Article:

»A Long History of ______.«. Literatur als Fragebogenlektüre bei Ernst von Salomon

Hildegard Knef confirms, in her chanson QUESTIONNAIRE (1972), that bureaucratic power is domination through knowledge. At the same time, she raises the question of how literature and art positions itself vis-à-vis paper knowledge. This essay pursues this question using the example of a mushrooming text that became a postwar literary success following its publication in 1951: Ernst von Salomon's THE QUESTIONNAIRE. What does it mean to answer a questionnaire with literary means – especially when it is a de-nazification questionnaire? Instead of merely filling in the blanks left by the questionnaire and defining its medial specificity, von Salomon's procedure sets out to over-fulfill its claim to knowledge.