Joachim Paech
An Individual and His Attempt at an Assassination
On the Re-Construction of an Event Lacking a Hero, Martyr, Rebel or Saint
Johann Georg Elser: Hitler’s Would-Be Assassin

On November 8, 1939 Johann Georg Elser, an artisan from Wuerttemberg, launched a bomb attack on Adolf Hitler in Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller. Hitler just barely managed to escape unharmed.

In this form of a news item, the event signified in this way can be read as an entry in the annals of history. Discourse articulates some sequence of events as 'emplotted' in an account of history (Stierle¹) – where the specific meaning is attributed to it that renders it comprehensible within this context. Since events only exist in the form of their repetition² and arrangement in discourse, they are constitutively connected to a horizon of meaning which makes them comprehensible in the first place. Pure events are absurd – not because they are meaningless, but because their meaning is not revealed to actual comprehension. And this is precisely the sense in which they are absurd. Georg Elser’s deed is anything but absurd, but, as an event, it has been understood in different ways. For the articulation of the event within a whole sequence of events has taken place with reference to various horizons of meaning and continues to do so. One reason for this is the specific inconclusiveness of the original event itself at the historical point of its occurrence. This differentiates it from similar events that are always incorporated into a set of events that provides the framework for their meaning (the July Plot or the student resistance group associated with Hans and Sophie Scholl) and attributes certain roles to the participants. Heroes, martyrs, rebels, or saints: These are role allocations in a contextually defined sequence of events with a stable horizon of meaning which, in turn, provides for the (relative) conclusiveness of the original event that has become 'history'.

The historical hermeneutics of the incident in the Bürgerbräukeller on November 8, 1939 cannot have a certain context (a conspiracy, for example) as its starting-point, but, rather, is referred back to the event itself which it totally misapprehends precisely because it constitutes the event only as its own repetition by situating or arranging it discursively or narratively in a sequence of events. Thus, there is no event outside this sequence which would constitute the event at its location discursively (for an opposing view, see Foucault on the conception of the external³) and that could be attained as a reference point to emplot the occurrence anew into history – for example, as a critique of the historiography of the event that constantly proves evasive and precisely for this reason requires supplements to "what happened".

The following example might cast more light on the subject. Two photographs that appear again and again in connection with resistance to Hitler tell something about an occurrence without being able to display the corresponding pertinent event, namely, the explosion of the bomb. The first photograph shows a ritual, the second destruction; together, they describe the interruption of a ritual by destruction.

In the chronological order of their occurrence, both photographs comment on a period of time in which the event that establishes the relationship between both of them is situated. They no longer describe what happened, but, rather, they tell something about this by making the empty gap between the two pictures discursive: An explosion has caused the transformation from the state of affairs in the first picture to that of the second. At the core of this transformation is the insurmountable event, the explosion. Incidentally, one can easily imagine the event as a photographic act in which the flash of the explosion lights the scene that it simultaneously creates – as with a photograph (this photographic aspect of such eventfulness became reflected upon in connection with the atomic flash from the Hiroshima bomb).

All narratives of the occurrence have their starting-point in this event, the unpredictability of which requires the creation of a context that assigns meaning to what happened. If Hitler had been killed, the meaning of the event would have been fulfilled in the act itself. But the scene is empty; both protagonists, the would-be assassin and his intended victim, are missing. It is this emptiness of the scene that is illuminated by the event of the explosion and that causes the inconclusiveness of what happened. If the scene is subsequently filled with the dead and wounded, with the actual victims of the bomb attack, then already within variations of discourse in which the victims play an important role (as in the Wochenschauen published shortly afterward). Not their presence, but, rather, the absence of Hitler and the would-be assassin is consequential. This is where the imaginary aspect of a sequence of events comes into play – an aspect that has the still unoccupied space of the event at its disposal. That is, the scene becomes a stage on which various plays can be performed. These potentially supplement – under diverse perspectives and only as a discursive repetition in corresponding discourses – precisely that which the event itself 'contains' as something not realized. The supplement can extend to the point of revision of the event itself. I will return briefly to this at the conclusion of my remarks.

The various (re-)constructions⁴ of the event and its participants in their roles can be separated and classified according to the following four epochs: first, the period immediately subsequent to the assassination attempt; secondly, the period after the war until the early 60s; thirdly, the 60s and 70s; and, finally, the 80s and 90s.

