The story teller – memories of my life with Herbert W. Franke
Herbert was a master of the word – and one should add: the spoken word. Because almost all of his literary works – both the non-fiction texts and his literary works – were not “written” but “spoken”. He developed a great routine in the use of his dictation machines, which he repeatedly updated over the decades. With the help of dictation microphones, he was able to pause or play back and forward if he wanted to modify a sentence afterwards. The operation became so natural to him that it was completely subconscious and did not interfere with his writing. “I can speak much faster than I can type,” he always said when asked why he didn’t write.
Since I got to know him in 1979, it was mainly in the summer that he wrote his sci-fi novels. He usually sat down with his deckchair either in the garden or – in bad summer weather – in the sun-warmed cactus house. He always remained very concentrated while dictating for many hours and was also a little absent while eating. He had to get through long texts quickly so as not to lose the thread. He dictated novels in just a few weeks. Above all, keeping the names of all the characters under control was sometimes not easy. Before dictating, he had put keywords on paper, which also contained the names of the characters. But the concept was never set in stone. He liked to let himself be driven by the story, and then new characters would suddenly appear in the story, more or less important characters, characters that hadn’t existed when he was first thinking about them and were therefore missing from the handwritten notes. Once, I remember, he couldn’t remember a name, so he spoke in a placeholder. This then had to be corrected by hand over several pages in the manuscript. Speaking of corrections: Remember, the early manuscripts were typed on a typewriter. It was only possible to improve a text once it had been written. It could only be done manually – or the page had to be rewritten. This would have been costly, which would have been very difficult for the writer, who was not exactly swimming in money. This led him to be very disciplined when dictating texts, but also to dictate all punctuation marks – which were always very important to him. And unusual or foreign words were always spelled out to be on the safe side.
I can’t remember a longer manuscript being typed twice, even in those days when typists were already typing on computers and corrections were easier to make. Even later, the first draft usually remained the only one. He did not want to perfect his literary works afterwards. He saw himself as an author who told a story to a virtual listener in a parallel world while dictating. His texts were deliberately modeled on spoken language. For Herbert, language was not an art form in his literature, but solely a means of communicating as unambiguously as possible. It was intended to convey the narrator’s thoughts as perfectly and unmistakably as possible. Everything should be kept simple and formally unambiguous in order to recognize the underlying model of the novel. Nevertheless, ambiguity was a deliberate component of his works, which was not to be expressed in the choice of words or sentence structure, but in the contextual interpretation of the model of the future presented. For him, characters were therefore also less individuals with an elaborately developed emotional inner life. Rather, they were figures who behave like models in the future. I remember that the request once came up to expand on the fact that person A builds up an emotional relationship with person B in an manuscript. Herbert refused. Herbert refused. This emotional world resonates between the lines in the text, and everyone can figure that out for themselves, was his answer.
A fast working process was of the utmost importance for someone who possessed such exuberant creativity and wanted to bring it to the street. It certainly also led him to machine art (“no painter can generate so many pictures manually and then select the best ones”), even if this aspect was certainly not the central point for him to turn to machine art. More importantly, he was convinced that art and technology belonged together. Therefore, today’s artists should, or at least could, use today’s technology for this purpose. Franke did not want to be dictated to by technology, and always argued in favour of the artist’s freedom to choose which means to use – but of course he demanded the same right for himself and for all his friends in generative art – as well as for himself as a science fiction novelist who wanted to write about the conflicts that affect people and the society developed by science and technology.
But back to dictation: Originally, there were around 30 magnetic tape reels, which Herbert repeatedly overdubbed for his recordings from the 1905s to the 1970s. Unfortunately, we completely threw these tapes away during a clear-out 20 years ago. In the 1980s, Herbert then switched to smaller dictation machines that worked with cassettes. Many of these were also disposed. Only five of these cassettes are still here in the Foundation archive. Some other tapes are stored – but not yet digitized – in the Herbert W. Franke Archive at the ZKM | Center for Art and Technology Karlsruhe.
I recently digitized these five cassettes that still happened to be in the archive. The sound head of the device, the chemical layer of the cassettes or both had been so damaged by the frequent overdubbing that the recording suffered: But thanks to Julian Scheufler from Tonstudio Südpark in Munich noise is well eliminated and you can listen to the voice of Herbert living in a virtual world. What was found on the cassettes: conventional letter post, as well as the almost complete dictation of the SF story “Geany Star”, which was published in the anthology “Der Atem der Sonne” in 1986. Then parts of an unattributed sci-fi story came to digital live, as well as the first part of a conversation with Abraham Moles about art and technology and reflections on a rational theory of art. This conversation from the end of the 1960s was recorded on ta meeting between the two at a conference; unfortunately, I don’t know exactly when.