Acquaintance 3: Productivity and Pigeonholes of Connectedness: In Place of an Interview with Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss

March 20, 2024

Acquaintance: Loose Links and Fleeting Connections #3: The concept of “acquaintance” has historically been given much less attention than notions of “friendship” or “love,” the idea seemingly relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy of influential social/intellectual/spiritual connections. And yet, much of our engagement with others—in social as much as in academic or political spaces—plays out on the level of acquaintance. This new series of essays on the Diacritics blog interrogates the impact of those fleeting, brief interactions, or, alternatively, the influence of connections with those we have known for a long time but not very well. Contributors explore how the meaning and value of “acquaintance” varies in different cultural, historical, or social contexts, and how we can think about surface connections between diverse thinkers and creators that nevertheless may have a far-reaching impact on their work.

 

Productivity and Pigeonholes of Connectedness: In Place of an Interview with Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss

What I mean to say is that I don’t believe there is any person who makes something from nothing, but that it is necessary to be in dialogue, in a discussion—with two or three, it can be ten people . . . But there always needs to be a stimulus in order to go further.[1]

In August 2022, Södra is a busy, gentrified district in the Southeast of Stockholm, Sweden, with nice parks, fountains, and plenty of coffee shops. The Palmstierna side of her family would never have decided to live in this part of town, the way it was when she moved here after her life partner had passed away in the early 1980s, when it was not quite considered a safe area. Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, Swedish sculptor, costume and stage designer, translator and public intellectual, cut the flower bouquet into half its size with a bread knife, valuing my efforts with “Ein Vermögen . . . !” (A fortune!) We discussed the forthcoming German translation of her autobiography Minnets spelplats (Playground of memories)[2] as we sat on her couches, first face-à-face, then next to each other. She expressed her regret about the difficulty of finding an equivalent for the Swedish title in German, opening her own volume to illustrate her accounts with an abundance of images, and later showed me the costume design sketches she was currently working on.

>> A Web of Intellectual Affinities

Minnets spelplats stands as impressive landmark, seemingly effortlessly describing and evaluating historical events or strands, and connecting them with biographical bits; the reader gets an idea of how connected the artist was, socially and intellectually. The autobiography sketches a web of intellectual affinities and bonds, anchored by a vibrant, witty voice that affirms its own position through this web. In 123 sub-chapters, each dedicated to an event, a place, or a person, a multitude of historical threads and intellectual or interpersonal connections overlap, each one carefully framed within its intellectual, socio-economic, and genealogical background.

Reading the autobiography feels a bit like looking through many different holes at a pastiche of twentieth-century intellectual Europe: her heritage between her father’s politically influential Palmstierna family, part of Swedish aristocracy, and the Jewish immigrant bookmaker family on her mother’s side. When her parents’ marriage fell apart, she and her older brother Hans temporarily lived with a foster family. The siblings then lived with their mother as she finished her studies of psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna. It was here that Vera Herzog met her second husband, Dutch fellow psychoanalysis student René de Monchy. The family settled down in the Netherlands where they survived the bombing of Rotterdam by the Germans on May 14, 1940. With the German occupation, Vera Herzog also lost her medical approbation, and in 1945—in a secret mission serving as messengers of military maps and sketches for the allied forces—the family of five was able to flee via Berlin to Sweden. Palmstierna-Weiss then would dedicate her life to politically motivated artistic work, resulting in connections with people across Europe and beyond.

September 2022, Haus der Berliner Festspiele in Berlin-Charlottenburg: at the book presentation of Eine europäische Frau (the German edition of her autobiography, published by the small Berlin-based Verbrecher Verlag), a number of anecdotes serve the author to illustrate her position and, in their repetition or variation, they already appear almost familiar to me. But I feel vicariously embarrassed about every question that is more interested in her as second-hand witness of her partner’s legacy than in her own positions and work. The friend who accompanied me asked the question I found perhaps the most central: how she managed to never doubt or undermine the relevance and urgency of her own work, as a female artist and craftsperson in the predominantly male theater world, as a refugee with Jewish family background, having immigrated as a child from Sweden to the Netherlands and back. Most of her anecdotes, during our conversation in Stockholm, at the book presentation, and in her autobiography, recount moments of resistance against what appears almost as inevitable as gravity: attempts at undermining her autonomy as artist and with this also her subjectivity as a human being.

