Wild Thinking, Wild Living: Exhibition in Munich about Susan Sontag

Munich. She liked hot weather, but not card games. Meat, but not German food. She wrote about glamour and believed "that it is wrong to deprive a person of life." And she said, "I write to find out what I think." Susan Sontag kept countless lists of everything and was always making new ones: what she liked, what she admired, what she disliked, what she believed in, what she wanted to buy.

The Sontag lists are famous, and some of them are now on display in reproductions at the Munich Literaturhaus. They demonstrate that there is hardly anything the author hasn't thought about and written about. The new exhibition on the American intellectual is titled "Everything Matters." Nothing was safe from Susan Sontag.

Who and what was this woman who, in her 71 years of life, made it her main, indeed her only, task to read, see, absorb, and write as much as humanly possible? She was a philosopher and literary scholar, a writer and essayist, politically firmly positioned on the left and a perpetual transgressor. In this self-conceived exhibition, the Literaturhaus provides information about Susan Sontag and her world in five key areas. These are, in brief: reading, writing, seeing, acting, surviving.

Essayist, writer, culture obsessive: Susan Sontag 1996.

Source: IMAGO/Belga

Born in 1933, she grew up in California. She was considered a child prodigy and probably saw herself that way too. Aware of her lesbian tendencies, she visited Thomas Mann at the age of 16 in his exile villa in Pacific Palisades. She had devoured his "Magic Mountain" at 13 and always referred to it as her "lifebook." According to Sontag expert Anna-Lisa Dieter in an introduction at the exhibition opening, she had expected a "mirroring of homoeroticism" from Mann. But the encounter was disappointing; the then 74-year-old grandmaster remained reticent.

Although she was attracted to women, she married early and had a son, her only child, at 19. According to Dieter, starting a family was probably driven by a burning desire to finally be considered an adult. Sontag pursued an academic career, taught, wrote, and repeatedly lived for extended periods in Paris, immersed in the bohemian scene there.

In 1959, she and her son—the marriage was divorced—moved to the place forever associated with the intellectual Susan Sontag: New York. She remained there, interrupted by travels, until her death in 2004. Sontag and New York—that became a cult, and photos of it are iconic.

The photographer Annie Leibovitz next to her pictures: on the left, her partner Susan Sontag, on the right a photo of Gwyneth Paltrow and Blythe Danner.

Source: IMAGO/ZUMA Press

Until her death, she was with her partner for 16 years, the renowned photographer Annie Leibowitz. Sontag admired photography and criticized mass snapshots as an attempt to appropriate places and people alike. A tendency that is intensified in the TikTok era, something she was no longer able to witness.

The current exhibition at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn focuses on Sontag and photography, while the exhibition in Munich focuses on writing and texts. On display are many Sontag books, manuscripts, photographs from various periods of his life, and diary entries.

Sontag was also quite business-minded - she published some essays first in very well-paying magazines such as Vogue or even Playboy before they appeared in anthologies.

Literaturhaus director Tanja Graf, who collaborated on the exhibition, describes Sontag as a "culture obsessive." She read constantly, went to the movies, wrote, and loved music. She tore down the boundaries between pop and "high" culture. Wild thinking, wild living. Isn't it possible to think? Susan Sontag couldn't. She wrote brilliant, sparkling essays, but also awkward, sometimes even incomprehensible prose. To sleep less and work longer, she took large doses of amphetamines, or stimulants.

Tanja Graf gives an entertaining account of her visit to Sontag's son, David Rieff, in New York, who is in charge of Sontag's personal estate. It also becomes clear, as Graf puts it, "She was an obsessive collector of everything." Rieff keeps everything in a penthouse; photos show tables and shelves completely crammed with the most diverse items. Everything matters. You can see skulls, crucifixes, books upon books in every corner, porcelain figurines, sculptures, paintings. There's absolutely no system to any of this, and it's surprising when Sontag herself states on one of her lists that she likes "sparsely furnished rooms."

The Literaturhaus director, she openly admits, had trouble getting anything from her son to loan for the exhibition. He finally managed to part with a Montblanc fountain pen, a book by Walter Benjamin with a Sontag signature, and an old, greasy leather coat. The display cases in the exhibition are largely filled with personal items from Literaturhaus employees in the Sontag style.

Susan Sontag died of leukemia on December 28, 2004. Her final journey took her to her beloved Paris, where she is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery.

Susan Sontag - "Everything Matters," until November 31, 2025, at the Munich Literature House, Salvatorplatz 1. Please note: Summer break lasts almost the entire month of August. www: literaturhaus-muenchen.de