History is Montage
History is Montage
Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall
It is there another story hiding behind ‘history’? Might it be that ‘history’ consists of nothing more than an intricate accumulation of narratives, fragments, and footnotes? The history of ‘history’ is rarely told in official history books. Such a history is plural, uncanonized, often fragile, even incoherent, and emotionally charged, which is to say: highly subjective. ‘History’ is preceded by manifold and often forgotten conflicts, claims and counterclaims, interpretations and experiences, case studies and biographical entanglements. These narrative strands intersect, opposing and neutralizing one another, forming larger structures and eventually becoming engraved as a societal narrative, a consensual ‘history’ that imprints a culture’s self-image in a perpetual process of self-renewal. As we learn from the history of philosophy, the prerogative to interpret ‘history’ rests on no natural law. Instead, ‘history’ is always contested.The history of ‘history’ stands at the centre of Thomas Kilpper’s project in State of Control. As his point of departure for an investigation of the dominant reading of the history of the two Germanys, he drew upon one of the most emotional aspects of German reunification, namely the attempt to come to terms with recent history, specifically that of the GDR state security authorities, the Stasi – a case which even today riles people and divides society. Kilpper carved exemplary portraits of figures from German history such as Rosa Luxemburg, Reinhard Heydrich, Reinhard Gehlen, and all the way to Erich Mielke and Markus Wolf, into the floor of the cafeteria of the former Ministry of State Security (MfS) in Berlin, allowing visitors to stroll past them as though in an opened history book. Addressed as well by these gigantic printing plates, however, was the history of the resistance against this oppressive regime, of its victims, and of the misguided idealists that for their part became coldblooded perpetrators of violence. Rarely has the history of the two Germanys been narrated in a way that ‘cuts so deep’, so to speak. Altogether, 91 motifs were suspended from the ceiling of the festival hall in the third upper storey in the form of a labyrinthine arrangement of fabric prints. Shifted from the horizontal to the vertical, these motifs and images become unwieldy icons. At this site of historic horror, Thomas Kilpper literally used art to expose the traces and tracks that lie concealed behind ‘history’. Made accessible to the public for the first time in conjunction with this project was the wing of the building where Thomas Kilpper spent 4 month engaged in the demanding physical labour of carving his historical panorama State of Control into the floor of the cafeteria, found in the first upper storey. Opened to the public for the first time as well was the festival hall in the third upper story, where the images were displayed on banners. The entire surface area covered by Thomas Kilpper’s intervention on the two storeys measured 1600 m², to which must be added the 800 m² surface of an immense banner, created by sewing together all of the printed motifs and suspended on the façade of the building on Normannenstrasse at the corner of Ruschestrasse.
Turning Point
The Ministry of State Security (MfS) was founded in 1950 as the ‘shield and sword’ of the SED, the Socialist Unity Party of East Germany. Located on Normannenstrasse in Berlin-Lichtenberg, the agency organized a totalizing surveillance apparatus during the ensuing decades. Under the long-term directorate of Erich Mielke, the daily lives of the entire population of the GDR were kept under detailed and constant observation. Reports were written up, letters opened, telephone conversations monitored, ‘smell tests’ conducted. Altogether, 85,500 official employees and an estimated 180,000 unofficial informers were active on behalf of the Stasi – a huge number given that the total population of East Germany was only 17 million. Conceived as late as the 1980s in the context of Stasi mobilization plans were internal internment camps designed to eliminate ‘hostile and negative forces’ said to be active within the GDR. On 15 January 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the GDR, citizen groups representing the ‘Neues Forum’ stormed the Stasi headquarters and demanded the preservation of files for later examination. On 3 October 1990, the symbolically charged day on which German unification was enacted, the Volkskammer (People’s Chamber) appointed parliamentarian Joachim Gauck as the Federal Republic’s Commissioner of the Stasi archives. Since 1991, the agency has received 6 million applications, whether to gain access to documents, to expose the identities of informers, or to copy files. Of these requests, 2.5 million were submitted by private citizens. These applications were related to reviews of civil employees, inquiries from journalists, and petitions for compensation or pensions. As a consequence of a long-standing