1 of

Trump/Beuys
Men at the Main Lever: A Historical Mirroring
Gregor Stemmrich on Donald Trump and Joseph Beuys

The attempt to assassinate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, is
inseparably connected in the public perception with his immediate reaction to it. With his
instinct for publicity, he turned to his followers, despite a gunshot wound to his ear, bleeding,
with his fist raised, and the image was captured with iconic succinctness by press agency
photographer Evan Vucci.1 Trump is presenting himself as a martyr, as a victorious
combatant, and as a savior chosen by God. Has such a scenario ever occurred before? The
historian and Fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes parallels to Violet Gibson’s attempt to
assassinate Mussolini in 1926. Gibson had stepped out of a crowd and fired a shot at
Mussolini but merely grazed Mussolini’s nose. Mussolini subsequently displayed the
bandage on his nose as “a kind of badge of honor,” which could also be observed in Trump’s
approach to his wounded ear. The dynamics and consequent effects of these failed
assassination attempts are, in principle, comparable.2 But, unlike Mussolini in his day, Trump
currently has no official powers. That made it all the more important to him that he turn to his
followers with an iconic gesture on the spot, immediately after being wounded.

The parallels between Mussolini and Trump that Ben-Ghiat points out serve to illustrate
the concepts of authoritarianism and fascism. The correlation of the historical situations is
thus based on the assumption that they can be shown to be almost entirely parallel. The
descriptions form vectors, all of which point in the same direction; it results in a double
portrait composed of two separate halves. The events and circumstances mentioned have just
enough differences to make it clear that nearly a century lies between them.

How could one lend more weight to the differences in personalities, historical contexts,
and the abilities to categorize without entirely ruling out the idea of possible parallels?
Presumably only by accepting that the parallels drawn need not be directly and self-evidently
comparable. One can be presented as if it were comparable—not in the sense of an assertion
but in the sense of the question that could be raised in the first place in this way or that could
come into view in a new way. The counterfactual insinuation of a parallel could lead to a
confrontation that offers unexpected and unadmitted correspondences to think about. A
corresponding experiment would in principle have to be conducted allegorically, understood
not as the illustration of an abstract concept but as the relation between two rows of texts,
images, and events that interact. People, actions, events can stand simultaneously in various
views from behind in the relationship of correspondence and contrast.
 2 of

Iconic Charisma and Its Contextual Implications

As outlandish as it may seem at first glance, this kind of correlative image can be constructed
of Donald Trump and Joseph Beuys. It begins with photographs that make it possible to relate
different spheres of origin with one another in unexpected ways. In the main auditorium of
the Technische Hochschule in Aachen, for the Fluxus festival called Festival der Neuen
Kunst on July 20, 1964,3 which had been organized by students, the audience’s reactions to
the actions by the artists ranged from amused to disturbed. Some of the actions took place in
the auditorium, which some members of the audience took as an opportunity to step up onto
the stage. In the resulting confusing situation, a glass with acid that Beuys was using in his
action tipped over, and splashes landed on one student’s clothing, whereupon he punched
Beuys in the face. Beuys punched back, then pulled a crucifix mounted on an apparatus out of
a suitcase and, with his nose bleeding, held it out toward the audience and stretched his other
arm upward with his palm open.4 Beuys was presenting himself as a martyr and as political-
religious savior. The photographer Heinrich Riebesehl, then still a student, captured the
iconic visual significance of this fleeting event in a black-and-white photograph. The festival
was cut short, but the image has become etched in the memory of the art world.

The photographs of Trump and of Beuys give the impression that the charisma of the
gestural reaction of these prominent people to an event that threatened them was already
present in them.5 Trump holds a clenched fist outstretched; Beuys, an open palm. The fist is a
sign of anger and a willingness to fight; the open palm combined with the raised crucifix a
sign of giving and willingness to sacrifice oneself. Both signs, however, have ambiguous
connotations depending on the context. The raised fist is usually identified with leftist politics
and views. One can scarcely speak of that in Trump’s case. The sign took on eminent
symbolic and ethical significance in the Spanish antifascist resistance; later, it was adopted by
various marginalized and oppressed social groups. In response, right-wing groups have
instrumentalized it for their purposes. Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan employ the “Aryan
fist.” Without wishing to suggest that Trump explicitly wanted his clenched fist to be
understood as “Aryan,” the fact that he has long abhorred leftist views and the far-right views
of many of his supporters make an affinity to the implications of the “Aryan fist”
unmistakable. On a superficial level, Beuys’s raised arm with open palm indicates the
opposite of a clenched fist, but both men, Trump and Beuys, styled themselves victims and
made a claim to superiority. Beuys’s raised arm runs parallel to the slightly slanting position
of the crucifix on the strange apparatus and appears to be its extension. It has an affinity to
the position of the arm of Christ hanging on the cross as well as an affinity to the so-called
Deutscher Gruss or Hitlergruss (German salute or Hitler salute), without clearly being one or
the other. The festival was held on the twentieth anniversary of Claus von Stauffenberg’s
failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, which was supposed to be officially remembered in
West Germany on that day—but all too self-righteously so from the perspective of the
 3 of

