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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
'Theory' - a magical glow has emanated from this word since the sixties. Theory was more than just a succession of ideas: it was an article of faith, a claim to truth, a lifestyle. It spread among its adherents in cheap paperbacks and triggered heated debates in seminar rooms and cafés. The Frankfurt School, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Adorno, Derrida, Foucault: these and others were the exotic schools and thinkers whose ideas were being devoured by young minds. But where did the fascination for dangerous thoughts come from? In his magnificently written book, Philipp Felsch follows the hopes and dreams of a generation that entered the jungle of difficult texts. His setting is West Germany in the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s: in a world frozen in the Cold War, movement only came from big ideas. It was the time of apocalyptic master thinkers, upsetting reading experiences and glamorous incomprehensibility. As the German publisher Suhrkamp published Adorno's Minima Moralia and other High Theory works of the Frankfurt School, a small publisher in West Berlin, Merve Verlag, provided readers with a steady stream of the subversive new theory coming out of France. By following the adventures of the publishers who provided the books and the reading communities that consumed and debated them, Philipp Felsch tells the remarkable story of an intellectual revolt when the German Left fell in love with Theory.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: What Was Theory?
Notes
1965 The Hour of Theory
1 Federal Republic of Adorno
Reflections from Damaged Life
Culture after Working Hours
In the Literary Supermarket
Adorno Answers
Are Your Endeavours Aimed at Changing the World?
Notes
2 In the Suhrkamp Culture
New Leftists
He Didn’t Write
School of Hard Books
Paperback Theory
Birth of a Genre
Notes
1970 Endless Discussions
3 Ill-Made Books
Theoretical Practice
Smash Bourgeois Copyright!
Mondays, Fridays and Sundays
The Disorder of Discourse
Notes
4 Wolfsburg Empire
Proletarian Public Sphere
In the Land of Class Struggle
The Lightness of Being Communist
A Fateful Stroke of Luck
Notes
1977 Reading French in the German Autumn
5 (Possible) Reasons for the Happiness of Thought
All Kinds of Escapes
Intensity Is Not a Feeling
The Laugh of Merve
Vague Thinkers
Notes
6 The Reader as Partisan
The Death of the Author
The Pleasure of the Text
Children’s Books
A Different Mode of Production
Lying on Water
Notes
7 Foucault and the Terrorists
A Schweppes in Paris
Political Tourists
Vermin
On Tunix Beach
Notes
1984 The End of History
8 Critique of Pure Text
The Master Thinkers
Adults Only
Sola Scriptura
Aesthetics of Counter-Enlightenment
A Little Materialism
Notes
9 Into the White Cube
The Mountain of Truth
Be Smart – Take Part
German Issues
The Island of
Posthistoire
The Trouble with Duchamp
Notes
10 Prussianism and Spontaneism
War in the Time of Total Peace
Machiavelli in Westphalia
The Wild Academy
In Search of the Punctum
Jacob Taubes’s Best Enemy
Notes
11 Disco Dispositive
Tyrannies of Intimacy
Pub Blather
The Art of Having a Beer
In the Jungle
Above the Clouds
Notes
Epilogue: After Theory?
Notes
Appendix: Translations of Illustrations
Bibliography
Archives
Author’s Interviews and Conversations
Audio and Video Recordings
Literature
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Introduction
2
Heidi Paris and Peter Gente, West Berlin, around 1980.
Chapter 1
3
Peter Gente goes to the cinema, 1956.
4
Layers of time in Berlin: ‘Trümmerfrauen’ clearing away the...
Chapter 2
5
Louis Althusser,
Für Marx
, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968.
Chapter 3
6
Charles Bettelheim, Über das Fortbestehen von Warenverhältnisse...
Chapter 4
7
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge,
Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung
[P...
Chapter 5
8
Jean-François Lyotard,
Das Patchwork der Minderheiten
[The patchwo...
Chapter 6
9
Pages 6 and 7 of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
Anti-Oedipus
, ...
10
Peter Gente (second from left) reading
Mille plateaux
by Gilles Deleuze a...
Chapter 7
11
Michel Foucault in West Berlin, Güntzelstrasse, Pension Finck, 1978.
12
Michel Foucault and Heidi Paris at the Tunix Conference, Berlin, 1978.
13
Michel Foucault and Peter Gente at the Tunix Conference, Berlin, 1978.
Chapter 8
14
Traverses: Revue trimestrielle
, 32 (1984).
Chapter 9
15
Architectural misunderstandings would like to become a book: Martin Kippenberger...
16
The site of Berlin’s former central railway station, Anhalter Bahnhof, 19...
Chapter 10
17
Endpapers of Ernst Jünger,
Auf den Marmorklippen
, Hamburg: Hanseat...
18
The Wild Academy at the buffet, Kassel, 1984.
Chapter 11
19
Dirk Baecker proposes Luhmann’s interviews to Merve.
20
In the original Dschungel at Winterfeldplatz, 1976.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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The Summer of Theory
History of a Rebellion, 1960–1990
PHILIPP FELSCH
Translated by Tony Crawford
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in German as Der lange Sommer der Theorie by Philipp Felsch © Verlag C. H. Beck oHG, Munich 2015
This English edition © 2022 by Polity Press
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).
Front endpaper: Sector boundary at Wilhemstrasse, Berlin, 1960. Copyright © Shawn McBride / Will McBride Archive
Back endpaper: The Gropius Building next to the Berlin Wall, Berlin, early 1980s © DACS, 2021
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3985-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Felsch, Philipp, author. | Crawford, Tony (Translator) translator.
Title: The summer of theory : history of a rebellion, 1960-1990 / Philipp Felsch ; translated by Tony Crawford.
Other titles: Lange Sommer der Theorie. English | History of a rebellion, 1960-1990
Description: English edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, [2021] | “Originally published in German as ‘Der lange Sommer der Theorie’ by Philipp Felsch, Verlag C. H. Beck oHG, München, 2015.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The story of how the German Left fell in love with theory”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021009973 (print) | LCCN 2021009974 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509539857 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509539871 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Germany (West)--Intellectual life--20th century. | Germany (West)--Politics and government--1945-1990. | Intellectuals--Germany (West)--History--20th century. | Books and reading--Germany (West) | Germany (West)--Intellectual life--French influences.
Classification: LCC DD260.3 .F4513 2021 (print) | LCC DD260.3 (ebook) | DDC 305.5/52094309045--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009973
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009974
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Dedication
‘We are obsessive readers.’
