Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Several months ago I received an email from an editor at Black Dog Publishing which operates out of London. Black Dog prints books on a variety of topics such as photography, architecture, film and design. They did a book on Independent record shops that I am dying to own. One of the publisher’s upcoming projects is a book on German rock, experimental and electronic music, and the 1960s counterculture. The editor contacted me for some images of Rhinozeros, a German little magazine published out of Hamburg, edited by brothers Rolf-Gunther and Klaus-Peter Dienst from 1960-1965. Klaus-Peter provided the iconic calligraphy. Burroughs appeared in four of the ten issues. I had Issues Five and Seven, which I purchased at the legendary Nelson Lyon Sale in 1999. I happily provided the images.

The request got me obsessed with Rhinozeros. I have touched on this remarkable little magazine in a piece I wrote about Burroughs’ early 1960s mag appearances in Germany and Belgium. There is not a lot of information on Rhinozeros in English, and I do not have much to add to what I wrote in that piece, but I did start digging around the internet looking to piece together a complete run of this visually stunning publication. A bookseller in Switzerland had several issues and a click to Powell’s website filled in the holes. Now I have all ten issues.

So here are the covers of all ten issues as well as scans of all the Burroughs appearances. The images make clear that some of the most exciting visuals in all of Burroughs’ oeuvre in any format, be it novel, broadside, magazine or painting, reside within the pages of Rhinozeros. The Dienst brothers were interested in the Beat Generation, concrete poetry, and the cut-up technique. Klaus-Peter knew Brion Gysin and would have been aware of the cut-up soon after its rediscovery. The Dienst brothers then discovered Burroughs through Gysin. In turn, Rhinozeros helped introduce the cut-up to a small German audience. Not surprisingly, Burroughs was a major presence in the magazine, but his influence spread throughout Germany during a renaissance in that country’s poetry and literature of the 1960s. German writers like Carl Weissner, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, and Jurgen Ploog took immediately to the work of Burroughs, particularly the cut-up.

Issue Five usually gets singled out for special attention by American collectors. This is the Beat Issue and features Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure and Peter Orlovsky in its pages. The issue is also the only one in color which makes for some remarkable visuals. Peter Ellis Booksellers, operating out of London, has a truly special copy of this issue for sale. Tipped in with the mag are four T.L.S. from Rolf-Dieter Dienst to Whalen and David Meltzer requesting material for his magazine and a projected anthology. Whalen has doodled on one of the letters and has written: “How far off is our history” and “How far off our history is.” The letters makes this special issue of Rhinozeros even more so.

My copy is signed by Burroughs and Gregory Corso. Interested parties might be aware of Burroughs’ importance in German literature of the 1960s, but Corso’s equally important role might be less well known. After a trip to Venice in the Summer of 1960, Corso arrived in Berlin in July of that year and stayed there for several months. In that time, Corso performed readings, wrote poetry, and met with poets and academics. Two years earlier, Corso began work on a German anthology of Beat writers with Walter Hollerer, a professor out of Berlin. In letters from late summer / early fall 1960, Corso writes on the topic of Beat anthologies and he hoped his anthology would be published within the year. Junge Amerikanische Lyrik was eventually published in 1961, introducing the poets of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology to Germany. So it could be argued that Corso was the face of the Beats for German poets at this time. Not coincidentally, Rhinozeros was started in 1960, possibly around the time of Corso’s sojourn in Germany. Without a doubt, Corso’s presence raised awareness of the Beats in Germany and helped spread the word about New America Poetry throughout the country.

Rhinozeros Covers

Rhinozeros 1
1960

Rhinozeros 2
1960

Rhinozeros 3
1961

Rhinozeros 4
1961

Rhinozeros 5 (View complete issue)
1961

Rhinozeros 6
1962

Rhinozeros 7
1962

Rhinozeros 8
1963

Rhinozeros 9
1964

Rhinozeros 10
1965 (?)

