Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen.
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Bettina Wassmann is a bookseller and publisher in Bremen. After
finishing school in 1958, she trained as a bookseller in Rodewald, near
Bremen. From 1961 to 1969 she worked at "Wolffs Bücherei" in Berlin,
returning to Bremen in May 1969. In July of that year she opened her
own bookshop in Bremen on the street, Am Wall 164. There she started
publishing an edition of bibliophile titles, among them "Der perfekte
Mord" (The perfect murder) by Djuna Barnes; "Abschied von gestern.
Kritische Theorie heute" (Yesterday's farewell. Critical theories
today) by Detlev Claussen; "Das Abendmahl, das Geld und die neuen
Medien" (The last supper. Money and new media) by Jochen Hörisch;
"Bartleby, der Schreiber. Eine Geschichte aus der Wall-Street"
(Bartleby, the writer. A story from Wall Street) by Hermann Melville;
"H. c. Alfred Sohn-Rethel" by Oskar Negt; and "Das Ideal des Kaputten"
(The ideal of the broken) by Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Bettina Wassmann was born in
1942 in Plauen in the Vogtland (where the family had moved to avoid
the bombing of Bremen). Her father was a cotton merchant
(Baumwoll-Börse Bremen), her mother an artist. Bettina Wassmann was
married to Alfred Sohn-Rethel, who died in 1990.
For those unfamiliar with Alfred Sohn-Rethel,
I'll try to paint a brief portrait here. He was born in 1899. He was
learned, without being lost in an ivory tower. He was an
epistemological thinker with an excellent knowledge of Marx. Of all the
Marxists, he was certainly the most original. From the 1920s on he
worked on his materialist critique of epistemology. When this was
published in the 1970s it won him widespread acclaim. Neither Max Horkheimer's withering criticism nor Theodor Adorno's
praise could divert his attention. Alone and resolute, he continued to
work on his heretical theory of money until he reached a ripe old age.
With the patience of an angel he went about showing that the form of
thinking develops out of the form of goods, and that the transcendental
subject owes much to the idiosyncracies of products, exchange and
money: that the origin of pure thought lies in the form of goods, and
not the other way around. His work aimed at unveiling the secret of
transcendental philosophy, in revealing the transcendental subject in
the form of goods. His life's work was comprised of meticulously
lifting this veil.
*
The biographies originally appeared in German in Die Tageszeitung on October 31, 2005.
Translation: jab.
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