legal battle concerning the Stasi files of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the laws concerning the Stasi archives specify that the names of living individuals named in documents may be disclosed publicly only if the affected individuals raise no objections. The ‘history’ of the Stasi as recounted by the mass media is in essence one of individual guilt and innocence, of betrayal and disloyalty, of passion and victimization. Perceived only rarely is the political dimension of state surveillance and control; rarely is this history confronted in ways that go beyond individual histories. According to the scenario followed by the mass media, the roles of perpetrator and victim can be assigned without difficulty. The countless personal tragedies of the victims whose lives were systematically destroyed by the Stasi have in many cases served to support the argument that because of the Stasi, ‘history’ needs to be written, that ‘history’ might have been very different – as in the case of the West Berlin police officer and Stasi employee Karl-Heinz Kurras, who on 2 June 1967 shot a student named Benno Ohnesorg, whose death is generally regarded as the turning point in the student protest movement. Also regarded as a crucial moment in the recent history of German-German politics is the unmasking of Günter Guillaume, an aide to Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt, who resigned in 1974. Appraisals of Brandt’s decision remain controversial, for Brandt’s withdrawal weakened West Germany’s GDR-friendly ‘Ostpolitik’, and the Stasi had in fact inflicted damage on itself – as Markus Wolf, longtime head of the main office of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA: Main Reconnaissance Administration) of the GDR’s foreign intelligence service later conceded. Both of these events have been thematized in Kilpper’s work. Taken together, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification represent simultaneously a highpoint and a turning point in the history of divided Germany. For West Germany, the disappearance of the ideological opponent, of socialism, which had provided orientation for decades, meant a new challenge, namely the total economic and cultural integration of the territories of the former GDR. Today, the actual price paid by the Federal Republic for reunification (and in particular for the withdrawal of the Soviet army) remains unknown: the documents concerning the ‘Two Plus Four Treaty’ signed on 12 September 1990 (and ratified by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR only on 4 March 1991 ), which opened the path toward German reunification, are to remain classified until 2050. The central point of the ‘Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany’, signed by the German Federal Republic and the GDR along with the allied victors, namely the USA, the Soviet Union, France, and Great Britain, terminated responsibility on the part of the four powers for Berlin and for Germany as a whole, and obtained an uncompromised sovereignty for Germany as a nation state. The failure of ‘real existing socialism’ as a historic experiment left behind a substantial problem: the German unity achieved on 3 October 1990 was celebrated as a political success and a victory for ‘history’, yet this event exacerbated a sensitive point with regard to the legitimation of West German politics since the end of World War II. The paradox of the reunification of the two Germanys was the fact that with the fall of the Berlin Wall, German unity had been achieved and, at the same time, its legitimacy forfeited. Reunification introduced no ‘third way’, as demanded by sections of the civil rights movement in the GDR, but instead the GDR’s accession of the constitution of the Federal Republic. Achieved during the initial years when the two German states were merged into one was the total dissolution of all state socialist structures. Especially established in order to handle what was by far the most contentious sociopolitical task, namely the processing of the Stasi legacy, was the so-called Gauck Agency (today the Birthler Agency). Revealed now was the extent to which the GDR’s system of surveillance and punishment had wreaked havoc upon the lives of East Germans. The GDR was subjected to a nationwide examination of its aptitude for democracy. To be sure, the Stasi hysteria characterizing the early years of reunification has abated, but association with the Stasi – whether as an employee or as an informant – still means moral exclusion from democracy and from a successful career. The scar left behind by the Stasi in the public consciousness is reopened every time an informant is exposed, every time a file surfaces, or a new film on the topic opens in Germany’s cinemas. Generations of GDR citizens were affected by this all-encompassing system of surveillance, one that penetrated into intimate and personal realms, for as intergenerational conflict research has shown, an awareness of having suffered injustice was handed down even after the disappearance of the Stasi.
