KING OF KINGS: AN INTERVIEW WITH KLAUS THEWELEIT

by Genevieve Fay and William Stern

William Stern: Let's talk about the Book of Kings. For the benefit of those who don't read German, could you give us a synopsis of the first volume and how it led you the second volume?

Genevieve Fay: And what led you into the first volume, what kinds of issues were you thinking about when you started it, and why the title...

Klaus Theweleit: What led me to the first volume was the same thing that led me into the second, and the third and the fourth laughs because they were all planned to be one. I decided after a while that each chapter was a book in itself, but I still called it "Book of Kings," not thinking of the Biblical reference. Readers, granted, may make that connection, but I don't really know the Bible--just bits of it, its language and how it works--but people tell me that what I'm doing is related to that chapter, that book of the Bible also called the Book of Kings. But forget about that....

My title relates to that phrase of Freud's about the dream being der Konigswieg , the king's way to the unconscious, which deals with how people are built (as in bildung) and who are the architects. For example, Freud discovering the unconscious, the split personality, or multiple personalities around 1900 (the end of the positivist century), through working with people who are more or less crazy: hysterical and paranoid. And a whole science centers around the deranged of the human race, trying to find out what's going on, why they are like that. The natural sciences-- physics, chemistry, biology--came to a point where the claim was put forth that they were able to know what humans are, how they functioned, and there was an assumption that there was no transcendence, that is no God....On the one hand you have this totally sick romance with sciences and on the other hand you have all these split-up, crazy individuals who are doing strange things, you have a culture producing world wars....

There's a sort of riddle concerning what happened centuries before in Europe when, from 1300 on, religion ended in a way, beginning with the Italian Renaissance first. They claimed for people the ability to build themselves--without needing God, without needing Christianity--but by being literary, discovering the world across the oceans, looking to the skies and the stars and finding harmonies there, while the painters were refashioning the image of how human beings should look or should be structured. It's very funny looking at pictures from the medieval period, where you have distorted humans all over, with two heads, one eye....Marco Polo said he met them in Siberia on the way to China, and that they looked like that in Africa, and in America. The Patagonians were said to have skin that was so long they wrapped it around their feet to use as shoes..

All that ended with Renaissance painting. They created a model for mankind; how we look today was constructed then. In a way it had been done before by the Greeks, but the culture of ancient Greece had drowned and needed to be rediscovered. The Europeans felt they had discovered it all anew, and in that way put themselves in the king's position of constructing people; instead of a medieval God, it was painters and musicians who began creation around 1600 when the inner life, the inner body had to be filled. The outer shape was given in the fifteenth century, but in a way the inner shape was left empty.

That's how music really started, as a thing that described what was going on inside the person: the feelings. Tones and modes became connected to ways of feeling; if you want to express glory you to have to compose in D major, or something like that. For centuries, there was a whole school of thought connecting music with feelings. In Germany, it was the classical poets who got commissioned to "build" people--not just to be poets, but to construct a new kind of person for the new administration class Prussia needed. By 1900, with the engineers coming in, those sciences who have the background per se where everything can be explained fostered the belief that you can go into anything in that manner, whether it's trees or fish or human beings. There is a congruence of time going on.

GF: And you're asking, who really is building the people?

KT: Yes, that is the question. After the creation of a unified Germany in 1870, and their defeat of the French in 1871, it was absolutely the military constructing the body. The model for all people was male, grim and disciplined. The military was said to be the school of the nation; you had to go and bear it, and come out of it a different person than you had been before. You came out German whereas before, implicitly, you were not.

Medicine, psychoanalysis, and religion go on in a way, but weakened. Sports, now and since the World Wars, has entered very strongly into this fear of how the body is constructed and how a person has to function: "training"; what is "fair play" and what is not; winning. The whole "beating and defeating" kind of language has gone from war to sports. I see it especially in the American newspapers: "Knicks burn the Bulls."

WS: So you're saying there's a kind of a shift in the Renaissance between accepting things as unknowable to insisting things are knowable. How does Freud fit in, I mean, doesn't he bring us back to the other side where there is a lot that isn't known or knowable?

KT: Freud also thinks the world is knowable, he just says there are things you can't see with the other sciences, like organisms visible only under a microscope. He wanted to put the unconscious under similar scrutiny. There is something like what religion calls soul, Freud says, and it can be discovered by language and through dreams and dream analysis. I think it was the final step really (before genetics) to say there are electro-chemical signs dictating the ways the human are functioning. According to Freud, we just don't have the formulas. So until we have them, we do it with language and with feelings and affects, analyzing them, but still in a positivist way.

