Danièle Huillet’s death signifies the end of a collaboration. »A small cine-tract remains, ›Europa 2005, 27 Octobre‹, part of a project to commemorate Rossellini’s ›Europa 1951‹, about two kids, who on this day last year met their death in an electrical sub-station while fleeing from the police.« As stated in the cited »Süddeutsche Zeitung«, Danièle Huillet’s partner Jean-Marie Straub does not want to continue without his collaborator. When he, puffing away at his cigars, would wax lyrical, she would bring the situation back down to the facts of material reality. Danièle Huillet tended to stand or crouch during a dry-run at the edge of the scene and to render the dramaturgy more precise. For »Klassenverhältnisse« (»Class Relations«) the »immerzu, Immer-Zu« (»keep on keeping on«) was practiced with pedantic precision. Repeatedly. Strictly. With clarity.

I write from memory. Whilst it does mislead, it at the same time supports the impression, the habitual, the filmic moment and the stringent slogans. »Not reconciled« for example. »Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt wo Gewalt herrscht« (»Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules«) was the title of an early film. »Moses und Aron« (»Moses und Aaron«) (1974) is in contrast dedicated to the filmmaker Holger Meins, hunger strike victim of the Rote Armee Fraktion. That gave a sense of direction to school days somewhere between ’68, the German Autumn and Discourse Pop. And indeed the era of The Pop Group, who, pre-pop, put up resistance to the murderous world right until the very last note died away, if one wanted to put it in bathetic terms. The fury of the poetic prophet.

Huillet/Straub’s low-lying R4 with its Rome number plate was parked next to the Zoo-Palast cinema. The Berlin Gedächtniskirche (Memorial Church) across the road had neither been demolished nor rebuilt as a reconstruction, but instead the ruined shell has been stabilised as a reminder of war. When the car drove off, the axis of the R4 almost gave up the ghost due to the Bordstein. Just imagine: »Der Tod des Empedokles oder Wenn dann der Erde Grün von Neuem euch erglänzt« (»The Death of Empedocles«), in the Competition Section of the 1987 Berlin Film Festival, on the gigantic screen in the Zoo-Palast. Back then Manfred Hermes wrote a hymn of praise in »Spex« to the movement of the trees. Was it really like that? Nowadays at least a good mood is the trump card in the Berlinale-Palast, purpose-built for industrially manufactured musicals in DaimlerChrysler-City at Potsdamer Platz.

Not reconciled with the state, business, society. However possible, even at the cost of one’s standard of living, which in the case of Huillet/Straub was always around subsistence level. Avoiding comfort meant being able to bear loneliness and animosity. Searching for support in history, in the paltry music and refractory texts, the work of the couple, who had collaborated since 1954, offered up resistance to West Germany as the successor establishment to the National Socialist state. The two of them – actually French-born – referred constantly to this Germany. What did they actually say about the GDR?

Antifascism was certainly present in West Germany’s secondary schools and cultural programmes. Huillet/Straub’s films were also of course still shown on television – at least on the cultural channel – and in the cinema. Now colleague Harun Farocki produces for art institutions in order to be able to work. In 1983 he played Delamarche in Huillet/Straub’s film adaptation of Kafka, »Class Relations« and in the breaks shot »Jean-Marie Straub und Danièle Huillet bei der Arbeit an einem Film nach Franz Kafkas Romanfragment ›Amerika‹«. (»Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at work on a film based on Franz Kafka’s novel fragment ›America‹«). In this work the rehearsal is followed with great precision. And that means: the act of speaking to the point of exhaustion. One of the couple’s assistants told me about the precision with which the camera was set up.

In 1991 Huillet/Straub moved into the theatre. It was located in a former cinema in the furthest reaches of West Berlin. The staging served to fund their »Antigone des Sophokles nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung für die Bühne bearbeitet von Brecht 1948« (»Sophocles’ Antigone in Hölderlin’s translation adapted for the stage by Brecht in 1948«), which they subsequently transposed into filmic form in Sicily in an ancient amphitheatre. A procedure they adopted on many occasions.

In 1991 my grandmother came to Berlin on a visit. We also went on a trip to the »former GDR«, where according to my grandmother »there’s still a lot of work to be done«. Those are the notions of the generation that experienced reconstruction. Everything has to be »normal« and to be made harmonious. After a day trip we wanted to take my grandmother to her small hotel and then go to the theatre. »Antigone« was showing in the Schaubühne theatre in the Cuvrystraße. We had already seen the rehearsals in the former Kreuzberg cinema – now diagonally across from Universal und MTVIVA, it houses the Lido Britpop club.
»Sophokles / Viele versuchen umsonst das Freudige freudig zu sagen / Hier spricht endlich es mir, hier in der Trauer sich aus« (»Sophocles / Many seek in vain to speak the joyous joyfully/ Here at last it expresses itself to me in mourning «), as Friedrich Hölderlin was cited on the back of the programme for the »Antigone« production. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet are in charge of direction and production design. Unusually for the Schaubühne, there’s no acknowledgment under the dramaturgy heading. All it says there is that Straub took charge of »selection of texts«.

Now, my grandmother, who must have been 85 in those days, didn’t want to go to bed or to spend the evening on her own. But the theatre, ah yes, she felt like coming along. Yet weren’t her ticket to the Mainz Stadttheater and her sense of aesthetics, acquired during her evening TV sessions, as well as her failing hearing, all factors that really argued against the idea of taking her to see a work by Huillet/Straub?

In opposing the reconstruction of the Federal Republic and its shattered bourgeois culture, the filmmakers had put their bets on excavating poetry that had undergone a real hammering. »The rapid decay of the tools of art under the Nazi regime apparently occurred imperceptibly. The damage done to theatre buildings is now much more noticeable than the damage done to acting styles«, as Huillet/Straub cited Brecht’s notes. Immediately after returning from exile in the USA – in 1948 he was summoned to the »Committee on Un-American Activities« –, Brecht staged the world premiere of the play in the Stadttheater Chur in Switzerland. It played to small audiences.

Somehow we managed to squeeze into the performance as the last audience members. Gretel sat right at the front, in other words on the same level as the actors in the sparsely decorated stage area. After the ninety minutes of the performance she was enthusiastic: she said she had understood everything. »There should not be any ›passion‹ before or underlying speech and actions«, as Brecht is cited in the programme. The clear cadences of the staging suited my grandmother, who died six years before Danièle Huillet. I think that they wouldn’t have got along outside of the theatre.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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