row zero and the poems

There is a copy of In stillen Nächten on my shelf. I have had it for years, long before the summer of 2023, when the allegations surfaced and the name Till Lindemann acquired a particular weight in public discourse that made it suddenly uncomfortable to say out loud that you own his poetry and have read it more than once. I am saying it now, which already feels like something — a small declaration, a minor positioning of myself, though in relation to what I am not entirely sure. In relation to the allegations? In relation to what the poems are? In relation to whoever might be reading this and already forming a judgment about what kind of person admits to such things in an essay that is, after all, supposed to be about ethics?

That last thought is the one I want to stay with, because it is the thought Dederer is most interested in: the thought that arrives just before you say the thing you are not sure you should say, the moment of internal self-monitoring that reveals something about the shape of the cage you are already living in. I noticed it. I noticed myself almost reaching for a qualification — of course the allegations are serious, of course I believe women deserve to be heard — and then I noticed the reaching, and I felt something slightly nauseating about the need for it. As if the preemptive qualification were the price of admission. As if I couldn’t just say: I like the poems, this is complicated, I don’t know what to do with that.

The case of Lindemann is not clean in the way that Polanski is clean, or rather, not clean in the same way. The Berlin prosecutors dropped their investigation in August 2023. His legal team obtained injunctions preventing Spiegel from repeating the core allegations. He has since filed criminal complaints against the publication for allegedly falsifying documents. None of this makes him innocent. None of it makes the accounts the women gave false, or the structural conditions those accounts describe — the auditioning, the hierarchy, the power differential at the centre of the Row Zero parties — any less worth taking seriously. What it means is that we are in a territory that has no clean floor, no place where you can stand and feel certain that your feet are on solid ground. The investigation was dropped but the publisher wasn’t wrong to drop him. The injunction was granted but the reporting was not fabricated. He may have done nothing criminal. That does not mean nothing happened. This is the territory, and it is not comfortable, and the discomfort is not a problem to be solved — it is, if Dederer is right, exactly the place where thinking has to begin.

But I keep returning to the poems. This is what I find most difficult to explain and what I suspect is most revealing about whatever I think I believe. The poems are dark in the way Lindemann is dark — obsessive, formally controlled, often violent in their imagery, occasionally tender in the way that things that have been through violence are tender. They are not good in the way a literature professor would use the word good. They are good in the way a very specific kind of attention to language is good, the way someone who has taken words seriously as physical objects, as things with weight and temperature, produces lines that land differently from lines produced by someone for whom language is primarily a vehicle for meaning. There is a precision in them that is also a kind of ruthlessness. And I noticed, reading them again recently, that the precision and the ruthlessness are part of what I find compelling — which means I am not, as I might prefer to think, loving the poems despite the darkness but because of it, or at least in the company of it, in the same room as it.

This is the thing Dederer calls the stain. Not the biographical fact attaching itself to the work from outside, contaminating something that would otherwise be pure. The stain is more intimate than that. It is the discovery that what you love in the work and what disturbs you about the person might not be entirely separable — that the quality of attention that makes the poems worth reading might be the same quality of attention that, directed elsewhere, toward other people, becomes something else. I don’t know if that is true of Lindemann. I am not sure it can be known. What I notice is that the thought makes me uncomfortable in a way that feels different from the discomfort of moral judgment, less clean, less satisfying. Moral judgment at least tells you what to do. This doesn’t tell me what to do. It just sits there, neither condemning nor forgiving, asking me to look at it.

What the poem knows, and what I keep having to acknowledge it knows, is that I came to it freely, without compulsion, and that I came back. That the returning is the part I can’t argue my way out of. I can tell a story about separating the art from the artist. I can tell a story about the death of the author, about the text as autonomous object, about how the biographical Lindemann and the lyric speaker of In stillen Nächten are not the same person. I can tell all of these stories and they contain genuine arguments and I do not entirely disbelieve any of them. And then I think about what his publisher actually said when they dropped him — and I find I cannot make the arguments hold as firmly as I would like.

The publisher’s statement, issued in June 2023 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, is worth reading carefully because it does not quite say what you might expect a publisher to say. It does not say primarily that the Row Zero allegations are credible, or that Lindemann has been found guilty of anything. What it says is that during the reporting surge, they became aware of a pornographic video — made in 2020, three years before it came to their attention — in which Lindemann uses the physical copy of In stillen Nächten as a prop in scenes depicting sexual violence against women. They describe this as a gross breach of trust. And then they say something that has stayed with me since I first read it: that they had always defended the separation between the lyric “I” and the author, had defended it stubbornly, as a matter of principle — but that Lindemann himself, through his deliberate use of the book in this context, had mocked that separation. Had collapsed it from the inside. The argument the publisher had been making on his behalf — that the violent speaker in the poems is a fictional construction, not the man himself — was destroyed not by a critic, not by a court, but by the author.

I find this philosophically vertiginous in a way I am still trying to think through. Roland Barthes killed the author in the Sixties, declared the text autonomous, freed it from the tyranny of biographical intention. What the reader makes of the text is what the text is; what the author meant or did or was is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to the work. This is not a frivolous position. It contains a genuine insight about how meaning moves and multiplies once a text enters the world, how it escapes its origins. But Lindemann’s gesture — if we can call it that, if we can call the deliberate staging of sexual violence around the physical object of a poetry book a gesture, which is already to aestheticize something that perhaps should not be aestheticized — does something peculiar to the Barthesian argument. It does not refute it from outside. It does not prove that the author’s biography contaminates the text. It does something else: it demonstrates that the author himself does not believe in the separation. That he was using the fiction of separation — the lyric I, the autonomous text, the freedom of art — as a kind of cover. And if the author does not believe his own poem is separable from himself, I am not sure on what grounds I am supposed to insist that it is.

This is not the same as saying the poems are now worthless, or that my reading of them has been revealed as a mistake. I am not sure it means anything so clean. What it means, I think, is that the argument I was relying on — the argument that let me keep the book on the shelf without too much difficulty — has been specifically and deliberately voided by the person whose work I was protecting with it. Which leaves me holding the poems with something less comfortable than a theory. Which leaves me holding them with just the fact of my own continued attachment, stripped of its justification, asking me what exactly it is I am attached to, and whether I would be attached to it if I looked at it clearly enough.

There is a version of this essay in which I conclude something. In which I come down, however tentatively, on a side. In which the honest examination leads somewhere, to a decision about the book on my shelf, to a position about the allegations, to a statement about what I will and won’t do with my attention and my loyalty going forward. I notice I want that version. I notice the wanting. I am choosing not to give it to you, because I think the wanting is exactly what Dederer is asking us to examine — the desire for the essay to resolve what life will not resolve, the hunger for the clean position, the relief of the conclusion. The book is still on my shelf. I still don’t know what that means about me. I am bringing that not-knowing into the classroom, and asking whether you have something similar, and whether we can sit with it together without immediately reaching for the stories that make it go away.

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