Michèle Bernstein

Michèle Bernstein (born April 28, 1932 in Paris ) is a French author and founding member of the Situationist International (SI).

Life

Michèle Bernstein came from a family of Russian Jewish immigrants. As a student at the Sorbonne, she met a group of students, writers and political activists who had come together under the name Letterist International , in which Guy Debord was also active. In 1954 she and Debord married, and she too became active in the group. In 1957 the group split off with the CoBrA group to form the "Situationist International", which in France, under Debord's leadership, had up to 40 members. For their publication she wrote international situation-nested articles, whose authorship, however, Orlich (2011) attributes to Debord. Although the group strictly rejected the production of works of art for a market and this also played a role in the case of Asger Jorn as a reason for exclusion from the group, Bernstein wrote a novel in late 1957 in the expectation of stabilizing the group's finances. Since the novel Tous les chevaux du roi , published in print in 1960, became a bestseller, this also happened. The novel was structured in the style of Françoise Sagan's successful novels at the time and was intended to satirize this style. A second novel followed in 1961, which conceived the same material in a different literary form, this time as a parody of the Nouveau Roman style of the successful Alain Robbe-Grillet .

The marriage with Debord petered out after eleven years when Debord turned to Alice Becker-Ho , who was ten years his junior , and Bernstein left the group in 1967, especially since they took a different stance on the Six Day War than the group. She supported Debord in bringing out the book Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels in November 1967, half a year before May 1968 , with her publisher Buchet / Chastel . Her marriage to Debord was not formally divorced until 1972. In 1973 she met Ralph Rumney (1934-2002), who had also been part of the founding of the SI, but was expelled from the group in 1958, and the two married in the same year, whereby she also acquired British citizenship. Debord, with whom she had continued to work until then, resented this step. She now worked for a horse racing newspaper, then in advertising, first at Havas , then at smaller agencies. She moved to England with Rumney in 1982. After her divorce from Rumney, she moved to Salisbury and discussed new book publications for the features of the French newspaper Liberation from there . She stayed for fourteen years, until 1996, with the newspaper, whose boss Serge July only discovered her situationist background two years later when she wrote the obituary for the publisher Gérard Lebovici .

Michèle Bernstein now lives in Paris again (2015). She advises the publisher Gérard Berréby on the publication of the literature on the SI in the Éditions Allia .

Works and writings (selection)

• Tous les chevaux du roi . Novel. Paris: Buchet / Chastel, 1960 (reissued Paris: Allia, 2004)
  • All the king's horses . Novel. From the French by Dino Beck and Anatol Vitouch. With an afterward by Roberto Ohrt. Hamburg: Ed. Nautilus, 2015
• La Nuit . Novel. Paris: Buchet / Chastel, 1961 (reissued Paris: Allia, 2013)
• No discussion (1955), in: Guy Debord presents Potlatch: 1954-1957; Information bulletin of the Lettrist International; with a document attachment . From the Franz. By Wolfgang Kukulies. Berlin: Ed. Tiamat, 2002, p. 318 f.
• No pointless indulgence (1958), in: Situationist International (ed.): Situationist International: 1958 - 1969; Collected issues of the organ of the Situationist International. Volume 1 . German first edition. Hamburg: MaD-Verlag, 1976, pp. 30-32
• Sunset Boulevard (1962), in: Situationist International (Ed.): Situationist International: 1958 - 1969; Collected issues of the organ of the Situationist International. Volume 1 . German first edition. Hamburg: MaD-Verlag, 1976, pp. 30-32
• Gaston Bachelard , Michèle Bernstein: Jorn Wemaëre . Paris 1960 (Document on "Le long voyage" et les autres tapisseries d'Asger Jorn et Pierre Wemaëre .)
• The Situationist International , in: The Times Literary Supplement , September 2, 1964 (The translator of the text into English is unknown, according to Debord it is "our article".) Link

literature

• Max Jakob Orlich: Situationist International: Entry, Exit, Exclusion; on the dialectic of interpersonal relationships and theory production of an aesthetic-political avant-garde (1957 - 1972) . Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Zugl .: Freiburg, Univ., Diss., 2010
• Jean-Marie Apostolidès: Les Tombeaux de Guy Debord: précédé de Portrait de Guy-Ernest en jeune libertin . Paris: Exile, 1999

Web links

• Literature by and about Michèle Bernstein in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Michèle Bernstein in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Max Jakob Orlich: Situationist International , 2011, pp. 267–274
2. ↑ Max Jakob Orlich: Situationist International , 2011, p. 272 ​​f.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Gavin Everall : The Game ( Memento of the original dated May 4, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Interview, in: frieze , September 2013 
4. ↑ Ralph Rumney: The Consul. Contributions to the history of the Situationist International. A conversation with Gérard Berréby in collaboration with Giulio Minghini & Chantal Ostreicher . With an afterword by Roberto Ohrt. From the Franz. By Michael Sander. Berlin: Edition Tiamat, 2011
5. ↑ Michèle Bernstein ( Memento of the original from May 29, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , at Edition Nautilus 
6. ↑ Malcolm Imrie: Ralph Rumney. Rebellious artist and co-founder of the Situationist International , obituary, in: The Guardian , March 8, 2002
7. ↑ Tous les articles de Michèle Bernstein publiés dans Liberation , at Liberation
8. ↑ Note: The 25 page references to Bernstein, Michèle in the register of persons and groups on p. 625 are almost without exception not verifiable, the readability of the book is low in this regard.