Children of Albion: a moment of national humiliation?
After writing about Horovitz as hustler, I saw a copy of Children of Albion in Oxfam, so I abandoned good taste and bought a copy. I will burn it after doing some analysis. (subtitle is “poetry of the underground in Britain”). First, he has 5 women out of 63 poets. That is definitely an advance on Allott, only seven years before, with 6 women out of 85 poets. About a 1% increase, 7% to 8%. But I don’t think that specific ratio changed much in the Sixties, it was the Seventies and some stiff polemics which changed things. I think the basic lesson is that Horovitz couldn’t tell good poems from bad. I read Albion in about 1973 and I was appalled. I just thought it was complete junk. Today, I notice that he has left out Patton, Henri, and McGough. That is so bizarre. But, he wanted to be Czar of live poetry and the Liverpool crew were far more popular than he was. So that is why he left them out. Horovitz did ‘poetry and jazz’, but Christopher Logue had done it a few years before, with the Chris Kinsey Quartet. Logue was the top man for jazz poetry, song related poetry, poetry about yesterday's news, radicalism, being hip. So... Horovitz left him out too. OK, this wouldn't matter if the quality of the poems selected was good.
I was just sickened by this book in 1973. Sixty pages of Horovitz’s visibly fake, inflated, marketing prose must have put me off. The inside jacket text says “the present anthology is intended to reveal his (i.e. MH's) subsequent ten years’ involvement with the living poetry which he found all around, within and without him.” Pretentious shit! He is radically confused between selecting poetry by other people and producing an art statement in which everything relates to him (and we buy it on that basis). This stress on the self is likely to make culture disappear behind the incessant testimony of egoism. Such wording signals a profound nervousness about objectivity, abstractions, and formal intuition.
Chaloner, four poems. None of them picked up in his Collected. Not his best. Paul Evans, six poems. Four lost. But two are in his first book – OK, they are both really good. I failed to respond in 1973. My fault. John James, two poems. Both in his first book. Both good.
None of the poems has anything blakean about them. That theme is only there because Ginsberg associated Britain with “Albion”. Just a reflection of a fantasy. The poems are much more like polaroids – instant and with no mention of the past. It’s the idea which so much good Sixties poetry uses. Obviously, the polaroids often show boring people leading boring lives. (There is an exception, and it is Horovitz's own poems, mediocre imitations of Ginsberg which have a sediment of Blakeanism due to the transfer of degenerative material from the American source. He had prominently confused the marketing guy with the talent, and the publicity release with the commodity.)
The cover is beautiful. I looked at an anthology called “It’s world that makes the love go round”, (edited Ken Geering, 1968) from Corgi, but from the same era and with the same Pop approach, for comparison. It is much worse than ‘Albion’, and one has to give Horovitz that much. I liked a couple of poems from ‘World’:
stones and other things
live like statues to words
praising the sound of sticks
uncarved
pebbles uncut.
In the beginning
was it the words or the beach?
(John Porter)
and by the same poet, ‘Analogue’:
has ever a clay model
reached pseudopodial about itself
to mould its eyes to face inwards
its ears to be deaf.
He will make the shell
make it solid,
and poke out the filling
as an unnecessary suicide circuit.
Horovitz gets credit for including poems by Harry Guest, not well known at that point. The take-away from the whole schlamassel is that a terrible anthology does not prove that a whole poetic scene is terrible, instead it may just be the product of an editor who can’t tell red from green and has missed everything good and desirable. If you have someone spending six days a week on the schmoozing, the networking, the fake spirituality, the ballyhoo, they haven’t got time to read poetry. Even supposing they wanted to.
“Here at last is the ‘secret’ generation of more or less British poets…” There was no ‘Albion’ era in British poetry. It is just a bad anthology. Lucie-Smith’s book came out a year later and that actually does define an era.
I am interested in finding a division between Pop poetry and the avant garde… but 10 of Horovitz’s sixty-three poets are also in Mottram’s list of the “British Poetry Revival”, five years later. So, a good portion of the avant-garde were writing Pop poetry in the 1960s, apparently. Poems became more stringent, more conceptually evolved, over a few years. The phrase about “living poetry” probably gave Mottram the stimulus for writing about a “poetry revival”. The subtext is, probably, about readings before a live audience, and to freedom from conservative artistic conventions. As an emotional utterance, it can take on many implications.
'Suicide circuit' is presumably what is attached to a "self-destruct button'. This was a real thing, for example the U2 spy plane was supposed to be destroyed by the pilot rather than have its design secrets fall into enemy hands. 'Mission impossible' had tapes which would "self-destruct in 60 seconds" -OK, that was fiction rather than Cold War fact. Wikipedia has a page on the topic, saying e.g. "The landmines have a battery and when the battery dies, the land mine self-destructs." This only applies to the expensive kind!
Friday, 14 February 2025
Wednesday, 5 February 2025
Riddle; ding?
In BF I quote Molly Vogel’s poem:
Silent is my dress when I bow to earth; pluck me
for pleasure and watch me blush; witness the birth of neither
nymph nor satyr. I am barren with seeds; watch me dismantle
my own throat. Who savours me pressed in wind? My vellum
pinion spews life. Shorn, my woolly husk unfurls like a mollusk.
I stand singular with many, mimic of mimicry.
- but could not propose a solution to the riddle. Robert Hampson emailed me.
"Dear Andrew,
I am currently working my way through your Beautiful Feelings. I have a former colleague who is an expert on Anglo-Saxon riddles, and she was very taken by the poem by Molly Vogel, which I sent her.
She noted it as a response to Exeter Book riddle 7 - and suggested the solution might be the Medusa Mushroom? She found this page with some details that seemed suggestive - particularly about the cluster and the blushing:
https://www.wildfooduk.com/mushroom-guide/medusa/ “
Riddle 7 is taken to be about a swan. It contains a line about silence, but also refers to dress which makes a sound (swogan). This is taken to refer to the creaking of feathers when the swan is flying. The word ‘hraegl’ refers to feathers rather than more generally to ’array’. Robert says further:
“The opening lines riff off Riddle 7 (where the solution is 'a swan' - hence, perhaps, 'pinions' later (with 'vellum pinions' as the constraints of the medieval page). The transformation of swan into mushroom would link to the reference to Ovid - and I wonder if transformation is the key to 'Medusa'. (Medusa also features in Ovid's Metamorphoses.)
Do mollusks unfurl? I imagine a snail emerging from its shell - and then I wonder about the 'woolly husk'. If I google 'shorn woolly husks', Google gives me advice about cutting the fur of woolly huskies ... From swan to mushroom, from swan to husky - 'singular with many'.
Mollusks have 'great morphological diversity' - which seems appropriate. Their body is called a 'mantle' ('Watch me dismantle my own throat'). The soft bodies, the gills ... remind me of mushrooms.”
My colleague, Jennifer Neville, has written quite a bit about OE Riddles.”
How a mushroom can be like the Medusa I am unclear.
I am not sure we have hit the jackpot here. Where is the “shorn/ my woolly husk”? But the ”blush” is the red tinge when the Medusa is bruised. The state of being neither nymph nor satyr would refer to an organism neutral in gender, so a mushroom rather than a plant, since plants have gender. I looked up the Medusa and it is one of the Amanita family. I am familiar with Amanita muscaria but that does not seem to fit well. I think the answer may be a book, and the 'vellum pinions" are indeed pages of a manuscript. (Pinions would mean wings rather than bonds.) 'Singular with many' could refer to the pages of a library. Hides have hair on one side which gets shorn off to make vellum for writing, so that could be the "woolly husk". The 'blush' could be rubrication, red-letters. I am not getting a real "ding ding ding feeling" about this solution.
Silent is my dress when I bow to earth; pluck me
for pleasure and watch me blush; witness the birth of neither
nymph nor satyr. I am barren with seeds; watch me dismantle
my own throat. Who savours me pressed in wind? My vellum
pinion spews life. Shorn, my woolly husk unfurls like a mollusk.
I stand singular with many, mimic of mimicry.
- but could not propose a solution to the riddle. Robert Hampson emailed me.
"Dear Andrew,
I am currently working my way through your Beautiful Feelings. I have a former colleague who is an expert on Anglo-Saxon riddles, and she was very taken by the poem by Molly Vogel, which I sent her.
She noted it as a response to Exeter Book riddle 7 - and suggested the solution might be the Medusa Mushroom? She found this page with some details that seemed suggestive - particularly about the cluster and the blushing:
https://www.wildfooduk.com/mushroom-guide/medusa/ “
Riddle 7 is taken to be about a swan. It contains a line about silence, but also refers to dress which makes a sound (swogan). This is taken to refer to the creaking of feathers when the swan is flying. The word ‘hraegl’ refers to feathers rather than more generally to ’array’. Robert says further:
“The opening lines riff off Riddle 7 (where the solution is 'a swan' - hence, perhaps, 'pinions' later (with 'vellum pinions' as the constraints of the medieval page). The transformation of swan into mushroom would link to the reference to Ovid - and I wonder if transformation is the key to 'Medusa'. (Medusa also features in Ovid's Metamorphoses.)
Do mollusks unfurl? I imagine a snail emerging from its shell - and then I wonder about the 'woolly husk'. If I google 'shorn woolly husks', Google gives me advice about cutting the fur of woolly huskies ... From swan to mushroom, from swan to husky - 'singular with many'.
Mollusks have 'great morphological diversity' - which seems appropriate. Their body is called a 'mantle' ('Watch me dismantle my own throat'). The soft bodies, the gills ... remind me of mushrooms.”
My colleague, Jennifer Neville, has written quite a bit about OE Riddles.”
How a mushroom can be like the Medusa I am unclear.
I am not sure we have hit the jackpot here. Where is the “shorn/ my woolly husk”? But the ”blush” is the red tinge when the Medusa is bruised. The state of being neither nymph nor satyr would refer to an organism neutral in gender, so a mushroom rather than a plant, since plants have gender. I looked up the Medusa and it is one of the Amanita family. I am familiar with Amanita muscaria but that does not seem to fit well. I think the answer may be a book, and the 'vellum pinions" are indeed pages of a manuscript. (Pinions would mean wings rather than bonds.) 'Singular with many' could refer to the pages of a library. Hides have hair on one side which gets shorn off to make vellum for writing, so that could be the "woolly husk". The 'blush' could be rubrication, red-letters. I am not getting a real "ding ding ding feeling" about this solution.
Tuesday, 28 January 2025
DDR-Krimis
DDR 2
am reading a book on crime in the DDR. The author, Wolfgang Mittmann, records that he was for 30 years a policemen in the Volkspolizei. He was writing in the 1990s, essentially, and looks back on the period with a bias in favour of objective facts, and an acquired disinterest in Marxist ideas. Once you get rid of the Marxism, the daily life of the DDR citizens becomes intensely interesting – inclining their economic endeavours, and also their crimes. Mittmann was a product of the DDR and speaks the language of its citizens, in the deepest sense. The book has been published under two titles and so I have inadvertently bought two copies under different titles. One is Tatzeit. The cover of the 1995 version ascribes 34 years' service to Mittmann.
He gives us 80 pages about the career of a smuggler named Schützendorf (not his real name). After 1948, a good part of his activity was smuggling eastern industrial goods into the West. This is interesting, because it shows how the East could export into the Federal Republic, at least up to a certain point. This possibility evidently declined, but in the early 1950s the problem was the exchange rate – goods sold in eastern shops for so many east-Marks cost about one-sixth as much as the same goods acquired through regulated cross-border trade, paid for in western marks (D-marks). The smuggling affected the DDR's conventional export business. Schützendorf is recorded, by Mittmann, as smuggling optical goods, office machines, silk, porcelain, and lace. Quite a broad range of products! The question for us is, then, how this advantage was lost, so that by 1989 the DDR had very limited exports, and almost everything collapsed after the 1990 currency reform (and reunification).
Schützendorf became famous partly through a trial involving his career smuggling goods into Spain, and through a 1959 DDR film “Ware nach Katalonien” (goods to Catalonia) which put his adventures on screen (in some form).
Mittmann records how the tradition of “DDR – Krimis (cop stories)” may have been started by someone called Preussler in 1949. The original format was little booklets (Hefte) of 20 pages. The style drew on traditions of Weimar detective stories, but obviously had to have a Marxist tinge in order to get access to paper and to retail outlets inside the DDR. This connects with an interest of mine in European low culture – obviously, the big story is the dominance of American imports, and the limited exportability of “popular” products from one country to another, but the details are quite absorbing. A simplifying theory is that the Communist Bloc did not have popular culture, because it was incompatible with Communist ideals about everyone liking high culture, and because all consumer industries were under-developed and badly funded. That is not the whole story. The Hefte series was called “Geschichten, die das Leben schrieb”. Obviously there was a line of DDR detective novels and TV shows. They are one of the little things people miss about the old DDR.
