Authors: Greil Marcus
Am I like you?,
people asked Huelsenbeck and Hausmann in the 1970s, when the old rebels allowed themselves to be interrogated on their dada past; Debord in the 1960s, when he presided over a small group bent on a revolution beyond the demands of all known revolutionary parties; Johnny Rotten in the 1980s, when the Sex Pistols were a ruin and he was John Lydon. As would-be new rebels, those who asked the question wanted approval, confirmation, sanction: franchise. The answer Huelsenbeck, Hausmann, Debord, and Rotten always gave was that there are several stages in the journey toward annihilation; finally, they always said, negation is sui generis;
in plain speech, the answer was always no. Those who asked wrote the bad answer off to arrogance, and there was that, but something more: franchise. You have to do it yourself. “We absolutely refuse disciples,” the situationists wrote in August 1964. “We are . . . interested only in setting autonomous people loose in the world.” If dada was the issue of an indifferent creator, real dadaists held themselves indifferent to the issue of their creation.
To Michel absinthe always left a taste of bile. As he wrote his book in the summer of 1950, Mourre saw the few months that separated him from Saint-Germain-des-Prés as centuries:
Once, people actually lived like that!
He had lived like that—moment to moment, he and his friends had found a way to say no to any question.
Do you have a philosophy of life? Fuck off
—
or, Yes, I have a philosophy of life: “fuck off.”
In a store:
May I help you, sir? Fuck off.
In a cafe:
Yes? My good man, the question you have answered is a question I have refrained from asking
—
fuck off.
Michel set out one last time for Saint-Maximin; in a week he was back with the Washouts. Sometimes they hit Isou’s cafe and heckled him. That was the best they could do.
Michel felt life reaching a verge. Confused, he went to Saint-Sulpice Cathedral to confess; he got bromides. It was the beginning of Easter Week; he went to Notre-Dame to hear the word of God and got a lecture on existentialism. “I felt as if I were attending a literary discussion in the Café de Flore,” Mourre would write. “The Holy Year was in full swing, and in the papers one could read this sort of advertisement: ‘Tour to Rome. Audience and pontifical blessing guaranteed. 14,000 francs inclusive!’ ” “You don’t fault a theme park for not being a cathedral,” a reviewer said in 1984 of Steven Spielberg’s
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom;
to Michel, the cathedral was no less a theme park than Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Cut into one of Michael Jackson’s 1984 Pepsi commercials, a line from a giveaway echoed back to Michel’s deadend: “Why take a risk when you can take a vacation?” For a price, Michel could become just like the people who stared
at him from their buses as he sat in his cafe. God promised him freedom; the church delivered indulgences and package tours.
Picking up the latest issue of
Ecclésia,
Michel chanced on a poem in homage to Saint Maximin; it set him on fire. He had to act.
At first, Mourre wrote, the assault on Notre-Dame was meant as a prank. Of course he wanted a reaction, but in himself, not in the world. It was his own God he had to kill to be free; he had to destroy the church within himself. But sitting in the Saint-Claude with Serge Berna, Ghislain de Marbaix, Jean Rullier, and a few more who chickened out at the last minute, another dimension was revealed: this could be a real “cry of revolt.” The Washouts could free all mankind. It was midnight; the one cup of coffee that bought the table was coated with ashes and dirt. They rose.
There were forty-eight hours to go. Michel found a costume store and rented a Dominican habit. Almost certainly, he telephoned the cathedral and warned that a disruption was about to take place. He shaved his head, carefully leaving a tonsure. With his friends he crossed the bridge from the Left Bank to the Ile de la Cité. He approached the cathedral. As every year of his life hammered in his head (“I thought,” he told the police the next day, “my heart would stop”) he entered Notre-Dame. He mounted the altar and seized the mass. Before ten thousand people from all over the world he said that God was dead. Then, as he must have pictured it a hundred times before, the guards drew their swords, rushed forward, and attempted to kill him.