WS: If one can say he replaces the soul with the unconscious and accepts that there are things that can't be seen--he was very interested in the occult for example--does this mean that he was trying to get beyond the empirical?

KT: No, he was just broader in his empiricism. Everything should be explainable, or understandable or perceptible, at least. So he deals with the occult also to have this riddle solved. Not to say what religion always said, "These are unsolveable things, divine mysteries, in which you have believe, taking it on faith, and giving thanks to the Lord," and so on. Freud was even absolutely sure you could make a sort of science out of telepathy, and if, okay, some things remained unexplainable, so what? That wouldn't mean that they aren't always unexplainable, but merely are obscured to us at our present state of knowledge.

GF: And he felt that it all came back to biology eventually, no?

KT: Absolutely, yes, and he said if one could find the chemical drug that makes these split persons, and use it to cure this disease of the brain, schizophrenia, he would use it. If he met someone who said that no medications of any kind are appropriate, Freud would answer that, in his moment--because the doctors hadn't found the drug--that one should stay away from medical treatments, that they aren't able to heal somebody, or only for a short time. Today there are people who say the percentage of success for chemicals and for analysis is about the same. Maybe that's true; I think it depends on the person. Some people can't tolerate the medical treatments...

WS: So how does Freud fit in to your project? You bring him up in the first volume...

KT: He claims this king's position for psychoanalysis, above literature, medical treatments, and religion. And I think Freud made the decision, really, after 1900, to use literature. He says of the poets--Goethe or Shakespeare are favorite examples--"they understood, they knew, although they didn't have the terminology they described exactly what I'm discovering now," and he dealt with them as being supreme to what he does. After 1900 he more and more becomes an interpreter of literature, placing literature under psychoanalysis.

GF: And where do you locate this change or this switch?

KT: This switch started with the Gradiva text which Freud gives to Jung as an entering present into psychoanalysis, courting the Swiss as his "Aryan leg" on which to make an international stand. As a Jew who does dream analysis he knew it would not be enough to make an international thing out of psychoanalysis. It would have been like a Jewish sect, laughable. So he really played politics, making this connection with Jung, although most things Jung did Freud didn't like at all, didn't find psychoanalytical in the way that Freud himself did, but he had to go along with it. Jung worked in an important clinic, and it was a big step to bring him in to Freud's domain. By the thirties, Jung was straying so far, Freud had to give him the boot...

WS: So how do you lead from that into your theorization of "production couples?"

KT: In volume I, I discuss Freud as producing psychoanalysis within the male couple, first with Wilhem Fliess, his friend and doctor who lived in Berlin. Their correspondence was voluminous, and documents the development of psychoanalysis. When the Fliess family later sold the letters through an antique dealer to Marie Bonaparte, Freud found out and was furious; he wanted the letters destroyed. Marie Bonaparte swore to him she would do so, but, of course, she never did, waiting till after he died to publish them.

The letters reveal to what extent Freud and Fliess were friends--a couple, really. One thing I describe in volume I is how all these working couples are never on equal terms; one partner grows, while the other is sucked dry, dies, or is thrown away. This is especially true between men and women in so-called "artistic" couples. I wanted to take the ground out from under the idea of these women as muses, as inspiration; they are much more. They are really starting as living couples, but then the man uses the woman in different ways: for singing the songs he composes, for typing the manuscripts he writes, for being the model for the painter, for being the film editor or the actress for the movie-maker like his wife, Alma, and Grace Kelly were for Hitchcock. These liaisons are based on "production love," which is different from, but often confused with, sexual love. Again and again, this takes the form of the woman preserving the couple for love, while the man preserves it for the sake of his art.

GF: It is this structure that you locate in classical mythology in the couple of Orpheus and Eurydice...

KT: Yes, I discovered a model of that--coming back to Freud/Fliess in a minute--in Monteverdi's Orfeo of 1607. The music in the opera changes when Orfeo goes down singing to get Eurydice back from hell, breaking with previous forms: it is revolutionary, and the basis for all western music after that. Orpheus goes down to hell and gets Eurydice back with this music, then he walks out with his lyre in his hand, singing "O, omnipotent lyre, I hold in my arms, you made this possible," etc., while Eurydice follows at his back, and you realize that the couple is really Orpheus and his lyre. Full of himself, Orpheus scorns Pluto, god of the underworld, (who allowed Orpheus to take Eurydice on the condition he not look back at her), saying something like "my love is stronger than any god," and so he turns around to look and loses her. Now, he's devastated because he realizes how much he needed Eurydice to be his "recording machine." She's the only one who understands his music, etc., and after she goes back to the underworld, he refuses to sing again (or to love women--the two are so much the same) until Apollo takes him up to Olympus to play for the gods. Thus the artist is elevated, brought to the level of the sun god, who was often played in the festivals by the local Duke, who, like Apollo, commissions the artist/musician to go on making art/music.

