“The violence elsewhere is battering on the door”:

27 September 2020

Lizzie Stewart (Lecturer in Modern Languages, King's College London), Benedict Schofield (Reader in German, King's College London), and Beni Atanasov (Undergraduate Research Fellow, King's College London ). Zoom July 2020.

Lizzie: This conversation takes place in the context of a King’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship (KURF) focusing on the work of Austrian-born, Berlin-based writer Kathrin Röggla. In this conversation, we wanted to explore some of the ways in which Röggla and her work help us think about the ways in which the German relationship to violence elsewhere is reflected, imagined, recreated or co-created in the literary sphere. Beni, you have been working on Kathrin Röggla as part of your UG research fellowship. Can you start by telling us what drew you to Röggla as an author?

Beni: I spent the penultimate year of my course at the Goethe University in Frankfurt as an exchange student and this is where I first encountered Röggla’s work when I had to prepare a seminar on her book really ground zero. I was mostly fascinated by her writing style and excited by her language. Röggla tends to repeat small bits of her sentences two or three times in the sentences that follow. In the context of really ground zero, I would say this mirrors the ubiquity of the terrorist attacks all over the media during the days and weeks that followed. In terms of talking about violence, it is the way she structured her book that I found particularly interesting. For example, that fact that she does not really contextualise 9/11 as an event. She does not look into the causes of 9/11, does not say much about the event per se, so whoever reads the book is already supposed to know what 9/11 was, what happens on that day. She starts her book by telling the reader “so now I have a life. a real life” (“jetzt also habe ich ein leben. ein wirkliches.” p. 6). So, all the violence and devastation experienced on that day seem to have had a significant impact on her and her perception of the US, New York and of the American people.

Lizzie: Yes, so the full title is really ground zero. 11. september und folgendes (really ground zero: the 11th of September and the following). For people who have not read the text, it is a semi-literary 9/11 diary. Röggla happened to be an invited writer in New York at the time of the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11th, and she ended up writing these blog posts almost as an accidental German or Austrian foreign correspondent in New York for the tageszeitung (a national paper), the Berlin-based Tagesspiegel and the Vienna-based Falter. Then she also produces them as a book. One thing I find really interesting in the context of the “Violence Elsewhere” project is how she plays with physical and temporal distance and proximity in the title – really ground zero. Writing in German, and so for a distant audience, the text seems to respond to the desire for an eyewitness account of this event: the desire to draw close to it, to work it out, to know more about it. At the same time, that use of English in the title emphasizes the physical and cultural distance of the German reader to the context Röggla is reporting from. And there is an element of authorial distance to the promise the title makes in the very choice of phrasing: the almost breathless use of ‘really’. Within the text she talks about the hyperbole around that term really Ground Zero in some of the media reporting at the time, so it both gives us that promise of closeness, understanding and witness, and then refuses to fulfill it at the same time, drawing our attention to the desire for that instead.

Language in really ground zero

Beni: Despite the fact that she witnessed the devastation and pain caused by the loss of human life, her protagonist maintains the degree of emotional distance from the American people. At the same time, Röggla, through her harsh critique of the US media for its incompetence and government for its plans to invade Afghanistan, brings her readers to an ever-closer proximity to NYC as the narrative unfolds.

Lizzie: This idea of distance and closeness is really key for thinking about the German relationship to violence outside of German borders. Can you say more about this emotional distance? What creates that and where does it come from?

Beni: The protagonist in Röggla’s book does not show any empathy with the American people and almost resembles a ghost-like figure. She walks on the streets and talks to other people, and she never really asks them about their feelings and opinions. She takes on the role of a reporter, but at the same time this positions her as a different type of witness to the other reporters on the scene. There was one episode within the book, for example, where she herself is approached by a journalist who asks her if she has lost anybody, a relative or a friend, and when she says no, the journalist simply walks away. So, while this looks more caring, or like greater empathetic engagement, we see that he does not care for her and if she had actually lost anybody, because he is not concerned with the feelings of the people. He is only looking for drama, for tragic stories which, to put it exaggeratedly, can be marketed well and present personal suffering well in the media.

Lizzie: So, we might say that the narrative distance is not only mirroring the traditional pose of the objective reporter but also reacting to the contemporary trend within reporting by trying to avoid that emotional overinvestment in the individual story or in the drama of the moment. Because the narrator is very interested in how the emotional impact of the attack helps drive the push to war, which is another element that we have not really talked about very much yet. That is one of the key things that the book ends up tracking here: the US drive to war, which also is, or will become, a further act of violence “elsewhere” from the German perspective.