Heidi Paris
(1950–2002)
and
Peter Gente
(1936–2014)
Illustrations
1 Wilhemstrasse sector boundary, Berlin, 1960. © Shawn McBride / Will McBride Archive.
2 Heidi Paris and Peter Gente, West Berlin, around 1980. From Der Spiegel, 53 (1980). Photo by W. Herrmann, Berlin.
3 Peter Gente goes to the cinema, 1956. © Benjamin Gente.
4 Layers of time in Berlin: ‘Trümmerfrauen’ clearing away the rubble for the reconstruction of the Hansaviertel, 1957. © Landesarchiv Berlin, F Rep. 290 Nr 0052363 / photographer: Gert Schütz.
5 Althusser, Für Marx, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968 (see Appendix for translation). Photo © Christian Werner, Berlin.
6 Charles Bettelheim, Über das Fortbestehen von Warenverhältnissen in den ‘sozialistischen Ländern’ [On the persistence of commodity relations in the ‘socialist countries’], Berlin: Merve, 1970 (see Appendix for translation). This stapled booklet was the first publication to bear the name ‘Merve Verlag’. © Merve Verlag. Photos by Christian Werner, Berlin.
7 Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung [Public Sphere and Experience], Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972 (see Appendix for translation). A preliminary draft was circulated among the Merve collective before publication. © ZKM Karlsruhe, Merve-Archiv. Photo by Franz Wamhof, Karlsruhe.
8 Jean-François Lyotard, Das Patchwork der Minderheiten [The patchwork of minorities], Berlin: Merve, 1977 (see Appendix for translation). © Merve Verlag. Photos by Christian Werner, Berlin.
9 Pages 6 and 7 of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Bernd Schwibs, Winterthur: Suhrbier, 1974 (see Appendix for translation). Peter Gente and Heidi Paris struggled through this pirate edition for five years. © ZKM Karlsruhe, Merve-Archiv / Man Ray Trust, Paris / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2015. Photo by Franz Wamhof, Karlsruhe.
10 Peter Gente (second from left) reading Mille plateaux by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Poland, 1994. © Benjamin Gente.
11 Michel Foucault in West Berlin, Güntzelstrasse, Pension Finck, 1978 (see Appendix for translation). © ZKM Karlsruhe, Merve-Archiv. Photo by Franz Wamhof, Karlsruhe.
12 Michel Foucault and Heidi Paris at the Tunix Conference, Berlin, 1978. © Ulrich Raulff, Marbach.
13 Michel Foucault and Peter Gente at the Tunix Conference, Berlin, 1978. © Ulrich Raulff, Marbach.
14Traverses: Revue trimestrielle, 32 (1984) (see Appendix for translation). Photo by Christian Werner, Berlin.
15 Architectural misunderstandings would like to become a book: Martin Kippenberger sends greetings from Tenerife, 1987 (see Appendix for translation). © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
16 The site of Berlin’s former central railway station, Anhalter Bahnhof, 1980s. © DACS, 2021.
17 Endpapers of Ernst Jünger, Auf den Marmorklippen, Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1939. Photo by Christian Werner, Berlin.
18 The Wild Academy at the buffet, Kassel, 1984. © Dieter Schwerdtle, Kassel, Germany.
19 Dirk Baecker proposes Luhmann’s interviews to Merve (see Appendix for translation). © Dirk Baecker / ZKM Karlsruhe, Merve-Archiv. Photo by Franz Wamhof, Karlsruhe.
20 In the original Dschungel at Winterfeldplatz, 1976. © bpk / Esther Colton.
21 The Gropius Building next to the Berlin Wall, Berlin, early 1980s. © DACS, 2021.
Acknowledgements
Although this book is mainly based on a composite of written records, it would not have been possible without numerous conversations. I thank the following people for their willingness to answer my questions: Hannes Böhringer, Peter Geble, Peter Gente†, Wolfgang Hagen, Marianne Karbe, Helmut Lethen, Michaela Ott, Wolfert von Rahden, Ulrich Raulff, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Cord Riechelmann, Henning Schmidgen, Edith Seifert, Walter Seitter, Georg Stanitzek, Jochen Stankowski, Ronald Voullié, Nikolaus Wegmann and all the others who have talked to me in the past few years about their experiences with theory. I especially thank Tom Lamberty and Elisa Barth of Merve Verlag for their generous help and support. My heartfelt thanks go to Stephan Schlak for the initial impulse that led to this book. I thank the staff of the Centre for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, the Walter Benjamin Archives (where there are photocopies of Adorno’s correspondence), the German Literature Archives in Marbach and the University Archives of Freie Universität, Berlin. I would not have been able to finish the book without a sabbatical semester funded by the Excellence Initiative of Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. For their critical reading and crucial suggestions, I thank Philipp Albers, Jan von Brevern, Martin Engelmeier, Martin Mittelmeier, Jan Mollenhauer, Moritz Neuffer, Kathrin Passig, Cornelius Reiber, Johanna Seifert and, most of all, Hanna Engelmeier. I thank Christian Werner for his dedicated photography. I thank Stefanie Hölscher for her great interest in this project. And I thank Yael Reuveny and Anne Henk for everything else.
Introduction: What Was Theory?
Sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for arson in 1968, Andreas Baader discovered letter-writing. He described the torment of solitude, ranted about the guards, and asked his friends to supply him with essentials. Besides cured meats and tobacco, that meant, most of all, books. He had people send him the student movement’s favourite authors, Marx, Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, which he had only known from hearsay up to then. ‘Mountains of theory, the last thing I wanted’, he wrote to the mother of his daughter. ‘I work and I suffer, without complaining of course.’ Later, in the maximum-security prison at Stammheim, it was up to his lawyers to feed his hunger for reading material. At the time of his death, there were some 400 books in his cell: a respectable library for a terrorist who was notorious among his comrades for his recklessness. Without a doubt, Baader played the part of a jailhouse intellectual, just as he had previously played the revolutionary. Yet, at the same time, there was a great deal of seriousness in his studies. His letters indicate that he felt a need to catch up1 – after all, the struggle to which he had dedicated himself was founded on theoretical principles.2 In a different time, Baader would have taken up painting perhaps, or begun writing an autobiographical novel. Instead, he plunged – almost in spite of himself – into theory.
