by Lena Eder-Schützenhofer
When you picture a group of experts coming together on a Friday night to examine the nature of evil, you probably wouldn’t expect them to discuss a serial killer’s charms, his poetic nature or his sex appeal.
Nonetheless, photo shoots, rules of attraction and poetry were discussed in the panel “EVIL – Can one understand a country by the nature of its crimes?” on June 25th 2010 at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York. Author John Leake, criminologist and police officer Thomas Müller, and sociologist Joe Dixon convened to analyze the evil in human nature from different angles.
Central to the discussion was Austria’s most famous serial killer, Jack Unterweger, whom Müller has investigated and about whom Leake has written a book. The panel attempted to get inside this (lady)killer’s head, dissecting his will for power, his narcissism and wily charms.
On a higher level the discussion revolved around the definition of evil, the motivation to kill and its origins, and what role external forces such as culture, gender, class, and race play in creating a killer.
The 90-minute panel was very lively and provided insight into matters of criminal psychology. The discussion profited from a well-prepared moderator and the inclusion of video clips relating to the night’s theme, such as Peter Lorre’s outstanding performance of a serial killer in “M- Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder” (1931) and Jack Unterweger’s various appearances on TV.
Further information on the panelists’ books is provided here:
The Human Beast by Thomas Müller
http://kalafudra.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/bestie-mensch-the-human-beast-thomas-muller/
Entering Hades by John Leake
http://www.enteringhades.com/
PHOTOS OF THE PANEL DISCUSSION
VIDEOS FROM THE EVENT
edited by Jane McAteer.
1984 Today, Tomorrow.
Surveillance, Privacy and Human Rights, seen from Media and Social Sciences perspectives
Within the framework of the exhibition, NineteenEightyFour, the ACFNY hosted a panel discussion on June 10., 2010, that addressed the themes of surveillance and control. The participants were Michael Freund, senior research professor at Webster University Vienna and editor and writer for the austrian daily Der Standard, Steve Lohr, author as and reporter for the New York Times, Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, and Matthias Karmasin, professor and chair for media and communications at the University of Klagenfurt.
A quarter century after the time in which Orwell’s dystopian novel takes place, they came together to discuss consequences, new concepts, responsibilities and ways of handling the exposure to modern technology.
PHOTOS OF THE PANEL DISCUSSION
The European Book Club, which is hosted alternatingly by The Austrian, Czech, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian and Spanish cultural institutes in New York City, examines well-known, contemporary novels from the respective participating countries.
The Austrian Session on June 15th 2010 discussed the novel “Night Work” by Austrian writer Thomas Glavinic. The book was reviewed by Simona Sivkoff for the ACFNY website.
We are thrilled that two of the Book Club participants decided to share their personal experience of that session with us:
During the last Book Club session at the Austrian Cultural Forum on June 15th, the discussion of "Night Work" by Thomas Glavinic was engaging. Thanks to its moderator, Martin, every participant was given a turn to respond to the book or to say something about it. The attendees related the book to their personal life experiences, to Austria, to the author, to the writing style, to the events in the book, to the characters, and/or to other elements they saw fit.
In reading the book, I have never been able to look upon Jonas as a truly fictional character. The author describes way too many details, or, to be more specific, details about details, which, I think, only an individual going through the experience can achieve with such precision and mastery. Thus, I wonder whether the author is the prototype of the main character. If yes, then why did he decide to kill him? So many participants wished to say more about the book than the limited amount of time permitted.
Finally, I have no intention of omitting the role of the moderator. The session was very interesting. After I described the experience to her, a Book Club acquaintance from a different Book Club responded: "A moderator who is 'good' already makes it worth going. But 'phenomenal'?! Darn for having missed it."
Sincerely,
Kamalia Simon
- - - - - - - - -
I really enjoyed the Book Club session on “Night Work”, and especially the discussion of the sites in Vienna mentioned in the book. It reminded me of my trips to Vienna. The discussion leader was very well prepared, even bringing a map of Vienna with him to pinpoint the corresponding sites in the book. His discussion questions were very thought-provoking and insightful. I could not have gotten more out of this book anywhere else.
Karen Svoboda
On April 15, 2010, Brigitte Doellgast, the head librarian of the Goethe-Institut New York, participated in Julius Deutschbauer's Library of Unread Books at the ACFNY. She recorded her impressions in the Goethe-Institut's "Librarian in Residence" blog:
- Which book have you not read yet?
- How often haven`t you read the book?
- Since when haven`t you read the book?
- What would have become of you if you would have read it?
- How do you compensate for not having read it?
- And if you had read it, what would that mean?
- Can you prove you have not read your unread book yet?
