King Theweleit "Let the dead hum a tune if they will. And let the perpetrator shut up please." - Armando According to Klaus Theweleit, the word "media" is too weak. He would prefer to label new technologies in their radical, altering, or programming aspects as "metamorphosers" or "transmutators." To McLuhan's thesis - "The medium is the massage" - Theweleit adds, "Metamorphosis is the product of this massage." Unlike McLuhan, Theweleit is not prepared to think from the medium's point of view, but instead cherishes a subjective position. He is obsessed with developments in the new media workplace: How are media workers to connect their bodies to the machines in order to render their medium productive? Theweleit is less concerned with the question of what reactions media cause in their receivers than with the mystery of how they are made to transmit. To him, the question of media is the question of their application. For him, the broadcast of life does not start over and over again, but is a process of growth. Theweleit observes that producers use the media metamorphosis to go through the same cycle again and again. His proposition is that we use the media as growth factors to support the extension of human experience. Theweleit rereads McLuhan in his own way. Each new medium picks out a single function from the whole of human experience and magnifies it. This amputation opens up an entire field of new perceptions and possible metamorphoses, but at the same time anaesthetizes through sheer force. The media subject becomes so fascinated with the new devices' unlimited potential that it no longer notices the rest of the world. In this "closed system," the users adopt a narcissistic position, mistaking their new medial possibilities for their own identities. The high thus invoked is labeled by Theweleit as the "narc pole," in reference to both narcissism and narcotics. "It seems irrefutable to me that, in terms of technological media that interfere with and alter the body, the path of individual growth/metamorphosis or obstruction always touches on the pole of intoxication/anaesthesia/narcosis." The fact that those who are engaged in the construction of artificial realities constantly skip over the intoxication/drug pole is not a matter of choice or whim. Intoxication is an inevitable byproduct, with a hazardous as well as a happy side. New media can cause an addiction in which the mediatist strives after an endless repetition of the same cycle of intoxication. This is a risk we have to take, Theweleit says, since it is only through media that humanity can grow. To him, growth is a prerequisite if we are to shape our own history instead of endlessly repeating past horrors. From his medial perspective, he does not see growth as a natural condition: "People with a history of their own must, by definition, be people from artificial/artistic realities." In 1988, ten years after his thousand-page "Male Fantasies," Theweleit published volume one of his magnum opus, "Buch der Könige" ("The Book of Kings"), whose four volumes are expected to consist of a total of 3,200 pages. "Male Fantasies" has become synonymous with a farewell to rigid Marxism, in that it explains fascism in terms of the male's incapacity to deal with his own body. The "Buch der Könige" tetralogy will comprise a farewell to an equally rigid belief in literature as an autonomous art form by explaining it in terms of the inability of writers to deal with their own history. With its 1,222 pages and 600 illustrations, "Buch der Könige" constitutes a genre of its own. It is a "second attempt to write unawaited biographies - a whodunit - a case study. More to do with the narrative psychoanalysis of the not-quite born: Narcissus; intoxication; murmurs." The leading character is Orpheus, in "Landsberg, Berlin (West & East), Mantua, Florence, at the polar circle, in America, Prague. In 1945, 1607, 1283, 1901, 1968. With his lyres: text, music, opera, radio, cinema, paintings." Discourse-jockey Theweleit inserts 312 pages on "Historical Complications," a succession of sources of inspiration, incoming mail, encounters, weird books, memories, auto-psychoanalysis, reviews of The Kinks albums and television shows, comic books, soccer heroes and his mother. Visiting Alice Miller in Zürich with his wife and kids, the "good child" is more closely examined. Over lunch, New York psychohistorian Lloyd deMause is questioned on the cycles of the Fantasy Wars. Velikovsky is consulted concerning cosmic catastrophes, and the Zürich writer p.m. regarding the global system of bolo`bolo. There is no end to it. "The detective-historian's task is not to reduce; on the contrary, he must add. There are never enough versions." Theweleit manages to restore to art its social role, without depriving it of its element of autonomy. He brings to bear the most wildly divergent texts, without ever misappropriating