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Datum/Text
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29. Februar 1968 |
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794, 12 |
Hilton-Hotel - s.K. 167, 2f.; 296, 24f.
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794, 14 |
Klaus Harpprecht - Geb. 11.4.1927, dt. Journalist; 1967-71 Mitherausgeber
des »Monat«; Amerikakorrespondent des Zweiten Deutschen Fernsehens.
Johnson gab Harpprecht in Washington am 1.6.1965 (am Ende seiner zweiten
Reise in die USA) ein Interview; vgl. Neumann, B. (1994), S. 544.
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794, 16 |
Auschwitz - s.K. 36, 12; 256, 28.
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794, 20-29 |
Ist der Tag ... die Jugend »brutalisieren« - Vgl. den Artikel »Lubke [sic] Will Answer
Nazi Camp Charges« der NYT vom 29.2.1968: »Bonn, Feb. 28 - President
Heinrich Lübke of West Germany told the Cabinet today he would
publicly defend himself against charges that he helped build concentration
camps during World War II. [...]
The issue arose anew after Stern, a mass-circulation illustrated magazine, revived
the charges.
An issue of Stern, that did not contain the articles attacking the President was
banned.
The reason given for the banning was a series of pictures of Gen. Nguyen
Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong suspect in Saigon and a serialization of The
Naked Ape, by Desmond Norris [sic], an anthropologist.
The Family Ministry said that the photographs would tend to brutalize
youth and the book, linking animal and human behaviour, would bring out
animalistic tendencies.«
Da die Fotos der Exekution auch in anderen Zeitungen erschienen, wurde
das Verbot als Racheakt für die Angriffe auf Lübke verstanden; Fotoserie:
s.K. 40, 16f.;
672, 15f.;
Lübke: s.K. 788, 22-36;
809, 16-24.
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794, 35 |
New York Review of Books - Vierzehntäglich erscheinende literarische Zeitschrift,
1963 während des Zeitungsstreiks gegr., galt als deutlich links; entwickelte
sich zu einem sachlichen Journal, offen für verschiedene politische
Standpunkte.
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794, 36 |
»Über das Verlassen Amerikas« - »On Leaving America«, offener Brief an den
Präsidenten der Wesleyan University, Edwin D. Etherington, in: New York
Review of Books, 29.2.1968, S. 31f. Johnson verwendet die engl. Fassung
von Enzensbergers Text; vgl. Fries (1990a), S. 168, Anm. 66.
»Ich habe jene Mrs. Cresspahl nicht davon abbringen können, Einfälle zu bekommen
anlässlich des Offenen Briefes (On Leaving America), den Hans Magnus
Enzensberger im Januar 1968 an die Linke der U.S.A. gerichtet hat, sie
über ihre eigene Lage und das eigene Land aufzuklären«, Johnson an Max
Frisch, Brief vom 10.8.1971, in: Fahlke (1999), S. 33.
Enzensberger, der im Sozialismus Fidel Castros zunächst einen positiven
Ansatz sah, siedelte 1968 für einige Zeit nach Kuba über. Von seiner zunehmenden
Desillusionierung zeugt nicht nur sein Bericht über den desolaten
Zustand der kubanischen komm. Partei (»Bildnis einer Partei« in »Kursbuch«
18/1969), sondern auch seine Versdichtung »Untergang der Titanic«, 1975, in
der die Korruption und der Machtmißbrauch angeprangert werden;
vgl. Helbig (2011b); Timmermann (2013); s.K. 15, 13-17;
737, 30;
s. 769, 14; 850, 36; 1340, 14.
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795, 3- 803, 20 |
Herr Enzensberger hat ... 1968«. »Yours faithfully.« - Vollständiger Text von Enzensbergers
Brief: »On Leaving America«. Die nicht im Roman paraphrasierten
Stellen sind in eckige Klammern gesetzt.
»Mr. Edwin D. Etherington, President, Wesleyan University Middletown,
Conn.
