Ausstellungen: 2025
―
the haymarket affair
https://youtu.be/q5ubFT-JTJM?si=t9J0GcYBjkcNBlVJ
McCormick Reaper Works, Chicago, May 3, 1886, 3:15pm
Depression looms over the city like a storm.
Unemployment, homelessness, starvation, destitution.
Workers gather at McCormick Reaper Works on Blue Island Avenue to protest the creeping industrialization of the factory. They were to be replaced by machines. A horde of policemen chime in. Viciously swinging their batons, they are greeted by a shower of stones from the strikers, which in return prompt the police to draw their revolvers and fire into the crowd. The brutal slaughter results in two fatalities and many wounded.
A leaflet written by the editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, labor activist and prominent Anarchist, August Spies, circulates:
To arms, we call you, to arms!
Be ready to strike when the time comes.
You cannot be worse off than you are now.
You have to face it sooner or later; do so now before you are utterly unable to act.
Ruhe!
(was the publication of Ruhe! meant to trigger an uprising?)
Haymarket, Randolph St., between Desplaines and Halsted, May 4, 8:15pm
August Spies: Is Parsons here? Is Parsons here?
Albert Parsons: I’m over here.
August Spies: Sorry, I’m late. I’ll begin my speech shortly.
Two to three thousand people have gathered on the square. Though many already left as the meeting was originally scheduled for 7:30pm.
Albert Parsons: You have for years endured the most abject humiliations; you have for years suffered the unmeasurable iniquities of wage-labor, you have for years worked yourself to death; you have for years endured the pangs of want and hunger. Just yesterday the bloodhounds shot down our comrades at McCormick! We must not give in to the compromise of the eight-hour-workday. For what is it worth to reduce working hours, when the revolution is on the horizon. And of that I am certain!
August Spies: You feign anxiety about their individuality; about the individuality of a class that has been degraded to machines—used each day for ten or twelve hours asappendages of the lifeless machines! About their individuality you are anxious! About your own individuality you are anxious! Just look at the great promise of modernity!
[relieving sigh] Which freedom!
At last, we can be a self. Ourselves. The flexible self. The productive self. The schizoid self. Atomic expropriation. Universal fatigue. Libidinal anesthesia.
Oh, how much I enjoy numbing the dreariness of day-to-day life by being your ideal commodity. Now, let me caress and fondle my meticulously assembled limbs. Let me swallow your fast-food, your vitamins and nutrients, your supplements, your painkillers, your prescribed anti-depressants, and get this lean, collapsing body some action!
The last speaker was Samuel Fielden. As the darkness of night approached, a stormy cloud formed over the skies of Chicago. There were apparently less than 300 people left for Fieldens speech.
Samuel Fielden: The skirmish lines have met. People have been shot. Men, women, and children have not been spared by the capitalists and minions of private capital. It has no mercy—so ought you. You are called upon to defend yourselves, your lives, your future. What matters it whether you kill yourselves with work to get a little relief, or die on the battlefield resisting the enemy? What is the difference? Any animal, however loathsome, will resist when stepped upon. Are we less than snails or worms? I have some resistance in me; I know that you have, too; you have been robbed, and you will be starved into a worse conditio-
As Fielden pronounces these words, without any indication, the police dauntingly march onto the Haymarket square through the surrounding layers of darkness like a herd of nocturnal animals. It was clear to anybody that they were up to no good.
Ruhe.
(was the publication of Ruhe! meant to trigger an uprising?)
This silence was passed by a deafening bang, accompanied by a radiant blast of light, illuminating the startled figures of the crowd and, for a split second, tracing their shadows onto the cobblestone ground. Shards of falling glass particles and thick, cloying smoke fill up the air. The unsettling, suffocating smell of acid and burnt earth swiftly turns into a sweet, gritty scent, caused by the nitroglycerin mixtures of the explosive. Screams of pain and agony.
The crowd is in pure panic—a stampede under Chicago moonlight.
The police, once again, react by drawing their revolvers and aimlessly firing into the crowd of workers. The everlasting fire was kept up for several minutes. In the end, at least 4 civilians and 7 police officers were killed and about 60 people suffered severe injuries. Most of the injuries had in fact been caused by the bullets of the police and not by the bomb, which means that the police ended up unknowingly massacring their fellow officers.