festival’s organizers.6 Several of the artists participating used it as an occasion to integrate

into their actions references to Germany’s National Socialist past and to World War II. No
such effort is evident in Beuys’s contribution (which does not mean that he wanted to rule out
corresponding references).7 At the same time, the overall atmosphere was charged
accordingly from the beginning because a tape of Joseph Goebbels’s Sportpalast speech (“Do
you want the total war?”) from 1943 was played in an endless loop. In this context, Beuys’s
handling of the apparatus he had acquired had the character of an evocation of an inseparable
amalgam of religion, art, and politics. Without implying that Beuys explicitly wished his
gesture to be understood as a Hitler salute, an affinity to it can scarcely be denied.

What Vucci’s photograph of Trump cannot show but increasingly drew attention in the
television images was that Trump, who first had to fight his way out of the circle of
bodyguards surrounding him before he could raise his fist iconically, made a pumping
movement with it and cried “Fight, fight, fight!” Because it was not amplified, that cry could
only be seen and not heard. Beuys, too, presumably first had to struggle amid the pushing and
shoving to get enough room to make a significant gesture: silently but nevertheless with
declamatory effect, he extended his right arm with palm open.

In Vucci’s photograph, surrounded by Secret Service agents who seem to be seeking his
protection rather than protecting him, Trump rises up above them, almost larger-than-life as a
patriotic avenger and, in the eyes of his supporters, as a God-sent savior. Trump’s claim to
expansive powers in combination with the calculation to make it seem religiously legitimized
can be correlated to Beuys’s comprehensive claim on art and his effort to make it seem
religiously ennobled.

The attempt to assassinate Trump, as it turns out, can sooner be traced to an extended
suicide by a twenty-year-old rather than any clear political intent, but initially it was
interpreted as an assassination attempt with a political goal. Because no political motive
could be found, the shock over the assassination attempt turned to shock that someone with a
weapon could so easily get close to Trump and fire shots.8 In the case of the Fluxus festival,
the traumatic memory of a failed assassination attempt with a political objective was one of
the premises of the event. Spatial proximity as a precondition for an attack on one of the
protagonists was ensured already because the hall was jam-packed, and the students had,
following the postulate of eliminating the boundary between art and life, crossed the
boundary between stage and auditorium. The confusion of the situation during the Trump
event and the inattentiveness of the Secret Service corresponds to the confusion of the
situation during Beuys’s action and the inattentiveness that led to contact with the acid.
 4 of

Political Posturing

The echo in the media of his iconic gesture suddenly made Beuys a public figure in 1964, and
for his followers, whose numbers Beuys was able to increase, a charismatic one. His policy of
admitting everyone who wanted to study with him to his class at the Staatliche
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (which had already grown to several hundred students) led to a
scandal in 1972 when, after heated internal conflicts at the academy, he and more than fifty
applicants who had not been accepted to the academy occupied the secretary’s office and
refused to vacate when ordered, which was interpreted as breaking and entering and resulted
in his dismissal. All of Germany took part in the “academy debate”. This did not harm his
reputation—rather the opposite. The correlate to the peaceful occupation of the secretary’s
office that was initiated by Beuys, however incomparable it might be, is the storming of the
Capitol by Trumps supporters on January 6, 2021, after he had lost the presidential election
without admitting it. That Trump did not lose his power base within the party or harm his
public reception—rather the opposite—points to a virtual comparability of the publicity
effects of the two actions.

A photograph that Beuys had his long-time collaborator Klaus Staeck take pictures from
behind Beuys standing on the overpass of a rest stop on the autobahn on whose window he
had written “DER MANN AM HAUPTHEBEL” (The Man at the Main Lever) and then
positioned himself under it with his bent arm pointing in the line of sight of the autobahn.9 In
Andres Veiel’s film Beuys (2017), Staeck says that he thinks that Beuys did indeed feel that
way. Trump also saw and sees himself as “the man at the main lever”: in his case as a
businessman and TV star, and Beuys as an artist and professor, and both seem convinced that
they were or are destined to operate “the main lever.” The common ground of art and
business for them was not “business art business,” which Andy Warhol declared to be his
paradigm, but rather the role of the politician. In that, they were successful. The proof of this
was Beuys entry into the Guggenheim Museum in 1979 and Trump’s entry into the White
House in 2016.