This parallels Monteverdi's life. His wife was a singer at a time when professional woman singers were absolutely new--castrati sang the soprano parts before--and flourished for about thirty years, until castrati took over their parts again. It wasn't until nearly two hundred years later that women singers returned to the opera stage. So Monteverdi's wife was in a very revolutionary position, too, as a singer. They could have been a perfect production couple as well as a loving couple, but that is destroyed and she dies of whatever, and another singer is put into his house, whom he had to train. She was a 13 year-old virgin, which the Duke wanted as a mistress, but her father refused to send her to the court unless her virginity remained intact, so the Duke placed her in Monteverdi's house, while his wife was still living. She had two children and wasn't singing any longer....So Monteverdi wrote his next opera for his new singer, Elsa Martinelli, who died young also.

WS: Sounds like you're describing a shift in the way man achieves immortality: first, through God, then, through art, where artistic production replaces reproduction. Could one then see the replication of the work of art, via the "recording machine" that these men make of women in the production couple, as an alternative to biological reproduction?

KT: Yes, absolutely, the artificial production is set in contradiction to the reproduction through bodies, and love. The artist is cut from the latter by the court, by the Duke himself, by "Apollo," who brings Orpheus to his side, and points out Eurydice in the stars, where she has become a constellation, a natural phenomenon that is to be the artist's inspiration.

WS: Did any of this thinking come out of your relationship with your wife, Monika, and trying to resolve on a personal level the problem of being in a couple where each partner has a career?

KT: Yes, we had been thinking about it all the time years before. When I was beginning what would become Male Fantasies, she had started to work as a child psychologist, and we wanted to have children but we had to decide how to do it, who would stay home, etc. So I quit my job and started writing and parenting at home. I realized after our first son was born, while I was trying to collect my materials and chase after a crawling infant, that it is not so easy to do both. It wasn't until he went to kindergarten that I began to write in earnest.

After the book was finished, I worked for a while in a leftist bookstore, while Monika began her psychoanalytic training. The book sold well, so I could afford to stay home and begin another. All this time, and since my early twenties, I was in this sort of wild psychoanalysis, reading about things and discussing it with Monika, so, although we had careers in different fields, it was connected all the time. What she was doing, then, shows up in my writing, in Male Fantasies, too, but especially in the Book of Kings, asking the question: How can we both work so that no one has to die, or go down? And so that was not only in my thoughts, but in our marriage.

WS: I think that might have been what interested the feminists in your work, too, the way you created a space that included women even when discussing men.

KT: Uh huh. I don't talk about that explicitly in the books, but it is there--in the writing--all the time, and I always thought them to be books for women, mostly.

GF: Related to that, one could also view the Book of Kings as a deconstruction of the myth of the genius as sole creator....

KT: Yes, and that brings us back to Freud and to production couples. If you look closer at these people, whether its Freud or Goethe or whoever, they are always talked about as geniuses, these single big persons, like sequoia trees standing out above the others. It's not true; there's always at least a second person, that forms a male or female couple. And this second person is invariably someone who aids the "genius" in mastering his medium.

WS: And you relate this to the product, to the work itself...

KT: I started thinking about content, of what art is about. If it's produced in couples and some person is eaten up or used up, it should be possible to show it in the work. I was not interested to describe it on the biographical level, which is really horrible, but as part of the work. So I took up, at the beginning of Book of Kings volume I, the Gottfried Benn poem, "Orpheus," which he wrote in 1945, shortly after his wife committed suicide. He has a resurrection as a poet from that poem, and it took me two hundred pages to describe that...how that was done, how the coupling was before with other women, and you really can say line by line in the poem, there she is! That's the transformation of her body into beauty! That's what he did, and he knew it perfectly. He writes about it in his letters; he's ashamed of it, he knows it's a sort of murder...transforming her death into beauty. It's a very beautiful poem.

WS: But isn't the poem also his way of working through the trauma of her death, his way of performing the work of mourning? Or do you see it more as melancholic?

KT: It's his way of mourning, yes, but also knowing there has been a killing. And it works for him: he comes out of his melancholia and marries again, completely aware of what he's doing. He later describes his life in terms of parts: "I've led five lives," he said. And these "lives" are marked off by his relationships, by the couples he formed and transformed.

I've seen this going on with the coupling of people I knew, and know now. There are certain rhythms of coupling and parting, I'd say it's about two and half years in the German scene, of students and young people. It goes through phases: the honeymoon, the breakdown, the blackout in the end. And if you don't figure out the rules, how it works, you go through it again, it's a total repetition. I knew lots of people who said, "Okay, it's the same person again, the same type, and it worked for two years and then it went crash" and then they immediately started it anew. After seven or eight times they say, "What's going on, am I crazy? Why am I repeating all the time the same sort of shit and never finding out why?" So I attached that to artistic things. In fact, I used the poets to describe it because I couldn't do it with the people I know: they weren't writing diaries and the production wasn't there and all that, so it's in a mist, in the dark. Sometimes there are couples who can talk it through or it comes out in analysis, but mostly it doesn't. I took those documented cases, like Benn and Freud, so I could really be sure I could show it there, show how it works. From there, you can apply it to yourself, and learn.

GF: So when did the romance end for Freud and Fliess?

KT: Freud was very much using up Fliess, and he knew that he was growing while Fliess was stuck to a certain model of bisexuality. Freud was aware that his own work was developing something Fliess couldn't or wouldn't follow, and you can read this in Freud's correspondence--he starts making jokes on Fliess. They quarrel, they part and almost end up in court. In the end, Freud sums it up in a text where he writes something like "If America is to be discovered, there has to be a Columbus and a Santa Maria," making Fliess into the ship, a vehicle. So you can absolutely trace how this thing happens in the couple, in this male couple. That's what I'm going to describe in Volume III: all the Freud couples, the male couples, and what theoretical shift in the work is connected to whom, and how that interacts with the state, both the political and the psychoanalytic state. Freud went through a long series of male couples, he loved those guys in a way, but he broke with all of them. Many of them actually died.

WS: It's interesting that you can say the same of Andy Warhol, that he was in the king's position in the many couples he formed with men and women, most of whom either burned out or died.

GF: In your seminar you talked about the King, Elvis. Do you see him as in the king's position as you describe it? The other artists you talk about, they all are able to stay on top, are able to keep these switches going, but Elvis wasn't. He was the one who died, while the other half of the couple, the media-manipulator, the Colonel, triumphed.

KT: Elvis was very young, he was twenty in 1955 when he gets this sudden success in the South. At first it was just about buying a house for his parents, but after the Colonel arranges a contract at RCA, and "Heartbreak Hotel" becomes a number one best seller, Elvis gets into big money. He relinquishes control of his career to the Colonel, and loses control of his life.

WS: So that's why he was the one who had to be sacrificed? He came out on the wrong side of the couple. Ironically, the King was not in the king's position but rather the one who was used up.

KT: Yes, I think so. That often goes on in pop groups, where very young people come quickly into big money and, not realizing the extent of it, allow their managers to exploit them. The Colonel was clever enough not to do that with Elvis; there was always enough money for both of them. The Colonel convinced him that he had everything he could want, and let him "play God," giving away Cadillacs and such, and Elvis never realizing how dependent he was on the Colonel. He enjoyed the illusion that he was the most comfortable and untouchable person in the world, the King, on that level, but he was not in control of what was behind it...

WS: Tell us about Pocahontas. How does she figure into a book of kings?

KT: Let's see, where to start...The craziest thing is that what happens in Jamestown between Captain John Smith and Pocahontas takes place the same year that Monteverdi's Orfeo played in Mantua (1607). This is after the British defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588), when England takes over Spain's role as chief colonizer of the New World. The Catholic Italian renaissance cities are in decline, and Protestant London becomes the new center. Under Henry VIII the English Protestants escape the Catholic domination spread by the Spanish Hapsburgs and the Counter Reformation, and build an empire. Francis Bacon, philosopher of the new empire, speaks of the Orpheus myth, where Orpheus' head is cut off and thrown in river, floating to this shore and that shore waiting for somebody to take it. First the Renaissance laid claim to it, but as their moment is ending, Bacon declares "I take the head." He puts it on his shoulders; now he's Orpheus.

GF: So you see two Orpheuses at that moment: Monteverdi's opera in Mantua and a new one in London.