any of them. As a result, his book acts as a labyrinth of sources that stands in its own right and cannot be interpreted as a transient product of the Zeitgeist. Unlike in "Male Fantasies," Theweleit now refuses to distill a single conclusive theory from his sources, but instead creates a field of tension between what he terms "poles": "I would exclude as little as possible, and poles are the means to this end. Poles may be added up and connected to one another, after which any short-circuits will occur of their own accord, as well as combinations that amount to a network of poles, in which something may be caught of the currents and waves that are actually en route in reality's net, or which - speaking more precisely, more physically accurate - constitute this net." In short, his is not a dialectical or deductive method: The currents which Theweleit discovered in the male body in his "Male Fantasies" are now retraced in the world, including his own immediate environment, and he consistently applies this experience to his own writing. Stories and concepts emerge, converge, give off sparks, combine, and gain an intensity for the reader which, after the first shock of recognition, amounts to an experience of "real history." Theweleit even took the consequences to a practical level: He typed his book on a writing table designed especially for him which allowed him to run a text dozens of meters in length through his typewriter without interruption (described in detail on p. 1125). Following the men of war in "Male Fantasies", the focus is now on the men of art. They are the kings referred to in the title. Theweleit decodes in detail the actual conditions which enabled such writers as Gottfried Benn, Brecht, Knud Hamsun, Franz Kafka, and Ezra Pound to begin and maintain their artistic production. What he discovers is that all these writers followed a specific pattern, based on the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. After the death of his beloved Eurydice, Orpheus the singer descends to the underworld to demand her return. Moved by his singing, the Hadean gods comply, on the condition that he will refrain from looking back on their way out. Just before their return to the world, however, Orpheus turns around, and Eurydice vanishes forever. This experience transforms Orpheus into the poet to whose lament all of creation bowed down. He refuses intercourse with other women in order to fully devote himself to art. Finally, he is torn to pieces by furious Maenads and cast into the sea, his head to sing on forever. Why did Orpheus look back? Out of overwhelming love, is the traditional answer. But love of what, Theweleit wonders at the beginning of his book, on rereading Gottfried Benn - Orphic poet par excellence. And he starts to recount: In September, 1946, Benn completes his poem, "Orpheus' Tod" ("Death of Orpheus"), which begins with the line "Wie du mich zurückläßt liebste" ("Do not leave me behind, my beloved"). A year before, Benn's wife, Herta von Wedemeyer, had committed suicide in the small town of Neuhaus, where he had sent her to escape the Red Army. He had remained in Berlin as an army medical officer. On hearing of Herta's death, some months after the fact, he immediately takes to writing the Orpheus poem, which he completes after a second visit to her grave, a year later. During the war, Benn had written his most important works in Landsberg: "Roman der Phänotyp" ("Phenotypical Novel"), "Statische Gedichte" ("Static Poems"), and "Ausdruckswelt" ("The World of Expression"). As he wrote to his friend Oelze, he considered these books to lay the foundation for a new German culture. After Herta's death, he fears he will no longer be able to write; with "Orpheus' Tod," however, he resumes production. The question, then: What exactly did Benn exorcise through his writings that allowed him to conquer his stagnation? "Orpheus' Tod" is a classic example of absolute lyricism, a high point in modernist writing; brilliant and impenetrable, even after several times of rereading. Theweleit, too, confesses he is always enchanted by it. Then he begins to read Benn's letters to Oelze and other biographical material, and discovers a secret code in the poem. It appears that Benn interpreted the entire story of Herta as his own experience of the Orphic myth. Herta was the Eurydice whom he had sent into the underworld, so that after her death (i.e., Germany's liberation) he might be resurrected as the new poet of the people. The poem's Maenads were the prostitutes who consulted with Benn to treat their venereal diseases and offered to compensate him in kind. He rejected them out of loyalty to Herta. Meanwhile, however, he wrote homosexually inclined letters to Oelze in which he suggested that the two of them were to give birth to the new culture. It is only when he completed his poem that Benn conquered his shame regarding his