Trauma and American Dream: Personalized Definitions of the General Public

Many see Beuys as an artist who addressed the traumatic experiences of German history in
relation to his own biography.10 Yet Beuys never offered an analysis of historical events and
contexts.11 Trump stands for a businessman who realized the American dream in his own
biography and from that takes license to describe present-day America as traumatic. He
offered no analysis of historical events and contexts either. Both cultivate a suggestive
approach to traumas, and both boast of their love for America. Trump dresses in the colors of
the American flag and sometimes kisses the flag for the media while murmuring “I love you,
 5 of

baby,” which not only creates a bond between him and his supporters but also leaves no
doubt about “to whom America truly belongs.” In Beuys’s case, his love for America is
manifested in his driving a Cadillac (a rarity in Germany both then and now)12 and above all
in his action Coyote—I Like America and America Likes Me of 1974, which can be seen as a
chiastic liaison of German trauma and American dream, in which an American trauma turns
out to be a German dream.13 The title is derived—consciously or unconsciously—from a
slogan once on the 7UP bottle: “You Like It / It Likes You.” For Beuys and for Trump,
“America” is “it,” and—with reference to Freud’s dictum “Where It was, shall I be”—“It.”
The political connection to the person saying “I” marks the claim to speak for the general
public. That already contains the idea of an outside, since the person claims to be defining
who belongs to the “general public” and who doesn’t, or because he or she is propagating an
unreal general public that itself represents an outside. Trump identifies the outside with
illegal immigrants whom he discriminates against as alleged criminals and patients of
psychiatric institutions, and he threatens his political opponents if they do not share his
discriminations. That is part of his political calculation. In his action, by contrast, Beuys
referred to the settlers of North America seeing the native coyotes as a threat and trying to
exterminate them. For him, the coyote embodies the Indians who saw the animal as a spiritual
creature. If he could succeed in having a dialogue—not just an interaction—with a living
coyote, Beuys prophetically calculated, the divisions in American society would be
overcome.14 Although Beuys tried programmatically and prominently to integrate coyotes
into his mantra “I like America and America likes me,” the idea of a dialogue with a coyote
turned out to be an unreal integration of an outside. The common ground of postulated
exclusion and postulated inclusion is showmanship.

Ambivalent Fascination with the Figure of the Outstanding Criminal

Following the success of a Hollywood biopic on the gangster John Dillinger in 1973, Beuys
improvised in 1974 a reenactment of the shooting of Dillinger in 1934 in front of the
Biograph movie theater in Chicago when FBI officers riddled him with bullets as he tried to
escape. Beuys explained: “I attach great importance to the energy that lies in a biography like
that of John Dillinger. The energy, which, for example, was negatively charged with
Dillinger can emit a positive impulse. According to the maxim: Our love impulse for such
people, or for people at all, is threefold: subhuman, human and superhuman.”15 He claimed
that great gangsters had “used their creative abilities in a negative way.” 16

Trump’s obsession with the character of Hannibal Lecter from the film Silence of the
Lambs, whom he confusingly integrates into his tirades at his campaign appearances is in no
way second to that: “The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’s a wonderful man. He oftentimes
 6 of

would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? ‘Excuse me, I’m about to have a
friend for dinner,’ as this poor doctor walked by. ‘I’m about to have a friend for dinner.’ But
Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations. The late, great Hannibal Lecter.” Whereas, on the one hand,
he identifies with the cultivated and witty serial killer and cannibal, at the same time, on the
other, he needs to paint a horror scene: “People are pouring across the border now, disease-
ridden people […] And I said it, I said it over and over: people from mental institutions, from
insane asylums […] That’s like Silence of the Lambs stuff. But they’re coming in to our
country.”17 The ambivalence that causes confusion is fated to integrate diffuse states of mind
of the audience by focusing on an amoral person became part of his MAGA ritual. Beuys’s
action Dillinger is overdetermined in a way that is no less confused; Johannes Lothar
Schröder notes that it “reshaped, as it were, Beuys’s internalized image of America and […]
enabled him by means of identification to pass his own feelings of guilt on to Dillinger, who
had sacrificed himself in the Christian sense as a representative and in advance for the
artist.”18

