Of Non-places and Heterotopias

Of Non-places and Heterotopias:
The Mise-en-Scène of Death and Terror(ism) in Antigone and the German ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1977

By Emily Babette 

In this essay, I will attempt to compare and contrast the ‘mise-en-scène’ of the play Antigone (specifically Sophocles’ version, although the Bertolt Brecht and Friedrich Hölderlin version would work as well) with the historical events undertaken by the urban terrorist group the Red Army Faction (the RAF) in the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1977 in Germany. In addition to real-life events of the RAF, I explore the film Germany in Autumn directed by Alexander Kluge, and two distinct bodies of artwork which were made in response to the actions and demise of the RAF. I use these responsive works to further my investigation of the mise-en-scènes found throughout all of them. These bodies of work are October 18, 1977 by Gerhard Richter and I am Ulrike Meinhof or (someone once told me time if a flat circle) by Daniel Joseph Martinez.

To begin with, I am using the theatrical term ‘mise-en-scène’, which is the term used by dramatists when describing the physical elements of the scene in a stage play. The mise-en- scène can be thought of as the elements of the play that create the environment, including stage set, props, costumes, lighting, etc. In other words, the mise-en-scène is the space in which events takes place in conjunction with the actors physical alterations which transform them from ‘an actor’ into their particular characters. In this essay I will compare the mise-en- scène of Antigone, the members of RAF and the artworks of Gerhard Richter and Daniel Joseph Martinez. I will continue to use theatrical terms throughout the essay as a strategy to heighten the connection of all material discussed.

The character of Antigone and the members of the RAF share a similar nature in that they exist as unfathomable ‘others’. In contrast to their respective milieus their actions are inexplicable and irrational, especially if rationality is paired up with a survival instinct. This makes them anomalies in their situation, and due to this they are considered much more dangerous to the authority and homogeneity of their respective societies. These similarities make the two disparate occasions, one fictional (set in ancient Greece) and one historical (set in post-war 20th century Germany), interesting to compare and contrast.1

Setting the Scene of Terror(ism)

We can start by thinking about the mise-en-scène of the theatrical stage production of Antigone. The location of tension and terror occurs in a ‘non-place’2—a vanquished space of movement, detachment and alienation. As the stage note in the Sophocles3 version of Antigone describes the setting occurs: “Outside the royal palace of Thebes. The scene shows the façade of the palace, which has a large central door. The time is just before dawn...” A worthy example of this vanquished space can be seen both in the Schlöndorff/Böll segment of Germany in Autumn, and more recently in the 2018 rendition of the play by the Classical Theatre of Harlem in Marcus Garvey Park, NY, in which: “The stage’s setting is decidedly a dystopia, though one not far from our own day and age. The brutalist concrete building that provides the backdrop could easily be a government office in any major metropolitan area.”4

Throughout the multiple renditions of Antigone, written by Sophocles, but also Bertolt Brecht and Friedrich Hölderlin, the constant similarity is that there is no domestic or habitable space at all throughout the play (save for Brecht’s experimental parallel scene of sisters returning to their home after being in a bomb shelter during World War II). The courtyard where Kreon, Antigone, the chorus, and all the other supporting characters that interact with each other, stands just beyond the doors of the royal palace in Thebes. In the ancient world this would perhaps been a place of meeting, traversing, and communicating with the authorities. Thus it serves a purpose as a place of transaction and movement.