I don't have information on when the DDR government decided that it would not accept payment for exports in East-marks. Evidently, there was a moment when the idea of “hard currency” was invented. And, evidently, the exchange rate problems (the two marks, still identical up to June 1948, rapidly evolved to have an exchange rate of almost 6 to 1) gravely reduced the purchasing power both of East German citizens, paid in eastern Marks, and of eastern firms, earning revenue in eastern Marks but needing hard currency to buy components and equipment outside their own small country.
I am not sure how Spain came into the operation, but I suppose that Spain had at that time a grave difficulty with foreign exchange, and a deep need for industrial goods not made domestically. Cameras are a relatively precision-made good, normally obtained as imports, in most countries. So there was probably a fat tariff on imported cameras. Put that together with a supply of east German cameras, a car with Swiss plates, and some under-paid customs officials, and you possibly have a business. ‘Ware nach Katalonien’ is on YouTube but only in a version with a spoken Russian translation slapped on top of it. I did watch five minutes, but my Russian is nowhere near up to it. I did see an old lady travelling on a train to the west, a cop searches her handbag, it has a pair of binoculars in it… this was how S smuggled the optical equipment, many people carrying small consignments. That was the 1950s. Later, he retired from crime and lived on Mallorca – an early exponent of the German interest in the Balearics. He made a lot of money out of a car rental business for tourists. (Handbag is sumka, I did get that much.)
Mittmann also writes about a “show trial” of eight businessmen in 1949, the so-called “Conti Affair”. They were the board of a big firm which owned many subsidiaries, mostly in the West, but which had its registered headquarters in Dessau. Faced with sequestration by the Occupying Power, they broke up the firm and transferred control of the western branches, only, to a new holding company. The Communist administration decided to treat this as if it had been the theft of a hundred million marks, as if the directors had been smuggling potatoes across the zonal border. It was presented as theft from the working people of the east, even though all the property transferred was in the western Zones. The accused all got fifteen years in jail. This was in January, 1949, a few months before the transfer of power from the Soviets to a notionally independent local, one-zone, government. The real point of the trial, possibly, was to intimidate the non-communist parties, who were getting the majority of the votes. Brundert, the minister in the regional government who had approved the break-up, was a member of the SPD, the social democratic party. Putting him in the dock, defaming his party as criminals, was part of the SED (communist) Party’s election campaign. Conti was mainly operating gasworks, so sequestering everything would have given the communists a grip on a key part of the West German economy. The three Western Allies would never have allowed this. Nor would they have allowed, during an economic crisis, the shareholders living in their Zones to be deprived of their shares by such an uncompensated sequestration. The directors had not broken any law known to the other Occupying Powers.
The prosecuting lawyer was Hilde Benjamin, sister-in-law of Walter Benjamin, a Stalinist culture critic. Walter’s essay “Linke Melancholie” is an attack on the SPD, as ineffective because they didn’t follow the Moscow Line. It is the same attack that Hilde was making on Walter Brundert, in 1949, and getting him fifteen years in Bautzen. Voters preferred the SPD, and that is why Stalinists had to pretend that they weren't talented and idealistic.
Hilde was a prosecutor in show trials, which, because they have so little to do with jurisprudence or factual testimony, have to be seen as part of literature. They are conspiracy theories staged as thrillers. Benjamin H looked, in photographs, like the villain of some film noir. She looks like a cross between Akim Tamiroff and Edward G Robinson.
I looked up the Potsdam Conference page of Wiki, and one of the provisions in the agreement is "8.The Soviet Government renounces all claims related to reparations on shares in German enterprises, which are sited in the Western Occupied Zones in Germany. That same applies to German foreign assets in all countries, except for the cases indicated below in section 9." ("Die Sowjetregierung verzichtet auf alle Ansprüche bezüglich der Reparationen aus Anteilen an deutschen Unternehmungen, die in den westlichen Besatzungszonen in Deutschland gelegen sind. Das gleiche gilt für deutsche Auslandsguthaben in allen Ländern, mit Ausnahme der weiter unten in § 9 gekennzeichneten Fälle.) - Potsdam agreement.
I have read elsewhere that there was a part of the Potsdam Agreement which gave the Soviet Union 25% of the shares of firms in West Germany. It was part of the agreement on war reparations - compensation for "scorched earth" tactics inside the Soviet Union's territory. My guess is that this idea was discussed, by the Three Powers, and that is why the clause in the actual agreement specifically describes that this claim has been renounced. Otherwise, section 8 has no force. Obscure. However, the conclusion is that the Conti trial was a complete fake. No crime had been committed and the 15-year jail sentences were an act of terror.
He gives us 80 pages about the career of a smuggler named Schützendorf (not his real name). After 1948, a good part of his activity was smuggling eastern industrial goods into the West. This is interesting, because it shows how the East could export into the Federal Republic, at least up to a certain point. This possibility evidently declined, but in the early 1950s the problem was the exchange rate – goods sold in eastern shops for so many east-Marks cost about one-sixth as much as the same goods acquired through regulated cross-border trade, paid for in western marks (D-marks). The smuggling affected the DDR's conventional export business. Schützendorf is recorded, by Mittmann, as smuggling optical goods, office machines, silk, porcelain, and lace. Quite a broad range of products! The question for us is, then, how this advantage was lost, so that by 1989 the DDR had very limited exports, and almost everything collapsed after the 1990 currency reform (and reunification).
Schützendorf became famous partly through a trial involving his career smuggling goods into Spain, and through a 1959 DDR film “Ware nach Katalonien” (goods to Catalonia) which put his adventures on screen (in some form).
Mittmann records how the tradition of “DDR – Krimis (cop stories)” may have been started by someone called Preussler in 1949. The original format was little booklets (Hefte) of 20 pages. The style drew on traditions of Weimar detective stories, but obviously had to have a Marxist tinge in order to get access to paper and to retail outlets inside the DDR. This connects with an interest of mine in European low culture – obviously, the big story is the dominance of American imports, and the limited exportability of “popular” products from one country to another, but the details are quite absorbing. A simplifying theory is that the Communist Bloc did not have popular culture, because it was incompatible with Communist ideals about everyone liking high culture, and because all consumer industries were under-developed and badly funded. That is not the whole story. The Hefte series was called “Geschichten, die das Leben schrieb”. Obviously there was a line of DDR detective novels and TV shows. They are one of the little things people miss about the old DDR.
I don't have information on when the DDR government decided that it would not accept payment for exports in East-marks. Evidently, there was a moment when the idea of “hard currency” was invented. And, evidently, the exchange rate problems (the two marks, still identical up to June 1948, rapidly evolved to have an exchange rate of almost 6 to 1) gravely reduced the purchasing power both of East German citizens, paid in eastern Marks, and of eastern firms, earning revenue in eastern Marks but needing hard currency to buy components and equipment outside their own small country.
I am not sure how Spain came into the operation, but I suppose that Spain had at that time a grave difficulty with foreign exchange, and a deep need for industrial goods not made domestically. Cameras are a relatively precision-made good, normally obtained as imports, in most countries. So there was probably a fat tariff on imported cameras. Put that together with a supply of east German cameras, a car with Swiss plates, and some under-paid customs officials, and you possibly have a business. ‘Ware nach Katalonien’ is on YouTube but only in a version with a spoken Russian translation slapped on top of it. I did watch five minutes, but my Russian is nowhere near up to it. I did see an old lady travelling on a train to the west, a cop searches her handbag, it has a pair of binoculars in it… this was how S smuggled the optical equipment, many people carrying small consignments. That was the 1950s. Later, he retired from crime and lived on Mallorca – an early exponent of the German interest in the Balearics. He made a lot of money out of a car rental business for tourists. (Handbag is sumka, I did get that much.)
Mittmann also writes about a “show trial” of eight businessmen in 1949, the so-called “Conti Affair”. They were the board of a big firm which owned many subsidiaries, mostly in the West, but which had its registered headquarters in Dessau. Faced with sequestration by the Occupying Power, they broke up the firm and transferred control of the western branches, only, to a new holding company. The Communist administration decided to treat this as if it had been the theft of a hundred million marks, as if the directors had been smuggling potatoes across the zonal border. It was presented as theft from the working people of the east, even though all the property transferred was in the western Zones. The accused all got fifteen years in jail. This was in January, 1949, a few months before the transfer of power from the Soviets to a notionally independent local, one-zone, government. The real point of the trial, possibly, was to intimidate the non-communist parties, who were getting the majority of the votes. Brundert, the minister in the regional government who had approved the break-up, was a member of the SPD, the social democratic party. Putting him in the dock, defaming his party as criminals, was part of the SED (communist) Party’s election campaign. Conti was mainly operating gasworks, so sequestering everything would have given the communists a grip on a key part of the West German economy. The three Western Allies would never have allowed this. Nor would they have allowed, during an economic crisis, the shareholders living in their Zones to be deprived of their shares by such an uncompensated sequestration. The directors had not broken any law known to the other Occupying Powers.
The prosecuting lawyer was Hilde Benjamin, sister-in-law of Walter Benjamin, a Stalinist culture critic. Walter’s essay “Linke Melancholie” is an attack on the SPD, as ineffective because they didn’t follow the Moscow Line. It is the same attack that Hilde was making on Walter Brundert, in 1949, and getting him fifteen years in Bautzen. Voters preferred the SPD, and that is why Stalinists had to pretend that they weren't talented and idealistic.
Hilde was a prosecutor in show trials, which, because they have so little to do with jurisprudence or factual testimony, have to be seen as part of literature. They are conspiracy theories staged as thrillers. Benjamin H looked, in photographs, like the villain of some film noir. She looks like a cross between Akim Tamiroff and Edward G Robinson.
I looked up the Potsdam Conference page of Wiki, and one of the provisions in the agreement is "8.The Soviet Government renounces all claims related to reparations on shares in German enterprises, which are sited in the Western Occupied Zones in Germany. That same applies to German foreign assets in all countries, except for the cases indicated below in section 9." ("Die Sowjetregierung verzichtet auf alle Ansprüche bezüglich der Reparationen aus Anteilen an deutschen Unternehmungen, die in den westlichen Besatzungszonen in Deutschland gelegen sind. Das gleiche gilt für deutsche Auslandsguthaben in allen Ländern, mit Ausnahme der weiter unten in § 9 gekennzeichneten Fälle.) - Potsdam agreement.
I have read elsewhere that there was a part of the Potsdam Agreement which gave the Soviet Union 25% of the shares of firms in West Germany. It was part of the agreement on war reparations - compensation for "scorched earth" tactics inside the Soviet Union's territory. My guess is that this idea was discussed, by the Three Powers, and that is why the clause in the actual agreement specifically describes that this claim has been renounced. Otherwise, section 8 has no force. Obscure. However, the conclusion is that the Conti trial was a complete fake. No crime had been committed and the 15-year jail sentences were an act of terror.
Monday, 6 January 2025
Colonisation of the former DDR?
Colonisation of the former DDR?
Kolonialiserung der DDR
I have been struggling with the proposal that the former DDR regions (Land is close to the un-English word Land, so we can refer to the five new Länder as the 5NL) were pressed into a colonial status by the new, expanded, Federal Republic, after 1990. This is the thesis of a 1995 book edited by Vilmar and Dümcke.
The simple reason for this classification is that, out of 8.5 million (steady) jobs in the 5 NL as at 1990, 3.7 million had been cut, lost, got rid of, by 1994. It is not credible that an autonomous country would have accepted a process like this, so the proposed answer is that the territory of the DDR had, once the DDR ceased to exist to protect them, been subject to a government which did not regard them as citizens.
The de-industrialisation was supervised by the Treuhand. When the DDR was abolished, it owned almost the entire economy. Its holdings were, generally, transferred into the hands of the Treuhand (“public trustees”). This was like a government, except that it was not run by elected officials, and that its managers were almost entirely interested in financial results. It originally had about half the economy, so 4 million jobs.
Before the Wall came down, the DDR had had low wage rates and its own currency. This had an exchange rate, on the open market, but to translate east German wages into the new D-Mark would have been to make them rather poor people. The conversion rate, when the east-Mark was got rid of, raised wage levels by a factor of roughly four. (The open market exchange rate between East and West currencies was about 8 to 1, and the rate which the Federal government imposed was two to one.) Employers were obliged, complying with existing and legally binding job contracts, to pay wages at this level. This almost instantly made their products too expensive to sell. This step had nothing to do with market values at all. The logical consequence would have been to close down all the East German producers, since their prices were uncompetitive.
The DDR economy had been running down for ten years or so before 1990. (Some say, twenty years.) The reasons for this gross failure of leadership are complex. It was the outcome of a network of their failings, and very hard to fix. The quality of the plant, in east German factories, was so poor that it was logical, as a next step, to close all the factories down.
