Lipstick Traces (44 page)

I had seen in him a man capable of driving his head through a brick wall in the service of an idea . . . In June of [1917], it became clear to myself, Franz Jung and Baader that the masses needed to be shaken from their stupor . . . I took Baader into the fields of Südende, and said to him: “All this is yours if you do as I tell you. The Bishop of Brunswick has failed to recognize you as Jesus Christ, and you have retaliated by defiling the altar in his church. This is no compensation. From today, you will be President of The Christ Society, Ltd., and recruit members. You must convince everyone that he too can be Christ, if he wants to, on payment of fifty marks to your society. Members of our society will no longer be subject to temporal authority and will be automatically unfit for military service. You will wear a purple robe . . .”

It was, at least from Hausmann’s side, a fully conscious recapitulation of the devil’s temptation of Christ. There were further plans: a great march through Berlin, where the cathedral would have been not disrupted, but stormed. The march never came off (“Funds were lacking,” Hausmann explained; what funds? the reader wonders). The world was denied the sight of Baader and a thousand others parading through the streets as saviors—or as Dada Death, Grosz’s sometime promenade costume, a long black cloak, a huge white death’s head mask, a costume that reappeared all over Germany in the 1980s, as students and punks, some explicit about their sources, paraded through the streets in protest against nuclear weapons.

Hausmann wanted to use Baader as a human battering ram. Though his schemes came to little, once in place Baader went his own way. Before catching the dada disease he was a promising architect, though it was not dada that caused his madness—dada simply rationalized it. Born in 1875 and much the oldest of his comrades, he died in 1956, penniless and forgotten, a sometime resident of asylums, an old man occasionally glimpsed on park benches, talking to himself—unlike almost all of the rest, who, living into the 1970s, went on to productive, honored lives after giving up the dada ghost. But though following his appearance in Berlin Cathedral Baader disappeared from history, which is to say from dada surveys and hagiographies, he achieved one more day of glory—almost unrecorded but even more perfectly ambiguous. Hausmann’s companion Vera Broido-Cohn told the story a half-century after the fact:

[In about 1930] Hitler was at the beginning of his [final ascendance]. One of the most curious symptoms that showed all was not right with Germany was the extraordinary number of people who thought they were Christ . . . Each one had his apostles and his disciples. They were so numerous that one day they decided to hold a Congress of Christs to find for themselves the true Christ among the imposters. As it was in the summer and in Thüringia

—in the Middle Ages a center of radical heresy, especially of the Free Spirit, and a focal point of religious mania ever since—

the Christs seemed to sprout like mushrooms. The meeting was organized in a large meadow near a town, and Baader did a fantastic thing. As he was [then] a journalist, Lufthansa had offered him a pass which enabled him to make whatever trip he wanted, free, if he went to an important rally in Germany. He called the company and asked them if he could be brought to Thüringia and set down in the middle of the meadow. It was accepted.

All of the people at the rally stood up and formed an enormous circle. Each Christ went to the middle, and behind him came all of his supporters. The spectators pushed from behind and then all eyes went up to see Baader descending from the sky. He landed, then went away. They saw his face, and were rendered speechless.

This was a convolution of farce, satire, practical joke, insanity, faith, alienation, and revolt; a convolution of the personal, the historical, the religious, the cultural, and the political that cannot be untangled. Baader’s appearance in Berlin Cathedral was the same. Because it could never be factored, which is why it could never be reported, the latter event found its place in almost every dada chronicle, and chroniclers gave it no more thought than they would have to any other meaningless prank. Decades later it was a good story. There is no reason to think that Michel Mourre or Serge Berna knew what Baader did, any more than there is reason to think that Baader, sitting on his park bench in 1950, read the news of what they did and then laughed, or cursed, or stared blankly through the pages without understanding a word. But Baader had charged history with a debt: the debt of the unsatisfied act. If the Notre-Dame four did not come close to settling it they surely brought it back into play—the debt, and all the history that came with it.

