Hans G Helms

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Hans G Helms (born June 8, 1932 in Teterow ; † March 11, 2012 in Berlin-Friedrichshain ) was a German writer and composer , ideology critic , social and economic historian .

Life

Helms was born in 1932 in the small town of Teterow in Mecklenburg . He came from a German-Jewish family who survived the Holocaust in Germany thanks to forged papers. He spent his childhood and youth in Teterow with frequent stays in Rostock and Berlin . He grew up trilingual: German, Yiddish and English. At the age of five he received music lessons from a Belarusian teacher in the subjects of piano, theory and history. During National Socialism , he became known by secretly listening to " enemy broadcasters " with swing and modern jazz (bebop), which he perceived as liberation music.

From 1946 living in exile with a Nansen passport , Helms learned tenor saxophone with Hans Koller in Vienna . From 1950 to 1953 he played in Sweden with Charlie Parker , Buddy DeFranco , Gene Krupa, among others . In addition to jazz, he dealt with new music ( Charles Ives , Henry Cowell , Hanns Eisler and the Second Viennese School ). 1954/55 Helms worked in Vienna for the radio stations "Ravag" and transmitter Rot-Weiß-Rot and in Salzburg for the US military broadcaster "Blue Danube Network". For this he invented the broadcast format Jazz & Poetry with readings of poetry and prose from Edgar Allan Poe to Edward Estlin Cummings and Langston Hughes on modern jazz .

On trips to the USA, Roman Jakobson introduced Helms to comparative linguistics at Harvard University , while he studied the latest developments in jazz in Boston and New York with Lennie Tristano, among others. In 1954 he gave up playing the saxophone in order to focus on writing and composing. In addition, he conducted private studies in philosophy and sociology with Theodor W. Adorno , Max Horkheimer and Siegfried Kracauer , with whom he was on friendly terms. As a result, his early cultural and socio-critical work was influenced by critical theory , while his later ideology-critical, social and political-economic analyzes were based on private studies with the Marx-Engels biographer Auguste Cornu and the Marxist social and economic historian Jürgen Kuczynski . Kracauer and Kuczynski named Helms his most important teachers.

Helms continued his literary and compositional work, which he began in 1955, in Cologne from 1957 to work with the composer Gottfried Michael Koenig in the studio for electronic music at WDR . Advised by Werner Meyer-Eppler , the phonetician from Bonn and founder of information theory, who had already assisted Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen , he carried out sound analyzes and phonetic experiments with Koenig , which supplemented linguistic studies.

While Helms had intensive discussions with Stockhausen in the studio for electronic music , there were close connections to Pierre Boulez , Bruno Maderna and John Cage , especially to Cage, for whose conceptions he worked through translations - first at the Donaueschinger Musiktage and the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music of his lectures, through radio features and writings, tried to awaken understanding as for those of Charles Ives .

In Helms' apartment, a group was formed that included Koenig and the musicologist Heinz-Klaus Metzger , including the composers György Ligeti , Franco Evangelisti , Wolf Rosenberg and Mauricio Kagel . This polylingual circle sought an analytical reading of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake . Even if Adorno, along with Proust, considered Joyce to be the decisive reference for Helms' compositions in the border area between language and music, Helms sees Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener , Jean Paul , Laurence Sterne , Edgar Allan Poe , ETA Hoffmann and Robert Walser as his most important teachers in the literary field in Hector Berlioz , Gustav Mahler , Charles Ives , John Cage and the serial composer in the musical. Against this background he composed his Fa: m 'Ahniesgwow , the stories of Yahud and the Daidalos , the latter as a joint work with Hans Otte . GOLEM and KONSTRUKTIONEN followed, and finally the film composition BIRDCAGE together with John Cage .

Helms' musical experiments caught the attention of Theodor W. Adorno . After the two had made acquaintance in the early 1960s, Helms became Adorno's “private student” and studied critical theory , especially its Marxist foundations. In the process he discovered Max Stirner , whose work The Single and His Property in 1845/46 had provoked Marx to violent criticism and had prompted the conception of historical materialism . Helms now devoted very detailed studies to Stirner's unique and its reception, from which his literary magnum opus , the book Die Ideologie der anonymous Gesellschaft , emerged in 1966 . This work and an abridged edition of Stirner's work published by him established the rediscovery of this author, who had been forgotten for half a century.

With his criticism of Stirner, Helms saw himself in the tradition of Marx as well as of some contemporary Marxists who had already “perceived the pus” and recognized Stirner's “current danger”: “The ideological situation in the Federal Republic of Germany was the reason for theirs dangerous development is the engine of this work. ”In his paper, Helms takes the view that Stirner created the“ first consistent formulation ... of the ideology of the middle class ”; Furthermore, "that Hitler articulated a specifically middle-class ideology and that Stirnerianism and National Socialism are variations of the same fascist demon." Because this demon lives on in the FRG dominated by the middle class, he wrote his book to combat it.

After this ideology-critical work, Helms turned increasingly to political and economic analyzes of international capital concentration from the mid-1960s. From 1967 he also experimented with the cinematic implementation of analyzes of contemporary music, but above all of urban and transport development since the beginning of industrialization. He viewed radio and television as effective media for conveying socially critical content. At the request of the University of Bremen , Helms received his doctorate there in 1974 on the basis of his publications Die Ideologie der anonymous Gesellschaft und Fetisch Revolution ( Dr. rer. pole. He decided not to appeal because it would have affected his field research . In addition to lectures and lectures in Western and Eastern European countries, Jamaica, Venezuela, Canada and the USA , he held visiting professorships at the University of Illinois (Urbana, IL) from 1976–1978 . From 1978 he lived in New York .

