The Limits of Noise. 
On Klaus Theweleit's second Book of Kings.

The long awaited second volume of "Buch der Könige" ("The Book of Kings") 
was published in 1994 in two volumes totaling 1,800 pages. Volume 2X, 
"Orpheus am Machtpol" ("Orpheus at the Pole of Power"), discusses what 
happens when writers develop the lust for power. In the introduction, Dr. 
Gottfried Benn along with Ezra Pound, Knut Hamsun, Gertrude Stein, and 
Céline are cited as examples of modernists who, at the critical point, 
could not resist defecting and joined the wrong regimes. Theweleit is not 
interested in the moral aspects of collaboration. He is concerned with 
the question of exactly what happens when great thinkers make the 
"mistake" of siding with power of their own free will. Is this the result 
of a sudden "bedazzlement," a childhood bug, the wrong friends, annoyance 
with righteous stupidity, outsider status, the moments of weakness of a 
misunderstood genius? These, after all, are real problems which afflict 
us all once in a while.

Theweleit devotes most of 2X to the period between 1932 and 1934, during 
which Gottfried Benn chose to side with the National Socialists. In his 
case, neither an incomplete birth nor physical armor is the crucial 
factor in his "turning into a fascist," nor is it a case of his "coming 
out" as one (assuming he was one all along); rather, we see a combination 
of resentment at his own impotence and the desire to gain access to the 
latest medium (in his case, radio). By the end of the 1920s, Benn had 
exhausted his poetic program, which for ten years he had managed to keep 
alive from the poles of the "underdoc" (the subclass's physician), the 
weak Ego, the need to save mothers, and intoxication. Benn is tired of 
his insignificant position and yearns for a bit of promotion, recognition 
and financial security. Unfortunately, he has few friends among the 
writing class, nor is he a member of any writer's organization or 
political party. He finds himself in deep intellectual isolation (not to 
mention personal, after his girlfriend commits suicide in 1930). Thus, 
the usual ideological and sociological explanations for why people become 
fascists apply as little to Benn as the cliché that aestheticism is the 
breeding ground of fascism. This gives Theweleit the chance to apply his 
method of power microphysics to Benn's case.

For 600 pages, Theweleit analyzes Benn's day-to-day activities, thoughts 
and writings during his transition from apolitical poet to failed 
party-political agitator, based on a massive amount of sources and 
documents collected everywhere. Theweleit and Benn make the perfect 
couple: Theweleit knows all about his partner, none of whose tricks and 
devices will distract him from his analyses. Theweleit recognizes the 
taste of Benn's every word, he knows every distinction of that language, 
he does not have to prove anything; all he wants to do is to put himself 
into his subject's position, like a private investigator.

The choice faced by the German intellectuals of 1933 was a choice between 
two mutually exclusive positions. The first one held that "Those who fail 
to speak up now will be silenced forever," the other that "Whoever speaks 
up now will make an eternal fool of himself." The two poles together 
could not build up the necessary tension to carry out a successful 
metamorphosis. Thus, as Theweleit makes stunningly clear, Benn missed out 
again and again in his attempts to become a fascist until finally, to his 
own good fortune, the Nazis turned their backs on him altogether in 1934. 
Had the fascists paid any attention to Benn's radio and newspaper 
speeches, the poet-physician might as easily have ended up one of 
Nazism's early victims as he might have a Dr. Mengele practicing Aryan 
population policies. Theweleit distinguishes between Ovidian and 
non-Ovidian metamorphoses: In the first, the human being changes into a 
plant, animal, stone, or other natural phenomenon; in the second, the 
human being attempts to change into anything at all, from fascist to 
businessman or whatever. "The petty bourgeois is nothing, he is precisely 
becoming; he used to be, he prospers and perishes, he soars, he falls 
down."

By 1933, there were two poles of power available to Benn: his radio 
speeches and his membership of the Prussian Art Academy, Department of 
Poetry. Through the Academy, he was acquainted with the "Family of Mann." 
Although Benn would never equal Thomas Mann, his relationship with 
Heinrich Mann was far more ambivalent. Theweleit successfully 
demonstrates how a letter from Heinrich, written in the turbulent 
transitional period around the takeover, played a crucial role. In 
retrospect, this letter was a potential medium. Heinrich Mann might have 
publicly supported Benn (thus denouncing attacks in the communist press). 
Publication of his letter could have offered a middle way out. But Benn 
had already been publicly accused of fascist sympathies, a charge no one 
was about to revoke. Klaus Mann knew better; he had thought of Benn as a 
leftist from the start (being a people's doctor). In 1931, Benn still had 
two options: He could have swayed to the left or the right. Theweleit 
shows that, at the time, nobody was unimpeachable. In the end, however, 
it was a series of small incidents (unfinished manifestoes, unpublished 
resolutions) that would determine Benn's life for the next 15 years.

Theweleit does not want to apologize for Benn. For a year and a half, 
Benn consciously adhered to fascism, but he need not have. Benn and his 
contemporaries were not the subjects of a history of ideas carrying out a 
19th century program, starting with German Romanticism and ending in the 
gas chambers, in an uninterrupted process of decline. In his resistance 
against the historians of ideas, Theweleit goes so far as to analyze all 
content (be it loyal or defective) as symptomatic of a 
psycho-technological disorder in its author. Thus, when Benn himself took 
to writing a history of ideas (e.g., on the "Spirit and Soul of Future 
Generations"), Theweleit interprets it as a text that deals only with 
Benn himself, because, according to Theweleit, no significant artificial 
reality can be produced on the pole of power. On the contrary, and with 
reference to Brecht, any text that is written on the pole of power is the 
result of a desire to kill other people. Whereas the goal of all of 
Theweleit's writings is to find a way of living/writing that does not 
victimize and which, firmly entrenched on the pole of powerlessness, will 
create a history of its own.