Beyond Responsibility: Programmatic Non-Identifiability of Perpetrators

Beuys’s attitude toward Christianity was highly ambivalent. That only made it all the more
important to him to propagate his own form of forgiveness. With his evocation of healing
powers, the suggestive power of his dramatizations, his shamanism, and his anthroposophic-
oriented theorizing, Beuys claimed a kind of general responsibility for traumas of all kinds:
war injuries, the Holocaust, the thalidomide scandal, Rote Armee Fraktion terrorism, the rift
in American society during the Vietnam War.19 Trump, by contrast, indulges his need to
fraternize in spirit with the autocrats of this world: Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, Kim Jong-
un, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Xi Jinping. He knows how to connect to
everything that can be used for his will to power and to reinforce a corresponding self-image
and presents himself as a “fixer” who, when he is in power again, will pardon all those
(including himself) who came into conflict with the law while serving him—as long as he can
continue to use them. That is connected to the promise that it is only a question of time before
he has changed the legal structures so much that no one who is prepared to serve him can be
identified as a perpetrator. In Beuys, one finds instead an idea of the connection of all
creatures that implies vulnerability. He announced this in his art. One can also read this as an
impulse to devictimization, but it cannot be connected to any idea of responsibility that would
make it possible to identify perpetrators. This downplays specific political responsibility as a
kind of self-granted absolution.20 The more obvious this became, the more urgent it seemed
that Beuys adopt the role of a politician, but a politician who was prepared to reduce politics
to the absurd by addressing a diffuse feeling of social malaise with simple explanations.
“Direct democracy by referendum” meant that the political system created after World War II
 7 of

had to be seen as a patronizing abuse of the people; and “Everyone is an artist” meant that
Beuys, as the artist who declared this, could claim to be “the man at the main lever” and also
wanted to place the lever at an all-too-imaginary Archimedean point.

Personalized Protest against the Political Class

Beuys founded the Free International University; Trump, Trump University. They had in
common that they were not universities at all but were supposed to be considered such. They
derived their attractiveness from the concept of capital that they propagated: Trump, the
business-oriented capitalist version, and Beuys the “creative.” Beuys’s spectacles that
oscillated between art and politics correspond to Trump’s that oscillate between politics and
business. The latter’s political success is based on the strategy of harshly attacking the
political establishment to make it his claim that he embodies the American Dream without
elevate himself above the common people so that they have to stick to him because on their
own they cannot do anything against the political class. This strategy enables Trump to
include everything that stands in his way in the political class: other parties as well as banks
and companies that support them; politicians, journalists, and lawyers who think differently;
administrative regulations, media, and laws. By populistically dividing society into “us” and
“them,” he gets the power to define the identity of social groups. Trump does not, as Beuys
does, evoke a traumatic past in order to offer a prospect of healing in the future but rather a
lost American greatness in order to make the present seem traumatic. The political thrust is
nevertheless the same: the claim to the “main lever,” only with the difference that Trump has
prospects for real political power, which he can employ autocratically. The Archimedean
point where he places the lever lies in the production of his voters’ imaginary identification
with him. That point is at once real and imaginary.

The setting up of this Archimedean point would be inconceivable without an all-but-

endless torrent of lies, insults (which his supporters register as humor), “alternative facts,”
and twisting of the truth. It is not a problem for Trump that one can see through his lies
because as an idol he is able to insinuate that his lies contain a deeper truth—whether in the
said, the way of saying it, or in its relationship to the circumstances—one that no fact
checking can prove. Because that was no different in the case of Beuys, fact checking would
also be futile.21 Trump and Beuys enjoy or enjoyed a kind of fool’s license. But whereas fools
at a royal court could tell the truth when joking, they mythomaniacally revealed or reveal
their effort to become kings.
 8 of

Mythomania and the General Public in Historical Perspective

Mythomania as a political calculation and mythomania as an artistic response to challenges