Now that the intellectual energies of ’68 have long since decayed to a feeble smouldering, it is hard to imagine the fascination of a genre that captivated generations of readers. Theory was more than just a succession of intellectual ideas: it was a claim of truth, an article of faith and a lifestyle accessory. It spread among its adherents in cheap paperbacks; it launched new language games in seminars and reading groups. The Frankfurt School, post-structuralism and systems theory were best-selling brands. West German students discovered in Adorno’s books the poetry of concepts. As the sixties dawned, the New Left rallied under the banner of its ‘theory work’ against the pragmatism of the Social Democrats: those who would change the world, they proclaimed, must start by thinking it through. But the thinking they had in mind had nothing to do with the philosophy of professors who stuck to interpreting the classic texts or the meaning of Being. It was concerned less with eternal truth and more with critiques of the dominant conditions, and under its scrutiny even the most mundane acts took on social relevance. Jacob Taubes, professor of the philosophy of religion in Berlin, saw his students reading the works of Herbert Marcuse with an intensity reminiscent of the zeal ‘with which young Talmud scholars once interpreted the text of the Torah’.3 On campus, theory conferred upon its readers not only academic capital, but also sex appeal. Marcuse led to Marx, and Marx to Hegel: those who wanted to have a say in the discussion got themselves the twenty-volume Suhrkamp edition of Hegel’s complete works.4 Only after the shock of the terrorists’ debacle in Stammheim and Mogadishu did any doubts about the canon of the ’68 generation mature into open resistance. New thinking came to Germany from Paris and did away with the tonality of dialectics. The books of Deleuze and Baudrillard called for a different kind of reading from those of Marx and Hegel. They seemed to have a more important purpose than the search for truth, and in the course of the 1980s theory metamorphosed into an aesthetic experience. And when ecology laid constraints of quantities and limits on the speculative imagination of the seventies, thorny philosophy set out to infiltrate the art world.
The first impetus to write this book dates from several years ago. In the spring of 2008, the editor of a journal of intellectual history called me to ask for an article on the German publishing house Merve. The editor was planning an issue about West Berlin, the walled-in city on the front lines of the Cold War, which Merve had supplied with theory for twenty long years. Peter Gente, the founder of Merve, had retired from publishing and sold his papers to an archive to finance his sunset years in Thailand, and so the time seemed ripe for historical retrospection.5 Although I wasn’t a Berliner, Merve was a byword to me too. There was no way I could refuse.
Merve has been called the ‘Reclam of postmodernism’ – Reclam, of course, are the publishers of the ‘Universal Library’, the yellow, pocket-sized standard texts that no German student can do without. Merve was the German home of postmodernism, and practically owned the copyright to the German word for ‘discourse’.6 Merve had made a name for itself in the 1980s, primarily with translations of the French post-structuralists. Its cheaply glued paperbacks were a guarantee of advanced ideas, and the pop-art look of their un-academic styling was ahead of its time. The coloured rhombus on the cover of the Internationaler Merve Diskurs series was a well-established logo whose renown rivalled that of the rainbow rows of Suhrkamp paperbacks.
I remember well the first Merve titles I read. It wasn’t easy, in Bologna in the mid-1990s, to get them by mail order. My intention had been to spend a semester there studying with Umberto Eco, but Eco’s lectures turned out to be a tourist attraction. Whatever the famous semiotician was saying into his microphone at the far end of the lecture hall was easier to assimilate by reading one of his introductory books. In retrospect, that was a stroke of luck, because it forced me to look for an alternative. And the search for a more intense educational experience led me – twelve years after his death – to Michel Foucault. My Foucault wasn’t bald and didn’t wear turtlenecks, and although he occasionally spoke French, his Italian accent was unmistakable. But his grand rhetorical flourishes and his tendency to overarticulate his words are engraved in my memory. In his best moments, he came very close to the original. Valerio Marchetti had heard the original Foucault at the Collège de France in the early 1980s, if I remember correctly, and absorbed – as I was later able to verify on YouTube – his way of talking as well as his way of thinking. He was a professor of early modern history at the University of Bologna. His lecture course, which was attended by very few students, was devoted to a topic only a Foucauldian could have come up with: ‘Hermaphroditism in France in the Baroque Period’. I was spellbound on learning of the seventeenth-century debates in which theologians and physicians had argued about the significance of anomalous sex characteristics.7 I had never heard of such a thing at my German university, where philosophy students read Plato and Kant. I hung on Marchetti’s every word, attending even the Yiddish course that he taught for some reason, and started reading the literature he cited: Michel Foucault, Paul Veyne, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Devereux … I waited weeks for the German translations to arrive in the post. I read more than I have ever read since, and collected excerpts on coloured file cards. In the heat of the Italian summer, the ‘microphysics of power’ and the ‘iceberg of history’ stuck to my forearms.8
In 2008, I hadn’t touched these books in years. Their spines crumbled with a dry crackle when I opened them. Inside I discovered vigorous pencil marks, reminding me what a revelation theory had been to me in those days. But at a decade’s remove, that experience seemed strangely foreign: it seemed to belong to an intellectual era that was now irretrievably past. I went to Karlsruhe to have a look at the materials that Peter Gente had turned over to the Centre for Art and Media Technology. In the forty heavy boxes that had not yet been opened – much less catalogued – perhaps I would find a chapter of my own Bildungsroman. They contained the publisher’s correspondence with the famous – and the less famous – Merve authors, along with the paper detritus that lined the road to over 300 published titles: newspaper clippings, notes, budgets, dossiers … While Gente rested, I supposed, in the shade of coconut palms, I immersed myself in his papers. Only gradually did I realize that what I was looking at were not the typical assets of a liquidated business: it was the record of an epic adventure of reading.
