A Post-Authoritarian Education Étude
What does a child of pop culture do when suddenly, in the guise of fatherhood and teaching responsibilities, he finds himself in a role for which there is no script? It all began with a simple request: a radio editor asked if I would like to join him in a three-week intensive seminar at Berlin's Hochschule der Künste (University of the Arts) on familiarizing young acting students with the microphone and working situation of a recording studio — the objective being to turn the resulting material into a publication-worthy one-hour radio feature. After having experienced, as a visiting writer in the studio of the Hessischer Rundfunk, how a text I’d written had been disfigured by a "director" and an "actor" — virtually destroying it beyond recognition — I swore to myself I’d never let this happen to me again. And, without seeing myself as such, I found I’d moved into the position of a director who, over time, had not directed but accompanied and coached some quite wonderful actors. Whatever else I had learned during my earlier professional studio experience, it was that there was nothing more foolish than the traditional, supposedly clear, "authoritarian" directorial messaging. Instead, the role of the director seemed to me more like that of a psychoanalyst who merely had to have an "open" ear for what was being said and, if he was ever forced to intervene, only had to point out a misheard textual vibration — which almost automatically opened up a new perspective and a new, different tone.
My Colleague, the editor Wolfgang Bauernfeind (*1944 - † 2022)This was already the description of the seminar1 — and at the same time, an instruction for its implementation: namely, that the exploration of the acoustic, the world of sounds, would itself be the subject of the seminar (which my fellow editor, recalling a Walt Whitman quote, included in the title of the program: Now I Want to Do Nothing but Listen). That thought alone opened up a different kind of space that shook up the usual group setting: instead of sitting in a circle introducing themselves with a few wisps of skinny-scrawny words (the standard technique which generally ended up with little more than psycho-clichés, postcards of caricatures strewn about the room), it came to me that the student actors could instead be asked to tell us about their childhood noises — during which time we would record their narratives. So the group gathered in the studio, and the recording session began. Relative to form, there was only one rule: namely, that each speaker’s accounting was not to be criticized simply because it was about remembered perceptions (and not about any assertions or ideologues). Already within the first few moments of the first narrative, a mood set in that I had rarely encountered before. A young woman told of how, as a child in the evenings, she’d always listened to the ringing of the nearby church and how her father's fax machine rang out again and again (from the lower floor). Obviously, he was either a merchant or engaged in some other important business. Whichever it was, you could hear the squeak of the planks as he climbed the stairs and, at some point, stopped in front of the door of the children's room, listened — then didn't come in, a behavior that seemed quite habituated, as the carpeting in front of her door (as the young woman told us) had developed deeply worn lacuna. What stood out about this narrative was how the participants tuned into it with absolute concentration, not least because each was translating the perceptual fragments into a psychic space, an acoustical Family Constellations. By concentrating only on their aural childhood memories, the narrators had solved another embarrassment: the dilemma of self-presentation. Thus, no one even remotely came close to criticizing the respective speaker's performance. Instead, a mood of sincere sympathy spread; everyone was strangely confronted with a simultaneously intimate but by no means egotistical narrative. When the session, which lasted several hours, was finally over, a visibly astonished young actor said that this session had seemed like a kind of psycho-tripping and had turned into group therapy for him — which I replied to by remarking no one had been asked to expose their innermost self.
The strangest result of the session was, of course, the resulting material — simply because it was categorically different from the usual. What’s so unique here is if it’s usually the case that the bulk of a professional guild’s seminar material is unusable precisely because what is said serves the purpose of self-promotion; here, almost every one of these childhood narratives possessed a virtually physical power of persuasion — to the delight of my editor, who realized just with this introductory session, his main problem had already pleasantly dissolved into thin air: being the question of if and how the first-year students' material could be assembled into a product suitable for broadcasting. What preoccupied me as I listened to the material was where the special magnetism of these narratives came from — why the description of a childhood sound, where even the speaker, the communicative setting, indeed all imagery had been stripped away from it, captivated the listener. The answer I arrived at was exceedingly simple: all these narratives touched on a commonality as if the sounds had an inherent communistic structure — they created a form of cerebral cinema in the listener: spaces of thought that magically appeared, as if by themselves. This had not least to do with the fact that the speaker, although almost hyper-present, at the same time remained exceedingly enigmatic — indeed, that each listener, like a detective, assembled the information into a puzzle, into their picture of the person.
