Tuesday, 28 May 2013, 7 p.m.

Where should we have turned left? Manès Sperber cross-read with Bini Adamczak.

Reading by Bini Adamczak, Dito Behr, Katharina Morawek

Communism “forced legally enforceable historical claims into the world … to no longer have to put up with any incapacitation or bear one single degradation. Since then, even the smallest injustice has become greater and the greatest one hurts that much more.”  Thus writes Bini Adamczak in her book gestern morgen – über die einsamkeit kommunistischer gespenster und die rekonstruktion der zukunft. Gestern morgen reads the history of the Russian revolution against the grain; beginning from Stalinist terror, the question is pursued of how, in the course of events after 1917, from revolt through to a universal emancipation that brought so many into the revolution, nothing remained.  In his novel trilogy Like a Tear in the Ocean, Manès Sperber’s revolutionary figure Herbert Sönnecke, a key protagonist in the work, states:  “One of the survivors is going to have to get to work to find out exactly when this development began.” At this point, Sönnecke, a communist since the Ruhr uprising in 1920, is standing before the court in Moscow as defendant in the show trials. He will be executed the next day.

We will take up this thread at the reading, and in a shared debate, will attempt to pursue the politics of memory that Manès Sperber admonishes and Bini Adamczak refers to in gestern morgen. At the same time, the reading pays homage to Manès Sperber. The writer spent three contradictory, yet decisive years of exile here in Zurich from 1942 to 1945. The base of his major novel trilogy Like a Tear in the Ocean was created here. With the title of the event, “Where should we have turned left?” we do not intend to argue about correct and incorrect revolutionary paths; moreover, we are not developing a political program and are not part of a group with a publicly-articulated or implied avant-garde claim. We certainly do not place ourselves outside of history—we are interested in the social conditions for revolutionary politics in the past, present, and future. 

Program 6 / Friday 17.5.2013, 19:00, Shedhalle 

Violence in the sound of Wagner – A valkyries ride through 98 years of film history (1915-2013)

Video-Lecture by Drehli Robnik

This video-lecture is not about „Wagner in film“ in the sense of biography, film history or musicology, but rather within the framework of a register of „Greatest Hits“: Richard Wagners most noted musical piece that is familiar under the name „Ride of the Valkyries“ continues to ghost around in film and media cultures around the world, issued in various replicas, mutations and counter forms. The lecture will deal with this and others of Wagners „Greatest Hits“ - beats and strikes - , showing the enactment of magnitude aswell as its demontage. These „hits“ will be brought together with film-aestetical and political thought: Following the ideas of Michael Rogin, Miriam Hansen, Joseba Gabilondo, Gilles Deleuze and Jaques Ranciere, the lecture crosses the history of cinema: From the mythological hour of birth of american movies, including the apology of the Ku-Klux-Klan in D. W. Griffiths racist „The Birth of a Nation“, 1915, through the placement of the piece in various re-visions of the US war in Vietnam (My Name Is Nobody, 1973; Apocalypse Now, 1979; Forrest Gump, 1994) up to the ambivalent layout of the Siegfried-story in the process of a hero-in-the-making (Django Unchained, 2013). In between, the repetition of an old Wagner-record in the anti-nazi-resistance drama Valkyrie (2009) – and a supporting character with a toothbrush moustache delivering the line: „One cannot understand National Socialism if one does not understand Wagner.“

Drehli Robnik, film theoretician and historian; PhD at the university of Amsterdam, external lecturer in film studies at universities in Vienna and Brno 1995-2012; film critic and edutainer; FWF-research project „Political Aesthetics of Contemporary European Horror Film“; Publications: „Film ohne Grund. Filmtheorie, Postpolitik und Dissens bei Jacques Rancière“. Vienna, Berlin 2010, „Geschichtsästhetik und Affektpolitik. Stauffenberg und der 20. Juli im Film“. Vienna 2009; Ed. with Amalia Kerekes and Katalin Teller: „Film als Loch in der Wand. Kino und Geschichte bei Siegfried Kracauer“. Vienna, Berlin 2013, Ed. mit Thomas Hübel and Siegfried Mattl: „Das Streit-Bild. Film, Geschichte und Politik bei Jacques Rancière.“ Vienna, Berlin 2010.