Clash of Giants: Nin Brudermann
Bolfras to Brudermann [Arthur Baron von Bolfras (1889–1917), Head of the Imperial and Royal Military Chancellery of Austria-Hungary to General Rudolf Ritter von Brudermann, Commanding General of the Third Imperial and Royal Army of Austria-Hungary], (unpublished letter, December 15, 1915) handwritten with overlaid translation, Brudermann family archive, Vienna, courtesy Nin Brudermann.
Clash of Giants by Nin Brudermann, an Austrian-born, mixed-media artist living in New York who has shown her work all over the world at venues like MoMA PS1, Brooklyn Museum, and Venice Biennale (Brudermann came to the US in 1996 through the MoMA PS1 Studio Program, recommended by celebrated French-American artist Louise Bourgeois).
Released Jan. 22 (hardcover, 236 pages, $45, published by VMFK), this unique book traces the web of early 20th Century espionage leading up to WWI, drawing uneasy parallels to today’s political climate. Simultaneously, it unfolds Nin Brudermann’s discovery of classified documents in her grandmother's attic—the correspondence & manuscripts of her great-granduncle, General Rudolf Ritter von Brudermann, commander of the Austro-Hungarian Third Army in 1914. Through a highly personal lens, Clash of Giants reinterprets the chain of micro-events that led to WWI and the ensuing reconfiguration of world powers. Ample literary, philosophical, and historical quotes intersperse her personal narrative, which begins from childhood queries and culminates with reflections on current global politics. Before coming to the United States, Brudermann pursued her Ph.D. in philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Vienna. Always more interested in live-action than museums, she takes on the role as conceptual artist turned-inventor/spy in immersive games, performative installations, sculpture, and film. Using comedy and play to address politically provocative matters, her narrative investigations often delve into niche worlds.
Over 100 years after her great-granduncle’s letters & manuscripts were ordered into hiding, with Clash of Giants, Nin Brudermann brings these high-level/secret documents into public circulation for the first time, illuminating her entangling family history with pre-WWI power machinations & intrigue. Nin describes Clash of Giants as "an almost surrealist game of high stakes enacted by the major players in the making of the Great War...disparities, covert alliances, ulterior motives— Europe of the early 20th Century was rife with a web of conspiracies and entrapments". Treason, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the secret Serbian Black Hand, the manipulation of media & public opinion, and the collapse of intelligence alliances became the engines of a global catastrophe.
Onkel Rudolf, photograph of ‘Uncle Rudolf’, General Rudolf Ritter von Brudermann, c. 1913, Brudermann family archive, Vienna, courtesy Nin Brudermann.
Among many things, the recovered papers featured in the book chronicle a veiled dispute between General Brudermann and Austrian Chief of Military Staff Conrad von Hötzendorf over responsibility for Austria’s catastrophic defeat in Galicia — and, more broadly, for igniting a war the empire was unprepared to fight (many suggest he the Galicia defeat was the beginning of the end of imperial Europe). Conrad blamed Brudermann, and Brudermann blamed Conrad (a grotesque intelligence failure, Brudermann argued). Also hinted at in these documents is that Conrad's son was a spy for Russia, and hidden between the lines lies a suggestion that the head of the Austro-Hungarian Army may have also been compromised, a revelation that reverberates uncannily in the context of modern geopolitics. The Willy–Nicky telegrams, exchanged between the German Kaiser and Russian Tsar in July 1914, appear as a tragic duet — two monarchs vainly attempting to halt a machine already in motion, their last words before weapons took over. Unpublished telegrams between Brudermann and Conrad from 1914 reveal desperate attempts to avert defeat in Galicia. Austria was woefully unprepared, its intelligence network fatally compromised. Yet Conrad had insisted on war. Why? — is the open question the book proffers.
Nin Brudermann, Clash of Giants, 2018, movie poster print, 27 x 40” (68 x 102 cm). Photo Guillaume Ziccarelli.
The book also introduces Colonel Alfred Redl, head of Austrian counterintelligence — celebrated patriot turned Russian spy, exposed in 1913 as Agent 25, a year before the war. A mysterious “Late Agent 25” continued to feed Austrian secrets to Russia after Redl’s death and the book unravels various methods of contemporaneous intelligence operations, contrasted with early techniques — surveillance, forgery, seduction — culminating in Redl’s compromise and his transformation into a double agent. The resulting climate of fear and mistrust became the volatile atmosphere from which war erupted.
Treating a book like a split screen, Brudermann revisits her 2019 eponymous film about the same topic and also tells the subjective story of her own multi-year research.
The 2019 film can be viewed here
And here's more info/background on the book:
When Nin's grandmother Maria moved to a senior residence and they had to clear her apartment, she found a stack of old letters bundled together. Some names were cut out of the papers, erased with an Xacto knife, Nin sensed a story. She says, "It is one of the best moments for any investigation when the clue has been carefully erased". These were letters of high ranking relevance, about who to blame for the loss, or, to be more precise, for the onset of that decisive battle of 1914, the first battle of the Great War. And who to blame for the onset of the war itself.
She couldn’t read those letters, written in the old German Kurrentschrift, so she took them to the Austrian State Archives. They called the content "explosive", one letter was field kitchen notes, often called Chiffren schlüssel, code (there were spies everywhere, so everybody spoke in code; for example, “twelve shocks twisted buttons in Tula along with other clothing” in plain language, this meant that the 12th Infantry Brigade had arrived in Tula and was garrisoned there).
To get the full picture, Nin started collaborating with espionage specialists like Bruce Menning, an American historian who calls himself something of an “accidental tourist” with reference to the role of espionage leading to the out break of WWI. Menning found an important piece in archives in Russia a few years ago, the meeting minutes of May 18, 1913 which reported on a secret high-ranking Austrian meeting that Conrad’s son—the son of the Austrian Chief of Staff—was involved in Italian/Russian spy circles and that this, under any circumstances, should never become public as the embarrassment would have been too severe. That meeting protocol got “wiped” from the Austrian State Archives, but Menning found it in Russian archives.
For more information about this publication, please visit here. The magazine did an interview with Nin, which can be found here.
