits the present territory of the potential. In what follows, I shall look at the scenario of Weimar’s return, investigating first of all the distinctive rhetoric of crisis that informs contemporary politicians’ and journalists’ discourses in which the Weimar Republic is employed as a powerful analogy for various national contexts. Secondly, I shall turn to the possibility of imagining a different politics of use for such ‘return’, taking as a starting point an interesting example: the art/research project entitled Red Channels Meets the Red Megaphone – Kuhle Wampe Revisited. This took place in Berlin in July 2011, was organised by the New York-based collective Red Channels, and was hosted in the art space OKK/Raum 29. The project, whose subtitle, significantly, was Suicide or Solidarity, was conceived as a collective research work around the movie Kuhle Wampe, which had been made in Berlin in 1932 as a collaboration between several artists including Slatan Dudow, Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler. The film, which premiered in Berlin on 30 May 1932 and was banned on 23 March 1933, was a political reflection on unemployment, labour and solidarity, portraying working-class Berlin life in the Republic’s crucial last year. The project proposed by Red Channels was an invitation to ‘reimagine, retrace, remix, reenact, and reload Kuhle Wampe’ (Red Channels 2011).

After discussing how the return of Weimar is performed on the stage of international politics, I shall look at this experiment as a way of reflecting on the position of Berlin in contemporary discourse on the crisis: interestingly, in fact, in such discourses Berlin (and Germany overall) seems to exist only as a spectre, and not as a direct protagonist in today’s history of the ‘crisis’. While, on the level of decision-making, in contemporary discourse Berlin’s position appears absolutely central, such prominence is radically detached from the Weimar spectre, which is evoked so often when discussing other European countries. Intercepting the proposal that Red Channels made to the project’s participants in 2011 – to bring back Kuhle Wampe and the historical moment in which the movie was made as material for study, but also as the possible basis for playful enactment – we shall discuss the characters of a potential re-appropriation of such return, in a logic of anticipation of a revolution that may, indeed, already be starting to happen – most likely elsewhere.

The Weimar syndrome

A brief tour of the landscape of the international press from the last five years offers diverse examples in which the Weimar spectre is called upon in explicit dialogue with contemporary politics, functioning as a strobe light that illuminates portions of the present and projects features, attributes and omens upon those portions.

On 5 October 2012, for example, in an interview with the German newspaper Handelsblatt, the Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras compared the recent scenario of Greek democracy with the Weimar Republic: according to him, the country was not only confronting an unprecedented unemployment peak, but the social unrest engendered by the economic situation was key to the rise of dangerous populist movements of extreme left and right,³ which had even made their way into parliament (2012). Samaras employed the powerful image of pre-Nazi Weimar to present his own government as a crucial opportunity not only to restore the national economy but also to ‘save’ Greece from an imminent destiny of political chaos. In this scenario, Germany’s support to Samaras’s commitment to maintain Greece’s position in the Eurozone was presented as vital for preventing both economic collapse and the ‘return’ of extremist politics in the heart of Europe, today bastion of an established social democracy, whose success Germany’s wealth is at pains to exemplify (Zeit Online 2012).

A few days after Samaras’s statements, the comparison between Greece and the Weimar Republic appeared again on the German news, this time in the context of an analysis by the ‘Eurozone expert’ Wolfgang Münchau (2012). According to the economist, Greece in 2011–12 found itself in a very similar condition to Germany in the 1930s, insofar as the country confronted a situation of high debt (like Germany after World War One, because of heavy war reparations), deflation and the impossibility of exiting the impasse by devaluing its currency, which was tied to a fixed exchange rate. What the rigid link to the gold standard represented for the Reichsmark in the early 1930s, the adoption of the Euro represented today for Greece: a connection to a fixed value that prevented national banks from responding to the economic emergency with a politics of greater monetary flexibility, rather than austerity. Therefore, in polemics with Chancellor Merkel’s determination to enforce austerity measures in Europe as a solution to the recession, Münchau’s article advised Germany to learn one more lesson from its own history: that the Weimar Republic ended in such economic and political catastrophe after 1929 above all because of its rigid adherence to a standard monetary value. The same mistake, Münchau concludes, should not be repeated today, positing the Euro’s value as a heavy burden that all European national economies should carry on the back of their social and political bodies.

Interestingly, a few months later in the Financial Times, Münchau evoked Weimar Germany again in relation to another European context. Commenting on Italian politics, shortly before the elections of February 2013, Münchau compared the economist and newly appointed Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti⁴ with Heinrich Brüning, the longest-serving chancellor of the Weimar Republic (2013). Just like Mario Monti, Brüning was an expert in finance, and he led a highly unstable governmental coalition between Ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Europe, Crises, Performance
• Part I Returns
• Part II Paradoxes
• Part III Interpreters
• Bibliography
• Index