Showing papers in "New German Critique in 1988"

A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism

Abstract: September 28, 1987 Dear Mr. Friedlander, On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the end of Nazi rule in May 1985, I published an essay entitled "A Plea for a Historicization of National Socialism" ("Plidoyer ffir eine Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus") in the magazine Merkur. As far as I know, you have voiced reservations about the concept and fundamental idea of this historicization postulate a number of times in various lectures and articles, more than any other of my colleagues in the field of contemporary history in Germany and abroad. Moreover, your apprehensions were also affected by the backwash of the Historikerstreit that erupted in 1986 in the Federal Republic, though this particular debate has been characterized in part by a quite different set of motives, emphases and opposing camps. In my view, this dispute has certainly also led to some positive results. Yet the Historikerstreit was not particularly suited as a means toward furthering an objective discussion of the notions which I for completely nonpolemical reasons had put forward in my "Plea" a year earlier. Rather, a part of my arguments were extolled and applauded by the wrong camp, while in contrast, certain reservations and doubts surfaced where the basic ideas expressed therein (in my "Plea") had met open-minded interest and agreement before. Due to such "distortions" of the objective discussion of the topic as a result of the Historikerstreit, I declined (as you are aware) after giving the matter considerable thought to accept an invitation by the Fischer Verlag to contribute to a paperback collection of essays that

Concerning the Public Use of History

Abstract: issue of Die Zeit and has not been following the emotional discussion in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung must have the impression that the argument we are involved in is about historical details. In fact, it is concerned with a political conversion of the revisionism which has emerged in modern historiography and which has been impatiently demanded by politicians of the "Wende" government (the Kohl government which in 1983 presented itself as the government of "change"/ "reversal" trans.). It is for this reason that Hans Mommsen shifts the controversy into the context of a "realignment of historico-political thinking." With his essay in the September/October issue of Merkur, Mommsen has supplied the most thorough and most substantial contribution to the dispute to date. In the center of his deliberations stands the question: In which way is the Nazi period to be processed in public consciousness? The increasing distance in time, he asserts, makes a "historicization" necessary one way or another. Today, the grandchildren of those who were too young to assume the burden of personal guilt at the end of the Second World War are growing up. This, however, does not amount to a distanced form of remembering. The focus of modern history remains fixed upon the period from 1933 to 1945. It remains firmly within the horizon of our own life histories, entwined with sensibilities and reactions which, admittedly,

Strauss, the Pervert, and Avant Garde Opera of the Fin de Siecle

Abstract: I wish to ask a series of questions about the social context of an opera libretto, about an author's intention in selecting a theme for an opera, about the cultural significance of selecting any given text to be set to music. My object will be one of the most popular operas of the twentieth century, Richard Strauss's Salome, first performed in the Dresden Opera on December 9, 1905. My contention is that in selecting a libretto, composers take into consideration much more than aesthetic appropriateness. They are aware of the cultural implications, including images of disease, and of the force that cultural presuppositions will have in shaping the audience and drawing it both into the work, as well as, perhaps even more important, into the theater. With Richard Strauss the problem of the libretto seems on first glance rather trivial, for did he not simply, to quote his own words, "purge the piece [i.e., Oscar Wilde's French drama of 1892] of purple passages to such an extent that it became quite a good libretto."' Would it not, therefore, be sufficient to read the play, to understand the drama's admittedly complex genesis, in order to comprehend Strauss's libretto? I hope to make

The Political Implications of Heidegger's Existentialism

Abstract: It is possible that a philosopher could be guilty of a compromise with political authority in an apparently inconsequential manner; he himself might be aware of this. But what he could not be aware of is the possibility that this apparent compromise with authority finds its basis in the most profound deficiency . . of his own doctrine. If therefore a philosopher should "conform" (by making concessions to authority), his disciples will have to explain what he himself was aware of in a merely external way, in an internal and essential fashion.

