“An der Kernstelle der Existenz”: Techno, Intoxication, and the Limits of Literary Representation in Rainald Goetz’s Rave Kai-Uwe Werbeck The University of North Carolina at Charlotte Abstract: This essay re-reads Rainald Goetz's novel Rave and argues that it is not - as some scholars have called it - a gratuitous exercise in authenticity effects. Rather, over the course of its three sections, Rave queries the limits of literary representations. Fascinated with the raw and unfiltered experiences allegedly endemic to the techno experience, Goetz proposes an experimental literature to communicate his decidedly non-literary, non-theoretical experiences in the clubs. This essay treats Rave as one of the authors’s frantic attempts among many to faithfully render the intoxicated and fragmented experiences of city-life legible, mapping the unchartered territories of post- Wall Berlin when the nation was draped with stories of completeness and closure. In this light, Goetz contributes significantly to the creation of a new, urban literature that suggests alternative patterns and identities for life in reunified Germany. A distant relative to the canon of Metropolenliteratur, Rave lends literary gestalt to what Goetz understood as the post-national urban experience ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: one that irritates linear narrativity, highlights a multitude of sensory perceptions, distorts time and space, suspends history through intoxication, and embraces the immediacy of the moment. Keywords: Techno culture, Metropolenliteratur, avant-garde, urban experience, literary theory 230 Kai-Uwe Werbeck Die Zeit wird kommen, sprach der Herr, da ich zu den Menschen sprechen werde. Und er nahm sich als Werkzeug die Members, die da waren: Members of Mayday. Er sprach: sehet her und kommt alle, denn ihr seid alle Teil von meinem Reiche, das da kommen soll, das königreiche Königreich der Räusche und Geräusche. [And the Lord said: The time will come that I shall talk to mankind. And He chose as His heralds the Members that had gathered around Him: Members of Mayday. He said: look here and cometh all since thou are members of My Kingdom that shall be, the Kingdom of many Kings of intoxications and sounds.] Rainald Goetz 1 Rainald Goetz’s conversion into an “apostle” of techno music coincided with the drastic geographic shifts that marked the final years of the 20 th century. The end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and Germany’s reunification in 1990 all led to the spatial transformation of European cities that proved optimal for a growing techno sub-culture, chock-full of “Räusche and Geräusche” [“intoxications and sounds”] ( Rave 79). 2 Especially in the formerly divided city of Berlin techno acolytes quickly appropriated the subterranean, abandoned, and hitherto inaccessible catacombs for clandestine insider events known as raves. Goetz, a former-punk-turned-raver, had taken the German literary scene by storm in the eighties with angry novels, poems, and plays. Goetz then changed his poetics from these “Punk-beeinflußten Collagen der achtziger Jahre” [“the collages of the 1980s, influenced by punk”] to one rooted in techno culture in which he had already found “zu einem versöhnlichen Verhältnis von Text und Bild” [“a conciliatory relation between text and image”] (Weingart 97). 3 He confessed that he had spent the “hedonistischen 80er Jahre verkrochen in Philosophie, Melancholie und Text” [“the hedonistic 80s, holed up in philosophy, melancholy, and literature”] ( Abfall 449). “Die Erlösung aus diesem Leben,” he continues, “brachte der Acid-House-Hype, der via DJ Hell im September 1988 München erreichte. Seither habe ich mit dem Ausgehen nie mehr aufgehört” [“Deliverance was achieved through the Acid-House hype that arrived in Munich in the September of 1988 with DJ Hell. I haven’t stopped going out ever since”] ( Abfall 449). As a “Member of Mayday,” Goetz contributed significantly to the creation of a new, urban literature that mapped out alternative patterns and identities for life in Germany’s newly reunified, bristling capital. 4 “An der Kernstelle der Existenz” 231 When Goetz started exploring Berlin (among other cities), he personally experienced the guiding principle of his avant-garde Metropolenliteratur , a move that, as I will show later, was criticized by German intellectuals and scholars. Provocatively, he asks, “Warum nicht mal die Sachen direkt in Augenschein nehmen, über die man schreibt? ” [“Why not cast a glance at the stuff you write about directly? ”], which creates a collision “zwischen der eigenen geistigen Form und dem realen Körperding” [“between one’s own mind and the actual body-thing”] ( Rave 176—77). However, Goetz’s newfound fascination with the raw and unfiltered experiences allegedly endemic to the techno experience - described by cultural historian Ulf Poschardt, quoting a 1992 club-flyer, as “the pure extasy [sic] of being in total harmony with his or her surroundings” - presented him with a set of problems (289). How to write about the rave; how to translate an event that, as Poschardt further remarks, is “about feeling communality, a shared social experience, a feeling of life. (…) about the combination of drugs, light and music” into text (291)? Searching for an experimental literature to communicate his decidedly non-literary, non-theoretical experiences, Goetz turned toward an eclectic multi-media project entitled Heute Morgen: Eine Geschichte der Gegenwart (1998—2000), a massive five-part publication including the Internet diary Abfall für alle , two prose texts ( Rave and Dekonspiratione ), the journalistic image-and-essay collection Celebration , and the avant-garde play Jeff Koons . 5 In its totality - even though Goetz would refuse such a term - Heute Morgen approaches the urban playground from various angles, employing each element’s media specifics to bring to the fore aspects of highly fragmented yet imbricated narratives. Rave , the focus of this essay, concentrates, at least initially, on the pseudo-Dionysian promises of techno before it launches a probe into both the potential and limits of literature. Along these lines, this essay treats Rave as one of Goetz’s frantic attempts among many to faithfully render the intoxicated experiences of city-life (and here in particular clubbing) legible. 