Burroughs Texts in Rhinozeros

Wind Hand Caught in the Door
Rhinozeros 5
1961

Novia Express
Rhinozeros 6
1962

Be Cheerful, Sir (Cut-Up)
Rhinozeros 7
1962

Der Doktor auf der Bühne (Cut-Up)
Rhinozeros 9
1964

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Living in the Beat Hotel in Paris and traveling around Europe in the 1960s, William Burroughs possessed the opportunity to rub elbows with several avant-garde circles active at the time. Previously, I wrote about Burroughs and his relationship with Scottish literary magazines. In 1961-1964, he also appeared in a handful of magazines in Germany and Belgium. I have always been curious about Burroughs’ appearance in three of these magazines: Rhinozeros, Nul and Phantomas. A little research shows Burroughs’ work tenuously linked to a few art movements that peaked in the 1960s. I have precious little information on these movements and magazines but I hope some readers, particularly European readers, might have some more information on these rarely discussed publications.

One of the more interesting magazines that featured Burroughs in the 1960s was Rhinozeros. Burroughs appeared in several issues of the magazine (Issues 5, 6, 7, 9) from 1961-1964. Burroughs submitted “Wind Hand Caught in the Door,” “Novia Express,” “Be Cheerful, Sir Our Revels Touching Circumstance,” and “Text.” Pieces from the then-titled Novia Express trickled into various magazines at the time, like Second Coming Magazine and Evergreen Review. “Wind Hand Caught in the Door” came from the end of Soft Machine which was published by Olympia Press in 1961. The other pieces are cut-ups that I do not think appeared elsewhere. “Text” contains a fragment from the Edinburgh Conference along with a fold in of Burroughs’ writing with Finnegan’s Wake. Rhinozeros featured concrete poetry and is a typographic marvel. Several of the texts appear in the authors’ own handwriting in colored ink. Text appears in both English and German. These magazines really have to be seen to be believed. The presentation of the pieces is extraordinary and in fact is difficult to read even in English. I have written previously on the similarities between Burroughs’ cut-up texts and concrete poetry. Like Cleft in Scotland, the editors of Rhinozeros were interested in Burroughs’ work of the period. Port of Entry: William Burroughs and the Arts provides a picture of Burroughs’ piece in Rhinozeros 5 as an example of visual poetry in the long tradition of Mallarme, Apollinaire, and the Dadaists up to the concrete poetry of the 1960s.

Burroughs was also included in Rhinozeros for another reason. Edited by Klaus Peter and Rolf Gunter Dienst in Hamburg and Berlin, Rhinozeros 5 (1961) was a Beat issue heralding the arrival of the Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Creeley, Michael McClure and other Beats in Germany. In November 1962, a Beat anthology, Beat: Eine Anthologie, hit bookstores in Germany with a print run of 6000 copies. Karl Paetal edited the anthology. I believe this anthology along with the publication of Naked Lunch in 1962 formally introduced Burroughs to the German general public, but Rhinozeros was there first. Burroughs appeared briefly in an issue of Akzente in 1963 and that was the extent of Burroughs in German magazines until Carl Weissner published Burroughs’ tape recorder experiments in several issues of Klactoveedsedsteen beginning in 1966. The Beats would have considerable influence on West German poetry by the early 1970s. (See this dissertation on Beat influence on West German poetics.)

The seeds of Burroughs’ magazine appearances in a Belgian magazine were also sown in Germany. Founded in Düsseldorf, Group Zero (1958-66) helped create an experimental art scene in the postwar era. Members Otto Piene and Heinz Mack (later joined by Gunther Uecker) held one-night exhibitions in their studios and published a journal. They created monochrome paintings and works utilizing light and movement. (See this slide show for examples of Group Zero works.) They chose the name Zero because it had no nationalist associations and evoked a blank slate, the potential for a new beginning.

In Belgium, Burroughs appeared in several issues of Nul Magazine. My initial impression was that this magazine served as the sounding board for the Nul Movement. Henk Peeters was a charter member of Nul which was the Dutch version of the German Zero movement of the 1960s. Most Nul artists rejected expressionism, and they often focused on systematic variation in works that could look like “hand wrought Minimalism.” In 1958, Peeters founded the Dutch “Informal Group.” “The Informal Art essentially was a result of the Post War abstract expressionism and the Informal artists strived for the dissolution of recognizable form in matter. ‘In-formal’ literally meant: without form.” Around 1960 everywhere in Europe young artists longed for impersonal, ‘objective’ art and the key figures in this movement were Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni. Peeters had seen the exhibitions of monochrome paintings by Klein in Paris and through Klein he came to know the Zeroists. They chose the name Nul after the German Zero group.