This incident spawned an unparalleled wave of hatred and prejudice against not only the Anarchists but towards the whole labor movement in general. The first Red-Scare in American history. It did not matter who threw the bomb or if the speakers had any connection to them whatsoever—their “violent” ideology and the glorification of insurgent resistance surely must have been the cause of this tragedy. This threat to the predominant order was to be smothered in the cradle. There was not a single piece of evidence which could be tied to any of the Anarchists, some of them were not even present on the night of the explosion. On top of this, the majority of the candidates, including the judge, admitted to being biased towards the defendants and their anarchist beliefs.
The eight accused men of the trial were: Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab and Oscar Neebe.
Spies, Parsons, Fischer, Engel and Lingg were to be executed.
Cook County Criminal Court, Chicago, August 22, 1886
August Spies: Wenn ihr glaubt, dass ihr durch unsere Hinrichtung die Arbeiterbewegung auslöschen könnt—die Bewegung, von welcher die unterdrückten Millionen, die Millionen, die sich zum Tode schuften und in Not und Elend leben, ihre Erlösung erwarten—wenn das euer Urteil ist, dann hängt uns! Hier zerdrückt ihr bloß einen Funken, doch hier, und dort, und hinter euch, vor euch, überall werden die Flammen auflodern. Es ist ein unterirdisches Feuer. Ein unlöschbares Feuer. Der Boden, auf welchem ihr steht, brennt.
Louis Lingg: I repeat that I am the enemy of the 'order' of today, and I repeat that, with all my powers, so long as breath remains in me, I shall combat it. I declare again, frankly and openly, that I am in favor of using force. Und nochmal, ich bin kein Freak. Ja, ich habe gesagt Dynamit wäre der beste Freund des Menschens. Ja, es ist wahr. Das hab ich nie geleugnet. Warum auch? Ich bin stolz darauf. Ja, ich weiß wie man Bomben baut und bin bekanntermaßen nicht abgeneigt diese zu verwenden, doch was in diesem Gerichtssaal geschieht, diese Zurschaustellung, ja diese grandiose, akribisch geprobte und einstudierte Aufführung der Repression durch den Staat, diese Affirmation des militärisch-industriellen Komplexes, in welcher wir doch nur als symbolisches Exempel, als entsubjektivierte Spielfiguren eines Spiels, welches bereits im Vorhinein als verloren deklariert werden müsste, als Substitut für die Gesamtheit der Arbeiter:innenklasse stehen, all dies zeigt doch die Tendenzen, übertrifft doch alle Verschwörungen, welche uns hier untergejubelt werden. Uns zugeschrieben werden. Und all die Wörter, die ich sagte, die ich nicht sagte. Die mir zugeschrieben werden. Die Wörter, die umgeschrieben werden, die umschrieben werden.
Das Schreiben als bewaffneter Widerstand.
If you cannonade us, we shall dynamite you.
[Laughter in the courtroom]
Louis Lingg: You laugh! Perhaps you think, 'You'll throw no more bombs'; but let me assure you that I die happy on the gallows, so confident am I that the hundreds and thousands to whom I have spoken will remember my words; and when you shall have hanged us, then, mark my words, they will do the bomb throwing! In this hope I say to you: I despise you. I despise your order, your force propped authority, your unquenchable thirst, your lavish laws, your tedious treachery, your seductive surveillance, your drooling discipline, your molecular materialism.
Hang me for it!
Julien Coupat (with a heavy French accent): Struggles create the language in which a new order expresses itself.
M o m e n t s o f I n s t a b i l i t y
↓ destabilizes triggers ↑
D i s /o r d e r ←→ S t r u g g l e
↓ creates leads to ↑
R e i n f o r c e m e n t o f P o w e r
Cook County Jail, Chicago, November 10, 1887, 8:50am
Louis Lingg: Das Gefühl man verstummt—
Das Gefühl nicht gehört zu werden, obwohl man doch spricht—
Man kann die Bedeutung von Worten nicht mehr identifizieren, nur noch raten—
Beim Schreiben: Zwei Zeilen—man kann am Ende der zweiten Zeile den Anfang der ersten nicht behalten—
Das Schreiben als bewaffneter Widerstand, als semiotischer Krieg—
Das Gefühl der Trennung—
Das Gefühl der Abtrennung—
Die Spaltung von sich selbst, vom anderen, von der Gemeinschaft, vom Raum, von der Ordnung, vom Gesetz—
Der Sprache unterworfen—
Doch gleichzeitig die Differenz der Sprache—
Doch kein Außen möglich—
Das Gefühl man verstummt—
Lingg sits on the corner of his bed and lights a cigar. Gradually the accumulated haze fills up the cell like a nightclub. He puts down the half-smoked cigar and places a dynamite cartridge between his teeth, calmy lights the fuse, which only seconds after results in a piercing bang. The dull, off-white walls are now covered in scarlet. Lingg's deconstructed face, with his jaw blown to smithereens, whilst still attached to his motionless body, falls down on the cot. Shreds of flesh and bone are scattered throughout the cell.