West Germany had factories covering the whole spectrum of goods and found it quite easy to expand their output by 20%, to satisfy the new lands. Farming was one of the sectors where this didn’t apply – along with service sectors, like teachers. The logical next step was to close down all the east German factories.
The DDR economy had been the specialist manufacturing region for the artificial Warsaw Pact system. All the other communist-satellite countries bought their goods in large quantities, so that the DDR was an industrial export economy. After 1990, the new countries rejected the Warsaw Pact ordering of things. They wanted to buy on world markets, and in fact were quite resistant to buying East German goods on the old pattern. But also, they were short of hard currency. And also, the new D-mark pricing made the goods deeply unattractive. So, the stable DDR export market vanished. The logical next step was to close down all the factories which had produced for export.
The DDR had no interest for packaging or marketing. In the old world, there was a permanent shortage of almost all consumer goods, so people would buy whatever was available. Its goods were deeply unattractive. (Cameras are the big exception to this.) By 1991, they also had the stigma of the old communist world, something which by now was the most unfashionable thing in the whole world. So, the Trabant car ran quite well, but nobody who had the choice would buy it. The logical step was to close down all the factories which produced consumer goods as clunky as the Trabant, and to replace the product with West German cars, etc., which customers actually wanted to buy.
One of the primary policy goals of the DDR was to avoid unemployment, and the Party could tell works managers exactly what to do. So the managers had no interest in raising productivity by shortening pay-rolls. When the Wall fell, DDR concerns were mostly over-manned to an incredible degree. One effect of this was that nobody really got paid very much. But, once wages floated to something like a West German level, getting rid of most of the staff was a logical step even in the firms which stayed open and made a success of it.
The DDR did not have a financial sector as such. It had five-year plans. None of its factories, or concerns, had organic relationships with a financial institute. West Germany had plenty of banks, and savings, but the mutual trust needed for a long and delicate campaign of travelling, through losses and job cuts, towards a shining quarterly profit, was simply not there. The pipe leading from the accumulated savings of many people, to saving the jobs which they relied on for wages, did not exist. The relationship between concerns and banks was critically weak. The usual remedies were not going to be applied. Local managers couldn't even put a loan application together. “Trust me and I will repay you in five years’ time.” That works better if the borrower and the banker went to school or university together, or have an experience of shared success.
Some people were willing to invest in uncertain eastern German concerns. But that capital supply was finite. You could perhaps have privatised the whole lot over 20 years, but trying to do it over 3 years destroyed the sales price. In a model where you either sold the firms or closed them down, the pace of the plan was fatal.
This is the background for the course which the Treuhand followed. An early evaluation was that, of all the businesses (Betriebe) which they controlled, one third could be privatised quickly, one third needed rehabilitation (“Sanierung”) before being privatised, and one third offered such problems that a buyer was unlikely to be found. The preferred method was management buy out (MBO also in German terminology). However, veterans of a communist economy were not always equipped to thrive in a market economy where you had to make a profit and where low-quality goods were not going to find buyers. A lot of the buy-outs failed within a few years.
It is unusual for a large region to be quite without local specialised products. It is very surprising that the DDR turned out to be like this in 1990. Part of the background is the effective reaction of German industrialists to expropriation by the Soviet occupying regime, in 1945 and for a few years afterwards. We can see that the firm Zeiss of Jena was expropriated, but that there was a Zeiss concern which started up in West Germany, and that this or similar processes removed the status of the optical industry as a specialism of the east, exporting to all other parts of Germany (and other countries, too). My speculation is that, after D-Day, at latest, industrialists faced the idea of a deluge. They were concerned to rescue what could be rescued, ready to re-start in a post-deluge world, with extensive devastation. My guess is that this involved making copies of technical drawings and hiding these documents, in fire-proof stores, in several places. This may be a fantasy, or may explain how families could re-start expropriated concerns out of reach of the Red Army (and, after 1949, the “democratic republic”), and re-create the inherited businesses. Rapidly, after 1945, wage levels in the West rose above those in the East. Because the border was still open, skilled workers could migrate out of the Soviet sector, and in practice the former bosses could re-create entire factories to replace the ones which they no longer owned. This drain of skilled workers was a major factor in the early history of the DDR. The BRD developed, in this way or in some other way, a full-spectrum industrial economy, which had no need of East German products in 1990 (or rather, was in competition with them). So the 5 NL had no market-leader industries in 1990. They were absolutely vulnerable. The firms of the west could just expand production by 20% and satisfy the new demands of the eastern consumers, without developing new sectors. The “new lands” could thus lose their whole manufacturing sector in a short time. This process of 1990-4 had been prepared by neglected processes of 1945-51 (or maybe even earlier – in 1944, perhaps).
Zeiss, of Jena in the east of Germany, began with making lenses, but expanded into cameras when they came along. The Eastern Zeiss looked like a very successful east German concern. But, after 1990 they were subject to West German law, and according to that law they did not own either their patents or their brand name. The Western firm of Zeiss owned those. Zeiss-East was in a difficult position. The Zeiss family (and their bankers) were apparently very successful in starting up new factories, after 1945, in the West. The Western Zeiss took over the “socialised concern” Jena-Zeiss after 1990.
The Dresden camera VEB, Pentacon, (a merger of several firms) had sold a lot of cameras prior to 1990 – my father owned one (a Practica, probably), and many people in Britain owned one. It was a source of great surprise that they didn’t thrive after the end of the DDR. Wiki says “Liquidation began on October 2, 1990 (one day before official reunification), and production ceased on June 30, 1991. By then it had shed nearly three thousand employees to retain a total of 3331 - the next day all but 232 were laid off.” I don’t know why it failed, but I do know that a lot of their cameras had Carl Zeiss (East) lenses. Wiki also says that someone (who?) estimated that Pentacon had 6,000 employees but could have produced the goods with only 1,000. Digital photography was about to take over that sector, and the east was strikingly weak at IT. The Dresden firm was in no position to grow into a digital age. Something similar applied to the print industry. East Germany had impressive printing firms, with a long history. But, in the 1980s and 1990s, digital typesetting and printing was taking over rather rapidly. Firms with powerful IT skills took over the market, and the DDR's lag in anything to do with integrated circuits was a fatal handicap. The sector was doomed to shed large numbers of jobs, and in fact entire firms. But the rapid liquidation of Pentacon is still a puzzle to me.
When the Treuhand itself was wound up, it had a deficit of 275 billion D-marks. (Also stated as 264 billion.) So, even after selling businesses off for many billions, they had spent that much either patching up or closing down the others. They had started off by owning the east German economy, effectively, so that figure is also a count of how much the West spent to refloat the East. To build a solution which would have “rehabilitated” so much that you didn’t shed 3.7 million jobs would have cost a multiple of that. To sum up, the solution chosen was to pay, federally, all the welfare costs for the new unemployed, but not also to pay for re-equipping all those rusting factories. Money always poured from West to East (and still is, given the higher unemployment in the eastern five Lands). In the early 90s, East Germany was a capitalist country without capital. Can we define the East German economy as being worth minus 275 billion D-marks? That seems a bit superficial, but it is hard to escape the implications of that negative. If there was more wealth, where did it go?
The argument for a collusive exploitation of the east is quite weak, but also depends on a belief in certain decisions which would have been secret and deniable if they were actually taken. Proving them out of existence is virtually impossible. Proving them into existence – almost as much. Obviously, Western manufacturers stood to benefit from potential competitors disappearing, but they were not the sources of finance, and the argument that they could prevail on banks, and the federal government itself, to act against their own interests and withhold necessary (and profitable) loans is strained and wholly unproven. The Treuhand most probably aimed to reduce its own deficit, first and foremost. They sold off “legacy” firms to anybody who would put the money up. Of course, buying a loss-making firm is always a specialised decision.
Another question is why nobody foresaw the economic collapse of the 5 NL before it happened. This is a trick question. For example, Beatrix Fautz reports Regine Hildebrandt, the minister for social affairs of the post-Communist but pre-unification government of Lothar de Maiziere, as predicting mass unemployment if the market-shock policies were followed. Some people knew that the local industries were uncompetitive and needed years of subsidy and tariff protection. The date is 21/6/1990. De Maiziere was told that he was going to impoverish the population of the country he was ruling, but proceeded to sign off the abolition of that country (and the end of his responsibility for a disaster). The relationship of his eastern CDU party to the federal CDU looks like a colonial situation of dependence, and fear of independent action.
De Maiziere didn’t really have a mandate, and didn’t really have a party with a relationship of trust with the electorate. The electorate did indeed want re-unification, as fast as possible. Democracy hadn't really started up yet. If we think of a country which has a dictatorship that crushes every other kind of political activity or discussion, the country goes into a deep-freeze. Then something external comes along which wipes out the dictatorship, prevents the “ruling class” nurtured by it from any kind of political activity. They troop into the deep-freeze. At this point you have a country with no government. It is utterly vulnerable. That situation may not last very long. But, for that interval, it was like being a colony – no government of its own. And the damage was done between 1990 and 1994, during the lifetime of the Treuhand. It is embarrassing to think of Hildebrandt, and however many other people who foresaw that the 5 New Lands would de-industrialise in a simplistically market/ competitive regime. There was no pipe by which their knowledge could be connected to a more social economic policy.
One “scare” process which didn’t happen was the compensation of the expropriated. The arrival of the Red Army saw very wide-scale dispossession of the upper class, for example of landed estates, houses, factories, shares. Such people set great store by their possessions, and their stake in the Cold War, which lasted up to 1990 in the end, was to reclaim their rightful possessions from the Bolshevik horde. That applied not only to the 5 New Lands, but also to the areas, such as East Prussia or Silesia, which had once been German but which were Polish after 1945 or 1946. They had high-powered lawyers and detailed inventories. This was a big argument against re-unification. However, even the CDU party didn’t take all this seriously by 1990. The really angry people had died off (I don't mean to be unkind). The seizures didn’t happen, although I believe compensation was paid in certain cases. The legislation was actually worded in terms of compensation to the politically persecuted, and included compensation to the "victims of fascism" (if they could be found). So, if you fled the DDR, or also if you got into politics and were sent to jail, the State took your house. Under the "Vermögensgesetz" you could then claim it back. So, a few thousand people in the New Lands found that their house didn't belong to them. People regained their houses, where still standing, and could charge rent to the existing tenants. But this was a country full of post-war blocks of flats.
Eastern Germany was not an overseas territory, was not ethnically different from the “dominant” country, has a population entitled to vote, and has benefited from large, one-sided, flows of welfare payments from the “dominant” country. None of this applies to genuine colonies, obviously. To sum up, putting the 5 “new Lands” into the category of colony is imprecise, and raises debating issues which are tiring, and finally stop being productive. Putting them in a category of “the former communist countries of eastern Europe trying to develop into market economies” is more natural and more productive.
The feeling of many inhabitants of the 5 NL, three decades later, about the re-unification process, was that they had been relegated to second-class status, and that the federal government was quite happy for them to fail in life. This disaffection is now being expressed by votes for disaffected, anti-liberal, right-wing parties – previously the NPD and now the AfD. The distrust in the Republic and its major parties echoes the initial disillusion with the re-unification process in 1990-94.
I thought earlier that the East German opposition had been very impractical in not foreseeing how their country could transition to a democratic state without everyone losing their job. I thought they were hypnotised by Marxism, and by quasi-Marxist critiques of Marxism. But that is not fair. Really, the groups which wanted a protected economy, with a slower transition to closer ties with West Germany, stood in the (pre-unification) election of 1990 and only got 5% of the vote. The east German voters were seduced by certain ideas of the West, put over by unrefined images and unsubtle media, and gave their trust to the West. The West then sent people to abolish the 3.7 million jobs we mentioned. A more painstaking and successful process was possible, but did not suit the CDU/CSU government and the West German business community, the only two groups who really had a say in those pivotal four years.
Vilmar and Dümcke, eds., Kolonialiserung der DDR Norbert Pötzl, Der Treuhand-Komplex.
Kolonialiserung der DDR
I have been struggling with the proposal that the former DDR regions (Land is close to the un-English word Land, so we can refer to the five new Länder as the 5NL) were pressed into a colonial status by the new, expanded, Federal Republic, after 1990. This is the thesis of a 1995 book edited by Vilmar and Dümcke.
The simple reason for this classification is that, out of 8.5 million (steady) jobs in the 5 NL as at 1990, 3.7 million had been cut, lost, got rid of, by 1994. It is not credible that an autonomous country would have accepted a process like this, so the proposed answer is that the territory of the DDR had, once the DDR ceased to exist to protect them, been subject to a government which did not regard them as citizens.
The de-industrialisation was supervised by the Treuhand. When the DDR was abolished, it owned almost the entire economy. Its holdings were, generally, transferred into the hands of the Treuhand (“public trustees”). This was like a government, except that it was not run by elected officials, and that its managers were almost entirely interested in financial results. It originally had about half the economy, so 4 million jobs.