How was it possible to maintain all these various connections—with fellow students from art school, with colleagues from the theater, with friend groups, and even distant family members—, and bring them to fruition through artistic projects, intellectual discussion, political engagement? One crucial strategy was that Palmstierna-Weiss took opportunities as they arose, according to her own judgement, without feeling indebted to the people who facilitated them. Offered a Riddarhuset stipend for international travel after her divorce through her uncle Carl-Fredrik Palmstierna’s connections, the young artist did not even bother to argue against the one, implied condition—that she would travel alone, and most importantly without the impecunious immigrant writer Peter Weiss and his unstable lifestyle—but simply accepted the offer and used it at her own will, ignoring any unwarranted demands.

>> The Crossing of a Social Line

In her autobiography, Palmstierna-Weiss addresses the ambiguity of the female artist as the crossing of a social line: as soon as a woman acts not only as consumer of art but produces art for a living, she competes with her male colleges.[3] In her case this autonomous creative production—first declared an unnecessary endeavor by the director of the Stockholm art school Konstfack upon her graduation in 1952: “Varför ska du ha ett arbet, du är ju gift?” (Why would you need to work, since you are married?)[4]—then developed into a possibility in form of a workshop which she co-founded at the pottery factory Skansen, which was about to close down, together with two other female graduates from art school. Their pottery workshop Tre Krukor (Three mugs) generated its income through the sales of its pottery and an admission fee for visitors, mostly families.

The same tension resonates also in a conversation with Suhrkamp publisher Siegfried Unseld, who visited the couple in their hotel room the morning after the premiere of Marat/Sade in West Berlin in 1964, when it became clear that this would be Weiss’s breakthrough as a playwright. Unseld asked Palmstierna-Weiss whether she would now let go of her own career plans in order to be able to better assist her partner, thereby suggesting that her interest in her work was only relevant as long as it was a necessary contribution to the joint income. Palmstierna-Weiss pointed out the implied bias by drawing an analogy to Unseld’s own partnership with reversed gender roles, asking if he would have given up his work as a publisher if his wife, a teacher, would have been promoted to the role of a high school principal during the course of their partnership. Unseld responded by declaring Palmstierna-Weiss a “ball crusher”: “Solche Frauen wie du machen einen Mann impotent” (Women like you make men impotent).[5] How could one possibly respond to such a vulgarized reproach for not being feminine enough, not sufficiently complaisant and obedient, especially when, as in her case, she was still in bed in her hotel room?

The questioning of gender roles—having an argument with a woman who pursues her creative work seriously, not only to secure living expenses but as a creative project, as a “desire of her own,”[6] who demands visibility as a creator and refuses to hide her light under a bushel—must still have been unexpected in 1964, even in intellectual circles. In conversation with what Ruby Hamad calls “a white damsel”[7] (a person who has not learned to take a stance and defend their position, exhibiting helplessness when confronted with their own privilege, shame when facing their inability to take responsibility), the counterpart’s role is easy, the interactions following a cultural pattern; yet the men in Palmstierna-Weiss’s social and professional circles had to reinvent their roles as well.

>> The Artist Couple

Speaking with a very contemporary voice and looking at events and conflicts as a curious, attentive spectator from a bird’s-eye perspective, Palmstierna-Weiss’s voice never gives in to self-pity, despair, or simplification for the sake of comfort, although there would be plenty of occasion to do so: the suicide of Vera Herzog, her poetic, empathetic, but also depressive mother; the passing of her brother Hans Palmstierna in a boat accident; the loss of both father figures: the first, Kule Palmstierna, through her parents’ separation, and the second, René de Monchy, when her mother’s passing lead to an estrangement between the siblings and their stepfather; and, finally, the challenge of living in a partnership with another artist, first in 1947 with the graphic artist Mark Sylwan, and since 1952 until his death, with the visual artist, filmmaker, and author Peter Weiss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It seems natural that in a collaboration spanning multiple decades, it is not always possible to pinpoint who contributed what; yet in some cases the facts are very clear and the obscurity lies in a reluctance to name them. Stage design and costumes for the West German premiere of the play Marat/Sade at the Berlin Schillertheater were both designed by Palmstierna-Weiss, but, following conventions at the time, were listed in the program as the work of the dramatist of the play, Peter Weiss. When Palmstierna-Weiss requested to be named, the response was incomprehension; and the fact that in 1969 even Manfred Haiduk, scholar and friend to the couple, refrained from just directly calling Palmstierna-Weiss the stage designer, appears disconcerting from a contemporary perspective.[8]