Mosaic
Theodor W. Adorno, that great critic of power, attributed an authoritarian mentality to the German people. The cowardice which prevented them from rebelling against injustice and despotism stemmed, he argued, from an aggressively militaristic spirit, one bent on dominating civil society. ‘Prussian virtues’ such as obedience, self-discipline, and modesty, he claims, have shaped this submissive psychology through the centuries. Anyone who – like the protesters of 1968 – attempts to revolt, is guilty of violating the most sacred taboo of the Germans: that safeguarding unity and consensus. Germany became a unified nation only in 1871. As a consequence of National Socialism and World War II, two German states existed side by side until 1989. While the GDR based its legitimacy on antifascism under the protection of the Soviet Union, the taboo against breaking consensus was the core political value of the Federal Republic from Konrad Adenauer to Helmut Kohl. After reunification, the Stasi was conceptualized as the demon of the GDR, and most West Germans accepted a sweeping verdict on the GDR as an erroneous path cut off from modernity – with the consequence that even the most recent generation is plagued by a persistent split, by a sense of alienation between Germans from East and West respectively. This brief interregnum in German ‘history’, as well as the notion – explored at the start of this essay – of history as a fluid, democratically contested process, illustrates the complexity and the challenges Kilpper set for himself in State of Control. In ways consistent with his understanding of history as a conflictual process, i.e. one directed against positivist accounts, he uses the free resources and the formal language of art rather than the linguistic and conceptual implements of the social sciences and historiography. This allows him freedom in selecting his motifs and arranging his images – which do not at first glance seem to form a coherent whole. From a radically subjective perspective, Kilpper writes the prehistory of ‘history’, rupturing the firmly established notions and images which have solidified for us into historical truths. Kilpper engages in a discourse about images – or at least iconic medial images having great associative powers – which he combines suggestively as though in a mosaic. At times, the results are apparently inappropriate concatenations of images which join perpetrators with victims and traverse various epochs and political systems; Kilpper unsettles us and sensitizes us to neglected details, forgotten relationships, marginal yet nonetheless prototypical figures and events. This method of the wildly associative intercutting of image fragments may seem unscientific, even a violation of the official historical canon. Yet this uninhibited artistic play with cited imagery, which follows the compositional principle of montage, generates salutary effects of alienation and distortion, ones that stimulate the interrogation or even the rupture of firmly established notions, even of our fondest prejudices. Kilpper refers to his work as a ‘proposal to make distinctions’. Confrontation is compulsory: ‘history’ rests on prehistory, and consists of a multiplicity of narratives and pretexts, renews and creates itself out of itself. By narrating and virtuosically staging his imagery, Kilpper transforms a contemporary locale into a ‘historic’ one, into a stage for confrontation, self-empowerment, and self-questioning; the individual’s powers of judgment emerge strengthened from an encounter with this work. By intervening at the site of the former Ministry of State Security, Thomas Kilpper un-demonizes and objectifies the Stasi debate, embedding it in a larger historical continuum of state surveillance and control which transcends any one political system. (And incidentally, by employing a medieval technique, he implicitly critiques the digital ideology of the Information Age.) Kilpper arranges his individual images – detached now from ‘history’ – into ambivalent relationships; his montage evades paradigmatic readings. His core message: there is no master plan of ‘history’, for history is always contested.This massive project neither justifies nor relativizes the crimes of the Stasi, nor does it construct Germany’s ‘history’ as a calamitous continuum leading from 1871 via the Third Reich and the division of the two Germanys all the way to reunification. It is a question of complexity, not cheap provocation. ‘History’ is found in the stories of individual protagonists who have been caught up in the supra-individual structures which shape them, and which they in turn influence. By means of his linoleum cuts, Kilpper assembles his historical figures into a kind of history painting: fragmentary, sharp-edged, and richly associative. But addressing the beholder as well is a no less vital poetological message: the manner in which ‘history’ is narrated constitutes its irreducible core. ‘History’ is montage. Marius Babias is director of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) in Berlin and curator of Thomas Kilpper’s project State of ControlTranslation: Ian Pepper
Marius Babias