Six hours after the explosion Louis Lingg is pronounced dead.
“WE DON’T BELIEVE IN SUICIDE”
the headline of the Arbeiter-Zeitung reads.
Julien Coupat (with a heavy French accent): There is no such thing as a peaceful insurrection.
Cook County Jail, November 11, 1887, 11:30am
Depression looms over the city like a storm.
Roadblocks, military-level policing, public anxiety,—the jail as a fortress.
The four hooded figures stand in front the gallows—nooses tightened around their necks. Fully draped in white cotton, the soft fabric tightly clings to their bodies—banishing their silhouettes into the abyss of spectral abstraction. There was no terrestrial presence left in the bodies of these condemned revenants—they will now roam the trenches of history from which they have been produced.
August Spies: The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!
Hurrah for Anarchy!
Albert Parsons: Hurrah for Anarchy!
Engel and Fischer repeat the same phrase.
The trap door opens and drops the bodies down below.
They twitch and jerk, before eventually becoming still.
[silence]
Epilogue
I overlook a vast field of green—vibrant, summery blades of grass—deep nourished hues saturated by sunlight. The wind ruffles your bangs, exposing your forehead.
You blush. The droning haze blurs my illusion into obscurity.
Julien Coupat (with a heavy French accent): The party is the central fiction.
Distant voices of playing children reverberate through humid air and slowly distort into layers of stacked noise. If I try hard enough, I can almost feel the heat of summer on my skin. Could almost reconstruct your face. I turn my eyes towards you, hopelessly longing for your gaze but cannot hold eye contact. If you only knew of your power over me, I fantasize.
The supremacy of sweet sweet idealization.
Lover 1: Desperate distraction.
Lover 2: Constant separation.
Lover 1: Your oscillation obliterates me.
Lover 2: I govern your symptom.
Lover 1: [silence]
Lover 2: Psst, just hold onto me.
McCormick Reaper Works, Chicago, May 3, 1886, 3:15pm
Depression looms over the city like a storm.
Unemployment, homelessness, starvation, destitution.
Workers gather at McCormick Reaper Works on Blue Island Avenue to protest the creeping industrialization of the factory. They were to be replaced by machines. A horde of policemen chime in. Viciously swinging their batons, they are greeted by a shower of stones from the strikers, which in return prompt the police to draw their revolvers and fire into the crowd. The brutal slaughter results in two fatalities and many wounded.
A leaflet written by the editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, labor activist and prominent Anarchist, August Spies, circulates:
To arms, we call you, to arms!
Be ready to strike when the time comes.
You cannot be worse off than you are now.
You have to face it sooner or later; do so now before you are utterly unable to act.
Ruhe!
(was the publication of Ruhe! meant to trigger an uprising?)
Haymarket, Randolph St., between Desplaines and Halsted, May 4, 8:15pm
August Spies: Is Parsons here? Is Parsons here?
Albert Parsons: I’m over here.
August Spies: Sorry, I’m late. I’ll begin my speech shortly.
Two to three thousand people have gathered on the square. Though many already left as the meeting was originally scheduled for 7:30pm.
Albert Parsons: You have for years endured the most abject humiliations; you have for years suffered the unmeasurable iniquities of wage-labor, you have for years worked yourself to death; you have for years endured the pangs of want and hunger. Just yesterday the bloodhounds shot down our comrades at McCormick! We must not give in to the compromise of the eight-hour-workday. For what is it worth to reduce working hours, when the revolution is on the horizon. And of that I am certain!
August Spies: You feign anxiety about their individuality; about the individuality of a class that has been degraded to machines—used each day for ten or twelve hours asappendages of the lifeless machines! About their individuality you are anxious! About your own individuality you are anxious! Just look at the great promise of modernity!
[relieving sigh] Which freedom!
At last, we can be a self. Ourselves. The flexible self. The productive self. The schizoid self. Atomic expropriation. Universal fatigue. Libidinal anesthesia.
