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Aliens and Anorexia

Chris KrausFrom Hatred of Capitalism

Countdown on the millennium clock at

34th Street and 7th Avenue inManhattan, a grid of twitching light-dots advancing into numbers, ringedby brightly-colored logos of itssponsors burned into the plastichrome- TCBY Yogurt, Roy Rogers, Staplesand Kentucky Fried Chicken - a neo-medieval message from our sponsors,instructing us that time is fluid butCapital is here to stay -

468 days, 11 hours, 43 minutes, 16seconds to go

1.

New York City, Autumn 1978:

IT IS a large room on the second floorwhere Pisti and Eva live. SquatTheater, a Hungarian group of actors-artists-underground intellectualswhose work was banned in Budapestbecause it was "morally offensive,obscene" and did not "serve the

objectives of the government'scultural policy" are now living in abuilding on West 23rd Street, NewYork City with their children. Theyneed a place where they can live andwork, where they can dissolve andrealign the boundaries between theircollective daily life and theirperformances, the inside of theirtheater/house, the passersby andtraffic in the street. They spendmonths planning and discussing thedetails of all of their performances,

but they do not rehearse.

In Andy Warhol's Last Love, EvaBuchmiller, a young woman with longhair in a short black slip sits in front ofa bookcase at a table. She ischanneling the voice of the deadUlrike Meinhof through a set ofheadphones. She is smoking while shelistens very hard:

...... zzzzz ......

This is Ulrike Meinhof speaking to theinhabitants of Earth. You must makeyour death public. On the night of May9th 1976 in a special isolation cell ofStammheim Prison where I was

confined without sentence by order ofthe Chief Prosecutor of the FederalRepublic of Germany, as co-leader ofthe Red Army Fraction....

zzzzzzzzz

As the rope was tightening around myneck, at the moment of losing mymind, suddenly I lost my perceptionbut regained all my consciousnessand discernment. An Alien made lovewith me. If it is true as certain as

newspapers write, that traces ofsperm were found on my dress, thesecould be traces of intercourse Aftermaking love, I could state that myconsciousness went on functioning ina new and uninjured body. Afterwardsthe Alien took me to a special planetwhich belongs to Andromedas. Thesociety there treats time and spacewith intensity, gentleness, disciplineand freedom. Over...

In this play, Andy Warhol and UlrikeMeinhof, two cultural icons who mightseem literally to oppose each other,come together - they are a dialecticalsynthesis transposed to psychicstates. Years later, Buchmiller wrote:"Ulrike Meinhof is a legend who turnedpolitics into tragic poetry... Accordingto the principles of pop culture, AndyWarhol is a clone of himself. Thus, heis as real as he can get. How did AndyWarhol meet with Ulrike Meinhof? Bychance."

2.

WITHIN MOMENTS of her death in1976, Ulrike Meinhof became: anAlien. "It's only at the moment ofdeath when an earthling can achievethe quality and intensity which Aliensstart with." In the Squat Theater play,Andy Warhol arrives in the financialdistrict of Manhattan riding a whitehorse. Meinhof comes back to meethim, inhabiting the host-body of a

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child. Zzzzzz. "You must," she says,"make your death public."

As channeled by the Squat Theater,the myth of Warhol and the myth of

Meinhof meet in a performance.Instead of scripting it, "a potentialfield of action was staked out." Thisunpredictability made reality alive,and much more immanently theatricalthan theater.

Long before the artist Gerhard Richterphysicalized her mythic image in hisblurry spectral paintings, Meinhof hadrecast her life as myth. How did shebecome one? While Andy Warhol, asSquat Theater says, "turned

exhausted art into daily food andgained freedom in complete unity withthe existing world," Meinhof lived inopposition. Eva Buchmiller sees herpolitics existing outside historicaltime, an act of "tragic poetry."

What moves me most about Meinhof slife is the way she underwent a publictransformation. The way she left theconscious, conscience-driven world ofacademic public discourse far behind

and entered, just before her death, arealm of pure sensation. As Squatdescribes an actor's job, so she lived,"manifesting an existence thatoverrode its representation."

Ulrike Meinhof crossed the linebetween activist and terrorist on May14, 1970 when she helped AndreasBaader to escape from Tegel Prison.Posing as the TV journalist she oftenwas, she set up an interview with himat the tony German Institute of Social

Questions. When he arrived manacledbetween two prison guards she waswaiting with her press card and gun.Then two girls with wigs andbriefcases walked in on cue andstarted flirting with the guards,creating a distraction for the maskedman who entered brandishing a gun.In a blur that lasted thirty seconds,Ulrike pushed one of the wall-lengthleaded windows open, grabbedAndreas' hand and jumped. They hitthe ground and ran.

Until that time, Meinhof had been anincreasingly militant but highly visiblejournalist and intellectual, marriedbriefly to Klaus Rohl, a mainstreamcommunist official who later claimed

to have taught her everything sheknew. "Her love for communism andfor me," he wrote later in a self-serving biography, "amounted to thesame thing." At 18 she wasconsidered brilliant, winningscholarships and prizes, courted bythe leadership of Rohl's own partywho saw a great political career inMeinhof s future.