experienced should be distinguished, but they are not without points of contact. As Walter
Benjamin explained in 1940, Baudelaire’s famous mythomania should be understood as a
publicity trick by the artist, who has to be his own impresario on the free market but also as
compensation for the loss of the great esteem in which poets were once held.22 He argued that
Baudelaire understood that both the aura and the halo must be considered antiquated. In his
prose poem “Perte d’auréole” (Loss of the Halo), Baudelaire writes of a poet who had lost his
halo in the shocking bustle of the metropolis, and when asked by an acquaintance about it,
claimed he was happy, because it was boring to be a dignitary, and he preferred to go about
incognito, as an ordinary mortal, and he found the idea amusing the some bad poet would
pick up the halo out of the dust and put it on.23 Although Beuys could also appear to be an
ordinary mortal in the extraordinary approachability of his persona, he never in fact went
about incognito (his felt hat was his distinctive attribute). His selection of materials, their
auraticization, and his mythologizing self-dramatization contributed a great deal to the
impression that he, romantically charged, had picked up a halo from the dirt and, having
made dirt apposite by means of esotericism and symbolism, put it on. The same thing that
made him absurd for sections of his audience also made him a luminary in the eyes of his
supporters. But the reason for the perte d’auréole in his case had nothing to do with capitalist
conditions (the free market and suffering from the shock of city life), but in participating
voluntarily in a criminal war: in 1941, at the age of twenty, Beuys signed up for twelve years
as a professional solider; “So I still think that my decision at the time was morally correct,”
he declared in 1980.24 After the war, when the realization became inevitable that this war was
connected to the Holocaust, Beuys understood that if he was going to be able to compensate
mythomaniacally for it, he would have to pull out stops very different from those that could
ever have occurred to Baudelaire.25

Considering the admiration felt now as ever in the United States for presidents such as
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln but also Ike and JFK, as well as the efforts other
presidents have made to catch up to them, Trump’s first presidency leaves a stale taste of
indignity, a perte d’auréole. The many legal proceedings brought against Trump have also
contributed to that, and even more so the many legal tricks of power politics in an effort to
stall these trials, usually successfully, and maintain the lie of the “stolen election” as an
official “alternative fact.” But this assessment is based on an outside perspective and does not
include the perspective of those who are prepared to make a second Trump term possible. It
is reasonable to assume that the perte d’auréole is the secret of his success.26 In Baudelaire’s
text, the poet explains that he has lost his insignia, the aureole: “Now I can go about
incognito, do bad things, and indulge in vulgar behavior like ordinary mortals. So here I am,
just like you!”27 but the acquaintance who recognizes him mocks him with barely concealed
 9 of

scorn. The poet’s exposed incognito in Baudelaire’s text proves that enjoying the advantages
of not having a halo cannot be tied to the incognito. On the contrary, only a standing in public
that defines itself correlative to the incognito of those who have no public sphere of their own
makes it possible to enjoy the corresponding advantages. In the continuity of his vulgar
behavior and his “bad things,” Trump makes his standing in public resistant to all criticism
his insignia of power politics, which in the politics of identity offers the explanation “So here
I am, just like you!” That makes him a luminary for his supporters. In lieu of a halo, there is a
self-dramatization that is as threadbare for his critics as it is powerfully persuasive for his
supporters.

Comparing Comparisons

One can compare Trump and Mussolini, as does Ben-Ghiat, and one can, as Buchloh did in
his highly regarded article “The Twilight of the Idol,” compare Beuys and Richard Wagner. 28
The Trump-Mussolini comparison and the Beuys-Wagner comparison are themselves
comparable in that they trace historical phenomena that many consider unique to precedents
and thus make them seem like a reprise in order to invite corresponding analyses. In the
process, they stick to categories that ensure the comparison in general and specific
relationships. The general category politics and the specific one that can be outlined in the
formulation “charismatic politician with dictatorial ambitions” stabilize the Trump-Mussolini
comparison; the general category art and the specific one that can be outlined in the
formulation “artist romantically and programmatically expanding the concept of art” stabilize
that of Beuys and Wagner. As a rule, historical comparisons offer the possibility of making
conjectures—that is to say, point to historical commonalities to draw attention that much
more effectively to significant differences. But that does not work in relationship to Trump
and Beuys. It suggests all the more the idea of a reprise (Mussolini/Trump or Wagner/Beuys)
as a crucial opportunity for comparison.

A correlation of Trump and Beuys like the one made here counteracts the schema of
comparison tied to the idea of the reprise. Because such a correlation lacks the categorical
license for a considered comparison, a top-down relationship of the general and the specific
can only be replaced by a bottom-up relationship of the concrete and the abstract. The
correlation can only be made by reflecting, not by determining; setting out from perception of
concrete affinities, one can ask about convergences on an abstract level—also with regard to
extreme opposites.