6 Goetz explains his struggle as follows: “man kann weit weg abtauchen müssen oder wollen, in diese Welten und Erfahrungen. Aber um davon berichten zu können, muß man zurückkommen in die Nüchternheit” [“even if you have or want to plunge into these worlds and experiences, you have to return to the sober surface when you want to report about them”] ( Abfall 94). I argue that Rave relatively quickly moves beyond the techno event as such in order to sketch out the author’s meditation on suitable forms of literary representation as a triptych of distinct phases of aesthetic production triggered by subjective experiences. Rave constructs a narrative arc beyond the party lifestyle that is often neglected in scholarship, but that can be deduced from the trajectory of its three sections, including the black-andwhite photographs that preface each chapter. Briefly: the first chapter, titled 232 Kai-Uwe Werbeck “Verfall” [“Decay”], focuses on urban night life in the clubs, while subtly moving from immediate representations of the rave to instances of reflection, the urge to tell the world what is actually going on “down there.” The second chapter, “Sonne Busen Hammer” [“Sun Breasts Awesome”], leaves the underground clubs behind: “Wir stolperten hoch und taumelten raus. (…) Mein Gott ist das hell hier” [“we stumbled upstairs and staggered out. My god, it’s really bright outside”] ( Rave 89). This is a painful return to the surface of the city, followed by an “escape” to sunnier pastures. This “sunnier” second section, too, keeps in touch with techno-culture as it focuses on the travels of DJs to well-known rave strongholds such as the Canary Island of Ibiza. It is noteworthy that the middle section also contains a large section about a drug deal gone awry that clearly presents itself as a made-up figment that has no relation whatsoever to Goetz’s life, no matter how distorted ( Rave 134 ff.). Chapter three, titled “Die Zerstörten” [“The Destroyed”], eventually revisits the dance floors, but retains a more analytical stance toward these experiences and their representability. At stake here is ultimately the question of the socio-political relevance and literary currency of Goetz’s writing. When Hubert Winkels calls “Urbanität, Massenunterhaltung, gleißende Werbefassaden, das Rauschen der technischen Medien, Sounds” [“urbanity, mass-entertainments, glistening billboards, the white noise of electronic media, sounds”] materials with which literature has to engage and take into account, he presents one side of the debate (16). Eckhard Schumacher advances Winkels’s argument regarding the particular medial form(s) of Heute Morgen and isolates techno music as a critical part of Goetz’s poetics. Schumacher sketches out connections between the music and the broader socio-cultural sphere surrounding it. He argues that “es (…) nie nur um die ‘Augenblicklichkeitskunst’ des DJs und nie nur um die Form [geht] (…), sondern immer auch um das, was Goetz das ‘Sozialexperiment Dance’ nennt” [“it’s never been exclusively about the DJs ‘art of the present moment’ and never just about the form, but also about what Goetz calls the ‘social experiment dance music’”] (147—48). The poetic techniques central to this “Sozialexperiment” are fragmentation, distortion, and multi-voiced collages. Thorsten Rudolph further argues that Goetz’s post-reunification texts query “ob und wie Gegenwart, ein Moment, ein ‘Jetzt’ überhaupt darstellbar oder - in der Form der Schrift herstellbar sind” [“whether and how the present, a moment, a ‘now’ is representable or - producible in writing at all”] (15). Playing devil’s advocate, Moritz Baßler also identifies this “DJ-Poetologie” [“DJ poetics”] but calls it a failure, mostly because “meßbare musikalische Kriterien wie Geschwindigkeit (etwa: beats per minute) (…) ja kaum auf Prosa übertragbar [sind]” [“measurable criteria such as speed (for example, beats per minute) can hardly be applied to prose”] (146). Baßler thus claims that Goetz “An der Kernstelle der Existenz” 233 succumbs to the purely decorative lure of “Authenzitätseffekte” [“effects of authenticity”] such as “Satzabbrüche” [“aposiopesis”] (144). In similar fashion, Axel Schalk claims, “Goetz adheres to time-honoured ‘Sprachskepsis’ [‘language skepticism’], which manifests itself primarily in senseless juxtaposition” (294). I disagree with Baßler and Schalk’s reading of Goetz’s texts and explicitly assume that the “senseless juxtaposition” of media and genres, images and texts, and collages of random impressions is precisely what produces meaning within Rave . Goetz suggests that the new political master narrative overshadowed the fact that new exciting urban, post-national stories emerged at ground zero of Germany’s new capital. The text is thus an attempt at mapping the unchartered territories of post-Wall Berlin, while the nation was draped with stories of completeness and closure replayed again and again. Techno culture facilitated what Goetz saw as the post-national urban experience ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: one that irritates linear narrativity, highlights a multitude of sensory perceptions, distorts time and space, suspends history through intoxication, and embraces the immediacy of the moment. With its emphasis on urban street and night-life, Rave can be considered a distant relative to the genre of German Metropolenliteratur , which includes works by authors such as Tanja Dückers and Elke Naters, among others. 7 Corinna J. Heipcke calls the genre “Berlin-Romane,” a post-reunification literature that emerged in the early 1990s and that sought to update modernism’s great urban novels - most notably Alfred Döblin’s 1929 Berlin Alexanderplatz - for the unified city (45). As Heipcke claims, Metropolenliteratur is interested in the capital “as a site of urbanism (…) and (…) the symbol of an exclusively German condition” (45). Over the course of the last decade, literary scholars such as Stephen Brockmann, Stuart Taberner, and Katharina Gerstenberger have argued that the arrival of the quintessential post-reunification Berlin novel of the realist or modernist mold might not happen any time soon. 8 Gerstenberger in particular claims that “the appearance of a ‘masterpiece’ that could perform such as task for the post-wall era might be more than a question of time (…). It may also no longer be what writers aim to achieve” (5). She further points out that the “critics’ calls for the Berlin novel - for one canonical text that could capture and explain the experience of unification - came when the appeal of ‘master narratives’ was