Editorial

       Culture, says Sigmund Freud’s tragic reading of history, originates in the murder and cannibalistic incorporation of the father by the brother horde. Poetry, says Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, originates in the poet’s Oedipal struggle with paternal predecessors: to come after a great poet is a wound of anxiety, answered through a misreading of the father’s poem. This issue originates in a conscious misreading of Bloom’s concept and its familial poetology, while holding on to the terms anxiety and influence, albeit in the more ambivalent German translation as Einflussangst. In one way or another, the contributions of this issue of dis/claim suggest that the source of anxiety lies elsewhere, both closer to and outside of ourselves and the other’s text – in language, in institutions, in the constructions of canons, and in the abstractions of capital – and that writing (and making images) under the influence of others may lead us not out of, but perhaps beyond anxiety.

       Anxiety, writes the philosopher and my dear friend Antonia Birnbaum in the book Mut ohne Heldentum (2025), lies close to courage. But if the hazard of anxiety befalls each and every subject, she insists that in order to subjectivize courage, as the affective access to a decision and its realization in an act, one must traverse it; courage therefore emerges not from the absence or overcoming of anxiety, but from its passage.^[4] (The courageous subject is, of course, not Oedipus, but Antigone.)

       Courage, I have found, is an unlikely but perhaps necessary political horizon for Einflussangst in a time when, both globally and here in Vienna, “we are no longer living ‘after fascism’, but suddenly in the midst of it.”^[5] A time when, for at least half of the Austrian voters, Einflussangst comes to signify Überfremdungsangst (an anxiety of foreign influences), which is an affective strategy of nationalistic isolation, and ultimately, a fascist fantasy of “remigration.” If writing confronts us with the failure of language to combat these very real fantasies (after all, antifascist alliances are built and defended not on the page but on the street), then perhaps writing under the influence of others, engaging in what Walter Benjamin called the art of citing without quotation marks, might provide a space to enact citational alliances from which other practices might emerge: other, political practices that ultimately put writing at risk.^[6]

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       In the introduction to the essay collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry (2025), I find a fourteenth-century definition of influence: “an ethereal fluid held to flow from the stars and to affect the actions of humans.” This mystical understanding of influence as the influx of the Holy Spirit into a soul that willingly opens itself to it prompts a fluid idea of influence. In today’s world, facing climate collapse, where fluids travel from the stars through greenhouse gas -d our writing, this seems a rather disquieting vision.

       Indeed, influential fluids can make us sick. In the entry on “Einflussangst und Vatermord” (German for anxiety of influence and patricide) in Helm aus Phlox (a collective theory of contemporary poetry, co-written by Ann Cotten, Daniel Falb, Hendrik Jackson, Steffen Popp, and Monika Rinck) the five poet-friends recount the following story of sickening influence: In 2008, in a slaughterhouse near Austin, Texas, workers developed a strange neurological disorder. They all quite literally had to blow out pigs’ brains, which were then processed into a pudding-like, cerebral mash and exported as an edible meat product. A translator, that is, a language worker, who had supported the predominantly Latin-American workers of the slaughterhouse at the hospital, was the first to point to the inhalation of atomized pig-brain matter as the illness’s cause.

       Moving from the slaughterhouse to the subway, the poets remind us readers that we not merely suck in particles or poems, but ourselves spread infection, influence.

       Like the teenager on the subway: “Read the beginning of Kleist, dude, it’ll fuck your eye!” He could have also said: “It’ll blow your mind.” I suck in particles and cause infection myself. You are the brain and you are blown out – pollination, seeing others getting sick around you – and: That’s not what I meant. Particularisation: Your brain dissolves into alien components. Fear of losing control arises.^[7]

       Writing, and particularly art criticism, is both a site where a fantasy of control (over the object of critique) is created and where, ultimately, a fear of losing control arises – when the work of art, or the language with which you seek to capture it, takes over and looks back at you.

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       Earlier this year, on a sticky summer day, I visited the Bode Museum in Berlin to see Paul Klee’s Angelus novus (1920). While looking at the bird-footed angel of history looking back at me in poor, dim light, I searched for Martin Luther.

       A decade ago, while studying the Angelus in the original, the artist R. H. Quaytman noticed that pressed between the watercolor paper bearing Klee’s drawing and the cardboard mount inscribed with its title was an old engraving. Upon a closer look, the edges of this interleaf, visible only in a few reproductions, revealed a 1520-something date, a monogram (“LC”), and folds of a robe against a dark background. Behind the angel of history, lies, indeed, a print of a Luther portrait produced by the workshop of Lucas Cranach, as Quaytman’s research revealed. Klee’s Angelus is a watercolored oil-transfer picture, involving a complex temporal layering of “interleaved pages, stored, and retrieved, and reprocessed”^[8], in which the Luther engraving likely served as the copy or transfer for Klee’s angel drawing.^[9]

       I thus saw the angel of history’s historical presence in a different light: While its face is turned toward the past – “where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet”^[10] – his back is not only turned toward the future, but also toward the sixteenth century.