Directly following the attempted assassination, three elements are of primary significance: Hitler was absent from the scene of destruction and thus was saved from the attack. The solution to this problem alone, namely deciding whether he was absent by chance or left the hall early because he was informed about the explosion, will influence the presentation of the set of events considerably. The would-be assassin was also absent; the bomb was set off by a time fuse. Eight dead and more than sixty wounded was the toll at the scene of destruction. The scene itself, then, also becomes visually emphasized, propagandistically exploited, but the victims of the attack only play a subordinate role in reference to the construction of the event. That is, they are to fill the scene while the discourse develops itself in a different direction. After three months of war in Poland, the Nazis relate the event directly to their next war aim: the western campaign, including the conquest of England. To this end, two English agents are captured in the Netherlands and, as witnesses to England’s responsibility for the bomb attack, are detained in concentration camps, first at Sachsenhausen, later at Dachau. They personify the propagandistic version of the set of events according to which Elser acted as an ‘agent provocateur’ on behalf of and on the orders of the English. The campaign against England is also supposed to be understood as a response to the English attempt to kill the Führer. Georg Elser, the bomber who was arrested while crossing the border between Constance and Switzerland even before the bomb went off, is also incarcerated at Sachsenhausen and, then, Dachau, and is withheld until 1945 for a role as a witness against England for the prosecution in a planned show trial after the presumed Endsieg. Not until April 5, 1945 is he murdered and eliminated without a trace – at a time when final victory and a show trial are no longer conceivable.

There is a version complementary to this representation by the Nazis popular in various resistance circles. But, this time, it is the Nazis who are the clients supposedly in need of an ‘agent provocateur’ whose attack misses an apparently invulnerable Führer whom destiny has favored. The victims of the attack are needed so that they can be celebrated with obituaries in state ceremonies and can be utilized for emotionalizing the hostilities against the war-time enemy England. Both discourses of such complementary construction of the event presuppose the absence both of Hitler and of Elser at the event itself. The Nazis attribute Hitler’s leaving the Bürgerbräukeller 13 minutes before the explosion to a stroke of fate and assume that a man like Elser would not be able to construct a complicated bomb and set it off using a time fuse without professional assistance from England. The resistance movement, on the other hand, is convinced that the Nazis themselves provided the professional assistance and that Hitler left the scene because he knew that a bomb would explode shortly thereafter. The idea that Elser could have acted alone, that he had made the complicated preparations for the attack without outside help (from the English or from the Nazis) and had taken the entire individual responsibility for his act upon himself was not only just as undesirable, but even just as inconceivable for the first group as for the second. Furthermore, the Nazi regime and the circumstances of the war promoted the version assuming the ‘agent provocateur’, for there were hardly any other possibilities of viewing the set of events and filling the scene of the event. An individual and his attempt at an assassination – actually an episode stemming from Spanish anarchism – is simply an impossibility for Nazi Germany.

The official version of the Nazis during the war became the unofficial one after the war, while the resistance-movement version was nurtured by a number of sources after the war and made Elser into a henchman of the Nazis for the entire duration of the Adenauer era.

The same condition of an 'enclosed' society promoted rumors kept popular by members of the resistance movement, for instance, by Martin Niemöller after the war. Information about Elser from the concentration camps that depicted him as an official guest of the Nazis in the camps was, at first, hardly verifiable, and there was little interest in such verification in the first years after the war. The hierarchical, authoritarian political thought dominant in the Adenauer era did indeed demonstrate understanding for a consensus, but not for resistance offered by individuals. Only as a consensus can resistance be state-supportive, and is thus, with reference to the historical legitimacy of Germany after the war, reserved for only a few groups (the group around Stauffenberg, those associated with Hans and Sophie Scholl, whereby the Nazi past of the Scholls and motivation for resistance stemming from personal offense were deliberately covered up) – groups that could be adapted to the dominant idea of society and its relationship to the state and to the official image of the past and of the way to cope with it (Vergangenheitsbewältigung). An individual who sets out to kill Hitler was simply not appropriate to the image of history if one considered that a successful attack on the Nazi leadership might have been able to prevent the war and to save the lives of 50 million people, among them 6 million Jews.