Before the Wall came down, the DDR had had low wage rates and its own currency. This had an exchange rate, on the open market, but to translate east German wages into the new D-Mark would have been to make them rather poor people. The conversion rate, when the east-Mark was got rid of, raised wage levels by a factor of roughly four. (The open market exchange rate between East and West currencies was about 8 to 1, and the rate which the Federal government imposed was two to one.) Employers were obliged, complying with existing and legally binding job contracts, to pay wages at this level. This almost instantly made their products too expensive to sell. This step had nothing to do with market values at all. The logical consequence would have been to close down all the East German producers, since their prices were uncompetitive.
The DDR economy had been running down for ten years or so before 1990. (Some say, twenty years.) The reasons for this gross failure of leadership are complex. It was the outcome of a network of their failings, and very hard to fix. The quality of the plant, in east German factories, was so poor that it was logical, as a next step, to close all the factories down.
West Germany had factories covering the whole spectrum of goods and found it quite easy to expand their output by 20%, to satisfy the new lands. Farming was one of the sectors where this didn’t apply – along with service sectors, like teachers. The logical next step was to close down all the east German factories.
The DDR economy had been the specialist manufacturing region for the artificial Warsaw Pact system. All the other communist-satellite countries bought their goods in large quantities, so that the DDR was an industrial export economy. After 1990, the new countries rejected the Warsaw Pact ordering of things. They wanted to buy on world markets, and in fact were quite resistant to buying East German goods on the old pattern. But also, they were short of hard currency. And also, the new D-mark pricing made the goods deeply unattractive. So, the stable DDR export market vanished. The logical next step was to close down all the factories which had produced for export.
The DDR had no interest for packaging or marketing. In the old world, there was a permanent shortage of almost all consumer goods, so people would buy whatever was available. Its goods were deeply unattractive. (Cameras are the big exception to this.) By 1991, they also had the stigma of the old communist world, something which by now was the most unfashionable thing in the whole world. So, the Trabant car ran quite well, but nobody who had the choice would buy it. The logical step was to close down all the factories which produced consumer goods as clunky as the Trabant, and to replace the product with West German cars, etc., which customers actually wanted to buy.
One of the primary policy goals of the DDR was to avoid unemployment, and the Party could tell works managers exactly what to do. So the managers had no interest in raising productivity by shortening pay-rolls. When the Wall fell, DDR concerns were mostly over-manned to an incredible degree. One effect of this was that nobody really got paid very much. But, once wages floated to something like a West German level, getting rid of most of the staff was a logical step even in the firms which stayed open and made a success of it.
The DDR did not have a financial sector as such. It had five-year plans. None of its factories, or concerns, had organic relationships with a financial institute. West Germany had plenty of banks, and savings, but the mutual trust needed for a long and delicate campaign of travelling, through losses and job cuts, towards a shining quarterly profit, was simply not there. The pipe leading from the accumulated savings of many people, to saving the jobs which they relied on for wages, did not exist. The relationship between concerns and banks was critically weak. The usual remedies were not going to be applied. Local managers couldn't even put a loan application together. “Trust me and I will repay you in five years’ time.” That works better if the borrower and the banker went to school or university together, or have an experience of shared success.
Some people were willing to invest in uncertain eastern German concerns. But that capital supply was finite. You could perhaps have privatised the whole lot over 20 years, but trying to do it over 3 years destroyed the sales price. In a model where you either sold the firms or closed them down, the pace of the plan was fatal.
This is the background for the course which the Treuhand followed. An early evaluation was that, of all the businesses (Betriebe) which they controlled, one third could be privatised quickly, one third needed rehabilitation (“Sanierung”) before being privatised, and one third offered such problems that a buyer was unlikely to be found. The preferred method was management buy out (MBO also in German terminology). However, veterans of a communist economy were not always equipped to thrive in a market economy where you had to make a profit and where low-quality goods were not going to find buyers. A lot of the buy-outs failed within a few years.
It is unusual for a large region to be quite without local specialised products. It is very surprising that the DDR turned out to be like this in 1990. Part of the background is the effective reaction of German industrialists to expropriation by the Soviet occupying regime, in 1945 and for a few years afterwards. We can see that the firm Zeiss of Jena was expropriated, but that there was a Zeiss concern which started up in West Germany, and that this or similar processes removed the status of the optical industry as a specialism of the east, exporting to all other parts of Germany (and other countries, too). My speculation is that, after D-Day, at latest, industrialists faced the idea of a deluge. They were concerned to rescue what could be rescued, ready to re-start in a post-deluge world, with extensive devastation. My guess is that this involved making copies of technical drawings and hiding these documents, in fire-proof stores, in several places. This may be a fantasy, or may explain how families could re-start expropriated concerns out of reach of the Red Army (and, after 1949, the “democratic republic”), and re-create the inherited businesses. Rapidly, after 1945, wage levels in the West rose above those in the East. Because the border was still open, skilled workers could migrate out of the Soviet sector, and in practice the former bosses could re-create entire factories to replace the ones which they no longer owned. This drain of skilled workers was a major factor in the early history of the DDR. The BRD developed, in this way or in some other way, a full-spectrum industrial economy, which had no need of East German products in 1990 (or rather, was in competition with them). So the 5 NL had no market-leader industries in 1990. They were absolutely vulnerable. The firms of the west could just expand production by 20% and satisfy the new demands of the eastern consumers, without developing new sectors. The “new lands” could thus lose their whole manufacturing sector in a short time. This process of 1990-4 had been prepared by neglected processes of 1945-51 (or maybe even earlier – in 1944, perhaps).
Zeiss, of Jena in the east of Germany, began with making lenses, but expanded into cameras when they came along. The Eastern Zeiss looked like a very successful east German concern. But, after 1990 they were subject to West German law, and according to that law they did not own either their patents or their brand name. The Western firm of Zeiss owned those. Zeiss-East was in a difficult position. The Zeiss family (and their bankers) were apparently very successful in starting up new factories, after 1945, in the West. The Western Zeiss took over the “socialised concern” Jena-Zeiss after 1990.
The Dresden camera VEB, Pentacon, (a merger of several firms) had sold a lot of cameras prior to 1990 – my father owned one (a Practica, probably), and many people in Britain owned one. It was a source of great surprise that they didn’t thrive after the end of the DDR. Wiki says “Liquidation began on October 2, 1990 (one day before official reunification), and production ceased on June 30, 1991. By then it had shed nearly three thousand employees to retain a total of 3331 - the next day all but 232 were laid off.” I don’t know why it failed, but I do know that a lot of their cameras had Carl Zeiss (East) lenses. Wiki also says that someone (who?) estimated that Pentacon had 6,000 employees but could have produced the goods with only 1,000. Digital photography was about to take over that sector, and the east was strikingly weak at IT. The Dresden firm was in no position to grow into a digital age. Something similar applied to the print industry. East Germany had impressive printing firms, with a long history. But, in the 1980s and 1990s, digital typesetting and printing was taking over rather rapidly. Firms with powerful IT skills took over the market, and the DDR's lag in anything to do with integrated circuits was a fatal handicap. The sector was doomed to shed large numbers of jobs, and in fact entire firms. But the rapid liquidation of Pentacon is still a puzzle to me.
When the Treuhand itself was wound up, it had a deficit of 275 billion D-marks. (Also stated as 264 billion.) So, even after selling businesses off for many billions, they had spent that much either patching up or closing down the others. They had started off by owning the east German economy, effectively, so that figure is also a count of how much the West spent to refloat the East. To build a solution which would have “rehabilitated” so much that you didn’t shed 3.7 million jobs would have cost a multiple of that. To sum up, the solution chosen was to pay, federally, all the welfare costs for the new unemployed, but not also to pay for re-equipping all those rusting factories. Money always poured from West to East (and still is, given the higher unemployment in the eastern five Lands). In the early 90s, East Germany was a capitalist country without capital. Can we define the East German economy as being worth minus 275 billion D-marks? That seems a bit superficial, but it is hard to escape the implications of that negative. If there was more wealth, where did it go?
The argument for a collusive exploitation of the east is quite weak, but also depends on a belief in certain decisions which would have been secret and deniable if they were actually taken. Proving them out of existence is virtually impossible. Proving them into existence – almost as much. Obviously, Western manufacturers stood to benefit from potential competitors disappearing, but they were not the sources of finance, and the argument that they could prevail on banks, and the federal government itself, to act against their own interests and withhold necessary (and profitable) loans is strained and wholly unproven. The Treuhand most probably aimed to reduce its own deficit, first and foremost. They sold off “legacy” firms to anybody who would put the money up. Of course, buying a loss-making firm is always a specialised decision.
Another question is why nobody foresaw the economic collapse of the 5 NL before it happened. This is a trick question. For example, Beatrix Fautz reports Regine Hildebrandt, the minister for social affairs of the post-Communist but pre-unification government of Lothar de Maiziere, as predicting mass unemployment if the market-shock policies were followed. Some people knew that the local industries were uncompetitive and needed years of subsidy and tariff protection. The date is 21/6/1990. De Maiziere was told that he was going to impoverish the population of the country he was ruling, but proceeded to sign off the abolition of that country (and the end of his responsibility for a disaster). The relationship of his eastern CDU party to the federal CDU looks like a colonial situation of dependence, and fear of independent action.
De Maiziere didn’t really have a mandate, and didn’t really have a party with a relationship of trust with the electorate. The electorate did indeed want re-unification, as fast as possible. Democracy hadn't really started up yet. If we think of a country which has a dictatorship that crushes every other kind of political activity or discussion, the country goes into a deep-freeze. Then something external comes along which wipes out the dictatorship, prevents the “ruling class” nurtured by it from any kind of political activity. They troop into the deep-freeze. At this point you have a country with no government. It is utterly vulnerable. That situation may not last very long. But, for that interval, it was like being a colony – no government of its own. And the damage was done between 1990 and 1994, during the lifetime of the Treuhand. It is embarrassing to think of Hildebrandt, and however many other people who foresaw that the 5 New Lands would de-industrialise in a simplistically market/ competitive regime. There was no pipe by which their knowledge could be connected to a more social economic policy.
One “scare” process which didn’t happen was the compensation of the expropriated. The arrival of the Red Army saw very wide-scale dispossession of the upper class, for example of landed estates, houses, factories, shares. Such people set great store by their possessions, and their stake in the Cold War, which lasted up to 1990 in the end, was to reclaim their rightful possessions from the Bolshevik horde. That applied not only to the 5 New Lands, but also to the areas, such as East Prussia or Silesia, which had once been German but which were Polish after 1945 or 1946. They had high-powered lawyers and detailed inventories. This was a big argument against re-unification. However, even the CDU party didn’t take all this seriously by 1990. The really angry people had died off (I don't mean to be unkind). The seizures didn’t happen, although I believe compensation was paid in certain cases. The legislation was actually worded in terms of compensation to the politically persecuted, and included compensation to the "victims of fascism" (if they could be found). So, if you fled the DDR, or also if you got into politics and were sent to jail, the State took your house. Under the "Vermögensgesetz" you could then claim it back. So, a few thousand people in the New Lands found that their house didn't belong to them. People regained their houses, where still standing, and could charge rent to the existing tenants. But this was a country full of post-war blocks of flats.
Eastern Germany was not an overseas territory, was not ethnically different from the “dominant” country, has a population entitled to vote, and has benefited from large, one-sided, flows of welfare payments from the “dominant” country. None of this applies to genuine colonies, obviously. To sum up, putting the 5 “new Lands” into the category of colony is imprecise, and raises debating issues which are tiring, and finally stop being productive. Putting them in a category of “the former communist countries of eastern Europe trying to develop into market economies” is more natural and more productive.
The feeling of many inhabitants of the 5 NL, three decades later, about the re-unification process, was that they had been relegated to second-class status, and that the federal government was quite happy for them to fail in life. This disaffection is now being expressed by votes for disaffected, anti-liberal, right-wing parties – previously the NPD and now the AfD. The distrust in the Republic and its major parties echoes the initial disillusion with the re-unification process in 1990-94.
I thought earlier that the East German opposition had been very impractical in not foreseeing how their country could transition to a democratic state without everyone losing their job. I thought they were hypnotised by Marxism, and by quasi-Marxist critiques of Marxism. But that is not fair. Really, the groups which wanted a protected economy, with a slower transition to closer ties with West Germany, stood in the (pre-unification) election of 1990 and only got 5% of the vote. The east German voters were seduced by certain ideas of the West, put over by unrefined images and unsubtle media, and gave their trust to the West. The West then sent people to abolish the 3.7 million jobs we mentioned. A more painstaking and successful process was possible, but did not suit the CDU/CSU government and the West German business community, the only two groups who really had a say in those pivotal four years.
