Choreographing the Global in European Cinema and Theater (Studies in European Culture and History)

Choreographing the Global in European Cinema and Theater

Studies in European Culture and History edited by Eric D. Weitz and Jack Zipes University of Minnesota Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the very meaning of Europe has been opened up and is in the process of being redefined. European states and societies are wrestling with the expansion of NATO and the European Union and with new streams of immigration, while a renewed and reinvigorated cultural engagement has emerged between East and West. But the fast-paced transformations of the last fifteen years also have deeper historical roots. The reconfiguring of contemporary Europe is entwined with the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, two world wars and the Holocaust, and with the processes of modernity that, since the eighteenth century, have shaped Europe and its engagement with the rest of the world. Studies in European Culture and History is dedicated to publishing books that explore major issues in Europe’s past and present from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives. The works in the series are interdisciplinary; they focus on culture and society and deal with significant developments in Western and Eastern Europe from the eighteenth century to the present within a social historical context. With its broad span of topics, geography, and chronology, the series aims to publish the most interesting and innovative work on modern Europe. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Fascism and Neofascism: Critical Writings on the Radical Right in Europe by Eric Weitz Fictive Theories: Towards a Deconstructive and Utopian Political Imagination by Susan McManus German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust: Grete Weil, Ruth Klüger, and the Politics of Address by Pascale Bos Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration by Leslie Adelson Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11 by Gene Ray Transformations of the New Germany edited by Ruth Starkman Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture edited by Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick Legacies of Modernism: Art and Politics in Northern Europe, 1890–1950 edited by Patrizia C. McBride, Richard W. McCormick, and Monika Zagar Police Forces: A Cultural History of an Institution edited by Klaus Mladek Richard Wagner for the New Millennium: Essays in Music and Culture edited by Matthew Bribitzer-Stull, Alex Lubet, and Gottfried Wagner Representing Masculinity: Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture edited by Stefan Dudink, Anna Clark, and Karen Hagemann Remembering the Occupation in French Film: National Identity in Postwar Europe by Leah D. Hewitt “Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture edited by Valentina Glajar and Domnica Radulescu

Choreographing the Global in European Cinema and Theater

Katrin Sieg

choreographing the global in european cinema and theater Copyright © Katrin Sieg, 2008. All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the US—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60822-1 ISBN-10: 0-230-60822-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: October 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Acknowledgments

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1

Introduction: Europeanization, Globalization, and the Arts

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2

Desiring the Global: Cinematic Family Affairs and International Relations

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3

Development and Migration: The Globalized Woman Comes to Neukölln

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4

Traveling Counterpublics: René Pollesch @ Prater

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5

Operation Media Storm: Elfriede Jelinek’s Theater of War

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Conclusion

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Notes

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References

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Index

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Acknowledgments

I thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for awarding me a fellowship that funded the initial year of reading and researching from 2001 through 2002, which eventually germinated into this book. In addition, a summer research grant from the Georgetown University Graduate School paid for visits to archives and theaters in Berlin, and a semester leave permitted completion of the manuscript. My research assistant, Drew Brooks, provided help with copyediting. Warm thanks go to my colleagues Kathy Olesko and Jeff Anderson for their feedback and support in applying for research leave. The Feminist Research Group at the International Federation of Theatre Research has been a wonderful, lively, and critical forum for exploring and developing some of the ideas you will find in the following chapters and for helping me feel tethered to feminist theater studies. In addition, I have to thank the following institutions for inviting me to present parts of my argument as it progressed: New York University; the Multi-Campus Research Group on Theater and Globalization at the University of California; the University of Florida, Gainesville; the German Department at Washington University, St. Louis; and the Women’s Studies Department at Duke University. I was able to participate in three conferences about contemporary German theater in Dublin (2005), Melbourne (2006), and Bloomington, Indiana (2007) and wish to thank the organizers, Moray McGowan and David Barnett, Denise Varney, and Claudia Breger, respectively. The graduate students in the German Department at Georgetown University were lively interlocutors in a seminar on German political theater. Randall Halle and Friederike Eigler were kind enough to read chapters and provide feedback. My friends in theater studies, German studies, and women’s studies were, as always, inspiring intellectual companions, and I owe a huge debt especially to Barbara Mennel, Lalitha Gopalan, and Angelika Czekay for sharing ideas, insights, and criticisms, along with food, drink, and generally good spirits. Most of all, I want to thank Silvia Trübiger for

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her love, humor, and strength, which sustain me in both their virtual and embodied expressions. Parts of the Introduction were previously published in Theatre in the Berlin Republic, edited by Denise Varney, published by Peter Lang (2008); Peter Lang has granted permission to republish. Chapter 4 incorporates some ideas that first appeared in “Globalizing Neoliberalism, Traveling Feminisms: Pollesch@Prater,” in Staging International Feminisms, edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case, published by Palgrave Macmillan (2007), as well as in “Kunst in der Suppenküche des Kapitals: Pollesch@Volksbühne,” in Das Analoge sträubt sich gegen das Digitale? Materialitäten des deutschen Theaters in einer Welt des Virtuellen, edited by Moray McGowan, David Barnett, Karen JürsMunby, Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2006. Finally, an earlier version of Chapter 3 was published in Theatre Journal 55.2 (May 2003).

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Chapter 1

I ntrodu ction E uropeaniz atio n, G lo ba liz at i o n, a nd t he Arts

T

his book explores German artists’ critical engagement with the images and stories through which politicians and the media describe globalization. International relations, migration, work, and war provide the thematic foci of the subsequent four chapters. I examine cinematic and dramatic texts in order to understand and assess the innovative symbolic forms through which one national culture deals with the impact of changes in these four areas on the democratic institutions and values that emerged in the era of nation-states. The choice of Germany is strategic because the country that not too long ago was the poster child of democratization is now struggling with processes that challenge democratic dreams and principles. German theater and, in more recent times, the German cinema have participated in the creation of a critical public sphere where tensions between nation and democracy could be addressed. Both institutions now offer arenas where the question whether the social order created by globalization is compatible with democracy can be collectively considered. At the same time, the very processes that are depicted on screen and on stage are altering the structure and function of cultural institutions. The changing conditions of cultural production have already shrunk the social spaces where the affirmative “globalist” discourse (Ulrich Beck 2000) prevailing in the media and in official political discourse can be held up to democratic notions of the common good. Privatization has

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removed the economic underpinnings of artistic independence that protected cultural institutions against commercial pressures; moreover, the transnationalization of public funding in Europe has tended to bring the arts in line with new political imperatives. The texts I discuss and the theaters that produced them, however, occupy a liminal space between the national and the transnational modes of cultural production, by eliciting critique rather than consent and by resisting both nationalist nostalgia and globalist enthusiasm. The films and plays I have chosen for this study, most of which were produced between 1992 and 2005, explore the social consequences of the neoliberal policies pushed by transnational economic actors like the WTO and are currently being implemented in Europe through treaties like the General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS). In the western European welfare states, these policies have raised hopes that the shift of sovereignty from the national to the European level will give rise to a new compromise between capitalism and democracy but also prompted fears that the nascent transnational polity of the European Union (EU) will further weaken states’ ability to guarantee beneficial working conditions, sustain social nets, and ensure social peace. The EU administration itself has sought to allay suspicions and build support for the transfer of political decision making to Brussels. Through substantial cultural funding programs it has sought to foster positive popular identification with European identity and values. The EU’s cultural policy has stimulated the visual, narrative, and theatrical imagining of European community as cosmopolitan, tolerant, and diverse. As transatlantic tensions mounted in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the representation of Europe as pacifist, secular, and committed to gender equality and sexual pluralism served to sharpen the polity’s contours in contradistinction to the military aggression, religious fundamentalism, and social conservatism of both the United States and its declared enemy, the Islamic states in the Middle East. The most recent films I discuss in the chapter on cinema exemplify well the trend toward representing a European culture that spectators are enjoined to identify with and desire. And while many of the theatrical performances produced in Germany and Europe develop similar dramaturgies, the subsequent chapters focus instead on those artists whose work does not conform to this pattern. Their plays depict a world in which community has expanded beyond the familiar contours of the local and national, yet only in rare instances are such broadening vistas welcomed as an education in multicultural tolerance. More often, they occasion violent encounters and relations.

Introduction

3

Holger Siemann’s opera IndierInnen (Indians) traces the migratory path of an Indian computer programmer to a German software lab and back, dramatizing the catastrophic love affair between transnational capital and third-world woman in a literally downsized version of grand opéra. The tetralogy Zelt Saga (Tent Saga) by René Pollesch stages the paranoid, violent sociosexual relations between national elites, ethnic service workers, and Eastern European creative entrepreneurs through a parodic reiteration of the Brazilian telenovela set in a Berlin beergarden. And the Iraq war plays Bambiland and Babel by Elfriede Jelinek compose a sinister chorus of embedded reporters conjuring an apocalyptic clash of civilizations. The plays elaborate totalizing, even totalitarian, visions of Europe and denounce as undemocratic an emergent form of social organization in which no public, political institutions can control the activities, movements, and values of corporations and in which individuals have incorporated capitalist imperatives at the most intimate level of subjectivity and desire. The works I discuss take issue with the narratives of modernization, mobility, development, and democratization that contemporary global capitalism tells about itself. In doing so, they expose the sexual economies that stabilize social upheaval, competition, and exploitation through recourse to fictions of romance, family, and home. These films and plays dismantle narratives of desire for the global that are organized around the sign of woman: for instance, they decry the metaphor of the “European family” for its encoding of unequal, authoritarian power relations among Europeans, and they scrutinize the celebratory story of migrant women’s emancipation from atavistic local patriarchies through their integration into the global workforce. Gender and heterosexual desire are identified as the motor of narratives of globalization, and the texts impede its smooth running through materialist accounts of sexual economies’ imbrication with class, ethnicity, and race. They examine the “feminine” management culture that converts emotional labor and skills learned in the domestic sphere into value. They call into question the fiction of European gender equality by bringing into view the international, ethnic division of feminine care work and the growth of a low-paid service sector of immigrant women of color. They challenge the fiction of the liberation and democratization of Iraq from which Muslim women benefit by rewriting the war as rape. Finally, they interrogate the liberal feminist story that women transform the patriarchal institutions into which they integrate, through the figure of convicted torturer Lynndie England. My feminist reading thus emphasizes the symbolic and activist interventions in the integrative logic of globalist narratives.

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My study is addressed to the fields of theater studies and German studies, which have been struggling in very different ways to define globalization, critically assess globalization’s remaking of their respective disciplinary objects of analysis, and consider strategies of intervention. I would therefore like to clarify my use of terminology before proceeding. Globalization, transnationalism, and uneven geographical development are all terms that have been used to describe the increased interconnectedness and accelerated mobility of money, people, and things across borders that characterize contemporary capitalism. While there is a great deal of scholarly disagreement about the causes, advent, and history of the process, the term “globalization” gained currency in the 1990s as the name of the “new world order” that U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush proclaimed at the end of the cold war.1 Early, seminal texts like Masao Miyoshi’s essay “A Borderless World?” linked the global expansion of capitalism to the rise of “transnational” corporations (Sklair 2001) whose economic power had begun to rival and eclipse that of nation-states. To Sklair and Miyoshi, the “trans” in this usage signals a lack of allegiance to national identity categories that historically regulated the behavior of economic entities and their replacement by the capitalist profit motive. Others have used the term “transnational” as an alternative to the kind of globalization associated with the neoliberal economic concepts and policies that benefit social elites to designate the activist, grassroots networking that also occurs increasingly across national borders. For the purposes of this study, I will instead reserve the term “transnational” for the deliberate crafting of Europe in economic, political, and cultural terms. The transnationalizing processes we could observe during the past two decades in Europe occurred in response to the global deregulation of markets as an attempt to jockey for the most advantageous position in the global economy. Inasmuch as the advocates of European transnationalism adopt the ideology of a single, universal trajectory of capitalist development, transnationalism can function as the regional vernacular of the ideology that Ulrich Beck very usefully calls “globalism.” However, Europe’s competitiveness as a global player hinges not only on its internal liberalization of trade but also on external policies of protectionism that often make appeals to a discrete European culture and identity. I trace out the complex relationship between transnational Europe, globalization, and globalism in the section on “Globalization and Democratic Sovereignty.” Globalization in German studies has been exclusively discussed in terms of cultural differences, for instance, as the spread and reception of things German through “emigration, immigration, tourism, and

Introduction

5

colonialism” (Berman 2006).2 Transnational and postcolonial studies are viewed as nearly coterminous, each challenging “those narratives of Western modernity that viewed the territorial nation-state as the primary site of progress” and questioning “the Eurocentric opposition between the West and all of those peoples who were believed to lack those constitutive features of Western modernity (or at least who were constructed as lacking them)” (Hong 2006). Sara Lennox’s call for a post-Eurocentric German history retrieves some of the images and voices whose repression facilitated the imagined national community in the first place. Her commitment to the mapping of “Black Europe” helps to excavate colonial legacies, continuities, and returns. A transnationally conceived German studies thus seems particularly inviting to those in the field who have engaged with critical race studies, postcolonial theory, and migrant/minority cultures. While some Germanists are daunted by the institutional and methodological implications of a much-expanded disciplinary object, the quick postulation of contiguities between familiar and new terms risks foreclosing other, crucial dimensions of a transnational field of inquiry. Cultural artifacts are rarely discussed in terms of the cultural economy that circulates them, which in the past two decades has undergone profound changes, drastically altering the conditions under which texts are published, marketed, and sold. Why do millions of spectators watch the folkloristic and essentialist staging of cultural difference by resident minorities and by Germans in ethnic drag at the annual Carnival of Cultures in Berlin, while many of the magnificent, imaginative interventions in an ethnonationalist German imaginary by Turkish-German writers that Leslie Adelson has unfolded in such rich detail reside in texts published in small editions, long out of print, and inaccessible to contemporary readers? To even pose such a question evokes the dusty “sociological” categories that poststructuralist theory had tossed onto the trash heap of supposedly obsolete Marxist analytical tools. Because of the lingering high/low culture divide in the discipline, only popular literature is ever discussed in relation to the profoundly changed business of culture. Yet it would be important and instructive to consider the conditions of a cultural text or object’s access to and circulation in transnational circuits, or lack thereof, especially when we want to understand what institutions, stories, and images now furnish key tropes of cultural difference, how they craft these tropes into a globalist rhetoric, and how they relate that rhetoric to local, national, and transnational settings and audiences. One of the methodological implications rarely addressed as part of transnational German studies is the “remediation” of older arts

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(literature, theater, cinema) by new(er) media and technologies. As the artists I discuss are well aware, the popularity or persuasive power of a novel or drama derives less from its creative brilliance or originality than from the way it both emulates and complements the conventions developed by globally dominant televisual and other screen-based technologies. Fatima El-Tayeb’s innovative work on television— comprising ethnocomedy and Kanak Web TV—is both a model and an exception. Screenic operations hinge crucially on cultural and sexual difference, an analytic that is notably lacking in the preliminary remappings of the field in the forum section of the German Quarterly and on the H-German listserv in 2005 and 2006, even in the visions of scholars otherwise known for their attention to the intersections of race and gender. The section below on “Gendering Europe” outlines a feminist critique of the way in which transnational and global relations are currently being imagined. By focusing on these axes of inquiry, I am hoping to push open a field that should not be closing down too quickly around a single analytic. By comparison, the study of institutions and cultural policies is an integral part of film studies and theater studies, both of which have a longer history of disciplinary engagement with globalization and transnationalism than Germanistik. Randall Halle’s work on German cinema, now aufgehoben (that is, both canceled and preserved) in transnational structures, has provided me with important impulses for conceptualizing film and theater in terms of coexisting and competing paradigms of global, transnational, and national cultural production (Halle 2002). My allegiance to the increasingly embattled performing arts leads me to a less sanguine assessment of the reconfiguration of the cultural sector, however. While Halle calmly and comprehensively surveys recent permutations of erstwhile national idioms ranging from the global mainstream to indy migrant cinema and avant-garde explorations of Europe’s borders, I decided on a rather partial focus on works that are not only aggressively critical of globalism but that arise from particularly successful compromises between traditional organizational structures and new exigencies of funding and audience outreach. I fear, however, that these compromises are contingent and temporary; certain theatrical traditions, spaces, and modes of public interaction will not be aufgehoben but simply lost or repressed by the ongoing reconstruction of performing arts funding and institutions. My pessimism regarding the future of political theater in Germany and in Europe is fed not only by the plays and the changing fortunes of particular houses but also by the discourse about the performing

Introduction

7

arts in German theater studies. Contrary to the trend diagnosed by Frank Trommler, many theater scholars in Germany continue to champion a particular variant of postmodern performance termed “postdramatic theatre” (Hans-Thies Lehmann 2006) that is marked by a pronounced lack of critical acuity in regard to theater’s ability to intervene in screenic modes of representation, much less sensitivity to issues of class, race, or gender. While I ground my performance analyses in diverse institutional forms ranging from a privatized house specializing in musical theater (the Neuköllner Oper), a publically subsidized experimental stage (the Prater, affiliated with the Volksbühne), and a large national theater (the Burgtheater), these three examples cannot provide a comprehensive picture of the state of theater in Europe. In the section on “Transnational Creative Industries” below, I sketch some of the changes faced by the performing arts in order to contextualize the small number of in-depth case studies I provide in the chapters. Clearly, much research remains to be done. Some of my colleagues in theater studies, like Susan Bennett, believe that scholars interested in globalization ought to focus their attention on the study of popular commercial theatre as one of the economic engines of tourism, such as the musical theater franchises and other entertainment venues and genres (from Stomp and Blue Man Group to Cirque de Soleil) that have sprouted worldwide in Las Vegas and New York, to Singapore, London, and Berlin. In addition, large-scale events and festivals (from the Olympic Games and Soccer World Cup to the Carnival of Cultures) have become important arenas for staging cultural difference and commonality. One group of researchers observes that in such venues a “globalized aesthetic is emerging in the twenty-first century,” while at the time, nations that “have lost their economic power to global corporations . . . have often turned to the cultural sphere as a primary means of creating/sustaining national identity for themselves in international fora. . . . In some cases, culture is to the nation within global economies what subjectivity was to the individual within national economies” (International Performance and Culture Research Group 2006, 170)3 The emergent Euroculture that mediates national differences to its members as well as stages them abroad would be well worth exploring in these terms. The research group’s hypothesis resonates with my own sense of national culture’s imbrication in the global political economy while simultaneously reflecting critically on that political economy—that is, the legacy of theater’s (and cinema’s) institutionalization during the

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era of nation-states. At a basic level, this informs the methodology of the following chapters, which read back and forth between cultural practices and political discourses. The increasing interpenetration of cultural and political economies, which is the hallmark of globalization, lends great urgency to the question of how to conceptualize a public sphere where truth can be spoken to power, and questions of the common good may be collectively considered.

Globaliz ation and Democratic Sovereignty Germans have good cause to view globalization with suspicion, as the state is unable to control the speed and scope of globalization and unable to absorb its social costs. The postindustrial reconstruction of Europe, the liberalization of the capital and labor market, and increased migration have profoundly rearranged social relations, including the gender order. The largely male labor aristocracy has been all but eroded. This occurred more slowly in Western European heavy industry and rapidly in Central and Eastern European economies as they reintegrated into the world economy during the 1990s. Large numbers of men faced redundancy and what sociologists call the feminization of labor already prevailing in the public sector and the service industry where women predominate. Even though men have also disproportionately profited from the privatization of national industries and public services during this period, there has clearly been a masculinist backlash against immigrants, resident minorities, and women. In analyzing critical discourses of globalization, it is therefore sometimes difficult to distinguish the defense of democratic principles from nostalgia for the nation. Not just in Germany and Austria, extremist groups and parties appropriate familiar fascist iconographies and rhetorics to assert nationalist and racist notions of belonging, patriarchal assignments of men and women’s proper place, and a violent intolerance against assertions of cultural and political differences. The spread of populist, right-wing movements and parties across many European countries during the last two decades makes it doubtful that the root of this resurgence is a particular Germanic predisposition toward nationalism and racism. The Stockholm Declaration signed by all EU member states in 2000, which formalized European democracies’ commitment to remember fascism and prevent its return, as well as the adoption of January 27, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz, as the first all-European holiday, were important symbolic gestures to solicit popular support for the idea or identity of Europe by way of disidentification with the continent’s past. Moreover, the EU’s

Introduction

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sanctions against Austria, where a right-wing nationalist party had just entered the governing coalition, signaled that the nascent transnational entity would correct for and overcome the legacy of nationalism and its excesses. Yet such lofty political ideals clash with many Europeans’ perception of the EU, which they regard as little more than an enforcer of free-market principles and a globalist agenda that conflicts with the democratic principles best protected by the nation-state. The EU, initially conceptualized as a common market, is seen to benefit big businesses while hollowing out the ability of nation-states to ensure the employment and social security of their citizens. Unemployed Germans find themselves in competition with Polish butchers, plumbers, and farmhands who can now legally work at very low wages in EU countries. At the same time, the press reports that thriving German businesses are ruined by aggressive, internationally operating managers of hedge funds and private equity funds. In the spring of 2005, the Social Democratic Party chairman Franz Müntefering initiated a “capitalist debate” by deriding multinational finance capital as “locusts” destroying local businesses and national economies, and Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass seconded him in an essay written on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Nazi government’s surrender to Allied forces and Germany’s liberation from fascism. Grass deplored the powerlessness of political institutions to harness and control economic forces, resulting in a fundamental threat to democracy. “I maintain that our freely elected representatives are no longer free in their decisions,” Grass wrote. “Parliament is no longer sovereign. It is dependent on powerful business associations, banks, and corporations that are not subject to democratic control. The legislative is a joke. Parliament has become a storefront for Wall Street. Democracy surrenders to the dictates of mobile, global capital. . . . We must ask the question of what has become of the gift of freedom we received sixty years ago, has it become an item on the stock market?” (Grass 2005, 1, my translation). In these events and the surrounding public discourses, the perception that political institutions have mutated into willing executioners of business interests sometimes (as in Grass’s piece) aligns the three scales of the nation, the European Union, and globalization in nightmarish visions of corporate rule, unfettered social Darwinism, and mass misery that render the historic liberation from fascism a sham. Others, like philosopher Jürgen Habermas and politician Erhard Eppler, construct these scales in productive tension in order to salvage and sublate the function of “starving” nation-states already too weak to protect

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their citizens against globalization effects at the supranational level of the EU, precisely to bring the destructive forces of global capital under democratic control. “The regulatory power of the nation state is no longer sufficient to cushion the ambivalent consequences of economic globalization,” according to Habermas. Only at the European level can we regain a part of the political agency lost at the national level. EU members are already strengthening their cooperation in matters of security, justice, criminal law, and immigration. A left informed about and active in European politics should have urged increased harmonization of tax law and economic policy long ago. . . . If the constitution is not ratified, the EU will not become ungovernable, but it will regress to a state of paralysis and indecisiveness that will only please the neoliberals. They have already reached their goals with the Maastricht Treaty.” (Habermas 2005, 756, my translation)

Eppler similarly confirms that European nation-states have become increasingly unable to stop the downward spiral of wages and benefits, corporate taxes, and public services and attributes this to the division of tasks between two EU agencies, the European Commission and the European Council. The regulatory impetus of the council has not kept step with the deregulatory activities of the commission, resulting in a progressive weakening of states vis-à-vis the market. “Theoretically, such a huge economic zone should be much better able to stand up to globalization pressures and to the disastrous competition between nations than any single nation-state. But in practice the division of competencies in Brussels has exacerbated and sanctioned these pressures rather than mitigating them,” concludes Eppler (Eppler 2005, 700, my translation). He borrows sociologist Ulrich Beck’s term of the “transnational state” to argue for a strong legislative apparatus at the European level that can assume some of the competencies the nation-state has lost in order to regain and strengthen a European alternative to the neoliberal model commonly associated with the United States. It is this shift in sovereignty and its implications that make the European Union such a novel and promising experiment in the eyes of democrats dreaming of domesticating capitalism, even as its success seems scarcely certain. Most commentators view the French and Dutch “no” to the constitution as symptomatic of the EU’s “democratic deficit,” that is, the disconnect between Brussels bureaucrats and the sovereign, namely European citizens. The last-minute commercial blitz designed by some national governments to explain the benefits of the constitution

Introduction

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to their electorate proved to be an insufficient surrogate for actual public debate about objectives, values, and ultimately the identity of this thing called Europe. Moreover, some critics pointed to shortfalls in the process of creating the constitution itself, which contradicted the basic principles of representative democracy. Andreas Wehr, for instance, a jurist and observer of the European constitutional convent, deplored the composition of this body. The grave underrepresentation of women made the inclusion of gender equality principles difficult, and the broad array of political positions represented in the European Parliament was pared down to centrist parties in the convent.4 While many regard the democratic deficit as a merely transitional feature of a nascent political entity and maintain that it is only a matter of time until political unification catches up with economic unification, others view the gap between them as emblematic of the decline of democratic institutions more generally, as states are shrunk below their ability to ensure social justice. Whereas earlier scholarship on globalization posited a general withering of national sovereignty and the state apparatuses embodying it (Miyoshi 1996; Bauman 1998; Sassen 2005), recent writing— responding in part to the militarization of many Western states since September 2001—has stressed the internal restructuring of mature democracies and the tendency to accumulate executive power at the expense of parliamentary decision making. In an essay entitled “The Unleashed Executive,” Saskia Sassen analyzes the erosion of congressional powers and concomitant decline of administrative accountability and transparency in the political institutions of the United States and argues that the process accelerated rapidly under the current Bush administration. Constitutional lawyer Ingeborg Maus attributes this increasingly authoritarian and oligarchical version of democratic sovereignty to the Montesquieuan division of powers adopted in the U.S. Constitution, which was exported to the Central and Eastern European democracies in the 1990s. This scholarship requires us to not only revise our focus on the state’s shrinking size and instead look more closely at its changing function but also to question the frequent juxtaposition of European versus American models of democracy, especially in regard to the state’s ability to regulate “private” interests for the public good. Ultimately, political philosopher and cultural theorist Susan Buck-Morss has argued that Western models of sovereignty, which since the French Revolution have been founded on the nation-state’s prerogative of organized violence, are as incompatible with democracy as the communist claim that the party represents the

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will of the people (Buck-Morss 2000, xiii). Both contain a “wild zone of power” at their heart that is activated under the sign of war against external and internal enemies—threatening to unleash party terror on the one hand and nationalist war on the other (Buck-Morss 2000, 3). The work of Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek emphasizes that the mobilization of such violence in the name of peace and security crucially depends on the mass media’s orchestration of empathy, compassion, fear, and hate along ethnic and political lines. The absolute rhetorical juxtaposition of democracy to totalitarianism during the twentieth century veiled how similar their concepts of sovereignty really were and that they shared the same conundrum of claiming “as legitimate the nondemocratic exercise of violent power” (BuckMorss 2000, 10). Buck-Morss’s emphasis on this similarity, in turn, undermines any complacency regarding capitalist democracy’s “victory” in the cold war. If both systems were deeply implicated in industrial modernity, she proposes, communism’s defeat calls into question Western democratic notions of modernity as well. If the communist states were unable to master their own fundamental contradiction (of being in the vanguard of history yet “behind” in industrial production), Western nation-states’ ability to “maintain [their] hegemony within a capitalist global economy that increasingly threatened to escape the control of nation-state political units” is equally uncertain (Buck-Morss 2000, 39). In their book Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri further explore the transformation of sovereignty. Their description of the passage of sovereignty from the disciplining and punishing state to the subject that controls her or his body and behavior connects the Foucauldian concept of biopower to the increasing responsibilization of the individual whom neoliberal economic restructuring strips of any form of collectively sharing risks or resources. To Hardt and Negri, this condition contains both the dystopian, catastrophic potential of universal interpellation into capitalist consumer culture as each human being is hooked into the market and the utopian potential of the multitude’s radically democratic self-government, abolishing the state with its history of violence against its own and foreign populations. Moreover, whereas Foucault contrasted “governmentality” to earlier, authoritarian forms of sovereignty, contemporary theorists from Hardt and Negri to Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben note contemporary governmentality’s increasingly authoritarian and violent forms of appearance. Buck-Morss and Hardt and Negri thus arrive to the conclusion that democracy, true mass sovereignty,

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is an unrealized project, and that its “real existing” manifestations in capitalist nation-states and socialist single-party states, which produced nightmarish histories of large-scale war and state terror respectively, have been but poor approximations of the collective dream of human freedom, equality, and solidarity. They also agree, however, that the nation and party dictatorship no longer constitute the main antagonists to democracy; global capitalism does. Whereas European politicians currently attempt to harness culture to the project of garnering popular support for a largely elite-driven effort to create a common market and polity, the artists and institutions I discuss in this book display little interest in participating in such a vision of European identity. Instead, they offer alternative, transnational genealogies that connect the anti-Semitic elision of cosmopolitan aesthetics in the nineteenth century with contemporary discourses on immigration (Siemann 2001) and trace the current contradiction between democracy and imperialism evidenced by the invasion of Iraq back to the earliest texts of European democracy, ancient Greek tragedy (Jelinek 2004). By generating visions of a Europe that is both barricaded and predatory, in which the mass media orchestrate empathy and hatred according to racist definitions of who belongs in Europe and who does not, and where human dreams of a better world have been funneled into the desire for commodities and profit, the plays I discuss develop innovative dramaturgical forms to grapple with the quandaries of consumerist interpellation, neoliberal governmentality, and collective agency. Like Buck-Morss and Hardt and Negri, who retain utopian notions of democratic mass sovereignty and communist multitudes, Pollesch in particular combines the critique of corporate subject effects with a search for forms of improvisational collectivity that do not revert to either liberal or Marxist notions of the subject. Similarly, some of the directors who have staged Jelinek’s polyvocal yet monologic texts have created forms of choric performance that underscore the dangerous convergence of democratic and totalitarian forms of sovereignty but also evoke glimmers of the heretofore unrealized notion of self-governing multitudes.

G ender i ng Europe Around 1989, popular culture and political rhetoric in the still-divided German states seemed swept away by a storm of familial feelings and heterosexual desire (see Sharp 2004). As I watched the massive public protests in East German cities in the fall of 1989 on U.S. television, there was no sense of a single objective or trajectory

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to the reforms demonstrators demanded. Yet, soon the heated disagreements between those who wanted to stay and embark on the “third way” of democratic socialism and those who were tired of yet another political experiment were drowned out by the chant, “We are one people!” In political discourse and in media representations, the wish for reunification was narrated as the return of prodigal brothers and sisters; as the long-delayed meeting of long-lost lovers; and soon, when revelations about the sorry state of the East German economy as well as the scope of its surveillance system put a damper on romance, as a shotgun marriage. The sexual rhetoric of reunification thus cast the profound changes attending the incorporation of East Germany into the West in terms of instincts and drives rather than political interests, of nature and destiny rather than ideology. German reunification—which heralded the dissolution of the East-West division, the economic and political cooperation of nation-states in the nascent European Union, and a world order characterized by global capitalism and U.S. military hegemony—also signaled an emergent transnational imagination in which political relations and processes are emplotted and mystified as family romance. Such metaphors constitute a shared symbolic language between national actors through which they negotiate power, articulate interests, express allegiances, and contend with political challenges and social alternatives. The sign “Woman” has long circulated in cultural fantasies of international relations: in European colonial fantasies of exploration, conquest, and colonization, native princesses figure foreign populations’ supposedly instinctive recognition of European superiority and desire for guidance and tutelage—as well as fearful savagery, undisciplined sensuality, and sloth. In her analysis of German colonial fantasies, Susanne Zantop demonstrated that relations between colonizing and colonized nations were imagined as naturally unequal through the language of family and romance and how in turn the colonial discourse of race cemented the gendered and generational differences that were being installed in the European, bourgeois family. The romance of East and West Germany that I briefly sketched above recalls sexual and familial tropes particular to the German literary and dramatic tradition. While the metaphor of marriage aimed to naturalize the process of incorporating a politically weakened partner with little negotiating power, critics of reunification invoked a counterdiscourse of colonization, annexation, and rape. I have discussed elsewhere how feminist artists and intellectuals in the German-speaking countries immediately seized on the dominant, familial iconography while rejecting or reversing its moral, affective pull; rather than saccharine stories of reunited

Introduction

15

lovers, they composed angry dramas of rape and pillage, sexual harassment, and battered wives (Sieg 1993). While conservative pundits slobbered over Eastern European markets as Sleeping Beauty being kissed awake by capitalist Prince Charming, the feminist postsocialist imagination invoked wounded Cassandras and betrayed Medeas. The demystification of love as an ideology masking unequal power relations and the exploitive sexual division of labor became an important feminist strategy for speaking about the divergent consequences of globalization for East and West Europeans, men and women, rich and poor, natives, foreign residents, and migrants. Neferti Tadiar has examined the sexual economy structuring international relations in the Asia-Pacific region and between that region and the United States as global hegemon. This economy imagines extremely unequal actors to be connected by heterosexual desire—the region comprises rich and poor states, former imperial powers (Japan), as well as former colonies (the Philippines)—as well as naturalizes the power differences between them as gendered. Thus public discourses construct economic transactions and political dependencies as the “marriage” of American husbands and Asian wives or the illicit “affair” of Japanese husbands and Philippine prostitutes. This sexual economy, which is material as well as metaphorical, Tadiar demonstrates, has replaced the language of political antagonism that characterized the relation between the United States and Southeast Asia during the cold war. It signals an emergent “global imaginary” based on an idea of international community that constructs nations like individuals who are thought to behave according to their gendered nature and are driven by desire and instincts. Discourses about Europe—especially in its current political shape as a union of twenty-seven rather unequal member states formally encoded in the treaties of Maastricht (1992), Amsterdam (1997), and Nizza (2000)—likewise evoke the dream of cross-continental and transatlantic cooperation, thereby supplanting the erstwhile threat of communism to Western military dominance and economic superiority. My reading of Germans’ imaginations of Europe and of globalization is deeply indebted to Tadiar’s insights, though I emphasize more heavily than she does that these fantasies are open to counter-hegemonic contestation, subversion, and rearticulation. While it is useful to decipher the erotic economy framing European unity and Europeans’ relations with other global actors, I am more interested in the means by which artists amplify, parody, and challenge the romance of globalism and the European family, the trajectory of this fantasy, and its telos. Their mobilization of fascist and socialist histories and adaptation of cultural practices in which these

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histories are embedded help them to articulate fears and warnings as well as imagine alternatives to a process that neoliberalism represents as entirely desirable and altogether without alternative. While feminist artists and critics, long adept at brushing patriarchal texts against the grain, are positioned as privileged readers of globalist fantasies, their critical activity has been marginalized deeply in the course of the neoliberal remaking of Europe where “gender mainstreaming” has become a purely administrative matter, and “autonomous” feminist opposition to discrimination and oppression is regarded a thing of the past. There is a consensus that women are not losers or victims of globalization in any uniform way. Many working women in Eastern and Western Europe appreciate their economic independence and social opportunities, even as their numbers in the upper echelons of political institutions or corporate hierarchies are still small when compared to men. Indeed, neoliberalism, by destroying the security and privilege previously enjoyed by the working man, has produced “flexible subjects for regional and global markets without regard for gender differences” (True 2000, 88). Some feminists have construed this into a competitive advantage enjoyed by women in general over men traumatized by their confrontation with what Maria Mies calls the “housewifization” of labor and by postsocialist women and their creative make-do attitude in particular (Nickel and Kolinsky 2003). Some of the cultural texts produced by contemporary German feminists, however, offer a darker reading of the postsocialist European woman as preeminent globalized subject, imagining her as violent avenger of the betrayed democratic dream5 or as hyperadapted creative resource for transnational corporations converting subcultural struggles of survival into surplus value (Pollesch 2004). Despite the prevailing sense of living in a postfeminist era and of having exhausted the old categories of identity, oppression, and liberation, women in Europe are deeply, though very differently, affected by globalization: the privatization of services previously provided by welfare or socialist states—such as the care of children, the old, and the invalid—has divided those who can purchase these services on the market from those who provide these services. The former, who can afford to throw off the shackles of so-called female labor, may indeed feel to have transcended traditional constructions of gender and benefit from an ostensibly gender-blind discourse that equates work with creativity, fulfillment, and self-realization. This gender-blind discourse of work, however, hinges fundamentally on the splitting off and outsourcing of traditionally female drudgery. The nannies, maids, and sex workers that Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild have

Introduction

17

described in their book Global Woman can be found among the nonEuropean immigrants and Eastern European commuters, prompting social scientists to speak of the “feminization of migrant work, and [ethnicization of] care work” (Hess and Lenz 2001, 159, my translation). The construction of Europe as the marriage of East and West in globalist discourse mystifies the relations between Turkish cleaning women, Polish nurses, and Ukrainian sex workers and their Western European employers in the deregulated workplace of the home and highlights the urgency of theorizing and analyzing gender along with ethnicity and immigration. Rather than eliminating gender or race as organized systems of inequality, Europe, along with other regions in the global economy, depends on valorizing and managing cultural (gendered and ethnic) differences, as these legitimize the segmentation and hierarchization of the labor market. The traditional associations of femininity with maternal nurturing, sensuality, and domesticity are alive and well in the hospitality industry, Internet matching services, or domestic employment agencies, where gendered qualities are linked with particular ethnic backgrounds. The work of René Pollesch that I discuss in Chapter 4 brings the gendering of immigration and racialization of gender into view, along with the global mass culture (television, cinema, pop music) that dramatizes and naturalizes these shifts.

Transnational Creative Industr ies The cultural practices and institutions that generate critical representations of globalist discourses are themselves affected by economic changes and cultural policies. The transformation process raises several questions: Does the downsizing and reorganization of the national theater really equal a loss of civic self-reflection and democratic expression? Or can the transnationalization of culture that is currently being implemented through EU cultural policy also overcome the troubling legacy of the nation-state, including the deplorable marginalization and exclusion of women, ethnic minorities, and immigrants—populations whose contributions are actively promoted as part of this policy? Does the EU’s insistence on a “cultural exception” to the GATS, which promises to protect linguistic and cultural diversity in Europe against profit-driven global media and entertainment conglomerates, ensure artistic freedom along with minority rights in a transnational public sphere? Or does the active promotion of the cultural sector, regarded as central to the postindustrial knowledge economy of the future, merely serve to create a quasi-national European superstate

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positioned advantageously in the emerging world system of regional trading blocks?—a superstate, moreover, that is saddled with all the oppressive ideological baggage of the nation but stripped of its democratic frills? In confronting these alternatives, I have looked to related disciplines and other national contexts to see whether film and museum studies, for instance, offer insights into the effects of privatization and of corporate sponsorship on the design and function of cultural institutions or whether the British cultural economy provides a glimpse of what’s in store for the continent as well. The standard theater histories describe the German theatrical landscape as comprising an extensive, lushly subsidized, national theater along with well-funded experimental fringes and a lively national and international festival scene. One hundred and fifty publicly funded and more than two hundred private theaters, in addition to thirtyseven festival houses, reach almost thirty-five million spectators annually. Theaters in provincial towns, large cities, and the capital Berlin have traditionally offered a three-track program of theater, music, and dance performances. Their organizing principle has been that of the ensemble dedicated to a repertoire with a mix of educational and entertaining fare (the classics, some new plays, musicals, and comedies), whose specific accentuation contributed to the theater’s profile. The mix of state-employed, tenured technicians with artists on term contracts allowed for a certain degree of dynamism and innovation while firmly embedding institutions and practitioners in the community from which they drew their audience. The ensemble/repertoire principle continually reproduced an organic notion of culture for a broadly conceived educated working and middle class. This institutional formation, which took shape in the nineteenth century and was firmly integrated into the centralized-versus-federal organization of culture in the two German states from 1949 to 1990, remained stable until the last decade. Across the political boundary of the cold war, this national paradigm of theatrical production was underwritten by the principle of public funding. After 1990, the centralized policy of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was adapted to the decentralized cultural funding practices of the Federal Republic where local authorities, states, and federal agencies together provided about 90 percent of the budgets of public cultural institutions, with the federal contribution being by far the smallest (43 versus 47 versus 10 percent). To be sure, there were significant differences among theaters within this national system; the large state theaters in Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich with their internationally renowned directors, conductors, and choreographers as well as star

Introduction

19

actors, musicians, and dancers privileged avant-garde practices and aesthetic innovation over reproductions of the canon and enjoyed greater cultural prestige. But municipal and state theaters together were bound to the public in a relation characterized by financial dependence and artistic independence, as state funding guaranteed freedom from commercial pressures and political influence. This constellation aligned theater with the discourses of democratic sovereignty in the two states with their respective, constitutive contradictions. In the West, that contradiction was shaped by the internal hierarchies and exclusions of the ethnically defined nation-state, in the East, by the political control and paranoia of the ruling party. It produced the modern and postmodern German theater whose hallmarks were its extraordinarily high production values, critical acuity (associated largely with East German artists from Brecht and Müller to Besson and Castorf), and aesthetic innovation (from Zadek and Stein to Peymann and Breth in the West). German unification in 1990 occasioned a first round of cutbacks, closings, and belt-tightening among theaters, but these were only the first harbingers of far-reaching structural and long-term changes. Managing directors everywhere have had to scramble to survive in an economic environment in which the state would and could no longer pay subsidies at the level to which theaters had become accustomed. For nearly a decade, dwindling subsidies have forced them to reduce personnel, lower wages and benefits, eliminate orchestra or ballet ensembles, and adopt more efficient bookkeeping and administrative procedures. The state’s imposition of new profitability benchmarks—for example, requiring theaters to raise revenue from tickets and TV rights—also compelled them to seek out new audiences and devote greater efforts (and more money) to marketing, outreach, and customer service. The Deutscher Bühnenverein (German Theater Association) proudly noted in its July 2004 newsletter that the theater business today is regarded as a model of efficiency and flexibility in the eyes of economists.6 Nevertheless, the theater continues to suffer from a steadily worsening crisis of legitimacy. In early 2006, the city counselors of Lübeck proposed an Internet referendum in which citizens could vote for or against funding the most deficit-producing institution in town. While immediate public outrage prompted the council to abandon its plan, the national paradigm is undoubtedly crumbling. What has appeared in its place is a differentiated system of top-tier houses (dubbed “cultural lighthouses”) and a provincial second tier. The elite tier stages, which position themselves in the public funding

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debate analogously to the academic “centers of excellence,” manage to maintain their ensembles by expanding their funding base, as they have tapped into European funding networks, while others have refashioned themselves in accordance to the new discourse of social utility into multi-use cultural centers. The second tier is in the process of transforming into multi-use performance centers as well, but rather than maintaining their own ensembles, they operate with only a lean managing/technical team in houses that accommodate touring companies and performances, comparable to the British Arts Council system. Orchestras and ballet companies are cut loose from institutions and communities and either dissolve or compete with each other on the German and European circuit. The Neuköllner Oper, which I discuss in Chapter 3, has taken the route of securing corporate sponsorship, which contributes about one third to its budget. The reform of the tax code pertaining to foundations and philanthropy (January 2000), which facilitated private and corporate sponsoring of the arts, has affected the theater less than other institutions because so much of its budget has traditionally been devoted to personnel and building maintenance. The more budgets shift to funding a slimmed-down management and the kind of attention-getting projects and events favored by private sponsors, the likelier it is that theater will join other cultural institutions in securing a mixture of private, corporate, and foundation funding and that we will see the more aggressive manifestations of corporate cultural politics discussed by Mark Rectanus in his terrific study Culture, Incorporated. One good example for that is the annual Carnival of Cultures, which was inaugurated in 1996 in Berlin. In sum, the theater, formerly a paragon of the Fordist economy, has been considerably transformed in accordance with the familiar watchwords deregulation, slimming down, outsourcing, privatization, and internationalization. Since the 1990s, the post-Fordist reconstruction of the dominant, national paradigm has aligned theater with a discourse on cultural heritage on the one side and with a social service paradigm on the other, which operate at the national and European levels. EU cultural policy and funding have fostered these trends. In its founding documents, the treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam, the EU declared its intent to actively foster its diverse and common heritage and has implemented a number of programs in accordance with this objective.7 Its bilateral funding programs aim at broadening citizens’ access to the arts, fostering artistic and intellectual exchange, enhancing cross-cultural and linguistic proficiency, and contributing to and improving artists’ media literacy. Platform Europe (1990) was the

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forerunner of a number of cultural programs, including Kaleidoscope (1991–99), Connect (initiated in 1999), and Culture 2000 (2000–6, recently renewed). Over seven years, Culture 2000 dispensed 236.5 million Euros. By 2004, it had supported more than seven hundred projects in visual, plastic, literary, and performing arts; translation; archaeology; and cultural history publicly presented in form of exhibitions, seminars, conferences, festivals, workshops, and tours. Projects encourage coproductions among participants from at least three nations and facilitate performances in all participating countries. In the performing arts, heritage funding tends to privilege the classics, the canon, and folklore over contemporary theatrical forms and proposes figures, myths, or texts (e.g., Hamlet, Cassandra, and King Lear) that are postulated as unifying signifiers of European heritage. The preservation of Europe’s rich cultural heritage has supported events associated with cities’ designation as “European cultural capital,” restored historic buildings, and facilitated public access to archeologically and culturally significant sites and regions. In that regard, heritage funding overlaps with structural investment and regional development programs targeting Central and Eastern Europe in particular by fuelling cultural tourism and promoting economic restructuring and growth. The heritage discourse has promoted a notion of culture that is driven by the economic prerogatives of the tourism industry. The controversy surrounding the demolition of the Palast der Republik in the former East Berlin city center (the building housing the erstwhile socialist parliament), and the erection of the last palace of the Hohenzollern Dynasty in its place reveals that socialist culture carries little value as “heritage” when compared to the architectural reminders of feudalism, monarchy, and imperial nation-states. Theater’s participation in the heritage paradigm integrates it in a comprehensive strategy of investing in an important economic sector, since seven million Europeans work in the culture industries. The development of that sector is an integral component of the larger goal formulated in the Lisbon Objective of making Europe the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the global arena by 2010. The EU’s insistence on the “cultural exception” from the liberalization of trades and services pushed by the United States and WTO at the 1993 GATS negotiations ushered in more than a decade of active cultural sponsorship. The EU’s recent about-face at the 2005 GATS round and aggressive demand that developing countries include culture in the newly liberalized trade agreements, however, suggests that it seeks to secure a share of the global entertainment market with methods previously associated with the United States.

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At the same time that heritage art predominantly revolves around the ancient or classical past, the EU’s stipulation that artists publicize and document their projects with the help of new technologies has spurred an increasing convergence or “synergy” between different segments of the creative industries. The performing arts are positioned as a driver in technological development but also experience increasing dependence on and competition with the audiovisual industries. It is thus no surprise that some theater, as it integrates digital technologies into stage practices, also adopts some of the genres already developed in the European audiovisual industries. While the productions I discuss in my book all in some manner work through mass mediated genres as figures of globalization, others borrow and emulate televisual dramaturgy, characters, and settings to dramatize Europe’s pluralistic heritage; this is true also for the “older” medium of cinema that adapts certain televisual idioms, as I show in Chapter 2. This tense relationship marked by rivalry and stipulated cooperation is only inadequately captured by the concept of “remediation,” which has been adopted in some of the critical writing about the relationship between live and mediatized performance (Bolter and Grusin 1999). By insinuating a process of gentle sublations, in which nothing is lost and everything gained in the superseding of forms by more advanced, illusionistic, accessible, and interactive technologies, the term can only render theater’s difference from mediatized performance as inferiority. Conversely, condemnations of mediatized mass culture in the tradition of the Frankfurt School sometimes fail to account for contemporary media operations, such as liveness, differentiated address to diverse users, and interactivity. Both Jelinek and Pollesch, for whom the relation between theater, television, and Internet is central to their critique of globalization, are very precise in their account of how particular technologies and genres dramatize social relations and encode and position bodies, and the same precision and specificity is necessary if we are to grasp how theater may intervene in mediatized narratives and images of globalization. Despite its cataclysmic ending, Siemann’s opera evidences a Benjaminian faith in the emancipatory, democratic potential of digital technology, making it the most hopeful text discussed in this book. Pollesch’s transposition of a Brazilian telenovela to Germany and its eventual incorporation into the genre of surveillance entertainment, by contrast, unfolds an extremely negative vision of the way in which collective improvisation, live bodies, and race and gender relations are being rearticulated by and for the Web camera. Likewise, Jelinek, who imports the most sadistic and brutal Web cast images to the stage, abdicates any faith in the ability of theater to

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counter private, pornographic modes of consuming violence with an ethics predicated on communal perception and moral judgment. The stage offers temporary shelter only for the few who seek to escape the hail of global capitalism and its perpetual “media storms.” Nevertheless, she insists on theater’s participation in a negative dialectic, holding the institution to the task to “provoke a kind of thought, of interrogation, that doesn’t seek an answer, through that which I throw onto the stage, in a sort of uncluttering of my brain. TV only answers. I only question” (Jelinek 2003, my translation). Culture 2000 and its predecessor and successor programs have forged new linkages among old and new Europeans formerly divided by the iron curtain as well as the economic North-South axis. As well, EU funds have gone to foster collaboration and exchange between EU and non-EU countries in Eastern Europe (Russia) and with Middle Eastern and North African cultural partners in the Mediterranean region. These cooperations have already transformed not only the national repertoire but might force open the demographic structure of the institution. The predominance of men’s work in this book— albeit work that is feminist by men who are gay—reflects the current composition of the theatrical institution. While I am wary of the way in which cultural heritage is signified within the transnational context, I want to keep the beneficial effects of this policy in view, which will perhaps achieve what a century of feminist complaints and several decades of immigrant activism have not been able to accomplish. The emphasis on young audiences, ethnic minorities, and disadvantaged populations that characterizes the majority of the EU-funded cooperative projects signals not only the transfer of previously national pedagogies to the transnational level but is also a hallmark of what I call the social service paradigm. Theater is described by the European Commission on its Web site as “one of the most important expressions of cultural life and democratic development” and regarded as a particularly apt vehicle for social integration projects (European Commission 1991, 3). At the national level, the social service paradigm has driven the transformation of theaters (as well as museums) into multiple-use cultural centers. The Volksbühne in Berlin, built in the 1920s as a private theater supported by a large socialist shareholder base, has stood in a notoriously tense relation to the national paradigm and succumbed to both political instrumentalization and commercial imperatives at different moments in its history. Since Frank Castorf assumed the theater’s artistic directorship in 1992, it has become one of the success stories of theaters surviving in the new funding environment. While its scaled pricing structures continues to ensure broad access

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to nontraditional, especially young audiences, its cooperation with prison theater, homeless theater, and immigrant theater aligns it with a social-service mission. Castorf’s concept of creating a “people’s theater” prioritizes the fostering of cultural, technological, and electronic literacy and refers back to a long socialist tradition. The building’s tawdry fifties interior conjures up the GDR, but performances neither nostalgically remember the bygone golden days of the socialist state, nor do they limit their notion of “the people” to ethnic Germans, as evidenced by international cooperations and an emphatically international repertoire. Moreover, the theater regularly hosts late-night film/video showings, as well as music events in its two second-floor lounges, which attract young club hoppers from the neighborhood and beyond. Finally, the Volksbühne organizes symposia and panel discussions on topical issues often in conjunction with activist groups and organizations, such as the antiglobalization network ATTAC and the immigrants’ rights organization Kanak Attak. The theater’s long history as an instrument for workers’ education informs the Volksbühne’s dual strategy of democratizing access to the arts and providing a forum for political opposition and critique. While it does not escape the pressure to subsidize cultural production through self-exploitation, I regard it as a promising example of the increasing disaggregation of nation and democracy, the measure of which is its social inclusiveness and critical bite. In sum, the reconstruction of the national paradigm of theatrical production in a transnational, European context, by closing down some of its traditional structures, has also created some promising openings and linkages. If we take a closer look at the newly privatized segments of the performing arts, however, the role of the performer as a socially useful service worker entrusted with the task of cultural-knowledge transfer and social integration particularly in volatile communities reveals a darker side. The annual Carnival of Cultures in Berlin (modeled on the Notting Hill Carnival in London) constitutes one place where Turkish and Kurdish culture (among over a hundred others) meets with an enthusiasm otherwise rarely awarded the members of those communities in the social and political realms. The ascendancy of belly dancers and folk musicians at the carnival, I have argued, illustrates how an angry, political discourse about social inequality, deprivation, and austerity—which dominated the discussions of immigration, integration, and discrimination in the 1980s and was associated with transnational expressive forms like rap, hip hop, graffiti, and break dancing—has been transformed into a celebratory expression of traditional heritage.8 The German state’s inability or unwillingness to

Introduction

25

create political solutions to the social problems caused by its still only half-hearted immigration policy is evidenced by the crumbling infrastructure of neighborhoods like Neukölln, which hosts the carnival. That event participates in the transvaluation of a “problem” district by importing, if only for three days a year, the “experience economy” that has already helped to gentrify other previously “rough” urban neighborhoods such as Kreuzberg. The carnival exemplifies the “festivalization” of urban space as a strategy that allows Berlin to stage itself as a culturally diverse, socially tolerant, edgy and fun location in the global arena in order to attract tourists, investors, and corporations. At the same time, its culturalization of political conflicts typifies the “soft” mode in which Western democracies now manage dissent, according to Andrew Ross. Whereas migrants largely view their participation as an opportunity to set or change the terms in which they are usually perceived and described in political discourse and the mass media, I am not convinced that cultural display challenges the heteronomous representation of ethnic differences by the carnival organizers and in the German media. Nor do I believe that their activity necessarily contributes to their social integration.9 Ultimately, the transposition of social inequalities into cultural differences naturalizes and affirms the former. Film scholar Randall Halle, British theater critic Baz Kershaw, and Mark Rectanus who writes on corporate sponsorship and museums all concur that the privatization of public art takes away the main prerequisite for artistic freedom and subordinates culture to the profit motive generally and the sponsoring corporation’s specific interests, even where corporations’ contributions to an institution’s overall budget is smaller than the public subsidies, as is very often the case in Germany. However, as governments increasingly adopt corporate practices in their operations, public funding is now more than before tied to commercial success. So as the overall balance of public and corporate power shifts in our world, the strict opposition of public=free versus private=enslaved art no longer holds. The Carnival of Cultures, where cultural display is not so subtly linked to the municipal/political aims of managing social difference as well as to property development and real estate values, illustrates the challenges artists and communities face as they demand public, political recognition. Yet the Neuköllner Oper, which has enjoyed a long-term relationship with a corporate sponsor, is certainly no capitalist lackey, nor are the numerous theaters that now survive on mixed funding, which includes support by associations of private sponsors, so-called Freundeskreise. These associations that have traditionally had a strong presence in German civil society

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occupy a “private” space that cannot simply be equated with corporate profit aims. Civil society, privately organized, is also the space where protopolitical or parapolitical democratic activity was located whenever exclusionary national discourses barred access to a public political sphere ostensibly (but not actually) open and accessible to all. Historically, this included the socialist workers’ movement, the women’s movement before suffrage, and, in recent and contemporary times, immigrants’ rights movements. While one might complain that the increasing importance of such private associations ties theaters’ repertoire more closely to audience demand, the history of the Volksbühne movement demonstrates that this demand is not synonymous with either populist entertainment or propaganda. Rectanus’s work on museums points to similar negotiations within privatized sponsorships, while Kershaw’s study of privatization in British theater too quickly equates private with corporate interests, both of which are constituted as democracy’s nemesis. Perhaps it is this peculiar formation of the private sphere that has opened the window for the magnificent, forceful, imaginative, feminist engagements with globalization that I will examine in the following chapters. Chapter 2, entitled “Desiring the Global: Cinematic Family Affairs and International Relations,” develops the concept of global imaginations to show how familial narratives and metaphors naturalize relations among nations and cement power inequalities between them. The chapter advances its argument through the close reading of three films: Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (1961), Margarethe von Trotta’s Das Versprechen (The Promise, 1994), and Cédric Klapisch’s L’Auberge Espagnole (Europudding, 2002). In the chapter, I track how the cinema has constructed the tension between capitalism and democracy at three auspicious moments: at the height of the cold war, during the liminal moment after German unification and before the founding of the EU, and after the implementation of policies fostering European cultural integration. The films, made by an Austrian expatriate in Hollywood, a German, and a French director respectively, depict Europe as threatened by fascism, communism, and American imperialism but nevertheless manage to make positive offers of identification with a democratic Europe to international audiences. Chapter 3, entitled “Development and Migration: The Globalized Woman Comes to Neukölln,” introduces the reader to central debates in globalization theory: Does globalization contribute to the development and modernization of the global South, or does it exacerbate social and economic differences between rich and poor nations? Will the integration of women into the global labor market

Introduction

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further their emancipation from patriarchal oppression, or will it subject them to the same processes of exploitation and alienation experienced by the male proletariat during the era of industrialization, while sidelining men and potentially inverting the traditional gender order? And finally, will digital technologies enhance creativity, leisure, and the “good life,” or will they insert an additional class difference between those who can escape the limitations of the flesh in the virtual realm and those who are stuck in the gendered, class, and racial coordinates of embodied identity? The chapter works through these key controversies through a reading of Indians (Siemann 2001), a musical in the Brechtian tradition produced by the Neuköllner Oper, a small, largely privatized musical theater in the West Berlin neighborhood of Neukölln, a district with a high proportion of immigrant and unemployed residents. The opera traces the migratory path of a female Indian computer programmer to a German computer lab and back. It adapts nineteenth-century grand opéra, a genre known for its reliance on new theatrical technologies and thematic concern with the masses, and thereby brings into view continuities and changes between the dawn and the dusk of the industrial age in Europe. Indians appropriates the allegorical form through which cinema and television stage global desire but reverses its direction, exposing its destructive, sexist dynamic. Chapter 4, called “Traveling Counterpublics: René Pollesch@ Prater,” investigates the paradigm shift from historic liberalism— which rested on the division of “productive” and “reproductive” labor—to neoliberalism, which wraps all areas of life into the logic of the market. This is the subject of two trilogies, Wohnfront (Domestic Front, 2001) and Tent Saga (2004), by critically acclaimed playwrightdirector Pollesch. Pollesch has invented a peculiar form of political theater that amalgamates theoretical, artistic, and activist languages. He develops a dramaturgy of doubled negation—cutting back and forth between the failure of critical thought and the falseness of mass culture’s promise of happiness—that produces as a partial positive the notion of a minoritarian counterpublic. Pollesch’s first season at the Prater in which his plays were embedded in a larger dialogue between artists, activists, and academics fostered such a counterpublic. Subsequently, however, his plays have tracked how the theater’s remediation by the screen gradually erodes that central tension between provisional, false identifications elicited by pop culture and the potential of political opposition held out by critical theory. Whereas political theater has historically sought to position itself as the place where mediatized constructions of reality can be interrogated or subverted,

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Pollesch shows how the theater is ultimately coerced into imitating and complementing the screen. The last chapter (Chapter 5), “Operation Media Storm: Elfriede Jelinek’s Theater of War,” examines two plays by the Nobel Prize winner that treat the media representation of the Iraq war. The plays Bambiland (2003) and Babel (2005) echo and even cite directly some of the most rigorous scholarly critiques and indictments of globalization in its current, militarized mode. The discussion of the plays allows me to engage with their arguments. The sharp tensions between the United States and some European states over the Iraq war have given rise to the perception that the longtime transatlantic partners embody opposites in terms of styles of power and perhaps even of styles of globalization. Jeremy Rifkin contrasts the American nightmare of unfettered capitalism, imperialist aggression, and social disintegration with the “European Dream” of mass prosperity, democracy, and peace (Rifkin 2004). Jelinek refutes any such Euro-romanticism. On the one hand, she recalls the long linkage between European democracy and imperialism dating back to ancient Greece. On the other, she refuses to blame American culture and media for the breakdown of civilization she diagnoses in the images of torture that flooded the Web in the spring of 2004. Yet the Internet’s responsiveness to and stoking of consumers’ pornographic and violent desires prompted the dramatist and the directors staging her texts to ask fundamental questions about the political consequences of the privatization of media production and consumption, the basis for a feminist pacifism, and the role of theater as a “moral institution.” European identity began to take shape according to the pattern of dissociation familiar from Benedict Anderson’s study of imagined national community, hinging on the rejection of that which one is not or does not want to be. Given that—as Anderson repeats again and again—love of nation has served first and foremost to justify war, sacrifice, and death, such a quasi-national identification might be appropriate for a political entity that has prioritized free trade over social justice and a common defense and security policy over a common immigration and integration policy. Rather than ending war, Europe’s citizens will be told to fight its enemies without and within; they will be asked to die for the EU. Against the discourse of acclamation, the artists whose work I discuss in this book chronicle the disintegration of the traditional, ethnically homogenous notion of national community without remembering the German nation with regret or nostalgia.