Along with recognition for Elser, the duty to engage in active opposition would have had to be acknowledged, because his example would have illustrated the factual possibility of active resistance to the Nazi regime of terror and its war plans – a possibility that had been denied again and again. Elser’s example would have been an argument from the standpoint of contemporary history against the alleged impotence in the face of the brutal force of terror, which played a significant role in the rehabilitation of the Germans after the war. At the same time, this would also have meant that the general right to offer resistance – provided for by article 20, paragraph 4 of the German constitution – should be aspired to politically and culturally even with regard to the democratic state since it had been confirmed as a duty with regard to tyranny. The criterion for the right to resistance claimed by Georg Elser in a time without rights would have been the individual responsibility for the prevention of the crimes the Nazis committed in the name of all Germans. Should, then, in the future anyone be allowed to claim the right to offer individual resistance to the state, even beyond the bounds of the democratic consensus and the rules of democracy?⁵ This question gained quite a bit of significance through the operations of the Red Army Faction during the mid-70s (a different situation had always been prevalent in and regarding the GDR; here, resistance to state socialism and the Stasi-state was explicitly legitimized by the West and promoted with attractive images of an alternative society in the West). To put it briefly, in West Germany it was opportune for the restorative Adenauer era to cope with both Elser and the Nazis as the past and to dispose of them as such. The pre-requisite for this was that Elser was neither hero nor martyr, nor rebel nor saint, but, rather, could disappear within the indeterminacy of the event 'bomb attack on Hitler' and be forgotten. In place of (propagandistic, legitimating, etc.) discourses we find myths which from the outset only allow history to be experienced as repetition and in which events always already have a place where they are unalterably situated. These are, then, no longer events which must create their own contexts so that they exist. From the very first, the mythical contexts arrange the events of their narratives and assign certain positions to them. The history of film since the Second World War is familiar with a number of examples of such mythical ways of coping with the past.

The postwar era comes to an end during the 60s; the relationship to the past and to the present society changes dramatically. A discussion of the ethics of resistance, which the Adenauer era had been determined to prevent, unfolds and develops in a practical direction. This new justification of resistance, which is related to a globally oriented perception of conflicts, above all to the Vietnam War waged by the U.S., but also to ecological problems stemming from unreflected capitalistic exploitation of the Earth’s resources, sought models also among those who had become victims of their ethically based (in the sense of duty) resistance to the Nazi regime. Here, resistance becomes removed from the realm of political expediency and is related anew to the understanding of a democratic state or, rather, is understood as the struggle for a democratic state and the interests of its individual members. The academic issue concerning natural law and resistance (under debate since Kant’s time) threatened to become practical.

In 1969, the transcripts of Elser’s interrogations at the hands of the Gestapo (rediscovered at the beginning of the 60s) were published for the first time in a complete edition by Anton Hoch. They supply impressive proof that Elser both decided on the attack and carried it out alone. During the very same year, Hans Gottschalk, at the time head of the television department at Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart, adapted the interrogation transcripts to a television play that was broadcast under the direction of Rainer Erler (Der Attentäter, 1969) on the thirtieth anniversary of the attack and was awarded the German television prize (Grimme Award). On the one hand, this television play is closely connected thematically and dramaturgically to that form of 'documentary theater' so virulent in the 60s and associated with the names of Rolf Hochhuth (The Representative, 1966, German: 1963) and Peter Weiss (The Investigation, 1966, German: 1965), Hans Magnus Enzensberger (The Havana Inquiry, 1974, German: 1970) or Heiner Kipphardt (In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1968, German: 1964). Here, authentic material from interrogations and trials was often performed on the stage with the use of purposely minimalist techniques. At the same time, the television play addressed the Nazi past, most certainly inspired by the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem and the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. Christian Geißler’s Die Anfrage (1962) deals with crimes of the Nazi era that theretofore had been hushed up. Ein Tag (1965) by Gunter R. Lys attempts to reconstruct the daily routine in a concentration camp in 1939 and contrasts this with the daily life of the Germans who remain unmoved by the events going on in their midst. The topic of resistance to the 'Third Reich' is dealt with by such television plays as Heiner Kipphardt’s Joel Brand. Die Geschichte eines Geschäfts (1965) and Der 21. Juli (1972) by Claus Hubalek. Also to be included in this context is the film mentioned above: Der Attentäter (1969) by Hans Gottschalk and Rainer Erler⁶. The film begins with Elser’s transfer to Berlin for interrogation by the Gestapo and, then, in minute detail and based on Elser’s presentation in the transcriptions, proceeds from his decision to assassinate Hitler and the reasons he cited for this (he wanted to achieve better living conditions for the workers and to prevent the impending war) to his arrest at the German-Swiss border in Constance. The interrogation and transcription alternate with a scenic representation of the transcribed material. On the basis of the documented transcription of the interrogation, the television production undertakes great efforts to achieve authenticity in its presentation. It succeeds in credibly relating the solitude encompassing this individual and his assassination attempt and the obsessive obstinacy with which Elser clings to his plan and carries it out in constant danger of being discovered and despite physical pain. The documentary television play requires that the 'document', the transcription of Elser’s statements to the Gestapo, be used as the basis of the presentation. This necessitates telling the story from its reconstruction, that is, from its aftermath and with the Nazis looking on. The concentration on Elser excludes all the other characters, especially Hitler, from the scene of the assassination attempt; Elser waits for the explosion listening to a radio broadcast of Hitler’s speech in the Constance customs office, where he was detained immediately after his arrest.