The non-place acts as a common denominator between Antigone, the events which took place during the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1977 in Germany, and the ways in which those events were depicted in Alexander Kluge’s film Germany in Autumn from 1978. German film historian Thomas Elsaesser, when talking about the RAF and the Kluge film, states that “To search out the sites where the RAF kidnapped their victims, found their safe houses or clashed with the police is thus to inspect a strangely familiar and yet dislocated topography...their ubiquity, proximity and simultaneous ‘underground’ existence also owed much to the way they occupied and made use of those sites which Marc Augé has called...’non-spaces’: motorway off-ramps,suburban tramway crossings, industrial estate wastelands, the sprawl of housing conglomerations.”5

In the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1977, the RAF undertook terrorist operations in places akin to Kreon’s Theban palace-courtyard including city streets, department stores, and motorway and “industrial estate wastelands”6. These scenes of terrorism are amplified by the fact that they occurred in public areas where many anonymous individuals traverse unknowingly very often and thus could have been the accidental target of these violent acts. Furthermore, these streets and ‘non-places’ hold historical memory that is not subjective but collective, and so when incidences to this magnitude occur, they affect the collective imagination of an entire city or country. As Professor Juli Carson says in her essay Beirut Lab: 1975(2020) “traumatic historical events tend to appear, disappear and reappear in any single contemporary moment. In tandem, this entails a projection of any given current moment as an anterior future moment —this will have been—as a means of sublimating historical trauma into political agency if not ideological efficacy.”7

In the film Germany in Autumn, these sites are explored through the collection of film segments that were commissioned and edited together by the German philosopher and director Alexander Kluge. In the film—in addition to scenes located in ‘non-places’—there was also an emphasis on what philosopher Michel Foucault would call heterotopias—places that have limited access, serve a purpose and change with time/need.8 Foucault imbeds time as a main principle of heterotopias, stating that “[they] are most often linked to slices in time—which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of break with their traditional time.”9

The main heterotopia depicted in in Germany in Autumn was the cemetery. The film begins with the funeral of Hans Martin Schleyer and ends with the burial of three of the RAF members: Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe. Hans Martin Schleyer was a successful businessman who used to be a member of the SS during World War II. He was kidnapped and killed by the RAF. Similar to non-places, cemeteries are not places for the living to spend long amounts of time in. However they do differ to non-places in some fundamental ways.

Cemeteries are not for traversing through and they do hold history and memory, even if it is in the form of the final resting place for deceased loved ones. Thus, cemeteries straddle both definitions of non-places and heterotopias in interesting ways.10 They are really more for the living than the dead, as the dead have no consciousness or ability to acknowledge the places to which they are assigned to lay post-life, in “her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay...”11 When talking about the importance of cemeteries, Foucault points out that “...it is in a time when civilization has become “atheistic,”...that western culture has established what is termed the cult of the dead...from the moment when people are no longer sure they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language.”12

Interestingly, in the play Antigone, graves and tombs are also a key point of tension in the narrative of the play. Antigone attempts to make an impromptu grave for her brother Polyneices, who is killed in battle by the hands of her other brother Eteocles. She attempts this act by pouring dust over Polyneices body where he lays slain. Despite Polyneices being announced a traitor—who shall go unmourned and unburied—by her uncle Kreon, Antigone rebels against these orders. She does so because in her mind Polyneices is an irreplaceable member of her kin, and someone whom she has primary allegiance to. Additionally this way the vultures and dogs would not eat and destroy Polyneices body, thus giving him a chance to claim his place in the underworld. As the translator of Sophocles’ Antigone Ruby Blondell explains “The rituals of burials were enormously important in the Greek world.”13

Additionally, the only other location where action takes place in Antigone is the tomb where Antigone is taken to die as punishment for defying the order of Kreon to leave the body of Polyneices unburied. It ends up being the site for multiple deaths including Haemon, her fiancé, who kills himself after he discovers the body of Antigone hanging from her robes. Even though this significant event occurs in the narrative of the play, Antigone’s journey14 to her final resting place happens off-stage and in the imagination of the audience. This imagined tomb echos the prison cells in which the members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe and Ulrike Meinhof are killed by alleged suicide in similar fashion to Antigone herself.

