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SIEGFRIED UNSELD, MARK BRADFORD, MARTINA HEFTER Seen & Read – by Isabelle Graw

A collection of letters by Siegfried Unseld not only sheds light on his relationships with Suhrkamp’s authors, but – as Isabelle Graw emphasizes – also tells us a lot about the changing publishing industry. An exhibition by Mark Bradford offers forward-oriented gestures while demonstrating how history reaches into the present, as our publisher observes. And the title of an award-winning novel cites a question about its protagonist’s well-being, which is in fact only part of a money-making scheme – but nevertheless serves as an effective cue for the heroine’s temporary escape. More on all of these in this month’s round of “Seen & Read.”

Siegfried Unseld, Hundert Briefe: Mitteilungen eines Verlegers 1947–2002

Siegfried Unseld and Peter Handke

Siegfried Unseld and Peter Handke

The letters in this collection are highly revealing. Written by Siegfried Unseld to his authors, they speak of a type of publisher that seems to have long died out: not only was Unseld a close reader of his authors’ books, he also offered them his expert criticism and wrote pithy blurbs for them. The economic pressures publishers are now under mean such close and intensive engagement is unusual today, when authors are usually left to write their own ad copy. It’s also interesting to note that Unseld agreed to the majority of his (mostly male) authors’ demands regarding cover designs, titles, advances, and pricing; while he was good at dissuading them from pursuing a particular project or book title when needed, he gave in when successful authors like Peter Handke dug their heels in. The letters also document Unseld’s efforts to prevent his authors from changing publishers. Handke, for example, repeatedly published books with Residenz Verlag during his time working with Suhrkamp (to Unseld’s chagrin), which put the author in a better position to negotiate. Handke proves to be a shrewd businessman in his correspondence with Unseld, often demanding his books be repriced or reprinted; his fixation on the publishing market can also be seen by the fact that, as Unseld recounts, he would paper the walls of his kitchen with the Spiegel bestseller list. Viewed from a gender perspective, however, Unseld’s letters are crushing. As already indicated, his cosmos was largely male, with the exception of Karin Struck and Friederike Mayröcker, and his letters to the latter have a fairly paternalistic tone. He also tried to dissuade Margarete Mitscherlich from publishing together with her husband, arguing that her voice would get lost in the process – the idea that her work could have the same presence as her husband’s (or more) didn’t even occur to him.

Publicly, Unseld stood behind his authors even when he disagreed with them, as with Handke’s stance on Serbia. However, this loyalty could be problematic at times, such as when he defended the infamous speech Martin Walser gave at Frankfurt’s Paulskirche in a letter to Ignatz Bubis. He took a more conciliatory approach to rivalries between his authors, refusing to get involved when Handke began publicly railing against the supposedly inferior writing of Thomas Bernhard, for example. Unseld comes across as a tireless worker in these letters, at times even hatching up ideas on the ski-lift, which were quickly written down. There was a seemingly tragic dispute with his son Joachim, whom he initially promised in writing to make his sole heir, only to oust him a few days later with the help of his second wife, Ulla Berkéwicz. Reading these letters, it’s clear that Unseld himself also suffered as a result of the quarrel with his son.

Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2024, 468 pages.

“Mark Bradford: Keep Walking”

“Mark Bradford: Keep Walking,” Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2024

“Mark Bradford: Keep Walking,” Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2024