Oh, how much I enjoy numbing the dreariness of day-to-day life by being your ideal commodity. Now, let me caress and fondle my meticulously assembled limbs. Let me swallow your fast-food, your vitamins and nutrients, your supplements, your painkillers, your prescribed anti-depressants, and get this lean, collapsing body some action!
The last speaker was Samuel Fielden. As the darkness of night approached, a stormy cloud formed over the skies of Chicago. There were apparently less than 300 people left for Fieldens speech.
Samuel Fielden: The skirmish lines have met. People have been shot. Men, women, and children have not been spared by the capitalists and minions of private capital. It has no mercy—so ought you. You are called upon to defend yourselves, your lives, your future. What matters it whether you kill yourselves with work to get a little relief, or die on the battlefield resisting the enemy? What is the difference? Any animal, however loathsome, will resist when stepped upon. Are we less than snails or worms? I have some resistance in me; I know that you have, too; you have been robbed, and you will be starved into a worse conditio-
As Fielden pronounces these words, without any indication, the police dauntingly march onto the Haymarket square through the surrounding layers of darkness like a herd of nocturnal animals. It was clear to anybody that they were up to no good.
Ruhe.
(was the publication of Ruhe! meant to trigger an uprising?)
This silence was passed by a deafening bang, accompanied by a radiant blast of light, illuminating the startled figures of the crowd and, for a split second, tracing their shadows onto the cobblestone ground. Shards of falling glass particles and thick, cloying smoke fill up the air. The unsettling, suffocating smell of acid and burnt earth swiftly turns into a sweet, gritty scent, caused by the nitroglycerin mixtures of the explosive. Screams of pain and agony.
The crowd is in pure panic—a stampede under Chicago moonlight.
The police, once again, react by drawing their revolvers and aimlessly firing into the crowd of workers. The everlasting fire was kept up for several minutes. In the end, at least 4 civilians and 7 police officers were killed and about 60 people suffered severe injuries. Most of the injuries had in fact been caused by the bullets of the police and not by the bomb, which means that the police ended up unknowingly massacring their fellow officers.
This incident spawned an unparalleled wave of hatred and prejudice against not only the Anarchists but towards the whole labor movement in general. The first Red-Scare in American history. It did not matter who threw the bomb or if the speakers had any connection to them whatsoever—their “violent” ideology and the glorification of insurgent resistance surely must have been the cause of this tragedy. This threat to the predominant order was to be smothered in the cradle. There was not a single piece of evidence which could be tied to any of the Anarchists, some of them were not even present on the night of the explosion. On top of this, the majority of the candidates, including the judge, admitted to being biased towards the defendants and their anarchist beliefs.
The eight accused men of the trial were: Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab and Oscar Neebe.
Spies, Parsons, Fischer, Engel and Lingg were to be executed.
Cook County Criminal Court, Chicago, August 22, 1886
August Spies: Wenn ihr glaubt, dass ihr durch unsere Hinrichtung die Arbeiterbewegung auslöschen könnt—die Bewegung, von welcher die unterdrückten Millionen, die Millionen, die sich zum Tode schuften und in Not und Elend leben, ihre Erlösung erwarten—wenn das euer Urteil ist, dann hängt uns! Hier zerdrückt ihr bloß einen Funken, doch hier, und dort, und hinter euch, vor euch, überall werden die Flammen auflodern. Es ist ein unterirdisches Feuer. Ein unlöschbares Feuer. Der Boden, auf welchem ihr steht, brennt.
Louis Lingg: I repeat that I am the enemy of the 'order' of today, and I repeat that, with all my powers, so long as breath remains in me, I shall combat it. I declare again, frankly and openly, that I am in favor of using force. Und nochmal, ich bin kein Freak. Ja, ich habe gesagt Dynamit wäre der beste Freund des Menschens. Ja, es ist wahr. Das hab ich nie geleugnet. Warum auch? Ich bin stolz darauf. Ja, ich weiß wie man Bomben baut und bin bekanntermaßen nicht abgeneigt diese zu verwenden, doch was in diesem Gerichtssaal geschieht, diese Zurschaustellung, ja diese grandiose, akribisch geprobte und einstudierte Aufführung der Repression durch den Staat, diese Affirmation des militärisch-industriellen Komplexes, in welcher wir doch nur als symbolisches Exempel, als entsubjektivierte Spielfiguren eines Spiels, welches bereits im Vorhinein als verloren deklariert werden müsste, als Substitut für die Gesamtheit der Arbeiter:innenklasse stehen, all dies zeigt doch die Tendenzen, übertrifft doch alle Verschwörungen, welche uns hier untergejubelt werden. Uns zugeschrieben werden. Und all die Wörter, die ich sagte, die ich nicht sagte. Die mir zugeschrieben werden. Die Wörter, die umgeschrieben werden, die umschrieben werden.