The oldest documents dated back to the late 1950s, when Gente discovered the books of Adorno. That discovery changed everything. For five years, the young man ran around West Berlin with Minima Moralia in his hand, before he finally got in touch with the author. By then, Gente was in the middle of the New Left’s theoretical discussions, combing libraries and archives in search of the buried truth of the labour movement. He was everywhere, cheering Herbert Marcuse in the great hall of Freie Universität, demonstrating with Andreas Baader in Kurfürstendamm, running into Daniel Cohn-Bendit in Paris a few weeks before May of ’68. Later, he had discussions with Toni Negri, sat in jail with Foucault, put up Paul Virilio in his shared flat in Berlin. There was never any question that he belonged to the movement’s avant-garde – yet he kept himself in the background. It was a long time before he found his role; he didn’t care to play the part of an activist, nor that of an author. ‘Tried to intervene, but wasn’t able to do so’ was his summary of the year 1968.9
From the beginning, Gente had been, above all, a reader. The scholar Helmut Lethen, who had known him since the mid-1960s, called him the ‘encyclopaedist of rebellion’.10 He knew every ramification of the debates of the interwar period; he knew how to lay hands on even the most obscure periodicals; his comrades’ key readings were selected on his recommendation. Compared with Baader – whom he supplied with books in Stammheim Prison – Gente embodied the opposite end of the movement: the man I met in 2010, and questioned about his past, interacted with the world through text.11 In preparation for our conversations, he would arrange books, letters and newspaper articles, and he picked them up in turn as he talked, to underscore one point or another. In the echo chamber of the theories that he mastered as no other, he had found his vital element. Professor Jacob Taubes, a gifted reader in his own right who counted Gente among his disciples, attested in 1974 to Gente’s talent for ‘dealing intensively with unwieldy texts’.12 One of the peculiarities of the theory-obsessed ’68 generation is that hardly any theoreticians originated in their ranks. ‘As they silenced their fathers, they allowed their grandfathers to be heard again – preferably those who had been exiled’,13 the cultural journalist Henning Ritter wrote. Was he thinking of Peter Gente, who had served alongside him as a student assistant to Taubes in the 1960s? From that perspective, Gente was the ideal New Leftist: a partisan of the class struggle mining the archives.14
Gente travelled to Paris and brought back texts by Roland Barthes and Lucien Goldmann, authors no one knew in Berlin. Towards the end of the sixties, when the leftist book market began booming, he picked up odd editorial jobs. But he didn’t find his life’s theme until, in his mid-thirties, he decided to start his own business: in 1970, he and some friends and comrades founded the publishing company Merve Verlag. Initially, they called themselves a socialist collective. As their political beliefs evolved, however, the organization of their work changed as well. For two decades, Merve shaped the theory scene of West Berlin and West Germany. From the student movement’s latecomers to the avant-garde of the art world, everyone got their share of dangerous thinking: Italian Marxism, French post-structuralism, a dash of Carl Schmitt, topped off with Luhmann’s sober systems theory.
2 Heidi Paris and Peter Gente, West Berlin, around 1980.
But Merve probably never would have been anything more than just a minuscule leftist publisher whose products occasionally turn up in Red second-hand bookshops if Gente hadn’t met Heidi Paris. In the masculine world of theory, where women were all too often reduced to the roles of mothers or muses, she was a pioneer.15 She led the group’s publishing policy in new directions, contributing to the dissolution of the collective. From 1975 on, she was Gente’s partner both in work and in a personal relationship. The couple composed Merve’s legendary long-sellers, established authors such as Deleuze and Baudrillard in Germany, and steered their publishing house into the art world, where it has its habitat today. They produced books that didn’t want to be read at university; they transformed readers into fans, and authors into philosophical fashion icons. They worked on film projects with Blixa Bargeld and Heiner Müller; they did the rounds of the Schöneberg clubs with Martin Kippenberger.16 As well-entrenched members of the theory crowd, they coexisted with a like-minded milieu whose centre of gravity was the university, but whose orbit passed through Berlin’s smart night spots. Or vice versa. In the 1980s, the Merve paperbacks were required reading in this milieu.
‘We are almost never in Paris and are happy living in Berlin’, Heidi Paris and Peter Gente wrote in 1981 to the New York professor Sylvère Lotringer.17 West Berlin was an ideal location for the publishers. Speculative thinking flourished in the city’s exceptional political conditions. The Merve culture grew lavishly between the bars and discos of Schöneberg and the lecture halls of Dahlem. Berlin in the sixties had been a bastion of the New Left; in the seventies, it became a biotope of the counter-culture. And in the eighties, as the Cold War ideologues faded to spectres, postmodernism dawned. Hegel himself had held the Prussian capital to be the home of the World Spirit; his critical heirs thought it nothing less – although the existence of the ‘enclave on the front lines’, as Heidi Paris once called her city, actually seemed to contradict Hegel’s theory.18
The history of the publishing couple of Gente and Paris is inseparably connected with West Berlin, yet it is more than an intellectual milieu study of the city. People in Germany tend to equate the heyday of theory with what was known as ‘Suhrkamp culture’: the phrase was coined in 1973 by the English critic George Steiner, referring to the catalogue of the Frankfurt publishing house Suhrkamp as the canon of West Germany.19 And, in fact, Suhrkamp played a crucial part in shaping and propagating the genre, as we shall see. Their policy of producing theory in paperback was one thing that made a project such as Merve possible in the first place. But because the Berlin publishers never blossomed out into a company with employees, proper bookkeeping and the imperative of profitability, the files I discovered in Karlsruhe afford a different perspective: they recount the long summer of theory from a user’s point of view. All their lives, the Merve publishers and their friends identified themselves as avid readers. Accordingly, Merve was not just a publisher, but a reading group, a fan club – a reception context.
That fact is an invaluable advantage for my project of writing the history of a genre: to understand the success of theory since the sixties, examining how it was read and used is at least as important as its content20 – which has long since been studied in any case – as the recently published memoirs of some former theory readers have pointed out.21 Perhaps certain texts had a power of suggestion that was even greater than their systematic argument. This preliminary intuition, and the methodological choice which follows from it, are not aimed at adding yet another interpretation to the history of twentieth-century philosophy.22 This book recounts the formative experiences of Peter Gente, the odyssey of the Merve collective, and the discoveries of Gente and Paris. It follows the course of their readings, their discussions and their favourite books – but it does not seek to penetrate the grey contents of those texts. The history of science has long had its eye on ‘theoretical practice’, to use the Merve author Louis Althusser’s term for the business of thinking. Following him and others, that history has learned to pay attention to the media, institutions and practices of knowledge.23 Why should this approach not prove fruitful for the theory landscape of the sixties and seventies, the environment in which it was originally formulated?24 In 1978, Michel Foucault developed the concept of philosophical reporting – ‘le reportage d’idées’, a form devoted to the real history of thought. ‘The world of today is crawling with ideas’, he wrote, ‘that are born, move around, disappear or reappear, shaking up people and things.’ Hence, there is always a need ‘to connect the analysis of what we think with the analysis of what happens’.25 This book’s purpose is precisely that.
Notes
1
Andreas Baader to Ello Michel, 21 August 1968, quoted in Klaus Stern and Jörg Herrmann,
Andreas Baader: Das Leben eines Staatsfeindes
, Munich: dtv, 2007, fig. 40; cf. 110–16, 177.
2
On the ‘highly theoretical’ motivation of the first-generation Red Army Faction, see Karl Heinz Bohrer, ‘The Three Cultures’, in
Observations on the ‘Spiritual Situation of the Age’
, ed. Jürgen Habermas, trans. Andrew Buchwalter, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984, 147.
