11 - The Impact of an Unperson? Peter-Paul Zahl, Peter-Jürgen Boock, and the Cultural Impact of Prison Writing

Summary

“LEBENSLAUF EINER UNPERSON” (Curriculum Vitae of an Unperson) is the title of the first section of a collection of documents titled Am Beispiel Peter-Paul Zahl (The Example of Peter-Paul Zahl), collated and edited in the mid-1970s by the “Initiativgruppe Peter-Paul Zahl” (Peter-Paul Zahl support group), a circle of established writers led by Erich Fried, who took a particular interest in Zahl’s case. Zahl (b. 1944) had published a number of short stories, poems, and his first novel before, in December 1972, he was arrested and held in solitary confinement as a suspected terrorist; he was also a member of the Verband deutscher Schriftsteller (German Writers’ Union). In prison he wrote an outline for a novel about conditions in Cologne-Ossendorf (the prison where Astrid Proll and Ulrike Meinhof, of the Red Army Faction, had been held in solitary before him) called Isolation and attempted to send it to a publisher; it was confiscated by the prison authorities on the grounds that it was defamatory to the prison service and threatened the security and order of the institution.

In the late 1970s, funding for a seminar series on Zahl’s work at Münster University was withdrawn; the reasons given were the writer’s criminal status and his insignificance in the German national canon. Criminal status is of course contingent: Rosa Luxemburg’s prison letters and Luise Rinser’s prison diaries have a place on German school and university curricula as documents of cultural worth and canonical significance because their authors’ criminality has since been recategorized as revolutionary activity or resistance; the writing, understood as the expression of resistance, supports a contemporary conception of the postwar German Rechtsstaat (the just and democratic state). The status of writing by Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, by contrast, who challenged and sought to discredit the Federal Republic, is still culturally contested; there is ongoing disagreement about whether they are to be regarded as criminals or (in some accounts misguided) resistance fighters. Matthew Philpotts, summarizing Bourdieu elsewhere in this volume, writes of the “circularity of practices in the cultural field,” whereby shared values and norms inform and police cultural production.