Ben: Yes, there is a documentary impulse, and linguistically, it is also similar to other works by Röggla in that there is something that pushes you beyond that. What is interesting is this resistance to overt emotionalisation, which potentially also has a political impulse itself, right? It is a way of bringing us closer to the tragedy in the catastrophe, but such emotional closeness is also something that can then easily be immediately instrumentalised for political causes. We have Röggla, we have her own positionality, but also the protagonist. Then we also have these multiple distancing devices, which we always grapple with as scholars, but which become even more freighted when the language that we use to talk about these things can both bring us close, but bringing us close can also lead us on to actions that perhaps you do not want to sanction. There is this constant act of appropriation, and it is the language there that is the vehicle and the power for both making that happen, but also the power for resistance. It strikes me as inherently political in its linguistic act.

Beni: Röggla’s writing has indeed always been deeply political. In really ground zero, she is highly critical of the “war on terror” and narrates her encounters with three left-wing intellectuals – Eliot Weinberger, Premilla Dixit and Norman Solomon – all of them prominent anti-war activists. Röggla meets them personally, speaks to them and brings their anti-war agenda to the fore. Is this too one-sided? Does she also partly replicate the work of the media, i.e. this process of selection where you only pick the bits and pieces that suit your own narrative and ignore the rest?

Lizzie: She does have other narratives in there. She has transcripts of the House of Representatives debating and what is really interesting there is she marks which speaker is a Democrat and which speaker is Republican. This is vital because in that moment you cannot tell from the discourse which speakers are from which party: regardless of political affiliation, at that point in time representatives of both main parties are saying the same thing about 9/11. Reproducing this in the literary sphere, marking it up and estranging it by moving the transcripts into a different media for consumption becomes a way of identifying that discourse as hegemonic, and of using the literary sphere to counter or interrupt that hegemony.

Ben: Röggla seems to be interested in the way in which discourse which should be ideologically freighted, and which should be precisely that space for debate, has collapsed in on itself and is not doing that work. She is drawing our attention to those processes incredibly insistently. This then comes down to something very crucial about when authors engage with political activities – the competing demands that are then placed on them. Are they there to arbitrate between two different positions? Should they literally include the plurality of voices, or are they using their authorship to authorise just one specific area? With Röggla, you know it might be that at times she seems to take up very specific stances and authorise very specific political actions, but this focus on language still seems to be the really crucial thing because she encodes her linguistic scepticism in all of that. Our colleague at King’s, Áine McMurty, has written a lot about how Röggla sits in an Austrian tradition of using linguistic scepticism to think about culpability and to advocate against dominant, often more right-wing, hegemonic practices, but in a way that also uncovers the power structures that you are engaging with to do that.

Violence Elsewhere – Looking Elsewhere in Röggla’s Work

Lizzie: We have seen that there is a really clear relationship between Röggla’s really ground zero and the ideas we aim to explore on the “Violence Elsewhere” project. There are also points where Germany turns up in the text in interesting ways, that we could also explore further with more time. One chapter, for example, discusses the circulation of the image of Mohammed Atta, one of the perpetrators of 9/11, in the American press and the speculation that goes on about what his experience in Germany was. But then there are also unexpected connections. There is a chapter called “die vergleiche hinken und wir ihnen nach” (“the comparisons fail and so do we”), which documents American colleagues of Röggla’s making comparisons between the atmosphere in New York at that moment in time and the atmosphere in Germany in the 1970s: a time when the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF or Red Army Faction) was carrying out terror attacks in the FRG. So, there is perhaps an unexpected mirroring back to Germany there that disrupts an easier equation of ‘safety here’ and ‘violence elsewhere’ which the German-language audience could otherwise slip into. At the same time, it almost reads as an attempt on the part of the American speakers to relocate terrorism away from their home territory into a location already associated in the US with a history of violence. Then you also have the inclusion of a dialogue from phone calls which the narrator makes back to Germany where you get snippets of what is going on in Germany politically as the European countries, and particularly the UK, also gear up to support the invasion of Afghanistan. So, there we see very concretely how both 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan (later to be followed by Iraq), are recognised very early on as instances of violence outside of Germany, which will come to affect German political life both at home and on the world stage.

One key question I have, though, is whether the relationship to the ideas we explore in the “Violence Elsewhere” project also extends beyond really ground zero to Röggla’s other work? How might it connect into those other big questions that she is better known for raising about, for example, life under global systems of capital?

Ben: In Nachtsendung. Unheimliche Geschichten, one of her most recent literary works, one of the final stories is called “Aktivbürger (weit entfernt)” [Active Citizen (at a great distance)] and this captures this notion of distance and proximity really closely. There is a classic Röggla linguistic game there in the title. It is about an engaged citizen travelling on a train and seeing a refugee camp outside the window and wondering to what extent that in itself should be his engagement in this crisis – because he is seeing, he is bearing witness, but he is also distanced and constantly passing by this place of violence that is happening now, not weit entfernt, right up close. But there are still these structures that distance us from these acts of violence.

A further example of this is the chapter called “G7”, which revolves around a translator – Röggla is often very interested in translator figures – who has had to be a simultaneous interpreter at a war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Here, Röggla questions what happens when this individual, this translator, is forced to inhabit the genocidal mindset of someone and vocalise that. So, the violence elsewhere is both presented – it is both coming back into a European context through the supranational institutions of the war crimes tribunal – but then it is also rendered linguistically and embodied by the character of this translator figure. That is something very typical that she has done in others of her works. She can also do it in a much more abstract way, but again, it tends to be through these supranational circulations of capital, of business or of these transnational institutions in which people then are confronted with the consequences of their actions in acts of violence elsewhere.

She is drawing our attention to those processes incredibly insistently and this is what she then definitely does elsewhere in her work, where she is also interested in violence elsewhere, but often in much more abstract senses. She is clearly very concerned about, for example, capitalism and the way in which capitalism generates flows of capital products, but also people and labour, which create sites of violence, death and genocide, and she draws these parallels. She is increasingly interested in the way in which these stories, that seem elsewhere, also increasingly encroach on the borders of Europe. Lots of people are concerned about the language we use to talk about these flows of refugees and the politicisation of that discourse. But the violence elsewhere is battering on the door and there is a tendency which Röggla is very able to identify it and look at it, and then that loops me back to what you have been talking about with really ground zero and the tension between the desire, on the one hand, to carry on with life, but also engage with the catastrophe of what has happened and the consequences of that catastrophe: how do you become an active, engaged citizen in that, and where is this relationship between distance and proximity?

There is also a series of stories called “Normalverdiener”, an almost Lord of the Flies-esque account of a week on a seemingly wonderful island, where the characters initially feel protected by the gloss of capitalism, by the swimming pools and the resort structure. But slowly, multiple moments of violence emerge, some named, some not. Sometimes it is an insurrection in a town, in other cases the European border wall being put up. No longer are the figures protected against these acts of violence, and then first the boats turn up with migrants, only to be replaced by the dead bodies washing up in their wake. So again, there is this constant desire to move from the big, abstract workings of these structures of capital right down to that individual body of either the interpreter or the body on the beach, and again there seems to be this linguistic scepticism that connects those.

For Röggla, there is no longer and there probably never has been any easy sense of ‘this’ happening ‘here’ (e.g. a protest in Berlin), and ‘that’ happening ‘over there’; there is this radical imbrication of these two things. Hence she also demonstrates a great deal of concern with flights and planes. 9/11 is not discussed in detail in Nachtsendung. But there are constant moments of take-off and landing of planes, and planes interacting with cityscapes – for example, planes threatening to crash into cityscapes and be sucked up by those cityscapes, but those cityscapes also breathing the planes back out. The direct disaster is thus averted, but I think her interest here is instead precisely in international travel and airports as places that seemed to promise us a transnational community, but obviously also function fundamentally as places of exclusion because of the privilege you need - financially, economically, in terms of visas and state-sponsored entities - to move through these spaces.

Lizzie: You were also talking about her political work as an author: a protest march as an act can be a way of connecting violence outside Germany to violence within Germany. And I know that you and Beni have been exploring not just Röggla’s writing, but her extra-literary activism, so how she uses her role as an author in the world.

Ben: Yes, sure. So, another part of the project that Beni and I have been working on is to try and map these processes, to map Röggla’s activism, and I suppose the idea has been to do what we have been doing in this conversation, which is a process of close reading of the literary artifacts, but also to combine that with a more distant reading: a mapping where she actively begins to advocate for specific causes within, but also beyond the literary text. In other words, where does Röggla undertake a kind of embodiment or performance of political activism? Of course, it is tricky: I think what Beni, you and I have been saying thus far is that political activism is not separate from the writing of authors. The writings themselves generate authorial capital, which enables authors to take stances on political issues. But I think Röggla is really interesting in this context, and I was drawn to her precisely because in her writing she expresses this kind of productive, political scepticism about the ability of affect change. At the same time, she is deeply committed to affecting change, and says we cannot hide everything in discourse. There is, she insists, always a way to act beyond the world of language too, even if language is one of the best ways to show how that world is constructed.