Two themes repeatedly emerge in Mark Bradford’s current exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof’s Rieckhallen. The first is the motif of moving forward and carrying on against all odds, as indicated by the exhibition’s title. In Niagra (2005), a video work on display in the rear room, this incessant forward motion is depicted as stoic and proud – as a reaction to racializing gazes in public space, for example. It shows a Black man – Bradford’s former neighbor, identified in the work simply as “Melvin” – walking determinedly along a boulevard in Los Angeles. While this confident forward orientation is characteristic of many of Bradford’s works, there is also a repeated sense that history, whether that of the Great Migration or the AIDS crisis, is catching up with us. In creating the two striking large-scale paintings that open the exhibition, for example, Bradford used train timetables from the period between 1910 and 1970, when six million Black Americans fled the Southern states: With their pastose columns of numbers and visibly layered surfaces, I Don’t Know What I Am (2024) and You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice (2023) have a relief-like quality, as if the history of the Great Migration were physically sedimented within them. At the same time, their stratified surfaces appear to have been ripped and torn, similar to Raymond Hains’s Affiches lacérées. These negative décollage gestures seem to correspond to the experiences of violence that a mass exodus of this sort brings with it. The way in which history extends into the present in Bradford’s work can also be seen in Deimos (2015), a large-scale video projection of brown and orange wheels rolling around an open space. As with so many of Bradford’s works, the piece is set to music – in this case the disco hit “Grateful” by the singer and queer icon Sylvester (1947–1988), who died as the result of an HIV infection. The wall text describes Deimos as a tribute to the famous roller disco The Roxy; the rolling wheels in the video thus turn out to be roller skate wheels. Here, grief for the person who has been lost goes hand in hand with gratitude for “loving, living, giving,” as the lyrics of the disco hit celebrate. A final word goes to my favorite piece in the exhibition: Manifest Destiny (2023), an oversized painting in the shape of a cross. Based on one of the “merchant posters” Bradford often uses in his work, it consists of three parts, whose décollaged and massively stratified surfaces each bear one word from the sentence “Johnny Buys Houses.” Viewed in the context of an art exhibition, this sentence evokes the close relationship between the real estate sector and the art world, whose members have often stood at the forefront of processes of urban gentrification. More significant, however, is that this “Johnny” promises to buy these poor people’s houses from them, making him a symbol of all those investors and developers who exploit the hardship of others or profit from their fears. Johnny is Trump, if you will. And yet his generic name also stands for the abstract violence of capitalism, whose basic principle is exploitation. By setting the name deep within the surface of the painting, Bradford also demonstrates that artists and the works they produce are not “innocent” bystanders to these processes but embedded within them.

Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, September 6, 2024 to May 18, 2025.

Martina Hefter, Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es dir?

Martina Hefter

Martina Hefter

The title of this novel, which was recently awarded the German Book Prize, is an homage to Maxie Wander’s GDR bestseller Guten Morgen, du Schöne. The story itself has a lot in common with Helga Schubert’s Der heutige Tag: Ein Stundenbuch der Liebe (2023), since Hefter, like Schubert, describes her everyday life attending to her care-dependent husband; unlike Schubert’s book, however, Hefter’s is written in a way that deliberately straddles the border between literary writing and light fiction. The way in which Hefter fuses two separate worlds in her story is particularly original, with its female protagonist Juno fleeing her analog reality each night to pursue a virtual relationship online. Like the author, Juno is a performance artist in her early 50s, who we follow as she performs her daily duties in “stony gray” Leipzig: she shops for her wheelchair-bound husband, takes him to the doctor, and files health insurance claims, all while preparing for her own theater performances and completing her ballet program. At night, she chats with Benu, a love scammer from Nigeria. While he knows she’s long seen through his game, he still manages to entangle her in an intense exchange: he tells her about his precarious situation in Nigeria, which makes Juno realize that her own is relatively privileged, and that her comfort has a price – one paid by people in Nigeria, among others. While she is determined not to become a victim of this love scammer, she still enjoys his compliments and attention. Another central theme of the book is aging, and the increasing invisibility of a protagonist who asks herself whether her audience might find it strange that she herself continues to appear in her performances at her advanced age. There’s a passage that defends Madonna’s surgically enhanced face against her misogynistic haters, which I particularly appreciated. By contrast, I was surprised that there’s no mention of menopause, despite the fact it might explain Juno’s chronic insomnia. But her inner conflict is vividly painted: while she is determined to concentrate on her “real” life, she repeatedly succumbs to the temptation to see if Benu has messaged her. When he eventually disappears, Juno blocks the next scammer, and the book ends in a daily reality whose only chances of escape come in the form of ballet lessons.

Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2024, 224 pages.

Translated by Ben Caton

Isabelle Graw is the cofounder and publisher of TEXTE ZUR KUNST and teaches art history and theory at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Her most recent publications include In Another World: Notes, 2014–2017 (Sternberg Press, 2020), Three Cases of Value Reflection: Ponge, Whitten, Banksy (Sternberg Press, 2021), and On the Benefits of Friendship (Sternberg Press, 2023).

Image credit: 1. © Rob Kulisek; 2. © Ruth Walz; 3. © Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jacopo La Forgia, courtesy of Mark Bradford und Hauser & Wirth; 4. © Maximilian Gödecke