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The works I analyze in this study render democracy as a heretofore unrealized project in Europe. Rather than inventing a mythical origin or heroic past, they mobilize historical memories of prior, imperialist projects of European unification in order to make them available for disidentification and exorcize them. Against political invocations of a common cultural heritage, these texts reveal inequalities, hierarchies, and divisions along the axes of gender, race, and class. The labor of grieving, remembering, nay saying, and provoking that these works perform and invite resists the transnational pedagogy of neoliberal political and economist discourses that seek to reform a European subject responsive to the hail of global capital. Instead, these artists say that this is how we were and do not want to be again; this is what would happen if we indeed became what we supposedly already are. Cultural institutions and practices, then, are engaged in their own performative reiterations of a democratic public sphere, calling into being that which they fear has already ceased to exist. Their works are haunted by the suspicion that dissent, critique, and resistance are mere simulacra of civil practices in a society that has long replaced citizens with consumers and that critical art has become the democratic fig leaf of an illiberal society.

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Chapter 2

Desi r ing th e Global Cinem at ic Fa mi ly Af fa i rs a nd Inter nat io na l Rel at i o ns 1

I

f the bourgeois novel shaped how nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers felt themselves to be part of a nation, as Benedict Anderson has argued, then film has been the preeminent vehicle of an international and global imagination.2 The cinema was the first culture industry that produced for a global market, which after World War II was dominated by films made in Hollywood. After a long period of protectionist policies during which European countries fostered a focus on national themes and high-art styles, the building of an infrastructure for cooperative European production and distribution networks in the 1990s aims to develop a transnational cinema in Europe that is both globally competitive and distinct from Hollywood. The American film industry since the 1920s and the European film industries since the 1990s have thematized international encounters and emergent transnational notions of community, engendering narratives and tropes of familial belonging, desire, and affinity. The cinematic culture industries are thus part and parcel of the political and economic transformations the films depict. The question I want to pursue through a series of exemplary readings in this chapter is whether the Hollywood model of cinematic production marked by commercial profitability and political conformity indeed provides less opportunity for a critique of global capitalism than the German tradition of state-supported artistic independence and what the consequences and implications are of the

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“sublation” of national cinema in the European film industry today (Halle 2002). Does the emergence of a European cinema provide a space for alternative, critical imaginings of transnationalism? The chapter tells three stories that intersect in the reading of three films: Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three, Margarethe von Trotta’s The Promise, and Cédric Klapisch’s Europudding. Each textual reading examines a particular, auspicious conjunction of these three stories, which narrate political discourses of European integration and globalization, the sexual economy of European and global imaginations, and the changing organization and aesthetics of cinema. Even though they overlap in the discussion of the films, let me disentangle them here. The first story told in this chapter shows how the cinema’s juxtaposition of transnationalist ideologies with national allegiances and concerns over sovereignty worked through particular political contradictions in the emerging global order. The architects of European integration after World War II set off their vision as antidote to the military-political-territorial world of nation-states, which had culminated in the Nazi attempt to build a pan-German empire on the continent. The conditions and aims of European integration itself as well as Europe’s relationship to America were far from certain. Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle favored an institutionalist, intergovernmental model of political integration that aimed at building a strong European power bloc under French-German leadership with protectionist economic policies, which would be relatively closed to the outside. By contrast, the functionalist model, championed by German economics minister Ludwig Erhard along with U.S. President John F. Kennedy, favored economic integration without government control within Europe and of Europe into the world market. The Atlanticist advocates of functionalism were convinced that the creation of a modern economic system based on free trade on a global market would foster democratization and peaceful international relations and thus supersede the aggressive, military imperialism that marked the past age of nation-states, but which they also saw resurrected in the Gaullist vision of a “continental, Carolingian empire” (Neebe 2004, 516). The ideology of globalism—the belief in the beneficence of free trade on open, deregulated markets—can be traced back to nineteenthcentury liberalism, whose most prominent proponent, the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950), contended that the

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growing interdependence of modern trading states promotes peaceful cooperation and that a “pure capitalist world” is intrinsically antiimperialist (Schumpeter 1963, 123). Rather than calling the validity of his thesis into doubt, Schumpeter’s followers explained the cataclysmic wars that did take place in the twentieth century by interpreting imperialist mentalities as social and psychological holdovers from the past. The functionalist model of European integration under the primacy of economics would similarly forge a rhetoric of progress by contrasting free trade in a global market as peaceful and democratic, against the imperialist aggression associated with the nation-state of the past. This neoliberal rhetoric could then be deployed to inveigh against any governmental control over economic policies and trade relations within Europe by characterizing the institutionalist approach as not only backward-looking but as the imposition of the (closed, authoritarian, and hierarchical) nation form on the new, transnational European Community. The history of the building of the European Community, now the EU, is marked by continuous debate and successive compromises between these two factions. The 1963 GATS minister conference sealed “the European Economic Community’s successful integration in the liberal world economic system” and thus, according to economic historian Reinhard Neebe, constituted an important milestone for the globalization of Europe (Neebe 2004, 491). Even the creation of the European Parliament, Council, and Commission fell short of submitting the process of economic integration, liberalization, and deregulation to political control. These institutions were primarily concerned with economic rather than political integration until well into the 1990s. The lack of transparency and popular participation in decision-making processes prompted the perception of a “democratic deficit” (Shore 2000, 3). The three films I discuss in this chapter stage key contradictions in the discourse of European integration. The first, Wilder’s comedy One, Two, Three, produced during a particularly tense moment of the cold war, issues perhaps the most fundamental challenge to the neoliberal rhetoric of democratization and peace through free trade and ironizes the “anti-imperialist” nature of capitalism. The second, von Trotta’s melodrama The Promise, was made after German unification. It dramatizes (and only partly allays) European anxieties about German domination at a time when the nascent European Union— which would firmly tie the unified nation into transnational structures and commitments—was perceived by some as a palliative to German

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unilateralism and hegemony, while others feared the EU would serve as mere camouflage for a renewed attempt at European empire with a unified Germany at its driving force. At the same time, the film contrasts the “American” model of global capitalism characterized by vapid materialism and social inequality with the refined, egalitarian intellectualism of a Francophile notion of civilization. The third, Klapisch’s Europudding, was released at a time when the European Union was shifting from an elite-driven, primarily economic project to one defined increasingly in political and populist terms. It rehearses and updates the older functionalist versus institutionalist debates by framing the future of the European Union as the choice between calcified, state-like bureaucracies and nationalist allegiances and prejudices, on the one side, and deregulated free enterprise and peaceful transnational cooperation on the other. The second story in this chapter traces the long tradition of gendering international relations in cinematic narratives that derive their persuasive force from the metaphors and narrative conventions of heterosexual romance and marriage. The films I analyze invest the relationships between states, institutions, and economic entities with feelings and drives conceived as primordial and natural. They construct nation-states as “persons” involved in a family drama. Neferti Tadiar has dated the emergence of a material and metaphorical “sexual economy” structuring relations within the nascent Asia-Pacific region and between that region and the United States to the end of the cold war when international relations were marked by ideological antagonism. The swell of heterosexual desire as connective glue between national actors in global imaginations, she maintains, thus figures the shift from ideological enmity and competition toward economic integration into the world market and political cooperation with the American hegemon. While I am persuaded by Tadiar’s argument about the integrative force of a sexual economy and find it eminently transferable to the European context, I disagree with her periodization and maintain that the sexual economy she associates with globalization has a much longer discursive history that not only structured cold war relations but stretches back as far as precolonial times. Scholars of precolonial and colonial fantasies have demonstrated the centrality of romantic and familial imagery to legitimating the European conquest and colonization of foreign lands. By modeling the relationship between colonizer and colonized on the hierarchy of the sexes in the bourgeois couple, these fantasies cemented their relationship as a permanently and “naturally” unequal one (Zantop 1997, Wildenthal 2001, Klotz 1995). Nor did the capitalist-communist antagonism during the twentieth

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century preclude “integrationist” fantasies. Hollywood produced the story of capitalist superiority as variations on Ninotchka (1939), that is, as the taming of the communist shrew whose love for the capitalist man cures her political dogmatism, unfeminine scorn for consumerism, and sober attitude toward heterosexual courtship.3 In short, only by embracing capitalism can the communist shrew become a “real” woman. Her seduction, along with the defection of her three male sidekicks, constitutes a fantasy of integration that coexisted with (and fared much better at the box office than) the antagonistic storylines of those social problem and noir films during the McCarthy era that commonly portrayed communists as unredeemable thugs and traitors who did not live to see the end of the film.4 One, Two, Three essentially retells the story of seduction and conversion in Ninotchka; although the film, as well as the play by Hungarian emigrant Férenc Molnar on which it is based, inverts the romantic couple’s gender making the communist male and the capitalist seducer female.5 The German cinema, too, dramatized the relationship between capitalism and communism as romance during the cold war and the quest of the lovers to transcend ideological borders as a desire to unify the divided national family—in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).6 The West German cinema suggested a natural inequality and hierarchy between capitalism and communism that was premised on the role division within the bourgeois family and thus consistent with the socially conservative gender and family policy of the FRG. Perhaps surprisingly, the persistent feminization of communism and masculinization of capitalism can be found as well in East German films. The best known and indeed emblematic example of division romances in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is Konrad Wolf’s adaptation of Christa Wolf’s novel Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven, 1964), in which the socialist woman must choose between her desire to join her lover in the West and her commitment to the socialist collective.7 Julia Hell has argued that the sexual body was constructed as fascist in the GDR imaginary and the fantasy of a “sublime communist body” predicated on the renunciation of sexual desire (Hell 1997, 174). Whereas West German division romances showed the often tragic failure of German couples to unite in order to indict the political division of an organic, national unit and the heartlessness of communist fanatics, East German division romances, by contrast, reinterpreted the desire to cross the border not only as a succumbing to the materialist temptations of the West but also as the moral surrender to the sexual body and its fascist past.

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After the fall of the wall in 1989 and unification of the two German states in 1990, these divergent views of East-West romance became even starker. In the early 1990s, West German film and television produced a number of celebratory unification romances that, by “assigning the female role to the GDR . . . normalize[d] assumptions which would otherwise appear extremely inequitable” (Sharp 2004, 91), and I wrote, equally sharply, “The feminization of the GDR as princessbride . . . fuelled the surge of nationalist euphoria imaged as a heterosexual union, which enabled the capitalist penetration of Eastern virgin markets” (Sieg 1993, 39). By contrast, love relationships between East and West Germans played no role in films made by East German directors.8 Margarethe von Trotta’s melodrama The Promise, like Billy Wilder’s screwball comedy, reverses the dominant gender coding by placing its female protagonist in West Berlin and the man she loves in the GDR; in addition, their reunion on the night of November 9, 1989, when the GDR authorities opened the border checkpoints, is far from celebratory, thus registering the disappointment of leftist intellectuals over the missed chance of creating a “third path,” namely democratic socialism (Berghahn 2005, Taberner 2000). In the 1990s, a growing crop of films explored the sexual economy of the nascent European polity. Two art films from the beginning of the decade are especially noteworthy for their attempts to identify Europe’s constitutive traumas and narrate them as family drama. Europa (released in the United States under the title Zentropa [1991]) is the second part of Danish director Lars von Trier’s Europa trilogy.9 In it, von Trier conjures a highly stylized noir vision of postwar Europe as riddled with Nazi criminals, American military, and insurgents. The film’s central character, an American innocent training to be a sleeping car conductor, is drawn into nightmarish political intrigues he can neither comprehend nor solve. Initially determined to stay uninvolved, he becomes increasingly entangled in dark machinations through his desire for a beautiful and enigmatic German femme fatale who may be an antifascist, a Nazi, or a terrorist. Europe is figured as the Nazi family trying to ingratiate itself to the Americans while secretly plotting against them. Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslovski’s Three Colors trilogy explores the republican principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity symbolized by the colors of the French flag as a desirable frame for European integration. White (1994), the middle part of trilogy, allegorizes the dream of integration as the marriage between Karol, a young Polish immigrant, and Dominique, his beautiful French wife, and may be seen as a meditation on equality and inequality. Their marriage soon

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founders due to the Polish husband’s impotence, which figures his economic insufficiency. The ideal of political equality uniting Europe is shown to be utterly undermined by the economic definition of equality. In the course of the film, Karol becomes a wealthy and powerful businessman in Poland who can finally get it up for (a delighted) Dominique, but the ruthlessness he has acquired on the way turns his love into vengeance. Having seduced Dominique into wanting to resume their marriage, he abandons her to leave for Southeast Asia. Released a decade before Poland’s accession to the European Union, Kieslowski’s elegiac film mourns the molding of postcommunist Poland into Europe’s love object. It deplores the sacrifice of a political vision based on Enlightenment precepts to the project of a European prosperity zone and warns that the unleashing of market forces unfettered by political aims will ultimately destroy even the hope for economic integration. The German-Polish coproduction Lichter (Distant Lights) (2003), set in the border town of Frankfurt/Slubice, confirms that fear: Hans Christian Schmid’s “film shows the contrast between the grand dream, the hope and belief in success and prosperity in the consumerist capitals of Europe and the reality of the shattered existence, the inhuman barrier of the border, the endless economic reassignment of 90 percent of the world’s population to the ranks of the impoverished,” writes Randall Halle (Halle 2007, 86). More recent films about Europe have experimented with dramaturgies that drastically depart from such classical narratives. Hannes Stöhr’s One Day in Europe (2005) and the omnibus Larger (2005) (English titles in the original) abandon the familial master metaphor along with a unified dramatic personnel. Larger even dispenses with the Aristotelian unity of time that One Day in Europe still obeys. Both employ an episodic structure connected only by somewhat randomly chosen, repeating plot elements (a soccer game, a theft, and a police report in the former, and a train station, a phone call, and a cell phone text message in the latter). This structure suggests that European unity must be created from scratch within set but arbitrary parameters and privileges the creativity and improvisation that result from spontaneous collaborations over a reflection on historically grown, shared legacies, mentalities, or aspirations. Both venerate the random encounters prompted by constant movement and modern technology over a sense of traditional political alliances and cultural affinities. Europudding sits somewhere in between the coherent narratives and the episodic dramaturgies I sketched above. Like the former, it explores the transnational sexual economy in the European Union but

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lacks their philosophical weight and elegiac tone. It shares with the latter the large, diverse cast of European characters, along with a playful, improvisational style, but presents the coherent story of a young French exchange student’s trials and tribulations in a shared household in Barcelona. Like Distant Lights, Europudding explores the meaning of Europe and the relations within it from a liminal perspective but interprets liminality in terms of time (the year abroad, adolescence), not space (the European border). It figures the nation through traditional (mostly suffocating) provider marriages and supplements them with extramarital, international affairs that generate a web of secondary affiliations and erotic possibilities. While the film emphasizes that the emergent “adulterous” European sexual economy does not threaten the nation, the main character ultimately chooses the European collective as his primary home over the sweetheart to whom he was supposed to return. This is a far cry from both Wilder and Trotta, who figured the forging of international community through binational marriages. The emergent transnational forms of affiliation, as I show in this chapter, instigate a reconsideration of the traditional couple, although they only partly succeed in rewriting (or transcending) the national and colonial histories that couple calls up. The third story I tell in this chapter is that of the changing organization and aesthetics of cinema. The pictures I discuss bring into view important stages in the globalizing film industries. This story has often been told as the rise of the American movie industry to global dominance and the defensive reaction of national European cinemas to Hollywood’s mass commercial appeal. Certainly the American industry enjoyed an advantage as an economy of scale over the craft-based filmmaking facilities of smaller countries, which were not as vertically integrated as the studio system has been since the 1910s. The large American market made high production values possible because attendant high production costs could still be recouped relatively quickly. These high production values also provided the U.S. cinema with a competitive edge internationally and furthermore continued to draw talented artists from across the world. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that both Russia and Germany developed powerful film industries of their own in the 1920s and that the latter instigated an initiative toward greater cooperation among European distributors and exhibitors called Film Europe, now considered the precursor of the integrative policies of the 1990s. It took the devastation of European economies through World War II, including film studios and theaters, and the political and economic

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dependencies created by postwar reconstruction programs to deliver the European market to Hollywood.10 The breakup of the American studio system as a consequence of the antitrust ruling of 1948 drastically changed the domestic organization of the industry and provided it with an added impetus to assert itself in foreign markets previously closed to it. In response, many European governments enacted protectionist measures that included import quotas and subsidies for their national film industries but also limited the outflow of their currency abroad. The “blocking” of funds and the stipulation that “a portion of the income earned in film distribution could only be spent in the country in which it was earned” prevented the studios from repatriating their foreign revenues (Lev 2003, 148). To access the money accumulating in these blocked accounts, most film studios chose to make movies in the country where the account was located, discovering in the process that exotic foreign locations also enhanced the movies’ visual appeal, that production costs were often lower due to lower local wages, and, not least, that they could take advantage of the very subsidy programs that national governments had established to keep them at bay (Lev 2003, 149; Guback 1968, 166). In short, the constraints put on the film industry both at home and abroad contributed to a further internationalization of Hollywood. The career of American immigrant Billy Wilder, one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed directors who briefly worked for the American military government in defeated Germany, underscores both the attractiveness of Hollywood to foreign talent and the political and economic opportunities opening up to the American film industry after the war. The national film cultures in postwar Western Europe, which struggled against the large market share of American movies, have tended to cast European cinema in terms of a resistance to American cultural imperialism, pitting film art against mass-produced fare, auteur against factory.11 Since the 1960s, European cinema has become increasingly defined—and marketed abroad—as art house cinema, associated with a realist style, open or multiple narratives, a comparatively uninhibited approach to sexuality and the body, and a preoccupation with national history and concerns (Forbes and Street 2000). Because of its cultural and ideological importance, filmmaking, like other arts, received government support in the form of loans, tax relief, and subsidies.12 Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, this government support has been supplemented by pan-European programs like MEDIA and EURIMAGES, aimed at coordinating training, production, distribution, and

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exhibition across national borders in Europe and thereby enhancing the market share of European films in Europe and internationally.13 While MEDIA has prioritized commercial viability, EURIMAGES has focused on artistic value, striving to foster cinematic treatments of European identity and cultural diversity. The former attempted to apply the lessons of Hollywood’s success by seeking to strengthen especially pan-European distribution, while the latter helped fund some of the most critically acclaimed European films of the 1990s. Rather than see economic versus artistic orientations as contradictory and associate the former with Hollywood and the latter with Europe, the two were as much connected by “cultural symbiosis” as by economic competition (Forbes and Street 2000, 42). Margarethe von Trotta, the director of The Promise, like many of her famous colleagues in the New German Cinema, admired Hollywood styles of cinematography and storytelling and incorporated them in her own films, which nevertheless grappled with weighty historical events and political problems, often organized around a female perspective.14 The Promise, a German-Swiss-French coproduction that received funding from EURIMAGES, captured only a fraction of the admissions garnered by the popular, contemporaneous unification comedies that formed part of what Eric Rentschler called the “cinema of consensus” in Germany, but unlike them it has enjoyed a certain canonical status as well as steady distribution in the international educational and home video market.15 It thus exemplifies well the dialectic of national specificity and international commercial viability that long characterized European art film. The MEDIA and EURIMAGES programs were primarily defensive strategies to combat the rise of U.S. market share that resulted from the reorganization and revival of the American film industry in the 1980s, which no longer competed with the home entertainment market (including television, cable, video, and DVDs) but achieved synergies with it. The post-Fordist reconstruction of the industry entailed concerted branding and marketing strategies, cut back plant and personnel overhead costs by adopting flexible production methods such as outsourcing and subcontracting, and plowed enormous amounts of venture capital into high-budget blockbuster movies exhibited at multiplex cinemas that recaptured the family audience. That reorganization increased the market share of U.S. films from 53 to 74 percent between 1985 and 1994 in the European Union, while European films could no longer compete in the international market.16 Given the enormous size and expected growth of the audiovisual industries in the European Union (Finney cites a predicted expansion from

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$45 to $120 billion between 1995 and 2010), neither the aggressive insistence of free trade advocates nor European politicians’ call for a “cultural exception” and protectionist measures are surprising, which culminated in the standoff surrounding the 1993 GATS agreement.17 That conflict reinvigorated the familiar terms of European-American cultural competition, however, at a time when the media business was undergoing changes not just in the United States but worldwide. Europeans’ accusation of American cultural imperialism on that occasion, however, constructs a political hegemony that disavows both the dispersal of Hollywood across international production sites and the rise of transnational media conglomerates in Europe during the 1980s and ’90s. Vivendi-Universal’s acquisition of Canal+, Europe’s most active and successful studio that produced Klapisch’s Europudding, exemplifies this development. On the occasion of the merger between the French conglomerate Vivendi and the American entertainment giant Universal, French executives stressed the expanded opportunities this would provide for European artists, promising that “more European talent will be used in films of worldwide appeal and more large-budget films shot in Europe with profits ploughed back into European film-making” (Jäckel 2003, 65). Their statement reveals the changing meaning of the phrase “European film-making,” which no longer denotes a distinct cinematic sensibility as defined by national art-house traditions from Italian neorealism, French cinéma verité, or the New German Cinema, but is a new, transnational phenomenon created by the Europeanization of film funding and avidly involved in developing transnational narratives for an expanded, perhaps even global, audience. As Randall Halle has stressed, this transnational cinema still carries within it aesthetic traces of the older formation but delinks them from the avant-garde scorn for commercial appeal and penchant for political critique. Halle also points out that many films produced in Europe by transnational corporations with a European background, like Vivendi-Universal, Kirch Media, or Bertelsmann, participate in what he calls a global paradigm defined by worldwide appeal, large budgets, and a “general” (that is, not nationally specific) audience.18 Both Halle and Thomas Elsaesser have suggested that it no longer makes sense to repeat the old binary of Hollywood versus Europe because both coexist as fictive modalities or brands. Hollywood’s shift away from the studio model may be seen to provide economic opportunities to the plethora of film production units now operating in Europe rather than to eliminate them. Thomas Elsaesser’s metaphor of the “two-way mirror” further suggests that “Hollywood” and “European” film will continue to produce

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cultural capital through the mutual replaying and repackaging of shared, global fantasies. The three films I examine more closely in the remainder of this chapter mark particularly auspicious constellations of political discourses, gendered metaphors, and modes of cultural production. What remains to be seen is precisely how these films mediate between national, European, and globalist concerns and between economic and political imperatives; how they choreograph diegetic and spectatorial desire in order to naturalize (or ironize) unequal international power relations; and how the conditions of cinematic production shape each director’s endeavor to both assert artistic autonomy and achieve transnational commercial appeal.

Ya nk ee Go H o me . . . Wi th M e Samuel “Billie” Wilder (1906–2002), born into a middle-class Jewish family in the Austrian town of Sucha, now Poland, illustrates in exemplary fashion the fantasmatic mirroring of Hollywood and Europe that Elsaesser speaks about. His life and career span the two continents and reflect the changing conditions of artistic production in the film industry. After starting out as a scriptwriter for the Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA) in Berlin, Wilder spent roughly two decades as a director under contracts with large Hollywood studios before becoming independent. While he approached American culture with a European sensibility, including a disdain for its ruthless materialism (epitomized by the noir thriller Double Indemnity [1944]), he was a firm believer in—and chronicler of—the “American century” that resumed with the Allied victory over fascism and in that sense typified the “classic example of the emigrant leaving Europe, buying into the American world view, and selling the outlook back in Europe,” as British film scholar Richard Armstrong put it (Armstrong 2000, 3). Conversely, Wilder’s European films (The Emperor Waltz, 1948; A Foreign Affair, 1948; Stalag 17, 1953; and One, Two, Three, 1961) packaged Europe for an American gaze but have also been said to meditate on conflicts and contradictions within American society.19 Moreover, he recognized that contradictions within his adopted nation—he became an American citizen in 1939—would resonate internationally and particularly in Europe where American notions of international economic interaction and political cooperation were being implemented as part of the postwar democratization and reconstruction efforts. In that implementation, film played a crucial role as Wilder knew well from his brief tenure as film officer in the American Information

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Control Division (ICD) of the military government (May to September 1945). The work of the ICD in developing a cultural policy of democratization and setting the stage for rebuilding the indigenous film industry has been well documented and complicates facile accusations of American “cultural imperialism.” Historian Heide Fehrenbach and film scholar Thomas Elsaesser carefully demonstrate that the ICD, which was run out of the state department, cannot simply be regarded as a helpmate of Hollywood interests wishing to destroy the vestiges of the German film industry and open up the German market as a dumping ground of Hollywood movies regardless of content or quality. Industry interests were represented by the Motion Picture Export Association (MPEA), the export branch of the Motion Picture Association of America, which recommended that “the German industry should be rebuilt more slowly. People now should be fed heavy doses of all pictures, except those of their own making, in order to counteract the long years of Nazi propaganda” (quoted in Fehrenbach 1995, 64). Fehrenbach concludes that “the enduring goal of this organization was the commercial penetration and domination of open, unregulated markets abroad,” thinly cloaked by a rhetoric of democratization and reeducation (Fehrenbach 1995, 65). While the military government enforced the decartelization of the German film industry because it had been linked to Nazi state control,20 film historian Jason Epstein points out that the MPEA itself operated as a cartel abroad, even after the antitrust ruling of 1948 forced the industry to reconstruct itself domestically (Epstein 2005, 37–38). The ICD and the MPEA were at odds, as the former emphasized both the importance of indigenous filmmaking and the distribution of only those Hollywood productions that convincingly sold the “American message of democracy, individualism, and free enterprise” (Fehrenbach 1995, 62). The ICD censored many Hollywood films deemed inconsistent with this message. In short, the economic imperatives of expansionism and domination were in tension with the political goals of democratization and cooperation during the years when Wilder went back and forth between Hollywood and Europe. While the ICD subordinated economic and cultural policy to political objectives, the MPEA instrumentalized political concepts and pressured state agencies for an economic agenda that aimed at domination rather than democratization. The association’s goals and often unsavory methods called into question the premise underlying the foreign policy of the postwar decades, which, in the face of only halting political initiatives geared toward greater integration and shared decision making in Western Europe, focused on economics as the primary means for creating

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peaceful international relations. Wilder’s role as functionary within the military-political administration that regulated cultural production likely shaped his cinematic mediations between the German and American cultural imaginaries. By 1961, when Wilder directed One, Two, Three in Berlin, economic liberalization had become the principal instrument of European political integration and transatlantic cooperation, so as to be virtually equated with them. The film, a fast-paced political satire with elements of screwball comedy, teases out the tensions between economics and politics that were glossed over—but not resolved—by that equation. It gleefully exposes both the imperialist tendencies disavowed by champions of free trade and open markets and the American policy of containment, which limited trade with the cold war enemy despite the declared aim of peaceful coexistence. While Wilder’s professional experience in the movie business and political appointment at the ICD might have given him an insight into these contradictions as they played out in the film industry, One, Two, Three explores them in relation to the soft drink giant Coca-Cola, whose name, like no other, conjures up the specter of globalization as a form of corporate imperialism.21 Two international, heterosexual relationships form the crux of this brilliant comedy, which adapt and crucially reverse the discursive traditions they conjure up. The romance between Scarlett Hazeltine (Pamela Tiffin), a nymphomaniac Coca-Cola heiress, and Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholz), a hotheaded young communist from East Berlin, which results in his quick-time conversion into a capitalist, recalls the fantasy of the West’s erotic irresistibility à la Ninotchka. At the same time, the film inverts the gender codes of the East-West romance, which traditionally functioned to confirm the natural superiority of capitalism over communism. The affair between the film’s main character Charlie McNamara (James Cagney), the managing director of the Coca-Cola plant in West Berlin and a married man, and his blond bombshell secretary Ingeborg (Lilo Pulver), evokes the much older tradition of colonial fantasies that Susanne Zantop has described, which pair men from an advanced civilization with enamored native princesses—while inverting the historic coupling of European masters and colonized Americans. Gendered drag and cultural mimicry appear at key moments in the movie, not just as part of Wilder’s directorial signature but to signal the logic of inversion governing the film. These romances thus embed postwar transatlantic relations in the history of global imaginations while also highlighting shifts in the mode of power, specifically the decline of formal

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imperialism and ascendancy of economic empire sustained by mass consumerism. At the same time, much of the comic energy propelling the plot derives not from these romances but from the competing aims of Scarlett and McNamara. In the tension between the erotically exuberant Scarlett and the controlling businessman McNamara, One, Two, Three dramatizes the fledgling superpower America struggling to balance consumerist pleasures, entrepreneurial rationality, and political imperatives. According to the dictates of comedy, that balance threatens to careen dangerously out of control as the pace of capitalist penetration accelerates, illustrated by the proliferation of Coca-Cola plants on the world map in McNamara’s office. To the immigrant Wilder, ever attuned to the political unconscious of American democracy, the very international success of that model also makes him worry about its internal volatility.22 The danger of democracy’s unraveling arises from the powerful, antagonistic forces at work in its own delicately balanced psychic economy. If either consumerism or corporate discipline gains the upper hand in that precarious equilibrium, consumerism threatens to accelerate into hedonism and the indiscriminate dispersal of wealth—or discipline threatens to turn into full-blown dictatorial authoritarianism. Both of these antagonistic forces gain momentum in the German setting. The film’s opening sequence, which pans from marching, chanting communists in the rubble-strewn Soviet sector to strolling shoppers on a billboard-lined modern boulevard in the American sector, sets up the divided city of Berlin as a mirror for the pleasures of consumption and prosperity on the one side and the imperialist posturings of uniformed masses belting out the “Internationale” on the other. McNamara is entirely focused on his career, in the service of which he drags his wife and two young children from one remote posting to another, much to their dismay. When his boss in Atlanta asks him to put up his teenage daughter Scarlett, McNamara even cancels his family’s vacation, as he sees the visit as an opportunity to ingratiate himself to his superior and possibly as a step closer to the London posting he covets. This plan backfires, however, as Scarlett, a man-crazy vixen, proves to be all but uncontrollable. Two months later, her hosts find out that she has not only secretly slipped across to the Soviet sector every night but has fallen in love with and married a handsome young communist, with whom she intends to move to Moscow. This leaves the horrified McNamara to explain Scarlett’s disappearance to her parents, whose arrival in Berlin is imminent. At an ever-more madcap pace, McNamara at first tries to foil the newlyweds’ departure by

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getting Otto arrested and imprisoned in East Berlin, yet when it turns out that Scarlett is pregnant, the manager must do everything in his powers to get the young husband back from the clutches of the East German secret police. He finally manages to persuade the bewildered and despondent man that he better transform himself into a respectable capitalist in the three hours left before his parents-in-law arrive at Tempelhof Airport. In that time, the marvelously efficient McNamara commands an army of clerks and salesmen, with whose help he manages to get Otto washed, shaved, manicured, dressed in an impeccably tailored wardrobe, adopted by a bona fide monocle-wearing aristocrat, taught bourgeois table manners and small talk, instructed in the profession of a bottling-plant manager, set up in a hotel suite, and driven to the airport in a limousine. Aside from orchestrating Otto’s metamorphosis, McNamara must dissuade his frustrated wife from leaving him with the children, as well as parry the sexual demands of Ingeborg. McNamara runs the company with as much discipline and authority as his famous namesake commanded his troops.23 In fact, much of the comedy’s humor resides in the contradiction between the obvious similarity of military and mercantile practices and the fact that the latter are constructed within a discourse of democracy that poses as authoritarianism’s opposite.24 McNamara’s daily morning ritual hilariously foregrounds the slipperiness with which the corporate hierarchy and aggression, a democratic ethos of free will, and a fascist mentality slide into each other even as they posture as incommensurate. Every morning as McNamara crosses a large office, clerks jump up and stand at attention, causing him to angrily reprimand his assistant Schwengler: “How many times have I told you I don’t want those people getting up every time I come in and stand at attention?! . . . Can’t they get it into their Prussian heads they’re living in a democracy now?” “That is the trouble with democracy,” Schwengler replies with Schwejkian ingenuity. “In the old days when you ordered them to sit they would sit. In a democracy they do what they want. And what they want is to stand!” (Wilder 1961). Nor does the film portray the clerks’ drilled response as wrong, since McNamara’s leadership style is utterly dictatorial. His wife (Pamela Francis), who teases him about the way in which he runs the office and his family by addressing him as “Mein Führer,” draws a more uncomfortable comparison between McNamara’s behavior and the ideological system that shaped his employees. Despite McNamara’s objections to deeply engrained physical habits such as his assistant’s involuntary heel-clicking, their work ethos of efficiency, diligence, precision, and obedience are perfectly matched

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to the corporation’s expectations. As corporate, democratic work habits are shown to match those fostered by Nazi authoritarianism, so, too, do Coca-Cola’s expansionist dreams echo those of previous empires. On the phone to Hazeltine, McNamara crows about his plans to penetrate the Russian market: “Napoleon blew it, Hitler blew it, but Coca-Cola’s going to pull it off!” (Wilder 1961). And indeed, to judge by the success with which the company has penetrated the German market (facilitated by the work ethic of the natives as well as the appetites of cola-craving communists), McNamara’s vision seems more likely to succeed than the military ventures of prior regimes. His boss’s decree that the corporation won’t do business with communists reveals, however, that in the absence of a political infrastructure and assurances, economic entities show no inclination to trade, invest, or expand, hence calling into question that market forces somehow operate outside of ideology or that they can prevail where politics fail. McNamara’s imperialist ambitions along with his authoritarian behavior illustrate the aggressive potential of venture capitalism, which may ally itself with liberal democracy when it fits its purpose but can lapse into a colonial language of conquest and coercion when provoked. (When the German government rejects McNamara’s bid to set up a Coke machine in the parliament, he is outraged: “Don’t they know who won the war?!” [Wilder 1961]) He personifies the dangers of capitalism’s authoritarian, imperialist underpinnings to comic excess, whose extremism is further certified by his peculiar lack of sexual passion or familial affection. The emotional needs of his wife, children, secretary, and houseguest are all mere nuisances that interfere with his single-minded pursuit of career advancement. While this remarkable lack of sexual energy also makes McNamara a faithful husband rather than a lecherous colonizer, his eventual reconciliation with his wife and return to Atlanta contains capitalist aggression by tethering it safely to nation and family. Moreover, it signals the crucial paradigm shift toward a new mode of empire that operates through consumerist desire rather than economic or political coercion. What McNamara lacks, Scarlett and Ingeborg have in abundance. The erotic allure of both the American girl and the wannabe-American Ingeborg (who is lecherously pursued by three Russian trade delegates) drives the infatuated communist men to sacrifice their political ideals in a fantasy of capitalist irresistibility and of conquest without military confrontation. While this fantasy is clearly juxtaposed with the imperialist thrust of entrepreneurial rationality, it is not without a political agenda. Neither Scarlett nor Ingeborg are passive objects of desire: the secretary regularly pressures her married boss into secret

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assignations, and the nightly escapades that lead to Scarlett’s marriage require premeditation and ingenuity, not to mention bribes. The women’s lust for the forbidden, for boys from the wrong side of the tracks and the wall, exposes the aggressive dimension of a capitalism that imagines itself the object of desire but also dramatizes the anxieties produced by that fantasy. Even as their erotic allure is presented as a fact of (their gendered) nature (“All the women in my family are hot-blooded,” the southern belle drawls unapologetically [Wilder 1961]), the feminine, nymphomaniac embodiment of capitalist desirability raises the specter of an indiscriminate dispersal of consuming pleasures that points to Hawthorne rather than Mitchell as Scarlett’s literary referents. In contrast to her calculating namesake from Gone with the Wind, Scarlett gives herself generously and indiscriminately: when she first emerges from the plane that has carried her from Paris to Berlin, she invites the smitten male crew to draw lots for a date with her. Worse, after her beloved Otto tells her that no woman should own two mink coats before every woman in the world has one, Scarlett gives away her second mink coat to the McNamaras’ cleaning woman. This episode evokes the unsettling potential of capitalism’s consuming pleasures; the possibility that its promiscuous libidinal energies might disperse commodities and pleasures in illicit unions rather than concentrate the wealth in the family (class) would be its undoing. In the character of Ingeborg, Wilder’s satire on global “coca-colonization” most clearly marks the shift from an older discourse of oppression to one of economic and cultural assimilation. The gumpopping, curvy platinum blonde satirizes both the colonial fantasy of the amorous native and the capitalist ideal of the ever-ready worker. Fräulein Ingeborg, a gifted mimic of sexy American femininity, cannot understand why her American boss refuses to take advantage of her. When he cancels their evening tête-à-têtes, euphemistically described as language tutoring sessions, Fräulein Ingeborg hands him her letter of resignation, pouting, “You no longer work me overtime or on the weekends, you have lost all interest in the . . . Umlaut, so obviously my services are no longer required here” (Wilder 1961). She can only be persuaded to stay when he agrees to compensate her services with “fringe benefits” (rather than a raise), asks her to spend an entire night seducing the lecherous Russian trade delegates, and declares a moratorium on his employees’ contractual hours, sick leave, and breaks when he hears of the Hazeltines’ impending arrival. Ingeborg’s craving for being dominated and exploited stands in comic contrast to her boss’s reluctance to do so, and in the end she happily leaves him for an employer whose conditioning in the communist system—in which the

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state did not tolerate workers’ demands or political dissidence—offers the prospect of permanent exploitation, intimidation, and harassment. While the foreign boss’s daughter figures the neoliberal utopia of universal consumerist entropy (a mink coat for every woman), the native secretary allegorizes a masochistic notion of limitless exploitation, cultural assimilation, and political oppression. After all, Ingeborg’s “fringe benefit,” a polka-dotted dress, becomes a visual leitmotif of deception, false promises, and outright torture.25 No wonder she ultimately leaves McNamara for the Soviet defector who promises to deliver the deregulated working conditions not yet available in the democratic West. Ingeborg is a stunningly prescient figuration of the global woman described by Wichterich, Ehrenreich and Hochschild, and others and discussed in detail in subsequent chapters. In this 1961 movie, the native woman already signals the expansion of deregulated, un(der)compensated labor, historically associated with the private sphere and the work of women and low-class or foreign domestics, throughout the entire economy. Her garish polka-dotted dress flags consumerist desire as the engine fueling exploitive labor relations. Like Wilder’s earlier film A Foreign Affair, which was also set in postwar Berlin, One, Two, Three uses Germany as a theater where the internal contradictions and furtive longings of American democracy can be explored. A Foreign Affair, starring Marlene Dietrich, tells the story of an American GI enthralled by a Nazi femme fatale; Andrea Slane has read it as an allegory of the dark temptations that military victory and political domination, even in the name of democratic reconstruction, may unleash. By contrast, One, Two, Three does not elaborate a comparably deep, sexual fascination with communism; to the contrary, the three Soviet delegates, while lusty, are thoroughly unattractive. Scarlett’s ability to envision a future with Otto Piffl under communism ends abruptly once she defines herself as a mother, and while she is crazy about Otto, she is contrasted starkly with the communist women glimpsed only briefly in the background. In both scenes set in East Berlin, women wear unflattering uniforms and engage in homosocial, perhaps homosexual, activities. Their main function in the narrative is to explain, through their unfeminine appearance, their comrades’ susceptibility to Western sex pots. No wonder the men betray their political ideals for a beehive and high heels. As in some of the oldest colonial texts, gender differentiation is posited as the marker of an advanced, superior civilization, but whereas desire was imagined to flow from native women to virile European conquerors, One, Two, Three genders the West as feminine and the East as helplessly smitten. In the film’s heterosexual logic, its refusal

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to represent communist femininity or consider its attractions reveals that it neither takes seriously the aspirations, the allure, or the benefits of communism (especially for women) nor considers the possibility that it might have a future. Capitalism might be endangered by its internal volatility, but communism poses a threat to it only insofar as it might add too much fuel to either of its two engines, consumption and authoritarianism. It is not imagined as a serious competitor for men’s hearts, replete with its own alternative value system. Divided Berlin serves as an amplifying mirror for the competition between pleasure and rationality raging in the American psyche, but the authoritarian discipline that fuels McNamara’s expansionist dreams is associated with the Prussian and Nazi past rather than socialism. The film thus reveals the inability of Hollywood, where studios abided by political self-censorship long after Senator McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunts ended, to construct a cultural rhetoric of American democracy through an ideological engagement with communism.26 Even as the movie satirized American fantasies of domination in the name of democratization, it was thus premised on a deep, underlying anticommunism. In One, Two, Three, Wilder rewrote Hollywood’s fantasy of capitalism’s powers of seduction over communism, as encoded in the story of Ninotchka and its variants. That story, America’s enduring wish for communism’s surrender (it generated a remake in 1957, as well as a Broadway musical), predicated the ideological enemy’s incorporation on her feminization and thus naturalized unequal power relations.27 One, Two, Three’s gender inversion in the conversion story, together with the demotion of the ebullient McNamara, might read as castration anxiety; after all, the launch of the Sputnik satellite (1957) and the beginning of the space race raised doubts that the cold war could be won in the economic arena. If one views the film’s inversion of the gendered ideological relations in the East-West romance as a function of its screwball elements, however, the feminization of the West turns what might otherwise read as a fearful fantasy of failure into an asset. In this comic genre that was popular in the 1930s and ‘40s, zany females shatter the rationalistic worldview, social isolation, and work ethos of the men they set out to seduce and, as a rule, come out on top (Gehring 2002, 55). In a world that is seen as irrational, screwball heroines, who are characterized by spontaneity and their ability to regard every obstacle as a fun challenge, fare better than their principled and rigid male counterparts—a description that fits both McNamara and Otto. Moreover, the irrationality of the world that was earlier viewed in existential terms is here connected to both

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the political situation and the internationalization of capitalism. The dizzying plot reversals and staccato dialogue convey the speeding up of capitalist processes of accumulation and circulation under the pressure of the cold war race for economic and military supremacy. The beginning of the “time-space compression” David Harvey diagnosed as a hallmark of globalization makes palpable the strain under which these processes put the human organism.28 The gendered inversion of international power relations in the Scarlett-Otto romance, then, signals the ascendancy of consumerism as the dominant ideology of the capitalist West and now the world and embraces irrationality as an appropriate response to a world careening out of control. Unlike the historical screwball comedy, however, that acknowledged a shift in modern gender roles and relations by centering on working girls and women in search of companionate relationships with men, One, Two, Three insists on linking women with the domestic sphere. While one might regard this linkage as mirroring and affirming the conservative gender policies of liberal democracies in the postwar era, I propose a more critical reading: the film constructs woman as a sign of privatized labor in the home (Mrs. McNamara and her cleaning woman) as well as in the realm of pink-collar wage labor (Ingeborg) and thereby brings into view the proliferation of deregulated, exploitive working conditions that were first legitimized by their embeddedness in so-called “private” relations and the sexual division of labor in the bourgeois home. The film was a critical and commercial success in America upon its release (see Kael 1965, 150–55).29 One factor in its popularity might be attributed to the modern advertising methods employed in the film’s marketing campaign, methods that have become a staple in the blockbuster-oriented advertising techniques since the 1980s but were still so uncommon at the time as to draw critical commentary. In what has become known as co-branding, The Coca-Cola Company promoted the film on “truck banners, supermarket ads, contests, and window displays,” prompting the influential movie critic Pauline Kael to sneer: “The target has been incorporated in the profits of the joke” (Kael 1965, 154–55). Today, such co-branding has become entirely customary, especially with fast-food chains, and while all Hollywood movies (and television) derive revenue from more or less conspicuous product placement arrangements, some movies have become full-length commercials for the brand(s) they build, as discussed by Naomi Klein in No Logo (2001).30 Yet Klein also warns against the kind of overgeneralization to which Kael falls prey when she suspects Wilder of “being closer to his Coca-Colonizer than one might have

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expected” (Kael 1965, 155) and trading in critical bite for a fistful of dollars. Such criticism assumes that filmmaking before the age of corporate sponsorship and investment enjoyed artistic autonomy, an assertion that just cannot be supported in an industry that abided by strict political and moral self-censorship and imposed heavy vetting procedures on its products with an eye to profitability. The old studio system under which Wilder began his career scarcely fostered artistic freedom, and the ascendancy of independent filmmaking is commonly dated to the dissolution of that system after the antitrust ruling of 1948. It allowed Wilder to terminate his contract with Paramount and sign on with the independent Mirisch Company under more advantageous conditions.31 It was most likely the Mirisch brothers who brokered the marketing campaign with the soft drink company. Rather than deplore the loss of a mythical artistic autonomy and the rise of corporate sponsorship and censorship, it is more accurate to consider the operation of multiple censorship codes, including the overt ideological and moral censorship laid down in the Hays Code, the commercial censorship imposed by the vetting process, and the corporate censorship that has come under increasing critical scrutiny recently (if mostly in regard to television). As my reading of Wilder’s satire aimed to show, it managed to incite social reflection or political critique despite Coca-Cola’s effort to co-opt it. As movies, music, games, literature, and musicals are increasingly produced and distributed by transnational media conglomerates, Wilder’s negotiated independence provides a more desirable model for those working in today’s post-Fordist creative industries than the mythical ideal of autonomy.