       As Annie Bourneuf points out in Behind the Angel of History, when Klee made the picture in 1920, Luther, who sided with the nobility against the peasants who revolted against them in a struggle for freedom, was the personification of authoritarian counterrevolution. And, in 1940, when Benjamin cited Klee’s picture in “On the Concept of History”, “there is no avoiding the Nazi’s use of Luther.”^[11] It seems, then, that the angel of history, facing the violence of the past, with its back turned towards Luther, is not only seeing one catastrophe, but is sandwiched between many.

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       It is a strange yet telling moment for an exhibition titled “The Angel of History. Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee and the Berlin Angels 80 Years After WWII,” for which the Angelus novus traveled from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem to Berlin – almost as if to prevent the angel of history witnessing the present Israeli genocide in Gaza, fixing its gaze instead on Germany’s turning away from its past. Curiously, the exhibition situated the angel of history not within the context of Nazism, that is, within one of the histories to which it belongs, but deliberately placed it in a Post-WWII frame, presenting the Angelus novus and Benjamin’s ninth thesis on the philosophy of history next to images of nostalgic photographs of a bombed-out 1945 Berlin and Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), exposing Germany’s Erinnerungskultur as Engelkitsch for historical revisionists.

       This replacement of history by memory is symptomatic of the current political moment in which Germany’s commemoration of the Holocaust is mobilized to ignore or deny the history of Palestinians and to justify another genocide in the present. The angel of history, which Benjamin positioned in a “complex quasi-biblical topography of spatialized time”^[12] and against the conception of history as a progressive flow of homogenous, empty time – instead configures history as a disruptive and anachronistic constellation of past and present. On a material level, such a constellation appears in the temporal layering of Klee’s oil-transfer technique, which makes visible the process and time of the work’s making.

       In a painting created after Quaytman had noticed the engraving behind the angel, but before she had identified Luther in it, she employed this technique to replicate his Angelus novus on one of the plywood panels she regularly uses as supports, “hoping to learn more through the making of the thing.”^[13] She then obscured almost the entire image of Klee’s angel with a thick, bulbous layer of foam, with only an angel’s eye lurking behind the black mass – a re-enactment of the hiding of the angel in an attempt to read its hidden history. Around this central foamed form, she added a pattern of closely spaced black-and-white zigzags, which irritate the viewer’s eye and destabilize any single fixed focal point. As an expropriation, this appropriation of Klee’s angel demonstrates “the distance between source and remake”, while drawing attention to “the procedural similarities between crucial maneuvers in Quayman’s own work – citation, superimposition, attention to the edge – and the way the Angelus was put together.”^[14]

       Her eventual discovery that Klee’s angel is glued onto a portrait of Martin Luther allows us to see the angel’s layered, non-chronological history, and points to the incompleteness of the history of modernism – “that, for our future’s sake, [remains] to be (re)discovered, (re)interpreted, (re)written.”^[15]

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       On the morning of the release day of this issue, some of us gathered for a workshop at Prosopopoeia, an exhibition space and book shop run by Inga Charlotte Thiele in a Gemeindebau in Vienna’s 5th district, with coffee and props – including pigs and a netted bag with fish, red flags and red wine, a Bible and a printed copy of The Twelve Articles, a flute and a trumpet – to read and reenact Berta Lask’s Dramatic Depiction of the German Peasants’ War (1925), which was originally commissioned by the German Communist party, and re-published in 2025 by Rab-Rab Press as a performance workbook with a first English translation of the play by Sam Dolbear (with Esther Leslie, Joey Simons and Charlotte Thießen). Lask’s play stages the reappearance of Thomas Müntzer, the political and spiritual leader of the German Peasants’ War, who awakens every hundred years to address the present, represented in the prologue as a cast of striking proletarians to whom he tells his story.^[16] In her preface to the play, Berta Lask writes: “I sought only to show the class-conscious proletarians of the present the revolutionary class struggle of their ancestors […] so that this play might clarify and consolidate our contemporary struggle.”

       If Klee, in an act of quasi-Dadist iconoclasm, covered Luther – the traitor to the revolutionary cause – who was then uncovered by Quaytman through a re-enactment of Klee’s visual methods of citation, Lask’s historical reenactment instead reawakens Müntzer, by way of language, to actualize the lost potential of the peasants’ revolt from a “non-defeatist position of defeat”^[17] for the present and its current struggles.

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       Later, in the evening, we gathered again, this time at Schleuse, for readings by contributing authors to this issue. While reading some of these lines as an introduction, I asked the crowd: “Do you know Thomas Müntzer?,” and a chorus of voices answered: “Brothers, brothers, Thomas Müntzer is coming!”

       Toward the end of their poetological reflections on anxiety, influence, and patricide, the five father and author killing poets raise the possibility that Einflussangst might not only refer, as in Bloom’s version, to the lingering force of the past on the present, but also to an influence exerted from the future: not merely a pressure pushing from behind, but also a current pulling forward.