A Kind of Settlement of Damages (Apologetic Tendencies)

Abstract: National Socialists did with the single exception of the technical procedure of gassing had already been described in the extensive literature of the 1920s.... Did not the National Socialists, did not Hitler perhaps commit an "Asiatic" deed only because they regarded themselves and those like them as potential or real victims of an "Asiatic" deed? (Ernst Nolte, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986)

The Jewish Question in the German Question

Abstract: Bitburg and the Historikerstreit are the most recent reminders that the Nazi past continues to resonate in contemporary West German politics. The topos of the "singularity" of the Holocaust in these highly public confrontations with the past demonstrates, moreover, that the "Jewish Question" in today's Germany is simultaneously a sovereignty question. Since 1945, every expansion of German sovereignty has, at least symbolically, been linked to a particular image of the Nazi past. The symbolic value of the "Jewish Question" in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany is to hold German sovereignty in escrow. Conversely, each reevaluation of the past on the part of Germans opens for Jews a new chapter in the equally permanent link to their own collective nightmare. Since 1945 there has been what Dan Diner, writing in the first Jewish-German intellectual journal since Weimar, Babylon, described as a negative symbiosis between Germans and Jews, a "kind of opposing commonality."' Yet in all the furor over the new historical revisionism, the deeper reasons for the emergence of a new "strategy of oblivion" have largely escaped critical scrutiny. It is not sufficient to moralize about the "misuse" of comparisons, or to invoke the phrase "relativization" to impart a sense of their injustice vis-a-vis the victims.2 The attempt to eradicate the burden of the past by means of a casuistry of comparative genocide, the symbolic reconciliation of the German and American

The Historikerstreit and Social History

Abstract: At first glance, the Historikerstreit seems to have little connection to the history of the working class and of everyday life under German fascism. The current controversy about the meaning of National Socialism and the methods appropriate to studying it focuses on macropolitics and international comparative analysis. The social history of workers and peasants, women and youth, leisure and popular culture concentrates on the microanalysis of issues and actors marginal to politics as traditionally conceived. The Historikerstreit has debated the uniqueness and moral meaning of the Holocaust, while Alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life, as much social history from below is called, has all but ignored that issue. Participants in the Historikerstreit seek consciously to shape national political identity among contemporary Germans, while social historians have attempted to reconstruct the much more local identities of Germans in the 1930s and 1940s.

Introduction: Habermas and the Historians

Abstract: In his most recent attempt to sustain the memory of Auschwitz, tided The Drowned and the Saved, Italian author Primo Levi describes an encounter with a fifth-grader in which the boy offered an elegantly simple plan for escaping from the concentration camp. After examining the layout, the youngster averred that Levi could simply have cut the guard's throat, stolen his clothes, cut off the power to the searchlights and the electrified fence, and then walked free. Both bemused and disturbed by the boy's naivete, Levi writes that "this episode illustrates quite well the gap that exists and grows wider every year between things as they were 'down there' and things as they are represented by the current imagination fed by approximative books, films, and myths. It slides fatally toward simplification and stereotype. ... It is the task of the historian to bridge this gap, which widens as we get farther away from the events under examination."' Written shortly before his tragic suicide just one year ago, Levi's acute observations on the failure of memory serve as a useful preface to understanding the current debates over the history of the Holocaust in West Germany.

My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome, 1936

Abstract: In 1936, during my stay in Rome, Heidegger gave a lecture on Holderlin at the German-Italian Ctilture Institute. Afterwords, he accompanied me to our apartment and was visibly taken aback by the poverty of our furnishings.... The next day, my wife and I made an excursion to Frascati and Tusculum with Heidegger, his wife, and his two small sons, whom I had often cared for when they were little. It was a radiant afternoon, and I was happy about this final get together, despite undeniable reservations. Even on this occasion, Heidegger did not remove the Party insignia from his lapel. He wore it during his entire stay in Rome, and it had obviously not occurred to him that the swastika was out of place while spending the day with me. We talked about Italy, Freiburg, and Marburg, and also about philosophical topics. He was friendly and attentive, yet avoided every allusion to the situation in Germany and his views of it, as did his wife. On the way back, I wanted to spur him to an unguarded opinion about the situation in Germany. I turned the conversation to the controversy in the Neue Ziiricher Zeitung and explained that I agreed neither with Barth's political attack [on Heidegger] nor with Staiger's defense, insofar as I was of the opinion that his partisanship for National Socialism lay in the essence of his philosophy. Heidegger agreed with me without reservation, and added that his concept of "historicity" was the basis of his political "engagement." He also left no doubt about his belief in Hitler. He had underestimated only two things: the vitality of the Christian churches and the obstacles to the Anschluss with Austria.