This is also the place where he discovers that his assassination attempt has failed. The problem with the film is that by concentrating on Elser’s perspective, it is hardly capable of conveying the contemporary social and political context, as Elser (according to the transcription) himself was hardly aware of this. Thus, at the end of the presentation, we might be able to reconstruct Elser’s bomb, the development and construction of which is presented in much detail – not least as proof that Elser was able to claim the sole responsibility for the attack. But we learn little of the conditions that ethically justify resistance to the point of launching a bomb attack; even the interrogation by the Gestapo serves more as a prompter for Elser’s account than as the threatening backdrop for his deed.

Diametrically opposed to this is the procedure realized in Peter Paul Zahl’s play Johann Georg Elser. Ein deutsches Drama⁷, which was written during the 70s and published in 1982. This play does not deal with the topic of resistance by documenting it on stage in interrogations or trials. On the contrary, it directly reflects the altered relationship to the state and to the issue of resistance both in the person of the author and in the theme and in the way the event of the attempted assassination is developed on stage as a dramatic plot. Peter Paul Zahl himself was a protagonist of a cultural resistance movement developing in West Germany in the late 60s and during the 70s. This development reached its peak with the Red Army Faction, of which Zahl was a sympathizer. Charged with attempted murder, Zahl was convicted and sentenced to 15 years of prison for resisting the authority of the state and for assault and battery in 1972. Reasons given for the sentence included "Zahl is an enemy of the state" and the sentence should serve as "a general deterrent". In the play, Elser becomes an argument for the author’s own claim to the right to active resistance in contemporary West Germany. It is obvious that now the protagonists of the event themselves – until now always absent from the scene – come on stage and oust all other characters from the stage except for a group of inactive resistance sympathizers affiliated with the German armed forces. The event itself, the explosion of the bomb, the attempted assassination, retreats to the background of the plot as a news item about its failure. Instead, Peter Paul Zahl stylizes the events to a duel between the individual (in this case really the sole individual), whose only possession consists in his personal responsibility for history, and his opponent, who is engaged in making history with a murderous war and must be prevented from doing so if catastrophe is to be avoided. This duel between two actually 'little men', one of which holds the absolute power over life and death of his contemporaries while the other is personified impotence, from which alone Elser’s operation can – almost – succeed, is structured with exact parallel configurations and no points of intersection between the two spheres. Thus, we watch Hitler planning war, then, Elser planning the assassination, which, in turn, is increasingly legitimated and made urgent by Hilter’s intensified war plans. This parallel montage of the operations of both sides is carried on up to the point of simultaneity and the direct interlocking of both scenes. To achieve this effect, Peter Paul Zahl makes use of the historically non-contemporary medium of television: The television is switched on in the background at the home of Elser’s parents and shows Hitler declaring his war aims for the western campaign; there are people in the streets watching large-scale television monitors showing Hitler making a speech and gesticulating; and just before Elser’s arrest, Hitler’s speech at the Bürgerbräukeller is being broadcast into the rooms Elser passes on his way to the Swiss border. One might say that symbolically the bomb is installed between both sides, the bomb that Hitler will set off for the war, Elser against it. If, in contrast to Hitler, who only appears surrounded by his soldiers, Elser is shown in daily situations and surrounded by everyday people, then this is because Elser does, indeed, act as an individual but as one who is conscious of an unspoken obligation for those who as workers and future war victims will be at the mercy of the Nazis. Elser is also always one of many. Hitler is surrounded by his war machine, Elser by the people; his actions are legitimated by the people. The military resistance group that not only fails to act, but is also made responsible for Hitler’s early departure from Munich and, thus, for his escape from the assassination, can no longer function as an alternative third party, since it is a form of state-supportive resistance. Elser’s resistance is based more on an anarchistic model according to which each individual is responsible for the destruction of state power even though a legitimating vision of the foundation of a new, democratic state need not (or should not) be behind the model. This anarchistic component in Peter Paul Zahl’s presentation prevents Elser from becoming a hero or the martyr of his deed and its consequences. This is, incidentally, something that Elser has in common with Chaplin’s Jewish barber, whose anarchistic opposition of the little man to the 'Great Dictator' is also carried out in an (involuntary) duel, in this case even within the same person.