Vilmar and Dümcke, eds., Kolonialiserung der DDR Norbert Pötzl, Der Treuhand-Komplex.
Monday, 16 December 2024
Goodeness
Chris Goode d.2021
Kevin Nolan has just made me aware of some of the material available on-line about the history of Chris Goode. The story seems to be that Goode had been dodging stories of sexual abuse of young men in his theatre companies for a number of years before being forced to close both of them. His husband then found illegal (category A) explicit images on Goode’s hard disc, and went to the police about them. Goode was arrested, questioned, released again. He then killed himself (in June 2021). We don’t know what the police knew, or what they would have done.
"He was one of the good guys, wasn’t he? Maddy Costa thought so when she was invited by Goode to join Chris Goode and Company to write about the work as critic-in-residence in 2011. A fan of Goode’s work, she saw it as “a very romantic proposition” and at the time didn’t see it as being part of the myth-making that Goode was enacting around himself.
Over the past four years she has had to question everything she thought she knew about Goode. “It’s been so shattering, because I really believed that the work that Chris was doing was about finding different ways to live and finding alternatives to hierarchy, patriarchy and capitalism, and to find that all to be a front for abuse and paedophilia has properly broken me.”"
I am now going to quote material written by Xavier de Sousa and posted on Maddy Costa’s website, in the part given over to a dossier on Goode – and not about his creative side, I fear. The whole blog is subtitled “thoughts on theatre, writing, music, feminism, dancing, dreaming & mothering, by maddy costa”. There is more to life than Chris Goode, fortunately. Both de Sousa and Costa worked for one of Goode's theatre companies.
“”Manipulation of narratives is exactly where I place a big focus of his abuse. He used us, our stories, and our collective history, as protective shields for himself to normalise his abuse. When I say ‘us’ I mean everyone who worked with him but specifically queer and trans people and our shared histories.
Across his work, he often narrated and wrote about young men, inter-generational relationships, queer utopias. Often his work revolved around entering a new, exciting if obscured world. Weaklings had the form and narratives one might find when lost in an internet-hole at 4am in search for something one hasn't quite figured out yet. Ponyboy Curtis was about young men’s explorations of their own identities and sexuality. Men in the Cities explored fantasies of intergenerational lust and rape among other things. This was all merged within a broad artistic practice that existed in a grey area of definition, intentionally. The constant greyness of it all, allowed for him to play with nuances of trauma and fill them with obscurity and abuses that obfuscated our understanding that those narratives were actually an attempt to normalise the concept of paedophilia. The violence in those stories was the point, the normalisation of abuse was the point.
There are some incredibly dangerous precedents set by his actions. First, the ‘experimentalism’ of his writing and directing styles. He used experimentation as departure point but also as cloaking shield. Reflecting back now, I can see that the nuances he so revered in his writing, was in the language used, not in the actual content. The content was abuse, as was the goal, and they were actually in plain sight, framed as ‘difficult’ and ‘dark’ aspects of the human condition. The language was intricate and nuanced to obfuscate our perception of the abuses that happen in these stories, and their normalisation.
Secondly, many contexts have told me that they won’t engage or commission “this type of work any more” (i.e. queer work). Experimental theatre and performance art are already considered ‘too challenging’ in the UK theatre landscape, often too risky to programme/support.””
This much excerpted from de Sousa’s text, leaving out much else of great weight. This is only relevant to the poetry world because of the role which Goode played in that world. To my knowledge, that included making a theatre available for the avant-garde series SubVoicive on Monday evenings, when his theatre troupe had a night off; the anthology he edited, Better than language (i.e., love is better than language); and his poetry pamphlet, Boomer Console. It follows, obviously, that he liked modern poetry – he was one of us. I think concerns about his career as a serial abuser of young men tend to distract from his more obvious role as the embodiment of smugness. This is the aspect I prefer to dwell on. He couldn’t enter a room without feeling that he was making a stand, poignant and yet robust, against patriarchy, capitalism, convention, and heteronormativity. I found this hard to take. In the aurasphere, his aura reminded me profoundly of David Cameron. They just gave off the same vibe of fatherly and immovable smugness.
In 2000, I was asked to review a batch of pamphlets, of which Boomer console was one. I didn’t like it. Terrible Work published my review. I got echoes back telling me that the younger generation (of pamphleteers) were outraged and didn’t think I had any right to an opinion. Goode was an Important Person and knew other Important People. I was supposed to consecrate, not record my reactions. My feeling about that batch was that the poets had given up logic, so the bond which connects primary experiences to inner states of mind. They wanted states of mind to be autonomous from experience, and an accelerated, incoherent, excited, and confused manner of utterance was how they imposed that. They could be insulated from experience, so from a world run by people who didn’t care about them, by randomness. This loosed state was able to take the place of lyric utterance -at least for that group and their followers. I found that the inherited poetry had allowed the reader to share states of mind by being told what the series of experiences was, which had led up to them. That was the basis for sharing. The new random style didn’t arouse any particular state of mind in me. It didn’t work as poetry. It was like a building falling over on the horizon. What I wrote about Boomer Console was “What is the opposite of blank logic? darkened logic? chromatic logic? gloss logic? logic matte? logic latte?Chris Goode's pamphlet is called Boomer Console. If you are going to cut very rapidly it is useful to develop a way of making the images arresting and recognizable in a short space. If the individual snatches are blurred and uninterpretable, the overall effect is like a camera bouncing down a flight of steps one by one. From handheld authenticity to what? The impression made by this pamphlet is one of indifference and frustration. The “feel” of the eye constantly being distracted by a new thing from the old thing which it didn’t really engage with may be “contemporary” in that young people are having this experience while watching TV, flipping through racks of CDs, wandering around shopping malls, patrolling university libraries, etc. However, we suspect that one part of the future is being interested. The text gives off messages like “skittish” “fear of commitment” or “not taking things in”. The Stooges, of course, were able to take states of boredom and indifference and make you emotionally identify with them. But they knew how to fill the subliminal channels. Not use them as garbage chutes.”
When Chicago Review did an issue on Young British Poets, they took on four poets of whom Chris Goode was one. I suppose this is what tends to happen in these international showcases, that they get lumbered with people who are Impressive but Bad. Was that around 2005?
I can now see that severing links of logic could also be the basis for rejecting morality and persuading yourself that your actions have no effect on others, and so you aren’t accountable. I suppose that should have been obvious.
I have taken the ultimate step of using my catalogue and locating those books on the shelf. Console is still no good. However, his anthology, Better Than Language, is important. I read it as part of a batch of nine anthologies of New Poets, which muffled its impact on me somewhat. I collected 200 names from those books; I was overloaded. In a good way. Someone corrupt can enjoy, and understand, modern art, in the same way that a bank robber eats exactly the same doughnuts that everyone else eats. Ten years later than Console, it is better thought out, the irrationality more integrated and contoured. Goode had got a long way into ‘alternative’ poetry as it stood in 2011. I think some of these 13 poets have actually given up (hard to check that!), anyway this is a document and still stands. In the introduction, he says “[…] on the whole – and this is something we see perhaps for the first time in thirty years (with a handful of glorious exceptions in the interim) – these high-end poets are nonetheless genuinely energised by pop culture, by the pop artefact and pop syntagmata and the vivaciousness of pop rationales (the pop of population more than the pop of fizzy-pop): as opposed to squeezing a lonely titillation out of a clumsy excited thrumming on pop’s sticky-out bits, gloved in ticklish ironies and throwing the dreamless shapes of sarcastic dancing.” This is vivid more than realistic, but it’s pretty good. This group were actually ten years younger than the poets I reviewed for T Work, and arguably a new generation.
The use of the theatre in Euston (I think the venue was called Tom Tiddler’s Ground, or maybe it was next door to a pub called that) was crucial for the fragile London alternative scene. If you don’t have a venue, you don’t have an event, or an events series. It was probably the Camden People's Theatre. I think that was around 2001 to 2004.
It's good that Goode's career as predator and abuser has been so well documented. I am posting this to acknowledge the truth, which several people gave up their careers in theatre to make public and bring to an end. But I don’t think this sort of pattern exists inside the poetry world. There is no power imbalance, because nobody is making any money and the prizes are so abstract. There is no role for a casting couch in the poetry world. It is a remarkably flat social structure – it is very hard to acquire power over others, and to some extent it is equally hard to satisfy ambition in it. The satisfactions are, shall we say, abstract, aesthetic, invisible. It's not quite "self-importance is the only importance there is". It really is flat and fair.
Fairness - Xavier de Sousa and Maddy Costa are properly the central and heroic figures of this story. That is a fair account of it. I have not written much about the Goode story, because accounts, including first-person ones, are already available on-line.
Kevin Nolan has just made me aware of some of the material available on-line about the history of Chris Goode. The story seems to be that Goode had been dodging stories of sexual abuse of young men in his theatre companies for a number of years before being forced to close both of them. His husband then found illegal (category A) explicit images on Goode’s hard disc, and went to the police about them. Goode was arrested, questioned, released again. He then killed himself (in June 2021). We don’t know what the police knew, or what they would have done.
"He was one of the good guys, wasn’t he? Maddy Costa thought so when she was invited by Goode to join Chris Goode and Company to write about the work as critic-in-residence in 2011. A fan of Goode’s work, she saw it as “a very romantic proposition” and at the time didn’t see it as being part of the myth-making that Goode was enacting around himself.
Over the past four years she has had to question everything she thought she knew about Goode. “It’s been so shattering, because I really believed that the work that Chris was doing was about finding different ways to live and finding alternatives to hierarchy, patriarchy and capitalism, and to find that all to be a front for abuse and paedophilia has properly broken me.”"
I am now going to quote material written by Xavier de Sousa and posted on Maddy Costa’s website, in the part given over to a dossier on Goode – and not about his creative side, I fear. The whole blog is subtitled “thoughts on theatre, writing, music, feminism, dancing, dreaming & mothering, by maddy costa”. There is more to life than Chris Goode, fortunately. Both de Sousa and Costa worked for one of Goode's theatre companies.
“”Manipulation of narratives is exactly where I place a big focus of his abuse. He used us, our stories, and our collective history, as protective shields for himself to normalise his abuse. When I say ‘us’ I mean everyone who worked with him but specifically queer and trans people and our shared histories.
Across his work, he often narrated and wrote about young men, inter-generational relationships, queer utopias. Often his work revolved around entering a new, exciting if obscured world. Weaklings had the form and narratives one might find when lost in an internet-hole at 4am in search for something one hasn't quite figured out yet. Ponyboy Curtis was about young men’s explorations of their own identities and sexuality. Men in the Cities explored fantasies of intergenerational lust and rape among other things. This was all merged within a broad artistic practice that existed in a grey area of definition, intentionally. The constant greyness of it all, allowed for him to play with nuances of trauma and fill them with obscurity and abuses that obfuscated our understanding that those narratives were actually an attempt to normalise the concept of paedophilia. The violence in those stories was the point, the normalisation of abuse was the point.
There are some incredibly dangerous precedents set by his actions. First, the ‘experimentalism’ of his writing and directing styles. He used experimentation as departure point but also as cloaking shield. Reflecting back now, I can see that the nuances he so revered in his writing, was in the language used, not in the actual content. The content was abuse, as was the goal, and they were actually in plain sight, framed as ‘difficult’ and ‘dark’ aspects of the human condition. The language was intricate and nuanced to obfuscate our perception of the abuses that happen in these stories, and their normalisation.
Secondly, many contexts have told me that they won’t engage or commission “this type of work any more” (i.e. queer work). Experimental theatre and performance art are already considered ‘too challenging’ in the UK theatre landscape, often too risky to programme/support.””
This much excerpted from de Sousa’s text, leaving out much else of great weight. This is only relevant to the poetry world because of the role which Goode played in that world. To my knowledge, that included making a theatre available for the avant-garde series SubVoicive on Monday evenings, when his theatre troupe had a night off; the anthology he edited, Better than language (i.e., love is better than language); and his poetry pamphlet, Boomer Console. It follows, obviously, that he liked modern poetry – he was one of us. I think concerns about his career as a serial abuser of young men tend to distract from his more obvious role as the embodiment of smugness. This is the aspect I prefer to dwell on. He couldn’t enter a room without feeling that he was making a stand, poignant and yet robust, against patriarchy, capitalism, convention, and heteronormativity. I found this hard to take. In the aurasphere, his aura reminded me profoundly of David Cameron. They just gave off the same vibe of fatherly and immovable smugness.
