Walking the Corridors of Mass Media: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s 1973–1974 Cologne Tape Recordings and the Poetics of Disruption

Am liebsten höre ich Stille, dann einzelne Geräusche, dann Musik (B6).

Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Wörter Sex Schnitt. ¹

“Ich gehe durch lange Massenmedienkorridore,” confesses the German avant-garde poet Rolf Dieter Brinkmann on tape as he walks through Cologne in the winter of 1973–74 (O7). The audibly breathless Brinkmann felt trapped in the city in which he lived, a city chock full of media signals. From 1970 onward, he exposed himself to West Germany’s encroaching “mass-media corridors,” building up his extensive material collections in which he catalogued urban landscapes. Erkundungen für die Präzisierung des Gefühls für einen Aufstand, Rom, Blicke, and Schnitte were published posthumously and are usually referred to as his Materialbände. These literary experiments were supplemented by various other works, among them Brinkmann’s lesser known and only marginally researched Cologne tape recordings. While this sound experiment is an intervention into post-1968 Germany, a time when Brinkmann could no longer overlook “das Scheitern der Studentenbewegung,” he is less interested in political change than a radical rethinking of literature in highly mediated environments (Späth 103). I argue that Brinkmann employs television, a “Medium, alles gleichmachend” and “mittelmäßig,” as a counter-example to his own poetics in which the single media channel – be it visual, aural, or textual – carries disruptive potential (O1). Analysing the recordings in great detail, my study focuses on three interrelated key concepts of Brinkmann’s aesthetics: the notion that West Germany’s cities are artificial places, the idea that language is in crisis, and the assumption that mass media play an important role in the policing of everyday life but are at the same time instrumental in the production of a disruptive counter-poetics. In the early to mid-1970s, as Sibylle Späth claims, Brinkmann’s art aims at a “Zerreißen eines geschlossenen Text-Bild-Kontinuums” (115).

Brinkmann’s tape recordings are the result of a larger shift in his poetics towards disruptive multimedia art from 1970 until his sudden death in 1975. Holger Schenk classifies the different stages of Brinkmann’s artistic orientation as follows:

Nach 1970 zog sich Brinkmann weitgehend aus dem Literaturbetrieb zurück, und erst nach seinem Tod erschienen die wichtigsten Werke, die er in den Jahren 1970–1975 schrieb: Der Gedichtband Westwärts 1 & 2, der Gedichte von 1970–1974 enthält und im Mai 1975 erschien, sowie Rom, Blicke, eine Sammlung von Briefen, die Brinkmann 1972/1973 aus Rom an Freunde [. . .] schrieb. Dieser Band erschien erst 1979. In beiden Werken ist ein Bruch mit Beat, Pop und Underground erkennbar, so daß diese Werke – in Abgrenzung zur ‘frühen’ (bis 1966/67) und ‘mittleren’ (1967–1970) Schaffensperiode – als ‘spätere Texte’ Brinkmanns bezeichnet werden.

(viii)

After he had spearheaded the German pop movement and written the controversial novel Keiner weiß mehr in 1968, Brinkmann became a disillusioned recluse only to focus on the production of experimental art, since “mit [traditioneller] Literatur [. . .] nicht mehr weiter zu kommen ist” (P2). Within the context of his later works, Brinkmann’s implied non-traditional literature is defined by the following characteristics: First, it moves away from the written word and, in the case of the tapes, replaces it with recorded speech and sounds. Second, it challenges the idea of carefully crafted artistic structures and opens up to real-life chance encounters. Finally, breaking down media barriers, it connects technology with the mobile body and personal experience and exposes it to an onslaught of sensory impressions. Brinkmann had indeed turned into a postmodern recorder who experienced reality more through “die verschiedenen Medien als durch unmittelbar eigenes, aktives Erleben” (Späth 95).

Brinkmann’s bionic multimedia experiments enabled him to challenge existing notions of authenticity, homogeneity, and linearity. What in Keiner weiß mehr had still been a tender infatuation with the immersive wonders of a city full of media signals – with its “Gras in Technicolor” (216) and its “blauglasige Cinemascopewolken” (219) – completely deteriorated into a fragmentd “non-stop horror-film” only a couple of years...