“Outside of the revolutionary periods when the masses become poets in action,” the situationists wrote in 1963, “small circles of poetic adventure may be the only places where the totality of revolution subsists, as an unrealized but haunting possibility, like the shadow of a missing person.” They meant that the impulse to change the world finds its way to absolute demands
or it is mute—that when this impulse finds its voice it is heard as poetry or it is not heard at all. In 1950, in the midst of a frozen present—the “malaise du demi-siècle,” sociologists were calling it—twenty-year-old Gil J Wolman and teenagers Guy-Ernest Debord, Michèle Bernstein, and Ivan Chtcheglov responded instinctively to the invasion of Notre-Dame and the blasphemies of Mourre and Serge Berna as an outbreak of just such a poetic adventure. It wasn’t “poetry in the service of revolution,” as the old surrealist slogan had it, but as the situationists would reverse it: “revolution in the service of poetry.” The inversion would come from the conviction that revolution meant “realizing poetry”—and that “realizing poetry means nothing less than creating events and their languages.”
Notre-Dame was the first event that Debord and the rest took as their own. Though they had yet to meet when it happened, as they came together over the next two years they took it as their founding crime. For them, Notre-Dame made a breach in stopped time, opening a route to “play and public life”; they took it as a sign that as they had heard Mourre, as what they heard made them come alive, others might hear them. It was an event, and they set out to find its language. So quickly disavowed by its actor, the incident gave them a first sense of what Saint-Just might have called “public happiness,” and it gave them a first sense of legacy—it gave them, among other fathers, Saint-Just. For the moment of poetic adventure not only opened up the possibility of creating events and their languages. It also brought “all the unsettled debts of history back into play,” and in this case there were enough.
Throughout the 1920s the surrealists sought a poetry to destroy the hypnotic symbolism of the church. Luis Buñuel, who as a young man went about Madrid dressed as a priest, risking prison for a private joke, and who in 1930 made the blasphemous film
L’Age d’or,
was first attracted to the surrealists by a photo published in 1926 in the review
La Révolution surréaliste:
“Benjamin Péret Insulting a Priest.” Characterized by Robert Hughes as “one of the world’s first documented ‘performance’ pieces, forerunner of a thousand equally trivial actions that would be recorded on Polaroid or
videotape by American artists in the seventies,” today the picture is almost impossible to read; a more obvious caption would be “A Priest Giving Benjamin Péret a Dirty Look.” All of which only proves that at the right time and place the most marginal poetics—here, an ambiguous photo titled by fiat—can lead somewhere: in this case, to
L’Age d’or,
which still changes lives.
Péret himself was present in 1950 to celebrate Michel Mourre and his comrades in terms more extreme than any other
Combat
correspondent. “I no longer despair of one day seeing the children of Paris imitate the children of Barcelona,” he wrote—“those who, in 1936, played in the blazing light of the churches their elders had destroyed.” That was one debt: the unfinished anarchist revolution that took place in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, defeated first by Stalinists, then by Franco, a defeat that Mourre had once embraced as the last true crusade. As he stood in Notre-Dame he hadn’t changed his mind—but to Péret Mourre’s act brought Stalin and Franco’s victims back to life.
Pumping the story,
Combat
claimed there was no precedent for the assault on Notre-Dame. That the world did not turn upside down with the announcement that God was dead allowed the paper to forget how many of the deepest desires unleashed by the French Revolution had begun in blasphemy—in such unread poems as Saint-Just’s “Organt,” a 1789 epic of orgy and nun rape—and to forget that in November 1793 revolutionaries seized Notre-Dame, changed its name to the Temple of Reason, built a Mountain in the choir, and cheered as a woman dressed as Liberty led a dance for the death of God. The Communards who tried to torch the place in 1871 were forgotten as well.
Neither
Combat
nor any of its surrealist chorus, Communist or not, noticed that the leading images in the sermon Berna wrote for Mourre came from Marx’s “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” “The criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism,” he said:
Man, who has found only the
reflection
of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mere
appearance
of himself . . . This state and this society produce religion, which is an
inverted consciousness of the world . . .