Ernst Bloch and the Obscenity of Hope: Introduction to the Special Section on Ernst Bloch

Abstract: In the spring of 1985, a colloquium entitled "Reification et Utopie: Ernst Bloch et Gy6rgy Luktcs" was held in Paris to mark the centennial celebration of the births of Bloch and Lukics.' During this three-day conference in honor of the two philosphers and there were others held in Europe during that year hardly a word was mentioned about the relationship of their philosophies to Stalinism. It was as though their support of the Soviet Union and the show trials was totally incidental to their philosophical works. Yet, when Bloch's Das Prinzip Hoffnung finally made its appearance in English translation in 1986, thirty years after its publication in German, Leon Wieseltier commented, "Bloch's reputation as an unorthodox Marxist appears to have escaped the fact that he was also an orthodox Communist. He was never a member of the party, but membership would have been redundant. 'The Principle of Hope' is the most monumental apology for the Soviet Union I have ever read. ... How can a man consecrate himself completely to the idea of human perfection and collaborate in the justification of millions of human deaths? The answer, of course, is: that's how. In its time, our time, Bloch's hope is obscene" (44).2

The Ornaments of Writing: Kafka, Loos and the Jugendstil

Abstract: In Kafka's fictions certainty of perception is often undermined by an absence of light. Darkness, shadows, snow or rain habitually obstruct the main character's vision of the object or scene he must interpret. The evening landscapes of The Castle, The Trial, the darkness of Gregor Samsa's room in The Metamorphosis these elements distance the characters from truth and make Kafka's fictional topography akin to that of Dante's Inferno, which is not only the moral realm of guilt and sin but also an epistemological realm of error and confusion, the realm into which God's light refuses to penetrate. "In the Penal Colony" is unusual among Kafka's works in that its landscape is marked by an abundance of light. But this light does not illuminate the field of perception, allowing the protagonist to interpret correctly the objects and events before him. Light is an obstacle to perception. The explorer must shield his eyes against the blinding desert sun to gaze at the penal machine. The glare of the sun in the "shadeless valley" hurts the explorer's eyes, making it difficult for him to collect his thoughts. And the machine itself, with its hard, polished surfaces, doubles the sun's violent radiance: "The Bed and the Designer were . . . bound at the corners with four rods of brass that almost

The Wish and the Phenomenology of the Wish in The Principle of Hope

Abstract: Max Brod once wrote the following: "I recall a conversation with Kafka that began with the contemporary situation in Europe and the corruption of mankind. 'We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts, that rise up in the head of God,' he said. This reminded me of the Gnostic view of life, God as an evil demiurge and the world as the place of the fallen, sinful men. 'Oh no,' he said, 'our world is only a bad mood of God's, a lousy day.' 'So could there be hope beyond this particular manifestation of the world?' I asked. He laughed. 'Oh, there's enough hope, infinitely great hope only not for us."'' Bloch's view might be described as the opposite of that of Kafka. There is hope only for the sake of humankind. The existence of hope in the world is a reason for saying that the world as it is is not worthy of humankind while at the same time this critique shows us how hope transcends the limitations of the world. The Principle of Hope begins with children's questions that already have hope in sight, such as, "Who are we?" "Where did we come from?" "Where are we going?" "What do we expect?" "What is expected of us?"2 The questions are, of course, not normally thought to be within the province of systematic, scientific examination, since only religion dares answer them in all their hybrid

The French Heidegger Debate

Abstract: Few events in recent memory have shaken the world of French letters as much as the appearance last fall of Victor Farias's book, Heidegger et le Nazisme (Trans. Myriam Benarroch and Jean-Baptiste Grasset [Paris: Editions Verdier, 1987]). Through an extremely thorough and painstaking (and for French Heideggerians, clearly painful) labor of documentation, Farias has single-handedly given the lie to four decades of inventive rationalizations concocted by Heideggerians as well as by Heidegger himself on several occasions trivializing the Master's alacritous participation in the "National Awakening" of 1933. It is no secret that since the collapse of the previous two dominant intellectual paradigms of the post-war era existentialism and structuralism Heideggerianism, as a philosophy of "difference," has enjoyed unquestionable pride of place. It is no small irony that Farias's book, while far from a theoretical tour de force, may well have paved the way for a new epistemological break in the volatile Parisian cultural world. Given the enormity of the debate his expose has unleashed, a significant intellectual shift would seem to be in the offing. Yet, there is one definitive outcome of the tumultuous events surrounding Farias's book that may already be discerned: from now on, French intellectuals in all walks of life will never be able to relate to Heidegger's philosophy "naively," that is, without taking into consideration the philosopher's odious political allegiances. In this respect, the debate spawned by Heidegger et le Nazisme is destined to become an inescapable reference point for all future discussions of Heideggerianism and its merits. If the relationship between the philosopher and his politics were not integral, if one could make a neat separation between the