W E N D E Romanc es and Po s ts o c ial is t Integ r ati on The public discourse about the relationship between East and West Germany after the sudden fall of the wall was rife with heterosexual imagery that provided intense symbolic fuel for the reunification of the long-divided states less than a year later. In political cartoons and editorials, East Germany was portrayed as Sleeping Beauty that capitalism had now kissed awake, as an Eliza Doolittle ready to be groomed by an experienced and caring Henry Higgins, and as a virgin bride ready to be made fertile by financial investments (see Morrison 1992). This discourse, which represented the East as woman while gendering the West as masculine, thereby presupposed an unequal division of power in the couple, but it nevertheless postulated a mutual

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desire between the two. It gave symbolic force to Willy Brandt’s assertion “Es wächst zusammen, was zusammen gehört,” as well as the Leipzig demonstrators’ chant “Wir sind ein Volk!”32 Within a matter of months, however, this symbolic tempest of desire lost its singular direction toward unification and its positive, romantic connotations. Revelations about the extent of police surveillance and collaboration as well as the collapse of the socialist state’s economy following the currency reform on July 1, 1990, produced a set of derisive allegorical representations of socialism as wallflower, gold-digger, and whore. The bond envisioned within such a discourse could only be modeled on a bourgeois marriage contract in which the wife willingly consents to henceforth abdicate all rights rather than a commitment ceremony between equals. The gendered imagery of reunification thus served to legitimate the actual legal conditions of the GDR’s integration into the existing constitutional framework of the Federal Republic of Germany as well as the catastrophic economic policies that preceded unification and ensured the five new states enduring dependency on West German and international capital.33 Imagining the East as a bride served to incite long-term commitments to and financial investments in a partner with few technological and financial assets but with a highly trained and cheap workforce. The Western fantasy of being socialism’s love object recast the entire socialist project and its ideal of equality as a history of material lack and consumerist longings, thereby eliding the possibility of alternative modernities to that delivered by neoliberal globalization. In addition, the metaphor of marriage both glossed over and naturalized the geographical and social disparities between Eastern and Western states as well as the downward mobility of many women in the erstwhile GDR through a discourse of mutual love, support, and unity. The premise of reciprocity makes most of these romances appear more benign and respectful of the socialist love object than the aggressive confrontations in the feuilleton or on televised talk shows. But the persistent representation of the GDR as either feminine or emasculated in the romances, I argue, also presupposes the devaluation and revision of socialist history and experiences. The domineering and conciliatory modes of discourse thus work hand in glove. The numerous love stories that have been produced since 1990 stage East-West encounters as expressions of each partner’s need for the other, despite seeming mismatched at first. In most cases, the economic ebullience of the West and disarray of the East result in a gendered schema of masculine Western and feminine Eastern partners compounded by class differences. In Marx & Coca-Cola (1991), a well-to-do Hamburg realtor

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falls for a proud farmer in Mecklenburg. And in Detlev Buck’s Liebe Deine Nächste (1998), set on the construction site of Potsdamer Platz complex with its corporate architecture, a callous neoliberal shark is reformed through the love of an altruistic Eastern European Salvation Army maiden. The initial spark of desire is commonly followed by a difficult courtship sustained by the Western man’s tenaciousness, but he must also learn to temper his arrogance and recognize that his love object may measure his attractiveness by more than the size of his wallet. The recognition that he is in fact spiritually empty often sparks his longing for her, who will teach him how to become a better, less materialistic human being. The inner strength of the autonomous and idealistic woman from the East corresponds to her physical beauty, even though the stories usually introduce her in a work situation where she appears as bossy, grimy, and unfeminine. Apart from masculine aggression and arrogance, the main obstacle to romantic union is female pride. As he must learn that his money will not just buy her, so she must cease to suspect him of controlling and destroying her uncompromisingly idealist (but also politically doctrinaire and materially impoverished) existence. Despite their difference, both come to appreciate the ways in which they complement and enrich each other materially and spiritually. Most of these romances, in short, offer an utterly revisionist account of the cause of the socialist state’s demise and the conditions of its transformation, the violent upheavals in the wake of the Wende, and the permanent socioeconomic consequences of global capitalism, especially for women. Many scholars have discussed the genre of the East-West romance as allegories of national unification (Hake 2002, Taberner 2000, Naughton 2002, Berghahn 2005, Cooke 2005) with a distinctly Western slant. Yet the larger symbolic significance of the wall for the cold war binary and of its toppling for what George H. W. Bush called the “New World Order” also allows for a reading of these films as globalist imaginations in the tradition of Ninotchka and One, Two, Three. More specifically, The Promise calls for a reading as a European fantasy that departs from the extant scholarship. Stuart Taberner, who has provided the most thorough analysis of the film so far, notes the international production context and adoption of Hollywood techniques but does not connect these aspects to the narrative. Yet The Promise embeds its German romance in a cold war European political topography at the center of which was the Prague Spring’s short-lived experiment with democratic socialism. It grapples with the impact of resurging German nationalism on the French-German relationship that was long the linchpin of European transnational community. And

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finally, it envisions a cosmopolitan European culture as embracing both American pop influences and modernist high art as antidote to a parochial, ethnic notion of national identity. The Promise, whose script was cowritten by novelist Peter Schneider and New German Cinema auteur Margarethe von Trotta, arguably presents the most complex and searching variant of the East-West romance.34 While several critics have noted the film’s distinct Western bias (Cooke, Taberner), it does not partake in the Western triumphalism that underwrites the narrative taming of socialist shrews. Rather it typifies the ambivalence with which many Western leftists regarded East Germans: as people permanently damaged by an authoritarian regime and embodiments of a lost utopia but also courageous resisters. The film’s sexual economy draws less on conventional national allegory or the familiar imperialist tropes than on the socialist literary and cinematic tradition. Its two main female characters evoke the socialist Neuer Mensch of the division romances who chooses not to succumb to the temptation of capitalism and its imaginary link to the fascist, sexual body. It evidences disillusionment with both socialism and capitalism but also retains a hope for future democratic transformation. Made by one of West Germany’s most prominent women directors, it predicates the vision of a democratic future on postpatriarchal gender relations. Commentators have so far neglected that The Promise interweaves the story of two heterosexual couples and thereby already complicates the simple schema of most films in this genre. Its main plotline traces the trials and tribulations of Konrad and Sophie, who attempt to escape from East Berlin together. While she makes it to her aunt in West Berlin, her boyfriend, due to bad luck and perhaps ambivalence, stays behind. Although he tells her that he will join her later, he never delivers on his promise. Both continue to pine for the other and even have a child who grows up with his mother. After 1968, they give up on the idea of a shared future and enter other relationships but meet again on the night of November 9, 1989. Whereas Konrad and Sophie’s deferred romance thus hinges on the East-West division and serves to compare and contrast the two systems, the story of Barbara, Konrad’s sister, and her devoted lover Harald dramatizes political contradictions within the GDR from the point of view of the peace and democratic opposition movements. Barbara, who fervently believes in socialism, eventually comes into conflict with the socialist state. She uses her position as a pastor to provide a forum for political debate and critique; her political convictions help her to endure surveillance and harassment by the secret police

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(Staatssicherheitspolizei, Stasi for short). While Harald shares her beliefs, he lacks her strength and is eventually coerced into leaving the GDR. Desperate and disoriented, he is killed during an attempt to cross the border dividing West and East Berlin. While Harald’s death reveals that this second love story is also structured around the East/ West axis, it reverses the allegedly natural flow of desire from East to West: significantly, Harald is dropped off in West Berlin against his will, and he dies trying to enter the GDR. In addition, Barbara insists that a critique of the socialist state must not be equated with a desire for the West. The film is subtle enough to show, too, that even though Barbara and Harald do not view their dissent with the socialist ruling party and their commitment to socialism as incommensurable, the socialist state could only conceptualize political dissent as betrayal punishable by expatriation.35 The diverging paths of Sophie and Konrad illustrate a reading of GDR history that is consistent with a Western point of view: while Sophie, a strong, unconventional, emotionally mature, and incorruptible woman, flourishes in the West, Konrad, an intellectually brilliant but otherwise meek character, loses his dignity through successive compromises with the repressive state. Initially, his loss of Sophie is counterbalanced by his professional achievements and his parents’ approval. His relatively privileged position as a scientist awards him the illusion of political neutrality, as he can at first afford to refuse collaboration with the state and its secret police. Later on, however, his desire to see his West German son, along with his sister’s oppositional activities, makes him susceptible to political blackmail. About to lose visiting rights for his son, he assaults the Stasi officer who has been manipulating him. As a result, and despite his long years of cooperation with the state, Konrad loses all of his privileges and spends years alone in a menial job as a mechanic. He is portrayed as indecisive, timid, and adept at shrinking down his political dreams and aspirations to mere concerns about his personal career and safety. Having accommodated himself to wanting that which the state offers him and not more, he does not know how to fight when he falls out of favor. While his sister embodies the aspirations and dreams of socialism, Konrad personifies its pragmatic, “real existing” dimension, whose deficiencies have shaped his personality and expectations. His collaboration with the Stasi, his lack of civil courage as evidenced by his faltering support for his friends in the opposition movement, and his cowardly refusal to tell his daughter about life in the West because he does not want her to be envious or ask questions further deform his already weak character. While Sophie is sad because she misses

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Konrad, Konrad is pitiful because socialism has warped his life. Even as the film’s closure hinges on the lovers’ reunion, the suggestion that Konrad is irreparably damaged casts a shadow over their future prospects. On November 9, 1989, when the two meet again in the midst of jubilant crowds, their faces show grief, regret, bewilderment, and disbelief, not euphoria or even curiosity. The comment of one melancholy woman in the street who tells a reporter that a bird caged too long can no longer fly seems to sum up their past and their future. Made four years after reunification, the film portrays their union as unpremeditated, belated, and infused with doubts rather than hope. Their future together is uncertain and burdened by the disappointments of the past. Konrad’s moral disintegration and opportunism echo the Western perception of East Germans as damaged, totalitarian subjects not unlike Nazis, a comparison that was key to the moral devaluation of the GDR in the Western public sphere. If Konrad alone stood for the GDR, I would concur with Stuart Taberner who reads Konrad’s singular act of rebellion (his attack of the Stasi agent) as symbolic of “a rather uncharacteristic—and belated—gesture of almost immature defiance by an otherwise passive GDR population” (Taberner 2000, 165). However, the film juxtaposes Konrad’s deformation with the moral courage and civil disobedience of Barbara and Harald and thus reminds spectators that the authoritarian socialist state (unlike the Nazi government) was toppled because of its own internal contradictions. The Promise thus honors the political engagement of many GDR citizens and offers figures of identification and validation to many East German spectators. The parallelism that the film constructs between the two strong female characters thus modifies the devaluation of the GDR conveyed by the central romance. That parallelism is most pronounced in both women’s responses to the Soviet quashing of the Prague Spring, which they spontaneously protest: Sophie by standing in front of a tank and Barbara by publicly demonstrating in East Berlin. Each transforms that protest into a long-term commitment to democratic reform: Sophie, though trained in the fashion industry, is shown working as a writer and a tour guide who provides critical narratives on national history. Barbara pledges to stay and work toward democratic reforms within the East German state by becoming active in the peace movement and founding one of the discussion circles that later feed the grassroots democracy movement. The film thereby constructs the democratizing impulse of 1968 across the iron curtain and locates its utopian center in Prague (not Paris), from where it radiates out into the West German left and its criticism of lingering Nazi

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legacies and into the citizens’ initiatives in East Germany. Sophie’s enthusiasm for Alexander Dubczek’s Czechoslovakia, her plan to move to Prague with Konrad prior to the crackdown, the consummation of their romance in a Prague hotel, and the conception of their son Alexander there are highly significant for the ideological map of cold war Europe that the film composes. The women thus mark the democratic deficit of their respective societies, prompting Daniela Berghahn to view the film as a “history lesson on the shortcomings of both East and West German societies” (Berghahn 2005, 226). The two women’s rejection of Western materialism recalls the socialist cinematic and literary tradition of division romances, whose moral turned on deliberately “choosing the more difficult path”: the words with which Barbara explains her refusal to take the state’s offer of an exit visa, hark back to Christa Wolf’s Divided Heaven.36 But Sophie, too, might be viewed in this tradition, as her turn away from fashion toward more intellectual pursuits signals her growing alienation from the hedonist pleasures that may have initially drawn her westward, and inserts a crucial distance between democracy and capitalism.37 That both women lose their love as the price of their political commitment—even though less as a conscious choice than as a result of circumstances—is consistent with this GDR genre, which The Promise adapts into a critique of the socialist state from the vantage point of democratic socialism. Democratic socialism is evoked not merely in relation to the Czechoslovakian opposition and its activist European echoes but also informs interpersonal relations in Sophie’s household. Indeed, these might be a more important index of Sophie’s politics and aspirations than her work, which, she tells Konrad dismissively, is just “a job” (Schneider and von Trotta 1994, 90). She raises her son together with her French live-in boyfriend Gérard, a journalist for Le Monde, who also does the cooking. Her son Alexander grows up speaking German and French, surrounded by books, paintings, and furniture that reference international modernism and European high culture, while seemingly never taking off his American baseball jacket and cap. The cordial warmth, curiosity, and openness that Gérard exhibits upon first meeting Konrad bespeaks a consensual but noninstitutionalized relationship with Sophie that is free from jealousy, sexual property claims, or male dominance. Relations between the generations, genders, and cultures are depicted as civilized and cosmopolitan; in short, Sophie’s family paints an idealized picture of European community organized around the French-German couple and on friendly terms with American pop culture as part of a larger cultural

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internationalism.38 This idyll is threatened and ultimately disintegrates as a result of Sophie’s persistent feelings for Konrad; Gérard moves out, leaving her alone with Alexander. The negative implications of this turn of events are further underscored by the stark contrast the film constructs between Sophie’s and Konrad’s homes. Konrad’s utterly conventional nuclear family duplicates traditional, patriarchal role divisions: he is married, and although his wife is, like him, a physicist, she does the housework and cooks traditional German dishes. Their overstuffed apartment shows a family closed in on itself rather than open to the world outside. Yet the spatial constriction does not translate into human intimacy: Konrad’s wife is jealous of his feelings for Sophie and Alexander; her complaints about his emotional distance evokes stereotypical gender behavior; and both parents patronizingly shield their daughter from knowledge of the world rather than expose her to it. Relations between the spouses and between parents and children are shown to be built on lies, omissions, and mistrust. The parochial oppressiveness of Konrad’s domestic sphere, which attests to his democratic deficiency, is thus the direct opposite of the cosmopolitan, postpatriarchal spirit prevailing in Sophie’s home. The pull of national desire that connects these two during their twenty-eight years of separation is not only exposed as increasingly irrational and destructive, but it also would not bode well for the future of Europe if Sophie and Konrad were the allegorical center of that project. The undemocratic East German lover as European home wrecker conjures up fears on the part of Germany’s European neighbors about the return of an enlarged nation with a history of imperial ambitions and unilateralism in its midst.39 The presence of Alexander in his perennial baseball jacket and cap at the scene of their final encounter might remind spectators that he, the bilingual, internationalized love child of the Prague Spring, is the bearer of the future and that the age of nationalism, which his parents embody, is past. Yet there is a deep ambiguity and uneasiness coded into this moment, as it is his agency that has brought them back together, and as the film’s closing image, a close-up and slow dissolve of Sophie’s mournful face emulates Konrad’s gaze, not Alexander’s. Given that the film is commonly discussed as evidencing a Western point of view—and I would concur with that—this final narrative image, that is, the image in which the narrative reaches its conclusion, seems peculiar. The Promise, a German-French-Swiss coproduction supported by the EURIMAGES program, was shot in 1993 at the studios of the erstwhile Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) in Potsdam-Babelsberg near Berlin. One might say that this was a fitting site given

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the film’s focus on GDR history and evocation of an East German gaze in its final shot. Indeed, the post-wall history of that site, named Studio Babelsberg today, provides an added layer of meaning to the film and its closing narrative image. After a period of receivership by the Treuhand, an agency created to oversee the privatization of East Germany’s nationalized industries, it was sold to CIP, a French investment company and subsidiary of the Compagnie Generale des Eaux Corporation (subsequently Vivendi-Universal) with ties to the French film and television industry.40 The man who had brokered this deal and served as the artistic director of the renamed Studio Babelsberg from 1994 to ’97 was Volker Schlöndorff, whose name, like von Trotta’s (to whom he was married), is connected with New German Cinema. Schlöndorff’s vision for the site was to turn it into the center of large-scale European film production that would rival Hollywood, replete with a European film academy. Although this vision has not been attained, the facilities have been modernized and now count among the most advanced in Europe. CIP was contractually committed to invest 410 million DM into the site by 2002; in addition, the state of Brandenburg as well as the federal government heavily subsidized this reconstruction, and CIP was also joined by two large private investors in the media business: the Bertelsmann Group (Europe’s largest media conglomerate and the second largest worldwide) and KirchMedia, which until its bankruptcy in 2002 was, like Bertelsmann, a powerful player in the European television business. The Bertelsmann-owned RTL, a large, transnational television broadcaster, was the most visible of the numerous media companies that have, since the 1990s, relocated to the vicinity of Babelsberg. Today, Studio Babelsberg largely thrives on the theme park that capitalizes on the site’s illustrious history going back to the days of UFA and on the numerous multimedia and postproduction services in demand by foreign film productions. The most lucrative segment of Studio Babelsberg today is not film but television production, particularly soaps and talk shows.41 In hindsight, The Promise was part of the smaller-thanexpected crop of films shot at the studio when it attempted to compete with Hollywood, contributing perhaps to what Taberner calls its “wholesale adoption of Hollywood techniques,” such as the romantic two-shot (Taberner 2000, 162). In addition, its conscious creation of a European identity in its character constellation, political mapping, and style, fit in well with Schlöndorff’s vision. Nevertheless, The Promise revealed its art house cinema roots in its audience appeal: it captured only a fraction of the market compared with the much more successful unification comedies from Go Trabi Go (1990) to Good Bye,

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Lenin! (2003), even though it did better in the long run in international distribution than some of these comedies.42 Yet despite this limited appeal (it has reached less than 204 thousand viewers in the year it was released), it still “managed to sell more tickets than just about all prominent eastern unification films combined” (Naughton 2002, 238, original emphasis).43 DEFA’s privatization and transformation in Studio Babelsberg entailed not just the success story of—briefly— European film, and ultimately transnational television, but also the dismantling of the East German film industry. Only about half of the cinemas in the new German states survived privatization, while most of the rest were modernized and turned into multiplexes showing largely American blockbusters. The integration of East German television into the existing federal television system has meant the creation of a public broadcaster responsible for the region (MDR and ORB now merged into RBB) but has nevertheless led to a “sharp drop in eastern content and eastern-based production” (Naughton 2002, 87). These developments have led to the shrinking of public fora in which East German filmmakers could voice their considerably less romantic, sentimental, or nostalgic perspective on East Germans’ grappling with the socialist past and encounter with the Western market economy.44 One might thus read the blurring final image of The Promise as emblematic of Eastern Germans’ loss of access to the national, European, and global screen, even as that screen romanticizes their desire for national unity (Hake 2002, 189) and simultaneously marks that desire as political threat.

The Creative Cl ass in Big Brother’s House Reunification romances like The Promise dramatize the difficult incorporation of socialist history into the national imagination, but they also provide important building blocks for Germans’ global imaginations. The portrayal of East Germans’ trials and tribulations as they encounter Western capitalism prefigures the globalization shock experienced by many Germans as the 1990s wore on. Deindustrialization and mass unemployment, the widening gap between rich and poor, the shrinking of the public sector and erosion of the social net, male ressentiment and xenophobic violence—these were first confronted by postsocialist European societies undergoing neoliberal “shock therapy,” recommended by Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs to jumpstart centralized, planned economies into the “free market” system. But a decade and a half after the collapse of the communist world, the era of social democratic welfare states in Europe appears to be nearing its end

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as well, narrowing the gap between Western and Eastern Europeans now joined in a common economic and political entity, the European Union. The EU has become the lens through which Europeans view globalization. The dream of philosophers like Jürgen Habermas of forging the EU into a political instrument of democratic control acting in the interest of the common good rather than corporate profits, however, is threatened by the pervasive vilification of calcified, “fat,” and inefficient bureaucracies as impediments to economic growth, private enterprise, and creative industry. Sociologist Richard Sennett, director of the London School of Economics, has noted the fusion of the New Left’s erstwhile critique of bureaucratic behemoths with conservatives’ dream of freeing capitalism from government meddling. This political convergence marginalizes a leftist vision of European democracy as equally stuck in the past as those who wish to resuscitate the nation as a guardian of cultural purity, ethnic homogeneity, and patriarchal order. During the last decade, Germans’ global imaginations have become increasingly embedded in inter-European relations rather than being emplotted in the romance between Germans and Americans or East and West Germans. Moreover, the crafting of Europe has shifted from a largely administrative and economic undertaking to one more clearly cast in political, popular, and ideological terms. Whether neoliberal think tankers devise a European internal security and military defense strategy that disregards the civil rights of its own population and the national sovereignty of others, or leftist intellectuals invoke Enlightenment traditions as guarantors of democracy and peace, they must mobilize popular feelings and commitments by arousing fear or empathy. The debates about Turkey’s accession to the EU, the political tensions with the Bush administration over the war against Iraq, and finally the referenda about a European constitution have all raised the question of how to envision Europe’s internal composition and external relations not just as a set of decisions made by political elites, but as a project requiring mass identification and consensus. Cinema contributes to the popular, ideological project of imagining Europe by asking what kind of transnational community is desirable and possible. I want to conclude this chapter by examining how the contemporary European cinema dramatizes the increasingly tenuous relationship between capitalism and democracy in Europe, how it allegorizes a European sexual economy, and how its aesthetic language reflects an industry environment marked by transnational cooperation and distribution as well as media convergence.

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The cultural project of imagining European unity has accompanied the construction of the European common market and political institutions, which together seek to establish the EU as a major global power. Even though they no longer explicitly reference America as icon of the global, cinematic fantasies of Europe must contend with the dominance of Hollywood movies in the European audiovisual market. In Germany, which has one of the five largest film industries in Europe, about three out of four films shown in cinemas during the 1990s were American movies. Even in the most protectionist French market American imports still make up about two thirds of new releases per year. In order to compete, national governments and increasingly European funding agencies seek to strengthen the infrastructure for the (co)production, distribution, and marketing of homegrown films. Theater chains like Europa Cinemas dedicate themselves to showing a high proportion of indigenous productions. European film festivals and prizes seek to identify and reward movies with critical and popular appeal beyond narrowly national confines. Databanks like that created by the Centre d’Information Audiovisuelle in Strasbourg help producers and directors identify public and private funding sources and have facilitated numerous international coproductions. The European Film Academy brings together students from different European countries and furthers especially German-French collaboration. The European Commission has initiated the MEDIA Plus Program to further the distribution of national and European films in Europe and strengthen the competitiveness of European film.45 The expectation of commercial competitiveness clearly creates structural incentives for international coproductions that are reflected in multinational characters, casts, and plots. Yet such cooperations also provoke the scorn of critics who universally deride the so-called “Europudding,” a blend of cultural ingredients whose sugary superficiality is as pleasing to the cash register as it is aesthetically unhealthy. The very idea of a cultural mixture does not easily rhyme with European traditions of conceptualizing culture as essentially ethnic, homogenous, and distinct, and syncretism as contamination or degeneration.46 Of these films produced under these conditions, Europudding is by no means the most intellectually probing or aesthetically innovative, but its effort to connect the thematic focus on Europe as a popular dream rather than an elite, bureaucratic project, with its adoption of popular generic elements and visual idioms, arguably typifies the recent shift to kindling broad grassroots support for a process long conducted by experts behind closed doors. One might justifiably accuse the film of settling too quickly and easily the problems around

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European integration that it raises, such as national stereotyping, racism, and homophobia. Moreover, while it foregrounds cultural diversity, it neglects the question of inequality usually connected to that through matters like the EU expansion, the prospect of Turkish accession, and the rights of foreign residents within the EU. While many films can be said to dramatize interactions among Europeans or treat aspects of globalization, Europudding explicitly thematizes the trials, tribulations, and prospects of the young generation growing up now that forges the European community. It connects the scales of the local/ethnic, national, and international through the experiences of its multinational protagonists. More implicitly, it engages with the question of whether the EU should function as an enforcer of neoliberal economic policies or as a political, democratic instrument through which the power of capital can be constrained and regulated in the interest of the people. And finally, it articulates the creative, popular construction of Europe in the language of romance and family. For those reasons, I find this seemingly slight movie worth a closer look to complete this chapter on cinema’s contribution to imagining and desiring the global. Europudding defines the project of creating Europe as culturally enriching and economically beneficial—in short, as desirable. Sexual desire and relations become the symbolic register in which the tensions between national and transnational community and the anxieties surrounding the perceived erosion of national sovereignty are most clearly spelled out. Part coming-of-age-story, part romantic comedy, Europudding dramatizes the (promiscuous) desire for international community in tension with more traditional (monogamous) forms of organizing sexuality. Different forms of erotic affiliation are thus mapped over national responsibilities and international commitments respectively. Moreover, the film’s juxtaposition of people’s creativity versus bureaucratic regulation as key to the creation of Europe might be seen to join the neoliberal chorus about the damaging role of government as an impediment to market forces and to perniciously synchronize capitalist interests with the heartfelt desire of the people. Yet its final image also sustains a more benign, even utopian, reading of the European project. Like the two films I previously analyzed in this chapter, Europudding cannot completely contain or resolve the epochal contradiction between capitalism and democracy that it raises, and therein lies its promise. Europudding chronicles the adventures of the French economics student Xavier in Barcelona during his year abroad. The film tries to

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portray Europe as both diverse and unified by first collecting a motley crew of Europeans in one apartment and showing how they get along despite occasional tiffs and tight spots and second by contrasting this improvisational process with the bureaucratic stuffiness of official European institutions like the EU headquarter in Brussels or the Erasmus Program that organizes international student exchanges in Europe. By portraying the European Union as a popular project, French director Cédric Klapisch produces something like a movielength commercial for it. Against the backdrop of the beautiful and hip city of Barcelona with its quirky architectural landmarks, Xavier and his roommates mature from national subjects to European citizens. While the rather stodgy and repressed Xavier repeatedly uses the word “messy” to describe life in the apartment, his roommates Wendy (from Britain), Lars (Denmark), Tobias (Germany), Alessandro (Italy), Soledad (Spain), and Isabelle (Belgium) are remarkably uniform in terms of age, class, work habits, and world view, and their squabbles usually concern little more than how to divide shelf space in the fridge. Perhaps not remarkably for a film made in 2002, there are no roommates from Central or Eastern Europe. (Those ten states joined in 2004.) More questionable is the absence of immigrants or ethnic minorities from the group. Only once a black student is shown who declares that he sees no contradiction between his Gambian background, Spanish nationality, and Catalan identity. Analogous to the American hyphenation of local/ethnic and national identities, national and ethnic identities are conceptualized as complimentary to the larger European affiliation and should not be subsumed or assimilated: “It’s a question of respect,” according to the Gambian-Spanish student (Klapisch 2002). The narrative conventions the film borrows in order to mediate questions of tolerance, I maintain, derive from reality television, specifically the genre of so-called gamedocs or “surveillance entertainment” (Nick Couldry 2004) exemplified by shows like American MTV’s The Real World (premiered in 1992) and Big Brother, which premiered in the Netherlands in 1999 and whose format has subsequently been sold worldwide by the Dutch corporation Endemol (Hill 2005, 22).47 These shows and their sequels and spin-offs, which since the 1990s have become enormously popular in Europe and the United States, usually assemble a diverse array of individuals in a house where they are put under constant camera and microphone surveillance. Edited versions are broadcast daily on TV, but many of them also broadcast as livestream footage over the Internet. While there are variants involving celebrities, the shows’ conceit is that

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players are “ordinary people” who do not act but are “themselves”—a distinction that has generated much debate among viewers, fans, and scholars. TV viewers vote at regular intervals to evict participants (by phone or Internet) until a final winner is declared and rewarded with a cash prize. Despite the claim to portray a slice of “real life,” these shows have quickly generated a rather ritualized dramaturgy, a set of recognizable generic features, as well as a whole slate of stereotypes. For instance, Stuart Fischoff sums up the cast of American Big Brother as follows: “You have the very smart, enterprising Chinese person, you have the rather vapid white beauty queen, you have the black woman who is the strong mother type and you have the guy with one leg who is kind of brittle. You have the Midwest ‘Aw shucks’ kind of plumb Pillsbury dough boy father figure, you have the exotic dancer and you have the angry black man” (quoted in Darling 2004, 42). The cast of Europudding is similarly unafraid of national and sexual stereotypes, as it consists of a bossy German, a shy English rose, a messy Italian, a passionate Spaniard, and a fairly predatory lesbian who is also Belgian. Most pertinent for the discussion here is the way in which gamedocs dramatize social difference and conflict. Scholars have noted that producers assemble their cast and advertise it to prospective viewers by underscoring the potential for conflict, for instance, by pairing off an openly gay cast member with a declared homophobe (LeBesco 2004, 283) or a white rural conservative with a black urban liberal (Kraszewski 2004, 188). “The seasons [of The Real World] deal with . . . initial events of racism by having an urban black teach the rural white about black culture over the course of several episodes. . . . The serial narrative always follows how the pedagogical nature of these relationships turns into friendships, in the process amending the rural American’s personal views on racism,” observes Kraszewski (Kraszewski 2004, 189). He rightly criticizes how racism, displaced onto city-country differences, is safely contained and solved as a problem of individual attitudes, rather than being portrayed as systemic as well as subconscious. The multinational shared house that Klapisch chose as the setting for his European comedy resembles the “surveillance entertainment” premise of closely observing a social experiment yet leaves out the competitive element and viewer involvement. However, its focus on and treatment of national and sexual differences and potential conflicts is clearly indebted to the gamedoc format. The film winkingly acknowledges this affinity when three of the men, despondent over love troubles, end up watching MTV for hours—the station that produced the youth-oriented The Real World, the longest-running

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surveillance entertainment. Sprawling on their couch, their eyes seem fixed on the other side of the very screen we are watching. Difficulties arising from intolerance occur twice and are constructed as parallel. Significantly, both national and sexual intolerance are attributed to (the notoriously Euro-skeptical) British characters. Wendy’s visiting brother William makes a series of poor jokes based on national stereotypes. When William points out Tobias’s diligence and tidiness as typically German traits and attributes them to Hitler, the youth is scolded and told that he must either reform or leave. Since Tobias is undoubtedly the most organized, bossy, and neat roommate, the film seems to suggest that stereotypes are true, but since they offend others one must not say them to their face. Wendy, in turn, is distressed when she finds out that the new Belgian roommate Isabelle is a lesbian, prompting Xavier’s pedagogical effort to help her reinterpret her homophobia as curiosity. Yet in this respect, too, the film’s tolerant message is half-baked: while it attempts to depict lesbianism as “normal” and useful to heterosexual men (Xavier, for one, benefits from Isabelle’s instruction in how to seduce a woman), owing in part to its liberal politics and perhaps in part to the legal normalization of homosexual relationships in Europe, it also continues, however, in the French comic tradition of representing homosexuality as farcical as well as including a fair bit of male fantasizing about lesbian sex.48 Only on these terms, then, can sexual difference be integrated into the celebration of diversity. The film’s charming insistence on the compatibility of different kinds of pleasures and its civilized expectation that marriages can survive affairs or even improve because of them are, of course, the hallmarks of French romantic comedy. What makes Europudding interesting is how its modulation of sexuality clearly spells out the orchestration of national differences and transnational desire. Xavier, Isabelle, Lars, and Wendy all engage in fun and passionate affairs during their year abroad with people whom they do not love. While Xavier’s playmate is beautiful but boring and (in his words) racist, Wendy is attracted to an American she finds stupid but wild in bed. The characters’ erotic adventures are contrasted with the responsibility associated with primary relationships back home where parents and partners are demanding, nagging, clingy, and, not accidentally, female. Yet the light-hearted, promiscuous, “European” desire enacted in the affairs of these international men (and the lesbian) is also shown to make those graver, “national” bonds more bearable. The film’s depiction of a transnational order that hinges on the ability to separate sex and responsibility, and manage both, draws on the masculine stereotype of

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the married man who suavely and discreetly juggles wife and mistress. The national mode of organizing intimate relations as exclusive, which the film suggests must be abandoned, is negatively charged through its association with the female stereotypes of the nagging mother and the shrewish, needy girlfriend. Sexual morality is still decidedly double: as Wendy’s affair illustrates, women’s cheating creates mainly the problem of preserving her man’s honor—thus, the roommate’s efforts to prevent her boyfriend from discovering her in bed with the American is the dramatic climax of the film—while the visit of Lars’s Danish girlfriend and toddler generates no comparable shenanigans. Men’s erotic adventures are treated as enriching experiences, and their ability to distinguish between primary and secondary relationships guarantees that the former are not threatened by the latter. The film thus builds gender stereotypes and the sexual double standard right into its notion of European community, which—notwithstanding the seemingly unconventional celebration of promiscuity—ends up looking rather conventional in terms of men’s and women’s roles within it. When the fridge and the bathtub in the Spanish apartment become too messy, it is the women who usually clean up, while the men occasionally help. The film’s refusal to challenge the bourgeois gender order or sexual morality signals its larger failure to take seriously the contemporary anxieties caused by the transformation of national sovereignty through the EU. Europudding translates and derides these anxieties as women’s old-fashioned expectation of fidelity and monogamy, which ensures that the money stays in the family/nation, rather than go to the support of mistresses or their children.49 Clearly, sovereignty, the ability to act in the interest of the nation, is being transferred to the supranational level in the European Union where these interests are being weighed against the interests of other members or of the union as a whole. The debate preceding and following the European constitution 2004–5 demonstrates that this transformation constitutes not just a loss but might be conceptualized in positive terms as an attempt to shape the EU into an institution that can control globalization on behalf of those whom the nation-state recognized as sovereign: the citizens. Europudding, however, does not attempt to grapple with the new quality of desires and relationships among Europeans, which should not be so easily dismissed as fleeting, secondary, and ultimately irrelevant to the nation. Why not a French comedy that seriously explores the pain and promise of an international threesome, for instance? Why not postulate the relations among the European roommates as primary and trace out how their commitments affect

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the sexual economies at home? In spite of its assertion of a natural desire figured as international and promiscuous, Europudding expects European citizens to sit patiently at home like cheated wives whose husbands fool around in Brussels. The material, political, and philosophical issue at stake in popular anxieties regarding the transformation of sovereignty is the EU’s role as a potential mediator between European people and global capitalism in a situation in which the nation-state is losing its ability to regulate that relationship. From the perspective of citizens, then, the transfer of sovereignty to the EU might be a promising attempt to forge a new compromise between democracy and capitalism. The film dramatizes this tension in the conflict between the roommates and the landlord, a short fat man right out of a George Grosz cartoon, who shows up unannounced with another prospective tenant in tow, finds the condition of the apartment unsatisfactory, chooses the stodgy Xavier as spokesman of the group, and willy-nilly imposes a hefty rent increase. The owner’s tyrannical disregard of the roommates’ rights or existing contract evokes the behavior of transnational corporations in their dealings with governments and workers, especially since the apartment is not portrayed as a purely domestic space but serves as the students’ sphere of production where they do their research and write term papers. The landlord’s bullying is clearly facilitated by the existence of other, more cooperative clients as well as the general scarcity of apartments that has driven rents to exorbitant heights in the entire region. And just as the EU has attempted to ensure the continuation of prosperity by expansion, the roommates decide to combat rising costs by distributing them over more members and ask Isabelle to move in. Her attractiveness makes up for the fact that one of them must now share a room, which might otherwise be read as a decline in living standard. Erweiterung (expansion) allows the roommates to avoid defaulting on the rent and thus remain competitive in the eyes of the landlord, but clearly this is but a temporary solution, as their lack of bargaining power has not improved. His tightening of the vise on their democratic community is portrayed as annoying, but his right to do so is not questioned or contested. Their strategy is to demurely accept his conditions and creatively manage the resulting financial shortfall. In this regard, the film’s focus on Europe as a project characterized by the “contradiction” between bureaucratic administration and creative production becomes legible as a way to recast and solve the central contradiction between popular and global interests, between democracy and capitalism.

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Xavier, whose journey had initially been propelled by his ambition to qualify for a job in the EU bureaucracy, chooses to follow his dream and become a writer instead (the final sequence shows him writing the script for the movie we have just seen), The movie’s explicit message is that Europe must be envisioned and created from the heart by artists and “ordinary people” rather than grey suits in Brussels. Yet the film reveals in the roommates’ response to the landlord’s outrageous demands that creativity can but provisionally staves off impoverishment or even homelessness. Only the temporal frame of the one-year student exchange serves to bracket the consequences of privatizing and liberalizing urban housing and development such as the displacement of low-income groups. Tenants’ rights, rent control, and affordable public housing strike me as more effective solutions to the problems created by the free (housing) market, but they are discredited by the film’s antibureaucratic rhetoric. Capitalism is not only portrayed as a force of nature but as midwife of valuable inner resources stifled by the old, calcified order erected by democratic nation-states. Europudding’s call to creativity and enterprise and scorn for state and suprastate apparatuses thus reveals a very partisan, neoliberal vision of Europe that presents itself as young, fresh, hip, and desired by the people. At the end, Xavier is back in the Barcelona apartment in front of his computer, surrounded by a heap of photographs that document his metamorphosis from number cruncher to creative artist. It encapsulates the ambivalence of the European dream: it evokes the harnessing of new communicative technologies for the enhancement of human creativity and the transcendence of the bourgeois division of drudgework and leisure in the combined living and working space. Moreover, Xavier’s choice to forgo a career in Brussels in order to pursue his childhood dream of becoming a writer links individual fulfillment to a collective project—both the Barcelona commune as chosen lifestyle and primary love object and the imagining of international community in the story of the very film we have just watched. On the one hand, the happy synchronization of individual autonomy and transnational collectivity in this image might be seen to foreshadow the kind of radically democratic sovereignty founded on the self-governing individual embedded in overlapping networks and multitudes envisioned by Hardt and Negri in Empire. On the other hand, the closing image of Europudding evokes the degradation of working conditions in an economy revolving around immaterial production, which Maria Mies has termed the “housewifization” of labor (Mies 2001b, 28). Without

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a stable income, it is uncertain how long Xavier will be able to afford a room of his own in the apartment, a condition that Virginia Woolf deemed indispensable to creative work. Finally, the social relations among creative freelancers like Xavier, Angela McRobbie’s critical study of the British creative economy has demonstrated, are marked not only by the pooling of resources to weather financial shortfalls but also by professional competition, thus calling into question any romantic, hippie image of collective lifestyles. The film as a whole thus poses as a sort of digital diary of the young man’s experiences, composed of video images and computer text. The opening credit sequence intercuts shots of Xavier at his computer, of his hands on the keyboard, and of words appearing on his monitor, with outtakes from the film. The entire prehistory of his arrival in Barcelona is also conveyed in a manner that foregrounds not so much the presence of the camera as it evokes digital editing at a computer: images are frozen, repeated, and accelerated in extended fast-forward sequences; text documents are imported into the screen; handwriting is superimposed over video; and the screen is multiply split. These operations not only facilitate great narrative efficiency as we literally speed through the exposition; they also support the assertion of authentic and uncensored authorship coalescing around the nude figure of the writing Xavier, encoding his writing as both private and truthful. While only the opening and closing scenes foreground these digital layerings and manipulations of image and text and the bulk of the movie deploys conventional, largely televisual narrative techniques, Europudding is thus implicitly framed as a blog—a private expression published, without any industry mediation, on the Web. This reading is supported by the final sequence in which the image of Xavier’s body is interlaced with the many nationalities and sexualities that the film had so far handled as distinct individuals, projecting his European self out onto a grid of monitors while the voice-over announces that “I am all of these.” The flashing grid of screens evokes young Europe’s arrival on all our terminals. These digital operations along with the televisual borrowings I discussed above signal the recent convergence of film, TV, and computer technologies and their distinct traditions of organizing the screen. Media historian Ted Magder points to the turn of the millennium as the moment when the integration of TV and other digital media entered public consciousness with a splash. The decision of Endemol to “extend the ‘program’ [Big Brother] beyond the confines of the box in the living room” by broadcasting, Web casting, and

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livestreaming to mobile phones revolutionized business strategy toward a multiplatform approach to programming (Magder 2004, 151). The company’s use of interactive technologies contributed to the jump in market share commanded by reality shows since then.50 Moreover, the success of Big Brother and its countless spin-offs has been largely responsible for the increasing strength of European suppliers in the American TV market (Magder 2004, 145). In the year 2000, the French corporate giant Vivendi, which owned the Canal+ studio where Europudding was produced, acquired the Universal label (film and music); after Vivendi’s near bankruptcy in 2002, it became junior partner in the new vertically integrated giant owned by General Electric that comprised Universal—the studio, music label, and theme parks—as well as TV network NBC, fourteen local television stations, six cable networks, and the leading Spanish-language network. Vivendi continued to control Canal+, with its global cable and pay-TV interests, and Vivendi Universal Music, the world’s largest record company (Epstein 2005, 81). The convergence of increasingly interactive media platforms (especially the old rivals film and television) and the merging of European and American companies seem to allay the competitions and enmities that long shaped the story of cinema. Klapisch’s hybridized screen and narrative borrowings gesture toward this development. Scholars have discussed this convergence as a result of technological development (Deuber-Mankowsky 2005), political processes such as the industry privatization and deregulation that began in the 1980s in Europe (Hill 2005), and economic developments, such as the emergence of transnational media conglomerates delivering a vast array of both entertainment hardware—from DVD players to iPods—and software such as films, TV programs, games, shows, and so on (Epstein 2005). Some also point to the politically troubling implications of reframing the proliferating surveillance and locating technologies that dominate public and corporate environments as entertainment (Stone 1995; Ouellette and Murray 2004). The film, by contrast, frames this convergence in terms of individual creativity, self-actualization, and “unmediated” expression (by posing as a blog). In this way, the playful, do-it-yourself editing of the opening and closing sequences, which locate the screen as a place of uncensored, authentic, free expression and “realness,” support the story’s populist message and youthful address. The European subject dispersed across multiple screens at the end is imagined as untethered from the very corporate and political interests that own, organize,

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and regulate those screens and with them our collective fantasies. By eliding the conditions of contemporary cultural production, the film also obviates any consideration of how these conditions may be democratically controlled or changed.

C o nc lus ion Reading changes in the political economy through exemplary cinematic narratives, this chapter’s leapfrogging between three historical constellations suggests an ever-tighter fit among political discourses of transnationalism, the economic organization of the film industry, and the kinds of stories that are being told about Europe’s relationship to global capitalism. Whereas for the independent director Wilder, the sexual vernacular of the screwball comedy furnished the means to ironize and subvert presumptions of capitalism’s benign dominance, the erotic charge infusing the nascent transnational European community in Klapisch’s film signals the close alignment of European cinema with hegemonic corporate and political objectives. By allegorizing transnationalism as an expanding set of relations between nations embodied by individual characters, moreover, these films subscribe to an additive logic, suggesting that the strength of a nation, along with its ability to forge alliances with others, determines its position in a global playing field. Such a view contains the very threat posed by the remaking of class relations on a global scale and overestimates the significance of the nation-state as a mediator of class. The persistence of international relations in figurations of the global, which arises from the allegorical form itself, thus contains what is new and threatening about globalization through the dramaturgy of the family with its familiar comforts. It is this sublation of the international in the transnational and the global that produces the largely affirmative character of these cinematic fantasies. None of the films I examine in this chapter, however, manages to completely purge capitalism’s internal contradictions to achieve catharsis and closure. Neither Wilder’s globalization satire nor von Trotta’s European melodrama suture spectators into accepting the social hierarchy allegorized in the happy international family, assimilating or eliminating the communist Other, or exorcising the ghosts of imperialism and fascism. Only Klapisch’s comedy produces a vision of Europe in which the trope of respect for national and sexual differences glosses over the absence of any political alternatives to an utterly unfettered capitalism. Yet for one fleeting moment, even this rather

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tendentious picture brings into view the utopian dream of sovereign multitudes in a radically democratic Europe. My reading of the films identifies moments of contradiction and excess that permit viewers to contemplate doubts about capitalism’s role as harbinger of global democracy and desires that cannot be reduced to or gratified by material consumption. The following chapters trace out how German theater has elaborated the critical impulses contained in these moments.

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Chapter 3

Development and Migration Th e Glo bal ized Wo ma n Co mes to N eu kö l l n

T

he term globalization did not gain wide currency until the 1990s, yet the process to which it refers was retrospectively given a much longer history that varied somewhat by discipline.1 While the rise of multinational and transnational economic entities, the accelerating speed and scope of migrations, and the emergence of a worldwide infrastructure of information and communication are regarded by many as the first indicators of a global era taking shape since World War II (e.g., Appadurai 1996, Bauman 1998, Miyoshi 1996, Sklair 2001), others attend more closely to the continuities linking contemporary capitalist formations to the histories of imperialism and colonialism (e.g., Wallerstein 2006, Hardt and Negri 2000, Grewal and Kaplan 1994). The dual process enabled by conquest and colonization of expanding and intensifying resource extraction in overseas territories and spurring modernization in the metropole was accompanied by the first intellectual attempts at creating what anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt called planetary conceptual grids. Such conceptual grids, exemplified by the botanical and zoological classification systems of Enlightenment scientists like Blumenbach and Linné, enabled people for the first time to grasp the diversity and interconnectedness of life across the regions of the earth, while literary narratives, cultural artifacts, and visual images produced by travelers fueled Europeans’ desire for exotic encounters, exploration, and conquest.

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Nevertheless, even those theorists of globalization who compose colonial genealogies of the term do not simply track continuities between contemporary capitalism and colonial exploitation or its attendant “civilizing mission” but seek to understand what is genuinely novel about contemporary globalization or, in the words of Hardt and Negri, what distinguishes historic imperialism from contemporary “empire” in which the clear geographical divisions between industrial center and underdeveloped periphery have been radically refashioned. After World War II when European economies were so weakened they could no longer maintain their hold over their farflung colonies and reconstruction became contingent on foreign aid and investment programs such as the Marshall Plan, the nascent discourse of development not only reordered the relationship between metropole and colony but became instrumental in the conceptual and practical crafting of a new planetary grid premised on economic progress and integration through modernization. This chapter introduces some of the central debates in globalization theory through the lens of development discourse: How does globalization affect the relationship between the global North and South in economic terms? How will the integration of women in the global labor market restructure local gender relations? And finally, how will digital technologies shape social relations in contemporary knowledge economies? The chapter works through these questions through a reading of Indians, an opera produced by the Neuköllner Oper. It traces the migratory path of a female Indian computer programmer to a German computer lab and back. It was presented at a time when the newly elected red-green coalition government was revising its strictly anti-immigration policy and introduced a refurbished guest-worker visa program for highly qualified workers. The focus of the piece, however, is the impact of education and modernization on rural Indian gender relations as well as the consequences of Indian women’s emancipation for international relations. The opera’s appropriation of nineteenth-century grand opéra, a genre known for its reliance on new theatrical technologies and thematic concern with the masses, to address the contemporary discourses of high technology and international development, brings into view continuities and changes between the dawn and the dusk of the industrial age in Europe. Indians, which premiered in spring 2001, ran to full houses for a short time, but hopes of touring the show did not come to fruition. The opera, which features a new libretto by Holger Siemann set to the music of nineteenth-century German composer Giacomo Meyerbeer,

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tells the story of the Indian computer programmer Soraya who comes to work in Germany to pay off her husband Mahatma’s debt.2 She saves enough money to pay for expensive surgery that enables the invalid man to walk again, yet his restored health and sexual potency prompt him to renege on their shared commitment to social equality and put Soraya back in her place: the home. The opera investigates the proposition that women’s integration into the global labor force liberates them from the shackles of patriarchal gender arrangements based on unpaid reproductive work and feminine subservience, which neoliberals cite as evidence that globalization knows “only winners, no losers”; increases productivity and affluence around the world; and leads to more democracy and more choice.3 Its unhappy ending, in turn, raises the question whether globalization is “a brakeless train wreaking havoc” (Harvey 2000a, 68), ineluctably devaluing labor and diminishing the quality of life for the many while increasing the wealth of the few. As theater is apt to do, Indians scales down these large questions to the level of the individual, the globalized woman Soraya. The character’s subjective choices, actions, and feelings make the human dimension of abstract relations, processes, and decisions concrete, but her story does not end at the level of individual options and remedies. The way in which Indians deftly translates between the macroscale of development and globalization, the national and local scales, and the microscale of the human body, I argue, can offer a model for the multi-tiered operations of feminist politics and cultural production in a global age. In this chapter, I would like to do several things: first, examine Indians in light of the debates about the gender politics of globalization. I look at the way the opera grapples with tensions in the discourse of development, which result from the conflicting aims of economic modernization and social transformation. I examine how the drama constructs a sexual rhetoric of globalization by juxtaposing the Indian couple’s utopian, post-patriarchal love relationship with capitalism’s consuming desire for them and exposes the different terms of participation that the globalized economy offers to the man and the woman in the couple. Second, I want to pay closer attention to the way the opera considers questions of historical continuity and change. While the production assembles a critique of globalization from feminist, postcolonial, and Marxist discourses, its miseen-scène demonstrates that the social and ideological formations to which these discourses responded historically have undergone profound changes, requiring Europeans to reconfigure familiar notions of gender, race, and class. The combination of a musical score by the

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Jewish composer whom Richard Wagner targeted in his famous antiSemitic invective “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (“Jewry in Music,” 1850) and a libretto that reflects contemporary controversies about race and migration draws attention to important political reversals in the discourses of race and nation. These reversals illuminate the ways in which globalization alters notions of how to reproduce the nation without necessarily changing ideas about cultural belonging. Third, I examine how the opera grapples with the lure of virtual technologies; perched in the altar niche in the couple’s home, the young woman’s laptop has usurped traditional deities by promising to transcend the constraints of the body and of material place. Soraya’s social and geographical mobility, the couple’s intercontinental marriage and communication, and Mahatma’s injury and restoration are all facilitated by digital technologies. The fantasy that humans’ interfacing with computers would solve the “problem” of the body as experiential matrix and limitation—a vision that trails behind it religion’s disparagements of the flesh, the body’s absence from Cartesian formulations of the self, and cybernetic views of materiality as inessential to the emergence and flow of information—is exposed as a betrayal of the struggles of negotiating differences and crafting communities. The pull of the virtual is thus confronted with and grounded by the sweating, laboring, mortal bodies on stage. That politics is embedded in the theater’s larger agenda of participating in the construction of cross-cultural, intergenerational, sexually inclusive community in the neighborhood of Neukölln. Indians installs a feminist perspective at the center of its critique of globalization, examining such issues as the spiraling disparity of capital and labor, the eroticization and naturalization of economic processes, conservatives’ appropriation of leftist notions of historical progress, and the impact of modern virtual technologies on the human body and subjectivity through a gendered lens. Engaging with the sexual economy of globalization I outlined in the previous chapter, the opera rewrites the romance of global capital and third-world woman as coercion. The opera suggests that globalization needs an asymmetrical gender system and concomitant notions of heterosexual desire in order to function at full throttle. Likewise, globalization is shown to draw on ethnic cultures and relations forged within colonial discourses while purporting to mend the injustices of the past. Most importantly, Indians confronts the tendencies toward World Wide Webs and toward technological miniaturization that characterize globalization with an insistent focus on the human body as the fleshly site for future technological interfaces and the measure of

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economic and cultural developments. Toward that end, the piece brings into play both the virtuosity of grand opéra and the modest means of local players.

Th e E rotic s o f Glob ali z ati on Mahatma and Soraya, the romantic Indian couple whose story is told in the opera, combat patriarchal traditions, raw economic pressure, and military domination, all of which threaten their hopes for material comforts, social justice, and political autonomy. Their love, based on equality, support, and mutual respect, encodes a positive vision of social relations in a global matrix, a vision that rests on the hope that technological advancement can enhance the quality of human life, that transnational communication and trade can further the exchange of knowledge, and that local injustices can be overcome through universal values and rights. The plot’s complications and contrivances, rivaling any nineteenth-century gothic melodrama, continually challenge this utopian vision. Condensing complex transnational relations and historical processes into a series of starkly schematized dramatic interactions, the opera makes palpable the temporal acceleration and spatial compression deemed central to globalization. Indians stages the assaults on the couple’s self-determination, economic and social opportunity, and dignity as a test of their love and loyalty. It also examines the forces that promise to defend the lovers against the encroachments of the global, especially local cultural tradition and national purity and pride. The couple’s longing for each other and for a better world is contrasted with capitalism’s desire for them, a desire that is constructed around domination and expropriation. While capitalism wants them both, it accords them unequal places—places traditionally constructed through the sexual division of labor in patriarchal societies but initially suspended in Mahatma and Soraya’s marriage. Only under very specific, rather extraordinary conditions, the opera demonstrates, can heterosexual love model a notion of social relations that can reconcile individual difference and dependency with equality and consensus. As soon as difference is aligned with a traditional gender hierarchy, other mechanisms of domination can kick into gear as well. The exceptional, nonpatriarchal structure of their relationship thus makes possible a political vision of globalization that can challenge and transform class oppression and colonial legacies. The eventual alignment of their marriage with traditional (local and global) patriarchal discourses through Mahatma’s betrayal, in turn, proves the rule

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that global capitalism is a neocolonial formation that crucially depends on patriarchal inequality and exploitation. In focusing on the impact of education and technological expertise on social power relations, Indians engages with the premises and aims of development, a discourse that has been key to conceptualizing globalization as the quasi-natural evolution of national economies along a fixed trajectory of stages of modernization and industrialization on the Western model. Helped along by international investment, aid, and trade, development programs and agencies in the industrialized countries of the North hypothesized, underdeveloped third-world economies would eventually catch up, and knowledge and wealth would trickle down to produce an equitable universal distribution of resources and wealth. Set up as part of the post–World War II European reconstruction efforts, but also to support the transitional economies of former colonies in Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, development discourse was key to both reformulating and preserving the “civilizing mission” of the colonial era into the post–World War II agenda of modernization as the political-economic underpinning of what is now called globalization. Since the 1980s and 1990s, however, the Eurocentrism of development discourse and its predication on a grand narrative of modernization (long shared by neoliberal and Marxist economists) have come under attack. Both political economists and social activists from developing countries and postmodern critics in the West were wary of the linear notion of progress as well as paternalistic hierarchy built into development theory and practice and insisted on greater participation of affected communities to define their needs and set political and economic goals. More fundamentally, the emergent critiques of globalization called into question the very premise of development, namely that the advancing of industrial capitalism and the creation of free-market economies through structural adjustment programs imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund actually close the economic gap between developing and developed countries. Especially in light of the economic crises in Russia, the Southeast Asian “tiger” states, and Latin America during the 1990s, theorists of globalization pointed not only to evidence of global economic divergence despite industrialization but also to increasing inequalities within developed countries as part of their postindustrial restructuring. Geographer David Harvey proposed the term “uneven geographical development” in lieu of globalization to better capture the violent rifts attending the international division of labor in the North and the South and the structural inequalities capitalism creates and exacerbates (Harvey 2000a).

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In this contentious debate between the proponents and critics of development, gender occupies an auspicious, highly charged place. After initially regarding women as embodiments of tradition and thus as obstacles to development, the liberal, feminist Women in Development movement during the 1970s and 1980s aimed at actively mainstreaming women into development programs both as recipients and administrators. This objective was criticized by socialist feminists, who charged that “the main purpose of [Women in Development projects] is to promote capitalism; the development and assistance of Third World women is incidental” (Chowdhry 1995, 35). More recently and in response to such critiques, the goal of development has been redefined as the empowerment of women. This goal may entail the transformation of culturally specific gender regimes but does not a priori consent to Western views of feminist liberation or patriarchal oppression, dividing those advocating an equality-oriented, assimilationist policy (smacking of a neocolonial “civilizing mission”) from those who regard religion as part of the cultural differences that must be respected and preserved (along with the gender inequities they entail) and from those who insist that third-world women must develop their own culturally appropriate strategies of feminist transformation. The third-world (migrant) woman’s agency thus becomes the linchpin of diverging interpretations of globalization. The mass integration of women in developing countries into industrial wage labor during the 1980s, largely in the textile industry but also in the rising electronics sector, sharpened questions around the transformative potential of development. The female textile workers in Bangladesh, for instance, were interpreted by some as the victims of capitalism’s intensification of gender subordination (Pearson and Elson 1981) and by others as subjects capable of successfully negotiating the constraints of capitalism and patriarchy (Lim 1990). Reconsidering her earlier position, Ruth Pearson not only arrives at a differentiated notion of female agency but also concludes that “discussion of women and industrialization has become, and perhaps always was, a signifier meant to represent a notion of women’s equality or economic importance” (Pearson 1998, 171). Soraya, in Indians, operates as such an overdetermined signifier around which notions of sociocultural transformation and global development play out. She catalyzes a feminist critique of development discourse that promises the eventual leveling of social inequalities on a global scale but risks leveling cultural specificities and of the culturalist paradigm that aims to preserve cultural differences but risks maintaining the social inequalities in which these differences are embedded.