Dada was defined by its refusal to make predictions and by its refusal to be surprised. “Dada,” read a 1919 manifesto credited to Huelsenbeck, Hausmann, and Baader, “is the only savings bank that pays interest in eternity.” “Invest in Dada!”

dada is the secret black market . . . dada is not subordinate to the sovereignty of the inter-allied economic commission. Even the
Deutsche Tageszeitung
lives and dies with dada. If you wish to obey this summons, then go at night between 11 and 2 o’clock to the spot in the Siegesallee between Joachim the Lazy and Otto the Milksop and ask the policeman where the secret dada depot is. Then take a one-hundred-mark bill and paste it on the golden H of Hindenburg and shout three times, the first time piano, the second forte, and the third fortissimo: dada. Then the Kaiser (who does not, as claimed for tactical reasons, live in Amerongen but between Hindenburg’s feet) will climb through a trapdoor out of a secret passageway with an audible dada, dada, dada and give you our receipt. Be sure that “W.II” is followed not by “I.R.” but by “dada.” I.R. will not be honored by the savings bank. In addition you can transfer your balance to dada at any branch office of the Deutsche Bank, the Dresden Bank, the Darmstadter Bank and the Discountocompany. These four banks are called the “D” or dada-banks and the emperor of China and the emperor of Japan
and the new emperor Koltschak of Russia have their court-dada in every bank (they used to be called “Goldschitter,” but now they are called “dada”; one is standing on the left corner tower of Notre-Dame).

Dada floated high-risk bonds on the cheap. The price went up with the dada version of the word on the street, the exemplary act, but the bonds were odds on to be bad paper the next day. Dada paid off on the reversible connecting factor: all or nothing. You could get in on the action for a penny; to get out you had to pay in kind. You might come in out of contempt for history—then you’d fall in love with the idea that you could make it, because history had assumed a debt that had never been paid—because, save in apparently trivial, vanishing moments, the debt had been forgotten, and even the chits had been lost.

The chits had been signed by God. They said that, failing to make good on the promise of the Garden of Eden, of the Kingdom of God on earth, he would give men and women all his fixed assets: all the beasts of the field, all the birds of the air. The catch was that men and women were to be unfixed; as masters of creation they could never be masters of themselves. In the logic of those who understood Notre-Dame not as a momentary scandal but as a breach in stopped time, this meant that God was simply a debtor with a good lawyer: Jesus Christ, Esq.

Those chits not lost had been burned along with those who tried to redeem them. The gnostic revelation that God could be fully manifest in human beings, that human beings could be god, that earth could be heaven, that heaven could be fully manifest on earth, was driven underground. But there this revelation was placed under so much pressure that when it surfaced it could, to some, carry the power to transform a gesture into a sign, a joke into a bomb.

The power principle of the Brethren of the Free Spirit had never been completely suppressed. In the Middle Ages, it was the idea that the authority of the church could be collapsed by an intensification of the mysticism the church carried within itself. In the modern world, it was the idea that a tiny group like the Lettrist International could collapse secular authority by intensifying the mysticism secretly contained in the secular realm—a mysticism, now imprinted in commodities and representations, in money and in
art, that had been taken over from the church. In the early 1950s, this was the freedom to prove that society was only a construct and fate only a swindle, that a new world was no less likely than the old—that, given the right weather, the right light, the right words, the right actors, the right theater, all of social life, every institution and habit, might fall to ruin as swiftly and as finally as any empire celebrated in the history books.

The Brethren of the Free Spirit, Norman Cohn wrote in the book the situationists knew as
Fanatiques de l’apocalypse,

were not social revolutionaries and did not find their followers amongst the turbulent masses of the urban poor. They were in fact gnostics bent on their own individual salvation; but the gnosis at which they arrived was a quasi-mystical anarchism—an affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified that it amounted to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation. These people could be regarded as remote precursors of Bakunin and of Nietzsche—or rather of that bohemian intelligentsia which during the last half-century has been living from ideas once expressed by Bakunin and Nietzsche in their wilder moments. But extreme individualists of that kind can easily turn into social revolutionaries—and effective ones at that—if a potential revolutionary situation arises.

In October 1967, in
Internationale situationniste
no. 11, one could have found a blind quote from Cohn under a photo of a ratty storefront, the photo purposely miscaptioned “
ALLEGED MEETING PLACE OF THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATIONISTS IN PARIS
”:

It is characteristic of this kind of movement that its aims and premises are boundless . . . Whatever their individual histories, collectively these people formed a recognizable social stratum—a frustrated and rather low-grade intelligentsia . . . And what followed then was the formation of a group of a peculiar kind