At the end of the 80s, more precisely, on the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination attempt in 1989, the material is deemed fit for a Hollywood-style German-American coproduction⁸. Klaus-Maria Brandauer had played the famous adherent and cultural representative of the Nazi regime in István Szabos Mephisto (1981). Now, he directs his own film (for the first time) and also plays Hitler’s would-be assassin Georg Elser in it. The dissimilarity to the documentary television play of 1969 can hardly be greater: There, Elser was totally pre-occupied with the bomb and the assassination and avoided any contact at all with women; in Brandauer’s film, by contrast, the presentation of the set of events is expanded melodramatically. In 1969, the character of Elser (played by Fritz Hollenbeck) is recreated authentically even to the point of physical similarity and copying the dialect – Elser appears as a small, nondescript, almost archaic, stubborn Swabian, a handicraft enthusiast. In 1989, Brandauer transforms Elser into a modern, nervous law-breaker motivated by moral convictions and on the run, a sort of lady-killer who nearly manages to blow up his pregnant girlfriend when the bomb explodes. The Bürgerbräukeller is decorated with swastika flags and SA uniforms are everywhere. Elser is brutally beaten by two Storm Troopers in the men’s room because he refused to greet them with the Nazi salute. We can actually feel how the hatred for these criminals rises up inside him; and as he and, along with him, we learn of the German attack on Poland and the beginning of the Second World War, there is no doubt left that Hitler must be killed. As early as Elser’s arrival in Munich, he has no choice but to watch as a (Jewish?) family is taken away from the house where he is just moving in. His landlords are staunch Nazis; the speeches of the Führer are ubiquitous. Here, there is definitely too much of the contemporary context and local color that had been so neglected by the documentary television play. When Elser has finally placed the bomb, his pretty girlfriend, a waitress in the Bürgerbräukeller, is assigned to hand the Führer a glass of water during his speech. In order to save her (and his child) from his own bomb, both of them dash to catch a train and flee in the direction of Zurich. Their flight is noticed and the pursuit begins. At the Swiss border, Elser tries to get off the train, but is captured by the border patrol. During the first interrogation, one of the policemen discovers that a bomb is supposed to go off next to Hitler in the Bürgerbräukeller. He is no longer able to prevent the explosion, but, due to an early departure, Hitler remains unharmed. Elser’s girlfriend is allowed to get back on the train and leave the country, since the Nazi demonstrates how humane he is and wishes to make amends for an earlier wrong his own wife experienced. The film ends with Elser being asked why he did this and with his terse answer: "Someone simply had to do it." This mixture of documentary and fictional elements which together form the entire set of events culminates, on the one hand, in Elser’s arrest at the Swiss border – although this time in a train – and, on the other hand, in the explosion of the bomb in Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller, which no suspenseful, entertaining film would have been able to do without in 1989. We see the building from the outside and the explosion, and only then do we learn that Hitler has escaped unharmed. But this main "event" has long since lost much of its significance in comparison to the melodramatic ending with the flight, Elser’s arrest, the rescue of the woman he loves, the mother of his child, who, in turn, personifies hope for the future. For the sake of completeness, the explosion does take place as a sort of epilogue, for, after all, a bomb did figure into the story somehow, but this has long ceased to be an "event".

The title of a 1995 television documentary by Christian Berger is: "A Time Bomb for the Führer. The Freedom Fighter Georg Elser" (Eine Höllenmaschine für den Führer. Der Widerstandskämpfer Georg Elser). Correspondingly, the presentation is totally geared to the act of resistance. The film starts with the Nazi celebration and Hitler’s speech in Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller on November 8, 1939. A clock ticks, the hands of the clock leap to 9:20 p.m., and an explosion can be heard.