In 2000, I was asked to review a batch of pamphlets, of which Boomer console was one. I didn’t like it. Terrible Work published my review. I got echoes back telling me that the younger generation (of pamphleteers) were outraged and didn’t think I had any right to an opinion. Goode was an Important Person and knew other Important People. I was supposed to consecrate, not record my reactions. My feeling about that batch was that the poets had given up logic, so the bond which connects primary experiences to inner states of mind. They wanted states of mind to be autonomous from experience, and an accelerated, incoherent, excited, and confused manner of utterance was how they imposed that. They could be insulated from experience, so from a world run by people who didn’t care about them, by randomness. This loosed state was able to take the place of lyric utterance -at least for that group and their followers. I found that the inherited poetry had allowed the reader to share states of mind by being told what the series of experiences was, which had led up to them. That was the basis for sharing. The new random style didn’t arouse any particular state of mind in me. It didn’t work as poetry. It was like a building falling over on the horizon. What I wrote about Boomer Console was “What is the opposite of blank logic? darkened logic? chromatic logic? gloss logic? logic matte? logic latte?Chris Goode's pamphlet is called Boomer Console. If you are going to cut very rapidly it is useful to develop a way of making the images arresting and recognizable in a short space. If the individual snatches are blurred and uninterpretable, the overall effect is like a camera bouncing down a flight of steps one by one. From handheld authenticity to what? The impression made by this pamphlet is one of indifference and frustration. The “feel” of the eye constantly being distracted by a new thing from the old thing which it didn’t really engage with may be “contemporary” in that young people are having this experience while watching TV, flipping through racks of CDs, wandering around shopping malls, patrolling university libraries, etc. However, we suspect that one part of the future is being interested. The text gives off messages like “skittish” “fear of commitment” or “not taking things in”. The Stooges, of course, were able to take states of boredom and indifference and make you emotionally identify with them. But they knew how to fill the subliminal channels. Not use them as garbage chutes.”
When Chicago Review did an issue on Young British Poets, they took on four poets of whom Chris Goode was one. I suppose this is what tends to happen in these international showcases, that they get lumbered with people who are Impressive but Bad. Was that around 2005?
I can now see that severing links of logic could also be the basis for rejecting morality and persuading yourself that your actions have no effect on others, and so you aren’t accountable. I suppose that should have been obvious.
I have taken the ultimate step of using my catalogue and locating those books on the shelf. Console is still no good. However, his anthology, Better Than Language, is important. I read it as part of a batch of nine anthologies of New Poets, which muffled its impact on me somewhat. I collected 200 names from those books; I was overloaded. In a good way. Someone corrupt can enjoy, and understand, modern art, in the same way that a bank robber eats exactly the same doughnuts that everyone else eats. Ten years later than Console, it is better thought out, the irrationality more integrated and contoured. Goode had got a long way into ‘alternative’ poetry as it stood in 2011. I think some of these 13 poets have actually given up (hard to check that!), anyway this is a document and still stands. In the introduction, he says “[…] on the whole – and this is something we see perhaps for the first time in thirty years (with a handful of glorious exceptions in the interim) – these high-end poets are nonetheless genuinely energised by pop culture, by the pop artefact and pop syntagmata and the vivaciousness of pop rationales (the pop of population more than the pop of fizzy-pop): as opposed to squeezing a lonely titillation out of a clumsy excited thrumming on pop’s sticky-out bits, gloved in ticklish ironies and throwing the dreamless shapes of sarcastic dancing.” This is vivid more than realistic, but it’s pretty good. This group were actually ten years younger than the poets I reviewed for T Work, and arguably a new generation.
The use of the theatre in Euston (I think the venue was called Tom Tiddler’s Ground, or maybe it was next door to a pub called that) was crucial for the fragile London alternative scene. If you don’t have a venue, you don’t have an event, or an events series. It was probably the Camden People's Theatre. I think that was around 2001 to 2004.
It's good that Goode's career as predator and abuser has been so well documented. I am posting this to acknowledge the truth, which several people gave up their careers in theatre to make public and bring to an end. But I don’t think this sort of pattern exists inside the poetry world. There is no power imbalance, because nobody is making any money and the prizes are so abstract. There is no role for a casting couch in the poetry world. It is a remarkably flat social structure – it is very hard to acquire power over others, and to some extent it is equally hard to satisfy ambition in it. The satisfactions are, shall we say, abstract, aesthetic, invisible. It's not quite "self-importance is the only importance there is". It really is flat and fair.
Fairness - Xavier de Sousa and Maddy Costa are properly the central and heroic figures of this story. That is a fair account of it. I have not written much about the Goode story, because accounts, including first-person ones, are already available on-line.
Thursday, 12 December 2024
Carl Schmitt
Schmitt
Am in a hotel room in Cambridge reading a copy of Carl Schmitt’s Glossarium which I have just borrowed from the university library. Schmitt was a lawyer dealing with the law of the State who spent the period of the Third Reich saying that Might was Right, and that since Power was the source of law then anyone who had power could not act illegally. This coincided with the policy of the government at that time. After May 1945, he spent two years in detention, as a potential criminal. Since he had been a vocal supporter of a previous chancellor, and an earlier ‘state of emergency’, he was marked as an enemy of Hitler– although obviously a Fascist. This meant that he was never employed by the Reich. He was an unemployed whore. He made the offer but the expensive cars didn’t stop to pick him up. So, on examination, he had not taken part in any war crimes, and was released. But he lost his job as professor of law – having failed the practical. You can’t teach students that everything the State does is lawful. So in the period 1947-58 (when this book was composed) he had a lot of time on his hands.
‘Glosse’ means an explanation of part of a law but also a satirical and witty interpretation of something a politician has said, or some event in the news. It is, then, an act of resistance. So a glossarium is a collection of glosses. It has elements of a diary but is mainly bilious grumbles about items in the news. He disapproves of Europe without Hitler and Pétain. It all seems wrong to him. He quotes early-modern Spanish jurists in Latin, but is also scurrilous and paranoid.
The new Right in Germany is furious about the need to feel guilty about the national past. They want to reach a state in which Nazism was a perfectly normal part of history, just another set of neutral facts and of glorious victories. It is attractive for them to go to Schmitt, who never went through the stage of feeling guilty about any of that.
He grumbles on about his loss of power every few days. He never mentions the fact that the Reich had taken away the liberty and lives of so many people. He is indifferent to that. He is a lawyer who has chosen a client, and nothing the client does can be bad in his eyes. He does chide the Reich for exaggerated racial policies– but only while making anti-Semitic remarks.
The Allies won the war. If might is right, then what they did to ex-Nazis (not so ex in some cases) was just by definition. Schmitt never even mentions this. He only believes in power – and his side lost. Establishing a moral basis for criticising Allied occupation policies is a task he never even starts on. He lacks self-awareness. In this condition, a diary cannot shed very much light on anything.
This is not a work of literature. It does describe personal feelings throughout, it is emotional, but it has a minimum of psychological content. He just wants to argue all the time. And it all feeds back into the central complex, whereby the wrong side won the war and he deserves to be a professor of law again. So democracy in America must be wrong, because it led to America winning the war, and so the wrong side being defeated.
People who respect pretention, as a symbol of social power and links to the powerful, look up to Schmitt. For me, his erudition is misplaced. For example, when he refers to himself as peripsema. I had to look this up, it means “offscouring, anything wiped away”. Like the French word décapage. So perhaps something dirty that is excreted through the skin. He had been purged by the university, scoured off. But he adds nothing by using a Greek word, in Greek characters, when several German words would have done just as well. He is signalling that his thoughts are significant. It is not a work of learning, but that does not make it literature. Schmitt is super erudite, but if you are wrong about everything then it doesn’t make any difference that you can quote some opinion in Latin.
Schmitt was almost a Literat, at one point in his life (around 1912-20?). He was at least on the periphery of the Stefan George world. When he talks about his house (modest as befits someone fired from his job), the paintings he mentions as decorating it are by Ernst-Wilhelm Nay and Werner Gilles. This is embarrassing. I wouldn’t mind some Nays on my wall. Of the George followers, he mentions Norbert von Hellingrath as being more important than Rilke or George. Hellingrath wrote the essay on parataxis which Adorno made so much of. I suppose Schmitt and Adorno were reading the same books, at a certain point. Hellingrath was killed in the First World War and is less significant, if only for that reason, than Schmitt suggests. Perhaps it was only part of a house. It was in a small town about halfway between the Rhine and the Dutch border. It was his home town, in fact.
He writes several times about a work by Otto Brunner on dominion and aristocracy in the Middle Ages, a work which came out in 1949. I have no use for this book, it is legal history with no interest in sociology. The land-owners may have been 3% of the population (already a sociological fact) and Brunner has no interest in the other 97%. He never mentions the ones who actually cultivated the soil. For him, the ownership of estates and attached rights is something abstract and purely conceptual, noble like gold. The soil and its bacteria have vanished from his view along with the peasants. No wonder Schmitt likes this, it reflects his view of history. Marc Bloch was a century ahead of Brunner even though his book came out a decade before.
At that time, 1949, the land-owners were being ‘collectivised’ in a whole strip of Europe, from the Baltic to Greece. I think that excludes the south Slavs, the big land-owners there were part of the Ottoman regime and had lost their estates generations before. I think the land was owned by the peasants in pre-communist Serbia or Bulgaria, although I might be wrong. Croatia was probably more thick with lords and estates. This was a moment of great estates being broken up, the end of the Middle Ages for somewhere like Pomerania. And that process created a group of dispossessed and resentful ex-landowners.
Generally, serfdom was destabilsied by the Black Death of the 14th century, which created a labour shortage, and this led to the end of serfdom in Western Europe. However, the same processes led to the continuation of serfdom in eastern Europe, where also landowners throve by exporting grain to western Europe. This parting of the ways led to the differentiation between Western and Eastern Europe, a difference which we still find as basic and formative. The strip, from the Baltic to the Balkans, which saw the end of serfdom only in the 19th century, was also the strip where the break-up of great estates, and the redistribution of land, was taking place in the later years of the 1940s. The landowning pattern had reproduced the later stages of serfdom, because the serfs received freedom but not any right to the land which they worked. So years like 1947 and 1948 were seeing one of the largest changes ever in European society. Schmitt pays no attention to this.
In 1950, there was a stratum of off-scoured and worthless Europeans, the survivors of the Fascist world and also of a feudal-monarchist world. They were like a nation, one without a territory. It is helpful to recognise the sounds they made, the self-justifying ideas which they exchanged. Reading a book from that zone is like visiting a foreign country. Like disaster tourism, I suppose.
Why am I reading Schmitt? It goes back to an atlas, which I believe my mother owned, which dated from the 1960s (I think) and marked East Germany as “Soviet occupied zone” (SBZ) and most of Poland as “Eastern Germany”. So this was a map of resentment and projective fantasy – of lost territory. I had the idea of a map of Far Right ideas which would link isolated acts of irrationality into a larger pattern. Schmitt owned that pattern, he was trapped inside it.
I have been pursuing that for forty years, probably a bit more. My worry is that I can read this book and not locate any new ideas, to round out my collection. Suppose we ask, what is the difference between Schmitt and Steve Bannon. It is not simple. But if you collect the ideas you get closer to an answer. Bannon was recently trying to organise the Right anti-democrats of Europe into an alliance. Presumably Schmitt would be a text-book for that movement of thought. The database of academic papers which I occasionally use shows publications on the use of Schmitt by Putin. Presumably, once Putin had suppressed democracy, his lawyers went on a shopping trip to collect anti-democratic thinkers.
There is another reason – in the glossarium, there are quite a few characters, and it is helpful to recognise them. Reading Schmitt is part of the equipment for recognising characters in some other text, not yet identified, where it would be important to know what is being said. So this is part of my work as a philologer.
For example, he reads poems by Max Kommerell. Now that I have looked up Kommerell, I at least know who he was. Conversely, when S attacks Bernanos this gives me reason to respect Bernanos, although he was politically far to the Right (Action française style) and in his lifetime was only read by people from that section of opinion. Schmitt spends time reading poetry by Kommerell and Däubler.
One of the papers I looked up, and glanced at, records a meeting between Schmitt and Mircea Eliade. In summer 1942. They discussed René Guénon. This was a moment of the occultist Right. Schmitt is also, fractionally, a writer of myth. He refers more often to Jünger than anyone else. Yes, those four are part of the syllabus of 20th C culture which we have to know about.