A correlation of Trump and Beuys like that made here has its initial moment in the
aesthetic grasping of the affinity of the charismatic iconicity of two photographs showing
their spontaneous reactions to aggression directed at them. The correlation is based on the
 10 of

surprise that it is possible at all, which triggers the desire to see where the idea of correlation
can lead—beyond its initial moment. All the more so as there can be no doubt that the events,
situations, things, and facts cited here are not usually taken as an occasion to relate Beuys and
Trump to each other. The operative assumption of a direct comparability of the two
protagonists is at the same marked by an as-if, by an incommensurability that is to be covered
up. That is tied to the hope of using the categorical difficulty of opening up a perspective that
can produce a space in historical consciousness in which things appear in an unfamiliar light
and can be renegotiated. The correlation that initially intended only to exemplify its own
possibility can unexpectedly and inevitably come across questions that have both political
and ethical relevance. Trump’s action takes on a false bottom in that of Beuys, and Beuys’s
takes on an unreal mirroring in that of Trump. That reveals an allegorical double structure
that cannot deny its character as a constructure but entails a historical knowledge (including
knowledge of a lack of knowledge) that is not bound to this construction.
1
On this, see Helen Sullivan, “‘The Job Is All about Anticipation’: Behind the Lens of the Defining
Photo of the Trump Rally Shooting,” The Guardian, July 15, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/article/2024/jul/15/trump-rally-shooting-photographer-evan-vucci-story.
2
See Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Mussolini, Trump and What Assassination Attempts Really Do,” Politico,
August 3, 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/08/03/assassination-attempts-
mussolini-trump–00171825. See also Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2020).
3
The official title was AKTIONS / AGIT-POP / DE-COLLAGE / HAPPENINGS / ANITART /
L’AUTRISME / ART TOTAL / REFLUXUS.
4
Adam C. Oellers and Sibille Spiegel speak of a “pneumatic cross” and describe the course of events in
“Wollt ihr das totale Leben?”: Fluxus und Agit-Pop der 60er Jahre in Aachen, exh. cat, ed. Adam C.
Oellers and Sibille Spiegel (Aachen: Neuer Kunstverein, 1995), p. 34. The literature usually mentions
only a cross and not the substructure. Bazon Brock, who participated in the festival himself, explains
on his website that it was a model of the imperial orb with a cross: Bazon Brock, Aktion. Festival der
neuen Kunst. Action / Agit-Pop / De-Coll/ Age / Happening / Events/ Antiart / l’Autrisme/ Art Total /
Refluxus; https://bazonbrock.de/werke/detail/?id=567. One can, however, at most speak of a weak
allusion to the imperial insignia.
That Beuys pulled the work out of a suitcase is reported in Adam C. Oellers, “FLUXUS +- RWTH
AACHEN!? technikstudenten erleben vier jahre lang ein höchst erstaunliches programm,” in Nie
wieder störungsfrei! Aachen Avantgarde seit 1964, exh. cat. (Aachen: Ludwig Forum, 2011–12), pp.
22–39, esp. p. 28. For the documentation of how of the events and their political and legal postlude, see
Hans Peter Riegel, Beuys: Die Biographie, vol. 3, Dokumente, 4th ed. (Zurich: Riverside, 2021), pp.
114–34.
It is notable that after making his iconic gesture Beuys distributed bars of chocolate in the audience.
After the assassination attempt, by contrast, Trump was able to lend credibility to his messages of hate
and make effectively generous campaign promises accordingly.
5
On the iconic character of images in general, see Martin Kemp, Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes
Icon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
6
When the university administration sought to postpone the event, the students declared it a “memorial
event”; see “Festival der Neuen Kunst am 20. Juli, 20. Juli 1964, Auditorium maximum der TH
Aachen,” in Beuys, Brock, Vostell: Aktion, Demonstration, Partizipation 1949–1983, ed. Peter Weibel,
exh. cat. ZKM: Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2016),
pp 117–30, esp. p. 117.
7
It should be noted, however, that Beuys later integrated the portable stove with two hot plates that he
had used to melt fat during the festival into his vitrine Auschwitz Demonstration, 1956–1964. See Gene
Ray, “Joseph Beuys and the After-Auschwitz Sublime,” in Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, ed.
Gene Ray (Sarasota, FL: John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art; New York: D.A.P., 2001), pp. 55–
74, esp. 59.
8
This moment of shock was repeated with the second assassination attempt on September 16, 2024.