However, maybe the problem of visibility in the collaboration between an artist couple is not as distant today as we would be inclined to think: Yulia Mahr, visual artist and partner to composer Max Richter, considers this a problematic specific to heterosexual creative couples: “It’s quite difficult as the woman in a partnership to be seen.” Mahr recounts collaborations with Richter where her contributions were being downplayed, eaten up by the media, and explains this as a result of the public’s desire for the persona of a male genius: a need for figures to admire and look up to, a desire to put down one single name. “You know, I really thought that glass ceiling for women was broken, and I really thought that that idea of the woman in an artist relationship—I thought that we’ve solved that; but we haven’t at all. And it’s really obvious that there is still a huge amount of sexism. And wife-ism, actually.”[9] What Mahr calls wife-ism is what I would consider the (not necessarily conscious) agenda of those questions at the book presentation in Berlin-Charlottenburg, which were aiming at excavating hidden truths in her partner’s work, putting her in the situation of a proxy at her own event: an undermining of an artist’s autonomous work.

>> An Open Letter to Bergman

Her pertinacity in working relationships becomes especially visible in the collaborations with Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, with whom Palmstierna-Weiss worked over multiple decades. Admitting a fascination with the director’s ability to arouse in each participant a commitment to the project and adherence to the rigid schedule of rehearsals, she asks: “Hur får man en sådan makt?” (How does one obtain such power?).[10]

In 1970 Palmstierna-Weiss responded in an open letter in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter to Bergman’s pledge for a minimalist stage. Bergman had declared: “Det behövs bara ordet, skådespelaren och ett par bräder” (Everything you need is the word, an actor, and a few boards),[11] which seemed to make the work of a stage designer superfluous. In her letter to Bergman, Palmstierna-Weiss approached the omission she recognized in Bergman’s claim by defining her work as stage designer as that which allows text and action to become visible;[12] this “making visible” however is a work that needs to be done not only on stage but also in the para-theatrical space, in non-theatrical reality. A sensibility and desire for drawing attention toward social grievances also reflects how she understood her role as visual artist: not only as craftsmanship but as a perspective from where to engage with sociopolitical questions in Sweden, Europe, and globally.

Bergman, when he heard that she had submitted an open letter in response to his claim, requested that she retract her text; Palmstierna-Weiss not only dared to contradict him, she also defended her position, with the result that Bergman asked her to design the stage for his next project at the Stockholm Dramaten Theater – the first collaboration between Bergman and Palmstierna-Weiss since Rannsakningen (Die Ermittlung) in 1966, this time without Weiss. Bergman said he wanted to see how much she could bear.[13]

What followed was a collaboration over twenty years and on nineteen plays. In her autobiography, she recounts almost as comic instances, and, if I am not mistaken, with some pride, situations where she ended up being caught in the middle between her work partner and her life partner–for instance, during a longer conflict between Bergman and Weiss over the dramatization of Franz Kafka’s novel Der Prozess in 1975.

The evidence of Palmstierna-Weiss’s political engagement and artistic productivity in Minnet’s Spelplats is enormous; yet I am also particularly intrigued by those moments when things just did not work out as planned. There was the time when, after encouraging her to apply for the position of director of the Stockholm Dramaten theater, Bergman suddenly changed his mind and voted for a competing candidate. Another time, Palmstierna-Weiss collaborated with director Mathias Lafolie over five years in order to re-habilitate the Strindberg Theater in the northern part of Stockholm, yet just when the proposal was successful, an uninvolved person was assigned the project and, as a consequence, the better part of the available funding was lost.

The urge for creative production, it appears, would not have allowed to get stuck in any pigeonhole; instead opportunities kept arising through the multitude of bonds held together and alive through a shared desire for intellectual engagement and artistic production. When I understood last fall that a second conversation with Palmstierna-Weiss would no longer be a possibility, I regretted that I had not asked her for permission to record our first conversation, but also that I would not be able to ask her about her response to my friend’s question at the book presentation in Berlin, how she managed to never second-guess her desire to have something to say and to search for ways to express it: “Es war einfach so, eine Selbstverständlichkeit”—that is just how it was, naturally.