The abolition of
religion as the
illusory
happiness of the people is their demand for their
real
happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to
call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.
The criticism of religion is therefore in
embryo
the
criticism of that vale of tears
of which religion is the
halo.
One can of course go back much farther, to the true christs and antichrists of the late Middle Ages: to Thomas Müntzer (hero of an early book by Friedrich Engels), who in 1525 led German peasants to slaughter in their search for the Kingdom of God on earth; to John of Leyden, who briefly found it. “The social revolt of the millenarian peasantry,” Debord wrote in
The Society of the Spectacle,
naturally first of all defines itself as a will to destroy the Church. But millenarianism spreads in the historical world, and not on the terrain of myth. Modern revolutionary expectations are not irrational survivals of the religious passion of millenarianism, as Norman Cohn thought he had demonstrated in
The Pursuit of the Millennium.
On the contrary: it is millenarianism, revolutionary class struggle speaking the language of religion for the last time, which is already a modern revolutionary tendency that as yet lacks
the consciousness that it is solely historical.
The millenarians had to lose because they could not recognize the revolution as their own action.
In more than four hundred years, little had changed; men and women had yet to truly learn that God was dead, that he had never been born, to recognize history as something they could make for themselves—had to make for themselves, if the ledger of history was to be more than a spectacle of “appearance,” a book of the dead. Thus did Mourre’s words echo back through various epochs—but given the accounting Debord and his comrades would favor, there was a more pressing debt.
On 17 November 1918, unless it was August 16 (unless it was 1917), Berlin dadaist Johannes Baader entered Berlin Cathedral. If it was 17 November 1918, it was ten days after Kurt Eisner proclaimed a soviet republic in Bavaria, nine days after the outbreak of Berlin’s November revolution, one
day after the convening of the nationwide Rate Kongress: the congress of councils, the autonomous circles of workers, soldiers, and intellectuals now federating to organize a new world out of the ruin of the old. There was shooting in the streets and starvation behind closed doors. For a moment, Germany ceased to exist.
At times limiting himself to an obsession with Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, most often Baader professed to be Jesus Christ, a claim that dada’s embarrassed apologists try to smooth away with offerings of irony; there was none. Baader was the sort of borderline psychotic inevitably attracted by negationist movements, and thrust into the forefront of movements that by their nature blur the lines between idealism and nihilism—as George Grosz said of the Berlin dadaists, in another age they might have been flagellants. But Baader was more than that: “a Swabian pietist who journeyed through the countryside as a Dadaist priest” (Huelsenbeck), out of time and forced to create his own context, his own language, he was a clear cultural reincarnation of the Free Spirit adept who was sure that just as he could do nothing without God, God could do nothing without him. In Berlin in 1918 Baader was a lunatic with a chance to change the world. He held the planet in his mouth; the indifferent creator would determine whether he would swallow it or spit it out.
The German government had certified Baader insane. In Huelsenbeck’s words, Baader was awarded a “hunting license”; since unlike the rest of the Berlin Dada Club he could not be held accountable for his actions, he could safely do what his comrades only dreamed of. As the Oberdada, he took advantage. In the heart of the cathedral—or from the altar, or on horseback—he announced—depending on which account one chooses to believe:
“DADA WILL SAVE THE WORLD!”
“TO HELL WITH CHRIST!”
“WHO IS CHRIST TO YOU? HE’S JUST LIKE YOU—HE DOESN’T GIVE A DAMN!”
“WE DON’T GIVE A DAMN FOR JESUS CHRIST!”
“YOU’RE THE ONES WHO MOCK CHRIST, YOU DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT HIM!”
Or ultimately:
“CHRIST IS A SAUSAGE!”
Baader followed up with an announcement of “The Death of the Oberdada”—widely reported in the Berlin press, which covered dada provocations assiduously—only to trump it the next day with “The Resurrection of the Oberdada,” thus beating out Christ the First by forty-eight hours.
There is an uglier version of this monomania, which for an instant found a field where it appeared not as madness but as culture. Raoul Hausmann, Baader’s closest friend, recalled in his memoirs: