Lipstick Traces (17 page)

In late October 1918 the world war collapsed on Germany; sailors mutinied. Days later, the November revolution broke out across the country, and the war government of Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated. Spontaneously organized, self-legitimating councils of workers, soldiers, intellectuals, and professional revolutionaries filled the suddenly empty public space. People who before had only muttered secret curses now asked questions, said their names out loud, left the crowd for the front of the room, said strange things. To some, it looked as if the councils were ready to begin everything from the beginning—it looked that way especially in hindsight, after the councils were pushed aside by the legal-fiction government of social-democrat
Friedrich Ebert, which set out to administer all possibility backward. Thus on 5 January 1919 Spartacist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, communists to the libertarian left of Lenin, called for a new revolt to save the November revolution from history; it lasted six days.

The rising was to Huelsenbeck precisely what, in rented halls in the spring and summer of 1918, he and his cronies in the Berlin Dada Club—Grosz, Walter Mehring, Johannes Baader, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann—had prophesied in microcosm. “
WONDER OF WONDERS
!” read one of their broadsides: “The Dadaist world can be realized in a single moment!” They signed it “Rhythms International.” Garbling already incomprehensible poetry with crazy gestures, singing ridiculous songs three at a time over pure noise, hurling abuse at the paying crowds, dissolving the ideologies of left and right into glossolalia, they tried to make the crowds strike back, to make the stopped clock strike twelve, to prove that time was up. Prancing on their stage, Huelsenbeck and Hausmann with monocles clamped into their left eye sockets, Grosz’s face covered with white pancake makeup, they tried to live out an old, orphaned metaphor as if it were not a metaphor at all. “The criticism” that deals with conditions in Germany, twenty-five-year-old Karl Marx wrote in 1843–44, in “Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,”

is involved in a
hand-to-hand fight,
and in such fights it does not matter what the opponent’s rank is, or whether he is noble or
interesting:
what matters is to
hit
him. The important thing is not to permit the German a single moment of self-deception or resignation. The actual burden must be made even more burdensome by creating an awareness of it. The humiliation must be increased by making it public . . . these petrified conditions must be made to dance by having their own tune sung to them! The people must be put in
terror
of themselves in order to give them
courage.

That was the manifesto of Berlin dada. In 1920, looking back to the Spartacist revolt, Huelsenbeck saw those nights on stage in rented halls, where the Dance of Petrified Conditions was first orchestrated to the hit lieder “Their Own Tune”: “For the first time in history,” he wrote in another 1920 pamphlet,
En avant dada,
“the conclusion has been drawn from the question: ‘What is German culture?’ (Answer: Shit.) And this culture is attacked with all the instruments of satire, bluff, irony, and finally violence.
And in a great common action.” It was a connection no one else could see: out of dada, revolution. Huelsenbeck set down his memories as if the outcome were still in doubt:

The atmosphere of a great event hovers over the city. You can see it: some only become human if death is breathing down their necks. They know how to primitively express their most primitive needs only when death brushes their sleeves. Then it is a joy to be alive. The bourgeois pig, who through the whole four years of murder cared only for his belly, can no longer escape the situation. He stands on his sturdy legs in the middle of hell. And hell is frenzied: it is a desire for life. Life is torture, life is fear, hatred, and vulgarity. Never has it been more so. Thus let life be praised. Through their nervousness, these people almost always turn into precious beasts. Their eyes, which always lodged in their sockets like pebbles, become attentive and active. They sense, darkly, that something is happening—something is happening outside their narrow, so-called God-given private family circle. On the corners, in the streets, everywhere a free space appears, they hack away at each other with poisonous speeches. A crowd quickly gathers around each dialogue. Here, dear reader, dramas are enacted. We find ourselves in Homeric times.

“Against an idea, even a false one,” Huelsenbeck wrote in
Germany Must Fall,
“all weapons are powerless”—no matter that the Spartacist rising was crushed, Liebknecht and Luxemburg assassinated, their bodies dumped like garbage. “Even a false one”: that idea was the essence of dada, and inside Winterland, where the performance was staged to give the lie to itself, that idea seemed the essence of the Sex Pistols. “F
UCKING BLOODY MESS
!” Johnny Rotten screamed at the fetus, then as the fetus, then as the Elephant Man—“I’m not an animal!”—it didn’t matter what you thought. The song wasn’t about abortion; it was an irresistible moment of torture, fear, hatred, and vulgarity. You went into the body, and the body was torn to pieces.

“Belsen Was a Gas” was the only tune the Sex Pistols played at Winterland that had not appeared on record—that the crowd didn’t know. It was
a crude, cheesy, stupid number, thought up, it is said, by Sid Vicious, the crudest, cheesiest, stupidest member of the band. It was altogether lacking in the poetry of “Anarchy,” “Bodies,” “Pretty Vacant”: a piece of shit. The audience locked into the song; something kicked up the crowd’s ability and its need to shout back the chorus the second time it was played, and “Belsen Was a Gas” didn’t even have a real chorus. As earlier people threw objects they had brought into the hall at the stage, now they threw back pieces of what was being thrown at them.

Stymied, perhaps in their attempt to see some history in “Holidays in the Sun,” here the Sex Pistols had turned to writing it, starting on 15 April 1945, when Belsen gave the British troops who liberated the murder camp their first good look at the Nazi fact. In a way, then, the Winterland audience had indeed heard “Belsen Was a Gas” before: seemingly affirming nothing but its own vulgarity (“Belsen was a gas, I heard the other day / In the open graves where the Jews all lay),” the song was a musical version of the punk swastika, a motif first popularized, in his pre-Pistols days, by Sid Vicious. In England (and, through newspaper and TV features, in the United States), the ubiquity of the symbol had by 1978 forged a media identification between punk and resurgent British Nazis. The swastika painted on clothes, carved into schoolroom desks, carved into arms—how different was it, really, from the National Front campaign to purify the U.K. of its colored populations, Jamaicans, Pakistanis, Indians, the backwash of Empire? How far, really, was punk from the 1970s rehabilitation of Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, who in his glory days led riots in London’s Jewish neighborhoods? As for years in the U.K., colored people were beaten on the streets, and some were killed, but in a context of a new sensationalism, a new seriousness. It was a hot topic until 1979, when the Tory party shifted from noblesse oblige to class war, and Margaret Thatcher, the new prime minister, buried the National
Front by coopting much of its program. After that, as in the early punk years, colored people were beaten and killed—more, as it happened—but with the context altered once again: with the hard facts smoothed into a context of legitimacy, the facts were no longer news. A punk parading down King’s Road with “
SID LIVES
” and a swastika stenciled on his black leather jacket caused no panic; he was a tourist attraction.

The punk swastika was a convoluted symbol: a nascent sub-cultural celebration of the purest racism; a demand for the replacement of business as usual with excitement. It meant (to take Nik Cohn’s definition of the impulse behind all postwar British pop subcultures—the Teddy Boys of the 1950s, the Mods and Rockers of the 1960s, the Skinheads of the early 1970s), “My dad’s a square, I hate him, I hate you too, I’ll smash your face in,” or diversion of that impulse into public business: I hate them too, let’s smash their faces in. It was a touch of the old épater la bourgeoisie. It meant, history books to the contrary, that fascism had won the Second World War: that contemporary Britain was a welfare-state parody of fascism, where people had no freedom to make their own lives—where, worse, no one had the desire. And it meant that negation is the act that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems—but only when the act is so implicitly complete it leaves open the possibility that the world may be nothing, that nihilism as well as creation may occupy the suddenly cleared ground.

Nazi crime was final crime, a buried wish made flesh and turned into smoke, the most complete wish ever given voice—a voice that in 1978, the year the Sex Pistols played their final concert, Guy Debord traced back to the twelfth century, to “the secret the Old Man of the Mountain”—Rashid al-Din Sinan, leader of the Assassins, millenarian terrorists of the Levant—“surrendered, it is said, only in his last hour, and then only to the most faithful of his fanatical disciples: ‘Nothing is true; everything is permitted.’ ”

Debord was not talking about Nazis. He was narrating a film on his own life, looking back a quarter-century over his years as the tribune of the Lettrist International, then of the Situationist International, groups little enough known in their own time and now barely remembered. He was staking his claim on history: “Thus was set forth the best-made program for the
absolute subversion of the whole of social life: classes and specializations, work and entertainment, the commodity and city planning, all were to be dashed to pieces. And such a program contained no promise other than that of an autonomy without rules and without restraint. Today these perspectives are part of the fabric of life—and there is combat for and against them everywhere. But when we first set out, they could hardly have seemed more chimerical—if the reality of modern capitalism had not been more chimerical still.” “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” Debord was explaining, was simply the watchword the young men who formed the LI in 1952 had taken as their passkey into the realm of “play and public life.”

On Debord’s screen one saw merely habitués of Saint-Germain-des-Prés cafes, sitting at tables, playing guitars, and then Lacenaire, the “literary bandit” executed in Paris in 1836: Lacenaire as played by Marcel Herrand in Debord’s favorite movie, Marcel Carné’s 1945
Les Enfants du paradis.
Dashing and sinister, Lacenaire turns to his rival, the Count, and to the Count’s retinue of toadies: “It takes all kinds to make a world . . . or unmake it.” “Quite good,” sneers one of the Count’s men. “Only a pun, but quite good.”

The last words of the Old Man of the Mountain too were only a pun, a play on words, an intimation of the absolute reversals hiding in everyday language, in everyday life—it was because Debord had learned that language that he heard his ideas in everyone’s mind. And just as Debord’s ancient motto contained all the possibilities of nihilism, possibilities that included creation, so too did the palindromic title of his film: “the ancient phrase which comes completely back upon itself, which was constructed letter by letter like a labyrinth one can never leave, in a manner that so perfectly marries the form and content of perdition:
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.
We turn in a circle in the night and we are consumed by the fire.”

All the feeling of that line was in “Belsen Was a Gas”: not in the words, or in the arrangement, not even in the rhythm, but in the sound, in the way the whole echoed back on itself. That night in Winterland, it was as if this
straightforward performance, established by means of ordinary equipment (microphones, amplifiers, speakers), had been transformed by onstage aural flashbacks, flash forwards, freeze frames, split screens, matched dissolves, metronomic tracking shots: all the technology of displacement. The echoes were patent, physical. Photographs and film documentaries, the commonplace evidence of Belsenism, came into view.

Everyone has seen some of this evidence, and everyone, for mnemonic reasons as unique as fingerprints, retains a few specific fragments—fragments of an individual response not swallowed up by the ideology of the fact itself. I remember visiting the Dachau extermination camp in Germany in 1961, before it was cleaned up and fitted with audiovisual displays, when the ovens looked as if they had been warm the year before—still that memory, like most of the commonplace evidence, is just genre, iconography. The victims, whoever they were, had no individuality for me, even though I was taken to the place by a man whose parents had been killed there, even though my ancestors had lived and worked just miles away. The victims were part of the pit, or interred soul-wise in some official memorial complete with meditation chapel. But in two photographs I know—“Nazi Execution of Two Russian Partisans,” taken by a Nazi photographer, and “U.S. Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky, Chairman of the House-Senate Committee on War Crimes, Buchenwald, near Weimar, Germany, April 24, 1945,” taken by a U.S. Army photographer—the sense of individuality is overwhelming, and from opposed directions.