Thus the RAF’s actions take place in non-places, but once they are caught, they are taken to the Foucaultian heterotopic place of a jail cell and eventually a cemetery. Foucault would define prison cells heterotopias as “the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else to else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures.”15

These non-places and heterotopias act as the setting for the general aporia rampant in the consolation of narratives of the play Antigone, the actions undertaken by the RAF, and the conflict depicted in Germany in Autumn. Accordingly Michel Foucault states that “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theatre brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another...”16

There is one strong scene of opposition to these spaces, and that is the space of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “melodramatic” segment in Germany in Autumn, which takes place in his cramped and dismal Munich apartment. Although this place is technically a domestic space, it has nothing in the way of comfort to indicate a functionally lived-in environment. It is impersonal and depressing, and is much more like Antigone’s Tomb or the RAF’s prison cells rather than a home. Fassbinder also shows more outward emotion than seen anywhere else in Antigone or the rest of Germany in Autumn.

As Joan Copjec describes in her discussion of absorption and melodrama, “...melodrama employs methods not of theatricality, but of absorption to involve us in its world...melodrama displays a clear recognition and dissatisfaction with the way things actually are and a longing for something else, for some ‘should be’ that remains inchoate.”17 Thus Fassbinder is a wreck in his apartment, antagonizing his lover and mother as he over consumes alcohol and narcotics as a way to calm his nerves. Thomas Elsaesser describes the mise-en-scène saying that “[this] episode shows Fassbinder, alternately naked and wrapped in an untidy bathrobe, restless and sweating, in his sombre Munich apartment”18

Non-places and Heterotopia’s in Art: Gerhard Richter and Daniel Joseph Martinez

In the series of fifteen paintings by Gerhard Richter called October 18, 1977 he attempts to create “nonpolitical, narrative image[s]”19 by distorting the spacial content of the photographs that were used as reference for his paintings. This series of paintings depicts the RAF members in various stages of their life (particularly Ulrike Meinhof who he paints as a youth in Youth Portrait, through to images of her dead body), arrest and demise by alleged suicide. He paints the series in monochromatic grays, similar to the gray of newspaper photographs. The entire series is hazy and blurred creating an ambiguous gray space, literally and metaphorically. This ambiguous space is a deliberate decision by Richter to indicate his suspicion of the phenomena when images and words are connected to each other in the media, and how they are used synchronously for political persuasion.20

The only somewhat recognizable locations in the paintings are a jail cell and cemetery. As just discussed, these sites are what Michel Foucault would call heterotopias. In the case of the paintings, these heterotopias are on the fraught side of the spectrum, being locations that none of the members of the RAF would have hoped to end up in. The are “heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed”21 They are places that are only made historically notable due to the actions that the RAF took prior to ending up in those places. As Juli Caron explains “...the space of an artwork’s production and, concomitantly, the type of historical consciousness it seeks to arouse, is inextricably bound up with the producer’s own temporal situatedness.”22 In this way Gerhard Richter’s own biography as “one of the central painters in postwar Germany”23matters when looking at and situating the work.

Daniel Joseph Martinez took Richter’s project a step further in his series of eleven black and white photographs called I am Ulrike Meinhof or (someone once told me time is a flat circle). Each photograph displays a self portrait of Martinez himself in a barren location in and around the city of Berlin. He is a lone figure in the photographs, and holding a banner with a photograph of Ulrike Meinhof in her various stages or life and death. The way he stands in the photographs is similar to the way a protester stands in a march and props up a sign of dissidence. The photographs used by Martinez are the same photographs used by Gerhard Richter in the painting series just mentioned.

The sites depicted in the photographs of Martinez are much more clearly indicated than those in the Richter paintings, as they are real physical points along which the Berlin Wall used to be erected before its fall in 1989. Along these sites Martinez “strikes a pose,” simultaneously existing as a loner traveller, activist and artist.24 The location of Martinez’s photographs are significant as it used to be a border—and a site of extreme tension—between East and West Berlin.