15/1/49. “I am reading an author, who develops an allegedly purely scientific theory, for example the descent of Man from the apes or the psychoanalytical explanation of dreams and neuroses. I however see only the author. The material is multiple, ambiguous, unpredictable in its consequences, never completed, therefore at base completely uncontrollable and open to every mythical interpretation. The more clear and irrefutable becomes the shape of the author and his historical position. From Darwin’s Origin of Species results nothing but a portrait of Darwin, his psychological make-up and his sociological situation. From all books and writings of Sigmund Freud, the same. In both cases scientific conviction is only the reflection of the certainty of victory of an upwardly mobile layer striving against a dying-out class. The animal developing from ape to human, that is the plebeian on his way in the 19th C; this was allowed by the European situation in the first generation after 1848, from that the huge success of “Origin of Species” in 1856. And now afresh the Viennese psychoanalysis since about 1912!” So, workers becoming enfranchised is like monkeys becoming humans. Except that both processes are wrong. And the scientific accuracy of Darwin is irrelevant because his idea must have been a justification of democracy, the barbaric and criminal theory of godless liberals. I don’t see any process of seeking the truth in Schmitt. He doesn’t even ask if evolution might be a true theory. He doesn’t care. For him, science and democracy are part of the same disaster, an error of History. There is a system here. The violence of the Third Reich is justified because it was the adequate instrument for fighting off Bolshevism. But the working-class movement in Germany was part of Bolshevism, not a separate thing. And democracy brought it about. So, Hitler abolishing democracy is not really a loss to feel bad about. You give them the vote and they use it to vote for a Marxist party. So it’s for the best that you take it away again.
The problem with reducing scientific knowledge to a reflection of sociology is that Schmitt doesn’t believe in sociology. It is one of the plebeian sciences which he rejects. It conflicts with law, as a knowledge of society.
17/5/49. “Grade 1: there are people, who are not ashamed to have accepted the Nobel Prize. Yet lower grade, 2:there are people who are not ashamed to have accepted the National prize founded by Hitler in opposition to the Nobel; all-lowest grade 3: there are people, who let themselves be compensated, because they received a prize from Stalin and not from Hitler, and for that reason announce and recommend themselves as candidates for the Atlantic-Nobel-Prize. Miracle of the D-Mark: Thomas Mann re-appears in Germany!”
The “Atlantic” qualification is meant to suggest that the prize bestowed by the Swedish Academy is now aligned with NATO, the Atlantic treaty organisation. Sweden was not a member of NATO. S is denouncing Mann, and other Nobel Prize Winners, and moves on to equate them with Stalin Prize winners. The point is to revalue winners of the Hitler Prize and to relativise the criticism which removes from such winners their rightful praise and admiration. The interest in prizes is significant because it connects to a scale, or scales, of worth and value. Something which preoccupies Schmitt is denying worth to people, and to the cultural objects they produce. He wants tight control over that, before anything else. He has to be the examiner; other people should not think of awarding prizes. The authority which ascribes value to achievements. So he starts with denying any value to science and democracy. Mocking Mauriac and Bernanos is just a moment in a long process of freezing disapproval. Mann was anti-Hitler so he couldn't be a good writer.
So, you have scholars who have never read a book by a working-class writer. Ones who have never read a book by a Jewish writer. Who have never read a book by a Protestant. And there are bookshops which guarantee this, because they don’t stock any books which would cross those lines. That was the everyday of European conservatism. Had Schmitt ever read a book by a Jewish writer?
Disdain is a central activity for Right-wing thinkers of this era. At maximum, they just spend all day expressing, and experiencing, disdain. It is like a job. This is partly a way of erasing independent knowledge - the validity of knowledge is constrained by the status of the people uttering it. Everyone who is not of the Far Right has to be discredited, before they can utter. Disdain carries that function.
November 1947. Discussion of the space left for resistance. And of the ocean. Possibly the idea that continental powers have continuous authority and naturally expand to the physical borders of the space; whereas oceanic powers are surrounded by the free ocean (and allow the activity of different parties?). The ocean is like a space open for resistance. The idea isn’t clearly made out – because of the diary style. But this is interesting. He thinks the ocean gave rise to Utopias, thought of as colonies with arbitrary and “philosophical” laws. So that the Ocean gives birth to the world of “total planning” of the 1950s. Interesting, although it was the navally weak Third Reich which was into “total planning”. He almost emerges into the idea that resistance is necessary to a state, and that is so because totalitarianism is wrong. But he never actually says that. His small house as hermit is, within the land of west Germany (which he never recognised as an independent state) a “space of resistance”, that is the basic position of the whole Glossarium.
He elsewhere quotes Heracleitus as saying that “nomos is space”. I don’t understand this. Perhaps simply that a law attaches to the territory of the state which makes the law. But does ”nomos” actually mean “law” in the 6th century BC?
He refers (November 1947) to the katekhon, identified in Second Thessalonians, 2,6-7 as the restrainer, which restrains Antichrist so that he cannot break loose and bring about the End of Days (and the Millennium). “only he who now letteth will let until he be taken out of the way”. Let is like let or hindrance, a restraint. He mentions an essay of 1932 on the subject. The Third Reich was the katekhon which held back Bolshevism. But he says that there was a katekhon in every century. It was the Jesuits, in their day. So the Jesuits hold back the Enlightenment, they are abolished and the Enlightenment breaks loose. It roams the land and brings about the plagues of democracy and the end of serfdom. The sequel is Bolshevism. And the katekhon which can deal with that is the Nazi Party and its instruments.
“One must be able to name a katekhon for every one of the last 1948 years. The post was never unoccupied, or we would not be in existence. Every great emperor of the Christian Middle Ages took himself with all faith and consciousness for the katekhon, and he was it, too.”
I find that this is an anomaly in the New Testament, a fragment of myth which has drifted in through the window and lacks connection to the main doctrines. It is ambiguous because it is isolated. It is not even certain that the thing which Paul refers to is the same as the Antichrist. He calls it “the mystery of iniquity”, the secret of evil. This mythic strand is like pieces of naive art in a museum full of learned paintings, which correspond to the work of Greek theologians. I am not sure why it is a mystery, surely it's visible and audible and you can even smell it.
What is the status of the rule of the Occupying Powers in Germany from 1945 to 1949? evidently it was only legal as an Emergency Situation, Notzustand, and so extralegal and comparable to the rule in Germany from 1932 to 1945. We have to concede this to Schmitt. He had theorised this situation. It was the suspension of democracy – an American conducted an opinion poll in 1946 and discovered that 80% of Germans would have voted for the Nazi Party. So they had the vote taken away from them. Might is right, the government was legitimised by the armies which had won the war and not by the consent of the people. One can only judge this situation by noticing that the Allies pulled out and handed power over to democratic government in 1949. That changes everything. (Of course the Soviet Zone did not turn into a democracy and did not really regain sovereignty until 1990.)
I find that Utopia was composed in 1516, and that England had no colonies at that date. It was very slightly engaged in Atlantic trade at the time, and had few ships capable of sailing the Atlantic. Moreover, Brave New World is an anti-Utopia. So Schmitt’s idea is wrong. An interesting idea, though. And could work for Bacon’s New Atlantis.
Am in a hotel room in Cambridge reading a copy of Carl Schmitt’s Glossarium which I have just borrowed from the university library. Schmitt was a lawyer dealing with the law of the State who spent the period of the Third Reich saying that Might was Right, and that since Power was the source of law then anyone who had power could not act illegally. This coincided with the policy of the government at that time. After May 1945, he spent two years in detention, as a potential criminal. Since he had been a vocal supporter of a previous chancellor, and an earlier ‘state of emergency’, he was marked as an enemy of Hitler– although obviously a Fascist. This meant that he was never employed by the Reich. He was an unemployed whore. He made the offer but the expensive cars didn’t stop to pick him up. So, on examination, he had not taken part in any war crimes, and was released. But he lost his job as professor of law – having failed the practical. You can’t teach students that everything the State does is lawful. So in the period 1947-58 (when this book was composed) he had a lot of time on his hands.
‘Glosse’ means an explanation of part of a law but also a satirical and witty interpretation of something a politician has said, or some event in the news. It is, then, an act of resistance. So a glossarium is a collection of glosses. It has elements of a diary but is mainly bilious grumbles about items in the news. He disapproves of Europe without Hitler and Pétain. It all seems wrong to him. He quotes early-modern Spanish jurists in Latin, but is also scurrilous and paranoid.
The new Right in Germany is furious about the need to feel guilty about the national past. They want to reach a state in which Nazism was a perfectly normal part of history, just another set of neutral facts and of glorious victories. It is attractive for them to go to Schmitt, who never went through the stage of feeling guilty about any of that.
He grumbles on about his loss of power every few days. He never mentions the fact that the Reich had taken away the liberty and lives of so many people. He is indifferent to that. He is a lawyer who has chosen a client, and nothing the client does can be bad in his eyes. He does chide the Reich for exaggerated racial policies– but only while making anti-Semitic remarks.
The Allies won the war. If might is right, then what they did to ex-Nazis (not so ex in some cases) was just by definition. Schmitt never even mentions this. He only believes in power – and his side lost. Establishing a moral basis for criticising Allied occupation policies is a task he never even starts on. He lacks self-awareness. In this condition, a diary cannot shed very much light on anything.
This is not a work of literature. It does describe personal feelings throughout, it is emotional, but it has a minimum of psychological content. He just wants to argue all the time. And it all feeds back into the central complex, whereby the wrong side won the war and he deserves to be a professor of law again. So democracy in America must be wrong, because it led to America winning the war, and so the wrong side being defeated.
People who respect pretention, as a symbol of social power and links to the powerful, look up to Schmitt. For me, his erudition is misplaced. For example, when he refers to himself as peripsema. I had to look this up, it means “offscouring, anything wiped away”. Like the French word décapage. So perhaps something dirty that is excreted through the skin. He had been purged by the university, scoured off. But he adds nothing by using a Greek word, in Greek characters, when several German words would have done just as well. He is signalling that his thoughts are significant. It is not a work of learning, but that does not make it literature. Schmitt is super erudite, but if you are wrong about everything then it doesn’t make any difference that you can quote some opinion in Latin.
Schmitt was almost a Literat, at one point in his life (around 1912-20?). He was at least on the periphery of the Stefan George world. When he talks about his house (modest as befits someone fired from his job), the paintings he mentions as decorating it are by Ernst-Wilhelm Nay and Werner Gilles. This is embarrassing. I wouldn’t mind some Nays on my wall. Of the George followers, he mentions Norbert von Hellingrath as being more important than Rilke or George. Hellingrath wrote the essay on parataxis which Adorno made so much of. I suppose Schmitt and Adorno were reading the same books, at a certain point. Hellingrath was killed in the First World War and is less significant, if only for that reason, than Schmitt suggests. Perhaps it was only part of a house. It was in a small town about halfway between the Rhine and the Dutch border. It was his home town, in fact.
He writes several times about a work by Otto Brunner on dominion and aristocracy in the Middle Ages, a work which came out in 1949. I have no use for this book, it is legal history with no interest in sociology. The land-owners may have been 3% of the population (already a sociological fact) and Brunner has no interest in the other 97%. He never mentions the ones who actually cultivated the soil. For him, the ownership of estates and attached rights is something abstract and purely conceptual, noble like gold. The soil and its bacteria have vanished from his view along with the peasants. No wonder Schmitt likes this, it reflects his view of history. Marc Bloch was a century ahead of Brunner even though his book came out a decade before.
At that time, 1949, the land-owners were being ‘collectivised’ in a whole strip of Europe, from the Baltic to Greece. I think that excludes the south Slavs, the big land-owners there were part of the Ottoman regime and had lost their estates generations before. I think the land was owned by the peasants in pre-communist Serbia or Bulgaria, although I might be wrong. Croatia was probably more thick with lords and estates. This was a moment of great estates being broken up, the end of the Middle Ages for somewhere like Pomerania. And that process created a group of dispossessed and resentful ex-landowners.
Generally, serfdom was destabilsied by the Black Death of the 14th century, which created a labour shortage, and this led to the end of serfdom in Western Europe. However, the same processes led to the continuation of serfdom in eastern Europe, where also landowners throve by exporting grain to western Europe. This parting of the ways led to the differentiation between Western and Eastern Europe, a difference which we still find as basic and formative. The strip, from the Baltic to the Balkans, which saw the end of serfdom only in the 19th century, was also the strip where the break-up of great estates, and the redistribution of land, was taking place in the later years of the 1940s. The landowning pattern had reproduced the later stages of serfdom, because the serfs received freedom but not any right to the land which they worked. So years like 1947 and 1948 were seeing one of the largest changes ever in European society. Schmitt pays no attention to this.
In 1950, there was a stratum of off-scoured and worthless Europeans, the survivors of the Fascist world and also of a feudal-monarchist world. They were like a nation, one without a territory. It is helpful to recognise the sounds they made, the self-justifying ideas which they exchanged. Reading a book from that zone is like visiting a foreign country. Like disaster tourism, I suppose.
Why am I reading Schmitt? It goes back to an atlas, which I believe my mother owned, which dated from the 1960s (I think) and marked East Germany as “Soviet occupied zone” (SBZ) and most of Poland as “Eastern Germany”. So this was a map of resentment and projective fantasy – of lost territory. I had the idea of a map of Far Right ideas which would link isolated acts of irrationality into a larger pattern. Schmitt owned that pattern, he was trapped inside it.