3
Quoted in ‘Marcuse: Hilfe von Arbeitslosen’, in
Der Spiegel
, 21:25 (1967), 103.
4
Cf. Nikolaus Wegmann, ‘Wie kommt die Theorie zum Leser? Der Suhrkamp-Verlag und der Ruhm der Systemtheorie’, in
Soziale Systeme
, 16:2 (2010), 463.
5
Cf. Sabine Vogel, ‘Die Kunst des Verschwindens: Es begann im Geist der 68er Bewegung; Jetzt hat der Berliner Buchverleger Peter Gente sein Lebenswerk, den Merve Verlag, weitergegeben’, in
Berliner Zeitung
, 2 January 2008.
6
Ulrich Raulff, ‘Tod einer Buchmacherin: Der Merve Verlag und seine Leser haben Heidi Paris verloren’, in
Süddeutsche Zeitung
, 19 September 2002; cf. Dietmar Dath, ‘Schwester Merve: Zum Tod der Verlegerin Heidi Paris’, in
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, 20 September 2002.
7
After years of archival research, Marchetti published his findings in a scholarly and voluminous work that should have been translated long ago: Valerio Marchetti,
L’invenzione della bisessualità: Discussioni fra teologi, medici, e giuristi del XVII secolo sull’ambiguità delle corpi e delle anime
, Milan: Mondadori, 2001.
8
I mean the Merve books Michel Foucault,
Mikrophysik der Macht
, trans. Hans-Joachim Metzger, Berlin: Merve, 1976, and Paul Veyne,
Der Eisberg der Geschichte: Foucault revolutioniert die Historie
[The iceberg of history: Foucault revolutionizes history], trans. Karin Tholen-Struthoff, Berlin: Merve, 1981.
9
Quoted in Merve Lowien,
Weibliche Produktivkraft: Gibt es eine andere Ökonomie? Erfahrungen aus einem linken Projekt
[Female productive power: is there a different economics? Experience of a leftist project], Berlin: Merve, 1977, 153. On Gente’s circle of acquaintance, see Jürg Altwegg, ‘Die Merve-Kulturen: Ein Verlags- und Verlegerporträt’, in
Die Zeit
, 22 July 1983; and Heinz Bude, ‘Die Suche nach dem Unmöglichen: Paul Arnheim und die Bücher’ [The search for the impossible: Paul Arnheim and books], in Bude,
Das Altern einer Generation: Die Jahrgänge 1938 bis 1948
, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995, 225. The pseudonymous Paul Arnheim of Bude’s study is Peter Gente.
10
Email to the author, 9 December 2011.
11
Altwegg, ‘Die Merve-Kulturen’, mentions that there were Merve books among the effects of the Stammheim prisoners. According to Stern and Herrmann,
Andreas Baader
, 177, many leftist publishers provided their books to the terrorists at no cost.
12
Jacob Taubes, ‘Secondary Recommendation on the Working Plan and Application for a Graduate Stipend of Hans-Peter Gente’, 15 July 1974: Merve archives, Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media Technology (ZKM).
13
Henning Ritter,
Notizhefte
, Berlin Verlag, 2010, 24.
14
A more nuanced view is in order here. As Lorenz Jäger has remarked, the cohort born around 1935 produced the best
observers
of the ’68 activists – who were a few years younger than themselves. Peter Gente, born in 1936, could be counted among those observers. See Lorenz Jäger, ‘Die Jahre, die ihr nicht mehr kennt: Mission Zeitbruch; Fotos von Abisag Tüllmann im Historischen Museum Frankfurt’, in
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, 26 November 2010.
15
On the problem of gender roles in the Merve collective, see Lowien,
Weibliche Produktivkraft
. See also Wolfert von Rahden and Ulrich Raulff, ‘Distanzgesten: Ein Gespräch über das Zeitschriftenmachen’, interview with Moritz Neuffer and Morten Paul, in
Grundlagerforschung für eine linke Praxis in den Geisteswissenschaften
, 1 (2014), 67–9.
16
The video adaptation of Heiner Müller’s text ‘Bildbeschreibung’ was never made, to my knowledge. See the extensive documentation of the project in the Merve Archives.
17
Merve Verlag to Sylvère Lotringer, 25 March 1981: Merve Archives. The outgoing correspondence of the Merve publishers is quoted here and subsequently from archived drafts, some of which were posted in translation.
18
Heidi Paris,
Drei Reden zum Design: Der Spaghettistuhl
[Three talks on design: the spaghetti chair], Berlin: Merve, 2012, 10. On Berlin’s traditional self-identification with the zeitgeist, see Patrick Eiden-Offe, ‘Hipster-Biedermeier und Vormärz-Eckensteher (und immer wieder Berlin)’, in
Merkur
, 786 (2014), 980–8.
19
George Steiner, ‘Adorno: Love and Cognition’, in
Times Literary Supplement
, 9 March 1973, 255.
20
According to recent research on literary genres, reader expectations play a key part in the emergence of genres. Cf. Wilhelm Vosskamp, ‘Gattungen als literarisch-soziale Institutionen’, in
Textsortenlehre: Gattungsgeschichte
, ed. Walter Hinck, Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1977, 27–44. For new thoughts, see Franco Moretti,
Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History
, London: Verso, 2005.
21
‘The texts we devoured in those days stimulated movement. Whether the middle Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, the early Marx or certain chapters of
Capital
– they were interchangeable. What mattered was definitively escaping the stifling air of the 1950s’, Helmut Lethen once said about reading theory in the sixties. ‘Fantasia contrappuntistica: Vom Ton der Väter zum Sound der Söhne’, interview with Helmut Lethen, in Sabine Sanio,
1968 und die Avantgarde: Politisch-ästhetische Wechselwirkungen in der westlichen Welt
, Sinzig: Studio, 2008, 98. Especially noteworthy among more recent memoirs are Helmut Lethen,
Suche nach dem Handorakel: Ein Bericht
, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012; and Ulrich Raulff,
Wiedersehen mit den Siebzigern: Die wilden Jahre des Lesens
, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2014. Important remarks on theory are also found in Karl Heinz Bohrer, ‘Sechs Szenen Achtundsechzig’, in
Merkur
, 708 (2008), 410–24, and Hans Jörg Rheinberger,
Rekurrenzen: Texte zu Althusser
[Recurrences: texts on Althusser], Berlin: Merve, 2014. For an American perspective that is analogous to that of Merve Verlag in many respects, see Sylvère Lotringer, ‘Doing Theory’, in
French Theory in America
, ed. Lotringer and Sande Cohen, New York: Routledge, 2001, 125–62.
