• Thu 04 05 2017 / 8 pm •
The Totalitarian Experience: Heinz Langerhans Felix Klopotek

FELIX KLOPOTEK with MICHAEL BUCKMILLER, JOKE FRERICHS, ANJA JAZESCHANN and MELANIE WEIDEMÜLLER

In a staged reading of poems, texts, pictures, and audio recordings, Anja Jazeschann and Melanie Weidemüller, as well as Langerhans’ students Joke Frerichs and Michael Buckmiller join Felix Klopotek to tell the dramatic story of Heinz Langerhans (1904 – 1976), a forgotten Communist political scientist and writer. Expelled from the Party as an ultra-leftist, Langerhans was close to Brecht and the Frankfurt School. Jailed by the Nazis for his activism in the resistance, he continued to write and smuggle out theoretical texts on cigarette papers, predicting the Second World War as early as 1935. Langerhans’ theory of totalitarianism from the 1940s, long believed lost, is an unflinching account of fascism and Stalinism in Marxist categories, applied to such a radical degree that they begin to dissolve. He predicted that totalitarianism would survive; by coopting part of the workers’ movement, and diverting it toward imperialism and war, it would present a new fusion of state power, capital, and its former opposition. This staged reading presents an insight into a larger research project into Langerhans supported by the Academy’s Open Call. Its results can be found on the website https://www.totalitaere-erfahrung.de/.

Venue: Boulehalle im Mülheimer Hafen, Hafenstraße 3, 51063 Cologne
Free admission
In German