waning” (7). In other words, German city life might be “too diverse, too ambiguous, and too influenced by global developments to be captured in one novel” (1). From Gerstenberger’s point of view, it takes a kaleidoscope of texts to succeed in the postmodern representation of Berlin. Heute Morgen is such a collage. Rave is not only one aspect but also a text that intrinsically pursues the same demolition of master narratives. Thus, while the novel contributes to the search for the holy grail of Metropolenliteratur , it simultaneously challenges and complicates it. 234 Kai-Uwe Werbeck In Rave a group of techno enthusiast descends into the night clubs, becoming nocturnal heirs to the Weimar flâneur. As Elisabeth Bronfen claims in her writings on the flâneur at night, “die von künstlicher Helligkeit ausgeleuchtete Vernetzung nächtlicher Schauplätze macht eine ganz andere Karte der Großstadt erkennbar als bei Tag” [“the artificially lit network of nocturnal settings renders visible a completely different map of the metropolis from the one we see during the day”] (382). Rave consists of a sequence of Momentaufnahmen [snap shots] of techno culture, the DJ life-style, and party nights and thus produces the alternative urban maps that Bronfen talks about. These snap shots utilize an experimental style of writing that relies on distorted, partly fictionalized anecdotes that have their origin in the lived experiences of the author. Urban life thus turns into an alloy of fact and fiction, a liminal space whose neon-romantic narratives are located on both sides of the ontological fence: Goetz calls his night-life stories “echte Märchen aus realen Nächten” [“true fairy-tales from real nights”] ( Rave 224). Berlin’s exciting undergrounds become quasi-mythic places detached from the city above; these spaces are alternative, dreamlike realities that feed the city’s self-perpetuated image as hedonistic wonderland. As the book cover informs the reader, Rave tells “Geschichten aus dem Leben im Inneren der Nacht,” a multiplicity of snippets from night-life’s inner sanctum, with an emphasis on the plural use of the term “Geschichte,” meaning both history and story. Rave ’s narratives of intoxication are decidedly fragmented and oscillate between several narrators, tracing the “adventures” of a group of insiders who effortlessly navigate the city, its recreational areas, its clubs and bars, in short, “das große Abenteuer der Nacht” [“the great nocturnal adventure”] (122). Yet, it must be noted that the sheen of hedonistic excitement fades rather quickly as the text grapples to come to terms with its underlying experiences. The “great adventure” begins with an image, as each section in Rave is prefaced by a photograph, setting the tone for the intrinsic contradictions between subjective experience and literary production that permeate the text. The first photograph strongly contrasts the atmosphere of disoriented intoxication that Rave promises and also delivers in its first section. It shows Goetz and his close friend DJ WestBam in front of a desk on which sit a laptop and a keyboard. 9 A sign in the background reads “Inter Continental” and reveals the place as a nondescript hotel conference room somewhere in Germany. Next to the various technological gadgets, sheets of paper and books can be spotted, alluding to the supplementary relationship between technology and writing, visual media and literature. The setting is mundane and suggests a collaboration of Goetz and WestBam as it displays a well-known German author working with an influential German techno DJ. The composition tells us that techno does not exclusively happen in some underground bunker located in the outskirts of Berlin. Very “An der Kernstelle der Existenz” 235 likely, this collaboration is also not happening at night, but even if it does, Goetz and WestBam are not part of any rave that might be going on. It insinuates that techno has arrived in the mainstream and also that the Dionysian experiences which the reader is privy to in Rave and which are yet to come from a narratological standpoint, do not correspond entirely to the reality of techno culture. The visual image refers to something that arguably does not take place during, but rather in preparation for the events recounted in the narration proper. From this relatively secure composition, displayed in this static (and, one might add, decidedly sober) photograph, Rave ’s opening lines suddenly release the reader into the ever so confusing darkness of the techno club-turned-text. In short, as day turns to night, Rave ’s narration stands in stark contrast to what is shown in the picture, prompting the reader to expect contradictions in the structure of the text as well as in its stories. After the introductory photograph and the quote, Rave begins abruptly, dropping the reader off in medias res . The first line of narration starts with an ellipsis followed by a dash, bespeaking a notion of incomprehensibility and incommunicability: “… - und kam mir in Zeitlupe entgegen” [“… - and approached me in slow-motion”] (17). Both semiotic signs suggest that pieces of information have been omitted, namely the events that took place prior (and outside) of this particular decelerated moment in the club. Opening the narrative in such a desynchronized way suggests that the characters in Rave are disconnected from the time and place outside the club. Taking LSD and dancing for 12 hours straight severs their ties to the external world, a fully-chartered, coherent city. The only piece of evidence gesturing toward a “before” is the photograph mentioned above, everything else turns from broad, inclusive panorama to selective sensory perception. Just like Rave ’s first narrator (one of many more to come), the reader begins his descent into the underground spaces of the city without any points of spatial or temporal reference. The techno clubs function as bubbles in which temporality is suspended and history altogether absent; it is a void filled with beats and strobe lights. The sense of sound turns into a haptic phenomenon: “Ich hatte das Picken der Sechzehntel superhell in meinen Fingerspitzen” [“I felt the pinch of the 1/ 16 beats super-bright in my fingertips”] (17—18). These instances of synesthesia suggest a decidedly embodied but also narrow and distorted mode of perception. The perspectival fluctuations that permeate Rave ’s first lines and the resulting feeling of disorientation such as the hectic