22
To name just a few examples: Martin Jay,
The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950
, Boston: Little, Brown, 1973; François Dosse,
History of Structuralism
, 2 vols., trans. Deborah Glassman, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997; Vincent Descombes,
Modern French Philosophy
, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding, Cambridge University Press, 1980, 182f.; Ingo Elbe,
Marx im Westen: Die neue Marx-Lektüre in der Bundesrepublik seit 1965
, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008.
23
On the importance of Althusser’s ‘theoretical practice’ for the history of science, see Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, ‘My Road to History of Science’, in
Science in Context
, 26:4 (2013), 639–48; Philipp Felsch, ‘Homo theoreticus’, in
Eine Naturgeschichte für das 21. Jahrhundert: Hommage à, zu Ehren von, in Honor of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
, ed. Safia Azzouni, Christina Brandt, Bernd Gausemeier, Julia Kursell, Henning Schmidgen and Barbara Wittmann, Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut, 2011, 204–6. Later concepts to which this book is indebted include the ‘discursive practices’ introduced by Michel Foucault in the
Archaeology of Knowledge
(trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, London: Tavistock, 1972), and also the stylistics of ‘intellectual practices’ proposed by Michel de Certeau (
The Practice of Everyday Life
, vol. I, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), and Ivan Illich’s ‘historical ethology of reading’ (
In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon
, University of Chicago Press, 1993). For a current attempt to bring together the history of philosophy and the history of science, see Darrin McMahon and Samuel Moyn (eds.),
Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History
, Oxford University Press, 2014.
24
For project outlines of such a concept of the history of theory, see Marcel Lepper, ‘“Ce qui restera […], c’est un style”: Eine institutionengeschichtliche Projektskizze (1960–1989)’, in
Jenseits des Poststrukturalismus? Eine Sondierung
, ed. Marcel Lepper, Steffen Siegel and Sophie Wennerscheid, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005, 51–76; Warren Breckman, ‘Times of Theory: On Writing the History of French Theory’, in
Journal of the History of Ideas
, 71:3 (2010), 339–61.
25
Michel Foucault, ‘I “reportages” di idee’, in
Corriere della sera
, 12 November 1978, 1. Foucault’s project largely remained just that. The only ‘reportage’ of ideas he wrote himself is his controversial series on the Iranian revolution of 1979.
1965THE HOUR OF THEORY
1FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF ADORNO
3 Peter Gente goes to the cinema, 1956.1
While Radio Free Berlin was broadcasting Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech, Peter Gente went to the cinema. As the radio waves rose into the evening sky, informing listeners on both sides of the divided city about the crimes of Stalinism, the curtain opened on Beauties of the Night, a comedy by René Clair about a young composer escaping into dreams of success and beautiful women, losing his connection to reality – until the end of the film, when he comes to his senses just in time to face real life.2 Gente was ecstatic, and gave the film a grade of ‘1+’ in his culture diary. He went to the cinema often in those days, and also visited Berlin’s theatres, concert halls and cultural centres. He had discovered his passion for culture after moving with his parents to the metropolis from the Soviet-occupied provinces. He began reading novels with the zeal of a late bloomer, and invested what money he earned at his summer jobs in admission tickets.3 Herbert von Karajan was the director of the Berlin Philharmonic. The Berliner Ensemble was an unbeatably affordable theatre at the unofficial exchange rate between Western and Eastern marks, and Brecht himself still watched from his box. And the cinemas showed films from France and Italy that broke with the aesthetics of the pre-war generation.4 On the eve of the Nouvelle Vague, Gente surrendered to the spells of Fellini, Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean Cocteau. ‘Read bourgeois novels; consumed culture generally’ was his summary of this period in a later self-criticism before his socialist comrades.5
Karl Marx once commented that the Germans are philosophically contemporary with the present day, but not historically.6 In Gente’s life too, major political events were only background noise. Although he lived at the epicentre of the Cold War, he hardly seems to have noticed Khrushchev’s speech, which heralded a thaw in the East and a disenchantment among the intellectual left in the West.7 But perhaps Berlin was precisely the wrong place to develop a stable sense of reality. There were too many realities coexisting here: the ruins of the World War, and the monuments of the post-war economic miracle; the Kurfürstendamm in the West with its cafés full of buttercream cakes, and the Stalin-Allee in the East with its socialist gingerbread housing blocks. To Maurice Blanchot, whom Gente later counted among his favourite authors, Berlin ‘was not … just one city, or two cities’, but ‘the place in which the question of a unity which is both necessary and impossible confronts every individual who resides there, and who, in residing there, experiences not only a place of residence but also the absence of a place of residence’.8
This is what it sounds like when a geopolitical situation invites metaphysical speculation. But, in 1956, Gente did not yet see the world in the light of theory. In a round script that betrays his youth, he kept a record of his evenings at the cinema and the theatre, and the minimalistic prose of his lists seems to quiver with pent-up desire. Gente was burning to find a place for himself in the world of the arts,9 and his readings soon influenced him to limit his search to the canon of high culture. In the year of the thaw, however, his taste had not yet matured. His diary mixes musicals with auteur cinema, Puccini with Hollywood and Brecht. It was up to him to discover a common denominator. In the meantime, he awarded the performances grades from 1 to 5 – the scale used by German secondary schools, including the one he had recently left. The numbers were a relatively modest instrument of cultural criticism, taking no notice of highbrow or lowbrow categories. At the same time, Susan Sontag, negligibly older, was already jotting savvy mini-reviews in her diary as she made her own cultural rounds in Chicago.10 Gente’s marks went no higher than the superlative ‘1++’ for Giorgio Strehler’s adaptation of Harlequin, Servant of Two Masters, performed by the visiting Piccolo Teatro of Milan, and no lower than the moderate ‘3’ for Puccini’s La Bohème. He was an easy grader who repeatedly had to expand his scale upwards because, worshipper of culture, he had started out awarding too many 1s.