KT: Yes and that's Bacon, he is sending out ships and Captain John Smith to head the new settlement. Smith had been part of the European forces assembled against the Turks in Hungary; there were French, English, German, Italian all on the same battlefield. Monteverdi was ordered by his duke, a Gonzaga, to play as entertainer there. He hated that, playing his viola during breaks in the battles, but he had to go. Also there, as part of the British army, was also Captain John Smith, who is mentioned in the records for having invented telegraphy with smoke signals. So, in a way, they meet there.

A few years later, Monteverdi is writing Orfeo and Captain John Smith is on his way to Jamestown. At first Smith and his crew were on friendly terms with the Indians, but, inevitably, they quarrel. Smith was taken hostage during a dispute and the tribe decided that he should be killed, his head crushed between two stones, (their method of execution). But one of the women of the tribe exercised her right to save him by putting her head next to Smith's, meaning he will be saved and they would marry. It's Pocahontas, daughter of Chief Powhatan, who does this, and saves Smith in that way. She's twelve or thirteen years old, like Eurydice when she goes to Hades.

This Orpheus landing himself in trouble is saved by this twelve-year-old Eurydice figure, daughter of the chief. But what happens to Pocahontas is this: Captain John Smith does not marry her, he gets called back to London because King James didn't want to allow any single commander to become too powerful in the colony, fearing they might create their own kingdom there. So Smith never came back. Pocahontas was told he was dead, but he was living in London, where Shakespeare was performing his imperial dramas, like Julius Caesar or The Tempest, reflecting state policy and establishing the form and importance of the English language, then being brought to Egypt and the New World.

GF: I have read that Shakespeare knew John Smith and his story with Pocahontas, and that he based The Tempest on it, reversing the scenario so that the "savage" Caliban--cannibal--takes the white woman when really it was the white man taking the Indian women.

KT: Yes and this reversal has to do with racial fears; The Tempest being the most racist play that Shakespeare wrote. And Pocahontas, as I describe her, is "in the basement" of the new state of the New World. There always is a Eurydice, I think, in periods where there is a flowering of art, opera, philosophy, or the creation of a new world, like America. Pocahontas and her tribe are angry about Smith's desertion, but they are told Smith is dead, so nobody is to be blamed. She marries another white man, John Rolfe, and allows herself to be Christianized, taking on the new name of Rebecca. Rolfe is significant because after being shipwrecked in the Bermudas, (the site of The Tempest) he made off with the Spanish tobacco seed, which was more to European taste than Indian tobacco, the latter being related to marijuana and considered too potent. It takes twelve years or so, but by the time the Pilgrims are landing at Plymouth, the English colonies (e.g., Rolfe's Plantation) already dominate the tobacco world market. The real "foundation" story of America takes place not up north, but down south, with Pocahontas and John Rolfe; America really begins as a commercial venture, not as a religious refuge.

Pocahontas has two sons by Rolfe, and is invited to present herself at the English court, where curiosity ran high about the Indian princess married to an Englishman. And so she gets on a ship and crosses the Atlantic to London, where she runs into John Smith. It must have made her crazy....She talked to him very shortly at the opera house where they met, and they had a short meeting afterward at the pub where they were staying, and then she dies. She gets smallpox or something like that, and is dead within six months, buried at Grave's End, where the mouth of the Thames empties into the ocean that separated her from her people. This the same year, 1617, when the Indians burn the tobacco plantations....

Chief Povatan had sent the shaman of the tribe to London with his daughter, telling him to count how many white people there were; he was not quite sure how to deal with them. The shaman brought a stick where he carved a notch for every fifty people he saw, and the stick became so full of notches he couldn't go on and he told Povaton when he returned to America, "there are more of them than leaves on the trees."

John Rolfe had two sons, one of whose descendants was George Washington (like Jefferson, Washington was from the "tobacco tribe"), another fought against the Indians in the French and Indian War. It parallels the story of Montezuma, whose daughter is Christianized, serves as translator, and has a son who fights against his mother's people. This doubling, it's crazy.

GF: There is something now called the Pocahontas myth where many Americans who claim a small percentage of Native American blood always trace their ancestry through their grandmothers, never their grandfathers. Male Indian blood isn't desirable; it has to be a gentler descent.

KT: There is a book I read recently that claimed that Americans are all descended from Pocahontas. There were lots of Pocahontas plays and operas. The first New York music house opened with a Pocahontas opera. She is daughter of us all and mother of us all!