Jewish Identity and Intellectuality in Fin-de-Siecle Austria: Suggestions for a Historical Discourse

Abstract: Kurt Waldheim personally opened the 1987 Salzburg Festival in July by attending the premiere of Herbert von Karajan's new Don Giovanni and dedicating an annual photographic tribute to Max Reinhardt, born Max Goldmann, a festival co-founder who died in New York exile in 1943. The last week of the festival was marked by the joint appearance of Pinchas Zukerman and Marc Neikrug, wearing yarmulkes a gesture by which they hoped to indicate that their fifth appearance at Austria's most glamorous festival, now in the Waldheim era, was not business as usual. (Reviews of the recital chose to overlook this extra-musical component.) The day after the Zukerman/Neikrug recital, the Israel Philharmonic played, after receiving assurances from the festival management that Waldheim would not seize the photo-opportunity and attend the concert. These events are not political intrusions or irrelevancies in the face of an apolitical celebration of high culture and great music. For the last fifty years, Germany and Austria have marketed culture with the ideological position that music and music festivals are apolitical. But in Austria, music is a political affair, and since its founding in 1920, the

Deutschlandpolitik on the Margins: On the Evolution of Contemporary New Right Nationalism in the Federal Republic

Abstract: Contemporary West Germany is in what Theo Sommer, the editor of the liberal weekly, Die Zeit, has called a "deep crisis of identity."' More than forty years after Germany's defeat in the Second World War, the majority of West Germans are finally confronting the reality of their situation, a reality they have long chosen to ignore or forget: "Not a nation, not a culture, hardly a society but an entity, a country which has been economically successful, and one in which economic success has been closely linked to the success of political institutions."2 At a time of world-wide economic and political uncertainty, and increased competition abroad coupled with economic struggle and high unemployment at home, many West Germans have started to look inward, to question their identity. Symptomatic of this search for identity has been the growing number of books, journals, and articles dealing with "German Identity," "the German Nation," or "the German Question." In 1986, Bublies & Hoeffkes, publishers of the national revolutionary journal wir selbst (see below), distributed a catalogue tided Germany and the German Question," which listed the "hundred most important tides on the German

From seduction theory to Oedipus complex: a historical analysis.

Abstract: Freud's repudiation of the seduction theory in favor of the Oedipus complex, long regarded as a key episode in the early history of psychoanalysis, has recently become the subject of intense debate. The controversy began in the United States around 1980, when Jeffrey Masson, a Ph.D. in Sanskrit and an analyst, was invited to prepare a new edition of the Freud/Fliess correspondance and was given access to the jealously guarded Freud Archives. According to Masson, as he was going through the earlier edition of the letters, edited by Marie Bonaparte and Anna Freud, he "began to notice what appeared in the omissions made by Anna Freud in the original abridged edition. In letters written after September 1897 (when Freud was supposed to have given up his 'seduction' theory), all the case histories dealing with the sexual seduction of children were excised."' Masson became increasingly convinced that the scholarship of the psychoanalytic movement had underestimated the hesitation with which Freud had abandoned the seduction theory in favor of the oedipal theory, and precisely because members of Freud's intimate circle had supressed evidence connected with this abandonment. In time, Masson's rebellion against the psychoanalytic movement became even more pronounced. Finally, he began to blame the

Introduction to the Broszat-Friedlander Exchange

Abstract: This exchange of letters between an Israeli and a West German historian, Saul Friedlahnder and Martin Broszat,' is part of the aftermath of the Historikerstreit, and represents a somewhat less controversial tangent to the main debate between Habermas and the conservative historians. However, in the long run the issues raised in their debate may prove a good deal more lasting and significant for the larger debate and the future of German historiography than the well-known skirmishes of the Historikerstreit proper. Many of the themes central to the West German historians' controversy actually first appeared in a 1985 article published by Martin Broszat in the prestigious journal Merkur, and entitled "Pladoyer ftir eine Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus."2 Broszat's article is crucial for negotiating the maze of the Historikerstreit because of the problems it raises, the timing of its appearance, and the impeccable anti-Nazi credentials of its author. Indeed, there can be no doubt that among the many groupings of German historians generated by the controversy, Martin Broszat firmly belongs to those who have unequivocally denounced the work of the notorious "Gang of Four" (Nolte, Hillgruber, Hildebrand, Sttirmer). Yet, some of Broszat's points in the Merkur article, which antedated the controversy, proved so provocative and conceptually dose to certain themes raised by the conservative historians that Saul Friedlkander