Das Schreiben als bewaffneter Widerstand.
If you cannonade us, we shall dynamite you.
[Laughter in the courtroom]
Louis Lingg: You laugh! Perhaps you think, 'You'll throw no more bombs'; but let me assure you that I die happy on the gallows, so confident am I that the hundreds and thousands to whom I have spoken will remember my words; and when you shall have hanged us, then, mark my words, they will do the bomb throwing! In this hope I say to you: I despise you. I despise your order, your force propped authority, your unquenchable thirst, your lavish laws, your tedious treachery, your seductive surveillance, your drooling discipline, your molecular materialism.
Hang me for it!
Julien Coupat (with a heavy French accent): Struggles create the language in which a new order expresses itself.
M o m e n t s o f I n s t a b i l i t y
↓ destabilizes triggers ↑
D i s /o r d e r ←→ S t r u g g l e
↓ creates leads to ↑
R e i n f o r c e m e n t o f P o w e r
Cook County Jail, Chicago, November 10, 1887, 8:50am
Louis Lingg: Das Gefühl man verstummt—
Das Gefühl nicht gehört zu werden, obwohl man doch spricht—
Man kann die Bedeutung von Worten nicht mehr identifizieren, nur noch raten—
Beim Schreiben: Zwei Zeilen—man kann am Ende der zweiten Zeile den Anfang der ersten nicht behalten—
Das Schreiben als bewaffneter Widerstand, als semiotischer Krieg—
Das Gefühl der Trennung—
Das Gefühl der Abtrennung—
Die Spaltung von sich selbst, vom anderen, von der Gemeinschaft, vom Raum, von der Ordnung, vom Gesetz—
Der Sprache unterworfen—
Doch gleichzeitig die Differenz der Sprache—
Doch kein Außen möglich—
Das Gefühl man verstummt—
Lingg sits on the corner of his bed and lights a cigar. Gradually the accumulated haze fills up the cell like a nightclub. He puts down the half-smoked cigar and places a dynamite cartridge between his teeth, calmy lights the fuse, which only seconds after results in a piercing bang. The dull, off-white walls are now covered in scarlet. Lingg's deconstructed face, with his jaw blown to smithereens, whilst still attached to his motionless body, falls down on the cot. Shreds of flesh and bone are scattered throughout the cell.
Six hours after the explosion Louis Lingg is pronounced dead.
“WE DON’T BELIEVE IN SUICIDE”
the headline of the Arbeiter-Zeitung reads.
Julien Coupat (with a heavy French accent): There is no such thing as a peaceful insurrection.
Cook County Jail, November 11, 1887, 11:30am
Depression looms over the city like a storm.
Roadblocks, military-level policing, public anxiety,—the jail as a fortress.
The four hooded figures stand in front the gallows—nooses tightened around their necks. Fully draped in white cotton, the soft fabric tightly clings to their bodies—banishing their silhouettes into the abyss of spectral abstraction. There was no terrestrial presence left in the bodies of these condemned revenants—they will now roam the trenches of history from which they have been produced.
August Spies: The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!
Hurrah for Anarchy!
Albert Parsons: Hurrah for Anarchy!
Engel and Fischer repeat the same phrase.
The trap door opens and drops the bodies down below.
They twitch and jerk, before eventually becoming still.
[silence]
Epilogue
I overlook a vast field of green—vibrant, summery blades of grass—deep nourished hues saturated by sunlight. The wind ruffles your bangs, exposing your forehead.
You blush. The droning haze blurs my illusion into obscurity.
Julien Coupat (with a heavy French accent): The party is the central fiction.
Distant voices of playing children reverberate through humid air and slowly distort into layers of stacked noise. If I try hard enough, I can almost feel the heat of summer on my skin. Could almost reconstruct your face. I turn my eyes towards you, hopelessly longing for your gaze but cannot hold eye contact. If you only knew of your power over me, I fantasize.
The supremacy of sweet sweet idealization.
Lover 1: Desperate distraction.
Lover 2: Constant separation.
Lover 1: Your oscillation obliterates me.
Lover 2: I govern your symptom.
Lover 1: [silence]
Lover 2: Psst, just hold onto me.