Dear Mr. President,
[I hereby ask you to accept my resignation as a Fellow of the Center for
Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University. At the same time, I wish to thank
you as best I can, for the hospitality which you have shown me during my
stay here. The very least I owe to you, to the faculty, and to the students is an
account of my reasons for leaving Wesleyan.]
Let me begin with a few elementary considerations. I believe the class which
rules the United States of America, and the government which implements
its policies, to be the most dangerous body of men on earth. [In one way or
another, and to a different degree, this class is a threat to anybody who is not
part of it. It is waging an undeclared war against more than a billion people;
its weapons range from saturation bombing to the most delicate techniques
of persuasion; its aim is to establish its political, economic, and military predominance
over every other power in the world. Its mortal enemy is revolutionary
change.]
Many Americans are deeply troubled by the state of their nation. [They reject
the war which is being waged in their name against the people of Vietnam.
They look for ways and means to end the latent civil war in the ghettos of
American cities.] But most of them still hold on to the idea that these crises
are unfortunate accidents, due to faulty management and lack of understanding:
tragical errors on the part of an otherwise peaceful, sane, and well-intentioned
world power.
To this interpretation I cannot agree. [The Vietnam war is not an isolated phenomenon.
It is the most visible outcome and, at the same time, the bloodiest
test case of a coherent international policy which applies to five continents.]
The ruling class of the United States has taken sides in the armed struggles of
Guatemala and Indonesia, of Laos and Bolivia, of Korea and Colombia, of the
Philippines and Venezuela, of the Congo and of the Dominican Republic.
This is not an exhaustive list. Many other countries are governed with American
support, by oppression, corruption, and starvation. Nobody can feel safe
and secure any more, not in Europe, and not even in the United States itself.
There is nothing surprising and original about the simple truth I am stating
here. I have no space to qualify and differentiate it in any scientific way.
Others, many of them American scholars like Baran and Horowitz, Huberman
and Sweezy, Zinn and Chomsky, have done so at great length. From
what I could gather here, the academic community does not think much of
their work. It has been called old-fashioned, boring, and rhetorical; the outgrowth
of a paranoid imagination or simply communist propaganda. These
defense mechanisms are part of the Western intellectual’s standard equipment.
Since I have frequently met with them here, I take the liberty of examining
them more closely.
The first argument is really a matter of semantics. Our society has seen fit to
be permissive about the old taboos of language. Nobody is shocked any more
by the ancient and indispensable four-letter-words. At the same time, a new
crop of words has been banished, by common consent, from polite society:
words like exploitation and imperialism. They have acquired a touch of obscenity.
[Political scientists have taken to paraphrases and circumlocution which
sound like the neurotic euphemisms of the Victorians. Some sociologists have
gone so far as to deny the very existence of a ruling class.] Obviously, it is
easier to abolish the word exploitation than the thing it designates; but then, to
do away with the term is not to do away with the problem.
A second defense device is using psychology as a shield. [I have been told that
it is sick and paranoid to conceive of a powerful set of people who are a danger
to the rest of the world. This amounts to saying that instead of listening
to his arguments it is better to watch the patient. Now it is not an easy thing
to defend yourself against amateur psychiatrics. I shall limit myself to a few
essential points. I do not imagine a conspiracy, since there is no need for such
a thing. A social class, and especially a ruling class, is not held together by secret
bonds, but by common and glaringly evident self-interest. I do not fabricate
monsters.] Everybody knows that bank presidents, generals, and military industrialists
do not look like comic-strip demons: they are well-mannered, nice
gentlemen, possibly lovers of chamber music with a philanthropic bent of
mind. There was no lack of such kind people even in the Germany of the
Thirties. Their moral insanity does not derive from their individual character,
but from their social function.
Finally, there is a political defense mechanism operating with the assertion that
all of the things which I submit are just communist propaganda. [I have no
reason to fear this time-honored indictment. It is inaccurate, vague, and irrational.]