wife's death and could thus undergo a new transformation, leaving the whole Orphic question behind him. He not only soon remarried, but began writing a new kind of leisurely poetry as well. Benn was aware at the time that he was going through an Orphic cycle. He had experienced the same thing before with two other women. This is why Theweleit uses him as a starting point for his observations regarding the question how the "production of artificial realities" (in short, art) takes place, and what the exact meaning of love is in a writer's life. Theweleit: "The production of artificial reality is not a matter of a single person; there is always a second or third one involved. Likewise, the artistic offspring is produced - or so it seems - by pairs. Men and women are linked together in an Orphic sense by relationships which may well take on the form of love affairs, but are essentially productive relations. The central productive pair seems to be the combination of two men." (Cf. Plato and Socrates, Freud and Fließ, Benn and Oelze, Brecht and Eisler.) The poet, if he is to continue to make real art, must constantly renew himself. "If he failed to change, he would be at risk of becoming rigid or turning into one of those half-grown monstrosities that invariably border on his production and life: homunculi, Frankensteins, Draculas, and furthermore, journalists, gurus, and assorted spirits whose growth has been stunted, whom he fears to produce or become himself once he loses his grip on the ongoing changes in reality." As we have seen, artists use the Orphic cycle to effect this renewal. Man uses woman to start off his production, then sacrifices her to enter a new productive cycle. By himself, he cannot produce lovely songs; the beauty of his art he extracts from the female body. It is only through her that he can develop a relationship with "Hades," with death, and with "wildness," with nature. This is where he finds his material. In this cycle, the male is the eternal survivor, the one described by Canetti as a prototype of the "ruler." The male always ends up on the "Ü-Pol," the pole of survival, where, out of shame, he pushes the preceding history into a black hole so he may move on. But in so doing, he prevents himself from ever learning from it. He thus has no choice but to repeat the same cycle. To "develop" or "grow" becomes impossible; to enter personal history becomes impossible; the "not-quite-born" need to see to their perpetual rebirth, which they accomplish by slaughtering another. At this point, Theweleit discards his role as detective and turns into mad analyst. He wishes to be neither cop nor judge and to prevent people from saying: "Benn? He's the guy who murdered his wives - Theweleit uncovered it." He is assisted in his attempts by his male partner, Friedrich Kittler, his contemporary student in Freiburg. Women not only work with media - as typists, telephone operators, or secretaries - they are also equated with media (typewriters named Monica). Women may even be used as media themselves. Kittler's surprising discovery was that almost all the writers of the last century fell in love with female typists or dancers. Theweleit takes the same approach. The artists' urge to stay in touch with changes in reality forces them to connect to new technological media, since it is the latter that initiate and program those changes. "Because media enable new registration techniques, they connect us to reality in other ways than the modes of (dis)connection of previous generations." Since women have a special relationship to the latest media, writers who seek to get in touch with those media invariably do so through a love affair with a woman. In the six chapters that follow his exposé of historical troubles, Theweleit traces this pattern back through the ages. Dante introduced vernacular literature as a substitute for Latin, by using Beatrice as the medium for the love rush discovered in the Florentine Summer of Love 1296. In 1607, Monteverdi collapsed polyphonous church music with the opera duet, featuring the first female singers instead of castratos. His opera, interestingly enough, was entitled "l'Orfeo." In a thorough reconstruction, Theweleit demonstrates how Monteverdi was forced by his royal commissioner to alter the romance between man and woman - Orpheus and Eurydice - in favor of the relationship between singer and king. Only art ought to conquer; all human relationships had to fail. The composer's duty extended even to his own life. Theweleit describes this as a general pattern: Every artist who enters into a relationship with power is obliged to see to the failure of his love affairs - which shun power - and to give permanence only to art. Theweleit discusses episodes from our own age in the lives of Brecht, Hamsun, Rilke, and Kafka. The most bitter chapter is reserved for the relationship between the life and work of