Reflections from Damaged Life
The following year, in 1957, Gente had an awakening. It occurred, however, not in the cultural sphere where he was seeking his future, but at the base, in wage labour. The scene is symptomatic of the young West Germany, which was already approaching full employment in the second half of the 1950s. On the assembly line of the Siemens factory in Spandau, where Gente worked to support himself while studying law – in accordance with his father’s wishes – he listened to two of his fellow students talking about a certain Adorno, whom they seemed for some reason to consider absolutely essential. Exactly what it was that captured his attention, he couldn’t remember later on. But the impression it made was certainly deep. ‘Adorno challenged earlier life’, Gente’s later self-criticism states tersely.11 He got a copy of Adorno’s best-known book, Minima Moralia, and couldn’t put it down, although he understood hardly any of its impenetrable aphorisms.12 Yet the author, claiming that only thoughts ‘which do not understand themselves’ can be true, apparently saw the hermetic tone as part of his message.13 The difficult language, yielding its meaning only to patient reflection, contributed to the influence of a book which made those Gente had read before it seem irrelevant.14
In 1957, Adorno’s ‘reflections from damaged life’, as Minima Moralia’s subtitle calls them, were still an insider tip. Six years after its publication, there was little to indicate that the book would be a philosophical hit, selling over 120,000 copies to date. In the middle of the post-war boom, between Opel Rekords and ice cream parlours, Gente was unsettled by it – by the way of thinking of a little-known Frankfurt philosophy lecturer who saw only disaster wherever he looked. ‘Life does not live’, reads the epigram, like a warning, on the first page; the pages that follow contain variations on that paradox. Condensing his experience of American exile into miniatures, Adorno exposes modern life as a state of deception. What seems to be alive and authentic is in reality long dead; the apparent aspiration to progress is caused by a ghostly compulsion to keep moving.15 It is a post-cataclysmic world we are living in. ‘The disaster does not take the form of a radical elimination of what existed previously’, a key passage reads – ‘rather the things that history has condemned are dragged along dead, neutralized and impotent as ignominious ballast’. Hence the macabre atmosphere of Minima Moralia: its pages are populated by the undead. Among the figures whose eerie ‘post-existence’ Adorno exposes are the achievements of the preceding bourgeois era – such as liberalism, socialism and the hospitality industry, which reached a state of rigor mortis with the advent of room service. Adorno discovers the ghastliest signs of decay in the tiniest details of day-to-day life – hence his now famous observations that the inhabitants of the Enlightened hemisphere no longer know how to give gifts, to be at home in their homes, or to close a door. ‘The world is systematized horror’ is his judgement of the present. That condemnation had the sinister weight, two decades before Apocalypse Now, of Coppola’s Colonel Kurtz watching a snail crawl along a razor’s edge. Meanwhile, German radios played the sentimental songs of the Austrian rover Freddy Quinn.16
In the depressing post-war atmosphere of 1950s Germany, Adorno made it plain that there was ‘no longer anything harmless and neutral’: his diagnosis of a society paralysed to death stood against the backdrop of the German genocide.17 Elsewhere, he wrote about the primal scene of the ghostly life: ‘In the concentration camps, the boundary between life and death was eradicated. A middle ground was created, inhabited by living skeletons and putrefying bodies.’18 Images like these must have conjured up childhood memories in Peter Gente. Towards the end of the war, prisoners from a nearby labour camp had turned up in his home town of Halberstadt. Children passed around the rumours of underground factories where these figures assembled aircraft – their parents said not a word about them. In return, Gente said nothing about his parents for the rest of his life. The rupture – precipitated not least by his reading of Adorno – was too deep for him to accord them any importance beyond rejection. As a result, only a few isolated facts are known about them. Gente’s father was a lawyer who had served as a lieutenant on the Eastern front and had been taken prisoner by the Red Army. His mother, from a ‘very anti-Semitic family’, contributed that heritage to the marriage. Gente remembered helping his mother carry his paralysed grandmother to the basement shelter during an air raid that destroyed large parts of Halberstadt in April of 1945. The family’s big house on the outskirts of the city was not hit. But when Gente’s father returned from Russia six years later, his career was ruined: a former member of the Nazi Party had no hope of advancement in the legal bureaucracy of East Germany. A short time later, the family had to flee to the West – allegedly because the father’s contacts with the American intelligence service had been exposed.19
Along with an initially small but later fast-growing number of his generation, Peter Gente made Minima Moralia his breviary: a book that was digestible only in small portions, but one that could be consulted in every circumstance. The dons of German universities did not know what to make of Adorno’s ‘painfully convoluted intellectual poetry’, as Thomas Mann once called the book.20 As a result, the influential reading experiences were extramural.21 Later, Gente the publisher would insist on making ambulatory books – readable on the train, ‘while travelling’ or around town – no doubt influenced by his experience as an Adorno reader.22 ‘I carried Minima Moralia around with me for a good five years. Every day, always with me, a regular vade mecum.’23 With his melancholy diagnosis of the present, Adorno instituted a new use for philosophy: his books replaced the volume of poetry in the young reader’s coat pocket.
Like Thomas Mann, the first critics to review Minima Moralia in the fifties pointed out its poetic character. They either revealed the book to be ‘secretly a lyric poem’, or attested that ‘only a musician’ could have composed it.24 Adorno himself later claimed, in an interview in Der Spiegel, to be a ‘theoretical person who feels that theoretical thinking comes extraordinarily close to his artistic intentions’.25 This was no doubt the reason for the book’s great success: it catered for the poetic demand of the post-war period. In the same year in which Minima Moralia was published, Gottfried Benn noted that the poets had triumphed over the philosophers. Even the philosophers, he declared in his 1951 Marburg lecture on ‘Problems of Lyric Poetry’, now longed to write poems. ‘They feel that systematic, discursive thinking has reached an impasse at the moment; consciousness can bear at the moment only something which thinks in fragments; five hundred pages of observations on truth, apt though some sentences may be, are outweighed by a three-verse poem.’26 If this diagnosis is correct – and the number of new poetry magazines emerging in the 1950s suggests that it is – then Adorno and his philosophical aphorisms were aligned with the trend of the time.
Adorno himself would by no means have wanted his work to be misunderstood as a prose poem, however. He is known to have rejected philosophers ‘borrowing from literature’ and expecting ‘that Being itself will speak in a poésie concocted of Parmenides and Jungnickel’, and decried the resulting language as a ‘jargon of authenticity’.27 But Adorno went further: in a world which had passed through an apocalypse, he saw no future for poetry itself. After Auschwitz, in his notorious dictum – also dated 1951 – writing poems was a barbaric act.28 Was he carrying this idea to its logical conclusion in MinimaMoralia? Was the book a subversion of the poetic form by discursive philosophy?29 Adorno was smuggling a work of social analysis full of difficult philosophical references into his readers’ reach by disguising it as literature. As the sixties progressed, they took the bait. Although Gente continued to read novels, he no longer read them as edifying tracts. Michael Rutschky, who discovered Minima Moralia a few years after him, wrote that Adorno’s texts made ‘literary writing seem completely anaemic compared with philosophy’.30 Ten years after Gottfried Benn’s premature declaration of victory, different circumstances prevailed: ‘theory’ – now in the singular as a mass noun – had so thoroughly co-opted poetry that it was in the process of superseding it.
