The weak father is an experience that turns into a cipher. Heiner Müller deliberately misreads power relations when he declares his behavior during his father’s arrest — a four-year-old pretending to be asleep — to be betrayal. Men of the Sturmabteilung take the Social Democrat Kurt Müller from the apartment; son Heiner dates the incident, at his own discretion, to January 31, 1933. On that day the National Socialists shut down Weimar — monkey dead and goodbye — and the writer Müller authorizes himself to pour the symbolic charge of that date into his biography.

Others would have broken in his place. Even a Saxon shoemaker, who haunts Müller’s œuvre as a fading grandfather figure, breaks. Müller does not break.

And does he not betray his father a second time with his decision to choose the GDR as the stage for his permanent residence? In any case, there is an ambition to provide the most trivial explanations for the separation from his parents. In the new Germany, Kurt Müller — bent by the concentration camp — faces the threat of Hohenschönhausen. Müller is welcome in the GDR with his socialist hopes. He imagines himself among the ranks and on the side of the victors. He places too much trust in his state.

After the first performance of The Resettler Woman (Die Umsiedlerin) on September 30, 1961, at a student stage in Karlshorst, his stigmatization begins. Müller is expelled from the Writers’ Union. In the GDR he becomes an unperformed author — and remains one for twelve years.

*

“You can only really make art in a society in which art no longer has the character of a commodity. Where it is irrelevant how many people go to see a film.”

Thomas Brasch noted this in connection with Domino. The film was made under conditions of extremely sparse resources. Brasch shot much of it in his apartment; he shot with his partner Katharina Thalbach.

*

Prime Minister Erdoğan described the protagonists of the Istanbul Gezi Park protests as looters — çapulcu. Activists adopted the word and set it in circulation. One title of solidarity, graphically varied hundreds of times, reads: “Everyday I’m Chapuling.”

*

“Woohoo! What a magnificent excursion through botany, mimicry, the world of bees and states — incredible the places you traveled! Your intellectual-literary playground really is an unbelievably vast, richly populated cosmos …” M.

*

Christoph Konrad Sprengel, director of the Lutheran secondary school in Spandau, discovered the symbiosis between flower and bee as a consequence of co-evolution. Sprengel observed that many of the most spectacular orchids produce no nectar at all — nature as a ninja master of deception. The plant organizes its fertilization by being alluring.

The fly orchid presents itself as a potential partner for digger wasps. Through mimicry it invites the wasp to copulate. In some cases, the deception goes so far that male bees of the genus Andrena even prefer the corresponding Ophrys blossoms to actual females. Such over-optimized decoys can also lead to confusion in our own species.

Scent as reward — the affected insect in a frenzy of the senses.

The First Information Age

The ascetic carries within him a readiness to turn against his own nature. When this impulse is intensified by the pressure to optimize, education becomes the royal road to success. In the fifth century, “a regulated, reflective, and controlled practice of asceticism” spreads across society. Monasteries provide the architectural frame. A knowledge society begins to coalesce. The first information age dawns. In its essence, a Church absorbed in itself is an academy — and, by extension, a kind of space center where ascensions into heaven are meticulously organized. What must you bring with you to be allowed aboard?

Three concepts mesh seamlessly: chastity — purity of heart — spiritual struggle. Bodily chastity coincides with mental chastity. Thoughts are not free. Imagination is dangerous. Education unfolds through discipline. Its counterforce: fornication — a word that has endured for centuries and still carries the stale smell of urine scale, orphanages, and juvenile detention.

Fornication. The word breathes inside Nana. She wants to fornicate — but what would that even mean in a secular society?

“Let’s be obscene tonight,” Nana messages Cornelius on WhatsApp, while offering his partner Simone a broad, open smile. The women sit at separate tables, yet close enough to catch the trace of each other’s perfume, in the legendary Da Vincent. A murderous tension saturates the air. Nana and Simone know each other from a moment of public intimacy. Professor Cornelius von Pechstein once had the pleasure of Nana before the eyes of his wife and a packed audience in a Frankfurt club … while Simone, meanwhile, had the pleasure of being licked by Nana.

Simone handled Nana more roughly than the grand seigneur clinging to the graduate’s backside. And even though Simone believed herself to stand at the epicenter of an overwhelming experience, she still carries a quiet grievance against Nana.