As the German Philosopher Hannah Arendt says, “...the world we live in at any moment is the world of the past; it consists of the monuments and relics of what has been done by men for better or for worse; its facts are always what has become.”25 This explains the attempt to remove the relics of the past which signifies unpleasantries or cruelty done in a nation’s recent history. Furthermore this urge for erasure is the impetus for Martinez’s use of the chosen location (and absence) of the Berlin Wall, which Martinez choses to highlight in his photographic project I am Ulrike Meinhof. By implicating himself as Ulrike Meinhof, he is acknowledging that “Time truly is a flat circle...when various state crimes, violent and nonviolent, are called upon as a means of resisting a fascist leader’s perpetual declaration of unjust laws upon his citizens.”26

The mise-en-scène of these works carry the common denominator of representations of non- places and heterotopias—mainly places of movement, travel or incarceration as opposed to places of living or inhabiting. Time and language also serve as notable characteristics. Carson’s ‘flat circle,’ implies that historical time blatantly impacts and informs the events of the current moment and future moments. Time has a way of repeating itself in ways that create noticeable archetypes, for example that of the ‘Antigone Effect.’27 Furthermore, in the words of Michel Foucault “We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.”28

To conclude, I would like to extend my metaphorical dramaturgical analysis of the above by including a review on the use of a ‘script’—i.e. language. Language is the medium in which knowledge of historical events and mythologies are passed down from one generation to the next. On tomb stones, the most important part is the language carved into them which describes who is laying beneath the ground, or in the urn, and how long they were alive. The tombstones often also include hints at who they were in life and who will miss them.

In the play Antigone, language (though speech acts) is what turns Antigone from potentially forgivable doer of misdeeds, into wretched traitor doomed to death. Additionally language was an important instigator and catalyst for the RAF. Ulrike Meinhof and journalist (and 1972 Nobel Prize laureate in literature) Heinrich Böll utilized language as a medium of adjacent communication throughout Meinhof’s imprisonment29, and leading up to her death. But how much can we trust in language? As Gerhard Richter said in an 1990 interview “Almost everything is prompted, forbidden or authorized by words, explained, transfigured, or falsified by words. So we ought to be skeptical and not forget that there’s another, highly important kind of experience. Whatever we experience nonverbally—by sight, touch, hearing or whatever— gives us certainty or a knowledge that can lead to better actions and decisions than any theory.”30 It was this “certainty”, fervently felt yet quite unexplainable by words, which created Antigone and the members of the RAF, caused them to complete their fatal acts, and lead to their ultimate demise—for better or for worse. The final judgement is for you to decide.

Notes

1 As an interesting source of comparative analysis, I found it illuminating to incorporate a reading of Marc Augé’s book Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity alongside the other readings/artworks discussed in this essay. Augé introduces the idea of an “anthropological other” in the first chapter to his book. He states “...whatever the level at which anthropological research is applied, it’s object is to interpret the interpretation others make of the category of other on the different levels that define it’s place and impose the need for it: ethnic group, tribe, village, lineage, right down to the elementary particle of kinship, which is known to subject the identity of the bloodline to the need for alliance; and finally the individual, defined by all ritual systems as a composite steeped in otherness, a figure who is literally unthinkable..” (My emphasis, Marc Augé, Non-places, P.23). That “unthinkable other” is how I interpret both Antigone and the members of the RAF.

2 Marc Augé defines non-place as a location which is fundamentally in contrast to what he defines as anthropological place. Anthropological places are “...places whose analysis has meaning because they have been invested with meaning, the need for which is endorsed and confirmed by every new circuit and every ritual reiteration.” (Augé, P. 52). Whereas non-places “...[designate] two complementary but distinct realities: space formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these spaces... As anthropological places create the organically social, so non-places create solitary contractuality.” (Augé, P.94)

3 Sophocles, and Ruby Blondell. Sophocles' Antigone: with Introduction, Translation and Essay. Focus Pub./R Pullins, 1998.

4Lorissa, and Ty Jones says: “Antigone Continues to Matter in Marcus Garvey Park.” Lorissa Rinehart, 20 July 2018, lorissarinehart.com/2018/07/19/a-new-take-on-antigone/.