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The opera’s centering of gender cuts across some of the traditional categories that orient discourses of globalization as leading either to equality, justice, and affluence or to exploitation, inequality, and mass misery. In the course of a few minutes, the opera sets up this opposition and immediately challenges it. The first act begins on a romantic and festive note, on the occasion of Soraya’s graduation from university and return to her husband Mahatma who works hard to support her studies despite being paralyzed from the waist down. Yet the couple’s shared dream of a better life is first disturbed by the remonstrations of the local religious authority, the Guru. He is a bearded patriarch who objects to women’s education, employment, and independence. In addition, their dream is severely threatened when the international credit shark Kaufland arrives to call in a debt Mahatma had incurred earlier.4 In order to pay off that debt, Soraya signs a contract to work in Germany. While globalization alters local traditions (as defined by the Guru), the opera does not deplore the loss of “cultural authenticity,” as that concept cloaks women’s subservience and dependency. Nor does it portray India’s entrance onto the world market naively as liberation from underdevelopment and oppression. When Kaufland auctions off Soraya in the first act and the local Guru and a German headhunter bid for her while she watches helplessly, the similarity with a slave market highlights the colonial dynamic undergirding the international division of capital and labor today. Working conditions in the German computer lab, Soraya’s place of employment in the second act, are also depicted in a critical light. Moreover, her imprisonment in Kaufland’s castle during the last two acts indicates a drastic, indeed catastrophic curtailing of her agency. Yet the opera avoids a deterministic view of globalization as a process whose momentum and direction cannot be controlled. The Guru, the German headhunter, the Pakistani supervisor, her Indian coworkers, and Kaufland all personify different limits to Soraya’s self-determination and dignity as a worker, a woman, and an Indian. Her run-ins with these figures, however, take the form of predicaments that she negotiates with varying degrees of agency and choice, rather than being already determined in advance: up to the final scene, Soraya is no globalization victim. The opera crystallizes, intensifies, and condenses social relations under globalized conditions, using the studio stage like a magnifying glass. The scaling down of macro processes to the microscale of individual bodies allows the opera’s producers to shift between a systemic, general analysis of globalization and a particularistic view that allows room for that which is accidental, extraordinary, and idiosyncratic. The result is a decidedly contingent, process-centered,

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and open-ended notion of globalization that highlights exemplary developments while also bringing possible alternatives into view. The dialogue is unadorned and straightforward, and the overall impression is one of simplicity. No great skills in subtextual interpretation are needed here, since all characters speak or sing their motivations. Characters are not developed for their psychological complexity but, typical of the Brechtian dramaturgy, personify social forces and functions; with the exception of Soraya and Mahatma, names signal social roles. The device of multiple casting (four singers play eleven parts) further undercuts the sense of psychological individuality. Set and costume design, too, simplify and condense social settings and relations. A minimum number of props and imaginative use of lighting transform the minuscule stage into stylized renditions of an Indian village, a computer lab, and the castle of the capitalist Kaufland. The colors and textures of the costumes emphasize differences and correspondences, contrasting the Indian Guru’s earthy brown garb with Kaufland’s metallic blue suit and Soraya’s flowing red-orange sari. The plot’s obvious contrivances compress complex sets of circumstances into short stage moments. For instance, the appearance of an American agent with oodles of high-tech weaponry, who promises to help Mahatma free Soraya from prison, is immediately followed by the revelation that the American is in part responsible for Mahatma’s invalid condition, since the bomb that crippled the Indian was intended for the American—throwing a more sinister light on the latter’s offer of military assistance and embedding their exchange in a broader canvas and longer history of international relations. As the opera progresses, these compressions of transnational relations and temporal processes appear to accelerate. The plot thus makes literal what Harvey calls the “time-space compression” he deems typical of globalization (Harvey 2000b). As I watched the tiny set, sparkling with glossy, vibrant colors in the sweltering heat of May, squeezed into the soldout auditorium with other Berliners, I felt myself at once constricted and extended into the intricate networks of transnational finance, economics, and politics. Indians has the quality of a child’s drawing, focusing on a few relationships and compressing them into a story that highlights certain exemplary, interrelated features and processes that scholars associate with globalization. Mahatma’s debt to the international man of finance Amor von Kaufland, which sets the plot in motion, points to the deepening dependencies suffered by third-world countries as a result of the economic crises of the 1970s and the rising power of transnational financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF

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to shape social relations in these countries. When Kaufland auctions off Soraya to the highest bidder, he curtails (by deferring) her right to accumulate the value of her own labor for her own profit as well as that of her family, community, and nation. Yet Soraya’s coerced migration to Germany still enables her to save money and transfer it back to Mahatma, suggesting that the increased global mobility of capital and labor not only benefits her German employers who thereby remedy a shortage of qualified native workers but also furthers the Indian worker’s interests. While Mahatma’s suffering from Soraya’s absence renders tangible the loss represented by the Indian economy’s “brain drain,” his physical restoration and social empowerment in turn illustrate a certain “brain gain.” Mahatma’s gain, however, clearly comes at Soraya’s expense. Mahatma’s disability—he is a paraplegic—and the needs and pressures created by it raise the question of who will care for those who cannot care for themselves in a world shaped only by market forces. The Guru’s demand that Soraya assume that responsibility—which would condemn both members of the couple to utter poverty—illustrates not only the indignities caused by the absence of a social net in many countries of the East and the South. His language of feminine duty also resonates with the dismantling of Western welfare systems and the attendant gender-specific distribution of responsibility. Western societies increasingly rely on women’s unpaid or underpaid work to compensate for the state’s failure to function as an instrument of social justice and wealth distribution. Certainly, the most important question the opera raises is whether the transnational financial institutions and corporations that are the engines of globalization can take over that function: Do the people integrated into the workforce and the nations incorporated into the world market benefit by way of knowledge transfer, technological advancement, and foreign investment? Will technical know-how and money “trickle down” for the enrichment of all, as neoliberal theorists proclaim? Whose life does Soraya’s migration improve? What is lost in the process? The opera echoes the hopes and concerns of feminist social scientists who have analyzed globalization as an open-ended process that is subject to variations, contestations, and the implementation of alternatives. For many Western women, the “de-traditionalizing and de-naturalizing of traditional local and national gender orders” that marks globalization provokes anxieties (Lenz, Nickel, and Riegraf 2000, 7) but also opens up opportunities for a critical reckoning with past practices and assumptions. The West German welfare state’s propagation of a male-breadwinner model, many women hope, will

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now be tossed on the scrapheap of history. Economist Susan Joekes has voiced one of the most optimistic assessments contending that no other social group has gained as much from global trade and export as young women, who have attained new degrees of independence and respect (Joekes 1996, 21). The editors of a recent anthology entitled Geschlecht—Arbeit—Zukunft (Gender—Work—Future, 2000) sound more cautious when they maintain that “women are not exclusively losers in this [globalization] process” (Lenz, Nickel, and Riegraf 2000, 9, my translation). The World Bank interprets the rising proportion of women (up from 36 percent to 40 percent in the last twenty years) in the swelling ranks of the worldwide wage labor force (which doubled to 2.5 billion between 1966 and 1995) as evidence of their improving situation. Feminist critics are less apt to simply equate wage labor with emancipation, nor do they interpret it only in the Marxian terms of economic exploitation and alienation. Many of them regard it as a potential opportunity for more autonomy as well as solidarity among women (Lenz 2000, 20) and view the degraded working conditions associated with the feminization of labor as a cause for concern and protest. From the local level of the Bangladesh textile workers who push the boundaries of feminine propriety against the familial and religious institutions of social control (Dannecker 2000) to the regional level of women’s networks (Wichterich 1998; Ruf 1998) and the global level of feminist human rights activism and networking (e.g., at the UN Women’s Conferences in Mexico City [1975], Nairobi [1985], and Beijing [1995]), scholars and activists have pointed to the ways in which women in Europe as well as in the poor countries of the South have actively and creatively grappled with globalization as a process that is “politically intended and therefore open to political transformation” (Randeria 1998, 17, my translation). Most feminists agree that, as Christa Wichterich puts it, “indeed the restructuring of the labor market and the expansion of consumers’ markets offer women new opportunities and individualized options, and call into question traditional gender roles and patriarchal control” (Wichterich 1998,12; my translation). As “cultural tradition” tends to stand in for a sexual division of labor that shunts women into unpaid or underpaid work and demure acceptance of social inferiority, feminist critics and activists organize the protest against the economic and social effects of globalization less around the preservation of cultural customs than around improving working conditions and workers’ living situations. This refusal to fetishize local culture sets women apart from those men who, by defending it, cling to patriarchal privileges. They are also suspicious of corporations’ motivations for ascribing “native” cultural

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traits and habits to local populations, which either make them particularly pliable as workers or herald a process of relentless commodification and cultural appropriation (Klein 2001). Soraya, who has enjoyed a university education in computer engineering, looks like the poster child for the empowerment approach and for the emancipatory possibilities of globalization. She wholeheartedly embraces the opportunities that open up to her in terms of economic independence and social equality.5 Even migration, which separates her from her home, is portrayed not in terms of coercion and loss but as a way to recreate that home in a more loving and gratifying way: the advancements of medical technology, the German headhunter tells her, make it possible to restore Mahatma’s health (and potency) through neurosurgery, provided she earns enough money. Soraya not only dreams of making a life for herself and her husband that is unconstrained by the traditional sexual division of labor but also envisions a world in which all women have the opportunity to do so. Romantic choice stands in metonymically for political choices and an expanded horizon of economic and social options. She is supported in her endeavor not only by Mahatma who encourages her studies and praises her accomplishments but is also buoyed by the respect and admiration of local women like the innkeeper who befriends Mahatma in Soraya’s absence. The romantic couple thus serves as an icon of consensual, postpatriarchal social relations, economic opportunities, and political autonomy. While the opera does not characterize the values embodied by the couple as inherently at odds with globalization, it identifies two discourses that do. The opera depicts both the Guru’s call to return to local customs and Soraya’s Indian coworkers’ belligerent nationalism as driven by patriarchal interests and thus challenges these discourses’ rather paternalistic claim to protect the globalized woman. At the local level, the old, bearded Guru keeps invoking the grand India of yore, where “a woman’s place was at the hearth, / and man protected her with his sword. / That’s the way it always was and should always be” (Siemann 2001, 4). The cultural background he conjures up and in which he embeds this vision of patriarchal peace and order invokes India as a splendiferous production at the Bombay opera. The India he invokes, replete with the voice of Enrico Caruso emanating from the palace windows, is clearly an Orientalist fantasy rather than a memory of indigenous authenticity. Significantly, the Guru’s description is punctuated by Kaufland’s exclamation, “It’s all mine,” suggesting a continuity of colonial and neocolonial/global relations of power and

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cultural ownership. Although the financial means necessary to put on such an extravagant show were and are clearly formidable, the cultural (re)production of Indianness is not therefore immune to interruptions (Soraya’s protests), contestations (anticolonial movements), or alternative productions—such as those by the small Neuköllner Oper. In short, the opera unravels the opposition between global and local, contests the equation of local customs with cultural authenticity, and thereby challenges the Guru’s call to preserve a supposedly natural gender order. The second act, which shows Soraya and male colleagues working in a German computer lab, dramatizes the claims of nationalist rhetoric to protect the purity of Indian culture. When Soraya is sexually harassed by the Pakistani supervisor, her Indian coworkers, inebriated after an exhausting shift, eventually intervene. Although she is capable of defending herself, the Indian men quickly escalate the confrontation into an assertion of violent, nationalist sentiments. Although she protests against their aggressive assertions of national shame and retaliation, her “honor” is instrumentalized in a labor dispute augmented by national differences, which results in the Indians’ murder of the supervisor. Soraya’s ability to decide how to fend for her dignity is thus compromised by her class position as an employee and her vulnerability as a woman but also her nationality. While the opera sympathetically portrays the taxing working conditions endured by the Indians and explains their aggression as a response to these conditions rather than an inherent national trait, it does not heroize their violence as an act of national resistance or revolution. The men’s legitimation of violence is too clearly shown to hinge on Soraya’s elevation into an allegory of the nation as oppressed and hence in need of protection and revenge and her simultaneous exclusion from the decision about how to handle and solve the conflict. They quell her calls for a rational, nonviolent solution to the dispute. National discourse purports to represent Soraya’s needs but fails to accommodate Soraya’s need for representation. In short, the nation and local cultural traditions are characterized as equally inhospitable sites for the empowerment of the globalized woman. Many mainstream Western texts portray (or fantasize) Western culture, ideological values, and social constructions of gender as inherently attractive. By dramatizing the flow of desire from local bodies to global brands, commodities, and organizations, such texts yoke gender and heterosexuality to socioeconomic processes. By cloaking such processes in terms of the organic and natural, they evade questions as

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to whose interests drive social transformations, how they are achieved, and how they may be redirected. As I have shown in the previous chapter, gendered rhetorics and global sexual fantasies “[libidinally configure] the economies and political relations of nations” (Tadiar 1993, 183). This sexualized rhetoric authorizes and mystifies material practices and political processes. On the one hand, Indians counters that mainstream use of sexual tropes by refusing to map the romantic couple’s wish for modern social relations, education, and technology along a third world–first world (or East-West) axis. In other words, the opera equates that wish neither with a flat-out rejection of Indian culture nor with a desire for the West but uses it to animate a dynamic account of the local. On the other hand, Indians counters the globalist rhetoric of heterosexuality with a sexual economy of its own in which capitalism’s rapacious need for labor power is cast in erotic terms. The love that Amor von Kaufland develops for Soraya, whom he abducts and imprisons at the end of the second act, reveals much about the fiction of consent that lies at the bottom of the capitalist vision of the contract between labor and capital and at the bottom of the patriarchal vision of marriage. Unlike his namesake from Roman mythology, Amor von Kaufland is not content to merely stimulate desire (for things, for a better life) in the romantic couple but wants to seduce and possess the woman on whose productive life force he thrives. At the end of act 2, he abducts Soraya and imprisons her in his castle, and he spends most of the third act trying to convince Mahatma to abandon and divorce his wife. Kaufland, the personification of global capitalism, recalls the aristocratic villain of the Bourgeois Tragedy who corrupts his bourgeois prey through his unbridled lust. He despoils not so much Soraya’s “virtue” as her naïve belief that she is a free agent, either as a worker or a wife. In the final act, when Soraya is discovered chained to the stove, the opera exposes the falseness of the capitalist myth that every worker is essentially “free” to contract out her labor power and reap the benefits of surplus capital through hard work and frugality. According to David Harvey’s explication of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, the notion of the laborer’s accumulation for herself or himself would make capitalist accumulation and the capitalist mode of production impossible: “Capital is not a physical thing but a social relation. It rests on the ‘annihilation of self-earned private property, in other words, the expropriation of the laborer’” (Harvey 2000a, 28). Thus, Soraya’s futile protest, “But I belong only to myself!” against Kaufland’s auctioning her off

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in the first act (Siemann 2001, 9) and against Mahatma’s assertion of patriarchal authority over her at the end (Siemann 2001, 32) underscores that she does not own herself but is owned by capital and by patriarchy respectively. Historically, Harvey argues via Marx, capitalism revealed the falseness of the myth of possessive individualism in the colonies, where slave labor and raw coercion forcibly excluded the laborer from control over the means of production, rather than in the metropolis, where trade unions, political institutions, and a code of law strengthened the bargaining power of labor. The place where Indians exposes the limits of Soraya’s agency as a worker and a wife is Kaufland’s castle. Where or what, then, is that castle? The building’s geographical location is left unspecified, but the set provides some clues: the walls are constructed of painted, corrugated metal, evoking a generic factory. The machine that is set up in this place is a stove, and Soraya is chained to it while Kaufland watches her from a small window set high into the wall. Conflating the icon of women’s traditional unpaid reproductive labor with the setting of industrial production, work here is characterized as unpaid, coerced, and policed. In the castle, the decreasing value and degrading conditions of work show up more crassly than in the German computer lab where workers could comfort each other, steal short moments of rest, use the machines for their own communicative purposes, and resist undue expectations on the part of the supervisor. The referent for Kaufland’s castle, I postulate, is the extraterritorial Export Processing Zone (EPZ)(also euphemistically called “free production zone”), whose number Naomi Klein estimates at close to “1,000, spread through seventy countries and employing roughly 27 million workers. The World Trade Organization estimates that between $200 and $250 billion worth of trade flows through the zones” (Klein 2001, 205). In her report about a visit to one such zone, Klein calls it “a miniature military state inside a democracy” (Klein 2001, 204). In the opera’s aesthetic of compression, the stove connotes the devaluing and feminization of work; the window stands for the surveillance and disciplining of workers; the chain connotes the coercive and violent working conditions; and the unspecified location points to the ubiquity and denationalized status of the EPZs. Indians’s sexual rhetoric emphasizes the expropriative thrust of unchecked capitalism and its vampiric hunger for the surplus value it extracts from labor. Kaufland’s desperate pursuit of Soraya, in the course of which he drops all pretenses at seduction, reflects

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the truth that without her, he is nothing. The social relation of capital is interpreted in heterosexual terms, contrasting the (masculine) accumulation of value with the exploitation and feminization of labor. Where, then, is Mahatma located within this sexual economy? By the phrase “the feminization of work,” sociologists and economists refer not only to the rising proportion of women in the worldwide wage-labor force but to the observation that forms of work previously regarded as typically female—namely unskilled work without any chances of advancement; low-paid work performed in the home; flexible, part-time, and short-term work; nonunionized and otherwise unregulated work; and work in illegal, immigrant, and offshore settings—are seen to increasingly typify the conditions of labor in general.6 Male workers are thus feminized as they experience the worsening of conditions of production and the rolling back of hard-won rights and protections for workers even in Western industrial countries where employers regularly complain about the prohibitively high cost of labor to press for a curtailing of workers’ rights and a decrease of wages, using the threat to move production toward cheaper locations as a way to blackmail local communities into political cooperation as well as material subsidies and low taxes. Mahatma’s “castration,” his lack of phallic power, suggests that he, like Soraya, is subjected by the “feminization of labor” in the globalized economy. When Soraya transfers money for expensive neurosurgery to a clinic so that Mahatma’s health can be fully restored, his complete regeneration leads him to renounce the common plight and shared political vision that defines their love relationship. This turn of events also acknowledges that men as a group still enjoy better opportunities within these generally declining conditions than women do and that they have more to lose than their chains. In the global economy, men continue on average to earn more money for the same work; they enjoy an advantage in education and professional training and have access to better-qualified jobs, continual qualification and reskilling, and the prospect of promotion and hence upward mobility. Indeed the income disparity between women and men, the main indicator of a gendered power differential, has remained steady at 30 to 40 percent (Wichterich 1998, 52). Global capitalism desires all workers, but it does not quite position them equally. At its climax, the opera recapitulates what is at stake in maintaining or abandoning the love relationship. Overjoyed to see her husband enter her prison, the chained Soraya sings of her imminent liberation and a happy future together:

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My heart is ringing with a hopeful dream That every woman in these Indian lands Will freely choose her place, profession, and her kin All of her own volition! The two of us together—what a team— Will make a child, and build a house, and laugh with friends! And years from now, when we are gray and long of tooth Remember how with vigor, love, and youth We overcame tradition. (Siemann 2001, 31)

But whereas cultural tradition, military might, and economic pressures had earlier failed to persuade Mahatma to either dominate or divorce Soraya, it is apparently his reclaimed masculinity that prompts him to choose the respect of men over his wife’s love, and domination over freely chosen dedication. “You’re repeating the muck / from those versions, silly duck / in which I couldn’t walk,” replies Mahatma as he refuses Soraya’s request to unchain her and join her in building a world based on democratic consensus and political choice. Rather than unchain her, he tells her that she is his property and that he will care for her from now on. Proclaiming that the four things women need are sex, food, jewelry, and a man’s orders, the all-male chorus celebrates men’s solidarity against women’s demands and wiles: patriarchal unity transcends the contest between local customs, national tradition, and global capitalism. Mahatma’s restored lower body allows him to call in phallic privileges that were out of his reach while he was paralyzed and impotent. The ending, in which male and female life options diverge so starkly, thus ironizes and contests what the feminist spelling of “IndierInnen” suggests, namely that female Indians stand in for the universal.7 In the face of this betrayal, the despairing Soraya pushes a red lighting button on the gas stove setting off an explosion that destroys everything, leaving spectators with nothing but smoke wafting over the empty stage. That cataclysmic ending, which more than one reviewer described as the detonation of an atom bomb, indicates that the project of justice and equality is a matter of species survival rather than individual happiness. The final scene stages the convergence of the initially antagonistic discourses of local and national productions of Indianness and capitalist demands for an ever-expanding workforce. When the Guru, Kaufland, and Mahatma join together to exalt men’s beneficent authority over women and women’s prime function of childbearing, they transcend “cultural” differences between East and West and between local, national, and transnational imperatives through the conjoining of

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patriarchal and capitalist motives and dynamics. Although the logic of their victory is persuasive, it is shown to ride only on an ounce of flesh. Does this ending surrender to essentialist conceptions of patriarchal masculinity lodged in the penis? Conversely, can only men who are not “real” men support a feminist agenda? Mahatma’s eventual interpellation to patriarchal ideology might be plausible, even highly probable, but not unavoidable. The extremely contrived dramatization of his conversion indeed undermines any sense of ineluctable anatomical destiny. To my mind, the tenuousness of his phallic restoration illustrates, most of all, that opportunities for feminist alliances must be seized where and whenever they exist—a project realized by the opera as a whole. Produced by a mixed team in which the libretto (by Holger Siemann), the musical adaptation (by Robert Nassmacher), and the mise-en-scène (by Dirk Rave) were created by men, Indians, and indeed the larger political agenda of the Neuköllner Oper, contradicts the conclusion that all people with penises are per se indifferent or opposed to notions of gender equality and justice.

Per mu tations o f Rac e and M i g rati on Siemann’s libretto was inspired by the vigorous public debate surrounding immigration, which peaked in such news headlines as “The Indians are coming!” and “Indians to the Rescue!” during the spring and summer of 2000. The production team’s decision to set a topical drama around an Indian migrant to music by the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864) opened up a rich historical dimension to the subject of race and migration. Whereas I examined the question of historical progress in terms of gender relations in the previous section, the following discussion will use the combination of a nineteenthcentury score with a contemporary libretto as an occasion to consider whether globalization alleviates imperialist structures and racial ideologies. Meyerbeer, who hailed from a prominent family of Berlin Jews and whose operas were performed on all the major European stages, was both exalted as one of the finest and most popular composers of his age and attacked by some German critics for his cosmopolitan and hence “un-German” music. While the music and the libretto are divided by more than 150 years, they share a discursive environment in which socially conservative factions attempted to demarcate German identity and culture in such a way as to discourage cultural mixing and derogate ethnic minorities. The opera highlights such historical-ideological continuities but also pinpoints an important shift within conservative politics away from the ethnonationalist paradigm

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that marginalized Meyerbeer. It makes possible a differentiated assessment of the recent consensus around a proimmigration politics that is all the more valuable because that consensus appears to confound familiar left-right positions. Moreover, the shrinking down of Meyerbeer’s grand opéra to fit the studio stage tempers the historical pessimism that marked the composer’s work. Let me first outline the political controversy around the German “green card” that prompted the creation of Indians and then examine in what ways the production team stresses historical correspondences and discontinuities for their own critical appropriation of the genre. When the coalition government of Social Democrats and Greens was elected to office in the fall of 1998, one of the items high on their list of proposed changes was the no-immigration policy of the Federal Republic. They championed dual citizenship for migrants and a reform of immigration law. While these politicians had earlier used mainly humanitarian arguments to plead their case, they now couched their propositions in terms that foregrounded demographic and market needs. They argued that, the country’s high unemployment rate notwithstanding, the Federal Republic needs both highly qualified and unskilled foreign workers to perform jobs Germans either could not or would not do. They pointed out (as many conservative politicians had done before) that the rising average age of the population threatens the public retirement system. Since the German state pays retirement out of the paycheck deductions of the current labor force, the decreasing cohort of working-age Germans will soon strain public coffers—unless tax-paying, young immigrants fill the gap. In spring 2000, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder announced at his keynote address to the computer industry’s annual trade fair that his party proposed to make so-called “green cards,” temporary work and residency permits, available to computer experts from Southeast Asia.8 The industry, which complained of a shortage of highly skilled German computer specialists, had lobbied the government to cut the bureaucratic red tape in order to make it easier for corporations to hire foreign employees. Employees with either a recognized university degree or an annual income of at least one hundred thousand DM (about fifty thousand dollars) would be eligible for such green cards. The model recruitee, regularly invoked by politicians, was the excellently trained and hardworking Indian computer expert. Jürgen Rüttgers from the oppositional Christian Democratic Union (CDU) promptly responded to the government’s proposition by running his campaign for state election in North Rhine Westphalia under the slogan “Kinder statt Inder!” (“Children instead of

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Indians”). The ethnocentric overtones of the slogan were picked up and further amplified by the extreme right-wing Republican Party. While the Republicans’ blatant pronatalism and xenophobia marked the outer edge of democratic discourse on these matters, the more moderate CDU was clearly split into an ethnocentric camp that postulated Germany’s inability to absorb more foreigners on the one side and a global market–oriented camp exalting competition and deregulation on the other. While the former drew on ethnonationalist, ultimately eugenic concepts and privileged cultural homogeneity over economic needs, the latter not only ranked those needs above all others but also presented the discourse of globalization as more urbane and cosmopolitan, co-opting some of the traditionally leftist language of multiculturalism. The president of the employers’ association, Dieter Hundt, not known for any progressive leanings, chided Rüttger’s campaign and argued for a new attitude toward foreigners “through state-regulated immigration in tune with international customs, oriented toward the economic, social, and cultural interests of Germany.”9 The government’s take-over of conservative arguments and some conservatives’ alignment of an economistic and elitist agenda with the harmony and diversity rhetoric of multiculturalism may seem like a dizzying reversal of traditional left-right positions. That reversal signaled the consolidation of a pro-immigration majority across party lines. Social Democrats, the Greens, and many conservatives (including the CDU candidate for chancellor at the time) agreed in linking immigration to market needs. Politicians like Rüttgers, whose antiimmigration campaign cost him the election because it was perceived as racist, were in the minority. I would also argue, however, that the marginalization of exclusionary ethnonationalist beliefs among conservatives signaled a shift from nationalist to globalist allegiances and imperatives rather than heralding the end of xenophobia. This “great coalition” of pro-immigration champions also meant that alternative notions of mobility as a human right, rather than the prerogative of employers and governments, no longer had any political advocates. The medium in which the story of Soraya, the model migrant, is told brings into view a historical dimension to the polarization between economistic-multiculturalist-inclusive and ethno-nationalistexclusive imperatives I sketch above. The music of German-Jewish composer Meyerbeer, who was instrumental in developing the genre of grand opéra in Europe out of its predecessors the opera seria and the opera buffo, materializes, as it were, the discourse of cosmopolitanism.10 His arias give musical shape and emotional force to the

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production’s whole-hearted commitment to the values of cultural mixing. In certain respects, the divided reception of Meyerbeer, a celebrated composer and director working in the most respected opera houses in Europe from Milano, Venice, and Turin to London, Paris, and Berlin, parallels contemporary disagreements surrounding national culture, which separates those who want to define the nation in narrowly ethnic terms from others who predicate a sense of national sophistication and cultivation on social openness, ethnic mingling, and cross-cultural literacy. While many of Meyerbeer’s contemporaries and successors admired his deft weaving of French, German, and Italian musical traditions and elements into a European genre, some also reviled his art as unpatriotic, inauthentic, and shallowly imitative. Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner were the German artist-critics who most viciously interpreted the composer’s aesthetic style as a symptom of his rootlessness, lack of substance, and artistic inferiority. Their narrow interpretation of genuinely “German” music in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Music Journal) that Schumann edited and in Wagner’s diatribe against Jewish composers in “Jewry in Music” in which he characterized Meyerbeer’s music as a shallow display of “effect without cause” (quoted in Zimmermann 1998, 206), devalued the composer’s training in and commitment to the universalist tradition of the European enlightenment and championed instead the Romantic quest for truly German art (see Zimmermann 1998, 181–208). By World War I, Meyerbeer’s grand opéra, so celebrated in his time and only recently recuperated by music historians as an early attempt at integrating all the arts into a Gesamtkunstwerk, was eclipsed by the Wagnerian interpretation of that concept and almost forgotten until the late 1980s.11 Because we know from hindsight that the forgetting of Meyerbeer and the unchallenged ascendancy of Wagner results from ideological judgments, the opera’s dedication to reviving Meyerbeer is also self-consciously political. The music calls up a discourse in which national art, ethnic purity, anti-Semitism, and violent state racism are aligned on the one side, with cosmopolitanism, social and geographical mobility, and a progressive embrace of cultural diversity on the other. Indians adapts Meyerbeer’s figures and themes in delightfully clever ways; the topicality of the libretto does not grate against an antiquated art form but rather underscores the modernness of grand opéra.12 The escalating conflict between Soraya and Kaufland recalls the central antagonism between the tiranno (tyrant) and the ensule (outcast/refugee) constitutive of the opera seria. The role of the

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impotent Mahatma wittily alludes to the fact that one of Meyerbeer’s earlier works, Il Crociato in Egitto, was the last major opera to include a castrato part. Most of all, the plot of the grand opéra, which juxtaposed virtuoso belcanto soloists with large choruses that could comprise hundreds of singers, staged the sense of individuals caught between the millstones of historic forces, which critics regarded as emblematic of an age marked by intense class, national, and religious strife. The violent conflicts between Christians and Muslims during the crusades (Il Crociato in Egitto, 1824), aristocrats and bourgeois during the post-1830 juste milieu (Robert-le-Diable, 1831), Catholics and Protestants in Les Huguenots (1836), and Portuguese colonizers and native Africans (L’Africaine, 1865) provided the subject matter that Meyerbeer and his long-time collaborator, the playwright Eugene Scribe, transformed into riveting musical spectacles. The Indian couple’s positioning in the clash of momentous historical forces echoes this basic compositional principle of grand opéra. Finally, the explosion that ends the play is reminiscent of the fireworks that nineteenthcentury stagecraft excelled in; in a century marked by industrialization and technological innovation, the stage not only aimed to incorporate new technologies (such as gas lighting) into more compelling storytelling enveloping all the senses, but these feats of ingenious, theatrical engineering were among its main attractions.13 The very dramaturgical features that make the grand opéra so apposite to dramatizing globalization are also the ones that most offended the champions of “national” art. Certain German critics complained that grand opéra’s showy display of technological prowess for its own sake detracts from the carefully crafted harmony of the whole, which they deemed the hallmark of a German aesthetic.14 That harmony, they contended, was further compromised by belcanto singing, a style designed to showcase the artist’s technical skill but detracting from the plot. Wagner inherited and overcame the grand opéra by forging it into a more illusionistic storytelling apparatus in which all the visual and aural elements, individual character development, set and costume design, and plot were made to dramatically and kinesthetically cohere. In short, technological progress and mastery were at the core of grand opéra, but rather than subordinating them to the musical and narrative production and synchronizing of the hero and the nation, the author-composer team emphasized precisely the dissonance of individual and masses, motivated by a resounding suspicion of psychological manipulation and frenzied mobs. The essence of grand opéra is its ambivalence toward technology, which is posited

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as irresistibly alluring on the one hand and as shattering the orderly unfolding of individual or national fates on the other. The genre is thus marked by a decisive pessimism. In the Jewish composer’s case, this pessimism regarding technological and political progress may have been informed by deep doubts about the mass violence that collective despair can breed. To his mind, an enlightened monarch was a better guarantor of social justice and stability than the revolutionary masses he witnessed in Paris in 1830 and 1848 but also during the anti-Semitic Hep-Hep pogroms in Germany. Meyerbeer’s biographer Reiner Zimmermann wrote, “In his works Meyerbeer measured the society of his time against the ideas of the Enlightenment. His experience showed him that liberty, equality, fraternity were not realized in the nineteenth century” (Zimmermann 1998, 20, my translation). For Meyerbeer, rapid progress, including technical innovation, has no value in itself but must be contained by universal, humanist values; his cataclysmic dramaturgy, in which the wheels of history crush the individual, encoded the tragic Failure of the Enlightenment project. In other words, the excessive, undisciplined aesthetic that some of his critics deplored as inferior and un-German might also be seen as a form of political drama that bemoaned the helplessness of individuals in the face of social upheaval, technological revolution, and ethical disorientation. What theatrical form could be more suitable for the staging of current predicaments? Yet Indians does not simply “update” Meyerbeer. Set on a stage so small there is no space for a single potted palm, the low-budget, pocket-sized show seems nothing like the opulent, techno-crazed spectacle that was grand opéra, suggesting that present and past relate through inversion or juxtaposition rather than affinity or parallelism. Whereas shows like L’Africaine featured full-sized ships that could be tilted to simulate ocean waves and challenged its virtuoso performers to compete with that for audiences’ attention, Indians makes the effects of technology on individuals its central thematic concern and puts the actor’s laboring body center stage. By asking whether computer technology will reinvigorate or level colonial inequalities between firstand third-world nations, Indians transposes the ambivalence shaping the dramaturgy of grand opéra into the ambiguity of social possibilities. Although Soraya ends like all of Meyerbeer’s tragic heroes and heroines, the downsizing of grand opéra to studio proportions modifies the pessimism written into the genre’s dramaturgy, because its focus on the human actor continually breaks the determinism and destructive momentum of technological progress.

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La bo r ing Bodi es and the P u l l of Tr ans c endenc e As I ride the subway to the neighborhood of Neukölln, my eyes glance distractedly at the screens mounted in each wagon, on which a software program called Berlin Windows silently pipes in daily news, commercials, traffic alerts, and announcements of theatrical, musical, and sporting events in the capital, while cell phones trill and music whispers from Walkman earpieces, opening visual and aural windows to other spaces. The Neuköllner Oper is located in a neighborhood whose windows and balconies are studded with satellite dishes capable of feeding broadcasts from America, Britain, Poland, Turkey, and Greece into Berlin living rooms whose inhabitants do not speak German as a first language. The entertainment complex in which it sits also houses a movie theater and a McDonald’s; a few doors down, there is a video arcade. The theater competes with this screen-centered corporate environment for customers and attention. Needless to say, it is not an equal competition given the tremendous resources invested by transnational corporations as well as the visual pleasures users are habituated to deriving from them. The Neuköllner Oper has devoted considerable intellectual and creative resources, in turn, to orchestrate a way of looking back at the screen and the social relations the screen organizes, domestically and internationally. In Indians, the centrality of the (computer) screen to contemporary social relations is made literal the moment that Soraya returns from college and places her laptop in the altar niche formerly reserved for a household deity. It is a fitting image for the quasi-metaphysical promise held out by virtual technologies to transcend the painful limitations of race, class, and gender that attend human bodies, lock them in a grid of differences, and pit them against each other. The Neuköllner Oper positions itself critically vis-à-vis the new communications and entertainment technologies with which it shares space without vilifying them. Drawing on the socialist tradition of musical theater from the 1920s, the theater focuses on the radical, transformative potential of new technologies to improve people’s lives in more self-directed, democratic ways. Soraya, the IT expert, hopes for a productive life for herself, support for the needy, help for the disabled, and knowledge for the uneducated. Recalling Donna Haraway’s socialist-feminist “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” Soraya embodies a vision that hinges on the benefits and universal availability of modern technology and credits it with the potential to eliminate traditional social barriers and mechanisms of exclusion. The case of Mahatma,

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who is cured through neurosurgery, demonstrates the radical effects of technology on the human body and its social possibilities. The opera describes the ways in which these new technologies reconfigure gendered subjectivity and illustrates, through Soraya and Mahatma, two possible outcomes and political consequences of that reconfiguration. The theater calls on spectators to be suspicious of virtual technologies’ promise to transcend the constraints of the body and of place and shows that the material reality of gender and ethnicity has not been canceled out. Indians explores how new virtual technologies construct the live, gendered, ethnically marked body and its social and imaginary possibilities. When Soraya returns from the university carrying her laptop, perches in front of a computer console in a German lab, and is shackled to the stove in Kaufland’s castle, her placement and displacement in the physical space of the stage illustrate the transformation of social space and relations, indexing domestic role divisions, neo-imperialist migration patterns, and deteriorating class relations. In addition, the story of Mahatma illustrates the literal reconfiguration of the human body through modern technology. First, Mahatma’s paralysis and sexual dysfunction result from an injury he sustained through a Russian bomb aimed at the American he was carrying. Then, after Soraya electronically transfers money to the online account of a clinic, his bodily control and sexual anatomy are surgically restored. Not only is the Indian man’s body staged as a literal theater of war, the jarring shift in his gender identity toward the end of the opera is dramatized as the result of a medical operation. Mahatma’s subjectivity, far from being explained in psychological terms, is constituted through his body’s transformation by military and medical technology. The theatrical discourse of embodied signification, so closely tied to the actor’s laboring, gesticulating, spitting, sweating body, functions as an alternative to virtual discourses that predicate the generation of meaning on the transcendence of the fleshly body and its material location in a geopolitical grid. The scholarship about computer technology, cyberspace or virtual reality, and informatics has developed this theme during the last decade. Katherine Hayles traces the emergence of scientific and literary discourses that conceptualize consciousness as pure information and fantasize about liberating information from the body, which is viewed as a passive, dispensable vessel in her book How we became Posthuman (1999). Tracking how in the course of the cybernetic revolution “information lost its body” (Hayles 1999, 2), she regards the new virtual technologies and the “consensual hallucination” of cyberspace (Gibson 1984, 51) as the realization of liberal

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philosophy’s long-cherished dream of a consciousness freed from the narrow confines of the body fettered to specific social and geographical coordinates. Likewise, Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Sue-Ellen Case argue that cyberspace now offers users the tempting promise of finally jettisoning that irksome body, completing the antimaterialist trajectory of the old metaphysics of gender (Case 2001). These feminist theorists are acutely aware of the stakes of this masculinist dream of disembodiment. While none of them rejects virtual technology or evidences nostalgia for a pre-cyber world, they all interrogate the gendered implications of imagining the mind as disembodied and aim to retrieve a materialist sense of embodied subjectivity, social relations, knowledge, and critique. “If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being,” Hayles writes, “my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival” (Hayles, 5). Mahatma and Soraya’s life stories are shaped by communicative, military, and medical technologies—they are both posthuman in the sense Hayles describes. The opera dramatizes the social potential lodged in that interface: technology offers a medium of creative social imagination and transformation that changes the way men and women relate to culture, community, nation, and each other. It also grants Mahatma access to a transnational sphere marked by patriarchal bonding across cultural, class, and ethnic differences on the one side, while shackling Soraya’s destiny to her anatomy on the other. Her confinement to the crudest coordinates of female existence, the stove and the crib, and his post-op assumption of patriarchal privilege and concomitant unmooring from the constraints of class, ethnicity, and geopolitical location starkly contrast female and male social experience and subjectivity in the metaphysical terms of immanence and transcendence. The pyrotechnics of the final scene in which Soraya blows up the stage in despair and protest bring the old tricks of live theater to bear on the virtual’s pull of transcendence. That ending insists on the laboring, mortal body as the ground and the measure of individual and collective transformation. Indians exemplifies the Neuköllner Oper’s project of creating political theater in a district traditionally characterized by deep ethnic, class, and sexual differences—Neukölln is one of the poorest districts

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of Berlin, home to a larger than average proportion of immigrants, unemployed, and gays and lesbians. Although I have no data about the ethnic composition of the audience, the repertoire’s themes respond to the neighborhood’s rich cultural mix. Gender relations; immigration; economic restructuring, especially unemployment; but also the social changes wrought through communications technology figure prominently in their librettos.15 These concerns position the institution in the tradition of workers’ culture and political entertainment and connect the analytics of class to those of gender, sexuality, race, and migration. The first production the Neuköllner Oper staged after it moved to its current location in 1987 was a Brechtian teaching play, and its approach to musical drama recalls Threepenny Opera or Mahagonny rather than franchises à la Cats that have sprouted up in several German cities during the last decade. It is one of very few theaters in Berlin that seem to weather the budget crisis caused by the decade-long covert collaboration of corrupt politicians with profit-hungry real estate speculators after the wall came down, which was disclosed in 2001 and forced the city government to step down. In the aftermath of that crisis, many alternative cultural projects have been foundering because they relied so heavily on public subsidies—monies that are now almost exclusively reserved for the temples of high culture. The theater’s operating budget derives mainly from ticket sales as well as from a corporate sponsor and modest public subsidies.16 In addition, it keeps expenses low by maintaining only a small staff and hiring students or graduates of Berlin’s actors’ training programs at intern-level wages. Its emphasis on contemporary, topical subjects draws audiences from outside the district; remarkably for a West Berlin house, over one quarter come from the city’s eastern districts. There is an unusually high proportion of younger people (roughly half are under forty) and many who are first-time opera goers, signaling that the concept of a Volksoper (people’s opera) succeeds in drawing in spectators who otherwise shy away from the institutions of high culture, perceived as imposing or irrelevant to their concerns. In a time of dwindling public subsidies, when politicians prioritize high culture for funding because it attracts tourists and business travelers and when privatization fosters commercial franchises such as the high-tech musicals running at the glitzy Potsdamer Platz complex, the Neuköllner Oper attracts faithful audiences because it neither espouses avant-garde attitudes nor mistakes the popular for the vapid. It puts on shows that confront middle-class spectators with the predicaments of the undereducated and unemployed; native Germans with the aspirations and

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disappointments of immigrants; and nuclear families with queer desires and sensibilities. In a time of want, fear, and war, it engages in the struggles and pleasures of creating a cross-cultural, intergenerational, polysexual community.

Co nc lus ion My analysis of Indians sought to read out from one performance into a range of critical discourses about globalization as well as to identify the ways in which the performance itself constitutes a critical, cultural-political practice. The opera considers the proposition that technological innovation as well as transnational knowledge transfer and economic relations can emancipate people from local conditions characterized by political oppression, social inequality, and poverty. In particular, it investigates whether third-world women benefit from the capitalist erosion of patriarchal traditions. Within neoliberal arguments, the claim to emancipate women can function to mystify an imperialist agenda through a feminist rhetoric of liberation. At the same time, patriarchal traditions are often fetishized as hallmarks of cultural authenticity within the same neoliberal ideology, and feminists have found it important to contest a discourse committed to preserving and exploiting social hierarchies cloaked as cultural particularity. The opera suggests that the convergence of patriarchal and capitalist interests to the detriment of third-world women is not unavoidable or irreversible and stages that convergence while keeping the alternatives to it in view. The social, economic, and cultural dynamics attending globalization are neither contrasted with a nostalgic vision of the good old days nor are they rejected as inherently or uniformly oppressive. Indeed, the opera stresses throughout the emancipatory potential of technology, trade, and education, recalling socialists’ exhilaration about the revolutionary possibilities of new media and technologies in the early twentieth century. Holger Siemann’s topical libretto is set to the music of Giacomo Meyerbeer, a tremendously popular Jewish composer and director of grand opéras in the nineteenth century but nearly forgotten today. The somewhat jarring combination between music and text allows for a comparison between the two historical moments divided by more than a century. Written on the occasion of a vociferous public debate about immigration that centered on the “quality” of people allowed to work and live in Germany, Indians shows the persistence of a certain ethnonationalist discourse that emerged during Meyerbeer’s lifetime and led to his lasting marginalization. At the same time, the

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opera illustrates how that discourse is no longer the dominant one in the present—which does not necessarily indicate a change for the better, however. It pinpoints a split within socially conservative politics from an exclusionary rhetoric claiming to protect cultural purity to a demographic-economistic rhetoric advocating selective immigration. Rather than signaling conservatives’ move away from right-wing ideology, that shift heralds instead the reorientation of right-wing conservatives from nationalist to globalist imperatives. The opera’s tracking of the current permutations of race and cosmopolitanism interrogates facile assumptions of “progress,” paralleling its dissection of women’s ostensible empowerment in the global economy. Siemann transposes the grand opéra’s dramaturgy, which pitted man against machine, into the central theme of Indians. Yet the downsizing of grand opéra to the scale of the studio stage is not so much a technique of miniaturization (characteristic of contemporary technological developments) as it effects a shift of emphasis away from Meyerbeer’s deterministic pessimism in the face of industrialization. Certainly our present historical moment underscores the destructive momentum that technological innovation can achieve in the hands of corporations when capitalist accumulation together with rationalization lead to mass impoverishment and misery on a global scale. Indians, however, does not share that pessimism; its protagonists show that, theoretically, technology may enhance life as well as justice, consent, equality, and self-determination. The opera’s focus on the scale of the individual human body hence insists on the notion of sustainability as anchoring technological and social transformation. Pain, impairment, and death are neither accepted as the “collateral damage” exacted by the global information revolution (as Kaufland or the American agent may think) nor rejected or miraculously skipped in the posthuman striving toward disembodiment (as Mahatma’s quicktime recuperation from his paraplegic state suggests). The promise of information technologies to sublate the inadequacies of the meat is revealed as a betrayal of very particular bodies, a betrayal that perpetuates the familiar metaphysics of gender rather than transcending them. The spatial and financial constraints of the studio theater along with the limitations of voices bravely grappling with demanding belcanto parts make palpable the profound material strains as the global, the national, and the local intersect at the site of the actor’s body. The poor players strutting the stage in the immigrant neighborhood of Neukölln mediate this production’s engagement with momentous questions as part of an ongoing communal project. Their exertions, their pathos, their agony, and their virtuosity are a measure of

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the superhuman efforts required to keep the posthuman responsive to and responsible for local perspectives and global possibilities, dependence and self-determination, pain and love. Indians ironizes and inverts hegemonic, neocolonial narratives that postulate the third-world woman’s desire for global capital and her presumed wish to be mainstreamed into development discourses of modernization. By contrast, the globalized woman Soraya appears here as the object of capitalism’s desire for cheap resources and labor. Her ethnic femininity, signified by her candy-colored sari, figures both the attractiveness of third-world labor, whose undervaluation is the legacy of colonial relations, and the feminization of labor in developing economies, emblematized by the superimposition of kitchen and factory. The following chapter will develop a fuller understanding of changing notions of labor in the European context, as neoliberal restructuring is eliminating the division between the market and the domestic sphere, on which bourgeois notions of gender historically hinged.

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Chapter 4

Traveli n g Counterpu blics René Po lles ch @ Prat er

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great deal of alarm about globalization results from the perception that privatization and deregulation, the watchwords of the neoliberal economy, are drastically curtailing the conditions under which a critical public discourse can be produced. Naomi Klein, for instance, remarks on the vanishing of “unbranded space” and of people’s ability to talk back to corporations and the images and ideas they disseminate. In her book No Logo: No Space No Choice No Jobs, she tracks the invasion of corporate interests into both the intimate and the public sphere and the attendant reconstruction of citizens into consumers. The juxtaposition of citizen versus consumer is, of course, a polemic one insofar as it implies an unquestioning valorization of civic rationality and intellectual exchange among educated equals over the authoritarian mentality, passivity, and gullibility attributed to the consuming masses. After all, both sides of this equation have been challenged: On the one hand, numerous scholars have offered trenchant criticisms of Jürgen Habermas’s idealized fiction of the bourgeois public sphere in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (see Calhoun 1992). On the other, British cultural studies has proposed a far-reaching reconsideration of consuming practices and rejected the totalizing notion of mass-cultural interpellation proposed by the Frankfurt School. Yet the underlying problem remains of where and how to foster a critical discourse about power and the

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common good as corporate interests, via the mass media, continue to shape both public spaces and intimate subjectivities while purporting to heed “public opinion” and “consumer demand.” Moreover, the institutions entrusted with the task to produce rational citizens for the state are traditionally animated by a national idea of culture. While globalization processes often prompt nationalist backlashes, I would like to examine in this chapter the possibility of a postnational theater seeking to foster political debate and social critique. Through a reading of the work of playwright-director René Pollesch, who is primarily associated with the Volksbühne in (formerly East) Berlin, I ask what models of political theater Pollesch inherits and transforms at that particular location. How do his plays, which track changes in the contemporary reorganization of work and consumption, adapt and update Marxist and feminist constructions of oppositional subjects? How do they locate the stage vis-à-vis the screen-centered technologies of consumer capitalism? The screen, which still assisted earlier avant-garde theater (e.g., Erwin Piscator) and fortified its link to the social by piping documentary material onto the stage, now becomes the vehicle and the figure of global totality. Yet Pollesch’s incorporation of mass cultural material also takes seriously the political potential lodged in mass culture, to dream of better worlds and thereby elicit powerful negations of actually existing capitalist society. In Germany, no institution has addressed itself more insistently and inventively to the question of political intervention than the Volksbühne, which sprang out of the workers’ culture movement. The Volksbühne (people’s theater), a socialist theater organization that emerged in the last decade of the nineteenth century, saw itself as decidedly partisan and committed to the idea of the sovereignty of the people at a time when Germany was a parliamentary monarchy run by Prussian aristocrats. In 1912, the movement built and began to operate a theater of its own that was located on what was then Bülowplatz, today the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz; for the first time in history, a partial, partisan public had created its own “private” theater. The Volksbühne situated its audience in opposition to both the state and to the private market interests that state protected. Its appeal to the “masses” instantiated the audience as the agon in a political struggle, allowing both for the dramatization of contrary political and economic interests and the unification of individuals into a critical public that was, ironically, declared a “private” congregation. That unity, moreover, was never defined as “national” in an ethnic or cultural sense but based instead on international socialist interests.

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The Volksbühne Theater has been extraordinarily successful in transforming a critique of class society that originated in nineteenthcentury socialist movements into an astute critique of global capitalism. Frank Castorf, the theater’s artistic director since 1992, has understood how to mobilize a century’s worth of institutional experiences, strategies, and tactics for a critical confrontation with the present. He takes his cue from the Volksbühne movement’s historic commitment to socialism as a transnational project (see Davies 2000, 30) while noting how capitalism has changed since Gerhart Hauptmann, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Frank Norris, and Fjodor Dostoyevski composed their socially critical works. He chooses highly physical, experimental, and avant-garde styles without detaching aesthetics from partisan, engaged cultural production—as its counterpart, the West German Freie Volksbühne, had done. The Volksbühne no longer has to contend with political censorship as it had during the Wilhelminian empire, the Third Reich, and the German Democratic Republic, but it does not simplistically equate absence of state control with freedom. On the contrary, it has focused increasingly on the structural violence unleashed by the free market economy and attendant dismantling of the state, its social net, and cultural policy. In short, it locates and practices critique in distance to and engagement with both the state and the capitalist culture industries. It practices a notion of “popular” theater that neither presupposes a revolutionary socialist collective nor the already interpellated masses greedy for trite entertainment. It adapts a rich, transcultural and transhistorical repertoire of experiences and strategies for an audience endowed with a high degree of political literacy. Let me turn to one of the younger directors associated with the Volksbühne to examine specifically how the theater incorporates the categories of gender and sexuality, as well as race and migration, into its critique of global capitalism and ask whether and how it translates these analytical categories into institutional structures and practices. My analysis of the work of René Pollesch investigates the conditions and meanings of “political theater” at a time when the international working class or the socialist state no longer serve as the referent of historical processes dramatized on stage—and when the postmodern, Western sense of politics as a playful deconstruction of processes of perception has only yielded strategies compliant with a hypermediatized capitalism. For and to whom does this political theater speak? How does Pollesch connect global capitalism to local conditions at the Prater and its surroundings; and conversely, how does he link local practices to collectivities elsewhere?

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Pollesch is a noteworthy playwright-director whose plays have been produced by the most critically acclaimed theaters in German-speaking countries, including the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg (Germany), the Schauspielhaus in Zurich and the Luzerner Theater (Switzerland), and the Burgtheater and the Salzburger Festspiele (Austria). As a student at the University of Giessen, he studied with visiting artists like Heiner Müller and John Jesurun and later apprenticed with Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill, all prominent and innovative figures in the European and international avant-garde. With about eighty theater pieces to his name at the time of this writing in 2006, Pollesch is an extraordinarily prolific playwright, producing at least three new plays each season. One of the two large public TV stations produced one of his teleplays, and most of his plays have been published.1 He has received many coveted awards, among them the prestigious Mühlheimer Dramatikerpreis (in 2001 and 2006), and was named “playwright of the year” by the influential magazine Theater heute in 2002.2 He enjoys a great deal of artistic control, as he directs almost all of his plays. Over the years, he has crafted and perfected a highly recognizable, idiosyncratic style characterized by the use of multimedia, the mining of theoretical texts, and the physically demanding delivery of dialogue. Since 2001, Pollesch has been firmly ensconced at the Prater, the small stage of the Volksbühne located in a beer garden a short walk up the hill from the main house, where he directs his own plays and curates other performances during the season. In addition, he directs his plays at theaters and festivals throughout Germany. Increasingly, Pollesch is in demand abroad as well; in 2003, he worked with actors in São Paulo, Brazil; he was a guest at the Festival of New Plays in Chile (2004); and in 2007 he was invited to New York. My discussion will follow along three interrelated trajectories. First, a close textual analysis of two trilogies (created only two years apart) tracks the evolving themes and expanding geographical scope of Pollesch’s globalization plays. They focus on the economization of realms of social experience and interaction that were previously shielded from market processes, namely the domestic, the sexual, and the artistic. While the earlier work situates this process in recently gentrified, central Berlin—the neighborhood in which the Volksbühne and the Prater are located—the later trilogy links Berlin to Brazil on the one side and to Eastern Europe on the other. As the division between public and private, work and leisure, erodes, the plays ask whether men and women are therefore released from gender, whose binary structure hinges on the bourgeois division of spheres. If the

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ethnicization of domestic service work inserts immigrants of color into the position previously reserved for women, do employer and worker form a transnational family? Can the conceptualization of work as selffulfillment still accommodate a notion of exploitation or oppression? What feelings and relationships can such a fully commodified subject that must fend for itself under increasingly precarious economic conditions afford to maintain? Should the spontaneously renegotiated, temporary affiliations that have superseded the stable biographies and patriarchal contracts of the liberal era be welcomed as the liberation from heteronormativity? By raising questions like these, Pollesch goes significantly beyond Brecht. Whereas the Neuköllner Oper welds a pre-bourgeois performance genre to Brechtian techniques in order to capture social contradictions, demystify globalist mythologies, and mobilize class interests across gendered, national, and ethnic particularities, Pollesch abandons or significantly reworks the basic elements of Western drama, plot and character. Pollesch’s stage no longer features coherent selves seeking to overcome economic or psychological obstacles but speakers whose furiously accelerated speech can never quite outrun the economistic discourse that continually co-opts their effort to generate autonomous, authentic subjectivity; these speakers no longer manage to occupy the stable, oppressed subject position still available to the revolutionary protagonists of Marxist or feminist drama, nor do they subscribe to Brecht’s faith (still shared by the Neuköllner Oper) in the power of rational analysis and theoretical insight to show the way to effective action. My discussion of Pollesch’s play Sex After Mae West (2001) highlights the adjustments that have become necessary to the feminist critique since Mae West’s sex-radical play first ran on Broadway if it wants to be attuned to the transformations of sexual labor. The more recent Tent Saga further considers issues of ethnicity and immigration as they complicate changes in the global organization of work. By bringing these changes into view, Pollesch’s plays link the sociological analysis of the global transformation of work (exemplified by Richard Sennett 1998 and 2006, Marion von Osten 2001, and Angela McRobbie 2002) with the poststructuralist discourse on the complex, fragmented, flexible subject in the 1980s, which Rosemary Hennessy has historicized as a symptom of global restructuring (Hennessy1993, 9). More specifically, the materialist categories of labor and oppression at the center of both Marxist and feminist critiques are brought into tension with poststructuralist-queer strategies of deconstruction and subversion in order to probe the validity of the former in a world where the organization and meaning of labor have changed

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beyond recognition, and the latter perpetually threatens to duplicate corporate imperatives. The second trajectory I trace through this chapter is the development and radicalization of the formal features and performance practices closely linked to the playwright’s evolving interest in globalization processes over the course of his career. While his work has often been labeled “postdramatic,” I show that there is in fact a residual sense of dramatic conflict embedded in the different linguistic registers Pollesch juxtaposes in the dialogue, which one might call the personal, the theoretical, and the economistic. In addition, his plays typically split dialogue from unscripted, often improvised performance segments whose designation (“clips”) references audiovisual mass culture. Whereas the dialogue reflects on the exigencies of critical thought, the clips revolve around the exigencies of an audiovisual pleasure that is traditionally decried as an affirmative mystification of social power relations. What help do the post-Marxist writings of Althusser, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari; the social geography of Mike Davis; the gender studies à la Judith Butler as well as, more recently, the globalization critiques of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri; and Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy of law have to offer to the speakers on stage, which is constituted as little more than capitalism’s echo chamber? What if the intellectual ammunition provided by theoretical reflection can no longer summon a resistant subject in the familiar terms of the bourgeois, rational individual or the collective, universalist subject underpinning Marxist and feminist narratives of social struggle? Moreover, if the global culture industries have installed standardized Aristotelian dramaturgies of social conflict, suffering, and rebellion in the emotional architecture of consumers, what impulse or force can be said to sustain the work of nay-saying, of the utopian imagination, of creating alternatives? Whereas both text and performance refuse the possibility of oppositional identifications, their modeling of shared speech and communal thought suggests something like collective operations and commitments. Yet even this very shrunken-down notion of the theater as collective, social laboratory is becoming more precarious as screen technologies appropriate (and “remediate”) theatrical representations and working processes. Pollesch’s more recent work investigates television’s swallowing up of live performance and focuses on two key genres of the global imagination: the telenovela and reality television. He thereby poses important questions about the continued existence and political function of the theater, which resonate with the scholarly debates about intermediality that I trace out in the last portion of this chapter.