zooming-in and -out that Goetz calls the “Splittrige” [“the splintered”] are what define and validate the urban experience at the beginning of the text ( Abfall 510). Berlin’s nights, Rave suggests, are captured best as prose blown to smithereens, insinuating that nocturnal encounters in Germany’s techno culture are ideally represented as fragmented hy- 236 Kai-Uwe Werbeck brids between lived experience and story-telling. The paradigmatic literary techniques in Rave , such as the multiple and unidentifiable (third and first person) narrators, elliptical sentences, and disconnected scenes, emulate the multiplicity of experiences through an adequate multiplicity of literary voices, disjunctive impressions, and the rhetorical figure of aposiopesis. The following example, describing a random encounter in a techno club, illustrates these techniques: “Und sah William, wie er seine Arme öffnete, und rief: ‘Hwill! , hey Hwill! , wie schauts? ’ ‘Bestens! Selber? ’ ‘Auch! ’ Und ich erzählte ihm von dem eben hier gedachten Satz. Er: ‘WAS? ’” [“and saw William, how he opened his arms, and said: ‘Hwil! , hey Hwil! , whassup? ’ ‘A lot! What about you? ’ ‘Same here! ’ And I tell him about this sentence I had just thought and he goes: ‘WHAT? ’”] ( Rave 25). Rave ’s first section repeatedly turns the city into discontinuous slices, but connotes the resulting breakdown in continuity positively. This suggests that a multiplicity of parallel narratives uttered in different languages still determined the discourses in Germany’s capital ten years after the geo-political fusion of the Germen states, a Babel-like concurrence of voices that appropriates different channels of communication. The question of representation in Rave is inextricably intertwined with the modernist search for an adequate literary language, a search the text ultimately suspends if not abandons. The alternation between tenses, in which the present intrudes into the past, emulates night life’s blurring effects on temporality. Entering the club brings about a change in temporal experience from past tense to the present, one that also shifts from a first-person narrator to one that talks in the third person: “Der Strom auf dem Gang nahm Wirr auf in sein mildes, gemächlich dahinwogendes Schieben und Gehen, Wogen, Tippeln und Trippeln, Tapern und Taumeln, (…). Halle aller Hallen, Wandelgang in Ewigkeit. Wieder, neu, und immer wieder neu und nie gesehen: Menschen kommen dir entgegen” [“the stream in the corridor absorbed Wirr into its mild, unhurried undulation, its pushing and walking, its surging, mincing, scurrying, scuttling, and staggering flows. Hall of halls, colonnade into eternity. Again, new, always new and never seen before: people that approach you”] ( Rave 52; my emphasis). Berlin’s clubs become places where the historical trajectory that determines the city during the day erodes until there is no cohesion and no point of connection left. As the narrator descends into the club, the music suddenly hits and completely engulfs him, shielding him off: “Dann stand ich mitten in der Musik. - Schub” [“there I was amidst the music - thrust”] ( Rave 17). Piece by piece, the scenery is revealed as an event in which communication - due to the sound waves and the excessive consumption of drugs - is significantly distorted, a distortion rendered “visible” in literature. “An der Kernstelle der Existenz” 237 This altered form of experience that Rave replicates drowns out the outside world in its force-field of bass lines and changes visual conventions through chemically and technologically manipulated perception, underscored by strobe and black lights, a mechanism the text describes as the “Schwarzlicht-Stroboskop-Zerhacker” [“black lights-strobe lights-shredder”] ( Rave 43). The text reproduces these “shredder” effects, evoking an environment that rapidly oscillates between drastically different moments of seeing and non-seeing, sound and silence. These moments alternate so quickly that ultimately differentiation becomes impossible. The club-goer taps both visually and bodily into new registers of experience, “das Kaputte, Beglückte, Vertrauen und Zartes, die vielen Signale, schnell, kurz, ganz klar, vom nächsten schon wieder verwischt” [“messed up, raptured, trust and softness, many signals, fast, short, clear, blurred by the next thing”] ( Rave 19). In this storm of stimuli, the subjectivity of the raver dissolves as soon as it comes into contact with techno music; nothing is meant to last. The first person narrator gazes at the dance floor and the text relays his thoughts as epileptic fragments, “Dann sah ich, wie sie mir ihr - Und drehte mich - Und lauter neue Blicke” [“Then I saw how she - and I turned around - and lots of new looks”] ( Rave 18). In tune with techno’s break-beats, none of these sentences come to an end. Toward the middle of the paragraph, the first-person narrator transmogrifies into a third person narrator as if the “I” had become a detached observer of his own body. These new registers of seeing, hearing, and moving allow the raver to detect spaces where “sich einige, für diese musikalische Raumwirkung gerade speziell empfängliche Leute versammelt [hatten]. (…) DER Ort um zu tanzen” [“some people who were especially susceptive to this musical ambiance had gathered. THE place to dance”] ( Rave 80). The club harbors a non-national community, determined instead through the cultural ability to heed the call of techno’s staccato siren song. Interestingly, however, Rave conserves its fractured and disorienting structure only half-way through its first section. While the text feverishly keeps switching between narrators, the prose adopts a slower rhythm and becomes less frantic: “‘Was soll ich denn jetzt machen? ’ fragt Jasmin. Und Johanna, die diese Geschichten schon kennt, wiederholt einfach noch mal alles” [“‘What am I supposed to do now? ’ Jasmin asks. And Johanna, who already knows these stories simply repeats everything one more time”] ( Rave 66). These two sentences exemplify the general change within the formal structure of Rave as it moves away from its frenzied beginnings toward more cohesive representations of Berlin’s underground caverns. The ability for reflection returns slowly and expresses itself in an urge to contemplate and write down what happens in the basements and clubs. One of the first person narrators thinks as if he was already writing about his immediate experience: “Und ich dachte, in einzelnen 