The Poet Is Present

by Rafaël Newman

January 16 is the anniversary of the death of Margarete Susman (1872-1966), the German-born Jewish philosopher and poet who survived the Third Reich in Swiss refuge and is buried in Zurich. To mark the occasion this year, Martin Kudla, a lecturer in Jewish intellectual history in Germany, organized a performance of lyrical texts by Susman that had been set to music by various 20th-century composers, and which he had discovered doing archival work, sung by a mezzosoprano with piano accompaniment in a recital held at Goethe University in Frankfurt.

Kudla, whose current research focuses on the vicissitudes of German-Jewish émigrés in Switzerland, is one of the editors of a volume of essays on Susman’s work that appeared last year; the concert also served as the kickoff for a new scholarly project under his aegis: the planned publication of an annotated anthology of the poems by Susman presented that evening in Frankfurt, among others that have served as the inspiration for art songs, supplemented by facsimiles of the original sheet music of their settings and annotated with bibliographical, musicological, and literary-critical commentary.

Virtually all the texts chosen for such settings, by a wide range of mostly unknown artists, come from Susman’s 1901 volume Mein Land, when the philosopher was still quite young, still under the spell of the German 19th century, and still secure enough in the land of her birth to entitle a collection of verse, with romanticized patriotic pathos, “My Country”. And yet, even at this early stage, Susman was already marshaling the critical ideas that would be fully formulated in Das Wesen der modernen deutschen Lyrik (The nature of modern German poetry), her 1910 book-length essay on the construction of a lyrical self in modern poetry, and the role of that constructed self in a reciprocal fashioning of modernity. (My own contribution to Kudla’s 2024 collection—which began life here before being presented at the 2022 conference, in Munich and Zurich, whose proceedings furnished the material for the volume—attends in part to this complex in Susman’s later poetry.)

On the appointed evening for this newest performance of Susman’s work, in the lobby of the Goethe University’s administration building that would serve as a performance space, Kudla introduced the concert with an overview of Susman’s life and work—her birth and assimilated bourgeois upbringing in Hamburg; her struggle, against patriarchal bigotry, to be allowed to study philosophy; her interwar work in Frankfurt; her re-embracing of her Jewish heritage after the Shoah; and her long career and eventual death in Zurich—before turning the stage over to the musicians.

The performance of the songs that followed was ably moderated by the pianist himself, who will also co-edit the planned volume with Kudla. Jascha Nemtsov is a Russian-born musicologist and professor of the history of Jewish music at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt in Weimar; his publications include From St. Petersburg to Vienna: The New Jewish School in Music (1908–1938) as Part of the Jewish Cultural Renaissance. Nemtsov’s brief comments between songs were self-deprecatingly witty, as he admitted that he could not find much biographical information on most of the composers represented, while deftly emphasizing the 20th-century fates inscribed in such (sketchy) histories as he had been able to reconstruct: which of them had had to flee Austria in 1938; which had wound up where in the US after the war, and with which illustrious students; and which had had to face the odds of being a female composer in the still male-dominated field of post-classical music.

Now, as this musical soirée was a celebration of a predominantly literary artist as well as the launch of a publication devoted to her textual corpus, albeit as the inspiration for song, greater attention was paid to the literary aspect of the recital than is typical for such events, with commentary on the circumstances of the various settings, and the personal connections, such as they were, between a given composer and the charismatic poet, as well as a program booklet making clear exactly which texts of Susman’s had been used—and on occasion transformed or retitled—by which musician. And thus it was possible to note that, of the 20 songs presented that evening, sung with admirable color and verve by the Berlin-based mezzo Alice Lackner, four were in fact settings of the same text by four different composers—among these the lone musical celebrity of the line-up, Jean Sibelius. “Im Feld ein Mädchen singt” (A girl is singing in the field), also from Mein Land, was set in 1906 by Sibelius, in 1918 by Richard Stöhr, and by Bernhard Burghardt and Heinrich Sthamer (dates of composition unknown)—as well as by Carl Heymann-Rheineck (1903/4), Fritz Kauffmann (1907), and Fritz Keller (1932), which last three compositions were not sung in Frankfurt.

Here is that poem, “Im Feld ein Mädchen singt,” rendered straightforwardly into English:

A girl is singing in the field —
Perhaps her dearest one has died,
Perhaps her happiness has withered,
To make her song sound so sad.

The evening light is dying down —
The pasture lands are calm and quiet —
And still her melancholy song
Sounds strangely on the distant air. —

The final note is fading. —
I’d like to go to her.
We’d surely understand each other,
Since she sings so mournfully.

What was it about this particular poem that made it so attractive to composers, more than any other of Susman’s texts? For it enjoyed a total of seven different settings (in fact it exists in two Sibelius settings, one in German and one in Finnish translation), while the next most popular of Susman’s poems among musicians, “Über den Kirchhof bin ich gegangen” (I walked across the churchyard), was chosen for composition just four times. Perhaps it was the relative composure, realism, and subjective distance of the “girl singing in the field” poem, in comparison with the uncanny Sturm und Drang of other of Susman’s texts, that created an emotional tension appealing to composers. In “Erde” (Earth), for example, the lyrical subject longs frankly to lay her head on Mother Earth, which knows her every heartbeat and can offer consolation and forgiveness to its eternally needy child; in “Dämmerung” (Twilight), the poet encounters an uncanny sylvan demiurge and listens, filled with longing (“sehnend”), to its mysterious, ancient melody as the light dies; and in “Über den Kirchhof” the poem’s first person is seized with a sudden violent desire to fling herself to the ground and weep wildly “over death and life”. (When Adolf Wallnöfer set this last poem, in 1902, soon after its publication, he changed the word “Kirchhof”—churchyard—to “Friedhof”—graveyard—, the better to account for the poet’s otherwise surprisingly spasmodic outpouring of anguish.)