First of all, the word Communism, used as a singular, has become rather
meaningless. It covers a wide variety of conflicting ideas; some of them are
even mutually exclusive. Furthermore, my opinion of American foreign
policy is shared by Greek liberals and Latin American archbishops, by Norwegian
peasants and French industrialists; people who are not generally
thought of as being in the vanguard of Communism.
The fact is that most Americans have no idea of what they and their country
look like to the outside world. I have seen the glance that follows them: tourists
in the streets of Mexico, soldiers on leave in Far Eastern cities, businessmen
in Italy or Sweden. The same glance is cast on your embassies, your destroyers,
your billboards all over the world. It is a terrible look, because it makes
no distinctions and no allowances. I will tell you why I recognize this look. It
is because I am a German. It is because I have felt it on myself.
If you try to analyze it, you will find a blend of distrust and resentment, fear
and envy, contempt and outright hate. It hits your President, for whom there
is hardly a capital left in the world where he can show his face in public; but
it also hits the kind old lady across the aisle on the flight from Delhi to Benares.
It is an indiscriminate, a manichaean look. I do not like it. I do not share
your President’s belief in collective graft and in collective guilt: [Don’t forget,
he told his soldiers in Korea, there are only 2000 million of us in the
world of three billion. They want what we’ve got, and we’re not going to give
it to them.] Now it is perfectly true that we all take some share in the pillage
of the Third World. Economists like Dobb and Bettelheim, Jalée and Robinson
have shown ample evidence for the contention that the poor countries,
which we are underdeveloping, subsidize our economies. But surely Mr.
Johnson is overstating his case when he implies that the American people are
but a single, solid corporate giant fighting for its loot. There is more to admire
in America than meets Mr. Johnson’s eye. I find little in Europe that
could compare with the fight put up by people in SNCC, SDS, and in Resist.
And I may add that I resent the air of moral superiority which many Europeans
nowadays affect with respect to the United States. They seem to regard
it as a personal merit that their own empires have been shattered. This, of
course, is hypocritical nonsense.
However, there is such a thing as a political responsibility for what your own
country is doing to the rest of the world, as the Germans found out at their
cost after both World Wars. In more than one way, the state of your Union reminds
me of my own country’s state in the middle Thirties. Before you reject
this comparison, I ask you to reflect that nobody had heard or thought of gas
chambers at that time; that respectable statesmen visited Berlin and shook
hands with the Chancellor of the Reich; and that most people refused to believe
that Germany had set out to dominate the world. Of course, everybody
could see that there was a lot of racial discrimination and persecution going
on; the armament budget went up at an alarming rate; and there was a growing
involvement in the war against the Spanish revolution.
But here my analogy breaks down. For not only do our present masters wield
a destructive power of which the Nazis could never dream; they have also
reached a degree of subtlety and sophistication unheard of in the crude old
days. Verbal opposition is today in danger of becoming a harmless spectator
sport, licensed, well-regulated and, up to a point, even encouraged by the
powerful. [The universities have become a favorite playground for this ambiguous
game.] Of course, only a dogmatic of the most abominable sort could
argue that censorship and open repression would be preferable to the precarious
and deceptive freedom which we are now enjoying. [But, on the other
hand, only a fool can ignore that this very freedom has created new alibis, pitfalls,
and dilemmas for those who oppose the system.] It took me three months
to discover that the advantages which you gave me would end up by disarming
me; that in accepting your invitation and your grant, I had lost my credibility,
and that the mere fact of my being here on these terms would devalue whatever
I might have to say. To judge an intellectual it is not enough to examine
his ideas; it is the relation between his ideas and his acts which counts. This
piece of advice, offered by Régis Debray, has some bearing on my present
situation. To make it clear that I mean what I say I have to put an end to it.