Culture after Working Hours
With Minima Moralia as a pocket compass, Gente set off into the sixties. The young German intellectuals of that time wore Caesar bangs and simple clothes, and demonstrated their nonconformism by listening to jazz. Their attitude towards life had existentialist foundations, and Adorno’s ‘teaching of the good life’ gave it a flavour of social critique.31 ‘Even the blossoming tree lies’, they read, ‘the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror.’ And: ‘For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity.’32 The dismay that sentences like these elicited in their readers is difficult to understand today; they sound oddly melodramatic to ears accustomed to the varieties of postmodern irony. Hence, it is with nostalgia that Michael Rutschky recalls the years when the world was still ‘in perfect disorder’. With a little practice, Adorno’s readers learned to apply his conceptual toolbox to situations of day-to-day life – at the risk of acting smugly superior.33 No wonder Adorno, returning from exile, seemed to many older Germans like an avenging angel. His ‘fiercely brilliant’ thinking was all the more influential among the younger generation.34
Written in exile in California in the mid-1940s, Minima Moralia anticipated the post-war era’s misgivings about the young West German state. The exiled Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, who spent 1963 in West Berlin as a guest of the Ford Foundation, seems not even to have known the book’s title, and yet the impressions he recorded in the divided city came surprisingly close to Adorno’s assessment. Gombrowicz looked out over the trees of the Tiergarten from his fifteenth-floor apartment in the Hansaviertel tower block, took a drive down the broad boulevards to Freie Universität, and marvelled at the concrete hair-dos of the ladies in the cafés on Kurfürstendamm. ‘City-spa, the most comfortable of all the known cities, where cars move smoothly without traffic jams and the people move smoothly, unhurriedly, where crowds and stuffiness are almost unknown.’ Yet the cool modernism and the ahistorical atmosphere that surrounded the author instilled in him a certain anxiety. ‘Death sat on my shoulder, like a bird, throughout my entire stay in Berlin’; terrible forebodings emanated from overgrown ruins. ‘Only the everyday and the trifle’, Gombrowicz wrote of the city where he contracted a heart ailment, ‘are diabolical.’35
4 Layers of time in Berlin: ‘Trümmerfrauen’ clearing away the rubble for the reconstruction of the Hansaviertel, 1957.
Peter Gente must have had similar feelings as he walked around town with his vade mecum in his pocket. Putting the past behind one was especially difficult in Berlin, where past and future overlapped. When Gente mentioned his new favourite author at home, his mother smelled ‘Jewish subversion’: she had retained her sensitivity to racial distinctions after the end of the war.36 Her son’s reaction was to drop law and enrol in philosophy, sociology and German literature. His sitting ‘ten hours a day at his desk’ to get through the gigantic reading load of three courses cannot be explained by political misgivings alone.37 Adorno was more than just a moral authority breaking the silence that hung over the past: he attracted his first supporters by feeding their hunger for culture. He had noticed with surprise, after his return from exile in the United States in 1949, his Frankfurt students’ zeal for ‘the mind’. In a letter to Leo Lowenthal, he compared his seminar with a Talmud school: ‘as if the spirits of the murdered Jewish intellectuals had descended into the German students’. Although these students had his respect – and although they helped him to feel at home in West Germany – Adorno found their political apathy worrying. People who would rather discuss poems than the state of the world, he felt, were continuing a German pattern of behaviour that prevented them from recognizing the gravity of the disaster. And yet, by the same token – such was the dialectic of Adorno’s success – they were bound to be fascinated by Adorno.38
The work of the intellectual, Peter Gente read in Minima Moralia, encompassed ‘what the bourgeois relegate to non-working hours as “culture”’.39 On this point, at least, the book must have made sense to him straight away. Adorno made going to see Herbert von Karajan conducting, or to the Komische Oper, a serious matter. In order to be ‘susceptible of aesthetic contemplation’, he explained in one of his radio lectures, art must ‘be thought through’ as well.40 Only by reflecting on its social entanglements can one activate its secret potential for emancipation. Thus, for readers like Gente who felt a vague desire to create culture themselves, Adorno had a tempting job to offer: they were expected to act as cultural critics. Even the cinema was an opportunity to practise the strenuous toil of conceptual reflection. After the awakening he had experienced in the Siemens factory, Gente never had to award school grades again. His new reading endowed him with different ways of responding altogether.41
Adorno is said to have been the ‘trustee’ of a German tradition, that of Beethoven and Hölderlin, which had been compromised and had to wait for his work to make it listenable and readable again. Perhaps it amounts to much the same thing if we say that West German post-war intellectuals not only had a weakness for culture, but also felt a need to raise the degree of thinking involved in approaching works of art. They understood Adorno’s belief that, after the breakdown of civilization, culture ‘in the traditional sense’ must be seen as ‘dead’. Only by adopting a critical distance could they accept their cultural heritage – and by the same token that heritage took on a social relevance. Joachim Kaiser wrote that nothing could be ‘complicated enough’ for German students. Witold Gombrowicz, spending his year in West Berlin literary and academic circles, found the intellectual climate of 1963 too ‘cerebral’. Alongside the aestheticization of theory to which Adorno contributed with his books, the theorization of the aesthetic experience was the imperative of the moment.42
As the beneficiary of both developments, the new genre was suspected of cant. One of the first to fall under that suspicion was Adorno’s antithesis, the Stuttgart philosopher of technology Max Bense. Bense’s project ‘Programming Beauty’ was aimed at subjecting the field of aesthetics to the mathematical calculations of information theory. Like a cultural engineer, he wielded formulas to dismantle irrational faith in art. Aesthetic philosophy in Frankfurt and Stuttgart could not have been more different in tone: in Frankfurt, the critique of instrumental reason was de rigueur; in Stuttgart, the hard language of science ruled. But, in spite of the stylistic difference, there were striking parallels: Bense too applied his complicated formulas to works of art; he too had set aside artistic ambitions for the sake of theoretical work; his theory too was marked by an unmistakable idiom.43 As early as the 1950s, Bense’s incomprehensibility was so legendary that he