Meanwhile, for its part, “Im Feld ein Mädchen singt” stages the well-worn romantic trope of grief rendered as art at a (literal) remove. Here it is not the lyrical self (the “lyrisches Ich”) that is subjected to a transformative traumatic experience, performing it for the reader at first hand as in the other poems mentioned above; rather, in the “girl singing in the field” poem, the painful creative passion is ruminated upon by a representative of the audience embedded in the very text, a reader who becomes, in the course of the text, a writer. Not quite Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility,” perhaps, since the lyrical self here does indeed express present empathy with the anguished singer, as well as a compulsion to join her (albeit as the song is fading away)—; nevertheless, this is a mediated, rather than an immediate, performance of intense feeling.

In Frankfurt, on this most recent January 16, Lackner sang the four settings of the poem—three of them in direct sequence—with subtly altered dynamic, mimicry, and gestures, and the result was an impression akin to that produced by the cubist rendering of an object viewed simultaneously from a variety of angles: as if to suggest the metamorphosis inherent in the ostensibly naturalistic staging of a scene by a lyrical subjectivity; as if to restage the moment of the artistic act, when the “self” conjured up by the tradition of modern poetry creates and simultaneously transforms the object of its observation; as if to summon the poet herself, from beyond the graveyard, and to celebrate the charismatic power of her still living text.

Or maybe what was staged in Frankfurt, alongside a recreation of lyrical production, was also the act of literary reception, in which Lackner, as she performed the various settings of Susman’s poem by four composers, had been delegated to stand in for the attentive reader, returning again and again to the same text, each time deriving a slightly altered interpretation—and in that repeated act implicitly revivifying and retrieving the poet and philosopher herself, in all her formal and generic variety, from the shades.

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On my return to Zurich I attended a retrospective of the work of Marina Abramović, the pioneering Yugoslav-born performance artist. The show, currently on view at the Kunsthaus, was curated by Abramović herself and features videos showing the artist’s best-known performances, alone or with Ulay, her erstwhile long-time partner, as well as a room in which a series of identically photographed, subtly varied close-ups of her face confront a series of similarly photographed faces of a wide range of different people. These were some of Marco Anelli’s portraits of attendees at “The Artist Is Present,” the 2010 installation at the MoMA in which Abramović sat immobile across from visitors for hours-long stints during the two and a half months of the show.

The Zurich retrospective also includes a video of Abramović’s celebrated work “Balkan Baroque,” for which she won the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Biennale. In the aftermath of the terrible conflicts that attended the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Abramović staged a remarkable performance in which she insisted on the visceral quality of worship and the awful ambivalence inherent in the notion of sacrificial victim. Seated for hours at a time on a giant pile of beef bones, the artist meticulously cleansed them of blood and gore, and thereby recalled both the recent carnage in the country of her birth, and the frankly instrumental nature of ancient pagan religion, which made of the Greek temple, for instance, a slaughterhouse, in which animals were sacrificed to the gods and their meat divided among the faithful.

In “The Artist Is Present” as well as in other of her works, which often center her body in various states of tension or repose and which frequently represent (or enact) physical violence, Abramović stages a further religious motif, a central topos of the Christianity—particularly in its Orthodox variation—that continues to permeate Serbia even after the decades-long imposition of state atheism: the paradox of a belief in the real presence of the suffering body of Christ despite His death and removal to Heaven, and hence of the believer’s paradoxical faith in that absent body’s transubstantiated presence in the Holy Communion offered by His priestly delegate. The Zurich show opens with a re-enactment of such delegation, as visitors pass through a doorway on either side of which is stationed, immobile, a naked person. Users of the entrance are thus obliged to confront the bare physicality, the real, naked presence of human beings, who are themselves the “delegated performers” of a piece originally realized by Abramović and Ulay in 1977—and are thus unable to deny the material history of the artworks on view, however ethereal or mystical their presentation, and are drawn into a form of secular ritual.

The artist’s “presence” is thus simultaneously recreated and interrogated even before the viewer enters the exhibition space proper. And as I turned sideways and gingerly squeezed my fully clothed form through the narrow space between the naked bellies of that day’s “delegated performers” at the Kunsthaus, I recalled my visit to the university campus in Frankfurt just days earlier, on my way to Alice Lackner’s delegated performance of Susman’s texts. I had approached the building in which the event was to be held, on Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz, from the south, and was thus first confronted by the looming, winged form of the I.G.-Farben-Haus, which since 2001 has housed the university’s faculty of social sciences. During the interwar period, the gigantic building had served as the headquarters of the I.G Farben chemical company, notorious for its collaboration with the Nazi regime, its use of slave labor, and its distribution of Zyklon B, the poison gas deployed in the death camps.

The inscription over the main entrance to the building today reads JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE-UNIVERSITÄT, commemorating the celebrated German humanist whose name the university has borne since 1932, now most recently inscribed on a monument to Germany’s anti-human history. As if the notorious aphorism had now been reversed, or resolved—that Germany, which had once been the home of “Dichter und Denker” (poets and thinkers), had under the Nazis become a country of “Richter und Henker” (judges and hangmen)—in a symbolic restoration of the poet’s presence in the one-time home of hangmen, against a backdrop of the terrible forces that had once willed his—her—absence.