It is a necessary, but hardly a sufficient thing to do. For it is one thing to study
imperialism in comfort, and quite another thing to confront it where it shows
a less benevolent face. I have just returned from a trip to Cuba. I saw the agents
of the CIA in the airport of Mexico City taking pictures of every passenger
leaving for Havana; [I saw the silhouettes of American warships off the
Cuban coast; I saw the traces of the American invasion at the Bay of Pigs;] I saw
the heritage of an imperialist economy and the scars it left on the body and
on the mind of a small country; [I saw the daily siege which forces the Cubans
to import every single spoon they use from Czechoslovakia and every
single gallon of gasoline from the Soviet Union, because the United States has
been trying for seven years to starve them into surrender.]
I have made up my mind to go to Cuba and to work there for a substantial
period of time. This is hardly a sacrifice on my part; I just feel that I can learn
more from the Cuban people and be of greater use to them than I could ever
be to the students of Wesleyan University.
This letter is a meagre way of thanking you for your hospitality, and I very
much regret that it is all I have to offer in return for three peaceful months. I
realize, of course, that my case is, by itself, of no importance or interest to the
outside world. However, the questions which it raises do not concern me
alone. Let me therefore try to answer them, as best I can, in public.
Yours faithfully,
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
January 31, 1968.«
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795, 3f. |
Wesleyan University - s.K. 737, 31.
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795, 10 |
The most dangerous ... men on earth - (engl.) übersetzt im Text; s. 797, 16f.
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795, 11 |
Paul Goodman - Paul Goodman (9.9.1911-2.8.1972), amerik. Autor, der
sich für Bürgerungehorsam und antiautoritäre Erziehung einsetzte, wurde in
den sechziger Jahren mit »Growing Up Absurd« bekannt, besonders bei der
Jugend populär; schrieb auch Gedichte, Kurzgeschichten und Dramen.
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795, 13 |
Body of men - (engl.) Gruppe von Menschen.
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795, 21 |
Mr. Gallup - s.K. 222, 3.
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796, 6 |
»Kursbuch« - Literarisch-politische Zeitschrift, die die Meinungsbildung der
dt. Linken stark beeinflußte. 1965-75 von H.M. Enzensberger hg. Zu den
Autoren der ersten Hefte gehörten Jürgen Becker, Samuel Beckett, Fidel Castro,
H.M. Enzensberger, Gisela Elsner, Frantz Fanon, Carlos Fuentes, Carlo Emilio
Gadda, Lars Gustafsson, Uwe Johnson, Martin Walser, Peter Weiss. Schwerpunkte
waren die revolutionären Bewegungen der »Dritten Welt«, die Studentenbewegung
von 1968, die dt. Frage und Wissenschaftsgebiete wie der
Strukturalismus und die Mathematik. 1968 wurden Literatur und Schriftsteller
wegen ihrer Wirkungslosigkeit angegriffen und der Tod der bürgerlichen
Literatur proklamiert. Johnson veröffentlichte hier: »Eine Kneipe geht verloren«
(1/1965), »Über eine Haltung des Protestierens« (9/1967), »Ein Brief aus
New York« (10/1967); s.K. 737, 30.
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796, 15 |
Baran und Sweezy - s.K. 207, 4.
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796, 22f. |
Wörter mit den vier Buchstaben - (engl. wörtl. übersetzt) four letter words: unanständige
Wörter.
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796, 23 |
fuck und shit und piss - (engl. Slang) ficken und scheißen und pissen.
|
797, 16f. |
the most dangerous ... men on earth - s.K. 795, 10.