Brecht. Theweleit examines a period beginning in Moscow, 1941, and ending in Santa Monica, California. Brecht used Margarete Steffin as his typist and lover and then finally left her to die in Moscow. But that he should write a poem about her death, in which she rises from the dead as a coughing constellation of stars so that Brecht may say to or about her what he likes - this is past Theweleit's limit. Brecht was shameless. And "it is only where shame remains that history is created. Shame allows our access to what actually took place between people." In his chapter on Kafka, Theweleit follows in the footsteps of Canetti's "Kafka's Other Trial" and Kittler's "Grammophon Film Typewriter." Kafka's massive correspondence with Felice Bauer connects all the poles charged by Theweleit over the past 1,000 pages. Following a chance encounter, Kafka decided to fall in love with Felice, who was, in fact, employed by Germany's leading manufacturer of dictating machines and had worked as a stenographer for a phonograph record company. Kafka expressed his fascination with the use of media by endlessly proposing to distribute the new recording equipment. At the same time, he used Felice to boost his own art production. He transformed her body into a not yet existing but anticipated or desired device that registers everything. This explains the enormous extent of his "correspondence" as well as his repeated promises of engagement to Felice, all meant to keep his writing going at all costs. But Kafka transformed his own body, too. In order to compete with modern media, he had to turn himself into a registration device as "objective" as the dictating machine. "Orpheus must tear himself apart if his tape is to register anything." Thus, the reader's expectation that Kafka, too, will go through successive Orphic cycles is disappointed. With Kafka, it is Orpheus himself who descends to the underworld, his Eurydice remaining above. Shortly after the last letter, Felice Bauer married and gave birth to two children. Kafka had come to realize what writing was and could be. Finally, he writes to Milena Jesénkà: "The curious, mysterious, perhaps perilous, perhaps liberating comfort of writing: to stand out in a row of assassins; to observe crime." (The same insight that had occurred to Benn.) Here, Theweleit asks his final question: "Is this the only alternative? To sacrifice the others, or to consume oneself, for the production of artificial realities and, most of all, to write? Or is this sacrificial urge a matter of the extent to which the art medium (language, music, painting, cinema) forms an alliance with political power, or is made to do so, or thinks it must do so - in other words, of the demand in autonomous activity to compete with political power?" These questions he will examine in the next volumes. "Buch der Könige" vol. I ends in 1958, with H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who, during psychoanalysis, wrote "End to Torment" about the love of her youth, Ezra Pound. She concluded that she had been Eurydice to Pound's Orpheus. Earlier in her life, she had written a poem about Eurydice which began with the lines: "So you have swept me back, I who could have walked with the live souls above the earth." She and Else Lasker-Schüler, an early love of Benn, are the only women mentioned by Theweleit as writer's lovers who realized what their men were doing to them. He claims that these women were able to write without sacrificing anybody because they stood their ground on the "pole of powerlessness." This enabled them to live their "own history" instead of always having to transform themselves in order to begin anew. Theweleit generalizes the question of guilt regarding the masculine sacrificial urge. Everyone has suffered one or more attempted murders in childhood by the caretakers at whose mercy the child is defenselessly left (he describes how he himself caused a car accident with his pregnant wife sitting in the passenger seat). By accepting this powerlessness, we can avoid always having to end up on the pole of survival again, where we have no choice but to pound others into the ground. From a position of powerlessness, it becomes obvious how impotent everybody else is (what has happened cannot be changed). And that, according to Theweleit, is the beginning of a personal history. Theweleit is not against "using" others. In keeping with the psychoanalyst Winnicott, he maintains that the other can be used - and thus deranged - as a mature "object," as long as this does not lead to the "consumption" of the person in question, as was the case in the relationships between Benn and Herta von Wedemeyer and between Brecht and Steffin. Even the "object" must be allowed to survive. The same does not apply to Orpheus himself. "With any luck, I'll have written the book at the death of Orpheus," Theweleit concludes his neverending scroll. ??