These are only some of the questions that Austrian artist Julius Deutschbauer asked roughly 40 people on April 14 and 15 at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York. For 13 years he has assembled descriptions of unread books, which he has compiled into a Library of Unread Books. During these 13 years, he has conducted over 600 interviews. The unread books can be found in the Arbeiterkammer Wien (the Austrian equivalent of the employment agency), with each book including the name of its non-reader.
The questions that Julius Deutschbauer puts to those he interviews reveal, of course, not only their experience of and assumptions about the books they haven’t read, but also a great deal about the interviewees themselves as well, who are subjected to a seemingly unending list of questions. “Would you be charismatic in your unread book?” “Has reading always done you good?”
Over time, as Julius Deutschbauer told me, a hit list of unread books emerged: the Bible, James Joyce’s "Ulysses", Robert Musil’s "The Man Without Qualities" (revealing that most of the interviews took place in Austria), Proust’s "In Search of Lost Time"; Karl Marx’s "Das Kapital" – these are the favorites among unread books. Or should one say the least favorite, as they haven’t been read?
It’s interesting how Julius Deutschbauer arrives at the questions he asks on unread books. He has taken most of them from Denis Diderot’s "Jacques the Fatalist and His Master", which itself must also be a good candidate for an unread book.
Those questioned also repeatedly mention made-up books. Books that not only are unread, but unwritten. But there are often also very specific titles that have not (yet) been read. In one interview I briefly overheard, someone named as his unread book "Basic Electronics", published by the U.S. Bureau of Naval Personnel. And this person also gave an interesting answer – among others – to the question “How would you prepare a snack for the protagonist or hero of your unread book?” As the navy presumably rarely has fresh ingredients at its disposal, this interviewee responded that he’d probably serve something out of a can.
Brigitte Doellgast's original post can be found here: http://blog.goethe.de/librarian/index.php?archives/284-English.html&serendipity[lang_selected]=en
Photos: courtesy of Julius Deutschbauer
The Histrionic Perversity of Thomas Bernhard:
One Little Goat’s New York premiere of Ritter, Dene, Voss
- by Adam Seelig
“Histrionic perversity”: These two words, which conclude Act II of Ritter, Dene, Voss, not only describe the caustic antics of Thomas Bernhard’s masterpiece, but also capture One Little Goat Theatre Company’s approach to the play through our exploration of what we call charactor.
In portraying two sisters’ attempt at reintegrating their brilliant yet volatile brother into their lives, Bernhard’s play is ostensibly about much, including:
>> The tyranny of genius, with its punishing demands on others. As Ritter warns her sister, Dene, their brother, Voss/Ludwig, is a “philosophical thug” not to be trusted:
We must be on our guard
against him
he’s intent on
ruining us completely
for years
for decades he’s been doing his work of destruction
>> The tyranny of mundanity, with its punishing irritations for the genius:
She brought me the wrong paper
and made it impossible
for me to write down chapter six
everything lost put the kibosh on everything
>> The tenuous balance between family and personal stability:
My sisters are my destroyers
they annihilate me
that’s what I always tell myself
>>The question of Ludwig’s sanity (reminiscent of Hamlet’s uncertain madness), leaving the sisters, and us, to wonder whether Ludwig is consciously manipulating or helplessly plagued by his mental state:
but who’s to say
that his thinking amounts to anything
perhaps what he thinks is all mere nonsense
perhaps he’s just thought nonsense till now
since he really is mad after all
since in fact he calls Steinhof [sanitarium]
his real home
>>Ludwig Wittgenstein and the prodigiously wealthy and cultured Wittgenstein family (portrayed as the “Worringers” in the play), whose houseguests included the likes of Brahms and Mahler:
Beethoven
Brahms
that Schönberg always the same
that boring Webern
What there’s too much of in Beethoven
there’s too little of in Webern
I beg you
spare me
the philharmonic concerts
>>Painting, specifically portraiture, and the vanity of representation (with the inside-joke below being that, in the real Wittgenstein family, no less than Gustav Klimt painted the portrait of Margarethe, one of Ludwig’s sisters):
Ritter
The pictures are badly painted
Voss/Ludwig
Of course the pictures are badly painted
portraits are always badly painted
unless they’re by Goya
but Goya didn’t paint you
Goya never painted in Vienna
never did Goya paint in Vienna […]
Music yes
painting no
>>Wealth as power:
Worringer the millionaire is coming
that’s what they say
then all those white coats rush in
and bow and scrape
and let me feed them [hundred schilling bills]
If I were to say
they should wipe my behind
as I want it done
of course as I want it done
they would fight for the privilege of doing it
>>Obsessions, both physical and mental:
Ludwig is a fanatic about cleanliness
pathological naturally
like our father
but father didn’t carry it to such extremes
and father didn’t end up in Steinhof
Worringer the industrial tycoon
who used to wash his hands
thirty times a day
and nobody knew about it
except us
>>The tragicomic ineptitudes of modern medicine:
there’s no point
in my going to Doctor Frege
the man is a fool
he’s worse even than all the others
he drove our parents
into an early grave too
there are doctors
who only accelerate disease
Frege what a bungler […]
We go to him
because our bladder hurts
and he looks into our ears
we tell him we have a pain in our right knee
he percusses our chest
>> The love/hate relationship some Austrian intellectuals have with their homeland, which earned Thomas Bernhard the dubious distinction of being a Nestbeschmutzer (“one who dirties their own nest,” or, in North American parlance, a shit-disturber):
I wish this country
would disappear one day
or better still
some night all of a sudden
in an earthquake
this odious fatherland
off the face of the earth
Then again I think
we haven’t got a better one
Yet while Ritter, Dene, Voss involves this dizzying array of themes — many of them from the misanthropic arsenal Bernhard built up over his career — its central subject, ultimately, is the art of acting. The two Worringer sisters, after all, are actresses, making Bernhard’s play a meta-play that simultaneously shows and addresses the machinations of theatremaking.