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Thirdly, I consider the social context in which Pollesch’s productions are located. Since his arrival at the Prater, he has linked the collective pursuit of critical thought to local academic and activist endeavors. In the 2001–2 season, he invited local groups onto the stage who had been involved in protesting the urban reconstruction of Berlin in the 1990s. During the 2003–4 season, his casts shared space with a network of artists and activists committed to immigrants’ rights. This communal grappling with political problems and the insistence on linking analysis to practice evoke Jürgen Habermas’s utopian concept of cultural debate as the model of enlightened civil society in the public sphere where citizens meet as equals to discuss questions of the common good. The philosopher historically locates the emergence of the public sphere in the eighteen century as a way to hold the absolutist state accountable to the people and transmit public concerns to the state via free speech, free press, and free assembly. He charts its decline as a result of both social differentiation and fragmentation and of the rise of mass media as manufacturers of public opinion and acclamation. Yet Pollesch’s work as director of the Prater also brings into view the exclusions and omissions of the philosopher’s idealized model: most notably, Habermas’s predication of the public communing of equals on the propertied self whose gender and class status are bracketed but nevertheless underwrite access; his definition of rational, disinterested discourse in contradistinction to vested economic interests and irrelevant domestic matters; and the privileging of a unified, monolithic over multiple, temporary, traveling counterpublics. Pollesch’s fostering at the Prater of an internally democratic, minoritarian, itinerant counterpublic that seeks to articulate itself to other spaces and interests substantially revises the Habermasian notion of the democratic public sphere. This strand of my argument thus traces out the adjustments for the many well-known shortcomings of Habermas’s model without jettisoning its key premise, the role of culture to interrogate power. Rather than discarding as obsolete the notion of democratic discourse, I argue, Pollesch’s facilitation of a collective space for reflection and debate at the Prater seeks to adapt, reinvigorate, and salvage it.

The Labor of Love Pollesch’s plays have become part of a broader dialogue about globalization, labor, the arts, and gender among leftist, feminist, and queer intellectuals in Germany.3 In Domestic Front (2001–2), Neustadt (New City [2002–3]), and Tent Saga (2003–4), Pollesch asks what happens

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when all social relations and cultural activities—family, love, emotions, sex, play, and artistic creativity—are measured in terms of efficiency, speed, productivity, and profit. Concomitant with the changing organization and significance of work, traditional careers unravel along with the stable identities fostered by the security and the rhythms of professional training, long-term employment, benefits and vacations, and retirement prospects. The increasingly precarious working conditions and social relations prevailing in the so-called “creative class” are harbingers of the postindustrial knowledge economy in Europe. During his first season at the Prater, Pollesch created a series of plays assembled under the title Domestic Front, including the plays Stadt als Beute (City as Prey), Sex after Mae West, and Insourcing des Zuhause: Menschen in Scheisshotels (Insourcing of the Home: People in Shit Hotels). Domestic Front revolves around the economization of the most intimate parts of subjectivity, sexual feelings and practices, and the extension of the market into the domestic, private domain. Shit Hotels employs a largely figurative reading of the term “sexual labor” by focusing on the relations between guests and the largely female employees of so-called Boardinghäuser (a cross between apartments and hotels, catering to the highly mobile transnational class) who are trained to model their job performance on that of a caring wife. Encouraged by management to create quasi-intimate, cordial relations with guests and learn their personal preferences, employees (called “cyborgs” in the play) imitate friendship and empathy as part of their paid work (Pollesch 2002, 20). The term “sexual labor” serves to highlight the emotional, interpersonal dimension of this type of work and to call attention to the way in which the workers’ subservience, attention, and interest in the guests’ well-being (regardless of their gender) cement the heterosexual matrix.4 Sex After Mae West takes “sexual labor” literally by examining prostitution but includes under that rubric the commodification of female sexuality in personal relationships as well as in the arts. The intertextual reference to Mae West’s successful Broadway play from 1926 allows Pollesch to show that a once-critical, materialist feminist discourse about sexuality has meanwhile become the normative experience for contemporary producers and consumers. Whereas Sex After Mae West once introduced an unsentimental discourse about sex as business and as a legitimate form of female agency to American drama, Pollesch suggests that self-determination and agency today have become the means by which subjects are hooked ever more tightly into a discourse of work as self-fulfillment that makes it difficult to distinguish dedication from alienation, love from exploitation.

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The dialogue plunges headfirst into this predicament. As spectators wait for the performance to begin, three actresses in garish polyester kimonos lounge around in one corner of the brightly lit, horseshoeshaped stage, which is equipped with a sink and stove as well as an overstuffed sofa and armchair. They might be 1970s suburban housewives; they might be sex workers waiting for clients or indeed actresses waiting for the beginning of the show. When the sound system is turned on, it abruptly amplifies a conversation about sex, money, and desire; the proverbially oldest business in the world clearly needs no further exposition. The character named S declares that she had planned to stop performing paid sexual services for the day, but then a client came who offered her an exotic bird’s feather—something she had always desired—and thus persuaded her to continue: “Although I really hadn’t wanted to sell my body anymore today, I wanted to have that thing so then we had sex for money and this exotic feather that I had always WISHED FOR SO MUCH! My wishes are so exotic, but he KNEW MY WISHES! FUCK!” (Pollesch 2002a, 131). C continues without missing a beat: “And then I don’t know anymore whether I sell my self here, or whether I rather pursue my own wishes, and work for my own gratification! . . . But I talk too much and if every client knows my wishes, I mean my TRUE WISHES! Then my wishes exploit me” (Pollesch 2002a, 131). And I joins in: “I thought I was working for money, but it’s my wishes that facilitate exploitation and the tailoring of exploitation to my individual predisposition! These coercive relations HERE are impelled by WISHES!” (Pollesch 2002a, 131). Clearly the speakers delivering the dialogue do not conform to the traditionally mimetic notion of dramatic character employed by Mae West; rather they comment on the historic play. The actor’s subjectivity becomes part of the performance, yet without the individualist, self-exploratory gesture of performance art, as all actors on stage seem to collectively produce one “self.” The shifting between character and commentary evokes Brechtian rehearsal techniques and presentational acting yet without the ironic distancing performed by a sovereign, intact self. In the epic commentary on Mae West’s play (which involves some kinky business with a feather), the referent of the “I” quickly comes unmoored from the heroine in Sex after Mae West and begins to drift among the three actors we see on stage, whose seamless delivery, moreover, works against a naturalistic reading of three distinct or individualized characters. (Pollesch is known to train his ensemble in maintaining a high pitch of energy and in avoiding breaks in the flow of language.)5 Pollesch’s decision to designate the parts in his plays by the initials of the actors who perform them—in this case,

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Sophie Rois, Caroline Peters, and Inga Busch—marks the donations of actors’ idiosyncratic idioms, recreational preferences, and improvisational panache to the role. The foregrounding of the authorship of the individual actor working with the text not only exhibits the traces of the rehearsal process but also inserts a distance between Pollesch’s directorial function and Brecht’s expropriative attitude to his female collaborators’ intellectual labor.6 For Pollesch, the preservation of traces of the process of textual production points to collective, argumentative collaboration as a social practice. A closer look at the language in this short opening passage reveals that it may be parsed into three distinct registers: the emotive, slangy vernacular of disgruntled contemporary thirty-somethings represented by Rois, Peters, and Busch; theories of sexuality, particularly the concept of “wishing machines,” developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their 1977 book The Anti-Oedipus, that help the women to rearticulate West’s individualizing dramatization in the lingo of poststructuralist theory; and, finally, a neoliberal, economistic language of sexual commodification that transforms the French theorists’ once-radical notion of “wishing machines” into a merely descriptive term for the operations of the contemporary subject of global capitalism. Acting style and dialogue structure demonstrate that the subject of neoliberalism, unlike the classical humanist subject represented by realist method acting (which is cited by way of Mae West’s play), is multiple, diverse, and agile. Eminently responsive to market demands, authenticity and uniqueness have become resources that can be converted into surplus value in the sex business. Instead of coherent selves, we see the operations of flexible components juggling social scripts without either vanishing into these scripts (as in method acting) or taking up a cool distance to them (as in epic acting). S expresses admiration for Mae West because the playwright had “extricated the concept of sex from clinical discourse and recontextualized it as an economic issue” (Pollesch 2002b, 135). West framed the naturalizing of feminine decency and virtue as a ploy to cloak the informalization and exploitation of marital sexual labor and provided women with a language to see through the pathologizing of female desire and agency. Speakers note, however, that the erstwhile progressive feminist strategy of making feelings and experiences visible as labor and assigning them a specific market value is now a revolutionary business concept. Hence, “the experience economy has usurped a feminist position” (Pollesch 2002b, 134).7 The speakers’ longing for love, authenticity, and a nonalienated life is shown to be the hooks of the experience economy’s customized marketing

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techniques. The three women in Sex after Mae West must recognize that selling sex does not increase women’s autonomy but merely serves the heteronomous reproduction of femininity. The hope of sex workers’ advocates that by designating sex as labor women would be able to access the mechanisms of negotiation forged by a century of workers’ struggle (and market their sexuality at a price they set themselves) is here undermined by the subsumption of previously extra-economic processes—sexuality, subject formation—under the imperatives of efficiency and accelerated productivity. As much and as fast as the women strain toward controlling the conditions of sexual production, it seems their hopes and aspirations for a desire that exceeds marketable concepts of sexual subjectivity always lag behind its cooptation: I: The business models change so fast I could almost believe you love me and don’t just perform loving me, YOU FUCKING HUSTLER! But maybe you’re only conforming to the newest revolutionary business model. And if I ‘buy’ the impression that you love me at this moment, then maybe this revolutionary business model has already won! (Pollesch 2002b, 143)

The language riffs on sexual commodification, female agency, and the construction of femininity by the advertising and sex industries, spliced with both yearnings for love and expressions of frustration and outtakes from post-Marxist theory ranging from Deleuze and Guattari to Foucault. Although there is no dramatic conflict in the conventional sense of protagonists and antagonists embodied by distinct characters and entering into a confrontation and undergoing change, drama is embedded in the relations between these distinct linguistic registers. It resides in the domination of capitalist imperatives to “shop around in me!” (Pollesch 2002b, 151), in the increasingly helpless and violent swearing, and in the failure of theoretical concepts and phrases to fend off the language of business. The speakers on Pollesch’s stage already have at their disposal the critical language for analyzing their predicament, yet their theoretical knowledge does not enable them to adjudicate the ambiguous status of their feelings and wishes or draw any political or activist consequences from them. To the contrary, theory’s promise of transforming diffuse dismay into critique and unequivocal opposition, of politicizing the personal, is repeatedly shown to fail. The bumbling, creaking stretching of theory into the realm of personal experience and intimate feeling yields moments of comic frustration, as when Inga concludes, “Some desire bolsters my exploitation and I’m just

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lucky that it’s no heterosexual desire. Wait a sec. OH GOD! But it is, I’m a fucking HETEROSEXUAL!” (Pollesch 2002b, 131). Moments such as this one bring into view the denunciatory tendency of theories of interpellation, discipline, and governmentality to position the subject as “always already” complicit, as inescapably subjected by the very discourse that instantiates it. As soon as desire can be named as the cause of exploitation, that act of naming it “HETEROSEXUAL” abruptly and irrevocably ensnares the subject in all the hopeless complicity called up by the speech act of self-naming. Rather than master contradictions by thought as the prerequisite for igniting resistance, as prior forms of Marxist theater had postulated, thought in Pollesch’s theater always returns to the disciplined body fully articulated with discourses that may once have held revolutionary potential but no longer do so in the contemporary constellation. In Pollesch’s excessively verbose theater, the body is remarkably present. The capitalized words and phrases in the script indicate vocalchord-wracking, abrupt increases in volume, one of the hallmarks of his theatrical style. These screamed passages, delivered at the top of the actor’s voice, jolt the body into the rigid, arched-back, flailing, head-shaking posture several critics have associated with hysteria (Barnett 2006, 38), without however encoding unconscious resistance to patriarchal repression (as Freud has postulated), much less jouissance (as French feminist champions of hysteric speech have suggested). Pollesch himself has called these screams signs of “cognition (Erkenntnis) and despair” that serve to “hold [old notions of subjectivity and individualized conflict] at a distance” (Berger 2002, 17). Gesa Ziemer describes them as the eruption of intense physical affects that are too sudden and polysemous to fit easily recognizable categories of feelings and emotional states but “may furnish the fundamental preconditions of any good theory” (Ziemer 2004, 126). In other words, these diffuse but fierce affects may furnish the epistemological ground for a “vestigial subject” (Bloch 2004, 67) refusing to “live THAT” (Diederichsen 2003, 16)—a vestigial subject that knows what it does not want without being able to know or say precisely how to resist THAT. Nonetheless, the aggressive, argumentative energy maintained at a constant high pitch also unifies speakers. Pollesch stresses this collective aspect of speech: “Here are four people working through a topic without occupying individual positions. They think forward, they support each other, they practice a kind of solidarity” (Pollesch, Pocai et al. 2003, 115). It may be this shared, high energy that is released in the form of affectionate, physical entanglements during segments of the play that

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Pollesch calls “clips.” At irregular intervals, actors jump up, walk around, and speak to each other in low voices, often huddling close to each other or embracing, while very loud pop music blares from the speakers. They use the clips as opportunities to stretch, drink water, wipe off their sweat, engage in recreational drug use, or do a quick workout to make their bodies fit for the next segment. Occasionally, they sing along with the music or reenact film scenes, suggesting that the pop cultural material provides emotionally charged clues to the past and identity of the characters, as Ruth Sonderegger has argued (Sonderegger 2003, 181). While the dialogue underlines the perpetual failure and cooptation of critique lodged in the script, the image/ performance track exposes as false the escapist, continually deferred happiness of identification. These double negations, Sonderegger contends, produce as a partial positive that of minoritarian or subcultural collectivity (Sonderegger 2003, 189). Sonderegger and Diederichsen have both pointed to the social milieu of artists, academics, and activists within which the theories Pollesch processes in his texts were first read and discussed. The reception of this body of critical theory initially took place not in German universities but in independent reading groups and various political collectives congregating around certain cultural institutions with a political bent; in Berlin, these included the Büro Bert, the NGBK gallery, b_books press, and the 40qm bookstore. Rather than advocating a set of ideas or analytical techniques, Pollesch’s style engages with the living and working conditions of what Diederichsen calls the “theoretical underground” in Berlin and beyond. In Domestic Front, Pollesch invited participants in this milieu onto the Prater stage, making explicit the alignment of his theater with related critical projects but also offering the stage as a place where the status and use of theoretical texts among the creative class may be critically reflected on. One of the working groups that constituted itself as the interlocutor of Pollesch’s ensemble and seasonal roommate on Bert Neumann’s set called itself NewCenterAddition.8 It staged events billed as The Wrong Life Show,9 which included a series of discussions that aimed to connect the personal, the professional, and the political; a reading group working through Hardt and Negri’s Empire; video nights; slide shows; and karaoke nights on the topic of suburbia. NewCenterAddition had grown out of a supraregional network of urban activists, which in 1997–98 had organized actions protesting the transformation of public, urban space into surveyed, increasingly privatized consumption and service zones from which unwanted minorities are systematically excluded.10 The Wrong Life Show sought to come to

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terms with the shifting role of artists and other urbanites from social outsiders to model citizens of the creative economy and the co-optation of self-determined, alternative, and politically critical practices located in the social margins. One of its participants, the urban theorist Stephan Lanz, coauthor of the book from which Pollesch had crafted his eponymous play City as Prey, later said, “For us, that was an important step from our book City as Prey, which reconstructs, analyzes and criticizes hegemonic practices, to NewCenterAddition’s Wrong Life Show at the Prater, which made us realize that we’re always talking about the operations of power and hegemony, but never about our place vis-à-vis power, the position we take up within hegemonic practices” (Pollesch, Quiñones, Becker, and Lanz 2005b, 24). The high competence for symbolic and theoretical work characterizing this class is here turned toward a critical self-reflection that opens out to more activist endeavors. Pollesch’s insistence on connecting the theoretical with the personal echoes but does not merely return to the post-1970 turn toward New Subjectivity, which rerouted political activism into the transformation of “private” practices and the search for nonalienated, authentic selves. Rather than retrieve lost wholeness, Pollesch’s theater aims to mobilize the affective and cognitive capacities of the fragmented, complex, calculating subject of capitalism in order to question and change the conditions under which that subject reproduces itself. The critical attention and acclaim that Pollesch has garnered in recent years owe to the fact that the creative class has moved from the margins of bourgeois-liberal society to the center of the postindustrial economy. Working conditions that long prevailed mainly in the cultural sector are spreading throughout the economy, while public spaces shielded against commercial and political pressures vanish. Political consultants in Britain, the United States, and Germany applaud the growing complexity, meaningfulness, and flexibility of work in postindustrial “creative economies.”11 By contrast, the work of cultural scholars points to overwork, poor pay, self-exploitation, lack of security and benefits, the accelerating pace of production, the shift from cooperation to competition, and the ubiquitous erosion of security or solidarity as the hallmarks of the increasingly deregulated, informal sector in which designers, musicians, graphic artists, architects, journalists, researchers, and many others work.12 These conditions are effaced by the enthusiastic rhetoric of work in terms of creativity, fun, self-actualization, and love. Critics warn that the austere work ethic, self-discipline, and erosion of cooperative relations prevailing in this sector are harbingers of the more fundamental

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reconstruction of capitalist economies as socialist and welfare states shrink down social nets. Pollesch’s stage thus brings into view a future in which labor masquerades as love. What kind of art and knowledge can be produced under these conditions, and what are the political consequences of the attendant transformation of civil society? Pollesch’s work at the Prater brings the exclusions in Habermas’s model into view and predicates its continued usefulness on adapting it to current requirements and conditions.13 First, Habermas distinguished between cultural discussion, public debate, and politics proper, a distinction that the Prater’s linking of artists, academics, and activists seeks to overcome rather than maintain. Secondly, Habermas’s very concept of the public sphere predicates its very particular, rationalist conception of debate on the exclusion of “private” matters associated both with the liberal market economy sharply distinguished from the state and with the domestic sphere as the site of feelings, practices, and relations deemed natural, nonrational, or both. In the Prater, by contrast, neither economic inequalities and interests nor intimate, gendered, and sexual emotions and bonds are excluded; instead, they occupy center stage. The predication of rational discourse on the exclusion of intimate matters and styles of expression is here undone by the assimilation of theoretical language by market imperatives and the bodily affects negating those imperatives. In addition, Habermas’s predication of access to the public sphere on the self, whose property (male gender and bourgeois class), however, is bracketed for the fiction of communing “among equals,” is here confronted with women’s production of exotic and authentic subjectivity for the market. The working and living conditions at this theater—where actors rehearse, perform, hang and strike lights, move furniture, manage props, as well as cook, eat, chat and cuddle with each other, exercise, and sleep, in short, where the relation among offstage, onstage, and backstage are continually foregrounded—further point to the need to revise some of the key assumptions and exclusions of Habermas’s model. Nevertheless, Pollesch’s theater does not reject Habermas’s much-criticized concept of the public sphere but rather adapts and modifies it for our present moment. By turning itself into a hub in networks of activists, theorists, and artists, the Prater models the very public sphere whose vanishing is the subject of Domestic Front. Notwithstanding the critical pessimism that marks the plays, I want to note the optimism of democratic will and method that drives the social and work relations in that space. Pollesch’s democratizing impulse also informs his theater’s institutional structure, which actively resists the social relations marked by isolation and

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competition that prevail in the gradually desubsidized, privatized, creative economy. By sheltering a whole array of activist, academic, and artistic interlocutors and fostering the very argumentative, collaborative discourse that the plays show to be increasingly impossible, Pollesch turns the Prater into an arena for staging the current, acute contradiction between capitalism and democracy without ceding the latter as a lost cause.

Tent S ag a Tent Saga reframes the familiar (if geographically much expanded) set of questions about labor and love in the age of corporate subjecteffects in terms of the relation between the mediatized and live body. Telefavela introduces the characters and plot of a Brazilian telenovela that migrates to Germany in the second and third installments—Svetlana in a Favela and Pablo in the Plus Store. While Telefavela confronts the televisual model with live performing bodies in the mode of parody, and Svetlana considers the possibilities of contradictory indy screens (the title character is a video artist), Pablo stages the absorption of the performing body into interactive screen technologies. Live acting is at first empowered to defamiliarize the authoritarianism of the screen, initially instantiated as the old medium of television, by positioning the screen as the corporate site of globalist discourses streaming interpellative appeals via gendered structures of narrative and the gaze. In the course of the season, however, the more recent, “consumer-friendly” technological permutations, the digital video camera and the Web cam, which are cited in Svetlana and Pablo, trope the way in which “liveness”—long the prerogative of the theater—is finally subsumed by these new media. The stage actor, transformed into a viewer endowed with agency, is positioned firmly within the screenic architecture rather than outside or opposed to it.14 If this move of incorporation is consistent with Pollesch’s earlier work, the almost complete banishing of live, laboring, and desiring bodies from the stage in Pablo nevertheless begs the question of the social relations and activist contestations to which those bodies so insistently referred. Much of Pollesch’s writing for the stage has emulated the seriality of television drama, especially the open-ended narrative structure of soap operas. Java TM in a Box (1999–2000) was described as a soap in thirteen episodes; the ten-part www.slums (2000–1), for which he received his first Mühlheim Dramatist Prize, was likewise described as a theater soap; 24 Hours Don’t Add up to a Day (2002) was produced

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and broadcast as a TV series by the ZDF Theaterkanal in cooperation with volksbühne films. Such references have prompted some critics to dub Pollesch a “pop” author whose postmodern sensibility bridges mass cultural entertainment and the serious philosophical and political concerns historically reserved for high cultural institutions like the theater. Even as Pollesch’s rejection of the closed dramatic form and other attributes of Aristotelian drama lead him to (tongue in cheek) adopt the degraded generic labels of series and soap, such characterizations of his work as “pop” theater do not account for the tensions between the stage and screen dramatized in all these plays. Tent Saga foregrounds and exacerbates these tensions, culminating—in what is perhaps Pollesch’s most pessimistic play—in the evacuation of the live actor as the last referent of embodied, material sociality from the arena of class, gendered, sexual, and ethnic inequalities. That evacuation facilitates the transformation of inequalities into exotic masks, or props, of difference on screen where they function as (literally floating) signifiers of a fulsome diversity that covers over deepening global asymmetries of social power. Although I bracket Der Leopard von Singapur (The Leopard of Singapore), the fourth play in Tent Saga, from my discussion because it works through cinema rather than the newer media of television and the Internet, that play also clarifies most forcefully the political stakes of the stage’s envelopment by the screen.15 In charting ideological continuities between historic colonial fantasies (exemplified by Fritz Lang’s B movie Der Tiger von Eschnapur) and contemporary discourses of humanitarian intervention (embodied by Ridley Scott’s Hollywood movie Black Hawk Down), The Leopard of Singapore reveals the morphing of social relations produced by globalization into a state of global civil war marked by ultraviolent racism and misogyny and the bifurcation of differences on screen into commodified exoticism and an abject, threatening Other. The remaining three plays in Tent Saga may be regarded as a trilogy, as they revolve around one set of characters and trace out the trials and tribulations of favela-dweller Pablo who ends up working up in a Plus store, which is part of a predatory German discount chain comparable to the American Wal-Mart. The world sketched in Tent Saga is a dystopic Darwinian jungle in which structural adjustment programs dictated by international finance capital have prompted the Brazilian state to cut its social services and shrink itself down to its policing function, leaving the individual to fend for her or himself in proliferating urban slums prowled by Nike scouts in search of street cool. In Telefavela, the first part of the trilogy, the personnel of the melodramatic telenovela serve to allegorize the love affair between

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labor and capital as well as bring into view the function of globally circulating mass cultural forms to mediate between local patriarchies and modern transnational gender regimes. The remaining two plays, Svetlana in a Favela and Pablo in der Plusfiliale (Pablo at the Plus Store), while still making reference to the telenovela personnel, transpose them to the German context. The favela referenced in the second play’s title is located in Germany, and so is the Plus store mentioned in the title of the third play. As the plays further develop the themes introduced in Telefavela, the geographical move also entails their transposition into Pollesch’s signature theatrical idiom. Together, the trilogy constructs an itinerant drama of globalization that highlights ideological similarities between geographically distant places and players; that is, it takes seriously the telenovela’s claim to universality. At the same time, the travel from screen to stage and back explores the possibility of theater’s interference in the telenovela’s purpose of ideological integration. The telenovela rose to prominence in Brazil during a period of political repression by a military dictatorship that pushed through an intense industrialization program from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s, which entailed massive internal colonization projects and unleashed mass migrations to urban centers. Produced by the giant media monopoly Rede Globo, assisted by money and technical know-how of the U.S. Time Life conglomerate, the telenovela aimed to cushion the disintegrative forces of rapid modernization by constructing a stable moral framework of family and nation. Indeed, television’s imaginative production of nation was crucial for ensuring cohesion in the face of fundamental social change and political repression (Tufte 2000, 73).16 According to Inácio Araujo, the telenovela’s mediation between modernity and tradition pivoted on consumption (Araujo 2000, 273). Arguably, the conduit of consumption stayed in place even when the contents of the telenovelas shifted in the late 1980s as the country transitioned to democracy and the lifting of political censorship facilitated new types of characters, topics, and styles of expression. As Globo took its products global in the 1980s and 1990s, its expertise in inducing “capitalist development and [creating] consumer ideals for a basically pre-modern society” turned telenovelas into key vehicles for initiating postsocialist Europeans in particular “into the life style and consumerism of late modern capitalist societies” while keeping their moral paradigms intact, according to Rumanian critic Madalina Nicolaescu (Nicolaescu 2001, 209–10).17 The gradual dismantling of welfare state provisions now underway in western Europe, attended by

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a discourse about the perils of big government and the need for flexible, deregulated, and liberalized markets, has also created a market for imported and homegrown telenovelas in Germany.18 The genre’s expert handling of social polarization and its promise to socialize viewers into urban modernity, stage dreams of upward mobility for the poor, and integrate immigrants and ethnic/racial minorities into the national community clearly recommend it as a vehicle for processing the massive socioeconomic reconstructions occurring in contemporary Europe.19 At a time when European community is envisioned by some in explicitly Christian terms, the telenovela’s Christian universe, in which suffering is reliably redeemed, might strike a chord among those who struggle to make it in a newly capitalist world. Pollesch’s theatrical hijacking of a televisual genre central to an emergent global imagination thus serves to highlight parallels among Brazil’s brutal modernization program, the recent transitions of postcommunist societies, and finally the neoliberal reform processes currently underway in Europe. At the same time, the play suggests that performance may parodically subvert the telenovela’s ideological function of managing the contradictions of global capitalism. Telefavela investigates how “[t]he dynamic of global transformation processes has produced structural similarities between the seasoned street vendor in Sao Paulo and the single mother working in a Plus store in Dortmund” (Pollesch 2004, 119). It brings into view those who shoulder deregulated, flexible labor: the favela dweller Pablo, who dreams of inheriting a fortune while stocking shelves in a German Plus store, and the self-employed businesswoman/video artist Svetlana, who turns decommissioned churches into movie theaters. Telefavela turns on a love triangle (or even a square): Svetlana competes for Pablo’s love with his employer, the Contessa, who stands for local elites flirting with Big Daddy, that is, global capital. The plot of Telefavela is set in motion when Pablo, whom declining wages and a lack of formal employment opportunities have pushed into the informal sector as a maid, confesses to the Contessa that he has been stealing her things, including money and credit cards, because they serve as a talisman of his love for her. The Contessa is torn between being charmed by this demonstration of love and denouncing him as a criminal to the police. She cannot resolve her dilemma of mistrust and desire, as she eroticizes precisely his outlaw status: “The informal economy is so attractive. All these people here who circumvent the market, and especially you, Pablo! You look fabulous,” she gushes (Pollesch 2004, 91). Yet Pablo, to the Contessa’s dismay, is also attracted to Svetlana, who has made a virtue of surviving as a free

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agent in the creative economy. Meanwhile, Big Daddy also asks the Contessa to finally put out after a long period of courtship, which she resents, as her national interests exceed her role as mere “sex object” of capitalist investment and implementer of neoliberal market reforms. Instead of winning the Contessa’s love, Pablo faces denunciation and jail; the Contessa must realize that her security forces and their hightech surveillance technologies cannot insulate her from the threat of crime unleashed by informalization; Svetlana is unable to derive money from her creative work, which Nike converts into surplus value; and Big Daddy, unable to recoup his investments, grows tired of the Contessa’s tantrums. The miasma of unrequited desire, desperation, and dependency crystallizes in USNavy’s insight that “somehow this wasn’t anticipated by neoliberalism. That somehow no one can make it here” (Pollesch 2004, 89; emphasis in original). The only ray of hope brightening the prospect of catastrophic self-destruction, however, is Big Daddy’s search for an heir. He bequeaths his enormous fortune first to the dying Contessa, who in turn bequeaths it to Pablo. Neither he nor Svetlana survive much longer; USNavy, too, bites the dust, and finally even the prompter keels over and dies a highly dramatic stage death.20 As my summary demonstrates, Pollesch appropriates the plot and personnel of the telenovela to provide spectators with a crude and comic allegory of the impact of neoliberal economic policies on social relations. It harnesses the genre’s sentimental appeal to comment on the dire social consequences of informalization: the precariousness of work; the systematic erosion of solidarity and community; the unequal valuation of creativity; the growth of social insecurity, crime, and police surveillance; and the reduction of the tax-starved state to willing executioner of global finance capital. Yet Telefavela is also, of course, an anti-telenovela. It diverges from its model through its lack of traditional milieu, family life, local community, and marriage prospects. The slum setting takes the degradation of supportive communal bonds as a given. Likewise, the insecurity of social relations that must be renegotiated afresh from day to day undermines the notion of marriage as a permanent, mutually supportive relationship, so that illicit affairs and thwarted efforts to take advantage of each other are the rule in Telefavela. Pollesch’s theater exhibits no nostalgia for a past in which colonial property relations operated hand-in-glove with a patriarchal division of labor. Nor does it regard neoliberalism’s remaking of community, family, and sexual relationships as liberating, however. The dismantling of the Fordist work regime that divided “productive,” well-paid

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employment with benefits from “reproductive,” unpaid work along the axis of gender has indeed produced gender equality of sorts but not in the way envisioned by feminists. The heteronormative, monogamous marriage that so irked queer theorists and activists in the 1990s has been replaced by a vision of spontaneous encounters by independent individuals who “must freshly renegotiate assurances every day” and whose relationships “don’t rest on enforceable laws or regulations, but on love and trust!” (Pollesch 2004, 68). In Svetlana in a Favela, one character—in a parody of queer theory—admires Pablo for his “sampling of sex acts without being encumbered by memory or trust or a concept of stability. You don’t know any of that. That bourgeois phantasm of a stable life” (Pollesch 2004, 112). In Pablo in the Plus Store, another states that “paralleling the collapse of the centralized economies in Eastern Europe, the West dismantles social contracts it took decades to negotiate,” prompting another to reply, “Well, good riddance to social contracts that are normative and heterosexual, good riddance to technologies that inscribe our bodies with biological truths! FUCK THAT SHIT!” (Pollesch 2004, 153). Clearly the plays do not advocate a return to the bourgeois notions of stability, heteronormativity, and biologist technologies of gender that they deride. But they deplore the way in which a queer rhetoric of sexual liberty, posturing as radical challenge to bourgeois family values, supports and mystifies the precarious social relations created by neoliberalism. The performance of Telefavela breaks with several of the customs that have become Pollesch’s signature. Actors are consistently aligned with particular roles, resulting in a much more representational style of acting: Sophie Rois portrays the Contessa in the costume of a Creole aristocrat, replete with ruffled cape; Christine Gross, dressed as a British governess, plays Svetlana; and Volker Spengler plays Big Daddy in a white suit reminiscent of the Tennessee Williams character in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. With the exception of Caroline Peters as Pablo, the gender and age of the actors conform to that of the character. The actors’ slowed-down delivery of dialogue and infusion of words with emotions further invite the identification of actor and role. Their performances evoke the grand emotions and high pathos of the telenovela’s personnel, even as that personnel is being defamiliarized through the epic mode of its presentation. The romantic pair, Pablo and the Contessa, for instance, is composed of familiar types from the genre (the haughty but love-starved rich woman and the sly “malandro,” or anti-hero, from the favela)21 reiterated as a leftist rereading of the telenovela’s plot functions: “I could no longer support myself or my dog

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or my family,” relates Caroline as/about Pablo. “So I had to circumvent the market. I probably thought that this action would cushion globalization shock, by going informal and not presenting a burden to the state” (Pollesch 2004, 72). The juxtaposition of sentimental characters and plot with the distancing analytical language in which actors comment on the characters they present creates a parodic style whose humor and pleasure derive from the continuous interruption of audience identification and ideological suture in typical Brechtian fashion. In addition, the spatial proximity of actors to audience in the large plastic tent that set designer Bert Neumann had installed in the Prater enhances the effect of demystifying the televisual allure and its illusory promise of an affluent life within the reach of whoever inherits Big Daddy’s fortune. Madalina Nicolaescu relates the plot staple of the unexpected inheritance to the predicament of those who “on the account of their poor education have but slim chances on the labour market and who feel doomed to poverty and squalor” (Nicolaescu 2001, 207). The telenovela’s rags-to-riches plot maintains a strong focus on material wealth as a measure of human worth, while reflecting the near impossibility of upward social mobility for viewers in Latin America and Eastern Europe alike. Seen from the seating area in the Prater theater, which is scarcely demarcated from the playing space, the glittering backdrop is clearly recognizable as cheap tinsel; the chunky jewelry and thick pearls adorning the Contessa and her thieving lover/employee Pablo are an obvious thrift shop purchase; and the Contessa’s upper-class outfit, viewed up close, looks like plain polyester. The tawdry thrift store aesthetic prevailing in Tent Saga, then, serves the purpose of disillusionment and ideology critique. The deliberately cheap production values exhibited by the performance not only advertise the unequal means of the Prater and Rede Globo but also subvert the consumerist agenda to which Globo’s near-cinematic quality has been wedded. Spatial proximity in the theater, unlike the suturing televisual close-up, thus works as a distancing effect that assists the defamiliarization techniques operating in the dialogue, highlighting the differences between stage and screen. In sum, Telefavela deploys critical theatrical techniques against a leftist revision of a globalist televisual genre, as if to cross out the possibility of a simple theatrical appropriation of the screen’s power to symbolically manage social contradictions.22 The second installment of Tent Saga, Svetlana in a Favela, translates the cast and story introduced in Telefavela into Pollesch’s familiar theatrical idiom: gone are the picturesque costumes, along with the roles they signified. Three female actors—who only occasionally

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address each other by the names of Contessa, Pablo, and Svetlana— divide up a text no longer parsed into distinct or coherent characters. As the performance shifts back into a presentational style, the dialogue resumes the theoretical register. Their delivery of the dialogue, an accelerated stream of language punctuated by screamed outbursts, resembles the style of previous productions. The play’s title figure is the favela dweller and sweat-shop worker Svetlana who seeks to escape her humble beginnings by making videos. Svetlana’s talent to appropriate and recombine garbage into art, personalize the generic, and infuse the global with local color brings into view the shift from productive to consumptive labor in the creative industries flourishing in Europe. Through the indy artist who “makes her own films on video and markets them herself, prints her own posters, and screens them in one of the defunct churches” (Pollesch 2004, 106), Pollesch also raises the possibility of appropriating the technological means of ideological reproduction—the cheap video camera—and of updating the documentary forms of representation that have served to authenticate contestations to the social order (“You can show the fragility and coldness of social relations in a city like Sao Paulo as a cliché, or you can show it to be hyper-complex! Svetlana! Show me how you live in your self-made films!” [Pollesch 2004, 106]). Much of the play revolves around the questions raised by such symbolic labor, the romanticization of creative work, and the aura of subversion enveloping some of its most precarious forms. However, the possibility of countercultural production is dismissed as Svetlana’s products are shown to capture the attention of corporate scouts able to convert her creative labor into surplus value for the multinationals—while Svetlana and her favela derive no value from their creativity. The romance of laboring for love is confronted with a materialist account of the apparatus: “Why do film producers make so much money off of love and sex workers don’t. That criminalized piece of shit, why doesn’t it make money, but fucking Dreamworks does, or Disney, why do they profit so much from love and we don’t?” (Pollesch 2004, 116). In the gendered and racialized grammar of Tent Saga, Svetlana’s gender signals the feminized working conditions prevailing in the creative industries that center on consumption practices that classical economists long excluded as “feminine” and passive from their account of productivity. Her Slavic name references Eastern Europe as a fount of cheap labor, creative enterprise, and eroticism.23 The video artist also fits the profile of the “intellectual proletariat” laboring under conditions characterized largely by self-employment and self-exploitation that Angela McRobbie and Marion von Osten have described. The

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ostensibly self-determined conditions under which this new class of highly flexible, motivated, and mobile creative workers toils merely energize the increasingly consumption-centered economies of the postindustrial West. Svetlana in a Favela closes with a long screamed dialogue between actors who profess uncertainty about how to end the play and confusion whether they are already dead or still alive. This uncertainty attending the in-corporation of the artist’s body in the corporate flow of data is reframed and resolved by the liveness of the visual media in the last installment of Tent Saga. In Pablo in the Plus Store, the stage has become an appendage of the screen. The stage’s spatial mapping of social relations has been replaced by the screen as window to the world, importing the street life in what might be a Brazilian favela into the tent. As spectators take their seats, the screen goes dark; but rather than confine itself to supporting player to the stage, it soon goes live and stays on during the entire evening. The adjoining stage, meanwhile, remains dark, its only illumination the glowing, giant LCD display next to it. The play opens with a close-up of actress Christine Gross’s face on screen, reiterating the previous play’s invitation to “show how you live” and carrying on a one-sided dialogue with the camera: “How much does this cost per month? Yes, not bad. (Pause) Un-huh! (Pause) Who’s that over there? Un-huh? (Pause) and that over there? Un-huh? So many people live here. . . . But they’re still alive, aren’t they? And how do they make a living?” (Pollesch 2004, 152). Prompted by her questions, the camera pans slowly over a narrow, sparsely decorated booth suggestive of a makeshift dwelling, furnished with chairs and mattresses on which several costumed figures lie inert. Christine’s questions about the material conditions of living are answered by the camera’s self-evident images. While the actor seemingly instigates the movements of the camera, she has also become a spectator. The cramped, ramshackle booth signifies an ambiguous location, part living quarters (mattress, chair), part workplace (a cash register with a chair in front of it, shelves, a storage bin). These props signal inside spaces, yet one mattress is upholstered in Astroturf, designating perhaps “outside.” The images surveying this space are displayed on a large screen set at an angle to the stage. Adjoining the stage on the other side is the booth from which the images are transmitted; the feed from the camera to the screen is controlled and edited by a row of young technicians stationed at a bank of computers fully visible to the audience. The computers face the favela-booth, which is half obscured from the audience’s sight and hearing by a glittering curtain of silver tinsel and a sheer plastic sheet imprinted with giant block

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letters that spell out the word “BILLIG” (cheap). The chairs in the auditorium face the stage; this conventional configuration constitutes the main joke of the evening, as the stage (whose tinsel backdrop suggests a “silver screen”) is used for no longer than ten minutes during the entire evening. Pablo’s migration to Germany has also entailed his migration to the screen. “Live” performance has been reconstituted in this play. With the exception of a few interludes, it no longer denotes the appearance-inthe-flesh of actors but the “live” screening of backstage actions. When actors do make an entrance, their performance is partly mediatized through the use of microphones; in addition, the bright, undulating silver backdrop reflects so much light that their bodies are turned into dull, dark silhouettes. Moreover, they must compete with the large screen, which continues to display what goes on in the closed booth. This unequal competition produces two distinct moods: whereas the camera in the favela-booth records interactions marked by tenderness, empathy, trust, and harmony, the stage is reserved for expressions of conflict, danger, and aggression. Close-ups of actors’ faces, the intimate touching of their bodies as they cuddle and stroke each other, their slow confessional whispering into the camera or into each others’ ears convey the romance of the global as mood, even when their dialogue grapples with economic contradictions, the dangers of migration and undocumented work, exploitation, and the increasing uncertainty of personal relationships. The screen can thematize anything because the image is empowered to fold even fighting words into the love story of the global. If Caroline/Pablo in Telefavela had still taunted the smitten Sophie/Contessa with the words “Some call it feminization of survival, I call it love,” Pablo shows how the critical discourse of the “feminization of survival” has become a soundtrack of tender murmurings. The subordination of text to image extends to written language as well: script turns into an illustration, as a cursor writes actors’ names and expiration dates onto the screen while the camera pans their faces. The “clip” in previous plays interrupted the angry narrative of interpellation with audiovisual material from mass culture, as a clue to dreams and desires that were entirely frustrated by the script. In Pablo, the clip has become the main track that has all but swallowed up the script. Even though the critique lodged in the script was perpetually shown to be failing in Pollesch’s work, the aggressive force of its negation had always been held in tension with the inklings of positive, collective mass cultural identifications elicited mostly by songs and movies and occasionally props during the clips when actors’ bodies

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entered into affectionate, polymorphously proximate relations that starkly diverged from the strained, stiff postures and argumentative tone characterizing the dialogue sequences. Such positive identifications—which take over as performance relocates to the screen—raise the specter of mass culture’s manufactured consent to the political order, which theorists in the intellectual tradition of the Frankfurt School, from Adorno and Horkheimer through Habermas to Enzensberger, have argued. Before I turn to the role that the theater occupies vis-à-vis the screening of globalist desire, let me pause briefly and consider the treatment of differences on this screen. While the screen trails the remnants of the telenovela’s personnel and plot, which resolved class contradictions through the power of love and fortuitous financial windfalls, its panoptic view of an enclosed space whose inhabitants rarely leave, its braiding of social interaction with individual confessions, and the digital manipulations of the screen all emulate the codes established by “surveillance-entertainment” (Couldry 2004).24 The camera angle, positioning of the bodies, mood, and voice all underline the promise of integration elicited by the synoptic gaze, that is, the many watching the few captured by the surveillance camera (Bauman 1998). The telenovela’s exclusion of certain members of the mestizo nation and duplication of a discriminatory social reality in its casting practices are here superseded by reality television’s foregrounding of sexual, ethnic, and national difference, revised as a set of cultural attributes that must be cherished while excluding any references to the material inequalities attending gender, race, and ethnicity. The comfortable and largely harmonious cohabitation enjoyed by the denizens of Pollesch’s favela-booth is thus enlivened by signifiers of gender and ethnic difference (wigs and moustaches), which actors put on and take off at will and pass to each other. In one shot, a black moustache (associated with Turkish masculinity in the German imaginary) floats through the booth, attaching and detaching from upper lips in a serial ethnic and gendered masquerade. In addition, journalist Günther Wallraff’s historic drag act as Ali, an undocumented Turkish worker, is cited at the outset, anchoring the globalized notion of ethnicity as voluntaristic sartorial code in a specifically German, leftist tradition of racial representation.25 A closer look reveals, however, that another set of ethnic signifiers, the colorful Peruvian poncho and hat worn by Susanne, never comes off. That cast member is also consistently excluded from the group cuddle. Susanne no more impersonates the character of Pablo than any of the others, but her ethnic costume sets her apart from the others who snuggle up with the affectionate

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Volker (who in Telefavela played Big Daddy). The poncho, a folkloristic signifier of cultural difference, then, naturalizes and valorizes Susanne’s marginal social position vis-à-vis the group in ethnic terms. The political discontent she voices, similarly to the rest of the cast (e.g., her reference to the “sans papiers” movement [Pollesch 2004, 159] and protest, “I don’t want to integrate the fact that the Schlecker [drug store chain] fucks over women into my sexuality!” [Pollesch 2004, 161]), is thereby reframed as evidence of charming cultural diversity. Despite this culturalization of dissent, Susanne remains as excluded from the embrace of human brotherhood and sisterhood as classical Nathan was in Lessing’s play about religious tolerance. While reality television exaggerates cultural conflict and psychological drama in order to launch its disciplining, assimilative project, the screen in Pablo cannot seem to accommodate either conflict or any of its attending emotions. These migrate onto the stage, resulting in a neat division of symbolic labor between television and theater. When Volker attempts to renegotiate his sexual and economic dependency on Gordon, the mounting conflict between them is first censored by blacking out parts of the screen, then confined to the off-screen space of the stage (Pollesch 2004, 164–66). While actors in the favelabooth converse at length about the challenge of borders to the intelligence and creativity of the illegal immigrant who surmounts them, an onstage pantomime, performed to the soundtrack of folksinger Al Stewart’s crooning of “On the Border,” illustrates the high cost of border crossing to the sans papiers who lose their money and their lives. Inga, whose friends steal all her money from her wallet, performs a furious, wordless tantrum on stage, while the thieves celebrate on camera. In short, the stage becomes the site of suffering, oppression, loss, and rage. This configuration of stage and screen appears to privilege the theater as critical public space over the affirmative visual technologies circulating the romance of the global. Yet Pablo also undercuts the tendency to heroize the stage as the rough-edged, gritty, and intrepid forum of protest and dissent against the treacherous inclusiveness of the screen, which falsely purports to integrate all in its seductive embrace. Critique and protest, as in Inga’s repeated punk-rock strutting, yelling, and head tossing, read at best as a pose that can be reproduced on cue, at worst as pornographic titillation. The crude border-crossing pantomime reveals the subordination of acting to mediatized data, as illustration of the musical soundtrack. Its comparatively inept realism is not only much less compelling than what the screen can show; it also reveals the immobilization of critique by mimetically repeating what it aims to indict. Finally, the rendering

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of social conflicts in an exaggeratedly sentimental style smacks of theater’s consent to occupying a niche, accepting the role of the fool and thereby providing an alibi to the globalized culture industries’ orchestration of desire and consent. Theater’s beggarly picking up of the referential crumbs of screen technologies, literalized as the exiling of “inappropriate,” “tactless” matter (Pollesch 2004, 164) from screened to stage space, is too complementary, too much determined by the framing technology to be revaluated in terms of critical truth versus mediatized simulacra. The actors’ rebellion against this division of labor in the final sequence of the play, consequently, can no longer be distinguished from the pose of protest the stage has adopted. While Inga belts out an energetic rendition of the ABBA song “S.O.S.” against the backdrop of the screen, which, karaoke-fashion, superimposes the words of the song over the image of a blond woman shopping for makeup, the remaining cast members bang against the plastic sheet dividing their CHEAP favela-booth from the auditorium. Their revolution, unlike so many others in the last two decades, is not being televised.