9
One can ask whether Beuys’s choice of site relates to the fact that the building of the autobahns in
Germany is regarded as one of Hitler achievements. In 1997, Hans Haacke filled the entire floor of the
inner courtyard of the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin with a fragment of a four-lane autobahn in
concrete. In his text, “Hans Haacke: Das historische ‘Sublime,’” Benjamin H. D. Buchloh attests to “an
archaeological if not indeed mnemonic quality” of the work”: “Announced by the Nazi fascists as their
inventions, and generally celebrated as a one of the regime’s great achievements, the building of the
autobahn was in essence a strategy of systematic preparation for war. Who did not hear the
compensatory lie in postwar Germany that the Nazis may have been criminals but they eliminated
unemployment by building the autobahn. Who did not see the autobahn in Germany or in Berlin of the
1960s and 1970s as an almost mystically precarious passage between the two parts of Germany and
attribute to it the status of a lifeline […]. And who did not understand in the 1980s […] the degree to
which the fanaticism of the cult of the autobahn in postwar German […] was still tied to the historically
significant intensified need for repression of this recently still totalitarian public?” See
Deutschlandbilder: Kunst aus einem geteilten Land, ed. Eckhart Gillen, exh. cat., Martin-Gropius-Bau,
Berlin (Cologne: DuMont, 1997), pp. 445ff., esp. p. 446.
10
It may suffice here to refer to the various contributions to the conference volume Joseph Beuys:
Mapping the Legacy (see note 7). They leave no doubt that a “legacy” of Beuys’s art cannot be
understood independently of the traumatic experiences of German history; for example, Joan Rothfuss
observes: “As scholars recently have begun to demonstrate, a large part of Beuys’ artistic project seems
to have been an attempt to heal the postwar German psyche.” Rothfuss, “Joseph Beuys. Echoes in
America,” in Ray, Joseph Beuys (see note 7), pp. 37–53, esp. p. 49.
11
After detailed studies and analyses, Max Reithmann concludes: “And we can therefore justifiably
doubt whether Beuys’ critical reflection on history had any particular depth,” in Reithmann, “In the
Rubblefield of German History: Questions to Joseph Beuys, in Ray, Joseph Beuys (see note 7), pp.
139–74, esp. p. 148.
12
Beuys wrecked his Cadillac on the autobahn; when he wanted to buy a new one in 1966, he decided
instead on a Bentley, because no Cadillac or Rolls-Royce (his second choice) was available; see
Eiskellerberg.TV, editor Anke Strauch, “Vom Bentley S1 zur Sozialen Plastik,”
https://eiskellerberg.tv/vom-bentley-s1-zur-sozialen-plastik/.
13
It is reasonable to assume that Beuys’s Coyote action had been inspired in part by Hermann Hesse’s
novel Der Steppenwolf and the American Hesse boom in the 1960er and 1970s. Warhol created an
artistic monument to it in the 1980s.
14
Many commenters on Beuys’s action unquestioningly speak of a “dialogue” to characterize the
relationship between Beuys’s spiritual introjections into the animal and his interactions with it, but that
can only be described as mistaken. See, for example, David Levi Strauss, “American Beuys”: Between
Dog & Wolf; Essays on Art and Politics in the Twilight of the Millennium (New York: Autonomedia,
2010), pp. 34–51.
15
Joseph Beuys, in Klaus Staeck, Beuys in America (Heidelberg: Staeck, 1987), 214.
16
Birgit Lahann, “Ich bin ein ganz scharfer Hase: Beuys-Interview mit Birgit Lahann,” Stern, no. 19
(April 30, 1981), pp. 77–82, pp. 250–53. See the quotation also in the context of Johannes Lothar
Schröder’s subtle analysis: Schröder, “Joseph Beuys als John Dillinger,” January 22, 2016,
https://blog.owlperformanceart.eu/?p=494. In the interview by Brigit Lahann, he also declared: “But
Hitler was also an artist, a great actionist. He simply used his creative talent in a negative way. John
Dillinger, Al Capone, all great gangsters had a lot of creativity, of course.” “Joseph Beuys im Gespräch
mit Birgit Lahann: Ich bin ein ganz scharfer Hase,” in Lahann, Hausbesuche: Zu Gast bei Künstlern,
Stars und Literaten (Hamburg: Engelhorn, 1989), p. 226.
17
Miles Klee, “Why Is Trump So Obsessed with Hannibal Lecter? A Complete Timeline,” Rolling
Stone, July 30, 2024; https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/donald-trump-hannibal-
lecter-timeline-1235070008/.
18
Schröder, “Joseph Beuys als John Dillinger” (see note 16).
19
See, among others, Auschwitz-Demonstration 1956–1964; Infiltration Homogen für Konzertflügel,
der größte Komponist der Gegenwart ist das Contergankind (Homogenous Infiltration for Concert
Grand; the Great Composer of the Present is the Thalidomide Baby), 1966; Dürer, ich führe persönlich