I have been pursuing that for forty years, probably a bit more. My worry is that I can read this book and not locate any new ideas, to round out my collection. Suppose we ask, what is the difference between Schmitt and Steve Bannon. It is not simple. But if you collect the ideas you get closer to an answer. Bannon was recently trying to organise the Right anti-democrats of Europe into an alliance. Presumably Schmitt would be a text-book for that movement of thought. The database of academic papers which I occasionally use shows publications on the use of Schmitt by Putin. Presumably, once Putin had suppressed democracy, his lawyers went on a shopping trip to collect anti-democratic thinkers.
There is another reason – in the glossarium, there are quite a few characters, and it is helpful to recognise them. Reading Schmitt is part of the equipment for recognising characters in some other text, not yet identified, where it would be important to know what is being said. So this is part of my work as a philologer.
For example, he reads poems by Max Kommerell. Now that I have looked up Kommerell, I at least know who he was. Conversely, when S attacks Bernanos this gives me reason to respect Bernanos, although he was politically far to the Right (Action française style) and in his lifetime was only read by people from that section of opinion. Schmitt spends time reading poetry by Kommerell and Däubler.
One of the papers I looked up, and glanced at, records a meeting between Schmitt and Mircea Eliade. In summer 1942. They discussed René Guénon. This was a moment of the occultist Right. Schmitt is also, fractionally, a writer of myth. He refers more often to Jünger than anyone else. Yes, those four are part of the syllabus of 20th C culture which we have to know about.
15/1/49. “I am reading an author, who develops an allegedly purely scientific theory, for example the descent of Man from the apes or the psychoanalytical explanation of dreams and neuroses. I however see only the author. The material is multiple, ambiguous, unpredictable in its consequences, never completed, therefore at base completely uncontrollable and open to every mythical interpretation. The more clear and irrefutable becomes the shape of the author and his historical position. From Darwin’s Origin of Species results nothing but a portrait of Darwin, his psychological make-up and his sociological situation. From all books and writings of Sigmund Freud, the same. In both cases scientific conviction is only the reflection of the certainty of victory of an upwardly mobile layer striving against a dying-out class. The animal developing from ape to human, that is the plebeian on his way in the 19th C; this was allowed by the European situation in the first generation after 1848, from that the huge success of “Origin of Species” in 1856. And now afresh the Viennese psychoanalysis since about 1912!” So, workers becoming enfranchised is like monkeys becoming humans. Except that both processes are wrong. And the scientific accuracy of Darwin is irrelevant because his idea must have been a justification of democracy, the barbaric and criminal theory of godless liberals. I don’t see any process of seeking the truth in Schmitt. He doesn’t even ask if evolution might be a true theory. He doesn’t care. For him, science and democracy are part of the same disaster, an error of History. There is a system here. The violence of the Third Reich is justified because it was the adequate instrument for fighting off Bolshevism. But the working-class movement in Germany was part of Bolshevism, not a separate thing. And democracy brought it about. So, Hitler abolishing democracy is not really a loss to feel bad about. You give them the vote and they use it to vote for a Marxist party. So it’s for the best that you take it away again.
The problem with reducing scientific knowledge to a reflection of sociology is that Schmitt doesn’t believe in sociology. It is one of the plebeian sciences which he rejects. It conflicts with law, as a knowledge of society.
17/5/49. “Grade 1: there are people, who are not ashamed to have accepted the Nobel Prize. Yet lower grade, 2:there are people who are not ashamed to have accepted the National prize founded by Hitler in opposition to the Nobel; all-lowest grade 3: there are people, who let themselves be compensated, because they received a prize from Stalin and not from Hitler, and for that reason announce and recommend themselves as candidates for the Atlantic-Nobel-Prize. Miracle of the D-Mark: Thomas Mann re-appears in Germany!”
The “Atlantic” qualification is meant to suggest that the prize bestowed by the Swedish Academy is now aligned with NATO, the Atlantic treaty organisation. Sweden was not a member of NATO. S is denouncing Mann, and other Nobel Prize Winners, and moves on to equate them with Stalin Prize winners. The point is to revalue winners of the Hitler Prize and to relativise the criticism which removes from such winners their rightful praise and admiration. The interest in prizes is significant because it connects to a scale, or scales, of worth and value. Something which preoccupies Schmitt is denying worth to people, and to the cultural objects they produce. He wants tight control over that, before anything else. He has to be the examiner; other people should not think of awarding prizes. The authority which ascribes value to achievements. So he starts with denying any value to science and democracy. Mocking Mauriac and Bernanos is just a moment in a long process of freezing disapproval. Mann was anti-Hitler so he couldn't be a good writer.
So, you have scholars who have never read a book by a working-class writer. Ones who have never read a book by a Jewish writer. Who have never read a book by a Protestant. And there are bookshops which guarantee this, because they don’t stock any books which would cross those lines. That was the everyday of European conservatism. Had Schmitt ever read a book by a Jewish writer?
Disdain is a central activity for Right-wing thinkers of this era. At maximum, they just spend all day expressing, and experiencing, disdain. It is like a job. This is partly a way of erasing independent knowledge - the validity of knowledge is constrained by the status of the people uttering it. Everyone who is not of the Far Right has to be discredited, before they can utter. Disdain carries that function.
November 1947. Discussion of the space left for resistance. And of the ocean. Possibly the idea that continental powers have continuous authority and naturally expand to the physical borders of the space; whereas oceanic powers are surrounded by the free ocean (and allow the activity of different parties?). The ocean is like a space open for resistance. The idea isn’t clearly made out – because of the diary style. But this is interesting. He thinks the ocean gave rise to Utopias, thought of as colonies with arbitrary and “philosophical” laws. So that the Ocean gives birth to the world of “total planning” of the 1950s. Interesting, although it was the navally weak Third Reich which was into “total planning”. He almost emerges into the idea that resistance is necessary to a state, and that is so because totalitarianism is wrong. But he never actually says that. His small house as hermit is, within the land of west Germany (which he never recognised as an independent state) a “space of resistance”, that is the basic position of the whole Glossarium.
He elsewhere quotes Heracleitus as saying that “nomos is space”. I don’t understand this. Perhaps simply that a law attaches to the territory of the state which makes the law. But does ”nomos” actually mean “law” in the 6th century BC?
He refers (November 1947) to the katekhon, identified in Second Thessalonians, 2,6-7 as the restrainer, which restrains Antichrist so that he cannot break loose and bring about the End of Days (and the Millennium). “only he who now letteth will let until he be taken out of the way”. Let is like let or hindrance, a restraint. He mentions an essay of 1932 on the subject. The Third Reich was the katekhon which held back Bolshevism. But he says that there was a katekhon in every century. It was the Jesuits, in their day. So the Jesuits hold back the Enlightenment, they are abolished and the Enlightenment breaks loose. It roams the land and brings about the plagues of democracy and the end of serfdom. The sequel is Bolshevism. And the katekhon which can deal with that is the Nazi Party and its instruments.
“One must be able to name a katekhon for every one of the last 1948 years. The post was never unoccupied, or we would not be in existence. Every great emperor of the Christian Middle Ages took himself with all faith and consciousness for the katekhon, and he was it, too.”
I find that this is an anomaly in the New Testament, a fragment of myth which has drifted in through the window and lacks connection to the main doctrines. It is ambiguous because it is isolated. It is not even certain that the thing which Paul refers to is the same as the Antichrist. He calls it “the mystery of iniquity”, the secret of evil. This mythic strand is like pieces of naive art in a museum full of learned paintings, which correspond to the work of Greek theologians. I am not sure why it is a mystery, surely it's visible and audible and you can even smell it.
What is the status of the rule of the Occupying Powers in Germany from 1945 to 1949? evidently it was only legal as an Emergency Situation, Notzustand, and so extralegal and comparable to the rule in Germany from 1932 to 1945. We have to concede this to Schmitt. He had theorised this situation. It was the suspension of democracy – an American conducted an opinion poll in 1946 and discovered that 80% of Germans would have voted for the Nazi Party. So they had the vote taken away from them. Might is right, the government was legitimised by the armies which had won the war and not by the consent of the people. One can only judge this situation by noticing that the Allies pulled out and handed power over to democratic government in 1949. That changes everything. (Of course the Soviet Zone did not turn into a democracy and did not really regain sovereignty until 1990.)
I find that Utopia was composed in 1516, and that England had no colonies at that date. It was very slightly engaged in Atlantic trade at the time, and had few ships capable of sailing the Atlantic. Moreover, Brave New World is an anti-Utopia. So Schmitt’s idea is wrong. An interesting idea, though. And could work for Bacon’s New Atlantis.
Friday, 15 November 2024
Count of titles
The curve
I have just completed a retrieval from library catalogues giving a figure for poetry published in 2015. All the counts exclude anthologies.
2000 1079 titles
2010 1530 titles
2015 1350 titles
2019 1648 titles
I can see we have a dip in 2015. All the same, the figures have grown rather steeply since the 1990s.
We can draw a similar curve for the percentage of women poets in these single-author figures.
2000 38.8%
2010 36.1%
2015 40.3%
2019 45%
For comparison, figures for 1990 are 866 titles and 28.2% of them by women.
I discussed this issue with a group of interested parties, here in Nottingham. One associate was very excited to show us an essay from a poet in Ireland, saying that you could only get published if you knew people, and that it was useless to expect publication, so you should write for yourself. The associate was excited because this was what he already believed. I had done rather tiring catalogue work to recovered that figure of 1648 volumes of poetry by individual authors in one year. It really didn’t seem that they had all chanced to be friends of the editor. It seems, on the contrary, that there is a moment when a script arrives in an email, by someone you have never heard of, you read it and get excited because it is really good, and shows patterns you have never seen before, and you can't get enough of it.
One has to ask if this growth in the number of titles being issued could represent a decline in cultural creativity. This does not seem to be a possible conclusion.
One way of looking at the growth in titles is to consider that the count of books by white males would have gone down if the overall count had remained static. The growth allows for titles by white males to remain at the original level while socially other groups take up other portions of the pie.
There are several thousand people in the country who have published at least one book of poetry. The related number of unpublished poets (and of their unpublished books) has never been counted.
During 2024, the pace-making publisher Broken Sleep Books had a “window” for submitting pamphlets for possible selection by them. They emailed the unsuccessful applicants to say that they had received 880 submissions. (I am not sure if they had one or two windows during 2024.) I saw one of these, a friend in Nottingham received it. Interesting figure! We have to ask, first, were these all new scripts, or was at least one of them ten years old, and enduringly unpublished. Secondly, if you looked back in 2026, how many of them would have found publishers and so moved out of the category of “frustrated”, and so made the original account wrong or misleading. Thirdly, is this one in five of the striving and productive poets, or one in ten or one in twenty. I have no way of knowing.
I have just completed a retrieval from library catalogues giving a figure for poetry published in 2015. All the counts exclude anthologies.
2000 1079 titles
2010 1530 titles
2015 1350 titles
2019 1648 titles
I can see we have a dip in 2015. All the same, the figures have grown rather steeply since the 1990s.
We can draw a similar curve for the percentage of women poets in these single-author figures.
2000 38.8%
2010 36.1%
2015 40.3%
2019 45%
For comparison, figures for 1990 are 866 titles and 28.2% of them by women.
I discussed this issue with a group of interested parties, here in Nottingham. One associate was very excited to show us an essay from a poet in Ireland, saying that you could only get published if you knew people, and that it was useless to expect publication, so you should write for yourself. The associate was excited because this was what he already believed. I had done rather tiring catalogue work to recovered that figure of 1648 volumes of poetry by individual authors in one year. It really didn’t seem that they had all chanced to be friends of the editor. It seems, on the contrary, that there is a moment when a script arrives in an email, by someone you have never heard of, you read it and get excited because it is really good, and shows patterns you have never seen before, and you can't get enough of it.
One has to ask if this growth in the number of titles being issued could represent a decline in cultural creativity. This does not seem to be a possible conclusion.
One way of looking at the growth in titles is to consider that the count of books by white males would have gone down if the overall count had remained static. The growth allows for titles by white males to remain at the original level while socially other groups take up other portions of the pie.
There are several thousand people in the country who have published at least one book of poetry. The related number of unpublished poets (and of their unpublished books) has never been counted.
During 2024, the pace-making publisher Broken Sleep Books had a “window” for submitting pamphlets for possible selection by them. They emailed the unsuccessful applicants to say that they had received 880 submissions. (I am not sure if they had one or two windows during 2024.) I saw one of these, a friend in Nottingham received it. Interesting figure! We have to ask, first, were these all new scripts, or was at least one of them ten years old, and enduringly unpublished. Secondly, if you looked back in 2026, how many of them would have found publishers and so moved out of the category of “frustrated”, and so made the original account wrong or misleading. Thirdly, is this one in five of the striving and productive poets, or one in ten or one in twenty. I have no way of knowing.
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