Notes

A heartfelt thank you to Nadja Weiss (Nachlass Peter Weiss, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss), Ulrike Faber (Nachlass Jürgen Schutte), Verbrecher Verlag, Akademie der Künste Berlin, and Sweriges Riksradio for their permission to include the illustrations as well as the quote from the 1990 interview.

[1] “Was ich hiermit sagen will, ist, dass ich glaube, es existiert kein Mensch, der aus nichts etwas produziert. Aber es ist nötig, dass man einen Dialog [führt], eine Diskussion—mit zwei oder drei, es kann mit zehn Leuten . . . aber es muss immer einen Reiz geben, um weiterzugehen” (Palmstierna-Weiss, “Interview”).

[2] Palmstierna-Weiss, Minnets spelplats; Palmstierna-Weiss, Eine europäische Frau.

[3] Palmstierna-Weiss, 114; Palmstierna-Weiss, 162.

[4] Palmstierna-Weiss, 128; Palmstierna-Weiss, 182.

[5] Palmstierna-Weiss, 209; Palmstierna-Weiss, 362 (cited in German in both editions). A documentary about her work as stage designer, titled Kvinnor som du gör en man impotent, was produced by director Julén Staffan for the Swedish National Television in 2014.

[6] In a 2003 essay, philosopher Michael E. Bratman addresses the dilemma “that you can sometimes have and be moved by desires which you in some sense disown,” arguing to consider an action as autonomous if “the role of desire in practical thought and action is determined by [higher-order] judgements” (Bratman, “A Desire of One’s Own,” 221, 223).

[7] Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars.

[8] Palmstierna-Weiss, Minnets spelplats, 209; Palmstierna-Weiss, Eine europäische Frau, 362. Haiduk describes Palmstierna’s role as “not only having drafted the costumes but also decisively contributed to the stage design” (Haiduk, Peter Weiss’ Dramen, 109; translation is mine).

[9] Mahr and Bradbury, “It’s quite difficult as the woman in the partnership to be seen.”

[10] Palmstierna-Weiss, Minnets spelplats, 300; Palmstierna-Weiss, Eine europäische Frau, 479.

[11] Palmstierna-Weiss, 288; Palmstierna-Weiss, 468.

[12] “Teater är för mig ord och ljud i bild. . . . Scenografin medverkar till att åskådliggöra texten och agerandet.” (Palmstierna-Weiss, 288). “Für mich ist Theater Wort und Ton in Bild. . . . Der Bühnenraum trägt dazu bei, den Text und das Agieren sichtbar zu machen” (Palmstierna-Weiss, 469).

[13] Palmstierna-Weiss, 289; Palmstierna-Weiss, 469.

Works Cited

Bratman, Michael E. “A Desire of One’s Own.” Journal of Philosophy 100, no. 5 (2003): 221–42.

Haiduk, Manfred. Der Dramatiker Peter Weiss. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1969.

Hamad, Ruby. White Tears/Brown Scars. London: Trapeze, 2020.

Palmstierna-Weiss, Gunilla. Eine europäische Frau. Berlin: Verbrecher-Verlag, 2022.

——. Interview by Jürgen Schutte, Andreas Schönefeld, und Elisabeth Wagner. Sveriges Riksradio, Formiddag i P1, 1990, Akademie der Künste [AdK], Berlin, Peter-Weiss-Archiv, call number AVM-32.2560, 1990.

——. Minnets spelplats. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2013.

Mahr, Yulia. “It’s Quite Difficult as the Woman in the Partnership to be Seen: An Interview with Yulia Mahr.” Interview by Sarah Bradbury. The Upcoming, June 4, 2021. https://www.theupcoming.co.uk/2021/06/04/its-quite-difficult-as-the-woman-in-the-partnership-to-be-seen-an-interview-with-yulia-mahr/

Staffan, Julén. Kvinnor som du gör en man impotent. Swedish National Television, 2014. https://vimeo.com/97233142/ee6f7d2fb7