238 Kai-Uwe Werbeck Worten: >Wirrnis, - Komma, Gedankenstrich - , Doppelpunkt: ANGENEHM. Ausrufezeichen! < Es war mir jetzt im Moment aber zu anstrengend, das genau so auch zu notieren” [“And I thought, in single words: >confusion, - comma, dash - , colon: NICE. Exclamation mark! < It was, however, too exhausting to jot this down correctly”] (Rave 31). The narrator considers jotting down his thoughts, but is unable to accomplish this. This failure, however, is only temporary. Twelve pages later another (or the very same) narrator admits that “stand ich im Getümmel, und mein Füller huschte blau über das gewackelte Papier vor mir” [“I stood amidst the commotion and my blue pen flitted across the shaking paper in front of me”] ( Rave 43). He is now capable of verbalizing his experiences, his pen already transferring intoxication into text, even though the act still takes some effort. The literary representation of night-life begins at this point, suggesting a literary text that depends on the immediacy of altered states of mind of its characters but tries to put them in order. As its narrative progresses, Rave substitutes the underground clubs for exotic, sunny locations, another staple of the European electronic dance music scene. The photograph that prefaces section two shows a sunny beach and waves rolling in. The picture allocates three-fourth of its composition to the clouds in the sky. This image, too, represents nothing that stands in relation to the rave and its predominantly industrial locations. Goetz’s text has long left behind the event that shaped it. Rather, Rave expresses freedom and the ability to go to faraway places basked in sunlight. We are left with a rectangular frame containing vast expanses of sky, suggesting a view of a paradisiac place that comes as a shock to the system: “Taumelnd also und stolpernd kommen sie da alle hoch, einer nach dem anderen, und halten sich die Augen zu, und geben Laute der Plage von sich, der Klage” [“Reeling and stumbling, they all ascend, one after the other, and they shade their eyes with their hands and emit sounds of dismay and lamentation”] ( Rave 100). Contrasting the serene atmosphere in the photograph, the transitional moment from darkness to light is one that prompts lament, evoking the notion of an exhausting (re-)birth or moment of decompression. The ravers are spit out of the clubs, forced to leave their safe-havens and re-enter the city above ground; and one is left to wonder if literature is forced to follow suit. The image of ejection is followed by the heading for the section, “Sonne Busen Hammer,” the intrusion of decidedly vernacular language into the blackand-white Garden of Eden. While the “sun” foreshadows the section’s focus on sunny places, “breasts” link the section to sexuality and fun. The last word, in a literal translation meaning “hammer,” is also an outburst of excitement and approval. Given Rave ’s interest in processes of decay, however, the actual meaning of “hammer,” both a constructive and deconstructive tool, should be kept in mind: the text is on the verge of shattering its frame. The unattributed “An der Kernstelle der Existenz” 239 quote that finally begins the section asks, “Do you feel allright [sic],” making the reader aware that something may be off. As soon as the group of ravers leaves the club, the sun “mit ihrem Atomlicht (…) scheinte [sic] und schaute sie jedem in die Augen hinein, leuchtete tief hinunter, jedem ins Herz” [“with its nuclear light shone and gazed into everyone’s eyes, illuminated him deep down inside, in his heart”], a shock to the system (99). The city, in this case Munich, returns with a vengeance, as they perceive a “Breite Straße, leere Straße” [“broad street, empty street”] (99). In the first section of Rave , the reader hardly ever learns anything about urban geography per se , at best it is possible to catch a reference to a club that enables us to assume the city. This suggests that initially the location does not matter as it explicitly remains disconnected from the event downstairs. Once the rave ends, however, the question becomes: “‘Wann wird es wieder dunkel? ’ ‘Das kann noch dauern’” [“‘When will it be dark again? That might take a while’”]; the real city awaits (100). The raver seemingly enters one underground space in one place and exits the techno party into another as soon as the night is over. The sequence of these random places appears “zerhackt,” [“chopped up”], just like the strobe light sensations that determine sense perception during the rave. Rave exercises a city-roulette that explodes any feeling of continuity. One narrator suddenly states: “Im Traum war ich in dieser Nacht versteckt an einem fremden Ort, in einer unbekannten Stadt. Ich war in einer völlig anderen Geschichte” [“in my dream I was hidden in a foreign place at night, in an unknown city. I was part of a completely different story”] (107). However, even though it will take “a while” before it gets dark again, Rave ’s narrative remains on the move. Only briefly “steht [still] die Hitze da, (…) glühte die Sonne, kein Mensch bewegt sich” [“the heat stands still, the sun radiated, no one moves”], before the entourage resumes its “adventures” (114). One of the narrators observes that “Das ‘Roxy’ auf der anderen Seite der Straße hat sich gefüllt, da sitzen die Leute zum Frühstück” [“The ‘Roxy’ across the street is now packed, people are having breakfast”], an uneventful and calm day-lit scene from which the ravers appear separated (121). However, just as the text establishes the diurnal city, “THE SAGA CONTINUES” as the intoxication returns without warning and a new paragraph cuts right into the diurnal tableau like a scream (125). The succeeding paragraph begins abruptly, with a first person narrator stating, “Ich liege am Boden, im Gras unter Bäumen, und wundere mich nicht, daß mein Körper revoltiert und in ruhig anbrandenden Wellen wilde Spasmen hochschickt” [“I’m lying on the ground, in the grass beneath the trees, and it doesn’t come as a surprise that my body is revolting, sending wild spasms up my body in calm waves”] (125). The actual transition from day to night is excluded, even though it must have been exhausting. Argu- 240 Kai-Uwe Werbeck ably forgotten by the narrator, this textual absence signals that which cannot be narrated: all we learn is that his body purifies itself of the toxins - figuratively and literally - responsible for its high, a reference to the difficulty of