At 27, she was editor-in-chief ofKonkret, an influential political

magazine. She and Rohl had twindaughters and a country house. Shelectured, commented on politics fortelevision, wrote. She was the tokenwoman on every panel. And yet, shedidn't like her life. "The relationshipwith Klaus, the house, the parties, allthat is only partially fun; it providesme with a basis... to be a subversiveelement... It is even pleasingpersonally, but does not fill my needfor warmth, solidarity, for belonging to

a group," she wrote in her diary whenshe was 31 years old.

During Meinhofs difficult pregnancy,which caused her ceaseless, blindingheadaches, Rohl took over hereditorship at Konkret and turned itinto a kind of German Evergreen:politics mixed in with arty pix of nakedhippie girls, "a jerk-off rag," she calledit. In 1968 she divorced him and led awidely publicized insurrection at themagazine.

And then she took a year off andspent it researching a television playcalled Bambule. She hung around theEichenhof, a reform school in Berlinfor illiterate, fucked up teenage girls.Meinhof had achieved her influenceand success because she was never ata loss for words, but at that momentshe fell in love with the confused logicof their voices. She found herselfunable to objectify them; fought withthe director; rebelled against the

journalists role.

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In the script published years after herdeath in 1976, Meinhof lets hersubjects speak in the stark andblunted rhythm of their own words

about what keeps them in the streets.She introduces the story of Irena fromthe observer's stance; "Irena's historywas a fairy tale, a joke. She ended upwith the police involved, locked insolitary confinement..." And thenIrena's voice takes over... Erica andme used to be allowed out into thecourtyard. They were hoping thatwe'd break something. But we didn'tgive them that satisfaction. Insteadwe stayed downstairs and plotted.Erica looked outside and she saw the

teacher was gone and she said shewanted to split ~ and she asked, Didwe want to help her? And we saidYeah, sure. So Erica went and got aladder and she put it up against thewall but she fell and nearly broke herneck. Well, we started cursing, Sofinally it was me who started. Iclimbed up onto the wall and startedstacking stones to jump from. Andthen Erica did it too, she climbed thewall and started stacking stones, and

as soon as Erica made up her mind todo it, she was gone! I went backdownstairs and they said to me,What've you been doing. And I saidnothing. And they said Nothing? Whatdoes that mean, Nothing? Where'sErica? What're those stones? Well, Isaid. Then one word lead to anotherword and finally I owned up. And theyasked if anyone else was involved,and I said NO! IT WAS JUST ME! Well,here we go again - solitaryconfinement. And then they

threatened to call the cops. Go ahead,I said, I don't give a shit. Well I didn'tthink that they'd really call the copsbut they did and two cops came, andone of them kicked me, and the otherone tied my hands behind my backand before you knew it, I was back inthe hole...

And then Meinhof-the-journalistdiscovers the psychic mobility offiction. She flips. She empathizes,starts to speak from the position of

the girls:

Girls end up in Eichenhof becausethere's no one to look after them. Tohave no one: that means there's nobread and butter waiting for you when

you come home from work, you haveto fix it yourself. And so you walkaround the streets, you spend a littlemoney, you don't sleep at night, butabove all it means having no one toturn to except yourself.

As a working journalist andintellectual, Meinhof felt a certainempathy but had no direct emotionalconnection to what frightened andseduced her most about these girls:the absence of ambition, the lack of

plans, the floating state of being lostand insignificant. Unlike hercontemporary Alexander Kluge, whoanthropologized the troubled teenager"Anita G." in his acclaimed movieYesterday's Girl, Meinhof was willingto think about the distance thatseparated herself and her youngsubjects as a subject. Yet still, theywere worlds apart.

Could Meinhofs entry into "armed

struggle" really be a war of language?Direct action as escape from the self-conscious claustrophobia of arrogant,objectifying discourse. One year latershe was friends with Gudrun Esselin, amember of the RAF, mastermindingAndreas Baader's escape from TegelPrison. Here is the text of thecommuniqu she wrote following theirescape:

Our action of May 14 was exemplarybecause anti-imperialist struggle

deals with the liberation of prisonersfrom prison, which the system hasalways signified for all exploited andoppressed groups of the people. Fromthe imprisonment of total alienationand self-alienation; from political andexistential martial law, in which thepeople are forced to live within thegrip of imperialism, consumer cultureand the controlling apparatuses of theruling class.

Direct Action as a means of escaping

fate. As every act of terrorism must

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be, the raid on the Social Institute was"exemplary": a metaphor explodingfrom the margins onto a much largerscreen. Yet Meinhof herself still livedwithin the confines of discursive

language. It was not 'til six years later,when she was incarcerated in amaximum security cell in StammheimPrison, that she herself became"exemplary." That she became anAlien, i.e., someone who had changed.

Writing in a secret diary some weeksbefore her murder-suicide, she wasspeaking in the same stark cadencesshe'd once transcribed among thegirls of Eichenhof:

Feeling your head exploding. Feelingyour brain on the point of bursting tobits. Feeling your spine jammed upinto your brain and feeling your brainlike a dried fruit. Feeling continuouslyand unconsciously and like an electricwire. Feeling as if they've stolen theassociations of your ideas. Feelingyour cells move. You open your eyes.The cells move.

At 42, she'd finally come to occupy

the same sensate psychic space,she'd once longingly observed amongincarcerated teenage girls.