In the USA and Canada, he examined the rapidly advancing computer and telecommunications technologies as well as automation in industry, trade and administration and their effects on the world of work. He also analyzed the effects of technologies on capital concentration, transportation and urban development. In doing so, he mainly relied on laboratory and factory tours and interviews with scientists, planners, entrepreneurs and workers. He processed the respective research results into radio and television productions for the ARD and Deutschlandfunk or published them in books, scientific journals, trade union organs, weekly and daily newspapers.

In 1989 Helms returned to Germany and settled again in Cologne; In 2003 he moved to Berlin. In 1993 he resumed his artistic work with the literary-musical Münchhausen project as “work in progress”. In connection with this he carried out research on fascism and studies on the history of the development of Jews in Eastern Europe. He wrote about the concentration of capital, urban development and the consequences of electronicization in all areas of society.

Helms was buried on March 17, 2012 in Berlin-Friedrichshain. Thomas Kuczynski spoke at his funeral and the musician Tristan Honsinger played the cello.

Works

Artistic work

  • Fa: m 'Ahniesgwow . Experimental speech-music composition / radio play. DuMont-Schauberg, Cologne 1959/60
  • Text for Bruno Maderna . Implemented and incorporated by Bruno Maderna in his Dimension II and Hyperion . Cologne 1959, Milan 1959, 1964 ff.
  • Daidalos . Composition in seven scenes for four singers and an instrumental ensemble. With Hans Otte. 1961
  • Yahud stories . Reading and listening pieces. 1961–65 (unfinished)
  • Golem . Polemics for nine vocal soloists. 1962
  • Constructions for 16 choir voices based on movements from the “ Manifesto of the Communist Party ” (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels . 1968
  • Birdcage - 73'20.958 "for a Composer . Film composition. With John Cage. 1972
  • Fa: m 'Ahniesgwow . Radiophonic stereo version of some parts of the speech-music composition. Cologne 1979
  • Hieronymus-John von Münchhausen: storyteller, adventurer, inventor of new worlds of sound . In: Jahresring 40: Mythology of the Enlightenment - Secret Doctrines of Modernity . (Ed: Beat Wyss). Publisher Silke Schreiber, Munich 1993
  • Rapprochements à John Cage . A radio composition with the integrated Music of Changes by John Cage. Cologne and Baden-Baden 1995–96. - Verbal score in: Protocols 1–2 / 1997

Literary works

  • Marijuana . In: Jazz Podium. No. 6 / 3rd year June 1954 u. No. 8 / III. Born August 1954.
  • To John Cage's lecture “Indeterminacy” . In: Die Reihe, v, 1959
  • The composer Charles Ives . In: Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, cxxv, 1964
  • The ideology of the anonymous society. Max Stirner'sonly one ” and the progress of democratic self-confidence from the Vormärz to the Federal Republic. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1966
  • About the social function of criticism . In: Criticism - by whom / for whom / how . (Ed .: Peter Hamm). Hanser, Munich 1968
  • Fetish Revolution - Marxism and Federal Republic . Luchterhand, Neuwied and Berlin 1969
  • On the political economy of transport . In architecture and urban planning in the 20th century . Volume 1. (Ed .: Joachim Petsch). VSA, Berlin 1974
  • On the way to the junkyard. For urban planning in the USA and Canada . Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1984
  • Artificial intelligence. A study of their historical development, their driving forces and their socio- and political-economic implications . Self-published, New York 1985
  • History of the industrial development of Berlin and its perspectives . In: Berlin: Global City or Bankruptcy Assets? An interim assessment ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall . (Ed .: Albert Scharenberg). Karl Dietz, Berlin 2000
  • Music between business and untruth (= music concepts , issue 111, ed .: Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn). edition text + kritik, Munich 2001
  • On Albert Speer's bureaucracy of the systematic impoverishment and deportation of Berlin's Jews . In: Journal of Marxist Renewal. Line 51, 2002
  • Not willing to compromise. Experiences and experiences with Franco Evangelisti . In: towards a new world. Notes on Franco Evangelisti. (Ed .: Harald Muenz ) Pfau, Saarbrücken 2002
  • Oświęcim - Oshpitsin - Auschwitz. Center of Jewish life, site of mass murder. Chronicle of a Polish city. Publisher May 8, Berlin 2007

Editor and co-author:

  • Max Stirner : The only one and his property and other writings. Hanser, Munich 1968
  • Petr Kropotkin : The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings. Hanser, Munich 1973
  • Capitalist urban development. (with Jörn Janssen) Luchterhand, Neuwied and Berlin 1970
  • The city as a table of gifts. Observations of the current urban development. Reclam, Leipzig 1992

Web links

Discography

  • Fa: m 'Ahniesgwow . Experimental speech-music composition / radio play. First complete recording of the work (Ensemble sprechbohrer: Sigrid Sachse, Harald Muenz , Georg Sachse). WERGO / HR, Mainz 2011. Prize of the German Record Critics, Quarterly List 3/2011.

Individual evidence

  1. Helms always wrote the abbreviation of his middle name without a period. There are different details about the full middle name: the German national biography calls "Günter", the Berlin State Library calls "Georg".
  2. On Helms' role as the initiator of a second “Stirner Renaissance” cf. Bernd A. Laska : A secret hit. A short edition history of Stirner's “Unique” , Nuremberg: LSR-Verlag 1994
  3. Hans G Helms: The ideology of the anonymous society. Cologne: DuMont Schauberg 1966, p. 495
  4. ibid., Foreword pp. 1–5, 481