bringing the “real fairy-tale” into daylight. The party, “im Garten des nach Klo-Containern stinkenden Outdoor-Suicides” [“in the garden of the Suicide outdoor section where it smells like chemical toilets”] is neither located underground nor is it an aesthetically pleasant event (125). From this representation of the breakdown of the body which experiences “Bilder (…), Gedanken, eine so ruhige Sukzession. Wie ich falle” [“images, thoughts, a quiet suceession. How I am falling”], the text then proceeds immediately to the sunny places promised in the photograph at the beginning of the section, highlighting again the texts erratic course and the inconsistencies that the nocturnal city sets up constantly (125). This imagery gestures towards the difficulty to reproduce linguistically what happened, tentatively equating the will to narrate the rave with the violent act of throwing up. From this revolting moment of self-cleansing, the narrative jumps to a relaxing vacation that a group of DJs takes in Spain. Part of the entourage, the narrator explains: “Nun gut. Die anderen sind aufgestanden, und an den Pool gekommen, und machen da jetzt bißchen Krach, springen rein, und spritzen rum” [“Well, the others have gotten up and come to the pool, they raise a little ruckus, jump in and splash around”] (127). Just as Rave seeks to inject the nocturnal fairy-tale into the larger framework of Heute Morgen , its own internal structure is equally “corrupted” by a segment that is in parts made up and thus subverts the text’s presentation as fiction distilled from lived experience. There is a plot element in Rave ’s second section - a story about a drug deal that could have come straight out of a thriller - which Goetz himself debunks as fiction in Abfall für alle . There he admits that “jemand an Rave das Fiktions-Einsprengsel mit der Deal-Geschichte als irgendwie störend empfunden [hat]” [“someone perceived the interspersed fictional element about the deal in Rave as somewhat distracting”] (522). Goetz concludes that he only “an nicht mehr als drei Stellen jeweils vier Worte nur RAUS nehmen müsste, und diese Störung wäre weg” [“take OUT four words at not more than three points and this perturbance would be gone”] (522). The drug-deal story occurs halfway through the book and thus constitutes Rave ’s center, suggesting that at the core of Berlin’s hedonistic narratives lies nothing but made-up stories, a reservoir of fiction that is a critical constituent of any “truthful” representation of what is going on. What is more important, however, is that Goetz charges these fictions positively: the fantasies of the DJ life finally signal themselves as such, contained by a decidedly real frame about techno’s day jobs. After this intrusion of “pure fiction,” Rave returns to the urban landscape and its clubs in a more documentary vein than before - gone are the literary “An der Kernstelle der Existenz” 241 gimmicks of the first act. This shift suggests that the narration is not interested in the decay of the raver’s body, but rather in the dissolution of the myth into something concrete. The final section is titled “Die Zerstörten” [The Destroyed] and insinuates that the process of decay begun in section one and furthered in the middle part of Rave has been completed ( Rave 183). The quote that follows on the next page reads “We’ll never stop living this way,” affirming what has transpired so far (185). The accompanying photograph shows a dimly-lit apartment that is only sparsely decorated. The viewer’s attention is drawn to the huge window that dominates the composition and which allows a glimpse of houses in a city; the visible buildings do not correspond to iconic images of the capital but rather evoke a quite provincial place, even though, of course, this is very likely Berlin. Compared to the first photograph, the perspective is now elevated, gone are all the hints at being part of the underground DJ culture and altered states. While the walls, the chair, and the folding table remain in the dark, the window allows beams of light to filter into the room. This is a scene where the writer pulls back from the darkness of the rave and the daylight of the drug-inflected vacationing. At the border of light and darkness, this suggests spaces of writing as a refuge. The picture neither contains representations of night-life nor does it evoke feelings of ecstasy. Rather the reader is offered a contrastive perspective, a conflict that permeates all of Rave ’s acts. The bright exterior of the city is linked to the dark, interior spaces of an apartment. If we look closely, we can spot sheets of paper strewn all over the floor in disarray as well as on the table and even pinned to the wall, implying that this is the apartment of a writer whose task it is to tell the stories that constitute the underground clubs. Section three opens with the exclamation, “Ich mache es diesmal anders und erzähle allen, was ich gerade schreibe” [“I’m gonna do it differently this time and tell everybody what I am writing right now”], underscoring the interpretation that the photograph shows a writer’s apartment as a liminal space between the rave and a drug deal (189). Daylight intrudes, metaphorically establishing a straight line between acts of perception and their representation on paper. However, rather than enabling the reader to see more clearly, the beams are uncomfortably bright. This moment of “tainted transparency” which posits literature as the window pane that allows readers to “look at” the city while at the same time blinding them, is then suddenly cut short by a sub-section titled “NÄCHSTE NÄCHTE” [“NEXT NIGHTS”], signaling a return to the nocturnal city and its incoherent experiences. Despite the title, however, the first anecdotes deal, at best, with the periphery of techno culture, rather than with its “inner sanctum.” For example, the text tells of people buying drugs: “Der Mann von vorhin spricht mit einem Dealer, gibt ihm Geld” [“The man I just met talks 242 Kai-Uwe Werbeck to a dealer, he gives him cash”] (195). The urban landscape in which these deals go down evokes desolation and boredom: “Der Fremde steht groß, dunkel und finster an der Ecke bei den schweren Bäumen, wo der Park beginnt, zur Stadt hin aufhört. Es ist Nacht geworden. Und es ist kalt geworden” [“The unknown man stands tall, dark and gloomy on the corner next to the heavy trees, where the parks begins or ends in relation to the city. Night has fallen. It