But if it is true that ideas only elucidate their inventor's biography, 
then the thousand pages on Benn, too, must be read as Theweleit's own 
life story. Perhaps a man who did not find enough recognition himself, 
who finds himself in an outsider/underdog position, while he had hoped to 
be a "professional writer"? If this is so, the pole of powerlessness 
would not be Theweleit's own choice, but one of those microphysical 
inevitabilities. Fortunately, in September 1995 he has received the 
Adorno prize in Frankfurt's Paulskirche. Moreover, in early 1995 he has 
published a separate collection of essays entitled "Das Land, das Ausland 
heißt" ("A Foreign Land"), which included analyses of the Berlin Wall as 
a "German national mass symbol," male childbirth, the Gulf War, memory 
films like "Shoah" and "Hotel Terminus," and the outburst of racial 
hatred circa 1992.

History speaks for itself. What 1933 meant to Benn, 1989 meant to 
Theweleit. He hooked up to computers, the Wall came down, the Balkans 
returned, and "I increasingly resented the thought of entering the 
nineties with a book that dealt exclusively with Benn. It needed more 
recent items. Especially postwar pop culture, which has forever shifted 
the paradigms of the art-states, needed to be included in the same book 
that discussed the art-state which Benn was trying to save for himself in 
1933/'34." The result was volume 2Y. Again, it is devoted to the "kings" 
and their male production modes. It begins by elaborating on "Buch der 
Könige" vols. 1 and 2X, by analyzing the biographies of Hamsun and Pound. 
To Theweleit, the present is history, embedded in his own biography. In 
order to understand the late twentieth century, we must return to 
Theweleit's primal scene - the sixties. A decade which, for him, started 
when he read Benn, and culminated in the student movement and, above all, 
the critical consumption of American pop culture, as personified by Elvis 
Presley, Andy Warhol and Jimi Hendrix. It is the same biographical 
interpretation of history found in Greil Marcus, Camilla Paglia, and 
Germany's leading pop theoretician, Diedrich Diedrichsen - the peers 
Theweleit tries to match in his 2Y. This illustrates his proposition that 
texts deal only with their authors.

Volume 2Y, the 834-page "Recording Angels' Mysteries," may be read as a 
successful contribution to the society of the debacle, "the courage to 
fail." Elvis may have been the King, but Theweleit fails to discover 
convincing proof that he was also an Orpheus. His analysis is no more 
than a repetition of the corny Oedipus triangle. It is not Elvis' wives, 
his manager nor the drugs, but his mother who inspired his songs and 
performances. But Theweleit lacks a sufficient grasp of the biographic 
material of his heroes. He suffers from a shortage of evidence. Since 
Elvis' letters (the critical edition?) remain unpublished, all the 
detective can do is review the movies. The other major chapter discusses 
Andy Warhol's monomaniac, planned-productive urges, his sellout to the 
aboveground, and his emptiness and artificiality as the condition of his 
continued productivity.

Theweleit and company are not satisfied with analyzing the sixties in 
terms of mass culture. Rather, it is a matter of having shared a 
mystical, collective moment at some point. The private and the historical 
get tragically intertwined. Sadly enough, no fascinating autobiographies 
(such as Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test") are being brought to 
bear. Theweleit himself is now overcome by the muse and gives in to free 
association. He no longer analyzes intoxication, but succumbs to it 
instead. Finally, he borders on the domain of the occult and of 
numerology with his play on words ("Connect-I-Cut"), his comparison of 
soup manufacturer Campbell with others who share the same surname, and 
his notion of Pittsburgh as the secret heartland of American modernity.

At this point, another of Theweleit's weaknesses becomes obvious: his 
relation to intoxication. In 2Y, his statement that all art results from 
intoxication and noise turns against him. The material he presents is 
intended for further analysis, but the reader is not stimulated to take 
on this task because, by now, arbitrariness prevails. Theweleit's power 
lies in the fact that he knows how to articulate theoretical allegories. 
He manages to shed light on cultural patterns whose validity stretches 
far beyond his own reach or research. But narrative theory is neither 
literature nor poetry, nor is it an essay, for which it lacks the 
necessary density. Theweleit is fortunate enough to have a chance to 
write down his 2,000 pages, abundantly illustrated, at the risk of 
succumbing to corpulence. The data galaxis produced by popular culture 
differs significantly from that of literary culture. The detective finds 
out nothing about musician-actor Presley, or about painter-movie director 
Warhol. No written evidence of the song's sensuality or the serigraph's 
emptiness exists. Whenever Gottfied Benn went into ecstasy, it would 
result in an utterly coherent poem. A large part of Benn's oeuvre 
consists of an ode to form as the acme of intoxication. Benn uses 
intoxication to break the conventional, in order to create new forms in 
uncoded territories. Whenever Theweleit goes into a writer's rapture, his 
pages fill up with parochial German odds and ends. Even Wim Wenders' 
embracing of American culture is treated with Oedipal small-mindedness. 
And all of this despite the fact that Theweleit, provided he does not 
lose his composure, is capable of the most astonishing insights. 
Theweleit, like so many of his contemporaries, is at his best when he 
tries to solve the mystery of fascism - even though that particular 
twelve-year period was never a part of their "personal experience." The 
generation of the sixties is brilliant when it comes to the 
deconstruction of the world before 1945. The manufacture of sixties 
mythology is left to the media industry, while its analysis is not the 
strongest point of those who were there. Apparently, to relive one's own 
past experiences is impossible; it only works with someone else's 
moments.
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