Baader + Meinhof durch die Documenta V (Dürer, I Will Personally Guide Baader + Meinhof through
Documenta V), 1972; and the action Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974.
20
Beuys’s explanation that “the principle of Auschwitz finds its perpetuation in our understanding of
science and of political systems” implies a leveling of out differences. Quoted in Caroline Tisdall,
Joseph Beuys (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1979), p. 23.
21
In his Beuys biography, Hans Peter Riegel (see note 4), uncovered numerous untruths about himself
that Beuys had spread. What Beuys had declared of his plane crashing in the Crimea in 1943 had been
discredited earlier by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s essay in Artforum in 1980 (see note 28).
22
Walter Benjamin, “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (January
1940); translated by Harry Zohn as “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings,
vol. 4 (1938–1940), ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2003), 313–45. In the Passagenwerk, Benjamin declares: “The ‘loss of a
halo’ concerns the poet first of all. He is obliged to exhibit himself in his own person on the market.
Baudelaire played this role to the hilt. His famous mythomania was a publicity stunt.” Walter
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 335 (J 59,7).
23
On Baudelaire’s text against the backdrop of his earlier Romantic view of the role of the poet, see
Richard Klein, “‘Bénédiction’ / ‘Perte d’Auréole’: Parables of Interpretation,” MLN 85, no. 4 (May
1970): pp. 515–28.
24
Joseph Beuys in conversation with André Müller, Penthouse (German edition) (May 1980): pp. 59–
62, pp. 98–101, quoted in Riegel, Beuys (see note 7), p. 432. English translation by David Costello,
2019, http://www.neugraphic.com/beuys/beuys-text10.html.
25
In his essay “The Boss: The Unresolved Question of Authority in Joseph Beuys’ Œuvre and Public
Image,” Jan Verwoert fails to see, not only in Beuys but also on a broad front in postwar Germany, “a
real effort to grapple with the experience of the victims of the crimes” (e-flux Journal, 1, 2008). He
argues that it is wrong to believe that addressing “Auschwitz” incorporates the experience of the
victims. Donald Kuspit speculates with regard to Beuys’s myth of having been saved by Tartars after
his plane crashed in Crimea: “There may have been an unconscious connection in Beuys’ mind
between the Tartars and the Jews, whose experience in the Holocaust he never directly and extensively
addressed in his work.” Donald Kuspit, “Joseph Beuys: The Body of the Artist,” Artforum 29, no. 10
(Summer 1991): pp. 80–86, esp. 86 n 10. Kuspit would like to see Beuys’s myth of the Tartars as a
“dream experience psychologically necessary for his survival.” This raises the question what real
experiences Beuys had of the persecution of the Jews. Max Reithmann remarks on this: “In a 1982
conversation with students at the Gerhart-Hauptmann school in Kassel, Beuys himself confirmed that
‘the synagogue in Kleve was burned down’ and then ‘two Jewish pupils from school … disappeared’
by emigrating to America.” Reithmann (see note 11), p. 148. In 1980, he explained his voluntary
participation in Hitler’s war: “I didn’t want to have an extra sausage, I didn’t want to adopt such a
cowardly, pacifist attitude. I have always fundamentally opposed emigration.” Joseph Beuys in
conversation with André Müller (see note 24), quoted in Riegel, Beuys (see note 7), p. 429. English
translation by David Costello, 2019, http://www.neugraphic.com/beuys/beuys-text10.html.
26
On this, see Stephen Reicher, “Donald Trump Is a Misogynistic, Billionaire Felon. Here’s Why
Americans Can’t Stop Voting for Him,” The Guardian, July 26, 2024,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/26/donald-trump-americans-vote-
psychology.
27
Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (see note 21), p. 342.
28
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Twilight of the Idol: Preliminary Notes for a Critique” (1980), in
Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to
1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 41–64. Buchloh points out that Marcel Broodthaers was
the first to have the idea of seeing Beuys in the Wagnerian tradition (ibid., p. 62 n. 1). In my view,
however, one must distinguish between an art historical derivation like the one Buchloh proposes and
an artful allegory as Broodthaers practices it in his “Public Letter to Beuys” in 1972; after his letter was
published in the press, Broodthaers included it in his book Magie: Art et politique (Paris: Multiplicata,
1973).
Translated by Steven Lindberg

Text in German:
https://www.textezurkunst.de/de/articles/gregor-stemmrich-manner-am-haupthebel-eine-historische-
spiegelung/