In her biography, Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian, Gitta Honegger argues that Bernhard’s dramatic works cannot be fully appreciated outside of their original Austrian context. This may be true of specific references that would resonate more in Vienna than in New York or Toronto, but to limit Bernhard’s deeply intuitive dramatic oeuvre to one country would seriously deprive the world stage. Of course mentions of the Josefstadt theatre and Steinhoff sanitarium in Ritter, Dene, Voss carry less weight abroad than in Austria, somewhat lost in cultural translation, but Bernhard’s larger theatrics only stand to gain from international interpretation.
In contrast to Beckett, Bernhard is more open to the individual sensibility each artist brings to a production. Whereas Beckett’s stage directions (in his Ghost Trio, for example) will specify the “Largo from Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Trio” including which bars should be played and when, Bernhard will simply indicate “Beethoven string quartet very softly” or “Eroica conducted by Knappertsbusch” — in the latter case Bernhard may have specified the recording, but he has left the rest to the director as a gift. And such interpretive gifts extend, naturally, to the actors. Bernhard understood that actors play themselves as much as the characters they portray, which explains why he wrote and named Ritter, Dene, Voss for the actors of the original, German-language production (Ilse Ritter, Kirsten Dene and Gert Voss, who performed the premiere at the 1986 Salzburg Festival). Actors inevitably bring their own nature to the stage, and the dynamic tension they generate in balancing their self with their role — the challenge they face in becoming a charactor — is one of “histrionic perversity.”
“Histrionics” originally referred to the art of acting. Today it refers to overacting. In Bernhard’s world, it is meaningful in both senses. And “perversity” turns out to be an excellent term for dramatic representation, which perverts sincere emotions in order to influence others. Thus actors histrionically pervert — they play — their very self. The genius-brother of our play may well be mentally unstable, but by playing this instability he can manipulate his sisters and, by extension, the audience watching him perform. In this way, as opposed to knowing how he truly feels (insofar as one can know such a thing), I’m far more concerned as a director with being true to his complexities and contradictions. Walter Benjamin put it well: “Truth is not the disclosure that annihilates the mystery but rather the revelation that does justice to it.” And so with anything that seems to be revealed by the performers in Ritter, Dene, Voss, we will wonder, in the end, whether it’s all just for show. What charactors expose, and how, may well be their mask.
All quotations are from the excellent translation by Kenneth Northcott and Peter Jansen, published in Histrionics (University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Adam Seelig is the author of Every Day in the Morning (slow) (New Star Books 2010) and Talking Masks (BookThug 2009). Seelig is a poet, playwright, stage director, and the founder of One Little Goat Theatre Company in Toronto, which presented Ritter, Dene, Voss in Toronto (English-language world premiere 2006) and Chicago (American premiere 2007). For more on One Little Goat, North America’s only theatre company devoted to contemporary poetic theatre, please visit www.OneLittleGoat.org.
This fall, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, in association with Toronto’s One Little Goat Theatre Company, presents the New York premiere of Ritter, Dene, Voss, with the partnership of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, starring Shannon Perreault, Maev Beaty and Jordan Pettle (September 23 - October 10, 2010). For information and tickets please call 212-475-7710 or visit www.LaMaMa.org.
- Maev Beaty and Shannon Perreault in Ritter, Dene, Voss (© Lauren Stryer)
- Adam Seelig (© Lauren Stryer)