The art work of the Zero Movement shows little similarity with the art of Burroughs in the 1960s cut-ups and scrapbooks or even the later art of the 1980s and 1990s. Burroughs’ work of the 1960s remains rooted in collage and fixated on the written word. The later fully abstract art work, like some of Kerouac’s painting from 1959-1960, contains elements of abstract expressionism in its De Kooning-like brushstroke. The paintings are gestural in the application of paint to the surface with individual strokes very defined. In many works, Burroughs concentrates on the representation of a figure. This is at odds with the Zero Movement’s attempts to rid paintings of “recognizable form.” Paintings in the work pictured above seem like minimalist art with roots in abstract expressionism although in this case the work of Barrett Newman or Ad Reinhardt.

Burroughs’ affinity with Zero/Nul is less in a comparison of artwork but in a similarity in goals and maybe theoretical underpinnings. Zero/Nul sought a detached, anonymous art, with which they turned away from the extreme individualism of other Continental art movements. They wanted to get rid of the idea of the painting as a representation of three-dimensional reality on a flat surface. The objective of ZERO/Nul was to reduce the figurative; they wanted to show the essence of reality by means of the reality of matter. The color white was one of the most important tools for this, together with the elements light, air and water and modern technologies. The artist accepted things “as they were” and avoided all personal feelings. Zero/Nul strove to take painting back to its essence.

These efforts parallel Burroughs’s work with the novel and the cut-up. Zero/Nul sought silence in art as Burroughs searched for it with the written word. To some extent in Naked Lunch and more radically in The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express, Burroughs abandoned the traditional form of the novel, such as plot, character development, and linear narrative. Burroughs would experiment more radically with these features in the cut-up texts that appeared in magazines throughout the 1960s. Features such as the death of the authorial intention (as exemplified by Burroughs’ distancing himself as author by not remembering writing Naked Lunch) and the use of objective tone in Burroughs’ novels, like Junkie, correspond with Zero/Nul’s desire for an impersonal art. Literary theories, such as deconstruction and structuralism, come into play dovetailing with Burroughsian theories of the word as image, the word’s relationship to speech, and the word’s link to the referred object. These similarities seem stretched.

Surprisingly, Nul published, not cut-up-based material, but the less textually radical routine based pieces, like “Roosevelt after Inauguration.” Nul also featured a piece entitled “Take That Business to Walgreens.” This has me wondering if Nul Magazine was associated with the Nul Movement. The magazine was published in Belgium by Paradox Press. I can find next to nothing on Nul Magazine. Why exactly was Burroughs published in two separate issues of this Belgian/Dutch magazine that may or may not be associated with an avant-garde art movement? Any help would be appreciated.

Burroughs also appeared briefly with Brion Gysin in an issue of the Belgian magazine Phantomas. Burroughs provided a quote to a larger Gysin piece. I believe Phantomas was the vehicle of the Phantomas Group. Progressing from the work of Belgian surrealists like Rene Magritte, groups like Phantomas challenged and broadened the scope and meaning of Surrealism. The ultimate Surrealist act is no longer the gratuitous act, but the act of fragmentation and deconstruction. The goal is to negate oneself. This dovetails nicely with Burroughs’ theories of the controlling nature of the Word and the need to combat its tyranny with silence. The cut-up also parallels Phantomas’s interests in fragmentation of self and thought. Gysin’s early ties with the Surrealists in the 1940s are probably more relevant here as are his permutation poems in The Exterminator and Minutes to Go.

Upon closer examination Burroughs’ ties to the avant-garde in German and Belgian magazines seems to be less strong and substantial than in Scotland. Yet Burroughs’ work with the cut-up dovetailed with the theories championed by the Zero, Nul and Phantomas Movements. Possibly a reader with more knowledge of those movements can clarify exactly what Burroughs was doing in these rarely discussed magazines from 1961-1964. In addition, more information on Burroughs’ publication history in Germany and Rhinozeros’ role, if any, in introducing Germany to the work of the Beats would be appreciated.