Pictures from news broadcasts show the destruction Hitler was able to escape and they show the victims who were only concerned that the Führer had not been harmed. Afterwards, the story of a freedom fighter and his attempt at an assassination are reconstructed with the use of the interrogation transcripts that are shown being removed from the shelves of the Federal Archives, where they are now kept, solely for this purpose. Contemporary eyewitnesses are interviewed, some of them members of Elser’s family, who are called on in the idyllic town of Königsbronn where Elser grew up. We learn that Elser did, in fact, have an illegitimate son who is shown getting some old photographs out of a box. A neighbor still has a sewing-machine table that Elser made for her. The people of the town only reluctantly remember the still unpopular former resident who was responsible for the Gestapo disturbing their idyll with investigations, arrests, etc. In nearby Schnaitheim, not far from Heidenheim, where Elser lived and worked for several years, a small memorial was erected in 1971 – in the face of opposition from the local residents. Everything seems to indicate that the Germans have come to terms with this individual and his attempt at an assassination and have accepted him as part of the history of the resistance to National Socialism.

Just in time for the 60th anniversary, on November 8, 1999 some reflections on Elser’s deed from a standpoint of moral philosophy by Lothar Fritze, a staff member of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism in Chemnitz, appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau⁹. Fritze raises the question of if and under what circumstances Elser’s attack might be justified and concludes that because of the way it was carried out, the deed is not morally justifiable and, thus, Elser should be criticized for having failed morally. The moral philosopher proceeds in a "scholastic manner", as one of his critics (Peter Steinbach¹⁰) remarks, or, one might say, in a totally formalist way to check off a catalogue of criteria, the fulfillment of which could alone provide moral justification for the murder of a tyrant and thus for Elser’s deed. I do not wish to list all of the universalistic hurdles that are set up as obstacles for active resistance; a few examples might suffice. According to Fritze, there should be some recognizable extraordinary danger that could not be avoided at a lesser cost to life and limb of bystanders. A large probability must exist for the success of the deed and its success must be able to be checked. Finally, there must be some sort of political plan that enables a new structuring of political power after the successful assassination (which, for instance, is contradictory to Peter Paul Zahl’s anarchistic concept). Up to this point, one can say that the criteria that justify the Stauffenberg attack are, of course, not applicable in Elser’s case. Fritze is primarily interested in the bomb attack itself, as a result of which 8 people died and another 60 were seriously injured. In the case of Hitler, tyrannicide seems to be objectively justified, even though the dead millions were still alive at the time of the attack and thus cannot be taken into account. On the subjective level, Elser’s right to kill Hitler would have to have been substantiated by intensive studies of contemporary history, which certainly would have revealed the criminal nature of the regime. Among the dead and wounded were many people of the same mind as Hitler, but also some totally innocent waitresses, whose lives were not simply at one’s disposal, that is, they would have had to consent to the sacrifice they would be making. In particular, Elser should have remained on the scene and risked his own life, the only right and proper thing to do since he was willing to risk the lives of others who were simply bystanders. Then, even at the risk of being discovered, he should have defused the bomb after it had become apparent that the explosion could no longer serve its purpose. Thus, Fritze’s moral condemnation of Elser is based, above all, upon the fact that he did not risk his own life with the attack, but nonetheless sacrificed the lives of others. The legitimate model behind such reasoning is obvious: it is the Stauffenberg bomb attack of July 20, 1944. In any case, this attack would also have been more successful if Stauffenberg had been willing to blow himself up along with Hitler.

On the one hand, this intervention, which aroused massive protests, is either simply an insignificant academic desktop offense, even if stemming from a renowned institute for research on totalitarianism, or, on the other hand, it is to be taken seriously as a symptom of a revaluation of the tradition of resistance to a criminal regime within the framework of the dispute over the Germans’ more recent past. The universalized criteria for active resistance that are divorced from the real conditions of the situation also imply a detachment from reality for circumstances that required the resistance of every individual and might also do so in the future. I do not wish to discuss this further here; instead I would like to return to my opening remarks. I mentioned that the 'event' itself or that which replaces it as a form of repetition is inaccessible and only finds its way into history as an element of a sequence of events articulated in discourse. The center of this set of events, the explosion of the bomb, is simply a vacant space for all narrative schemes with a documentary interest in the (re-)construction of the real occurrences, but can, however, certainly be (re-)told and repeated as an occurrence in a fictional narrative scheme. Lothar Fritze’s moral assessment of Elser’s deed is (almost) exclusively concerned with this core of the set of events which as an 'event' is itself inaccessible and can only be filled with some fictional element (just as, at the relatively calm eye of a hurricane, one might deliberate on the storm). Fritze makes a fiction out of the only 'real' and, therefore, inaccessible element of the set of events (for instance with the demand to obtain the consent of the involuntary victims since no one may simply consider their lives to be at his or her disposal). Fritze demands that the occurrence itself should have been rendered undone when it became apparent that Hitler would no longer with any probability come to harm. Fritze causes the event to implode by wanting to remove it from its place. His aim is to delete from history an event that has found its way into history as the decision and occurrence of an individual’s active resistance and that has since managed to hold its ground there. Such an aim should itself be actively resisted.