My son was born eight months after undertaking this project (which was to continue supporting me for the next seven years). And just as little as the figure of the director or instructor seemed plausible to me, so did the Father role, conceived as being authoritarian, which seemed desirable to me. My school and university years had already left me with an almost visceral aversion to all authority, all those teachers who, instead of inspiring their pupils to do what mattered to them, only knew how to prevail with punishments, threats, and by imposing acts of sovereignty — something I didn’t want even remotely to have anything to do with. While thinking about how to educate a child about the rules of living together, I fell into the idea of staging something like an educational play — appearing less as an educator and more as an entertainer, which turned out not to be particularly difficult. All that was needed was a small hand puppet. And because there was one in the apartment, in the form of a bearded, sinister-looking robber, I let the puppet indulge in all the mealtime nonsense with the most incredible enthusiasm typically attributed to small children: he played around with his cup, spilled water and behaved as you would expect from an ill-bred ruffian. My son loved this robber dearly, all the more so because every meal and activity came with all sorts of surprises. If the robber went too far (for example, if he started to beat on me), my son didn’t discipline him but rather began talking him down all on his own accord — which, over time and all by itself, led to some rules of etiquette: that you don't throw food around; that you don't spill glasses over wantonly; and that you don't attack other people roughly. What fascinated me about this communicative triangle was that the robber, who I spoke as in a disguised voice, was perceived by the child as an independent being. And the older my son got, the broader our criminal houseguest repertoire became. For example, when we drove by a vacant Berlin lot (which was everywhere at the time of reunification), the robber, who had special contacts in the criminal milieu, claimed that he and his colleagues had blown up this house. In this curious way, life became a great adventure novel for my son. For example, some accomplices occasionally called and left messages on our answering machine. The fact that I was the one who had called from the study in a disguised voice and left this message was lost in the excitement of finding a secret message or object under some stone in the Grunewald. If things got too cramped in the apartment, the whole day could be brightened up with such a call — not to mention that he, guided by the robber, could see all kinds of sights. Over time, the robber, who didn't always agree with his parents and was capable of every imaginable provocation, grew into a sort of virtual sibling — so much so that my son was inconsolable when he became lost in the apartment one day. So a replacement robber had to be found, who, because he didn't look so run-down yet, had to be provided with a legend: plastic surgery in Tunisia, escape from the police. At some point, of course, the lost robber reappeared from behind a bookcase, which meant that the familial history of unexpected twins had to be revised — and I now had to operate ambidextrously. Thinking of Schiller's moral institution, I added a policeman hand puppet (Bruno Kleine-Brötchen-Bäcker2), which offered the advantage that this puppet cosmos could now negotiate all conceivable conflicts — providing an inexhaustible occasion to reintroduce all the books and stories we’d previously read to our son. And because the world of the puppets held such a reality for him, when we encountered a police patrol in the Grunewald parking lot, my son insisted we introduce the policeman, dozing in his VW van, to our police hand puppet – to which he said, after a moment of surprise, with a broad smile: Hello colleague!
No, it was not that I was convinced about the correctness of my decision from the outset, as there were always those given moments of asking myself if such an experimental educational style wouldn't also have some detrimental effects. What convinced me, or at any rate silenced the nagging doubts, were the results of my decision. When my son started school, he didn’t struggle with authority issues or his schoolmates; on the contrary, he continued with the same enthusiasm he’d shown for the adventures with his robber. And it was his enthusiasm that made me sure I’d chosen the right path. Now the lessons linked to these experiences were of a much more fundamental nature. It’s the difference between the auctoritas, as either a social authority, going back to the author - or only being empowered through careful use of scriptural authority; any formal authority unaware of this vesting's fealty is, to say at the least, problematic. Just to the extent that its bearer ignores this, they risk dispensing with gnawing, nagging self-doubt that comes with exploiting the power imbalance, becoming increasingly preoccupied with hollow pretensions. In a situation like ours, with the digital revolution shaking the writing field to its foundations, it is little wonder that pop culture had articulated itself primarily as an anti-authoritarian reflex — that even the system had been placed under general suspicion. But if you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, the task is to clarify the role of authorship in this new, digital world. That’s what preoccupied me in the drama seminar — the realization that a new, largely unheard-of space had opened up beneath the postcard certainties of the old world. So if my teaching assignment had any meaning, it consisted of nothing other than this: to introduce those entrusted to me to this world, to familiarize them with the laws of writing. As I was to learn from my son's computer games, these laws developed new, highly fascinating structures over time. And in the same way that the robber had shaped his childhood years, my son now insisted on introducing me to the world of computer games, a request to which I gladly submitted. While I was exposed to a complete overdosage of gamer culture for years, it didn't prevent me from being amused by their simple plot lines while playing Mafia II or Alone in the Dark together - and from meticulously dissecting the dramaturgical and aesthetic inconsistencies. Which is why my son confided to another playmate with a frown and an audible sigh: My father is hard to raise!
Translation: Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
Johannes Schmölling, whom I had collaborated with for a long time on various audio pieces, had brought this book by the music journalist Joachim Ernst Behrendt to my attention: Das dritte Ohr (The Third Ear). It contained a mixture of highly lucid observations and esoteric rapture between Pythagorean number mysticism and techno. One passage, admittedly, struck me as extremely remarkable: that of Francesco Petrarch's gaze from Mont Ventoux as an intellectual metempsychosis in which the bondage of the Middle Ages had been transformed into the visibility of the modern age. And when I read Leonardo da Vinci's "Book on Painting," in which he expatiated the sense of sight's primacy and that music could only be painting's little sister, I understood that the hardness of hearing of many contemporaries was not a personal deficit, but went back to a deep, cultural coding.
2The Police Puppet’s name Bruno Kleine-Brötchen-Bäcker [Bruno Small-Roll-Baker], came about from a visit to a torture museum on the Bavarian Border where Martin and his son learned baking bread rolls that were too small in the Middle Ages was punishable, landing the poor baker in the pillory. [Translator’s note]