Decoration and Decorum, Adolf Loos's Critique of Kitsch

Abstract: functionalism: this reputation rests mainly on the widespread dissemination of his notorious and paradoxical essay, "Ornament and Crime" (1912).' In this essay, as commonly understood, Loos advocated an uncompromising anti-ornament position on functional grounds. His radical assertions became an article of faith among the post-World War I European avant-garde, who accepted his claims uncritically and somewhat naively, and incorporated the essay into the canon of the Modem Movement. Through the agency of the avant-garde, Loos's alleged anti-ornament position has had a profound impact on the shape and character of the world's major metropolises in the post-World

How Can We Understand the Bends in the Upright Gait

Abstract: The above quote from Bloch's preface to his book on natural law marks the counterpoint to his outline of social utopias, "Freedom and Order." We came to Zagreb in 1987 in order to discuss "Blochian thought as a philosophy of the upright gait (aufrechter Gang)," as the invitation to the symposium said. We honor this thought insofar as we examine it. Insofar as we examine, we investigate and criticize in order to emerge from a "jargon of inauthenticity." And insofar as we criticize, the philosophy becomes tangible: for veneration is not elucidation, and glorification is not explanation. As it is all too common to praise into oblivion, let us remember Bloch's own chiasma in his essay "Two Kinds of Kant Anniversaries" ("Zweierlei Kant-Gedenkjahre"): "Where nothing is serious, much can be celebrated" (1924) and "Where much is serious, not everything can be celebrated" (1954).2 Bloch saw the upright gait as a moral orthopedics of human dignity, as strengthening the backbone against humiliation, dependency, and subjugation. He stands behind Marx's demand "to overthrow all relations in which man is a degraded, enslaved, abandoned, or despised being."

The Great Austrian Taboo: The Repression of the Civil War

Abstract: The Moscow Declaration of November 1, 1943, signed by the foreign ministers of the USSR, the USA and Great Britain, declared Austria to be the first victim of National Socialist aggression. The events of March 11 to March 13, 1938, were thereby internationally defined as what they in fact were the occupation of a sovereign state as the direct consequence of brutal military blackmail. As a result, on April 27, 1945, eleven days before the end of the war in Europe, the Austrian caretaker government, comprised of three "antifascist" parties, declared the 1938 Anschlug null and void. Austria was liberated.

Notes on the "Ontological Path" of Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukacs: Philosophical Sublimation of a Historic Defeat or the "Reasonable" Refounding of Modern Revolutionary Thought?

Abstract: If it is easy to admire Ernst Bloch and Georg LukUcs, and if it is impossible to remain fascinated by the breadth and depth of their thought and reflection on modernity, it is more difficult to grasp the elements that are truly common to both, in the fundamental tendency of their effort to systematize ontologically the categories of social and natural Being. The differences, so to speak, leap to our eyes: on the one hand is Bloch's great, rational dream of a friendly nature, of a subject capable of establishing with us and with our history a new, redemptive alliance; on the other, the apparent coldness of Lukacs's ontology of "labor" that would like to replace expressly the benumbed philosophical frame of the old, Stalinist "dialectical materialism," transformed by history into an ideology of manipulative legitimation. If the differences lead us toward a somewhat scholastic classification of

The Early Aesthetic Theories of Bloch and Lukacs

Abstract: Heidelberg, around the beginning of the first decade of this century: an intellectual center for the elite in the humanities. Setting the tone: the sociologist Max Weber and the philosopher Georg Simmel. Gaining status: two brilliant young men, Georg von Lukdics and Ernst Bloch, respected and wooed by the older philosophers, envied by the younger philosophers, and soon to be persecuted by the overwhelming mediocrity of the academic community. Through Georg Simmel the two became acquainted, each unexpectedly recognizing the other's enormous philosophical talent. On January 11, 1911, Lukdics wrote to his then closest confidante, the art critic Leo Popper: "Dr. Bloch, the German philosopher, whom Simmel sent to me once, was the first inspiring intellectual after a long hiatus; he is a real philosopher in the Hegelian mold" (Correspondence, 146).' Just