(Translated from German by Thomas La Presti)
 

1  Karlheinz Stierle: Geschehen, Geschichte und Text der Geschichte (971). In: H.Brackert, E.Lämmert (Hg.) Reader zum Funkkolleg: Literatur Band 1, Frankfurt/M 1976, S.210-216
2  Vgl. Eva Meyer: Die Form der Wiederholung. In: Kunstforum 114, 1991, S. 148-154. – Zur „Ereignis-Philosophie“ von Gilles Deleuze: Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet: Dialoge. Frankfurt/M. 1980, S. 59-82
3  Michel Foucault: Von der Subversion des Wissens, München 1974  (=Reihe Hanser 150)
4  Ich folge hier der Dokumentation von  Anton Hoch, Lothar Gruchmann: Georg Elser: Der Attentäter aus dem Volke. Der Anschlag auf Hitler im Bürgerbräu 1939. Frankfurt/M 1980
5  Vgl. zur juristischen Diskussion um das Widerstandsrecht im GG: Fritz Bauer: Die Humanität der Rechtsordnung. Ausgewählte Schriften, hg. von Joachim Perels und Irmtrud Wojak, Frankfurt/New York 1998   ( Im Kampf um des Menschen Rechte (1955) S.37-49; Eine Grenze hat Tyrannenmacht. Plädoyer im Remer-Prozeß (1952) S.169-179; Widerstandsrecht und Widerstandspflicht des Staatsbürgers (1962) S.181-205; Das Widerstandsrecht des kleinen Mannes (1962)S.207-214 – Hanno Loewy: Der Widerstand zwischen unbequemer Erinnerung und nationalem Mythos. In: Gerd R.Überschär (Hg.) NS-Verbrechen und der militärische Widerstand gegen Hitler. Darmstadt 2000, S.3-13
6  Es ist erstaunlich, daß in den Fernsehgeschichten der Bundesrepublik wenig oder nichts über dieses doch hochdekorierte Fernsehspiel zu erfahren ist. Vgl. Knut Hickethier: Das Fernsehspiel der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Themen, Form, Struktur, Theorie und Geschichte 1951-1977. Stuttgart (Metzler) 1980 S.272, wo es allerdings falsch zitiert wird.
7  Peter Paul Zahl: Johann Georg Elser. Ein deutsches Drama. Berlin (Rotbuch-Verlag) 1982
8  Georg Elser. Einer aus Deutschland. Regie Klaus-Maria Brandauer, Deutschland/USA 1989 nach dem Roman von Stephen Sheppard: Georg Elser. Einer aus Deutschland (‚The Artisan‘). München 1989
9  Lothar Fritze: Die Bombe im Bürgerbräukeller. Der Anschlag auf Hitler vom 8.November 1939. Versuch einer moralischen Bewertung des Attentäters Johann Georg Elser. Frankfurter Rundschau, 8.11.1999
10  Peter Steinbach, Johannes Tuchel: Es schein als schreckte die Öffentlichkeit vor Elser zurück. Der Widerstandskämpfer und das Attentat vom 8.November 1039. Deutungen und Diffamierungen. Frankfurter Rundschau, 18.11.1999. Ebenso: Bernhard Honnigfort: Ein Anruf vom Verfassungsschutz ... Frankfurter Rundschau, 23.12.1999 – Katharina Sperber: Die Bombe, Rauchvergiftung nicht auszuschließen. Frankfurter Rundschau, 7.1.2000 – Guntolf Herzberg: Georg elser tat das moralisch Richtige. Der umstrittene Angriff von Lothar Fritze auf den Hitler-Attentäter geht fehl. Frankfurter Rundschau, 8.2.2000