5 Elsaesser, Thomas. “Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerilla or Guerilla Urbanism? The Red Army Faction, Germany in Autumn and Death Game.” Giving Ground: the Politics of Propinquity, edited by Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin, Verso, 1999, pp. 267–301.

6 Ibid.

7 Carson, Juli. “Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020) or again, rubbed smooth, a moment in time__caesura, P.4

For Marc Augé, time is a main component (along with individual ego and excess of space) in what he has coined “supermodernity.” In supermodernity there is an “excess of time” due to “...the acceleration of history. We barely have time to reach maturity before our past has become history, our individual histories belonging to history writ large.” (Augé, P.26)

8 Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, p. 22., doi:10.2307/464648.

9 Ibid.

10 Marc Augé actually makes reference to Foucault’s idea of heterotopias. When talking about the city of Paris, he quotes Sylviane Agacinski who says of this city: “The paradox of the seat of this abstract, universal—and perhaps not simply bourgeois—humanity...is that it is also a non-place, a nowhere, something like what Michel Foucault—who did not envisage it as including the town—called aheterotopia.” (Augé, P.112)

11 Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, doi:10.2307/464648. 

12 Ibid.

13 Sophocles, and Ruby Blondell. Sophocles' Antigone: with Introduction, Translation and Essay. Focus Pub./R Pullins, 1998. Page 20.

14 Marc Augé says “The traveller’s space may thus be the archetype of non-place.” (Augé, P. 86)

15 Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, p. 22., doi:10.2307/464648..

16 Ibid.

17 “The Invention of Crying and the Antitheatrics of the Act.” Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and

Sublimation, by Joan Copjec, MIT, 2002, pp. 108–131.

18 Elsaesser, Thomas. “Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerilla or Guerilla Urbanism? The Red Army Faction, Germany in Autumn and Death Game.” Giving Ground: the Politics of Propinquity, edited by Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin, Verso, 1999, pp. 267–301.

19 Schwabsky, Barry. “Daniel Joseph Martinez's Blunt Statements.” The Nation, 22 Feb. 2018, www.thenation.com/article/archive/daniel-joseph-martinezs-blunt-statements/.

20 Ibid.

21 Foucault, Michel, “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, doi:10.2307/464648

22 Carson, Juli. “Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020) or again, rubbed smooth, a moment in time__caesura.

23 Crawford, Karin L. “Gender and Terror in Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977 and Don DeLillo's ‘Baader-Meinhof.’” New German Critique, vol. 36, no. 2, 2009, pp. 207–230., doi:10.1215/0094033x-2009-006.

24 Marc Augé, once again, brings to the table a thought that is remarkably appropriate to this discussion, this time in regards to the work of Daniel Joseph Martinez. He says that “...movement adds that particular experience of a form of solitude and, in the literal sense, of ‘taking up a position’: the experience of someone who, confronted with a landscape he ought to contemplate, cannot avoid contemplating, ‘strikes the pose’ and derives from his awareness of this attitude a rare and sometimes melancholy pleasure. This it is not surprising that it is among solitary ‘travellers’...that we are most likely to find prophetic evocations of spaces in which neither identity, nor relations, nor history really makes sense...” (Augé, P.87)

25 Carson quoting Hannah Arendt: Carson, Juli. “Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020) or again, rubbed smooth, a moment in time__caesura.

26 Caron, Juli. “The Antigone Effect: Thresholds of Resistance in Four Acts, Act One: How are we not all Baader-Meinhof? (When words fail)

27 Ibid.

28 Foucault, Michel, “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, doi:10.2307/464648

29 For more about the communication between Böll and Meinhof, and the reactions of the German media, see: Caron, Juli. “The Antigone Effect: Thresholds of Resistance in Four Acts, Act One: How are we not all Baader-Meinhof? (When words fail)

30 Crawford, Karin L. “Gender and Terror in Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977 and Don DeLillo's ‘Baader-Meinhof.’” New German Critique, vol. 36, no. 2, 2009, pp. 207–230., doi:10.1215/0094033x-2009-006.