has gotten cold”] (190). One of the narrators, a man named Schütte, drives through this bleak environment, “Die Frankfurter Straßen und Schulen, Sonntagabend. Die Stadt ist leer. Das Taxi fährt dahin. Schütte raucht” [“Frankfurt’s streets and schools, Sunday night. The city is empty. The taxi glides through it. Schütte is smoking”] (194). Schütte is on his way to the airport and even though he has a goal his journey seems aimless. At the airport, a heterotopia, “man hört die Flughafenatmo. Reden, Rauschen, Ansagen und Ausrufungen, Dialoge in Fetzen” [“one can hear the airport ambient. Talking, white noise, announcements and calls for travelers”] (190), acts of communication as meaningless as those in the clubs. The difference is that the reader is now offered sign posts as to who is experiencing these things. The paragraphs of Rave ’s last section oscillate between different cities, quickly jumping from Frankfurt to New York to Munich and beyond, following a group of distinguishable characters: “Andere Stadt. Paris. Paderborn. Emden” [“Another city. Paris. Paderborn. Emden”] (194). The airports resemble corridors that connect urban landscapes across the globe, such that these spaces lose their distinctive features. Schütte, for example, “geht durch die unteren Hallen der Flughafenanlage. Effekt des Neons. Die schlaffen Farben. Überall Menschen, Türen, Zeichen, Abzweigungen. Lichter, Reflexe” [“walks along the lower halls of the airport. An effect of the neon light. The meek colors. People everywhere, and doors, signs, junctions. Lights and reflections”] (198). Schütte’s experiences are toned-down replicas of the club nights, reduced in power as they have become “schlaff” [“meek”] (198). Unable to navigate, Schütte, who is now more of a traditional character in a novel, ”irrt durch diese Hallen und Gänge. [Er] hat sich verirrt” [“goes astray in these halls and hallways. He is lost”] (198). What was exciting in the clubs - getting lost, being afloat - has become a negative experience. Schütte reacts by leaving the surface world behind as fast as possible, seeking refuge in the underground clubs: “Schütte trifft Tiermann und sie gehen gemeinsam aufs Klo, gehen zusammen in eine Kabine und nehmen Kokain” [“Schütte runs into Tiermann and they go to the restrooms together, into one of the stalls where they do cocaine”] (198). As a result, Schütte again experiences “die einzelnen Handlungsteile (…) übertrieben zerhackt, isoliert und dadurch in ihrem Sinngehalt (…) traumatisiert” [“the discrete parts as exaggeratedly fragmented, isolated and thus traumatizing in their meaning”] (199). The “An der Kernstelle der Existenz” 243 perceptual fragmentation that dominates section one briefly threatens to return, but this time these disorienting events are not communicated as first-person experiences. Rather, the reader follows Schütte in the third-person, which suggests that the immediacy of section one is no longer sustainable. Toward the end, Rave represents the intoxication almost exclusively from the perspective of an uninvolved writer sitting in his darkened office in an anonymous apartment somewhere in the city. One could wonder if Goetz is suggesting either that literature has failed to capture the techno event or that it is precisely literature’s contribution to deconstruct the inherent presentness of the rave? To be sure, Rave ’s last section retains its sober, observational quality almost throughout. Only twice do the paradigmatic techniques characteristic of its beginning resurface. As “Schütte, Tiermann, eine Unbekannte, Bruder Maßlos, er und ich” [“Schütte, Tiermann, an unknown woman, Brother Self-Indulgent, he and I”] meet at a club, they snort cocaine: “Wir haben uns möglicherweise für diese Nacht jetzt vorläufig hier mal so ein bißchen ein- und festgekokst” [“maybe, we have ‘cocained’ ourselves into this place for the time being”] (248). In these intrusive moments, the paragraphs and the sentences become shorter - emulating the style of the book’s very first pages - until an anonymous voice in Rave utters, “Zeit vergeht” [“time passes”] and thereby comments on the unavoidable reconnect with the reality “above” (250). At some point one narrator exclaims “pff,” expressing exhaustion and deflation, before the narrative breaks down into “dingens, ä” [“thingy, um”], meaningless phrases, or as the narrator evaluates it, “brutalste Verstörung” [“completely through the wind”] (251). We find the second example at the very end of the text. The final four pages follow the group of ravers into the morning light once more. The narrator explains, “wir tapern hinaus. Völlig am Ende” [“we exit the building, complete done in for”] (270), a statement that not only refers to the morning after the party, but that also comments on the looped state of the text itself. This group of people still tells stories to each other and decides to repeat the phrase “Nein, wir hören nicht auf, so zu leben” [“No, we’re not gonna stop living this way”] (270). This is not only the moment when the party is over, it also arguably signals the limits of a narrative of the urban night; afterwards, a new experimental “text” is needed to capture these other fairy tales. Although the characters resolve to go on living their party lives, Goetz’s project shifts its look at post-Wall Berlin to yet another perspective, another building block of the vast kaleidoscope that is Heute Morgen , after having mapped out both the possibilities and limits of literature. After his punk-phase and arguably up to his more recent reflections on late capitalism in novels such as Johann Holtrop , Rainald Goetz focused on the literary representation of seemingly mundane experiences such as raves. This infat- 244 Kai-Uwe Werbeck uation with Berlin’s night-life allegedly transformed the artist Goetz, whom Hubert Winkels had earlier called “die notwendig politisch-militante Verkörperung des Dandys im nachbürgelichem Zeitalter” [“the necessary politically militant embodiment of the post-bourgeois dandy”], into an apolitical and decadent party boy (230). However, as this essay demonstrates, Goetz’s later works are much more than just empty exercises in hedonistic bragging forced into the straightjacket of DJ-style writing. Goetz has repeatedly referred to the critical moment during which forces of forgetting and reflection clash, and it is this particular dialectic image that fuels his texts: “Das Erleben, so blindwütig es auftrat, sehnte sich zugleich