Michael Stöppler

Michael Stöppler

Social Scientist

Michael Stöppler is a scientist and Lufthansa ground staff on call in Frankfurt am Main. Since 1994 he has held a teaching position for pedagogy in the course of studies in theatre and opera direction at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Frankfurt am Main. Since 2016 he has been a member of the Academic Committee Fellowships Program at Auschwitz (FASPE New York), Michael is a member of "Team 2038" of the German Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice (2021).

Rohstoff

Jörg Fauser|German edition
Jörg Fauser as an observer of his life and his time: junkie in Istanbul, 1968 communard in Berlin, squatter in Frankfurt The autobiographical testimony is a fast-paced contemporary document of the sixties and seventies - and the story of one who set out to become a writer.

Fauser imagines Harry Gelb. A rare Human. In Rohstoff (raw material) he makes him a present to us. Generous and delightful. Fauser is letting Gelb, at page 13, grow up „in Frankfurt/M 50“. There, in the age of eighteen, he lets it become clear to him „that the profession of the writer was the only one, in which I could live out my Apathy and maybe nevertheless could make something out of my life.“ 277 pages later, with stopovers in Istanbul, Göttingen, München and Berlin Harry Gelb lies, at the last page and right there, in the Frankfurt main station district, outside. „This then was the pavement.“ And under the pavement with Fausers Gelb lies nothing, not even the strand. Until there and then Harry Gelb transports what Fauser experienced in his own body. „We took everything we could get… raw Opium… Nembutal … all kinds of Uppers… . Ede painted, I wrote.“ Narrated is the resumé of Life towards personality. From myth to novel. Truth knowing itself, between 1968 and 80/81. Just history. All the rest is error, turpidity, opinion, striving, arbitrariness and transcience. Absolutely rousing.
 

Michael Stöppler

Luftkrieg und Literatur

W. G. Sebald|German edition
The revised Zurich Poetics Lectures by W.G. Sebald on literary efforts to come to terms with the realities of the post-war world in Germany and the failure of German authors to deal with aerial war (Luftkrieg).

Luftkrieg und Literatur (Aerial Warfare and Literature) is published in 1999. The same year, March 24th 1999 exactly, the German postwar period came to an end. In Operation Allied Force the German Air Force, for the first time after WWII, took part in an armed combat mission. „Der Aufsteiger“ (the upward climber), so the 2020 title of Edgar Wolfrum Geschichte Deutschlands von 1990 bis heute shifted the paramount political commandment of power from „Never again War“ to „Never again Auschwitz“. Luftkrieg und Literatur „was initiated by Carl Seeligs description of a trip with the institutional patient Robert Walser that took place in midsummer1943, exactly on that same day followed by the night in which the city of Hamburg perished in fire.“ Sebald analyses the blank that the aerial warfare over Germany left in German literature and diagnoses a „failure in face of the violence of the absolute contingency that emerged out of our heads mania for order.“ The „disastrous horror“ of aerial warfare over Germany seems to have barely left „a trail of pain“. Rather it has been tried to make of it „a glorious page in the register of things endured successfully and without evidence of inner weakness.“ W.G Sebald choses the rare German word Ruhmesblatt (glorious page). It reminds us of another, completely different „glorious page that has not and will not be spoken of“ from that same year of the war 1943. The „merciless“ scale of the events triggered by the „professionals of terror“ opens up only, if ever, „under a synoptical, artificial view.“ Documentation needs Fiction. From page 35 to 80 Sebald tries to find the start of a „Natural History of Destruction“. In this attempt he again and again takes into artificial view the night of July 28th, when under the title >Operation Gomorrha< „the complete annihilation and incineration of the city“ of Hamburg began. In the end Sebald confines his view from that of Alexander Kluge, whose view „despite all intellectual steadfastness is also the horrified look of the angel of history ". The Sebaldian view, the readers of the not jet written view, is similar to the one of Clockwork Orange Alex, clinged in the Ludovico Technique. No more Singing in the Rain. The Fire Next Time.

Michael Stöppler

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