R emediati on and Inter medi ali ty The tense, rivalrous relation between stage and screen that Pablo in the Plus Store dramatizes has been the subject of vigorous scholarly debate since the advent of technologies of mass reproduction. Pollesch’s contribution to this debate comes at a time when theater and theater scholarship are wracked by anxieties about the status, function, and the very existence of live performance in an age whose dominant mode of cultural reproduction is termed “televisual” (Fry 1993) or, taking newer computer technologies into account, “screenic” (Case 1996). The replacement of live acting by screened bodies, the divergence of affect between screened image and spoken text, and the complementary role division between screenic affirmation and performative negation in Pablo resonate with scholarly debates concerning the technological convergence between the two. Theater scholars are, in general, wary of the kind of progressivist narrative told by media historians David Bolter and Richard Grusin, who construct the “remediation” of older representational technologies by new and improved ones as a story of perfected realistic illusion, expanded access and distribution, and enhanced interactivity.26 In his book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Philip Auslander instead renders cinematic and televisual remediations of theater in agonistic, even predatory, terms and speaks of contemporary mass media domination (Auslander

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1999, 1) of film’s “devastating cultural-economic impact on theatre” (12) and of television’s “pillage” of prior media (12) and its “colonization of liveness” (13). He disparagingly concludes that theater’s only remaining social function is to mark cultural prestige (58) and symbolic capital (59).27 While undoubtedly Auslander’s observation, that “the general response of live performance to the oppression and economic superiority of mediatized forms has been to become as much like them as possible” (7) is true for much U.S. and European theater, the ascendancy of the “televisual” or “screenic” paradigm has also challenged artists and scholars to redefine theater’s political raison d’être, especially those who seek to ground the antagonism of the stage to the screen in the materialist terms of anti-capitalist theatrical traditions and social formations. The history of the Volksbühne, where Pollesch works, is entwined with the changing relationship between stage and screen. Artists affiliated with this house have been at the forefront of shaping the theater into an arena where the politics of screened representation can be called into question and where new notions of political theater could be developed in response to the rise of mass media. The brief narrative that follows, which interweaves media development, theater history, and political interpretations of spectatorship, traces the critical, intermedial practices that Pollesch has inherited and adapted to current conditions and locates his work in a larger historical and theoretical context. For the director Erwin Piscator in the 1920s, film and slide projections offered an efficient means of referencing the social and accelerating the pace of epic theater, which saw itself as a laboratory for processes of political transformation. The screen as instrument of epic storytelling remained subordinate to the narrative. While technology was sometimes associated with the development of capitalism and positioned as inimical to human progress (e.g., the clanging mechanical walkway that expedited the hapless Schwejk to various battlefields in The Good Soldier Schwejk of 1928), the diverse visual material piped onto the stage served to “lend the proletariat mechanical, architectural, or geographical strength” (Bryant-Bertail 1991, 21). The leftist avant-garde around Piscator and Brecht was enthusiastic about the potential of technology to aid in the proletariat’s empowerment, in bringing about new modes of perception, in encouraging critical scrutiny and expertise, and in fostering new forms of political consciousness, as Walter Benjamin argued in his visionary manifesto “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” New photographic and cinematic technologies of reproduction, he postulates, destroy

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the artwork’s aura that both signals and cloaks the work’s oppressive conditions of production in an age when the contemplation of art was the prerogative of elites. The passive, enthralled spectator is emancipated from contemplative absorption and aesthetically and politically awakened by the shock of cinema’s fast-moving images. The probing look Benjamin imagines for the collectively empowered political actor/artist is clearly borrowed from Brecht and Piscator’s epic spectator, whose participatory social practices likewise empower him as political subject. In a society where technology serves the creation and sustainability of a better life for all, rather than the fascist, imperialist means of war and domination, Benjamin believes ordinary people will take the means of cultural production into their own hands. That he attributed qualities fostered by the political theater to the cinematic spectator attests to a nonthreatening relationship of screen to stage, even though nickelodeons had already begun to displace theaters in the early twentieth century. Several decades later, after the rise of cinematic industries harnessed to first hot and then cold wars, and the eventual abandonment of inner-city movie houses when suburban viewers stayed home to watch television, Jürgen Habermas could no longer premise his notion of aesthetic-political emancipation, democratic discourse, and the public sphere on screen spectatorship. His idealized public sphere is a decidedly literary one, contrasting sharply with the visual technologies aimed at generating acclamation and manufacturing consent. Habermas’s disparaging assessment of the screen as harbinger of a totalitarian society echoes Adorno and Horkheimer; their essay on the culture industry portrays the mass cultural spectator as aesthetically numbed and politically homogenized by the moving image. Put differently, the aesthetic uniformity of mass culture produces political conformism. Powered by the capitalist society of the spectacle, the screen sutures user to image, whereas the written word drags behind it not only critical thought and analytical reflection but also, in the tradition of political theater from Bertolt Brecht to early Heiner Müller, delivers the continuous movement of social dialectics. In the 1970s and ’80s, when playwright Heiner Müller and director Benno Besson collaborated at the Volksbühne in East Berlin, Müller’s later performance scripts shared Habermas’s sense of the screen’s alliance with consumer capitalism. Sue-Ellen Case, a U.S. theater scholar at the forefront of theorizing the live body at the threshold to the digital age, describes Müller’s style as an attempt to critically respond to screen technologies. In the increasingly fragmentary scripts of the 1980s, the performance’s image track splits off from dialogue; and mute action,

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conveyed by highly metaphorical stage directions, no longer illustrates but runs alongside the truncated, citational speech track shot through with bits of advertising, brand names, political slogans, and poetic debris from earlier plays.28 Case historicizes the divergence of script and image and the deterioration of dialogue, in terms of the encroachment of capitalist consumerism via Western radio and TV broadcasts on socialist space on the one side and of Stalinist repression and the mandate of socialist realism on the other. As the largely monologic script splits off from the image track of performance, stage space is unmoored from its material conditions and colonized by images from the capitalist movie screen: “The cultural and literal landscapes are completely commodified and available only as screened. The verse play is supplanted by the image play . . . screening is the process of exporting capitalism.” Case asks, “What role can communist performance or intellectual production play within high commodification?” (Case 1996, 138). The scholar’s despairing question pinpoints the “running apart” of performance and text as the key symptom of the screen’s dominance over the intellectual activity of imagining the socialist state as alternative to capitalism, which is lodged in scripted drama and embodied by Müller’s early verse plays. At the same time, she argues, Müller’s proliferation of autonomous, disparate scenic elements unleashes a semiotic terrorism of sorts that aims at fortifying the spectator’s cognitive abilities in the face of continuous, seamless interpellations (Case 1996, 141). Case’s description of Müller’s theater as one that aims to terrorize capitalism by turning its visual excess against itself is remarkably similar to the German theater scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann’s notion of “postdramatic” theater, which is likewise catalyzed by Müller’s late plays. The postdramatic theater, in which text is but one element of performance, is prompted by the dominance of media in the 1970s, he states. Whereas for Case the deterioration of dialogue had signaled the cessation of the rolling dialectic, however, the postmodernist Lehmann celebrates the “running apart” of text and performance as the subversion of the rule of language, assigned to the domain of the law and the logos, by the unsynchronized play of theater’s multiple visual and kinetic signifying systems. The postdramatic theater’s autonomous scenic, gestural, textual, and other elements, moreover, no longer reference an external reality but, as in abstract painting, create an “aesthetic experience [that] demands—and makes possible—reflected visual pleasure, conscious experiencing of purely (or predominantly) visual perception as such, independent of any recognition of represented realities” (Lehmann 2006, 36). By privileging nonreferential,

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postmodern practices over referential, text-centric ones, Lehmann necessarily redefines the notion of the political, previously tied to theater’s engagement with social processes. His identification of the text with the logocentric organization of the real, rejection of dramatic action and character now usurped by the screen, and valorization of the static image leave the postdramatic theater with few resources at its disposal to contest the commodified spectacle that consumer capitalism plays on all its screens. The spectator’s semiotic participation in the disparate construction of meaning, he hopes, will somehow eclipse the media’s interactive allure (Lehmann 2006, 167). Lehmann’s notion of the postdramatic theater is characterized by a notable lack of critique vis-à-vis the dominance of the screen and its usurpation of theater’s openness to social processes. Indeed, Lehmann’s theoretical moves surrender to these conditions, providing a descriptive and celebratory vocabulary for theater’s assimilation into the screenic order, where it flickers between emulating screenic functions and compensating for them. In Case’s mournful account of the script’s demise resides her yearning for a bygone poetics of collective improvisation based on the openness between representational and political systems, which she finds both in Müller’s early plays about postwar socialist transformation and, elsewhere in her theoretical work, in lesbian feminist theatrical experiments of the 1980s. They rehearse an oppositional relation to the screen image, furnished by the lesbian community’s strategies of camp and parody.29 In the performances she discusses, the power of the capitalist screen is subverted through butch-femme role playing and drag appropriations of straight movie star icons and ads aimed to make lesbian pleasure, power, and communal commitment visible. Further, Case notes the constitution of the “audience” as players (reminiscent of Brecht’s teaching plays), offering an alternative notion of agency and access than that contained by the succession of screens in Bolter and Grusin. Together, early communist theater and lesbian performance thus yield a notion of the stage informed by dialectic and campy relations vis-à-vis the screen image respectively. Her predication of political opposition and transformation on the collective participation of live bodies, moreover, confronts the enhanced capacities of the screen, which has, by the 1990s, overcome the early culture industries’ limitations by Fordist modes of production. The uniformity observed by Adorno and Horkheimer has been replaced by greater interactivity, product differentiation, and interlinking across media platforms. Case drafts her critique of the

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capitalist screen from sources attuned to these technological developments, crossing Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky’s feminist analysis of the computer screen’s remediation of the cinematic gaze with Naomi Klein’s investigation of globalization in No Logo. Rather than equate interactivity, differentiation, and interlinking with user choice and, by implication, political agency and democratization, Case’s critique of the screen greatly amplifies Habermas’s concerns regarding the antidemocratic implications of visual mass culture. Case’s project, to theorize a materialist sexual politics in coalition with race- and class-based critiques, resonates with Pollesch’s interest in neoliberalism’s remaking of the gendered and racialized division of labor in the economization of sexuality and subjectivity, the feminization of survival, and the commodification of political dissent as ethnic difference. At the same time, the components Case assembles for a political theater in the age of intermediality are unavailable to Pollesch. His theater can embody neither the “communist nation” the way Müller could nor a notion of sexual subculture the way lesbian feminist theater of the 1980s did. Remarkably, Pablo is the first play by Pollesch that shows gay relationships (exemplified by Gordon and Volker) and acts (evidenced by a long, onscreen kiss between the glamorous Inga and Caroline), yet it shows them as part of the globalist romance rather than opposed to it. While the Benjaminian utopia of taking the means of production into their own hands continues to animate feminist investigations of new media, Svetlana’s digital Webcam can only show us the reality of favela life within the established dramaturgies of reality TV and telenovela, reproducing television’s idealizations of feminine bodies along with exoticized valorizations of ethnicity, to the financial benefit of the corporations that provide the hardware. At this moment in history, then, the camera has ceded its potential role as harbinger of critical imagining, collective empowerment, and radical social transformation, as the historical avant-garde and its theorists had envisioned. Nor can the sharp critique of screenic operations, which Pollesch’s parodic reiterations bring into view, be counterbalanced any longer by the kind of positive, utopian practices and identifications remembered by Case. If her argument already flickers between mourning an activist past and the faint hope of “terrorizing” the absolute dominance of the screen, Pollesch’s Tent Saga maps the degrading effects of enduring exposure to that constellation, exacerbated by the failure of postmodern theory to imagine change or opposition. The precariously balanced, fourfold negations contained in his earlier plays—that critical theory can no longer sustain its no

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to the world as it is and that mass cultural identifications can no longer impel fierce albeit diffuse refusals of that—collapse as the screen enfolds all users in the inclusive romance of the global. The emphasis on repetition in the formal composition of the script advertises the poststructuralist revision of agency lodged in discursive reiterations and unfettered from social processes. The strict distinction between the static recitation of text and the hectic physical activities performed during the “clips” foregrounds the running apart of text and image tracks, which signal the screenic remediation of the stage. The absorption of theoretical postulates into capitalist maxims announces not just the power of the latter but the surrender and bankruptcy of the former. And the screams, which Pollesch described as the theatrical equivalent of cinematic “cuts” running through the speakers, are explicitly linked to the corporate, screenic organization of subjectivity.30 In Tent Saga, this tension between theatrical and screenic modes of representation is pulled to the foreground and aligned with starkly contrasting moods of protest and affirmation respectively. At the same time, agony and protest are already denounced as a pose the theater must adopt in order to be granted its proverbial fifteen minutes that interrupt the screenic flow. In Domestic Front, Pollesch had embedded his examination of contemporary regimes of sexual labor in a communal, activist project engaged with urban planning, gentrification, and the rise of the creative class. Even as his plays noted the inability of certain theories to retain critical acuity in the face of neoliberal reconstruction, they did so in order to insist on the use value of critical thought and on the political accountability of academic and theatrical practices. One might even regard his collaboration with NewCenterAddition as an attempt to revive and update Müller and Besson’s experiments at the Volksbühne during the early 1970s to use the theater as laboratory where the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism may be collectively worked through—albeit on a much more modest scale than that envisioned by Case. Tent Saga likewise shared space and resources with an activist roommate, namely the immigrant rights network Kanak Attak, whose trilogy Döner Stress premiered in May 2004 in the same red tent that Bert Neumann had designed for Pollesch’s four plays that season. A mixture of multimedia variety show and agitprop, Döner Stress dealt with the plight of migrants and asylum seekers in Europe and criticized restrictive immigration laws while also emphasizing the resilience and inventiveness of migrants faced with illegalization and racism. Kanak Attak’s emphasis on migrants’ creativity attempted to counter the discourse of victimization that has all too often bolstered

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leftist and feminist paternalism vis-à-vis immigrants and ethnic minorities in the past, as well as provide a forum for migrants’ own artistic and critical articulation of their experience. While the Prater did not create a framework for exploring common theoretical premises and political agendas, Kanak Attak nonetheless shared Tent Saga’s preoccupation with masquerade as part of immigrants’ survival strategies and thus might be seen to ground theatrical drag in social practices. Recounting the challenges faced by undocumented immigrants, Kanak Attak called attention to the class cross-dressing of the sapeurs in particular, a subculture of young Congolese men who migrate primarily to Paris and Brussels and seek to demonstrate entitlement and belonging by dressing in high designer fashion. Kanak Attak valorized the sapeurs as savvy manipulators of capitalist codes of class, whose sartorial display of affluence not only flouts the social position reserved for the postcolonial, immigrant underclass but constitutes a way of individually collecting Europe’s “colonial debt” (Gondola, 35). Kanak Attak’s failure to critically reflect on the fact that the sapeurs’ intense, legitimate desire for integration is entirely mediated by high fashion commodity fetishes and that la sape as a rule is embedded in extremely competitive, exploitive, and misogynistic social relations thus leaves uncontested the premise that capitalist consumer culture, emblematized by the haute couture coveted by poor postcolonials, holds available the means to correct colonial wrongs.31 To be clear, I do not want to chide the sapeurs for failing to live up to leftist or feminist notions of collective resistance, but I question Kanak Attak’s uncritical valorization of neocolonial mimicry as a solution to the problem of racist exclusion and class oppression, rather than its symptom. Moreover, Kanak Attak’s faith in performative subversions of race and class was strangely overpowered by the set. The tent’s orientalist design, which ironized capitalism’s screening of ethnicity in Pollesch’s plays (analogously to Pablo’s stereotypical poncho and hat), enveloped the members of Kanak Attak in a kitschy aura of fake authenticity as if the sand on the tent floor and the colorful cushions on which spectators perched referenced the exotic desert origin of the immigrants parading through it. The set thus reinstalled the very essentialist assumptions about racial class difference and facile multiculturalism that the activists explicitly condemned and inadvertently demonstrated the devastating effects of installing strategies of individual subversion in place of collective organizing for rights within a democratic public sphere. The social masquerades performed by the sapeurs and the figuration of ethnicity as a set of cultural codes literally free-floating from the burden of material bodies and systemic inequality on screen

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in Pablo together signal the faltering of collective strategies of thinking, arguing, and acting historically associated with the performance of live bodies and the scripting of political agency.

Co nc lus ion The figures on Pollesch’s stage struggle with their fervent desire for a nonalienated authenticity, which is, however, always already commodified. Neither the theoretical language they deploy to describe their condition nor the fierce yet diffuse affect lodged in their bodies can ultimately resist their interpellation—these can only forestall it. In that sense, Pollesch’s theater, which has attracted a faithful fan following in Berlin and beyond, conveys the disillusionment of a generation of forty-something artists and academics who have witnessed the failure and co-optation of democratic socialist movements in Central Europe in 1989 and the withdrawal of Western poststructuralist theory from social questions. In the predominantly architectural metaphors of his plays, the subject is relentlessly exposed to the nonstop commercial announcements of global capitalism in the shopping mall or department store that is the postmodern self. In a signature technique adapted from cinematic editing (but also echoing Heiner Müller’s later performance scripts), Pollesch uncouples the text and image tracks of performance, separating out the long, physically static passages of recitation from shorter, hyperactive clips.32 The “cuts” slicing text from performance do not so much divide critical and affirmative tracks as they juxtapose two distinct negations of what Adorno called “wrong life”: the negation lodged in the text’s citation of critical theory and the negation of capitalism’s contradictions that characterizes mass entertainment. Whereas the dialogue’s surrender to economistic imperatives signals the failure of both dramatic art and critical thought, the intermittent, positive identification of actors with the passionately rebellious affect of pop and rock yields them up to the ideological affirmation that mass culture orchestrates between screen and user. Nonetheless, in the earlier plays, the sounds and images piped in still carry the distorted traces of suffering, alienation, and yearning for an alternative to “wrong life.” There is thus something in the juxtaposition of negations—the serious, critical “I don’t WANT THAT!” with the trivial yet equally earnest “S.O.S.!” enunciated in the pop voice of ABBA—that hints at the possibility of instantiating a collective subject that can accommodate yearning, identification, and commitment, along with critique. In the more recent work,

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however, the stage appears to lose its ability to hold these two negations in tension in order to produce or prefigure the impassioned, oppositional collective. In his predominantly (often exclusively) female ensembles, Pollesch develops his own version of post-individualist “character,” which can be found in much contemporary theater (as in Jelinek’s scripts). The aggressive energy with which performers share the vestigial subject positions referenced in the dialogue oddly alternating with the affection that connects them during the clips suggests a subject that is neither individualized in the traditional, liberal-humanist sense nor monolithic and unified the way Marxism and feminism imagined women, workers, and the postcolonial underclass. It presents, however, a form of collective thinking, speaking, and acting that resonates with older notions of solidarity. Moreover, this collective, marked by the anti-authoritarian, collaborative rehearsal process and bearing the biographical traces of the actors for and with whom Pollesch creates the plays, is not only geographically and socially specific to a particular intellectual and artistic subculture in Berlin but uses its recent, increased mobility—the festival circuit in Europe and beyond, along with the international invitations now trickling in—to link up with allied groups, situations, and agendas. Tent Saga grew out of a brief sojourn in São Paulo where Pollesch discovered that his work about urban reconstruction meant little to the favela dwellers with whom he collaborated; but his exploration of the precarization of romantic and familial relationships did.33 These experiences in turn link back to local, national, and transnational/European networks of immigrants rights activists and artists like Kanak Attak. While his impulse and explanatory reach is rather modest in its biographical, local specificity, the appeal of Pollesch’s work thus resides in the way in which the post-individualist solidarity of collective speech becomes tethered to shifting activist alliances and coalitions. The process of remediation dramatized in Tent Saga, however, which begins as a theatrical parody of a global televisual genre and considers subversive uses of visual technologies only to arrive at theater’s complete integration in screenic technologies and adoption of the forms they have developed to dramatize and resolve social conflicts, calls into question the tenability of theater’s commitment to collective thought. The theater assumes a role vis-à-vis the screen that is at once imitative and complementary, seemingly eliminating any space for collective interacting and nay-saying altogether. As the stage is literally sidelined by the screen in Pablo, what speaks in his theater is the aggressive, coordinated bellowing of capitalism as it penetrates

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into the remotest spaces on the globe, the most intimate nooks of subjectivity, and the most recalcitrant holdouts of opposition. The eroticization of social inequalities in the telenovela compounded with the celebration of cultural diversity in reality television figures the uncoupling of global capitalism’s ability to interpellate any and all subjects through consuming desires from the socially integrative agenda of historic welfare states. Tent Saga shows the scope of capitalism’s totalizing reach while rendering its hail as violent and terrorizing rather than seductive and reveals a deeply negative vision of our current condition as a social psychosis. The only critical stance this vision leaves spectators is not the hope for therapy, reconciliation, or reform but the mere willingness to face that terror.

4

Chapter 5

O perat ion Media Stor m El fr ied e Jeli nek’s Theat er o f Wa r

B

etween March 20 and May 1 of 2003, the United States and Britain along with a band of smaller nations invaded Iraq without approval by the United Nations (UN) Security Council in order to prevent Saddam Hussein’s government from deploying the weapons of mass destruction it allegedly possessed and from sheltering and collaborating with Islamic terrorists—allegations that could not be conclusively substantiated and eventually proved to be false. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the invasion a breach of the UN Charter and of international law. The U.S.-led coalition promised to liberate the Iraqi people from an oppressive dictatorship that had brutally persecuted the Kurdish minority and suppressed both religious groups and political dissenters and implement a democratic system of governance. While the brevity of the concentrated ground and air war seemed to bear out the triumphant assertion that superior American intelligence and weapons technology could ensure American security without significant loss of life or a tax increase, hopes for the restoration of peace, the rule of law, and democratization were soon dispelled. Whereas the invasion of Iraq and the taking of Baghdad had been documented around the clock by “embedded correspondents” conveying the perspective of the “liberation” force, the censored, synchronized media coverage was soon disrupted by groups and individuals taking advantage of new communications technologies. If initial coverage had

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aimed to create the illusion of a “clean” war and deflect attention from civilian casualties, destruction, and unrest, footage of torture, assassinations, and brutal mutilations perpetrated both by and against coalition personnel proved that the information technologies used to orchestrate public support for the war could also be turned around to inspire fear and terror against the occupation and those who would collaborate with it. The Austrian artist Elfriede Jelinek, recipient of the 2005 Nobel Prize, created two plays, Bambiland (2003) and Babel (2005), in response to the media coverage of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. They were written in the period between the war in 2003 and the escalating insurgency in the spring of 2004 when photographs and video footage from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib Prison, and the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah became public. Although related thematically, their critique shifts from one directed mainly at the fact, means, and effects of government censorship and mass-mediated orchestration of sentiment toward one that considers the implications of the individual, privatized production and consumption of violent images and the moral consequences of a sadistic gaze facilitated by small consumer electronics such as camera phones and laptop computers. Whereas the photographs from the Vietnam war zone, like the pictures of screaming children fleeing napalmed villages, famously instigated a powerful popular consensus against war, the photographs of torture and carnage from Iraq arguably did not occasion a comparable pacifist movement, political protest, or wider ethical discourse. Jelinek asks why that is so. The continuities she charts between ancient Greek tragedy and contemporary “wartainment” underscore not merely the implication of European democracy in imperialist projects but identify the ambivalence of empathizing with and eradicating the Other as constitutive of democratic art. Bambiland’s splicing with Aischylos’s The Persians calls into question the opposition between democratic civilization and barbaric tyranny, and Babel’s incorporation of the myth of Marsyas goes even further in diagnosing the Iraq War as a breakdown of human civilization tout court. The question Jelinek poses to the directors that tackle her notoriously un-theatrical plays and to the spectators who watch them is what alternatives the theater can offer to the pornographic mode of “regarding the torture of others” (Susan Sontag 2004) with nationalist, sexist, racist pleasure. How can it connect the recognition of the other’s vulnerability and pain to an ethical response rather than the denial of her humanity or the wish to kill?

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Bambiland and Babel echo and even cite directly some of the most rigorous scholarly critiques and indictments of globalization in its current, militarized mode. In the eyes of these critics, the term globalization serves as little more than a euphemism for empire (Hardt and Negri 2000), neoimperialism (Wallerstein 2006), and uneven development (Harvey 2000a) and connotes the hollowing out of national sovereignty (Sassen 2005) and of democracy (Butler 2004; Agamben 2005). The discussion of the plays allows me to engage with their arguments, many of which were developed in the United States or extrapolate from American domestic and foreign policy, and inquire whether they hold in regard to Europe. The sharp tensions between the United States and some European states over the Iraq War have given rise to the perception that the longtime transatlantic partners embody opposites in terms of styles of power (Robert Kagan polemically aligned “hard power” Americans with Mars and “soft power” Europeans with Venus) and perhaps even of styles of globalization. Jeremy Rifkin, for instance, contrasts the “American Nightmare” of unfettered capitalism, imperialist aggression, and social disintegration with the “European Dream” of mass prosperity, democracy, and peace. Jelinek rejects any such romanticization of Europe. On the one hand, she links the contradiction between the invasion’s democratic mission and its imperialist agenda back to the earliest cultural texts of European democracy, Greek tragedy. On the other, the contemporary media that enthralled viewers around the world with photographs and video footage of torture and assassinations are not specific to America. The synchronization of the press with hegemonic, political imperatives (particularly through the new hero of war reportage, the embedded correspondent) and the Internet’s responsiveness to and stoking of consumers’ pornographic and violent desires prompted the dramatist and the directors staging her texts to ask fundamental questions about the political consequences of the privatization of media production and consumption, the basis for a feminist pacifism, and the role of theater as a “moral institution.” This chapter traces out the questions raised by Jelinek in Bambiland and Babel: What internal logic connects globalization and war, and how have wars changed as a consequence of globalization? How do public discourses about war signal changes in the democratic division of power, and how are these changes legitimated politically? How can the arts intervene in the dehumanization and elision of “precarious life” (Butler 2004), and what processes prevent them from such intervention? And finally, what contributions can feminists make to a critique of war, precarization, and violence, and on what basis do we

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imagine a just distribution of resources and security globally, if not on essentialist assumptions of female peacefulness?

Ch o re og r aphing C ons ent In December 2003, Bambiland opened on the experimental stage of the Burgtheater, the Akademietheater. The theater’s artistic director had granted Jelinek’s wish to have Christoph Schlingensief direct the play. Schlingensief (b. 1961) is an enfant terrible whose artistic playpen comprises film and video, theater (he was associated with the Volksbühne in Berlin during the 1990s), television (he had his own talk show on German MTV), art, as well as opera (in 2004, he directed Wagner’s Parsifal in Bayreuth). In addition, he is known for a number of spectacular political performance events, including the campaign stunts of his party Chance 2000 that nominated him as candidate for chancellor in 1998. One might describe him as a mixture of Abby Hoffman and Joseph Beuys, political clown and avant-garde shaman, whose work appears both earnestly naive and ingeniously engaged with contemporary media culture. Schlingensief’s work, biography, and current interests are fulsomely documented on his Web site www.schlingensief.com. Bambiland was the second part of Schlingensief’s Atta Atta trilogy, which began at the Volksbühne with Atta Atta—die Kunst ist ausgebrochen! (Atta Atta—Art has broken out!) and concluded with Attabambi-Pornoland at the Schauspielhaus Zurich in 2004, for which Jelinek wrote two monologues that later became the first two parts of Babel.1 The two artists had first met in 2000 at one of Schlingensief’s most controversial performance stunts titled Ausländer Raus! Bitte liebt Österreich (Foreigners Out! Please love Austria), which called attention to the xenophobic policies of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), the far-right party that had just been elected and joined the governing coalition in Austria to great international concern.2 They share an interest in the troubling resurgence of xenophobic far-right parties as well as a fascination with television. About this event, Jelinek wrote, “I admire how incredibly fast he responds. That he throws current conditions back into the face of those in power like a cream pie.”3 Bambiland, too, was a fast response to recent events. The text is one long polyvocal stream of language in which the triumphalist discourse of invasion and liberation swells in volume and conviction as air and ground forces penetrate Iraq and climaxes in the taking of Baghdad. The replacement of dramatic conflict and dialogue with a monologic block of text in which different speakers echo, vary, and modulate

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certain themes much like a musical score typifies Jelinek’s dramaturgy. Many directors have parsed her plays into distinct speaking parts, but Jelinek’s stage scripts resist the traditional notion of dramatic character replete with an individual psychology, subconscious motives, and internal coherence and consistency over time. Instead, she conceives actors as discursive relays or “linguistic planes” (Jelinek 1989, 153) that illustrate quite palpably the Foucauldian sense of subjects being spoken by discourse. Jelinek’s texts replace the classical individual protagonist with flickering, code-hopping, channel-switching subjects that are nothing more than unstable assemblages of code from the archive of Western culture. Discourse is usually refracted into synchronically multiple (though often complementary) components as well as diachronic sediments. Her textual explorations of a specific theme or event show both the contemporary interplay of social forces to produce a discourse and trace the genealogy of such an endeavor through the archive of European history. Jelinek amalgamates literature, pop culture, mythology, and politics into compound (but not unified) personas that reference both the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of discourse as their speech flips or switches between parts in a way that illuminates the internal logic connecting distinct cultural registers. The scope of her dramatic assemblages is impressive and unique. A writer of enormous intellectual acuity and erudition, Jelinek is able to work both in the high cultural registers of philosophy, aesthetics, and political theory and in the idioms and genres of mass culture, particularly television and the yellow press. Both Bambiland and Babel exemplify this range. While the former switches between Aischylos’s tragedy The Persians and CNN’s coverage of the war, Babel connects the footage from Abu Ghraib and Fallujah to Freud’s anthropological meditations in Totem and Taboo and interweaves both with the ancient Greek myth of Marsyas. Jelinek creates a profoundly post-humanist theater suspicious of the way in which Western drama has encoded notions of the human person, social conflict, and historical change. In terms of both themes and form, I regard her work since the late 1990s as key to articulating national concerns to transnational problematics, in a way that retains the specificity of national cultures and histories yet embeds them in discoursescapes (to adapt Arjun Appadurai’s terminology) increasingly constructed as European, Western, or global. Although Jelinek’s plays are not organized around dramatic conflict, they usually follow a dynamic arising from her poststructuralist understanding of language and discourse. Sign systems seek to produce truth and organize knowledge through the hierarchical arrangement

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of binary differences that prove ultimately elusive, causing them to intensify and accelerate the reproduction of dominant and subordinate terms until they finally implode from the momentum of their own semiotic violence. The infliction of mass casualties through hightech weapons systems to root out weapons of mass destruction and the violation of sovereignty to implement the rule of the people pose steep challenges to the conceptual machinery of Western democracy, causing it to exacerbate and ultimately exhaust the energies necessary to maintain the hierarchical distinction between itself and the oriental Other. In this way, her war plays aim to dismantle the Huntingtonian discourse of the clash of civilizations. Bambiland’s amalgamation of the voices of Aischylos, Western TV viewers, Christian crusaders, high-tech weapons experts, embedded reporters, military functionaries and policy advisors, Jesus, God, and the trinity of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld conveys the aggregation and synchronization of diverse social interests into the aggressive, choric voice of Western civilization from which doubt and dissent are expunged. That voice initially attempts to assert its disinterested, democratizing mission in Iraq. The familiar Orientalist rhetoric of indistinct, irrational, hate-filled, or unfeeling masses of “sand niggers” (Jelinek 2004, 35) ruled by monstrous tyrants and thus unable to govern themselves, which props up the supremacy of Western rationality riding in on its tanks and rockets, accelerates in order to master its own internal contradictions and escalates into cataclysmic violence. The final image of exploding missiles penetrating underground targets is explicitly sexual, figuring the supposed liberation and democratization as rape. Concomitantly, the choric voice registers the shifting of empathy to revulsion, pity to fear, vis-à-vis the victims of tyranny. Whereas they first appear as wailing women and starving locals surrounding supply trucks, they are soon perceived at best as collateral damage, at worst as dangerous insurgents who shoot their rusty rifles at low-flying missiles or Apache helicopters. Again and again, the choric voice is diverted from recounting the violent incidents accompanying the army’s progress; whenever the suffering and death of “liberated” civilians come into view for a moment, it launches into enthusiastic odes to the “golden army” (Jelinek 2004, 22) and its leaders or long, detailed recitations of technical specifications of weapons, recalling protofascist, technophile artists like Ernst Jünger or Filippo Marinetti.4 “Fuck, how do I get from the winners to the losers, how do I get from the losers to technology, which is where I really want to be” (Jelinek 2004, 27), wonders what is perhaps an embedded reporter, perhaps the authorial voice imbricated in the chorus: “I always want

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to talk about the losers and end up with the winners, but everyone wants that, that’s why I try to drive in the other direction, but my steering wheel doesn’t obey me” (Jelinek 2004, 29). Like CNN’s Peter Arnett, who enthused that the storming of Baghdad was “just like an action movie,” the chorus’s perception of the military conflict is mediated by an extant dramaturgy of clashing civilizations; in contrast to Arnett’s contemporary pop reference, Bambiland unfolds an aesthetic foil that is almost two and a half thousand years old. Aischylos’s The Persians, the first recorded Greek tragedy (472 BCE), dramatized the squashing of an imperialist, despotic, pan-Asian regime under Persian leadership by a fledgling European democracy. Aischylos had fought at the Battle of Salamis, which ended with the destruction and dispersal of the Persian army, and could thus authenticate battle descriptions and troop movements from his own experience—making him the first “embedded dramatist” of theater history, as Jelinek noted on her Web site. Some critics have described The Persians as an antiwar play because it is set among the vanquished Persians mourning their dead and deploring the recklessness of King Xerxes’s attack on the Greeks after his father Darius had already failed to conquer them. Certainly the detailed recounting of the horrors of the battle and the calamities that befell the survivors as they returned home through a wintry Greece and Macedonia stirred up pity for the widowed queen mother and the grieving, wailing chorus of old Persian men receiving news of the army’s demise. Yet the three-fold repetition of the news (first as allegory in an ominous dream, second as messenger’s report, and third as Xerxes’ confession) elicits other affects as well, as the German translator Emil Staiger noted in his afterword. He found the contrast between the beaten, injured, grieving Persian losers and the cheering Greek crowds in the Athenian theater so disturbing that he surmised the play would not be performed within the foreseeable future.5 Staiger characterized the drama as a plotless yet masterful orchestration of diegetic and spectatorial passions culminating in the “savage Asiatic howling beyond all measure” of the final scene, which “melds tragic pity, and sorrow for the unfortunate hero with the cheering of the audience” (Staiger1970, 97, my translation). The ghost of Xerxes’s own father condemns his son’s hubris for crossing the Bosporus on a wooden bridge, disrespecting a natural barrier imposed by the gods and angering them. The Persians forfeit divine sanction not only because of their feats of engineering but also because of their despotic form of government. An empire ruled by a greedy and vain elite is contrasted with the Greeks’ loyal and altruistic

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community of equals who enjoy the protection of the gods. As stand-in for the audience watching the play, the Persian chorus judges (and condemns) the actions of their political leaders; but as Staiger’s remark about the howling “savage, Asiatic” horde illustrates, the Persians also embody a quintessential Other represented as politically immature, morally despicable, and physically/aurally out of control and hence subject to the moral judgment of a rational, democratic audience. The tragedy thus ignites the clash between democratic and barbarian civilizations into chauvinist fervor couched in moral approbation and metaphysical assertions. To emphasize Staiger’s point once more, The Persians does not stir up excitement through or about military action (no battle scenes here) but shows intense affects (fear, grief, sorrow) as the just desserts of the Persians who come to recognize their own army’s actions as wrong and sinful; and it creates intense affects (triumph) among the Greek audience who are affirmed as virtuous and loved by the gods. In the three retellings of the war, military might is articulated to moral right. It is this aspect, suggests theater scholar Sue-Ellen Case, that makes Aischylos’s drama into the progenitor of the contemporary media and their orchestration of moral acclamation for the military actions of reckless political elites (Case 2002). The synchronization of natural, divine, and political order underpinning the historic victory of Greek democracy in The Persians might also be regarded as the first manifestation of “European universalism” (Wallerstein 2006), which framed historic projects of imperial domination as the generous impulse to bring Christianity to the heathens, Western civilization to the colonies, modernity to the third world, and democracy and human rights to rogue states, that is, as the disinterested sharing of universal values. The Persian chorus’s ambivalent representation as both like and unlike “us” figures the disavowed imperialist impulse of European universalism, which distinguishes it from what Wallerstein calls “universal universalism.” While Jelinek harvests Aischylos’s text in order to mark such continuities and their enormous historical tenacity, she also foregrounds differences to the ancient foil, exemplified by the contemporary embedded writer’s inability to empathize with the losers. Equally noticeable is the chorus’s inability to maintain the elevated style and diction that would underline the gravity of an epochal conflict between civilizations that is cast as a cosmic battle between good and evil. Instead, high pathos keeps slipping into ballistic technobabble or baby talk, careening between Ernst Jünger and Bambi. When a missile explodes in a marketplace full of women and children, the choric voice

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wonders, “Did it want to go shopping, the dear Tomahawk? Did it perhaps want to eat out?” (Jelinek 2004, 30), in a grotesque parody of kiddy TV. Whereas Aischylos reserves incoherent howling for the vanquished Asians, the choric language of the Western public begins to disintegrate into repetitions and stutters. The pose of disinterested universalism, of a higher, god-given mission, is exposed as chauvinistic triumphalism, as pure will to power and domination, material greed for resources, and sexual sadism. Whereas Aischylos’s despairing Persians seek to puzzle out how their actions offended the god-given order, Jelinek’s text speaks in the voice of god (Jelinek 2004, 78). The partiality of a god who engineers and throws cluster bombs aligns this campaign of democratization with other colonizing missions in which a higher power was invoked to legitimate what Walter Benjamin called “pure violence.” That violence has no other purpose than to assert itself, figured in a tremendous ejaculation: “We know nothing, we experience nothing, we err, we start over, we deceive ourselves, we deceive others, we are disappointed at not having won yet. But soon we will. Soon we’ll buy another lottery ticket, soon we’ll be rid of ourselves, someone will help us, not me, not yet, but soon, but soon. Over. Over. Over. Finally he jacks off. I thought he’d never come. Well. That’s over with” (Jelinek 2004, 84). Whereas Aischylos chose to ventriloquize the subaltern voice in accordance with the victors’ rationale, Jelinek channels an ideology that cloaks itself as moral right in an effort to denounce it as pure violence. His representation of the “barbaric” Persians was informed by his embedded perspective but parades as universalism. By contrast, she exhibits and foregrounds the partiality of Western knowledge and empathy embedded in a media-saturated environment marked by the convergence of corporate and political interests. In such an environment, artists have no access to the perspective of barbaric others, hence her refusal to co-opt the voices of the Iraqis for an affirmation of Western morality. At the same time, Jelinek’s recounting of an unmourned, trivialized violence clearly stakes out a blank spot in discourse, a moral position opposed to the chauvinist morality articulated by the chorus. Like all her work, Bambiland thus enjoins spectators to lament, grieve, and remember the nameless dead and the injured. Schlingensief’s production seized on several of the questions that structure Jelinek’s text without actually incorporating much of her script into the performance. He contextualizes the predicament of the “embedded artist” who seeks to intervene in mass mediated discourses with artistic means that are themselves in the grip of commercialization, in the history of the West German and Austrian avant-garde.

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In particular, Schlingensief cites the spiritualism of Joseph Beuys, an artist who was also known for his direct intervention in public politics (among other things, he campaigned for the fledgling Green Party in the 1980s). Just as Beuys’s placement of a golden Easter bunny in a museum display case reminded the art world of art’s spiritual dimension by means of a mass produced icon, Schlingensief’s donning of Beuys’s famous felt blanket and shaman’s staff and final metamorphosis into a flaming transsexual shaman accompanied by a stag (another key item in Beuys’s iconic repertoire) plays with and against the giant Bambi that is the production’s central emblem. The stag is Bambi’s double and its antidote. Bambi stands for the transformation of war into entertainment. Like Beuys’s bunny, which both underscores the presence of the market in an institution supposedly outside of it and retrieves what is other to its commodified form of appearance, Schlingensief’s stag echoes the profane iconography of Bambiland but also stakes a claim to a sacred other. The same holds for the actionist spectacle Schlingensief performs on stage, recycling the ritualistic orgies of the Viennese artists Nitsch, Mühl, and Brus from the 1960s. He assembles the aesthetic arsenal of a Western avant-garde posturing as the radical, primitivist, sacred Other to an alienated, technocratic civilization, but the juxtaposition of bodies smeared in (stage) blood, gore, and excrements with the footage of an army triage unit displayed on a large screen actually collapses both into the same splatter aesthetic. By serially repeating and parodying the actionists’ efforts to convert profane into sacred, the artistic citations in Bambiland strike through the posture of opposition and become signs of art’s embeddedness. Schlingensief thus calls up a locally specific artistic idiom in order to delineate, in visual rather than linguistic terms, the same moral blank spot around which Jelinek’s text is organized. Like Jelinek, Schlingensief accelerates the flow of dominant ideology and turns up its volume, but while she translates the stream of televised images into a storm of words, he returns to the visual as the dominant register of propaganda. The simultaneity of screened and live action makes it impossible to construct coherent, linear narratives or plots. Stage left is a petit bourgeois living room, replete with a nagging mother on a couch, the site of the formation of artistic consciousness and avant-garde sensibility; the center is occupied by a camping ground (which could also be a prison or military camp) whose many occupants seem to pass the time with various innocuous activities but that also occasionally erupts in violence, including rape. At regular intervals, the campers (or inmates, or soldiers) flock

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to a meeting room stage right where they listen to political stump speeches in front of a flag bearing a stylized Bambi forming the shape of the swastika. The cast includes Schlingensief’s permanent ensemble of nearly twenty largely amateur members (several who are mentally disabled) that calls itself Church of Fear, along with three professional Burgtheater actors. Occasionally, Schlingensief would climb up a tall watchtower overlooking the camp to conduct parts from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, which is piped in at high volume over the sound system. Opposite the camp on the revolving stage is a vaguely Arabian palace. Three screens are suspended from above that display different looped image tracks. These include an interview with the conductor Pierre Boulez who speaks about Wagner, CNN footage of anti-aircraft fire over Baghdad, and close-ups of triage operations on wounded soldiers during the Vietnam War. The simultaneity of the screenings that evoke the split-screen technique of many news stations providing coverage of the war and the genres of the footage shown—the talking head of the expert, the long-distance shot of moving missiles against the night sky, and grainy, semi-distant tracking of the procession with a hand-held digital camera—all cite the televisual conventions of contemporary war reportage. During the second half of the performance, a giant gauze screen on which a film is projected is lowered over the entire stage. Shot in black and white, it shows a nocturnal procession through the Viennese city center circling Alfred Hrdlicka’s memorial to Austria’s murdered Jews and touring through such locations as the Hotel Sacher and the Café Imperial (where Elfriede Jelinek is shown sitting by herself and reading) to finally descend into a basement. Aside from the well-known film stars Udo Kier and Margit Carstensen (famous for her roles in Fassbinder films), the procession includes a journalist for the German Süddeutsche Zeitung, a male Austrian porn star, two Hungarian sex workers, and assorted other characters wearing placards with the inscription “COF” (Church of Fear). In the basement, the two Hungarian women get to work on the porn star and masturbate him (and afterwards, themselves) with an American flag, while Kier and Carstensen watch. The so-called “money shot” is paralleled by the image of exploding bombs in the night sky over Baghdad on one of the other screens. After the man ejaculates, the sex workers cover his detumescent penis with the flag, as if it were a soldier’s coffin. Behind the scrim, the stage keeps revolving, alternately displaying the camp ground and the desert palace where life seems to just go on.6 The participation of Kier, a Fassbinder actor-turned-Hollywood star, in the porn film and the “embedding” of an actual journalist in the

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procession mark as obscene the conscription of artists and journalists in the ideological project of moral approbation. That project itself is boiled down into the crude, entire artless action of jacking off into a flag; the association of artist and sex worker made literal in this scene challenges the status of any cultural work that, like Aischylos’s tragedy, elevates and mystifies propaganda as art. Whereas Jelinek’s text disrupts the chorus’s certainty with news bites of accidents, errors, and civilian deaths, Schlingensief refuses to use the stage as a place where the dirty, violent reality of the war and the materiality of the Other’s suffering body could be revealed in order to puncture the glossiness, beauty, and distance of mediated images. Schlingensief’s politics is animated by the division of live bodies and screened images, but the blurred human shapes going about their business behind the semi-transparent scrim seem to confirm that even the most repetitive recordings are incomparably more fascinating than the sounds and movements of live bodies. The simultaneity of image tracks, along with the extremely loud volume of the music, simulates and aggravates the condition of sensual assault, while the discourse about art and war playing across the screens is actually as uniform as the choric voices Jelinek amalgamates. The Wagner references on the sound and image tracks can be read as an ironic appropriation of the nineteenth-century artist’s Gesamtkunstwerk concept, which aims to involve and synchronize all senses. The well-publicized fact that Schlingensief himself was about to direct a Wagner opera at Bayreuth implicates him in that which the production indicts, in much the same way that Jelinek merges her voice with that of Aischylos. “Today the consciousness of the world AS A WHOLE has been lost—and in this condition of lost consciousness Schlingensief lurks as the zombie of a long-lost notion of autonomy,” wrote reviewer Hans-Dieter Schütt in Neues Deutschland (Schütt 2003). Schlingensief’s production is a classic example of the Artaudian theater of cruelty, which aims to expose spectators to violent sensual overstimulation in order to produce as the theater’s “double” the desire for an alternative to an utterly nightmarish world. The obscenity of war entertainment divorced from dimly discernable collective life is unleashed to produce what might well be called “the consciousness of the world as a whole” as its double. Bambiland does not merely suggest that embedded reporting falls short of the press’s civil responsibility to interrogate authority but rejects the myth of democracy’s original (now lost) capacity of egalitarian integration and argumentative discourse altogether. It brings into view the profound contradiction of imposing freedom by means of domination, a contradiction that increasingly entangles the

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invading force, including the media. As the chorus of armed-to-theteeth warriors marches on Baghdad, the starving Iraqi men, women, and children they encounter, who are abandoned by their defunct government, dependent on humanitarian aid agencies, and prone to the massive violence inflicted on them by high-tech weaponry, can less and less be perceived as human beings worthy of empathy or care. Their imploring faces fade from sight and, more frighteningly, are imagined to mask the sleeper, the suicide bomber, the insurgent. It is this process of becoming indistinct, becoming inscrutable, becoming invisible on which concerted military aggression and domination are predicated. The public sphere, where images and stories about the invasion are produced for mass consumption, is rendered as synchronized, choric discourse from which dissent and doubt are eradicated. This convergence of aesthetic, political, and civil spheres, or rather, the penetration of the public sphere by corporate and political interests that unravel the notion of democratic process, signals the totalitarian orchestration of public sentiment for the purpose of war, a totalitarianism that no longer opposes democracy—as it did in the first half of the twentieth century—but has become fully compatible with it.

G lo ba l izi ng the Pr i vate Gaze Babel, written in the aftermath of the invasion, pushes beyond the remnants of public democratic discourse and takes a close look at the economic, political, and aesthetic effects of privatization as the proper domain of globalized subjects. Jelinek’s second play about the war and occupation of Iraq brings the interrelated economic, political, ethical, and aesthetic quandaries of globalization into sharp focus. The published script is divided into three parts, of which the first two (“Irm says” and “Margit says”) relate group aggression to paternalistic religion and locate their genesis in the patriarchal family. Jelinek suggests that the current proliferation and mass consumption of violent sexual imagery will be the undoing of civilization, envisioned as the descent into cannibalistic carnage. The third part (“Peter says”), which is by far the longest, traces out that supposition through the visual material floating through the Web, connecting the footage from the Iraq war zone with the dungeons and chat rooms where European consumers of pornography congregate and suturing the lone user to the collective, electronic imaginary through scopophilic, sadistic pleasure. The Net is conceptualized as both global Internet and individual retina, the organ that conducts the suturing. Theater, Jelinek proposes, must

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slice through that link between retina and Internet to reinstate the possibility of another way of regarding the Other. Babel chronicles key moments in what commentators have called the “war of images” that in the spring of 2004 reverberated in the World Wide Web, turning it into a new theater of war. The play circles around these images, which document the escalating violence on the part of both occupying and insurgent forces in disintegrating Iraq, but pushes beyond sorrow and outrage as immediate responses to massive violence and toward a more rigorous and analytical labor of mourning. The contrast with Bambiland is stark. Although Bambiland’s critique of Western democracies’ imperialist aggression fully implicates Europeans and thus thwarts the juxtaposition of supposedly peaceful “old” Europe and militaristic Anglo-America, it retains the familiar opposition of oppressor and oppressed in its deployment of the high-contrast tropes of colonial and gendered violence. Babel, by contrast, reveals a profound sense of disorientation, as women and indigenous people of color can no longer figure a moral authority founded on injustice, misrepresentation, and oppression. It struggles with empire’s utter refashioning of power and the consequent loss of any notion of resistance and grapples with the seeming futility of indicting injustice on behalf of the oppressed. Like all of Jelinek’s plays, Babel exposes discourse’s function to continually reproduce binary differences that lubricate the operations of power and accelerates the theatrical difference engine in order to exhaust it, imploding and voiding the ontological certainties on which social hierarchies are founded. Unlike her previous work, however, Babel can no longer attain the cleansing cataclysm of discourse and history that suggests that self-destruction is the only sort of utopia possible. The play is stuck in a dystopic loop of violence and desire whose endless repetition obviates any change. Whereas Bambiland still permitted a distinction between “them” and “us” as victims and agents of imperialist war, Babel offers the ruined state of Iraq and the violent social relations prevailing there as contiguous with us and as a mirror of our own future. In particular, the outsourcing of military services to for-profit firms brings into view the political consequences of improved efficiency in the form of proliferating grey zones in which the rule of law, democratic oversight, and international conventions ensuring human rights are suspended. Moreover, by amalgamating the voices of soldiers, so-called independent contractors, and remote audiences following events on their television and computer screens, Jelinek articulates economic privatization and the increasing secrecy shrouding political decision making,

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with the newly private mode of producing and consuming mediated images. Babel shows that privatization not only undermines democratic structures and principles but throws into disarray the notion of victims of globalization whose interests can anchor opposition to injustice and oppression. The murdered mercenary whose voice dominates the long last portion of the play is both perpetrator and victim of globalization. The images of Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, taken on cheap digital cameras, emailed to friends and family, and uploaded into the Web, can no longer fully instantiate either the reprehensible specter of imperialist coercion or the romance of resistance. Downloaded by millions of viewers, these pornographic images invite and multiply the sadistic pleasures of domination and humiliation, hardwiring the loop between power and desire. From May 2003 to June 30, 2004, Iraq was ruled by a Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer along with the Iraqi Interim Governing Council. During Bremer’s tenure, the country’s economic, social, and security infrastructure decayed as his administration’s agenda of financing reconstruction through the largescale privatization of the economy and the attraction of international investment did not come to fruition. Instead, postwar Iraq has seen a massive, diverse, and growing insurgency that has plunged the country into civil war, cost the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and left more than two and a half thousand American soldiers dead at the time of this writing.7 Insurgent groups, mainly (but not exclusively) fed by Iraqi nationalism and Sunni Islamist radicalism, not only turned against allied forces but also attacked water mains, oil wells, and pipelines and disrupted the civilian populations’ provision with food, water, electricity, health services, and humanitarian aid. Newly trained Iraqi military personnel and police were particularly targeted. Some extremist groups engaged in kidnapping, hostage taking, and assassination; organized crime flourished. These conditions left the population without jobs, welfare, basic provisions, and a minimum of security. Military historian Mary Kaldor concluded that the invasion and occupation of Iraq not only failed to achieve any of its stated or unstated aims but actually brought about the very things it promised to end: “No one has found any WMD nor evidence of links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida—but since the war, sensitive military material has gone missing and there have been many attacks by alQaida-related groups now present in Iraq” (Kaldor 2005, 5). The failure to democratize Iraq (or, for that matter, Afghanistan), which advocates of the wars explain in culturalist terms as the incompatibility of Islam with democracy, modernity, and freedom, is regarded by

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Kaldor and others as evidence of the inherent flaws of the economic system whose imposition was supposed to ensure internal democratization and harmonious international relations.8 In Iraq, the economic term “shock therapy,” first coined in regard to Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s and applied extensively to the postcommunist economies in Europe and Russia during the 1990s, became wedded to the military means of its implementation in the American military’s strategy of “shock and awe.” The population of a country suddenly exposed to free market forces in the aftermath of drastic political changes is thought to “be so stunned, and so preoccupied with the daily pressures of survival, that it too will go into suspended animation, unable to resist” or consider political alternatives and more likely to cooperate (Klein 2004).9 Naomi Klein has analyzed the Iraq War and occupation as the Bush administration’s attempt to create ideal conditions for the utopia of a privatized economy without government interference. Its failure, she argues, cannot be attributed to the resistance of native elites leery of losing political power and economic privileges (the argument commonly used to explain adjustment problems in Latin American and Eastern European economies) but exposes the fundamental flaws in neoliberal theory itself: Iraq was to the neocons what Afghanistan was to the Taliban: the one place on Earth where they could force everyone to live by the most literal, unyielding interpretation of their sacred texts. One would think that the bloody results of this experiment would inspire a crisis of faith: in the country where they had absolute free reign, where there was no local government to blame, where economic reforms were introduced at their most shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a failed state no right-thinking investor would touch. (Klein 2004)

In short, the Iraq War and occupation exposed the ideological fundamentalism of the economic theory driving globalization. Their devastating social and political results evidence not the incorrect implementation of that theory but indicate its inherently destructive logic, which elsewhere was tempered by political compromises. One might characterize Klein’s essay as an investigation of the militarization of economics in a much more fundamental, far-reaching way than those who have condensed the economic aspect of the war into the formula “blood for oil.” Others, meanwhile, have focused on the way in which the military itself has been fundamentally transformed by privatization and

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become a prism for the processes characterizing globalization at large. The scholarship on the flourishing sector of private military firms that play a key role in what Mary Kaldor, Herfried Münkler, and others have called “new wars” has pointed to the inherent lack of transparency, accountability, and oversight in this sector. The outsourcing of military and security services to private companies, which politicians tend to present as more frugal and more flexible than the large standing armies maintained by the state, however, on the one hand facilitates the flagrant disregard for civilians’ safety and human rights of prisoners that have been so troubling in postwar Iraq and on the other contributes to the creeping devolution of Western democracies into a condition of “preconstitutionality” without a functional division of power (Uesseler 2005, 333). States are thus not only caught in a cycle of decreasing security at increasing cost but become trapped in the deeper conundrum of suspending the law in order to save democracy. Jelinek’s Babel echoes the warning issued by philosophers like Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler that once democracy must be protected by violent means it is no longer one and brings into view the internal logic connecting the neoliberal dogma of privatization and the dedemocratization of politics that the Iraq War and occupation exposed. The militarization of economics and the privatization of state violence are dramatized in Babel’s nightmarish pairing of the Abu Ghraib prisoners undergoing “shock treatment” and the lynched American mercenary whose burned, castrated, beheaded body was strung up on a bridge in Fallujah. The lynchings in Fallujah occurred on April 1, 2004, and were staged in front of the cameras of the international media assembled in the central Iraqi town in order to deter the American forces and instigate their withdrawal. Four mercenaries hired by the private military firm Blackwater USA and euphemistically termed “independent” or “civilian” contractors by the U.S. government were escorting American businessmen into town when they were ambushed, killed by a large incensed crowd of Iraqis, dragged through the streets, and strung up on a bridge over the Euphrates. In the dead mercenary’s monologue, Jelinek gives the victim something like a sociological profile, though not an individual biography. He is one of the growing numbers of men laid off in the restructured economies of the postindustrial global North who try to survive by seeking employment in the flourishing sector of private military industry “that promises security and holds your hand when you find your body burned and mutilated on a highway in Fallujah” (Jelinek 2004, 177). About this industry, the

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mercenary tells us that it earns twenty-one million dollars for protecting the Coalition Provisional Authority, that its legal “home” is usually an offshore tax haven, and that it is so successful because its offshore management allows for both cost cutting and legal wiggling room. For a wage of one thousand dollars a day, this burned, blackened corpse has finally “received a different appearance, which fits the world from which I come” (Jelinek 2004, 185). He notes, “You won’t find a real blonde among soldiers, those poor wretches” (Jelinek 2004, 186), and later he says, “I look like an African American” (Jelinek 2004, 207). “Personally, I was still produced onshore, with all the high cost that incurred. At the time one hadn’t shifted my production to a low-wage offshore location, as they did later, they hadn’t realized that people could be produced more cheaply abroad and then destroyed” (Jelinek 2004, 198). Allusions to the American history of racial violence are here entwined with references to the contemporary reconstruction of the global division of labor. Both the offshoring of production and the reconstruction of the postindustrial economies together have resulted in the racialization of low-paid labor and the deceleration, perhaps the end, of immigrants’ and minorities’ prospects of upward mobility. In 2005, about thirty thousand Iraqis worked for private military firms, in addition to up to twenty thousand foreigners. Experts on the industry have pointed out that in addition, egregious social costs are regularly associated with privatizing public security.10 Compensating for these steep financial and social costs, Uesseler and Azzellini argue, are the political benefits states derive from privatizing military services: it allows them to conduct more rather than fewer wars, and it permits governments to “remove military deployments from public control” (Azzellini 2005, 335) and legal accountability. Human rights or the Geneva Convention prove nothing more than an expensive impediment to economic efficiency and can be discarded without fear of legal consequences. Privatization and subcontracting have thus created the ideal conditions under which civilian abuses, neglect, crime, and torture can all flourish. Jelinek condenses it all into one punning passage: Yes, prisons are being privatized as well, and why not, war has become a private affair a long time ago. We deal with things amongst our membership. And we’ll remove that member, as long as we’re at it, and put it next to the other members. Only the bold will own the world, at least the piece on which he stands, yes, although now that I hang from this bridge burned to a crisp and have to cede every last inch of

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ground I find myself beyond the law, I’ve been strung up in a lawless zone, which so far I’ve quite liked moving around in. Don’t worry, this lawless zone is no dictatorship, it is the hereafter, and that’s where I’ve arrived. (Jelinek 2004, 195)

Political scientists, philosophers, and cultural critics have all commented on the troubling expansion of “lawless” zones and pointed to the hollowing out of the legal frameworks governing civil rights. The mercenary’s speech echoes some of their objections, such as the “constant expansion of executive power” that Saskia Sassen has diagnosed and the “state of exception” that Giorgio Agamben analyzed as the now normative mode of democratic governance in which the law is suspended ostensibly to preserve democracy (Jelinek 2004, 208). Judith Butler has framed this development as the reconstitution of authoritarian forms of sovereignty believed to have been superseded by the “soft” governmentality (Foucault 1991) fostered by the liberal welfare state. Both Sassen and Agamben define democracy in terms of the rule of law and the separation of (executive, legislative, and juridical) powers and argue that liberal democracies are currently undergoing de-democratization, characterized by the deregulation and “privatization of public, executive power, and the corresponding de-privatization of the private sphere” (Sassen 2005, 414). Sassen’s phrase captures precisely the linked processes Jelinek brings into view, namely the increasing opaqueness of government operations as privatization removes them from public oversight and decision making and the penetration of citizens’ “private” lives by both intelligence agencies and consumer technologies. Agamben regards the expansion of executive powers and the suspension of laws in the name of internal security as normative practices of governance in liberal democracies since World War I, “through fascism and National Socialism, and up to our own time. Indeed the state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment” (Agamben 2005, 86–87).11 Anti-terror legislation, such as the Patriot Act in the United States and the German Anti-Terror-Paket I and II, risks blurring the distinction between peace and war and between war against a foreign enemy and worldwide civil war (Agamben 2005, 22), which allows totalitarian systems to legally eliminate not only political enemies but entire categories of citizens regarded as unassimilable (Agamben 2005, 2). The irony of this development, Agamben adds, is that “at the very moment when it would like to give lessons in democracy to different traditions and cultures, the political culture of the West does not realize that it has entirely lost its canon”

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(Agamben 2005, 18). When Jelinek’s dead mercenary cites conservative political theorist Clinton Rossiter, who in 1948 declared that “no sacrifice is too great for our democracy, including the temporary sacrifice of democracy itself” (Jelinek 2004, 193; Rossiter 1948, 314), she concurs with Agamben’s postulated continuities between democracy and totalitarianism and suggests that globalization is inaugurating a state of worldwide civil war. Judith Butler has likewise written about the problematic category of “detainees” without rights as symptomatic of the fundamental precarization of life under the administration of privatized agencies taking over formerly public tasks of government but operating without democratic legitimation or protocols. Her interest in the public representation of what she calls “precarious life,” which she regards as intimately connected to the way in which people in that category are being treated, returns us to the question of how to respond ethically to mediated images of the suffering and hostile Other, which is the key problem posed by Babel as well. Whereas Bambiland had still framed the problem of representing the Other in terms of its invisibility, Babel unfolds the new problematic as the popular desire for demonstrations of the Other’s ritual subordination, as hypervisibility. “We thought it was fun,” Private Lynndie England’s laconic explanation at her trial, becomes the refrain of Babel. This no longer allows for a postulation of “the public” as kept in the dark, lied to, and manipulated by hawkish politicians and embedded media but as directly and indirectly implicated in the production and circulation of images: they are the intelligence and security personnel watching the photo sessions at Abu Ghraib (elided in the cropped, published versions, according to Susan Sontag [2004]); the colleagues, friends, and family who viewed them on their computer screens or on the Web; the viewers who watched the Fallujah footage on the Arab language TV station Al-Jazeera; and the users whose massive curiosity about the videotaped execution of Nicolas Berg brought down the server of the Islamic Al-Ansar Forum that had put it on the Web.12 The public is the private individual clicking through hyperlinks and surfing the Web, hanging out in hardcore chat rooms and trolling porno sites.13 Clearly that public’s lack of empathy is not caused by too little information but has to do with how these thousands of images represent their objects’ humanity or inhumanity, how they convey his or her pain and vulnerability, and how they stage the relationship between perpetrators and victims.

