A quote from Heiner Muller, the East German playwright:
The cultural industry as a whole is aimed at arresting people. It's just
a massive police mechanism. When you advertise something you are
immediately treated like someone who can be criminally identified, who
can be arrested. You are confined into an identity reserved exclusively
for use in a police report.
and an extract from an interview, of tangential interest, perhaps, but
which I think is funny:
(After a question about "scientific literary" responses to Hamletmachine
which saw the play dealing a deathblow to "bourgois ideas of history" -)
Muller: The best answer was given by Marlene Dietrich in the last
discussion a critic held with her. "What do I care?" (He laughs)
Brenner: Why bother to write then? So someone comes and interviews you?
Muller: Certainly not! That would be a reason to stop.
Brenner: But why do you write? Why do you breathe? Why do you eat soup?
I'm asking this as a Marxist, as a Communist.
Muller: Marxism is neither an artistic category nor a movement.
Brenner: But writing a Marxist aesthetic is conceivable, and it has been
tried.
Muller: But what was the result?
Brenner: Lukacs.
Muller: That's censorship.
And finally:
When we talk of the level of power, we are really talking past one
another. We talk past one another when we conceal our differences rather
than formulating them.
(From _Germania_)
Best
Alison
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