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797, 29 |
Wie isses nu bloß möglich - (nd.) Wie ist es nur möglich! Eine der Redensarten Grete
Kempowskis in Walter Kempowskis »Tadellöser & Wolff«. Auf die Verwendung dieser Redensarten bei Kempowski angesprochen, erklärte Johnson 1974: »Das hat nichts zu tun mit literarischen Beziehungen, sondern diese Frau lebt in Rostock und Gesine nicht weit davon, und beide sind durch solche Redenarten verbunden. Der eine Autor und der andere Autor - die sollten auf diese Weise nicht zusammengebracht werden. Denn der eine Autor, der das mit dem ›Wie isses nu bloß möglich?‹ aufgezeichnet hat, der hat ja nicht etwas Privates seiner Mutter aufgezeichnet, sondern eine Floskel wie sie in halbgebildeten Bürgerkreisen durchaus umlief, nicht? Der hat also schon zitiert. Und ich habe gleichfalls zitiert. Ich wollte da aber nicht die Frau zitieren, sondern einen Gestus der Hilflosigkeit«, Lesung Köln (1974), S. 2f. »Es mag Sie erschrecken, ich will
Ihnen aber doch nicht vorenthalten, dass der Gebrauch von ›verbumfeit‹ und ›wie isses nu
bloss möglich!‹ bei uns verheerend um sich gegriffen hat; man kann schon von household
words sprechen.« Johnson an Kempowski am 17.4.1971, Johnson/Kempowski (2006), S.24; vgl. Mecklenburg (2013), S. 146-149;
s.K. 1546, 16;
1661, 28f.;
s. 1781, 36f.
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797, 38 |
General Motors - s.K. 144, 34f.
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797, 38 |
I.B.M. - Abk. für International Business Machines Corporation; am 16.6.1911
als Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in New York registriert;
seit 1964 Sitz in Armonk, N.Y.
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798, 12f. |
Die Toten halten zuverlässig das Maul - s.K. 45, 33.
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799, 10 |
manichäischer - Manichäismus; gnostische Erlösungsreligion der Spätantike
und des frühen Mittelalters, gegr. von dem Perser Mani (14.4.216-26.2.277),
basiert auf dem Dualismus von Licht und Dunkel (Gut und Böse).
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800, 38 |
Kebse - Konkubine, Nebenfrau.
|
801, 5f. |
Krieg gegen die spanische Revolution - Spanischer Bürgerkrieg (17./18.7.1936-1.4.1939);
Deutschland und Italien unterstützten die gegen die Republik
putschenden Militärs unter General Franco (s.K. 287, 15), die Sowjetunion
die legale Regierung; die Westmächte verfolgten eine Politik der
Nicht-Einmischung; s.K. 497, 9f.; s. 801, 19; 833, 14f.; 878, 13f.
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801, 17f. |
und Einer sah ... darüber zu schreiben - Ernest Hemingway: »For Whom the
Bell Tolls«, 1940, (dt. »Wem die Stunde schlägt«, 1941); s.K. 210, 13.
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801, 39 |
Conn. - Connecticut, Bundesstaat im Nordosten der USA.
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802, 12f. |
ja, Bauer, das ... ganz was anderes - Zitat aus Karl Wilhelm Ramlers
(1725-1798) Fabel »Der Junker und der Bauer« nach Michael Richeys Fabel
»Duo cum facint idem, non est idem.« (lat.: Wenn zwei dasselbe tun, ist es
nicht dasselbe.); vgl. Ramler (1783), Bd. 1, S. 45.
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802, 14 |
C.I.A. - s.K. 536, 30.
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802, 33f. |
Die Verwandlung des ... auf offener Bühne - Anspielung auf den Titel von Peter
Weiss’ Theaterstück: »Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats, dargestellt
durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung
des Herrn de Sade«, Versdrama, 1964.
Selbst in einer Heilanstalt interniert, inszeniert Marquis de Sade mit den Insassen
Marats Ermordung durch Charlotte Corday als Spiel im Spiel, wobei
die im Mittelpunkt stehende Auseinandersetzung zwischen dem Revolutionär
Marat, der verfrüht leninistische Standpunkte vertritt, und dem nihilistischen
Individualisten de Sade unentschieden bleibt.
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803, 20 |
»Yours faithfully.« - (engl.) übersetzt im Text. Die Schlußfloskel ist nicht korrekt,
»yours faithfully« wird im allgemeinen dann verwendet, wenn der Name
des Angeschriebenen nicht bekannt ist.
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803, 36 |
Solche guten Leute - s.K. 45, 33.
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