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The moniker “war of images” (Paul 2005; Walser 2004) marks a new relationship between the military and the news media. The censorship executed by the U.S. government’s Office of Global Communications, which had succeeded in portraying the war in Afghanistan as a “clean, unbloody war without human suffering, injuries, or casualties” (Frohloff 2004, 47), broke down during the spring of 2004. The torture of Iraqi prisoners and mistreatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay as well as violent protests against occupation forces, mercenaries, and Western businessmen were posted on the Internet in the form of photographs and videos of shocking cruelty. Yet those who hoped that the photographs documenting human rights abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison would undermine the legitimacy of the occupation (and retrospectively, the war), just as the photographs of the My Lai Massacre had earlier helped to end the Vietnam War, were disappointed. Intellectuals and artists, from Susan Sontag to Elfriede Jelinek, feared that the war of images had ushered in a new era of unfettered violence all the more terrifying because it would inure people against feeling empathy with the pain of others—the capacity on which any hope for peace and any vision of ethical and equitable international relations must be founded. The puncturing of a carefully controlled public sphere where only certain images could be displayed nevertheless did not herald alternative or counterpublics along the lines imaged by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. Babel demonstrates that the fracturing of the industrial-commercial publicity, which Bambiland shows to be aligned with military imperatives, rather than instigating the emergence of powerful pacifist, feminist, or anti-imperialist movements, merely spawns partial publics that nonetheless obey the common logic of ethnic separatism, religious crusading, gendered violence, and worldwide civil war.14 Jelinek and director Nikolas Stemann thus organize their theater of war around the predicament of the pornographic gaze that derives pleasure from pain, raising the question of empathy with the Other and ultimately the problem of morally mobilizing an audience increasingly anaesthetized by sensual overstimulation. Jelinek’s text frames that problem within the avantgarde tradition of shocking the audience, and Steman draws on and further develops specific visual and performance techniques associated with the avant-garde. The images described in Babel and reenacted as silent tableaux on stage illustrate the quick escalation of violence on both sides of the conflict. Together, these images broke fundamental taboos regarding the visual representation of the human body and of civilized conduct. The

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atavism of the beheadings committed by Islamist militants snubbed the coalition’s deployment of advanced precision weapons and punctured the sense of invulnerability and invincibility that such weapons promised. The incidents at Fallujah and Abu Ghraib show the extent to which the camera itself became part of the various acts of torture committed against the enemy, making the act of violence indistinguishable from the recording of the violence. The elimination of the traditional role division between soldier and professional photographer broke with the established conventions of war photography, which tend to either aestheticize war and elide its bloody reality on the ground or invite viewer’s empathy with the victims through close-ups of anguished faces and injured bodies. The images from Iraq, by contrast, were shot from the combatants’ perspective that render torture as something normal, quotidian, and fun. The Abu Ghraib torture photographs in particular expose a startling continuity with violent leisure practices. Performed for the camera, the staged interactions of guards and prisoners obviate any sympathy for the victims, whose faces are blurred and bloodied, hooded, and blocked from the viewer’s gaze. The estimated sixteen hundred photographs and videos were taken by prison guards then downloaded onto laptops in Internet cafés and burned onto CDs for further circulation. Decried by the Bush administration as the aberrant acts of individuals, they reveal the lustful enjoyment of absolute power Americans share with other colonizers whose forces often took photographs as trophies of their exploits, as critics like Susan Sontag and Norman Birnbaum pointed out. They recall the photos of lynchings in America, Sontag argued in her essay “Regarding the Torture of Others,” which likewise showed that violence against a racial Other instills no sense of wrongdoing.15 And they reveal the troubling way in which “fun” among young video gamers has become firmly tied to brutality. Many feminist critics pointed out the pornographic character of many of the Abu Ghraib photographs, whose composition echoes classical sadomasochistic poses and practices.16 According to Sontag, the overlapping choreographies of torture and pornography in these photographs are indicative of the way in which recording technologies (from video cameras and digital photography to live Web casts) have become imbricated with erotic practices, so that “an erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured in digital photographs and on video. . . . And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet—and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate” (Sontag 2004).

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Jelinek’s text is haunted by the dominatrix threesome of Lynndie England, Sabrina Harman, and Megan Ambuhl, the military guards charged with inflicting sexual, physical, and psychological abuse on Iraqi prisoners of war.17 The women’s grinning faces and victorious thumbs-up gestures and their posing next to prisoners’ mutilated and humiliated bodies, many commentators have pointed out, evoke the familiar iconography of colonial and military trophy photography, with the decisive difference that men are now shown to experience sexual degradation and symbolic castration at the hands of women. The images articulate the iconography of conquest and subordination with the visual codes of gender equality and sexual liberation, as Bernd Hüppauf has argued. By exposing men’s nude bodies to the camera, staging their genitals as the object of female guards’ attention and glee, and coercing them into oral sex with each other, these amateur pictures provide a blunt visual translation of Iraq’s forced emancipation from the religiously decreed shackles of patriarchal oppression, sexual shame, and heteronormativity. “The photos show us visual representations of a perverted idea of liberation,” Hüppauf concludes (Hüppauf 2004, 56). By reading the dominatrix as transparent representation of imperial power, Hüppauf resolves a question that continues to unsettle and divide feminist commentators of the Abu Ghraib photos. While some regard them as evidence of women’s abiding victimization by patriarchy, others read them as proof of women’s complete integration into oppressive hierarchies of class and race. The prominent liberal feminist Alice Schwarzer, for instance, insists on seeing the female torturers as the objects of a male pornographic gaze and hence as proof of women’s continued exclusion from power. The popular American author Barbara Ehrenreich points out, however, that torture at Abu Ghraib occurred in an environment in which women occupied all significant positions in the chain of command extending from Lynndie England and her cohort all the way up to the secretary of state, prompting Ehrenreich to demand a reckoning with long-held liberal feminist assumptions regarding women’s supposedly pacifist nature, the gradual transformation of historically male-dominated institutions (like the military) as a consequence of women’s integration in them, and the possibility that women’s equality would automatically solve the contradictions of race and class. Rejecting these assumptions, she aligns herself with a radical feminist vision of structural, systemic change and intersecting, linked struggles (Ehrenreich 2004, 69–70). In Babel, Jelinek, like Schwarzer, strives to retain a notion of oppression that hinges on the status of sexualized, feminine icons on the

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screen; at the same time, like Ehrenreich, she acknowledges women’s inclusion in institutions that formerly excluded them. While Schwarzer implies that women’s full integration in patriarchal institutions would alter them, Jelinek regards that integration as both accomplished and utterly dystopic. Jelinek has often explored the marginalization and degradation of women in her work. Her novels have tended to revolve around the debilitating and destructive effects of women’s insertion in misogynist practices and institutions, exemplified by Women as Lovers (1976), The Piano Teacher (1983), and Lust (1989). Jelinek always attended to the frictions produced by women entering and appropriating the patriarchal symbolic; after all, that symbolic constructs artistic genius or political power as antithetical to femininity, often resulting in women’s painful deformation and (self-)destruction. Even as her interest in the past decade has shifted toward racist and anti-Semitic exclusions and injustices, women’s bodies and voices continued to figure the deformations attending subjection or helped to stall interpellation into the nation and hold it at a distance. In her works of the last decade, however, feminist dissidents have been increasingly eclipsed by the horrific figure of fully interpellated patriarchal femininity, embodied by the Freudian mother whose acceptance of the son as surrogate for phallic power energizes her emotional claims to the son’s life and her eventual taking of his life. This murderous figure is animated not by the sparks caused by chafing against bourgeois constructions of femininity but by accelerating and ultimately exhausting the Oedipal machinery. In Babel, that figure is split into the dominatrix trinity of “Lynndie, Sabrina, and Mega-Megan” (Jelinek 2004, 153) and the monstrous mother who fosters in her son the aggressive drive for supremacy that must compensate for her abdication of phallic power. His zealous striving for absolute mastery leads him to sacrifice his life to the idea of perfection and show utter contempt for those—women and infidels—he deems imperfect. She is the mother of religious martyrs, suicide bombers, and militant fundamentalists, of Theweleitian soldier males, torturers, and cannibals. In the context of Jelinek’s work and its trajectory of gendered tropes, the pairing of the trinity of cruel, racist daughters (whom Stemann has played by men) with the murderous mother signals the evacuation of any notion of dissidence or resistance. While the place of the father is marked by the pictures of Jesus and bin Laden, the Bush effigy on the crucifix, and Apollo, it is the women who become the most zealous, eager, willing executioners of the patriarchal symbolic charted in Babel’s map of global economics, media, and politics. This

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troping of femininity, in conjunction with the racial trope of the lynched, black(ened) mercenary, marks the end of identity-based critiques of imperialism, racism, and sexism and heralds a world in which the dialectic of social contradictions has been replaced by varying degrees of discipline by and incorporation in the global order. Lynching and sexual torture, the two tropes of racial and gendered violence around which Babel is organized, are here reconfigured to confirm a dystopic view of social relations reproducing themselves without the hope of opposition or even self-destruction. Babel thus offers the most pessimistic assessment of our historical moment in Jelinek’s work to date. The dominatrix as icon of the Iraq occupation captures the internal logic of prevailing sexual discrimination in gender-inclusive institutions; that figure, which is simultaneously the embodiment of sexual power and the object of the gaze, foregrounds women’s ambiguous status on the worldwide screen. Jelinek’s texts expose the growing rift between the lives of actual women and the degradations they suffer and perpetrate and the function of feminine icons as advertisements of the military-corporate surround. Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky introduces the notion of the character as logo in her essay on the game Tomb Raider and its protagonist Lara Croft. The feminist philosopher demonstrates how the logo abstracts the hypersexualized sign of woman from the devalued material reality of women, all the better to advertise the processing prowess of the Sony Playstation. Babel suggests that the widely disseminated images of England, Ambuhl, and Harman are similarly disconnected from the ignominious material realities of women in the military and in war zones but advertise the thrill of military domination free from public scrutiny and accountability in the name of democratization. Moreover, the dominatrices of Abu Ghraib can circulate as logos of military-corporate power without the steep expenditures of marketing departments like the one that built up Lara Croft as global icon. Susan Sontag eloquently refuted George W. Bush’s contention that the acts recorded at Abu Ghraib do not reflect the “hearts and minds of Americans” by reading them as evidence of larger cultural and political phenomena in the historical and contemporary West, such as colonial brutality, increasingly violent leisure practices in modern consumer societies, and the mediatization of sexuality. Sontag and Birnbaum were important voices within the American Left that articulated a rigorous critique of the war, of American foreign policy, and of the undermining of democratic principles through the expanding legal grey zones since the passage of the Patriot Act. Nonetheless, despite

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the wider phenomena symptomatized by the torture photos from Abu Ghraib, their critique was directed toward a national discussion. Jelinek’s play echoes their concerns but deliberately refuses to frame the problem of visual violence as either specifically American or as typifying an Islamic mentality.18 By splicing descriptions of torture committed in the context of war with references to torture committed and recorded in Europe, Jelinek shifts the discussion beyond the antagonism echoing Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” or George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.” Instead, she brings into view the material effects of lifting inhibitions and taboos facilitated by new visual technologies. If the torturers in Abu Ghraib were inspired by the generic conventions of Internet pornography, Jelinek takes the implications of disseminating images of sexual torture to its logical conclusion, by imagining the literal, rather than the figurative (visual), consumption of human flesh as the point where technological development achieves the undoing of human civilization, which Freud defined as the sublimation of aggression and desire through cultural activity. Cannibalism offers a congenial metaphor for the becoming literal of the larger dynamic she observes in the image war, namely a massive desublimation. But it is also significant that the text and the production refer to actual instances of cannibalism, namely the cases of Armin Meiwes, the so-called cannibal of Rothenburg, and Issey Sagara, a Japanese pop icon.19 Nikolas Stemann had a beautiful Japanese actress in a blond wig and white evening gown recite Sagara’s description of eating a Dutch woman to elegiac music, while another actress stage front slowly stripped.20 The simultaneity of both acts equates the visual and the physical consumption of the female body and implicates the watching audience in both. At the same time, their heightened aestheticization—we do not watch the dismemberment and eating of a woman’s body but a mellifluous recital describing this event—condenses the conundrum around which the entire play is organized, namely the detachment of image from referent necessary to produce aesthetic pleasure. At the same time, that detachment is shown to have devastating and degrading effects on the realm of material bodies and social relations. The point is made explicit by the user zapping through the Web: I feel directly, I feel all kinds of cruelty directly in my own body, without sensing them. It is horrifying to imagine horror. Yes, my feeling is corporeal, really, but fortunately not genuine. At the last moment the knife slipped and didn’t hit my eye. It hit something, I’m glad it wasn’t me. But if you absolutely must watch the knife as it approaches

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the battlefield of the body, yes, for example, watch the beheading by hand, by knife, more precisely: the sawing off, the hacking off (they held his head like a sacrificial animal, just like an inexperienced masseur would who doesn’t know what he’s doing, and then they stuck the knife somewhere into his neck and kept sawing and hacking, slicing, squeezing, pressing), in the masses that you are and represent, if you absolutely must watch this en masse, then it’s no wonder that the server crashes. (Jelinek 2004, 142)

If the representation is sliced from its referent, the body becomes incapable of physically responding to another’s suffering, on which any ethical response is predicated. By raising the question of morality, Babel returns to Friedrich Schiller’s vision of the theater as a moral institution and confronts it with a contemporary conundrum: by connecting empathy to ethics, the moral artwork aims to reignite an immune system that has suffered a catastrophic breakdown—yet under current conditions, vision can no longer generate empathy. Rather, the dramatization of extreme violence occasions sadistic, voyeuristic pleasure unchecked by either formal laws or moral mechanisms of shame or compassion. In view of the pervasive condition of visual immunization, art must take its cue from the surrealist metaphor of slicing through the eye, that instrument of interpellation and complicity, in order to disrupt or destroy the habituated, numbed, complacent gaze and open up to the raw, naked pain of the image and its referent. While the privacy of the look has cut off the gaze from ethical feeling, the suturing of collective affect to political morality, historically in the theater and in the contemporary mass media, is shown to be equally problematic. Although Stemann’s interposing of the zapping user between auditorium and the torture tableaux might be seen as an attempt to reconstitute the collective, public dimension as precondition of ethical action, the production rather puts the entire classical model of moral art under erasure. In a visual culture that associates only certain modes of artistic expression with the beautiful and hence the good, while disqualifying others as ugly, inhuman, and unworthy of compassion, calls into doubt the premise that gazing at the Other’s pain will spur empathy and intervention. Jelinek brings into view long-standing debates within European aesthetics by staging the mythical contest between Marsyas and Apollo, which emblematizes contrasting notions of art. The Marsyas of Greek mythology is a satyr who challenges the god Apollo, an expert player and innovator of the lyre, to a musical contest. The judge, King Midas, is about to call Marsyas the winner when

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Apollo ups the ante: different versions of the myth have him play the lyre upside down or add his singing voice to the sound of the instrument—both of which are impossible for a flute player. Apollo wins the contest and flays Marsyas alive. Moreover, Apollo punishes Midas by giving him the ears of an ass. Jelinek articulates the myth to the contemporary situation and teases out the contrasting notions of art embedded in it. The defeat of the ugly satyr, whose play was said to arouse the senses, heralded the ascendancy of the Apollinian notion of harmonious, cerebral beauty in Western aesthetics. Art historian Werner Hofmann has contextualized this opposition in European art history: “If the satyr’s appearance and performance are associated with nature, sensuality, the uncultivated and lowly, in Apollo the refined cultural values of the mind and of the divine are exalted. The moral maxims encoded in this aesthetic value judgment become full-blown during the Christian middle ages, when Marsyas and Apollo symbolize the opposition of sinful and virtuous music” (Hofmann 1973, 11). Apollo’s victory also signals the rise of a new prototype of artist distinct from the craftsman: whereas Marsyas has achieved mastery through diligence, Apollo’s aesthetic “genius” resides in his ability to reinvent his instrument and change the parameters of music making (adding strings, playing the lyre upside down, combining it with other sounds), rather than accepting the limits of tradition. Apollo’s freedom to set his own artistic rules also informs the cruel despotism with which he treats his opponent. The myth thus encapsulates a political fable as well, revealing the conformism of Apollinian notions of beauty with a social order postulated as god given and revealing devaluation and literal eradication as the fate of artistic expressions that contest that order. The absolute sovereignty of Apollo that cloaks itself as lawabiding governmentality actually flouts the instruments and institutions of justice—witness the public humiliation of judge Midas. The tortured Marsyas’s scream pierces through the legitimation of power by the law and reveals Apollo’s license as pure violence. Jelinek’s reading of the mythical situation, which aligns genius and tyranny, grounds dissident art in the ability to make the scream of the tortured audible and their injured bodies seen. Such a political aesthetic recuperates the “ugly” as dissident, but can it reverse or escape the logic of empathy prevailing in the mediatized culture at large? The final sequence of the play begins with the recital of Marsyas, whom the text amalgamates with the mercenary hanging on the Fallujah bridge, while Apollo reclines in an armchair and the other four blood-drenched mercenaries killed in Fallujah play their recorders.

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Hanging over them is a life-size crucifix with an effigy of George Bush attached to it. The noise level increases while the lighting level is raised, drowning out the recital, until spectators are assaulted with banks of blinding lights directed straight at the auditorium and the eardrum-bursting amplification of sound. Stemann amalgamates Marsyas/mercenary with Jelinek by having him recite the text of the speech she delivered when she received the Nobel Prize, “Im Abseits” (“In the Margins”). The director’s choice clearly situates the playwright as a dissident artist who has, in the last decade, spoken forcefully on behalf of past and present victims of racist and anti-Semitic violence in Europe.21 But the format of the academic lecture, with Marsyas/mercenary/Jelinek reading a script on a lectern over a pandemonium of sight and sound, also ironizes the pedagogical mission of the theater.22 Rendered inaudible by the incomparably greater volume of electronically amplified signs, theatrical discourse is marked as both part of the mediatized storm of sounds and images and an ineffectual, futile form of oppositional speech. This is the end point of Schiller’s moral institution that positioned the audience as students willing to learn how to be enlightened citizens. On Stemann’s stage, civic pedagogy is exaggerated into a sadistic, retina-searing, eardrumblistering spectacle. The painful assault on the senses perfectly translates the flipping of Western rationality into barbarism, and orderly language and music turn into a scream that expresses as much as it indicts the pure violence of a symbolic order presided over by Bush/ God. The disciplining of the student-spectator is here amplified into the full-blown sadism of the apparatus. Babel assembles several complaints: that through torture, the victim’s agony is turned into the perpetrator’s fantasy of absolute agency; that pornographic representations not only inflict actual sexual violence on the camera’s object but affect the observer’s body and his or her attitudes as well; and that the Internet, as the newest and first truly global arena of “industrial-capitalist publicity,” constitutes a totalizing medium of “organization of everyday experience which contextualizes all other sites” (Hansen 1993, xl; Poster 1995). These complaints trail behind them the antifascist critique of state power (Scarry 1985), the feminist critique of the sadistic gaze animating the visual culture industries (Mulvey 1999, Williams 1989), and the post-Marxist critique of the fully mediatized public sphere (Negt and Kluge 1993, Hansen 1993, Poster 1995). Yet they also bring into view decisive shifts in the social and institutional formations to which these critiques were historically addressed: acts of torture now spell out the drama of democratization (not fascist state power) and do so, moreover, in

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electronic grassroots vernaculars rather than in state-sanctioned protocols. And finally, the growth of a global medium of publicity is shown to be canceled out by a dynamic of ever-greater privatization, both in the sense of functioning as a commercial domain and in the sense of an atomized and furtive mode of consumption. Differentiation and interactivity, the key traits of contemporary media such as the Internet, no longer instigate a dialectic of proliferating sites and forms of reciprocity, alliance, and solidarity, as still postulated by Miriam Hansen and Mark Poster. Rather than constituting a new, electronically mediated public sphere humming with the performances of mobile, “appended” subjects, as Poster had predicted in his essay on “Cyberdemocracy,” the Internet has become a staging ground for the military-corporate complex. Privatization, ever curtailing access to information and open-source software, short circuits the formation of alternative or counterpublics into mere “partial” publics that are nonetheless synchronized according to the unifying logic of militarized, global capitalism: the chat rooms visited by German adherents of esoteric sexual practices may not be accessible to Japanese consumers of pop culture, Islamic militants, or multinational mercenaries staffing Iraqi prisons, but they operate along similar principles of sexual and racial fetishism. The play thus allows us to grasp the Iraq War and occupation as part of the history and mythology of the West on the one hand and as the harbinger of new developments on the other: rather than positioning Iraq as barbaric Other to the civilized West and the incidents of the war as impossible to occur in enlightened Europe, they mirror our shared future. The constellation of torture, pornography, and Internet finally coalesces around the problem of the “live” body: each juxtaposes the denigrated “meat” of the human body with an inflated power lodged in discourse, an apparatus of sadistic scopophilia, and the promise of universal access and reciprocity, respectively. Ultimately, the violent alignment of morality with power prompts the system to go into loop mode and spin endlessly in empty time. Theater is proffered not just as a model of experiencing without empathy the torture of others but of entering a masochistic economy in which pain can be converted into profit; both are fully compatible with the binary codes of the digital age. This brand of political theater can do no more than exhibit the institution’s disciplining by, and suturing to, militarized capitalism’s interpellating hails. Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben both suggested that we are experiencing the emergence of extremely authoritarian and violent forms of sovereignty that nonetheless cloak themselves in the rhetoric of democracy. If we read this contradiction

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through the lens of the debates about the Internet as a space facilitating the abstraction from, and transcendence of, the body’s social and physical coordinates, including its subjection to surveillance, profiling, harassment, censorship, confinement, and pain, we might conclude, with Jelinek, that the physical experience of terror in the form of extreme sensual assault constitutes the only appropriate response to such dreams of transcendence. Spectators who run to the theater to take cover from the storm of mediatized discourse are assaulted by a torrential downpour of sounds and images. In her essay “In Media Storms” posted on her Web site, Jelinek punningly refers to power, Macht, as not being something that is but as something “das ich gemacht habe” (“that I made”) and that can therefore be taken back. When you exhibit it on stage, she writes, might’s domain is no longer the wide world but only “a limited space, and that’s why you can start to play with it” (Jelinek 2003b). Written before the war of images, that belief appears utopian in retrospect.

C o nc lus ion The plays discussed in this chapter provide insights into the recent militarization of global capitalism as part of the political campaign against terrorism, narrated as the quasi-cosmic clash of civilizations. The war in Iraq is shown to crystallize the economic processes on which neoliberal globalization is predicated, along with their disastrous political consequences that not only call into question the war’s official aim but throw into doubt the compatibility of globalization with democracy altogether. Instead, they link globalization with the totalitarian synchronization of civil society with not only state politics but also individual desire, through the mass media. Whereas most of her plays unleash the full-blown violence of Western phallogocentrism in order to exorcise it, Babel shows it hit bottom, as it were, in the cells of Abu Ghraib and the cannibalist dungeons of the World Wide Web only to repeat in endless cycles of sadistic pleasure and racist terror. Jelinek’s classically deconstructive dramaturgy, which has sometimes been criticized for eliding any trace of oppression or resistance, portrays the global condition as less and less animated by contradiction, contestation, and struggle but by different degrees of self-discipline and repression. Jelinek’s plays not only read neoliberal discourses of globalization against the grain but also thwart any attempt to regard the Iraq War from a position of distance, as the work of barbaric others that would be impossible in enlightened Europe. They consistently implicate both

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the writer and her audiences, forcing them into the choric “us” whose universalist claims cloak domination and violence. Their production at the Burgtheater in Vienna, the preeminent bastion of national theater that long resisted any attempt to confront the country’s own racist and anti-Semitic past, incorporated the critique of the war in a cultural tradition marked by a strong unwillingness to face Austria’s own militarist tendencies, imperialist history, and fascist complicity. The playwright’s insistence on an inclusive address aims to foreclose the tendency among Austrian critics and spectators to imagine the nation as innocent of atrocities committed elsewhere. In Schlingensief’s production, references to the Viennese Actionists and to local landmarks in the Vienna city center, including the Holocaust memorial and the Burgtheater itself, firmly ground the play in specifically Austrian icons of civilization and barbarism. The Burgtheater, whose main stage had remained closed to Jelinek’s work until 1998, arguably admitted her only after she had emerged internationally as a significant author who had garnered many important awards even before receiving the Nobel Prize of Literature. The mainstream Austrian press, as well, regards this writer with scorn and derision, as a muckraker who likes to air the nation’s dirty laundry in the international arena.23 Her deployment of irony has often been misunderstood, parody misrepresented as approbation. To this day, the relationship between a theater this conservative and an author this contentious remains fraught. Nonetheless, art’s reliance on transnational categories of merit and value, in this case, wrenched open a space for the diversion of resources traditionally devoted to maintaining the nation’s central fictions. The interrogation of global relations through the lens of the nation position national history and identity as neither outside of nor a remedy to globalist violence. Jelinek’s focus on women as icons of globalist violence, moreover, thwarts a constellation that has become habitual in the European media, which confronts victimized Muslim women with brutal Islamic patriarchs and accords egalitarian European men and women the role of liberators. In November 2004, the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose film Submission had issued a strong indictment of domestic violence in Muslim families, by an Islamic extremist stoked cultural condescension and fear among white Europeans and invigorated assumptions of gender along with perceptions of cultural and religious conflict. By contrast, Jelinek foregrounds the violent sexism prevailing in secular, Western societies along with the global intensification of a racial class system and foils the co-optation of feminism into a racist, anti-immigration, anti-terrorist rhetoric. More

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fundamentally, Babel’s cruel women intervene in the circulation of woman as the figure of globalist desire, the figure that eroticizes the incorporation of reproductive domesticity into systems of exchange of value, thereby equating the market with emancipation and liberation. In this book, that figure has already been ironized in Wilder’s globalization farce, subversively refashioned in Siemann’s development opera, and posed as emblematic of neoliberal regimes of labor by Pollesch. Jelinek’s Babel goes beyond these critical reformulations by foiling the operation of femininity as a potentially empowering signifier of oppression within allegories of international relations, a signifier that still undergirded Bambiland’s indictment of international power asymmetries as rape. Babel, by contrast, forecloses the social dialectic usually invoked by that trope. While Jelinek’s entire oeuvre is dedicated to remembering and grieving the dead, the displaced, and the ostracized, the labor of mourning that her plays invite resists the way in which profound collective grief has been harnessed to a Manichean view of the world and made to fuel further acts of military violence and internal repression. Jelinek’s war plays intervene in the discourse of the war against terror and contribute to an understanding of the historical continuities connecting contemporary globalization with prior political formations, including colonialism, imperialism, and fascism. Moreover, they point to the way in which war today no longer denotes a geographically discrete event but signals the expansion of “lawless zones,” not only in those regions where state structures have collapsed due to military force, but also within Western democracies, as an effect of economic policies and political processes connected to neoliberal globalization. In particular, Jelinek highlights the way in which women and feminism have been co-opted by the current military mobilization against a barbaric, Islamic Other in public discourse. Bambiland provides glimpses of those women whose rescue from patriarchal oppression and empowerment by the implementation of democratic forms of government are the stated aims of the military campaigns: they are killed as they shop in public marketplaces targeted by the coalition’s precision bombs, shot with their children as they attempt to flee the war zone, or kicked off vehicles providing food and humanitarian aid to now destitute populations. Babel focuses on the Western women whose emancipation bolsters claims to democracy’s superiority: as torturers on par with their male colleagues, they teach Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib about sexual liberation and gender equality, while the pornographic discourse in which torture is embedded climaxes in the consumption of women’s flesh. Similarly, the monologue of the lynch

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victim in Babel foregrounds the ways in which a growing racial underclass experiences symbolic and literal violence in Western democracies, which is elided from the stark binary constructed by the “axis of evil.” Yet neither the murdered mercenary nor the Western women working as prison guards are positioned as victims; rather, they are also shown to actively collaborate in the familial constellations, state discourses (war), and transnational formations (such as religious ideology) that produce violence, including neocolonialism and misogyny. Jelinek’s long-term attention to the media as primary textual source has enabled her to bring into view shifting notions of “public discourse,” whose privileged sites of production are no longer the press or even television with their ties to national histories and imperatives but the World Wide Web, the global purveyor of information, entertainment, and communication. Even as her plays, especially Bambiland, note the reinvigoration of nationalist narratives hinging on masculine heroism and female sacrifice and victimization for war, they illuminate the reconstitution of nationalism within the transnational formations of “Western democracy” as well as religious-political fundamentalisms. Babel foregrounds both formations as contingent on and reinforcing patriarchal oppression, gender difference, and sexual violence and thus rejects the rhetoric of a war on terror to go forward in the name of liberated, white, Western women and oppressed nonWestern, especially Muslim, women. Some scholars, such as Edward Said and Immanuel Wallerstein, have developed powerful critiques of globalism out of postcolonial theory in explicit rejection of postmodern theories and practices. They contrast the ludic impulse of a postmodern discourse deemed purely aesthetic with the historicizing, material account of unequal power relations elaborated within the field of postcolonial studies. This split also reverberated in feminist theory and women’s studies, separating those who focused on the phallocentric organization of knowledge and cultural practices (and derided as increasingly entrapped in a selfreferential universe of texts and discourses) from those concerned with women’s material oppression, exploitation, and resistance (scorned for perpetuating essentialist notions of gender difference). Jelinek’s work bridges this theoretical gap, as she is concerned with the link between the material conditions of postmodernity—that is, the economics and politics of globalization—and the symbolic systems that prop them up. Jelinek seems astutely aware of postmodernism as “one of the most effective critiques of modernism and modernity” (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 4). Far from engaging in any ludic postmodernism, she is eminently sensitive to the encoding of power relations in

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canonized notions of art and beauty and to discourse’s material effects. Her amalgamation of the mutilated mercenary and the flayed Marsyas foregrounds precisely the braiding of symbolic, political, and physical violence and connects the questions of aesthetic intervention and political resistance. Even as her writing insists on the performative production of categories like “the emancipated Western woman” or “barbaric Islamist patriarchy” and denies them any ontological status, this does not mean that acts of violence, terror, and torture cannot be accounted for or morally condemned. On the contrary, Jelinek along with the theater artists who have directed her plays insist on the need to reflect on the mass-mediated imaginations of a violent and violated Other through art, mobilizing all available genres, means, and channels of communication, from the bloody rituals of live avantgarde performance and their homeopathic approach to mediatized slaughter and the still-subsidized bastion of national culture, to the circuits of cyberspace where Jelinek’s fighting words reside at www .elfriedejelinek.com, jostling with transnational feminist manifestoes, ordinary pornography, and holy terror.24

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4

Conclu sion

I

have devoted much of my professional life to thinking and writing about the ways in which the theatrical institution has for a very long time excluded or marginalized women and feminists as well as those considered alien to the German nation. In my first book, conceptualized in the 1980s, I set out to re-evaluate the work of German women playwrights, impresarios, and performers as feminist interventions in the canon and in ostensibly gender-blind notions of the political, recuperating, among other things, subjective, lyrical, body-centered performance practices. Later, prompted by the upheavals of reunification and its aftermath, I studied the sublation of racial discourses in postwar West German culture, which since the 1960s has revolved around the project of “coming to terms with the past”—largely to the exclusion of Jews, Turks, and other resident minorities that clearly have a stake in this collective undertaking. “Ethnic drag” was the name I found for that curious void at the center of a discourse that purported to empathize with, while simultaneously displacing, the Other. And yet, as I kept returning to Berlin, where I also lived from 2001 to 2002, the low-level unrest attending the country’s postindustrial restructuring combined with the unprecedented growth and concentration of media corporations on the continent (some, like Silvio Berlusconi’s international empire Mediaset and the Russian Gazprom’s NTV, with direct ties to government) and the fierce protests of theaters against downsizing and defunding alerted me to the specific impact of globalization on old European welfare states at a time when

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notions of the public and of civil society, where these far-reaching transformations could be discussed, were clearly changing. While the German theater, in my view, had historically functioned as a bastion of class-based, ethnic, and gender normativity rather than an arena of social critique, I began to wonder whether there was something to the complaint that the dwindling support for the arts signaled the shrinking and erosion of critical public discourse about contemporary concerns. Or was it true, as the proponents of the “creative economy” that would replace industrial modernity promised, that the long-overdue dismantling of calcified cultural bureaucracies would give rise to a new creative landscape of flexible, international ensembles eminently responsive to diverse audiences’ social and political needs, questions, and demands? I examined these questions in the institutional context of a small, private American university that very much parallels the quandaries in which the arts in Europe find themselves, a context that Bill Readings described with great acuity and prescience. Like him, I welcome the expanded opportunities for interdisciplinary inquiry afforded by such a context, while also noting the risks of ideological uniformity. My effort in this book, to read the dominant narratives of globalization through the paradigms of cultural theory, is as much fueled by my transdisciplinary immediate environment as it is impelled by my wish to argue for the importance of the arts and humanities in imagining the world as different, rather than administering the one we inhabit. The genres described in the preceding chapters range from mainstream romances to the epic techniques of Brechtian opera, to the posthumanist, violent dramaturgies created by Pollesch and Jelinek, which appear to systematically and sadistically overstrain the capacities of the human body. Yet this sequence should not necessarily be equated with a privileging of postmodern over other styles. While I perceive limitations to those dramaturgies that construct a global imaginary through international relations—including the Brechtian model adapted by the Neuköllner Oper—I am drawn to that theater’s belief in the creative, socially beneficial uses of new technologies in the intellectual tradition of Benjamin, Enzensberger, and Poster and troubled by the vilification of new communications technologies in some of the work discussed in the later chapters. The theater’s railing against monolithic global screen technologies risks reviving that old Frankfurt School bogeyman, the masochistic, authoritarian mob. At the same time, some cultural studies scholars’ belief in the resilience of consumers to foil mass culture’s interpellating efforts strikes me as founded on essentialist assumptions about the a priori resistant

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consumer.1 I agree with Naomi Klein that it takes both stubbornness and a high degree of cultural proficiency to jam the master narratives of globalization broadcast on many but not all frequencies, including the numbing, Orwellian invocation of democratization as a foreign policy goal. It would be as foolish to forego the possibilities offered by new technologies toward this end as it would be to mistake the Internet for a global public sphere. Cultural institutions in contemporary Europe are under enormous economic and political pressure to transform themselves. The theater, which has sometimes positioned itself antagonistically to mediatized forms, is facing a predicament remarkably similar to that experienced by the cinema. While many theaters have responded to this pressure by either providing “pure” postdramatic pleasures to affluent elites or franchised spectacles for the masses, some companies and artists have managed to wedge open the stuffy, chauvinistic bastion of national theater to search out new audiences, build novel alliances, and devise remarkably creative appropriations of mediatized technologies. While the theater has no privileged hold over notions of critical, public discourse, the plays I have discussed in this book foreground the stakes of detaching a mediatized, global imaginary from the exigencies of embodied social identities and relations. The folkloristic ethnic fetishes and sexualized feminine attributes circulating on the interlocking screens of surveillance and entertainment technologies reveal less and less about the lives of immigrants, refugees, and women, as the work of Pollesch and Jelinek demonstrates. It is the very precariousness of physical existence and the vulnerability and interdependence of our mortal bodies, these plays suggest, that must compel more sustainable visions of the global.

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Notes

C hapter 1 1. Geographer David Harvey’s term “uneven geographical development” sought to mark the inequality and violence attending globalization and to intervene in the defeatist lack of alternatives written into the very term globalization. While I find his criticism persuasive, his term has not attained the same currency as globalization and transnationalism. See Harvey 2000a. 2. Nina Berman, a contributor to both the Forum on German Studies and Globalization in the German Quarterly (78:2, spring 2005) and the debate on transnationalism on the H-German listserv (spring 2006) argues that as cultural reference systems expand, so must our comparative cultural knowledge; her cursory map ranges from knowledge of Turkish language and history to assess migrant literature, to Swahili literary traditions in order to grasp colonial interactions. 3. Letter to the editor of the journal Theatre Survey (2007), signed by members of the International Performance and Culture Research Group of the University of California in response to three special issues on theater, performance, and globalization, published by Modern Drama (Canada), Theatre Journal (United States), and Contemporary Theatre Review (UK). My heartfelt thanks to the group for inviting me to their Spring 2006 colloquium where they discussed this letter and to Janelle Reinelt for sharing it with me. 4. “Few have noticed that the convent was a male domain. They constituted 83 percent of members. There were only two women among the twelve voting members of the presidium. After the departure of the Spaniard Ana Palacio in March 2003 Gisela Stuart, from Britain, was the only remaining woman. The European Constitution was thus conceptualized under the near exclusion of women. Equally ignored was the politically homogenous and hence skewed composition of the convent. Due to the selection criteria of the member states—one representative from the government and two from the national parliament respectively—only

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5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

Notes members from the two large political camps, the conservatives and the social democrats, were selected. In addition, there were some liberals. Other large political groups from the left, the Greens, the so-called Eurosceptics, but also right-wing, nationalist groups were only marginally represented” (Wehr 2004, 23, my translation). See my article on the feminist crime fiction writer Doris Gercke (Sieg 2005). This model status was specifically linked to the theaters’ hard-nosed bargaining with recalcitrant trade unions (Deutscher Bühnenverein). The Enquete committee “Kultur in Deutschland” recommended a constitutional amendment in this direction in 2005, however, illustrating the force of European norms and standards (Connemann 2004). For a fuller treatment of the Carnival of Cultures, see Sieg 2005 and Frei 2003. See also folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett on the impact of in-group cultural brokers on self-representation and its political consequences.

C hapter 2 1. This chapter has benefited from the careful reading, suggestions, and criticism of several friends and colleagues: thanks especially to Barbara Mennel, who read several drafts and was most generous in her thoughtful response, as well as to Randall Halle, Jeffrey Anderson, and Lalitha Gopalan. 2. While some theorists of the new virtual technologies have argued for the radical difference between computer and film screen (Case 1996), others have persuasively argued that cinema’s organization of the screen and of narrative has been incorporated and perfected in the new virtual technologies, rather than being superseded by them (DeuberMankowsky 2005). 3. Lubitsch’s romantic comedy, which featured Greta Garbo as the female lead, had been co-scripted by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. A 1957 remake (dir. Rouben Mamoulian), titled Silk Stockings and featuring Fred Astaire as the male lead, was much less sympathetic to the protagonist’s political convictions. In addition, the Broadway musical Silk Stockings told the same story, with music by Cole Porter. Both films and the musical were based on a play by Melchior Lengyel. This story was much more popular and successful than the approximately forty anticommunist films Hollywood studios released from 1948 to 1954 during the McCarthyist Red Scare. Film scholar Peter Lev suggests that these films were made less for commercial reasons than to demonstrate “Hollywood’s loyalty to the United States” (Lev 2003, 51), when that loyalty was being questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigation of artists in the film industry. 4. See Roffman and Purdy 1981 about films dramatizing the dangers of communism at home and abroad.

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5. While Wilder took the plot from Molnar’s one-act play, he left virtually none of the original dialogue and renamed the main characters. More on the significance of the characters’ names is found in notes 23 and 24 in this chapter. 6. Only one of approximately nine films made between 1953 and 1989 temporarily reverses directions by showing its protagonist returning to the German Democratic Republic after having initially fled it (Reich 1975). While maternal and filial love also motivate some of the attempted or successful border crossings in these films, they are primarily driven by sexual desire, thus casting the allure of the West in terms of an irresistible force. East-West romances produced in West Germany include Anna (dir. Uschi Reich, West Deutscher Rundfunk, 1975), Der Mann auf der Mauer (dir. Reinhard Hauff, Bioskop/Paramount, 1982), Eisenhans (dir. Tankred Dorst, Bavaria/WDR, 1982), Flucht nach Berlin (dir. Will Tremper, Stun, 1960), Genosse Münchhausen (dir. Wolfgang Neuss, Satir, 1961), Himmel ohne Sterne (dir. Helmut Käutner, NDF, 1955), Lieb Vaterland, magst ruhig sein (dir. Roland Klick, Solaris/Lotta/Filmstudio Havelchaussee, 1975), Tunnel 28 (Escape from East Berlin [English], dir. Robert Siodmak, Germany/USA: Walter-Wood-Produktion, 1962), Weg ohne Umkehr (dir. Victor Vicas, Occident, 1953), Westler (dir. Wieland Speck, Searcher Filmproduktion Sunger & Grüttgen, 1985), and Der Boss aus dem Westen (dir. Vivian Naefe, WDR, 1988). 7. See also Das Leben beginnt (dir. Heiner Carow, DEFA, 1960), Der Fall Dr. Wagner (dir. Harald Mannl, DEFA, 1954), Der geteilte Himmel (dir. Konrad Wolf, DEFA, 1964), Eine Berliner Romanze (dir. Wolfgang Kohlhaase, DEFA, 1956), Geschichten jener Nacht (dir. Karlheinz Carpentier, DEFA, 1967), Irgendwo in Berlin (dir. Gerhard Lamprecht, DEFA, 1946), Kinnhaken (dir. Heinz Thiel, DEFA, 1962), Roman einer jungen Ehe (dir. Kurt Maetzig, DEFA, 1952), Sein grosser Sieg (dir. Franz Barrenstein, DEFA, 1952), Sonntagsfahrer (dir. Gerhard Klein, DEFA, 1963), . . . und deine Liebe auch (dir. Frank Vogel, DEFA, 1962), and Unser täglich Brot (dir. Slatan Dudow, DEFA, 1949). 8. Daniela Berghahn writes, “Invariably the female protagonists choose foreign men, originating from Africa, Poland or Russia, as their lovers, never West Germans, thus implicitly making a rather pessimistic comment on the possibilities of German unification on a personal level” (Berghahn 2005, 227). 9. The first two parts are entitled The Element of Crime (1984) and Epidemic (1988). 10. British film scholar Jill Forbes writes, “American lobbyists shamelessly associated the triumph of democracy with the export of American movies” (Forbes and Street, 17). In Germany, one of America’s strongest international competitors before World War II, the Hollywood film industry held “the military government to ransom over the use of American films for education and propaganda purposes” (Elsaesser 2005, 9)

186

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

Notes and ensured “that the trading arrangements were extraordinarily advantageous to the U.S.” (Forbes and Street, 17). This narrative is being challenged on many counts: British Cultural Studies have revised the Frankfurt School’s simplistic notion of mass-cultural consumption; postcolonial theory has effected a rethinking of cultural imperialism and replaced paradigms of cultural imposition with a more complex dynamic of transculturation, selective appropriation, and hybridity; and film historians have rewritten the story of European anti-Americanism as one of cultural symbiosis and complicated mirroring effects (Elsaesser 2005). The branding of European cinema as art rather than commerce hinges on the elision of indigenous popular forms and on disavowing Hollywood’s avant-garde capabilities, which Elsaesser, following Benjamin, defines as embodying “the most (technically) advanced practice and employ[ing] the most experimental, risk-taking practitioners” (Elsaesser 2005, 183). Jäckel reports that in 1990 the market share of domestic films in the five European countries with the strongest film industries ranged from 7 percent (UK), 9.7 percent (West Germany), 10.4 percent (Spain), 21 percent (Italy), to 37.5 percent (France) (Jäckel 2003, 69). The corresponding percentages of U.S. films in these countries are 88 percent (UK), 83.9 percent (West Germany), 72.5 percent (Spain), 70 percent (Italy), and 55.9 percent (France). The MEDIA and EURIMAGES programs are commonly capitalized, although they are not acronyms. Jäckel shows that while film production and admissions have increased in Europe during the 1990s and the film industries, especially in small countries and in the struggling postsocialist economies, benefited from European support initiatives, these initiatives’ objective of increasing the market share of European films (i.e., not domestic productions) has not been attained (Jäckel 2003, 143). For complete filmography and discussion of von Trotta’s work, see especially Julia Knight 1992. The producer managed to sell the film to twenty countries in the first year of its release, thus providing a widely circulating, perhaps definitive narrative of the history of Germany’s division. During the same period, the foreign-language market in the United States collapsed, declining from 6.4 to 0.75 percent (Finney 1996,15). For a discussion of the background, outcome, and significance of this stand-off, see Finney 1996, 4–8; Jäckel 2003, 14–15; and Forbes and Street, 24–25. This paradigm is exemplified by international blockbusters like Harry Potter, Independence Day, and The Day After Tomorrow, all of which were made in Europe or by European directors yet clearly do not fall within the older concept of European filmmaking. On the occasion of a Wilder retrospective in 1979, for instance, the National Film Theater program described Stalag 17, which is set in a

Notes

20.

21.

22.

23.

187

German prisoner-of-war camp, as “an exuberantly dispatched allegory of American consumerist society” (quoted in Armstrong 2000, 62). The most original, in-depth reading of a Wilder film as a working-through of tensions within American conceptions of democracy can be found in Andrea Slane’s brilliant study A Not so Foreign Affair (2001). See Fehrenbach 1995, 52. It should be noted that Nazi economic policy for German-dominated Europe centered on the formation of cartels (Berghahn 1996, 21–22). Ranked the world’s twelfth most valuable corporation in 2002, The Coca-Cola Company is notable especially for its early and consistent deployment of branding strategies; its trademark alone is worth seventy billion dollars (Schutts 2003, 8). The drink was created by John Stith Pemberton, an Atlanta pharmacist and patent medicine entrepreneur, in 1886 but achieved success as a national brand under Asa Candler who bought the patent in 1887. Candler became the patriarch and chief executive of The Coca-Cola Company (founded in 1892), which rose to national and international prominence through innovative methods of mass production and mass marketing, tying itself firmly to American identity and values. “By the time Asa Candler died, the wealth generated by his company had penetrated the whole of Southern life and industry,” according to one business historian (quoted in Schutts 2003, 70). CocaCola was thus an important player in the reconstruction and modernization of the old South and the symbolic folding of the South into an American identity conceptualized as democratic. See also the highly ambivalent representations of feminine consumption in postwar West Germany discussed by Erica Carter. On the one hand, Carter argues, the female consumer embodied the new model of citizenship, which based citizen status on “participation in free market processes” (Carter 1997, 7) and accorded women a key role in the emergent, neoliberal social market economy. On the other, popular culture was haunted by and sought to banish the specter of the irrational, female consumer constructed as a threat to the moral and economic order of the nation (Carter 1997, 10). Carter demonstrates that these threats were often ethnically or racially coded through symbolic associations with Eastern Europeans and black Americans; Scarlett, whose name conjures up Margaret Mitchell’s portrayal of the antebellum South in Gone with the Wind (1936), clearly resonates within this German discourse of deviant, hedonistic consumption but also subverts it by associating transgressive femininity with whiteness. Robert McNamara (born 1916) first distinguished himself as the highest paid assistant professor at the Harvard Business School. In 1961, his name was synonymous with American economic efficiency and military prowess. After joining the air force during World War II, where he increased the efficiency of U.S. bombers, he became the first

188

24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

Notes president of the Ford Motor Company from outside the Ford family. His reforms greatly improved the company’s performance and profits. From January 1961 to 1968, McNamara served as secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson during the Vietnam War. Barbara Mennel has pointed out to me that for American viewers the pairing of McNamara and Scarlett calls up specifically American problems of democratization by linking the Reconstruction of the Southern slave economy (thematized by Margaret Mitchell) with the contemporaneous civil rights movement headed by Dr. Martin Luther King, hinting at the troubling racist legacies that the modern generation of Americans, epitomized by the Kennedys, inherited. The location of Atlanta, moreover, links political (civil rights) with economic (Coca-Cola) history, thus raising related questions of ideological continuities for the American context as the film does for the German one. McNamara’s machinations have gotten Otto arrested by the East German secret police. They manage to extort a confession from him that he is an American spy by depriving him of sleep, interrogating him, and torturing him by playing the then-popular song about the “itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow polka-dot bikini.” It is the continuous playing of the song that finally breaks Otto’s resistance. The film industry adopted the Motion Picture Production Code, preferring to self-censor rather than abide by outside regulation. Even though the code focused on moral and sexual decency, Congress exerted strong political pressure on Hollywood during the McCarthy era as well. Peter Lev writes that in this climate, “the wall between moral and political regulation largely disappeared” (Lev 2003, 101). Joseph Breen, the conservative head of the Production Code Administration (Hollywood’s self-censorship board) for more than two decades, reportedly recommended changes to screenplays that he felt “contain[ed] or seem[ed] to contain anti-capitalistic sentiments” (quoted in Lev 2003, 101). Interestingly, the three Soviet commissars who defect along with her, in the remake Silk Stockings, adopt an ethnic Russian identity that they commodify in the restaurant Old Russia that they open in Paris. Cagney reportedly rehearsed for his almost superhuman pace of delivery by tap dancing (Chandler 2002, 240). By contrast, its reception in West Germany was lukewarm because its release soon after the building of the wall was seen to needlessly exacerbate an already extremely tense political situation. It gained a second life after its revival at the Berlin Film Festival in 1985 and has since acquired the status of a cult film (see below). See, for instance, her discussion of the film Space Jam (1996) starring Michael Jordan, “a human superbrand” who grew beyond the brand he was originally subordinate to, namely the sneaker and sportswear giant Nike (Klein 2001).

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31. Wilder terminated his seventeen-year contract with Paramount, the largest of the major Hollywood studios, in 1954. Relations with the studio had grown strained after the flop of Ace in the Hole (1951), which many perceived as anti-American (Armstrong, 53). During the following years, different studios signed him up as a director, and in 1958 Wilder signed a contract with the Mirisch Company that gave him “freedom of subject, screen play, casting, direction, final cut, a good salary as director/screenwriter, and 25 percent of the net profits. He would stay with the Mirisch Brothers for sixteen years” (Armstrong 2000, 149). The Mirisch Company’s library was acquired in 1985 by the United Artists Corporation, and the rights for their movies’ home video/DVD distribution currently lie with MGM/UA. 32. Brandt made the often-cited proclamation that “now everything that belongs together will grow together” at a demonstration in front of the city hall in Schöneberg, a district in Berlin, on November 10, 1989, the day after the wall opened. 33. The “accession” of the GDR was conducted under Article 23 of the Basic Law, which governed the accession of “other parts of Germany” (previously belonging to the German Reich). That article had previously allowed for the accession of the Saarland. Philosopher Jürgen Habermas was among those who strongly advocated that Article 146 was more apposite under the circumstances. That final article of the Basic Law noted the transitional nature of the document until the day when a new constitution would take effect, “chosen by the German people in free determination.” Habermas argued that German unification must be decided by a referendum of all (not just East) German citizens, and that it must occasion a new constitution for a new, unified polity no longer conceptualized as transitional, as the Basic Law is by definition. The choice between Article 23 and Article 146, according to the philosopher, equals the choice between a mere administrative annexation and the democratic decision of the sovereign (Habermas 1991, 95). 34. Daniela Berghahn counts it among the few West German film productions that “seriously engage in the realities of unification and post-Wall Germany” (Berghahn 2005, 225) and contrasts it positively against the many “glossy relationship comedies” that Eric Rentschler termed “cinema of consensus” (Rentschler 2000, 260). That is not to say that there were no other serious cinematic treatments of unification and its aftermath, but, as Berghahn 2005 and Naughton show in great detail, these tended to be made by filmmakers from the erstwhile GDR, whose works in the early 1990s, with few exceptions, did not revolve around EastWest German romances. 35. The state’s refusal to allow East German poet and musician Wolf Biermann to reenter the GDR in 1976 was only the first of numerous instances in the late 1970s and early 1980s of purging critical artists and intellectuals in particular. This wave of expatriations put even heavier pressure on those who wished to remain to demonstrate their political allegiance.

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36. In an interview included in the published script, GDR critic Jens Reich pointed to the similarities he perceived between The Promise and Divided Heaven. 37. The casting further emphasizes this, as her young, pleasure-seeking, pop music–loving, swing-dancing, clothes-horse self is played by the wellknown, pretty West German TV actress Meret Becker, while the strikingly handsome East German theater actress Corinna Harfouch plays her post-Prague, sober, and notably less flamboyant self. 38. Taberner notes von Trotta’s turn away from feminist concerns in The Promise and maintains that the film “does not focus on matters of particular relevance to women” (Taberner 2000, 161). I argue instead that gender relations are indeed central to the articulation of national and postnational formations of European community. The patriarchal versus democratic practices associated with Sophie’s and Konrad’s families build feminist notions of gender egalitarianism right into nationalist and transnational notions of European community. 39. Volker Berghahn points to the “major irony of modern history,” that Germany, “which twice in the first half of the twentieth century vainly attempted to establish by force a formal empire stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Ural Mountains and beyond, now at the end of this century finds herself on the verge of acquiring an informal empire of similar dimensions without having fired a single shot. There can be little doubt that reunited Germany . . . will occupy a pivotal position not only in the European Union (EU), but also in Eastern Europe” (Berghahn 1996, 1). Berghahn notes the anxieties this raised among political leaders and businessmen in Europe and the erstwhile Soviet Bloc countries (Berghahn 1996, 2). 40. The story of DEFA’s privatization, which reads like a crime novel about the Wende, has been extensively documented by Dalichow and Naughton. It later turned out that CIP’s majority shareholders were two British and French property developers, fanning fears that the corporation was more interested in the valuable real estate in Potsdam the studio sat on than in the facilities. 41. For a fuller account of the transformation of the “Film City Babelsberg” since the 1990s, see Naughton and Berghahn 2005. 42. The Promise’s educational afterlife is attested to by Forbes and Street’s choice to include Taberner’s essay on the film in their textbook on European cinema. At the time of writing, it was the only unification film aside from the more recent Good Bye, Lenin!, available in the English-language video/DVD market. 43. For detailed discussions of East German films about postunification Germany, see Berghahn 2005; Naughton 2002; and Cooke 2005. 44. The one exception is Leander Hausmann’s film Sonnenallee (1999), which epitomizes the phenomenon of “Ostalgia” (nostalgia for the East)

Notes

45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

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and was extraordinarily successful in both eastern and western Germany (2.6 million viewers). International cooperation has been one way in which filmmakers have tried to assemble funding from multiple sources and broaden their potential audiences. Lars von Trier’s Europa trilogy was jointly funded by Danish, French, German, and Swedish monies and featured an international cast. Lichter (Distant Lights) was a German-Polish coproduction. Other, more mainstream, Europe-themed cooperations among the larger players include Europudding, a French-Spanish coproduction, and One Day in Europe (2005), a German-British collaboration. See also Halle 2008. I should add that the production of films for international (European) distribution rather than the national audience, along with the expectation of commercial success, have also resulted in a certain tendency to reproduce national and ethnic stereotypes, a development that has provoked criticism. Bernd Buder wrote about the annual film festival Go East in Wiesbaden, which features new central and eastern European film; cinema in that region has become a machine generating national clichés that merely confirm western audiences’ expectations (Buder 2005). Examples of such ethno-kitsch are the Mongolian Story of the Weeping Camel (2004) and Bosnian-Serbian director Emir Kusturica’s Life is a Miracle (2005). By 2004, the Big Brother format had been sold to seventeen countries. Since 2004, Spain is one of three European countries (after the Netherlands and Belgium) where homosexual partnerships are accorded complete legal parity with heterosexual marriage. Many other European countries have introduced the option of registered partnerships to homosexual couples, which afford many but not all rights reserved for heterosexuals. In the movie, this issue arises in relation to Lars, who is involved with his Spanish roommate Soledad but finds out that his Danish girlfriend gave birth to their child. The film downplays this potential conflict, as Soledad is shown to encourage Lars to recognize and rejoice in his child. Europudding consistently dramatizes national as primary and international as secondary relationships, thus making them compatible. “In the United Kingdom, Big Brother devotees had access to SMS text news updates, logos, and ring-tones. They could vote by text message as well: comments and suggestions could also be sent to the production team, and some of those ideas would run alongside the interactive version of the TV broadcast, which supplied four different video views of the house. In Sweden, the summer 2002 version of Big Brother featured live streaming to mobile phones. As the head of interactive media at Endemol UK puts it, ‘We’re creating this virtuous circle that excites the interactive audience about what’s going on in the house, drives them toward the TV program, the TV program will drive them to the Internet, the Internet to the other ways they can get information, and the other ways back to the TV’” (Magder 2004, 150–51).