danach, sich zu verstehen. Und will das schon im selben Moment wieder vergessen, will das Verstehen zerstören, das Verstandene von neuem Erleben wieder zu Unsinn sich erklären lassen, durch Neues, wieder Wirres, Tolles” [“Experience, no matter how blind, wanted to understand itself. Once it realizes that it wants to forget, to destroy this understanding, declare that which is understood silly and transform it into something new, confusing, awesome”] ( Rave 255). Goetz suggests with respect to the heated debate about the post-Wall Berlin novel that a single text is not sufficient to capture the plurality of Germany’s “new” capital but that it still has the responsibility to try. While he employs a variety of texts - from Internet diaries to journalistic essay and image collections - to approach postmodern life in the city, even a single building block in Heute Morgen cannot remain inherently stable throughout; rather it demands fragmented narratives that complicate the relation between Berlin’s “reality” and “fiction” as both paradigms have long started bleeding into one another, throwing each other into relief. Literature, Goetz argues, has more to do than just describe from afar, it has to capture the event and then transform it in the process - even if it fails - and then start the whole process anew. Notes 1 Rainald Goetz, Rave 79. All translations are my own. 2 Techno’s genealogy is complex. The interested reader is referred to Ulf Poschardt’s cultural history of DJing in which he also documents the development of electronic techno music. Poschardt states that the term techno has been used “since 1985 for a variation of house music that became one of the most successful kinds of dancefloor, and which was incarnated in dozens of versions in the early 90s: from dreamy ambient via hip-hop-related breakbeats to the relentlessly hard and fast sounds of Gabba (…)” (313—14). It is worth noting that house music - of which techno is a sub-genre - shares its pedigree with gospel and its “secularized pop-variants,” R&B, soul, and disco (Poschardt 255). “An der Kernstelle der Existenz” 245 3 With regard to these changes, Thorsten Rudolph argues in his study on Goetz that “ Irre von 1983 und Rave von 1998 zwei kategorial verschiedene Modelle hinsichtlich der epistemologischen Voraussetzungen, der ästhetischen Umsetzung und der politischen Implikation vorführen” [“ Irre , published in 1983 and Rave , published in 1998 present two categorically different models with regard to their epistemological prerequisites, their aesthetic execution, and their political implications”] (16). 4 “Members of Mayday” refers to an annual German techno event, the Mayday, and is the name of a DJ collective that collaboratively produces its “hymns.” Although the Mayday took place in an official, non-derelict, and above-ground building - the Dortmunder Westfalenhallen - the secluded subterranean spaces that hosted the at times illegal techno parties were often abandoned, dilapidated, and off-limit locations that had outlived their intended functions either in West Germany’s capitalist or the GDR’s socialist system. 5 The five texts that constitute Heute Morgen are numerically labeled, from 5.1. to 5.5. The first digit, 5, situates Heute Morgen in the overall trajectory of Goetz’s literary oeuvre in which every released text is assigned a number. His first novel Irre , for example, is labeled 1 while the 1993 play Festung is ranked 4.1. Rave carries the notation 5.1, while the Internet diary turned novel Abfall für Alle , written and published earlier, marks the voluminous end point, 5.5. The experimental play Jeff Koons and the journalistic essay and image collection Celebration: Texte und Bilder zur Nacht complete the cycle. Jeff Koons and Celebration are numbered 5.2 and 5.4 respectively, while the last part of the project to be published, Dekonspiratione , is labeled 5.3. The 2009 text Loslabern carries the notation 6 and thus marks Heute Morgen as completed. 6 In his study of the city at night, the cultural historian Joachim Schlör argues that it has something of a jungle and “is inevitably expelled into the realm of prehistory and mythology. None of the many histories of lighting, which in their different ways all describe the triumph of light, is able to dispense with preliminary description of the impenetrable terrain of the nocturnal as an alien region of fear that is conquered and finally subjugated” (57). 7 For the protagonists in novels such as Tanja Dückers’s Spielzone and Elke Naters’s Königinnen , who all navigate the clubs and raves (and the city as a playground in general), it is often the spectacle that “made it possible for Germans to rethink what it means to be German in a globalized culture, to reevaluate critically the legacy of their past, and to reinsert the body and its pleasures into postnationalist negotiations of culture and community” (Koepnick 233). 246 Kai-Uwe Werbeck 8 See Stephen Brockmann’s Literature and German Unification , Stuart Taberner’s German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond , and Katharina Gerstenberger’s Writing the New Berlin for more detailed accounts of the genre. 9 WestBam (born as Maximilian Lenz), who also comes from a punk background, became a well-known German techno DJ, producer, and label executive. He organized the first Mayday rave - an event chided by critics as the sell-out of techno - and published the book Mix, Cuts & Scratches in cooperation with Goetz in1997. Interestingly, Mix, Cuts & Scratches - a collection of interviews, images, and reflections on techno culture, published with Merve Verlag Berlin rather than Suhrkamp - follows the notational system of Goetz’s works. In fact, it is 5.5.1. even though it was released two years before Rave , which is 5.1. Similar to the photograph discussed above it turns history on its head and presents that which came first as a supplement to the last part of Heute Morgen , the Internet diary, notated as 5.5. Works Cited Baßler, Moritz. Der deutsche Pop-Roman: Die neuen Archivisten . 2. ed. München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2005. Brockmann, Stephen. Literature and German Reunification . Rochester NY: Cambridge U P, 2006. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Tiefer als der Tag gedacht: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Nacht . München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2008. 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