I spent an uncomfortable evening with Kittler and a handful of Austrians at a restaurant in Linz back in 1998. It was uncomfortable because of the language gap. My German was worse than his English. He states elsewhere in the interview by John Armitage (excerpted below) how shy he is, and that goes a long way to explaining the dis-comfort. I ended up talking mostly with his American-born assistant before cashing in early to get some sleep — I had to catch a sunrise train from Linz on to Copenhagen.
JA: Virilio argues that war is his ‘laboratory’ and for you too war, it seems, is the ‘mother of all technologies’. Yet, unlike Virilio, you are deeply concerned with war as an international mechanism of technology transfer. What, for you, is the significance of, for example, the transfer of technologies such as Nazi Germany’s V2 rocket programme to America after the Second World War?
FK: What I can tell you is that I believe that war is at least the mother of all high-speed information and communications technologies. Like Pynchon, I am very interested in the topic of technology transfer. The key question for me is, what technologies or which kinds of technology transfer gave rise to the contemporary American Empire? Obviously, the first source of the American Empire is the British Empire which was originally driven by a coal-based fleet system but which has, since the Second World War, been transformed into an oil-based system founded on air power. Naturally, the second source is Nazi Germany, which made great strides in the technological development not merely of the V2 rocket but also of the tank. For instance, by 1939, Nazi Germany was the only country in the world that had a radio in every one of its army’s tanks. Otherwise the Blitzkrieg simply would not have been possible. Of course, it did not take long for the Americans to adopt this idea and by the end of 1942 there were radios in US tanks. But, as we have discussed before, war also has a way of transferring its language too, as when today’s high-technology businesses in particular speak of ‘logistics’, ‘strategy’ and even of ‘duty officers’, terms which all arise from the military-industrial complex. It is for these and other reasons that I think that US President Dwight Eisenhower spoke brilliantly when he coined the term military-industrial complex, for he saw immediately the connections between war, technology and commerce. However, it is difficult for us Europeans to investigate American military and techno-scientific history, a subject that has been well researched by the Americans themselves, as acquiring even declassified documents on the Second World War, and so on is still very hard, as I know from long experience. Yet I must confess that I cannot stand on American soil with much pleasure. In fact, my antipathy to America is one of the main reasons why I often avoid talking about the military-industrial complex since for me to talk about the devil is to talk with the devil. As a good friend of mine said to me lately, we in Germany should not say a word about America’s war on Iraq or speak any longer of the seemingly endless necessity of reforming Germany. We should not so much forget all this as not talk about it. Instead, we should focus on changing ourselves and speak about other things. So I asked him what we should discuss as an alternative and he answered that we should talk about love in Europe.
and another piece on Kittler by Tom McCarthy . . . good for the personality profile.
and a long reverie by former student Eugen Leitl . . .