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Chapter 3 1. Heartfelt thanks to Holger Siemann and Andreas Altenhof of the Neuköllner Oper for making manuscripts, photos, and materials available to me. 2. Synopsis, libretto, and production photos are available on Holger Siemann’s Web site at http://www.schreiberey.de/katalog.html (accessed October 7, 2006). Information about the Neuköllner Oper can also be accessed online at the theater’s homepage at http://www.neukoellneroper .de. All translations from the libretto quoted in this chapter are my own. 3. This prediction was made by the director of GATT, Peter Sutherland, in April 1994 on the occasion of the founding of the World Trade Organization (quoted in Wichterich 1998, 11). 4. Kaufland’s name may be translated as “buying land.” 5. To be sure, the character can transport these aspirations better than a laborer in a textile sweatshop or a data processor, figures that feature prominently in the more pessimistic accounts on women in the global economy. The drama brackets the widening gap between wage labor and education that continues to segregate the majority of women in the lowest paid and least protected sector of production and limits their dreams of upward mobility. 6. Guy Standing of the International Labor Organization spoke of the global trend toward the “feminization through the flexibilization of labor.” In 1996, he added that the feminization of wage labor increasingly affected not just women but also men (quoted in Wichterich 1998, 39). 7. The capitalized “I” only registers gender difference in writing but not in speech, thereby categorizing (grammatically and socially) masculine referents as supplement to the feminine universal. This way of spelling became widespread in the progressive press (like the tageszeitung) in the 1980s; today, feminist linguists’ demand that women should not be subsumed under a masculine universal has become the norm for almost all public utterances. The friction between the opera’s spelling and its plot implies a jibe against current linguistic usage, which has surrogated symbolic change for social change. After all, when feminists linguistically inverted the grammatical relation of (masculine) norm and (feminine) supplement, they protested a social reality in which women were treated as subordinate to men. 8. Unlike its American equivalent, the German green card neither functions as a permanent residency/work permit nor does it allow the permit holder to bring family members with her or him to Germany. As several Indian correspondents pointed out in the course of the debate, neither the pay scale nor the permit situation made Germany look attractive compared to, for instance, the United States or the United Kingdom. 9. Associated Press Worldstream 2000, 1, emphasis added, my translation. The same article cited the positions of three conservative politicians from

Notes

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

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the CDU and the Christian Social Union (CSU), Günther Beckstein, Thomas Schäuble, and Edmund Stoiber, regarding the proposed green card. While the first two rejected the loosening of immigration restrictions on the basis of high unemployment (suggesting that foreigners take jobs away from Germans) and Germany’s oversaturation with foreigners respectively, Stoiber argued for a state-regulated immigration policy that brings in “foreign elites” rather than merely unskilled migrants. The role of “cosmopolitanism” as the opposite of nationalism is fitting in the context of the opera, given the historical association of the term with diasporic Jews and with cultural elites, but one must ask whether these associations make it a useful term for the transnational underclass of poorly educated, transient workers. As an informatics expert, Soraya enjoys economic privileges not available to the majority of migrants, such as the Turkish residents of Neukölln. The program notes for Indians include four pages of excerpts from entries in music encyclopedias and standard reference works about Meyerbeer, which illustrate that the negative evaluations German critics articulated in the nineteenth century were passed down almost unaltered and assumed the status of incontrovertible truth, although explicitly anti-Semitic comments were excised after 1945. The well-researched and well-written program pointed spectators toward the intriguing figure of the Jewish Berliner Meyerbeer, enabling them to better appreciate the relation between historic form and topical story. Aubers’s La Muette de Portici (1828), which is deemed the first grand opéra, culminated in the full-scale eruption of the Vesuvius volcano, a spectacle that awed audiences. Meyerbeer, too, was well-known for the technological wizardry of his shows: “For the first time, [opera] stepped up its arsenal of theatrical means; in order to pull in spectators, it used the most modern technical inventions, such as gas lighting, arc lamps, or—as in Le Prophete—roller skates. It perfected the illusionistic apparatus of the baroque opera, created new effects, enlarged its personnel, and enthralled its audience through the rapid alterations of [éclat] and tableau” (Zimmermann 1998, 142). In a sneering eulogy published upon the composer’s death, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung wrote, “We find in his main works Italian beauty and smoldering melodies, French esprit in his rhythm; yet that which could be called German, the careful harmony, is foreign to him” (quoted in Zimmermann 1998, 326). For instance, the two tremendously popular musicals Die Kroetzkes kommen and Die Kroetzkes sind drin that the Neuköllner Oper put on in the 2001–2 season dramatized the trials and tribulations of an intergenerational household of three women wedged between the promises of choice, self-determination, and affluence pouring from computer and television screens and the effects of unemployment, poverty, and shame on their relationships, aspirations, and commitments. The shows’ message was simple: the seductions of TV soaps and cyber chats can expand

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users’ professional skills and social horizons but also lull them into forgetting the injustices, inequalities, pains, and troubles to which the flesh is subject and transcend them through virtual, disembodied pleasures. Such transcendence, the musical insists, cannot be in their interest. 16. Dramaturg Andreas Altenhof proudly told me that the Neuköllner Oper on average sells 85 percent of available seats, a high rate indeed when compared to the 13–15 percent achieved at large, highly subsidized opera houses. Several of the shows I watched were sold out weeks in advance.

Chapter 4 1. See Pollesch 2002; 2003; 2004; and 2005. 2. Domestic Front was selected to participate in the Theatertreffen 2002, an annual theater festival to which the ten best productions of the season are invited. In 2006, he also received the Audience Award at the Mühlheim Festival. 3. For instance, several scenes of www-slums were excerpted and anthologized in the volume Forge Reproductive Accounts: Heterosexuality, Work & Home by a feminist collective of critical urbanists and social geographers; the written analyses of that collective were in turn incorporated in Pollesch’s play Shit Hotels in Berlin later that year. 4. I discuss Insourcing of the Home: People in Shit Hotels at length in Sieg 2007. 5. Several actors may share a “character” or subject position as is the case in the passage I quote here, or they may trade characters, as is the case in Tent Saga (discussed below). 6. Feminist Brecht scholars have pointed out the problematic “collaborations” Brecht maintained with women playwrights, directors, and actors, which minimized their contributions or elided them entirely. See Fuegi, Bahr, and Willett 1983; Fuegi 1994; and Silberman, Mueller, Tatlow, and Weber 1994. 7. The phrase is a direct reference to Pine and Gilmore, eds., The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. Arguing that “experiences represent an existing but previously unarticulated genre of economic output,” the authors show that, provided businesses sufficiently customize experiences and hence “help customers experience less sacrifice in their interactions with you and your offerings,” the creation of experiences “opens up possibilities for extraordinary economic expansion” (Pine and Gilmore 1999, ix–x). 8. Neue Mitte (New Center) was a catchphrase often used by German chancellor Gerhard Schröder for the reorientation of social democratic parties away from their historical commitment to the interests of labor. Schröder invoked an entrepreneurial subject required by the neoliberal economy

Notes

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

195

in order to legitimate the dismantling of the welfare state as collective safety net and mechanism of secondary distribution. The term also designates the utterly redeveloped district “Mitte” in the former East Berlin, a historically Jewish neighborhood at the turn of the twentieth century but relentlessly gentrified in the mid-1990s when it was taken over by chic, young dot commers, upscale boutiques, and hip cocktail bars. It is in this redeveloped neighborhood that both the Prater and the Volksbühne are located. The group explains its name as follows: “Utterly enmeshed in these [neoliberal] practices, we cannot discern an outside. That’s why we’re choosing to add-on: tacking tawdry sheds onto the interior walls of cool lofts. Air out Beautiful Homes by drilling holes in their walls” (AnbauNeueMitte 2002, 107). The title alludes to philosopher Theodor W. Adorno’s aphorism that “wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (Adorno 1974, 19). See the special issue on Fragmente städtischen Alltags of the journal Widersprüche 78 (December 2000), the study Stadt als Beute by the collective SpaceLab (Klaus Ronneberger, Stephan Lanz, Walther Jahn), which Pollesch adapted for the stage; and Boudry, Kuster, and Lorenz 1999. Pine and Gilmore 1999; Florida 2002; Caves 2000; Howkins 2001; and Goehler 2006. Du Gay and Pryke 2002; McRobbie 2002; and Yudice 2000. Habermas 1989; for critical appraisals of Habermas, see especially Calhoun 1992. Subsequent plays, like the ones collected in Prater Saga (2005), are set in a TV studio, although they attempt to recuperate a sense of live performance in tension with that setting. Pollesch coauthored this play with Katja Dieffenbach and used as its primary theoretical intertext her essay “Just War,” which draws in turn on the writing of Herfried Münkler and Giorgio Agamben. The unifying power of the telenovela was enhanced not only by media monopolization and by Globo’s synchronization of commercial with political interests under conditions of censorship and self-censorship. It was also instrumental in promoting national unity because of its unique reach into Brazilians’ everyday life: broadcast six days a week for four to five hours of primetime a day, it averaged ratings of 60–70 percent of the population during the genre’s heyday, the 1970s, and even during the 1990s still reached 40–50 percent of the population. Some telenovelas and episodes reached almost 100 percent of viewers. While I focus here on Eastern Europe as a market for South American telenovelas, I should note the popularity of the genre in Russia and China as well. The Rich Also Cry, a Mexican telenovela, ran on Russian television; according to Kate Baldwin, it reached 70 percent of the population, or 200 million viewers, who regularly watched its 249 chapters, achieving the highest ratings ever (Baldwin 1995, 286). In China, 450 million viewers watched the tribulations of The Slave Girl Isaura

196

18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

Notes (Brazil), which was exported to ninety-five countries and has been the most widely watched telenovela so far. Rather than export and dub ready-made telenovelas, production companies today often sell telenovelas as formats, resulting in a closer cultural fit between product and viewers. One particularly successful telenovela, Yo soy Betty, la fea (Columbia 1999–2001), has been glocalized in Russia (Ne rodis krasivoy), the Netherlands (Lotte), Mexico (La fea mas bella and its sequel, El amor no es como lo pintan), India (Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahin), Germany (Verliebt in Berlin), Greece (Maria, I Aschimi), Isreal (Esti Ha’mechoeret), Spain (Yo soy Bea), and the United States (Ugly Betty). The practice of selling formats rather than complete shows also prevails in reality television (see Chapter 2). By 2006, nineteen South American telenovelas had been shown on German television (predominantly on the private cable stations), and German television companies had produced ten telenovelas of their own. The characters and casting of telenovelas illustrate the official discourse of Brazil as a multiracial, mestizo nation first conceptualized by social scientist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s, but Tufte’s study also highlights traditional patterns of racial exclusion and discrimination: while indigenous actors and characters appear to feature not at all in the telenovelas, black Brazilians—descendants of African slaves—are cast mainly in the minor roles of servants or maids (Tufte 2000, 220). In contrast to the never-ending format of the soap opera, which perpetually forestalls closure, telenovelas “have always had clear-cut stories with definite endings that permit narrative closure” (Lopez 1995, 258). Tufte 2000, 103. Here Pollesch most clearly parts ways with the Neuköllner Oper, which undertook precisely such an appropriation. Eastern European women contribute to the European economy not only as cheap workers but also as consumers, fuelling demand for the very products, lifestyles, and identities from which they are excluded. It was precisely in the postcommunist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which were undergoing far-reaching social, economic, and political upheaval following the collapse of communism, that the telenovela found its most fervent followers. For a discussion of reality television and its treatment of social differences, see my discussion in Chapter 2. See my discussion of Wallraff’s Turkish masquerade in Sieg 2002, chapter 4. While Wallraff explored class oppression and exploitation in the guise of a Turkish laborer, critics charged him with not only subordinating national difference to class issues but also with duplicating the very processes of exploitation he indicted in his book Ganz Unten (1984), because he failed to credit the work of his Turkish collaborators and passed them off as his own (see Gail Wise 1995).

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26. For instance, Thomas Kuchenbuch, a media scholar writing about intermediality on stage, has criticized the authors for providing merely “a technologically inspired survey of media development of improved world representation, in the sense of an illusionary realism” (Kuchenbuch 2006, 179). Kuchenbuch questions the modernist narrative of remediations on ideological terms and points to its duplication of the entertainment industry’s perspective. 27. Peggy Phelan is less pessimistic but attempts to locate the specificity of live performance in the ontological terms of evanescence, presence, and immediacy; her influential book Unmarked: The Politics of Performance turns performance’s exclusion from the economy of repetition and reproduction into an asset, arguing that it “gives performance art its distinctive oppositional edge” (Phelan 1993, 42). 28. Case focuses on Hamletmaschine (Müller 1978), Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preußen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei, and Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten (Müller 1983) to advance her thesis (Case 1996). Leben Gundlings was produced at the Volksbühne as Preussische Spiele in 1986/87, as was Verkommenes Ufer during the same season. 29. Case discusses the New York collective Women’s One World (WOW), particularly the work of Split Britches, a theater group composed of Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw, and Deb Margolin. 30. In an interview with Romano Pocai, Martin Saar, and Ruth Sonderegger, Pollesch explained his view of the screams: “My intent is to have the actors place the cuts into themselves, that the cuts occur within them, that they have become part of their sensual perception. It is a cinematic perspective, that one has internalized the cut” (Pollesch, Pocai, Saar, and Sonderegger 2003, 116). 31. While it might be tempting to compare the sapeurs with the Harlem drag culture Jennie Livingston documented in Paris is Burning (1992), both the pleasurable disjunction of anatomical body and social role marked by drag and the kinship system created by participants of the drag ball culture are absent from the sapeur subculture. The politics of the Harlem drag balls reside in flaunting both the arbitrariness and the violent rigidity of social codes of gender, class, and race and in an ethics of support and solidarity construed in opposition to the patriarchal structure and values of the heteronormative family. By contrast, the sapeurs intend to pass, and passing invests in the stable, naturalized relation between body and role. By signaling, in effect, “I deserve your respect, because I’m rich,” the sapeurs implicitly affirm the converse—that the poor deserve to be excluded. Moreover, the sapeurs’ avid admiration of capitalism translates into brutally social Darwinist social relations within this all-male subculture, in which the fittest survive by exploiting weaker members of the group, as Didier Gondola has shown.

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32. For a discussion of the splitting of script and performance in Müller’s later plays, see Sue-Ellen Case’s chapter “Bringing Home the Meat” in The Domain Matrix (1996). 33. Pollesch remarked on his interactions with actors in São Paulo in an interview with the organizers of the festival Theaterformen, which is published in Tent Saga (Pollesch 2004, 180).

Chapter 5 1. These two monologues, entitled Irm sagt (Irm says) and Margit sagt (Margit says), were later supplemented by a much longer third monologue called Peter sagt (Peter says); the three were published as Babel and directed by Nikolas Steman at the Akademietheater in 2004. Even though Peter says was not part of the Attabambi-Pornoland show in Zurich, it turns on the central theme of the Atta Atta trilogy, namely the relation of art to terror. 2. For a week, twelve asylum seekers whose biographies were posted online lived in a container placed in front of the opera house. As in the reality TV format Big Brother, the denizens of the container were under nonstop camera surveillance, and viewers could watch them via Web cast and vote out two per day. Those voted out, posters and Web site announced, would be deported, while the one remaining winner would be rewarded with a residency permit. This happening illustrates well the ambivalence with which Schlingensief’s work tends to meet as well as his artistic method of amplifying certain political processes and problems and defamiliarizing them through the reality TV format. While many were appalled at the politically incorrect display in public space, many others participated in it without being aware of it as an artistic rather than a political action (no one was actually deported or won a residency permit). The event is documented in Lilienthal and Philipp 2000. 3. Back cover blurb of Lilienthal and Philipp 2000. 4. All translations from the plays cited in this chapter are my own; English translations of Bambiland are posted on Jelinek’s Web site. 5. In 1970 during the height of mass protests against the Vietnam War, Staiger wrote, “An eine Neubelebung der Perser auf der Bühne ist in absehbarer Zeit wohl kaum zu denken. Der nationale Gehalt, das Pathos, das Widerspiel von Jammer auf der Szene und Jubel unter den Hörern, das wir nicht zu teilen vermögen: dies alles scheint eine Wirkung auf heutige breite Massen auszuschliessen” (Aischylos 1970, 98). Contrary to Staiger’s supposition, there have been several revivals in recent years. 6. None of the dozens of reviewers covering the show described the actions in those locations, and one remarked that he concentrated on the porn film because it had the highest production values of all the performance elements (Corsten 2004).

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7. For an updated estimate of casualties, see www.Iraqibodycount.com. 8. See also Klein 2004. 9. Klein’s essay originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine. She has protested against the unauthorized publication of this essay as a book (No War, 2006) and pointed interested readers to Harper’s Magazine’s Web site where the text is freely available (http://www.harpers.org/ BaghdadYearZero.html [accessed December 5, 2006]). 10. Wherever the “new mercenaries” appear, writes Uesseler, “instability and chaos take hold, the illegal arms and drug trade flourishes, informal networks between military and organized crime spread, civilian populations are terrorized, and the exploitation of the affected country’s resources and workers increases” (Uesseler 2005, 331). 11. Agamben notes “a continuing tendency in all of the western democracies” to replace the declaration of the state of exception “by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government” (Agamben, 14). 12. Gerhard Paul writes that Al Ansar’s Web site was in such high demand it could not be opened for days. Moreover, “forty-eight hours after news broke about Berg’s murder, search terms connected to it (like ‘Nick Berg video’), according to the U.S. Internet company Lycos, were among the most used search words, topping even the usual searches for pop stars and porno Web sites” (Paul 2005, 176, my translation). 13. Director Nikolas Stemann puts that public on stage as a lone man in a baseball cap and a dirty T-shirt munching chips in a ratty armchair, whose double-clicks prompt the curtain to open and close, revealing glimpses of the carefully choreographed bodies in pain familiar from torture photos and execution videos. 14. In her foreword to Negt and Kluge’s book, Miriam Hansen writes that the branches of industrial-commercial publicity, especially the mass media, enter into alliance with the disintegrating classical public sphere, an alliance that usually works to reproduce dominant ideology and, above all, to simulate the fictive coherence and transparency of a public sphere that is not one (Hansen 1993, xxix–xxx). 15. To a German viewer, they evoked the photographs displayed as part of the controversial Crimes of the Wehrmacht Exhibition. See Paul 2005, 190. 16. On the pornographic aspect of the Abu Ghraib photos, see also Braun 2004, Birnbaum 2004, and Harders 2004. 17. England was sentenced to three years in prison, Harman to six months, and Ambuhl was acquitted after pleading guilty to two minor charges. All three were dishonorably discharged. The prison guard who received the highest sentence of ten years was Charles Graner, also mentioned in Jelinek’s play, who impregnated England, and later married Ambuhl. 18. Isolde Charim’s comment that the pictures from Fallujah confirm the West’s worst nightmares about the Orient echoes that of several other

200

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20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

Notes German newspaper (Charim 2004). For a summary of the coverage, see Paul 2005, 172–73. While Jelinek does not mention Armin Meiwes, dubbed the “Rothenburg Cannibal” by name, the details she works into her text clearly refer to his story. In late 2002, Meiwes was arrested and put on trial for castrating, killing, and eating another man who had consented to this treatment; he had cut off his penis and fried it, a detail that Jelinek mentions repeatedly. Meiwes is a creature of the digital age: a computer programmer who had met his quarry on the Internet and whose murder he recorded on videotape; Meiwes’s trial revealed the existence of a subculture whose members share hardcore sexual fantasies of cannibalism. There is now a Hollywood movie based on this case entitled Rothenburg (dir. Thomas Weiß, 2006). Her recital was taken from Issey Sagara’s description of his murder and cannibalism of a Dutch woman in the 1980s, which he had recorded on tape. An interview with Sagawa is excerpted in the Program Notes of Babel under the title “Ein moderner Kannibale” (“A modern Cannibal”). In 1981, while Sagawa studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, he killed and ate Renée Hartevelt, a Dutch student of literature, after he became entranced by her whiteness. Sagawa, who suffered no punishment for his crime, has written about his experience and other cases of cannibalism and enjoys enormous pop cultural status in Japan. He not only recorded his crime on an audio tape recorder, but detailed descriptions of it can be found excerpted on the Internet (http://everything2.com/index .pl?node_id=1153136). It seems that Stemann used a similar excerpt as the one posted on that Web site. See especially her plays Stecken, Stab und Stangl, Das Lebewohl, and Ein Sportstück, but also her monumental novel Die Kinder der Toten. I thank Michel Chaouli, who noted this irony during a discussion at Indiana University, where I presented a talk based on this chapter, in 2007. Pia Janke has extensively documented Jelinek’s reception in Austria (Janke 2002), including the Austrian responses to her receiving the Nobel Prize (Janke 2005). See Paola Bacchetta et al. for a widely circulated manifesto outlining “Transnational Feminist Practices Against War,” which called for much of the conceptual work that Jelinek undertakes in her plays.

Co nc lus ion 1. Janice Radway’s study of women readers of romance novels and Christine Gledhill’s analysis of British viewers of soap opera exemplify this stance.

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Index

The letter n following a page number indicates a note on that page. activism, 3, 4, 23, 24, 27, 58, 80, 85, 111, 115, 117–20, 125, 137–39, 141; immigrant, 23, 138, 139, 141. See also Kanak Attak actor. See performer Adelson, Leslie, 5 Adenauer, Konrad, 32 Agamben, Giorgio, 12, 110, 145, 159, 161, 162, 172, 195n15, 199n11 allegory, 27, 53, 87, 121, 149, 175, 186n19 Anderson, Benedict, 28, 31 anti-Semitism, 13, 78, 95, 97, 166, 171, 174, 193n11 Appadurai, Arjun, 75, 147 artistic autonomy/freedom/ independence, 2, 17, 19, 25, 32, 42, 52, 154 audience, 5, 18, 26, 40, 47, 60, 66, 73, 97–99, 101, 106, 126, 128, 134, 135, 139, 142, 149, 150, 154, 156, 163, 164, 171, 174, 180, 193n12, 13; outreach, 6, 19, 191n45 Auslander, Philip, 132, 133 authoritarianism, 33, 45–47, 50, 55, 57, 105, 120, 143, 180 avant-garde, 6, 19, 41, 101, 106, 107, 108, 133, 137, 146, 151, 152, 163, 177, 186n11

Bauman, Zygmunt, 11, 75, 130 Beck, Ulrich, 1, 4, 10 Benjamin, Walter, 22, 133, 134, 137, 151, 172, 180, 186n11 Berghahn, Daniela, 36, 54, 58, 185n8, 189n34, 190n41, 43 Berman, Nina, 5, 183n2 Besson, Benno, 19, 134, 138 blog. See Internet body: fascist, 35, 36, 55; live, 22, 120, 121, 129, 134, 136, 140, 154, 172; posthuman, 99, 100, 103, 104; sexual, 35–36, 39, 55 Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin, 22, 132, 136 Branding, 40, 105, 186n11, 187n21; marketing, 51 Brandt, Willy, 53, 189n32 Brecht, Bertolt, 19, 27, 83, 101, 109, 113, 114, 126, 133, 134, 136, 180, 194n6 Buck-Morss, Susan, 11, 12, 13 Burgtheater, 7, 146, 153, 168, 174, 198n1 Bush, George H. W., 4 Bush, George W., 11, 148, 158, 164, 166–68, 171 Butler, Judith, 12, 110, 145, 159, 161, 162 camera, 22, 65, 71, 120, 127–31, 137, 153, 157, 159, 164, 165, 171. See also surveillance

218

Index

capitalism: domesticated, 10; global, 3, 4, 13, 23, 29, 34, 54, 69, 73, 88, 114, 123, 140; and imperialism, 33, 47–48, 75; as neocolonial formation, 80; as object of desire, 48, 104 Carnival of Cultures, 5, 20, 24, 25, 184n8 Case, Sue-Ellen, 100, 132, 134–38, 150, 184n2, 197n28, 29, 198n32 Castorf, Frank, 19, 23, 24, 107 censorship, 43, 50, 52, 143, 144, 163, 173, 195n16; Hays Code, 52; McCarthy era, 35, 50, 188n26. See also embedded journalist Choric theater, 3, 13, 148–51, 154, 155, 174 Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 93, 193n9 Christianity, 123, 148, 150, 170 cinema, 6, 7, 17, 22, 26, 27, 121, 134, 135, 137, 181; art house, 36, 39, 40, 60, 186n11; East German, 35, 190n43; European, 31, 32, 61, 62, 73, 186n11, 186n12, 186n13, 186n18, 190n42, 191n46; German, 1, 6, 35; global, 31, 61; national, 32; New German, 40, 41, 55, 60; West German, 35, 36. See also film industry civilization: clash of, 3, 148–50, 168, 173; civilizing mission, 76, 80, 81, 151; Francophile notion of, 34 civil society, 25, 26, 29, 111, 119, 173, 180 class: as analytical category, 3, 7, 77, 101, 137, 141; difference/ oppression, 27, 29, 73, 87, 98–100, 111, 119, 121, 126, 130, 139; struggle, 96, 107, 109, 112, 139. See also creative

class/economy/entrepreneurs/ industry cold war, 4, 12, 15, 18, 26, 33–35, 44, 50, 51, 54, 58 collective: lesbian feminist, 136, 197n29; socialist, 107, 134, 136 colonialism, 5, 47, 75, 97, 122, 164, 175; colonial fantasies, 14, 34, 35, 44, 48, 49, 121; colonial history, 14, 15, 38, 80, 124; legacies, 79 comedy, 73; screwball, 36, 44, 50, 51, 73; unification, 40, 61 communism, 11, 12, 13, 15, 26, 35, 44–50, 62, 73, 88, 184n4; postcommunist transition, 123, 158, 186n13, 196n23 community: European, 2, 55, 58, 62, 64, 68, 73, 123, 190n38; imagined, 5; international, 15, 70; local, 25, 124; national, 5. See also European: Union consumerism, 12, 13, 29, 35, 45, 47, 49–51, 53, 74, 105, 106, 122, 126, 134–36, 139, 186n19, 187n22 corporation: corporate discipline, 45; global, 7, 16, 69, 98, 127; hierarchy, 46; imperialism, 44; interests, 26, 62, 110; sponsorship, 18, 20, 25, 52, 101 cosmopolitanism, 2, 13, 55, 58, 59, 92–95, 103, 193n10 counterpublic, 27, 107, 111, 163, 172. See also public : sphere creative class/economy/ entrepreneurs/industry, 3, 22, 25, 52, 71, 112, 114, 117–20, 124, 127, 128, 180, 194n7, 195n11, 195n12. See also culture: industry critical theory, 22, 27, 105, 115, 117, 130, 134, 136, 140, 180, 185n11

Index cultural: assimilation, 48, 49, 65, 131, 161; culturalization of political conflicts, 25, 131; diversity, 2, 4–7, 17, 20, 25, 64, 65, 67, 95, 121, 131, 139, 142; exception to GATS 17, 21, 186n17; fantasies/ imaginations, 14; heritage, 20–24; homogeneity/purity, 92, 94, 95, 103; institutions, 1, 2, 18, 29, 117; policy, 2, 6, 17, 23, 43, 107. See also economy; funding culture: American popular, 55, 59; high/low, 5, 55, 58, 101, 121, 147; industry, 21, 22, 31, 41, 107, 110, 132, 134, 136; mass, 17, 22, 27, 105–7, 110, 121, 122, 129, 130, 134, 137, 138, 140, 147, 185n11; organic notion of, 18, 63; transnationalization of, 17 dance, 18, 19; ballet, 19, 20; belly dancer, 24; break dancing, 24 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, 110, 114, 115 democracy: European versus American models of, 11, 43, 45; European versus barbarism, 144, 150, 171–75, 177; and nation, 24; radical, 12, 70, 74; tension between capitalism and, 1, 2, 13, 26, 62, 64, 70, 120, 173; threat to, 9, 26; as unrealized project, 29 democratic: control, 10, 156, 157, 161, 162; de-democratization, 159, 161; deficit, 10, 11, 33, 58; democratization, 1, 3, 24, 32, 33, 42, 43, 49, 50, 55, 57, 137, 143, 148, 151, 157, 167, 171, 181, 188n24; principles, 8, 9, 157; sovereignty, 4, 8, 11,

219

13, 19; transparency, 11, 33, 159 desire: for Europe, 54, 67–70; for global, 27, 31, 87, 104, 175; heterosexual, 3, 13, 15, 34, 78, 113, 116; for unification, 35, 53, 56, 59, 61 Deuber-Mankowsky, Astrid, 72, 100, 137, 167, 184n2 Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA), 60, 61, 69, 185n7, 190n40 Deutscher Bühnenverein (German Theater Association), 19, 184n6 development, 3, 4, 21, 25, 26, 75–77, 80–82, 104, 175; Women in Development, 81 director: artistic, 23, 107; film, 26; managing, 19, 111; theater, 13, 18, 27, 28, 95, 102, 107, 108, 114, 133, 134, 144, 145–47, 171 domestic sphere, 3, 17, 49, 51, 59, 69, 104, 108, 111, 112, 119 drag: ethnic, 5, 130, 139, 179; gendered, 44, 130, 136, 197n31 dramaturgy, 2, 13, 27, 37, 38, 73, 96, 97, 110, 147, 173, 180; televisual, 22, 66, 137. See also polyvocality economy: British, 18; cultural, 5, 6, 8, 18; East German, 14; economic restructuring, 8, 12, 21, 159, 160, 179; Fordist, 20, 124, 136; global, 4, 7, 8, 12, 17, 77, 90, 103; political, 7, 73; post-Fordist, 20, 40; postindustrial knowledge-based, 17, 21, 76, 112, 118, 119, 123, 124, 128. See also creative class/economy/entrepreneurs/ industry; sexual : economy

220

Index

Ehrenreich, Barbara, 165, 166; and Arlie Russell Hochschild, 17, 49 Elsaesser, Thomas, 41, 42, 43, 185n9, 185n10, 186n11 El-Tayeb, Fatima, 6 embedded journalist, 3, 143, 145, 148, 150, 153, 154, 162 empathy, 12, 13, 129, 144, 148, 150, 151, 155, 162–64, 169, 170, 172 empire, 45, 47, 145, 156; European, 32. See also Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri England, Lynndie, 3, 162, 165, 166, 199n17 enlightenment, 37, 62, 75, 95, 97 Eppler, Erhard, 9, 10 Erhard, Ludwig, 32 ethnicity, 3, 99, 109; differences, 12, 17, 25, 28, 100, 137; ethnic culture and identity, 78, 139, 181; ethnocentrism, 94; homogeneity, 28; minority, 5, 8, 17, 23, 65, 92, 123, 139, 143, 160, 179; notion of national identity, 55, 95, 179 Eurocentrism, 5 Europe: Central and Eastern, 3, 8, 11, 15, 17, 21, 23, 65, 108, 125–27, 158, 190n38, 195n17, 196n23; identification with, 2, 26, 62 European: bureaucracy, 10, 34, 62–65, 69, 70; Commission, 10, 23, 33, 63; constitution, 10, 11, 62, 68, 183n4; cultural policy, 20, 26; culture/ heritage/identity, 2–4, 8, 11, 13, 14, 21, 28, 29, 40, 60; dream, 28, 63, 70, 145; expansion, 64, 69; integration, 26, 28, 32–34, 37, 44, 62, 64; polity, 2, 13, 36; Union (EU), 2, 8–10, 17, 20–23, 26, 28, 33, 34, 62–70, 190n39

exploitation, 3, 15, 27, 48, 49, 82, 85, 90, 109, 112–16, 129, 139, 176, 196n25, 199n10; selfexploitation, 24, 118, 127 extremism, right-wing, 8, 94, 103, 184n4 family: image and metaphor, 3, 14, 15, 26, 34–37, 64, 73, 109, 122. See also patriarchy fascism, 8, 9, 26, 134, 161, 171, 175; fascist mentality, 46 Fehrenbach, Heide, 43, 187n20 feminism: critique of globalization, 6, 14–16, 26, 77, 78, 81, 111; critique of screen, 137; discourse about sexuality, 112, 114; opposition to war, 200n24; theater, 109, 136, 137. See also gender; patriarchy festival, 21; national and international, 18; festivalization, 25 film industry: American, 26, 31, 35, 38–44, 50, 54, 60, 63, 134, 184n3, 185n10, 186n16, 188n26, 189n31; East German, 61; European, 31, 32, 39, 43, 60, 186n12; German, 63; global, 38, 73 folklore, 5, 21, 24, 131, 181 Forbes, Jill, and Sarah Street, 39, 40, 185n10, 186n17, 190n42 Foucault, Michel, 12, 110, 115, 147, 161 Frankfurt School see critical theory free-market principles, 9, 61, 70, 80, 107, 158 functionalism, 32, 33, 34 funding: European cultural funding programs, 20–23, 38, 40, 41, 63, 186n13 private, 20, 23–26, 101; public funding, 2, 6, 18, 19, 24, 25, 39, 60, 101, 120, 177, 179, 194n16

Index Gaulle, Charles de, 32 gender: differences/inequalities, 6, 14–17, 29, 73, 81, 84, 98–100, 104, 119–22, 130; equality, 2, 3, 11, 58, 92, 108, 125, 165, 175, 190n38; gendered imagery of unification, 52, 53; male privilege, 8, 16, 91, 111; policies, 16, 51. See also feminism; misogyny; patriarchy General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS), 2, 33, 41 German: Democratic Republic (GDR), 13, 18, 19, 24, 35, 36, 53, 55–60, 107, 185n6, 189n33, 35, 190n36; studies, 4, 5; unification, 14, 19, 26, 33, 36, 40, 52–54, 57, 61, 179, 185n8, 189n33 Germany, 1, 8; divided, 13, 18, 35, 45, 50, 52, 56, 186n15; Federal Republic of (FRG), 18, 19, 35, 53, 179 global: fantasies and imaginations, 15–17, 26, 31, 32, 34, 42, 45, 54, 61, 62, 64, 88, 123; market, 31–34, 82, 84, 94, 180, 181 globalism, 1, 5, 6, 9, 17, 33, 42, 94, 103, 109, 120, 126, 130, 137 globalization: critique of, 6, 8, 22, 24, 26, 28, 32, 74, 77, 80, 107, 111, 137, 145, 176; of Europe, 8–10; militarized mode of, 11, 28, 145, 158, 159, 172, 173; satire, 48, 73; scholarship on, 4, 7, 11, 83, 183n1; shock, 61, 126; social consequences of, 8, 15, 16, 54, 77, 173; styles of, 28, 145; theories of, 26, 76, 80; victims of, 16, 81, 82, 85, 157. See also feminism; socialism governmentality, 12, 13, 116, 161, 170

221

grand opéra, 3, 27, 76, 79, 93–96, 102, 103 Grass, Günter, 9 Greek: democracy, 28, 150; tragedy, 13, 144, 145, 147–50, 198n5 Green Party, 93, 94, 152, 184n4 Habermas, Jürgen, 9, 10, 62, 105, 111, 119, 130, 134, 137, 195n13 Hake, Sabine, 54, 61 Halle, Randall, 6, 25, 31, 32, 33, 37, 41, 191n45 Haraway, Donna, 98 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, 12, 13, 70, 75, 76, 110, 117, 145 Harvey, David, 51, 61, 77, 80, 83, 88, 89, 145, 183n1 Hayles, Katherine, 99, 100 hegemony: American, 34, 41; German, 34; global, 15 Hell, Julia, 35 Hess, Sabine and Ramona Lenz, 17 heteronormativity, 109, 115, 125, 165, 180, 197n31 Hollywood see film industry Homophobia, 64, 66, 67 human rights, 94, 150, 156, 159, 160, 163 immigrant, 8, 15, 17, 27, 45, 65, 90, 101, 102, 139, 181, 198n2; immigrants’ rights movement. See activism immigration policy, 25, 28, 76, 93, 94, 102, 103, 123, 138, 192n8, 193n9 imperialism, 13, 33, 47, 92, 134, 149, 175; American, 26, 28, 43; European, 28, 144, 150, 156; German, 59. See also empire improvisation, 13, 22, 37, 38, 65, 110, 114, 132, 136

222

Index

industrial: age, 27, 76; industrialization, 27, 80, 81, 96, 103, 122 institutionalism, 32, 33, 34 interactivity, 22, 72, 120, 132, 136, 137, 172, 191n50 intermediality, 110, 132, 133, 137, 197n26 international: division of labor, 3, Monetary Fund (IMF), 80, 83; relations, 1, 15, 26, 31, 32, 34, 42, 44, 51, 73, 76, 83, 158, 163, 175, 180 Internet, 19, 22, 28, 66, 75, 78, 98–100, 103, 121, 145, 149, 155, 156, 162–64, 168, 171, 172, 173, 176, 177, 181, 191n50, 199n12, 200n19, 20; virtual reality, 27 Iraq: invasion/occupation of, 2, 13, 143–46, 155–58, 163, 167, 172, 199n7; liberation of, 3, 146, 148 Iron curtain, 23, 57 Islamic: mentality, 168; states, 2. See also terror Jäckel, Anne, 41, 186n11, 12, 17 Jelinek, Elfriede, 3, 12, 13, 22, 23, 28, 141, 143, 144, 180, 181, 200n19, 21, 23, 24; Babel, 3, 28, 144–46, 155–77; Bambiland, 3, 28, 144–56, 162, 175, 198n4 Jews, 77, 78, 92, 94, 95, 97, 102, 179, 193n10, 195n8 Kael, Pauline, 51, 52 Kanak Attak, 6, 24, 138, 139, 141 Kennedy, John F., 32, 188n23 Kershaw, Baz, 25, 26 Kieslovski, Krzysztof, 36, 37 Klapisch, Cédric: L’Auberge Espagnole (Europudding), 26, 32, 34, 41, 65–72

Klein, Naomi, 51, 86, 89, 105, 137, 158, 181, 188n30, 199n8, 9 labor: emotional, 1, 3, 112; female, 16, 114; feminine care work, 3, 17; feminization of, 8, 16, 17, 85, 89, 90, 104, 127, 192n6; international division of, 80, 160, 175; labor market, 17, 26, 76, 85; productive, 27, 124, 127; reproductive, 27, 77, 89, 125; sexual, 109, 112–14, 138; sexual division of, 15, 51, 70, 79, 85, 86, 99, 104, 124, 137; undocumented, 129, 130, 131, 139. See also class; sex worker; working: conditions Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 7, 135, 136 Lennox, Sara, 5 liberalism, 13, 27, 33, 47, 51, 109, 118, 119, 141. See also neoliberalism liberalization: of capital and labor market, 8, 43, 44, 70, 123; of trade, 4, 21 liberation of Germany from fascism, 8, 9. See also Iraq Lisbon Objective, 21 liveness, 22, 110, 120, 121, 128, 129, 132–36, 140 Maastricht Treaty, 10, 15, 20 Magder, Ted, 71, 72, 192n50 Marxism, 5, 77, 80, 85, 88–89, 106, 109, 110, 115, 116, 141; Marxist notions of the subject, 13, 106 Materialism, 34, 36, 42, 54, 58 McRobbie, Angela, 71, 109, 127 media: conglomerates, 17, 41, 52, 60, 72, 122, 126, 137, 179, 195n16; convergence, 22, 63, 71–72, 132, 191n50; digital/ electronic, 6, 71, 102, 120, 128, 172, 173; German, 25;

Index literacy, 20, 24; mass, 1, 12, 13, 14, 22, 23, 106, 111, 132, 133, 135, 151, 166, 169, 171–74, 176, 177, 199n14; mediatized performance, 22, 27, 120, 129–33; print, 9; representations of Iraq war, 28, 143, 144, 150, 152, 155, 159, 162, 163, 200n18. See also embedded journalist; technology Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 76, 92–97, 102, 103, 193n11, 12, 13 Middle East, 2, 23 Mies, Maria, 16, 70, 71 migration, 1, 3–6, 8, 10, 13, 17, 24, 26, 75, 78, 84, 86, 92, 99, 101, 107, 122, 129, 139; literature of, 5, 183n2. See also immigrant; immigration policy military: aggression/dominance, 2, 15, 32, 47, 49, 51, 79, 83, 91, 149, 150, 155, 167, 187n23, 199n15; defense, 62; government, 39, 43, 44, 89, 122, 185n9; technology, 83, 99, 100. See also globalization misogyny, 121, 139, 166, 176 Miyoshi, Masao, 11, 75 mobility: geographical, 3, 4, 78, 84, 94, 95, 128, 141; social, 53, 90, 123, 126, 160, 192n5 modernity: alternative, 53; industrial, 12; modernization, 3, 26, 61, 75–77, 80, 104, 122, 187n21; Western, 5, 150; Müller, Heiner, 19, 108, 134–38, 140, 197n28 multitude, 12, 13, 70, 74. See also Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri museum, 18, 23, 25, 26, 152 music: hip hop, 24; musical score, 77, 92, 94, 102, 147; performance, 18, 24, 96;

223

pop, 17, 117, 131; rap, 24; soundtrack, 131, 154; theater, 7, 18, 27, 52, 101, 194n15; tradition, 95. See also orchestra Muslim, 3, 96, 174, 176 nation, 18, 31, 78, 95, 100, 122; nation-state, 1, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 32–34, 68–70, 73, 159; nostalgia for, 2, 8, 28 national: community, 28; identity, 4, 7, 24, 32; imagination, 31, 61; security, 10, 12; sovereignty, 11, 32, 68 nationalism, 8, 9, 32, 34, 86, 87, 106, 157, 193n10; ethnonationalism, 5, 92, 94, 102; German, 55 Naughton, Leonie, 54, 61, 189n34, 190n40, 190n41, 190n43 Nazi: attempt to build a panGerman empire, 32; authoritarianism, 47; criminals, 36; femme fatale, 36, 49; government, 9, 43, 57; past, 50, 58 Neebe, Reinhard, 32, 33 neocolonialism, 80, 81, 86, 104, 176 neoliberalism, 2, 4, 10, 12, 13, 16, 27, 29, 33, 49, 61, 64, 70, 77, 80, 84, 101, 104, 105, 114, 123–25, 137, 138, 158, 159, 173, 175 Neuköllner Oper, 7, 20, 25–27, 76, 87, 92, 98, 100, 101, 109, 180, 192n1, 193n15, 194n16 Nickel, Hildegard Maria and Eva Kolinsky,16 Ninotchka, 35, 44, 50, 54, 184n2 Nobel Prize, 9, 28, 144, 171, 174 orchestra, 19, 20 Orientalism, 86, 139, 148, 200n18

224

Index

pacifism, 28, 144, 145, 163, 165 patriarchy, 3, 8, 16, 27; and capitalism, 81, 92, 101, 109; patriarchal hierarchy, 35, 59, 73, 77, 79, 80, 85, 86–92, 100, 102, 122, 155, 165–67, 175–77, 190n38, 197n31; postpatriarchal gender relations, 55, 59, 77, 86, 190n38. See also economy; feminism; gender; sexuality performer, 19, 24, 97, 113, 114, 116, 119–21, 125, 126, 129, 132, 140, 141, 170, 179 performing arts, 6, 7, 21, 22, 24 Piscator, Erwin, 106, 133, 134 political opposition, 24, 16, 27, 29, 55–58, 131, 136, 142, 143, 144, 167, 171 Pollesch, René, 3, 13, 22, 27, 28, 105–42, 175, 180, 181, 194n1, 195n10, 195n14, 195n15; Insourcing des Zuhause: Menschen in Scheisshotels (Insourcing of the Home), 112, 194n3, 4; Pablo in der Plusfiliale (Pablo in a Plus Store), 120, 122, 128–32, 137, 140, 141; Sex nach Mae West (Sex After Mae West), 109, 112–16; Svetlana in der Favela (Svetlana in a Favela), 120, 122, 126–28; Telefavela, 120, 121–26, 131, 196n22; Wohnfront (Domestic Front), 27, 111–20, 138, 194n2; Zeltsaga (Tent Saga), 3, 27, 109, 111, 120–42, 194n5, 198n33 polyvocality, 13, 146 pornography, 23, 28, 131, 144, 145, 153, 155, 157, 162–65, 168, 171, 172, 175, 177, 198n6, 199n16

postcolonial theory, 5, 77, 176, 186n11 Poster, Mark, 171, 172, 180 poststructuralist theory, 5, 109, 114, 137, 138, 140, 147 Prague Spring, 54, 57–59 Prater, 7, 27, 107, 108, 111, 112, 117–20, 126, 139, 195n8 privatization: of cultural institutions, 7, 18, 24–28, 61, 72, 101, 120, 144, 145, 172; of military, 159, 160, 199n10; of public services, 1, 8, 16, 20, 60, 70, 105, 117, 155–62, 172 propaganda, 26, 43, 152, 154, 185n9 prostitute See sex worker protectionism, 4, 32, 39, 41, 63 public: debate, 11, 198n2; institutions, 3; services, 8, 10; sphere, 1, 8, 17, 26, 29, 57, 105, 106, 108, 111, 117–19, 131, 134, 155, 163, 169, 171, 172, 180, 181, 199n14. See also funding; public queer theory, 109, 111, 125 race, 3, 6, 7, 27, 29, 77, 78, 92, 98, 101, 107, 139; colonial discourse of, 14; critical race studies, 5, 179; racism/ xenophobia, 8, 13, 17, 54, 61, 64, 66, 67, 94, 95, 121, 144, 146, 160, 164, 166, 167, 171, 173, 174, 176, 188n24, 196n19; relations, 22 rape, 3, 14, 15, 148, 152, 175 Rectanus, Mark, 20, 25, 26 reiteration, parodic, 3, 137, 138 religion, 78, 81, 82, 85, 96, 143, 155, 174, 176; religious fundamentalism, 2, 163, 165, 166, 176

Index remediation, 5, 22, 27, 110, 132, 137, 138, 141, 197n26 Rentschler, Eric, 40, 189n34 Reunification. See Germany Rifkin, Jeremy, 28, 145 romance: of capital and labor, 125; of capitalism and communism, 35, 36, 44, 45, 50, 185n6, 7, 8; of global capital and thirdworld woman, 78; globalist, 129, 138; Wende romance, 40, 52–62. See also sexuality sadism, 22, 144, 151, 155, 157, 164, 169, 171–73, 180 Sassen, Saskia, 11, 145, 161 Schlingensief, Christoph, 146, 151–54, 174, 198n2 Schmid, Hans-Christina, Lichter (Distant Lights), 37, 38 Schwarzer, Alice, 165, 166 screen: computer, 27, 98, 165, 184n2, 194n15; cinema, 1, 184n2; television, 6, 27, 28, 67, 110, 194n15; screenic modes of representation, 7, 132, 133, 136–38, 180; versus stage, 22, 106, 110, 120–22, 126, 128–41, 152–54, 195n14, 197n30 screwball comedy. See comedy secret police, 46, 56–57, 188n25 seduction: of communist men, 48; of communist woman, 35, 50; of third-world woman, 88–89 September, 11, 2001, 11 set and costumes, 83, 96, 113, 117, 125, 126, 128–30, 138, 170, 171 sexual: economy, 3, 15, 32, 34, 36, 38, 55, 62, 69, 78, 88, 90; harassment, 15; morality, 68; property, 58; stereotypes, 66. See also labor

225

sexuality, 3, 64, 67, 107, 112, 114, 115; heterosexuality, 50, 67, 116; homosexuality, 49, 67, 101, 191n48; monogamy, 64; promiscuity, 48, 64, 67–69; theories of, 114 sex worker, 15, 16, 17, 113, 115, 127, 153, 154 Sharp, Ingrid, 13, 36 Shore, Cris, 33 Siemann, Holger, IndierInnen (Indians), 3, 13, 22, 27, 75–104, 175, 192n1 Slane, Andrea, 49, 187n19 social: conservatism, 35, 66, 92, 94, 103; Darwinism, 9, 121, 197n31; discrimination, 24, 130; equality/justice, 11, 28, 77, 86, 97; inequality, 24, 25, 26, 29, 34, 37, 64, 102, 119, 121, 130, 139, 142, 156, 183n1, 194n15; integration, 24, 25; net/security/services, 2, 9, 16, 84, 107, 119, 121, 195n8 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 9, 93, 94 socialism: critique of globalization, 107; democratic, 14, 36, 54, 58, 140; history, 15; socialist culture, 21, 55, 58; state, 13, 16, 24, 53–58, 107, 119, 135, 136, 189n35; theater, 23, 24, 98, 106, 135–37; as transnational project, 107; postsocialism, 15, 16 Sontag, Susan, 144, 162–64, 167 sovereignty, 2, 9, 10, 12, 13, 106, 148; authoritarian forms of, 12, 161, 172; mass, 12, 13; national, 64, 145; transformation of, 12, 69; Western models of, 11. See also democratic; national; governmentality spectator. See audience

226

Index

Stemann, Nikolas, 163, 166, 169, 171, 198n1, 199n13 stereotyping, 59, 64, 66–68, 139, 191n46 subject: corporate subject effects, 13, 116, 120, 138; European, 29, 72; globalized, 16, 114, 140, 155, 194n8; notions of, 13, 106, 109, 110, 114, 116, 118, 140, 141; vestigial, 116, 141 sublation, 6, 9, 22, 32, 73, 179 subsidies. See funding; public surveillance, 14, 53, 56, 72, 89, 117, 124, 161, 173; entertainment, 22, 65–67, 130, 181, 198n2 sustainability, 103, 134, 181 Taberner, Stuart, 36, 54, 55, 57, 60, 190n38, 42 Tadiar, Neferti, 15, 34, 88 technology: digital, 22, 27, 76, 78, 98–100, 131, 132, 134, 143, 144, 168, 200n19; medical, 86, 90, 99, 100; technological development, 22, 79, 84, 96–97, 102–3, 133, 137. See also interactivity; media; screen telenovela, 3, 22, 110, 120–26, 130, 137, 141, 142, 195n16, 17, 196n17–20, 23 television: American, 13, 40, 51, 52; European, 60, 61, 156; German, 36, 108, 120, 121, 146, 147, 176; global, 6, 17, 72; national, 176; reality TV 65, 72, 110, 130, 131, 137, 142, 191n47, 50, 196n18, 24, 198n2; soap opera, 120, 121, 194n15, 196n20, 200n1; televisual genres/techniques, 22, 71, 126, 153. See also dramaturgy; screen

terror: anti-terror laws, 161; Islamic extremists/terrorists, 143, 144, 157, 162, 163, 172, 174, 175; semiotic terrorism, 135, 137, 142, 143, 173; state, 12, 13, 142, 143, 198n1 theater: British, 26; cultural heritage paradigm, 20, 22; as education, 18, 171; as entertainment, 18; ensemble, 18, 19, 153; experimental, 7, 18; German, 1; in Germany, 7; immigrant, 24, 138; as moral institution, 28, 145, 163, 169–71; municipal and state, 19; national, 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 174, 177; political, 27, 97, 100, 107, 110, 134, 136, 137; postdramatic, 7, 110, 135, 136, 181; postmodern, 19, 136; repertoire, 18, 23, 24, 26, 101; social service paradigm, 20, 23, 24; studies, 4, 6; theater history, 18. See also feminism: theater; performing arts; socialism: theater torture, 3, 28, 48, 144, 145, 160, 163–72, 175, 177, 199n13 totalitarianism, 3, 12, 13, 57, 134, 155, 161, 162, 173 tourism, 4, 7, 21, 25, 101 transatlantic: relations, 15, 28, 32, 44; tensions, 2, 28, 145 transnationalism, 2, 4–6, 9, 32, 34, 73; transnational state, 10 transnationalization: of culture, 23, 24; of film industry, 32. See also globalization Trommler, Frank, 7 Trotta, Margarethe von, 38, 40, 60, 186n14; Das Versprechen (The Promise), 26, 32, 33, 36, 55–61, 73, 190n36, 190n37, 190n38, 190n42

Index unemployment, 9, 27, 93, 101, 193n9, 194n15 United States, 2, 10, 11, 15, 21, 28, 34, 36, 41, 65. See also film industry; transatlantic Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA), 42, 60 utopia, 12, 13, 49, 55, 58, 64, 73, 77, 110, 111, 137, 156, 158, 173 violence, 2, 3, 23, 28, 96, 148, 152, 163; pure, 151, 170, 171; state’s prerogative of, 11, 12, 159; structural, 107 Volksbühne, 7, 23, 24, 26, 106–8, 133, 134, 138, 146, 195n8, 197n28; movement, 26, 106, 107 Wagner, Richard, 78, 95, 96, 146, 153, 154 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 75, 145, 150, 176 war, 13, 134; against terror, 175, 176; Iraq War, 3, 28, 143–45, 153–59, 163, 165, 167, 168, 172, 173; Vietnam War, 144, 153, 163, 188n23, 198n5; wartainment/war of images, 144, 152, 154, 156, 163, 168, 173; World War II 31, 32, 39, 76, 80, 185n10; worldwide civil war, 121, 161–63. See also globalization: militarized mode of

227

web camera, 22, 120, 129, 137; cast, 22, 164, 198n2; log (blog), 71 welfare state/system, 2, 16, 62, 84, 119, 142, 157, 161, 179, 195n8 Wende. See German: unification Wichterich, Christa, 49, 85, 90, 192n3, 6 Wilder, Billy, 38, 39, 42–44, 175, 184n3, 5, 186n19, 188n31; A Foreign Affair, 42, 49; One, Two, Three, 26, 32, 33, 36, 44–52, 54 Wolf, Christa, 35, 58, 190n36 woman: globalized, 26, 77, 86, 87, 104; as sign, 3, 14, 51, 81, 167, 174, 175 women: of color, 3; in Europe, 16; immigrant, 3; Muslim, 3; thirdworld, 3, 102, 104; Turkish, 17; women’s movement, 26, 163 work. See labor workers’ movement, 24, 26, 101, 106, 115 working: class, 18; conditions, 2, 48, 49, 51, 70, 82, 85, 87–90, 112, 117–19, 127, 128 World Bank, 80, 83, 85 world market. See global: market World Trade Organization (WTO), 2, 21, 89, 192n3 Zantop, Susanne, 14, 35, 44