325)
ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN.
ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason
The masterpiece of such rethinking is to be found at the end of his book Einbahnstrasse (One-way street; 1928), where he ventured into the lion's den in order to speak of things that otherwise were ap- propriated by the military Right--about war experiences and the blood wedding of human technology and the cosmos.
With a small twist, he succeeds in uncover- ing the spiritlessness in bourgeois philosophy of technology: Mastery of nature is not the significance of technology but rather the clever mastery of the relation between humankind and nature.
On the planetarium If, as Hillel once had to do with the Jewish doctrine, one had to express
the doctrine of antiquity very briefly, standing on one leg, the sentence would have to read: "The earth will belong to them alone who live from the forces of the cosmos. " Nothing distinguishes the human being of an- tiquity from the human being of modernity more than the former's sur- render to a cosmic experience the latter hardly knows. Its disappearance can already be noticed in the blossoming of astronomy at the beginning of modern times. . . . Antiquity's way of dealing with the cosmos was effected differently: in ecstasy. Ecstasy is, indeed, the only experience in which we reassure ourselves about what is nearest to us and what is farthest from us, and never the one without the other. That means, however, that the human being can communicate ecstatically with the cosmos only in a community. It is the threatening error of modernity to regard this experience as irrelevant or avoidable and to leave it to the individual as revelry on beautiful starry nights. No, it becomes due
over and over again, and then peoples and lineages elude it just as little as in the last war, when it made itself felt in the most fearful way, as an attempt at a new, unheard-of wedding with the cosmic powers. Masses of people, gases, electrical forces were set free, high-frequency currents traversed the countryside, new stars lit up in the sky, airspace and the depths of the sea hummed with propellors, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were bored into Mother Earth. This great wooing of the cosmos took place for the first time on a planetary scale, namely, in the spirit of technology. However, because the greed for profit of the ruling class thought of atoning for its will to profit with it, technology betrayed humanity and transformed the bridal setting into a sea of blood. Domination of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the meaning of all technology. But who would want to trust a disciplinary master who explained that the meaning of education is the domination of chil- dren by adults? . . . The thrill of genuine cosmic experience is not bound to that tiny fragment of nature that we are used to calling "na- ture. " In the nights of annihilation during the last war, a feeling shook the frame of humanity that resembled the fortune of epileptics. And the revolts that followed this feeling were the first attempt to bring the new
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 467
body under its control. The power of the proletariat is the measure of its becoming healthy. If its discipline does not grab this body to the marrow, no pacifist reasoning will be able to save it. What is living will only overcome the tumult of annihilation in the ecstasy of creation, (pp. 123-26)
Benjamin succeeds in doing something no mere analyst of struggle, strategist, or ideologue of hardness could do. In the course of his meditation, a piece works itself loose from the hardening cramp of the subject. Ecstasy, the dissolution of the ego, is recognized as the precondition for cosmic communication. At the same time, it provides a presentiment of the reconciliation of human beings with one another. The ambiguity of the topic does not let go of Benjamin either. He speaks of proletarian discipline that has to grab the social body "to the marrow. " The en- tire contradiction lies there openly in a nutshell. From the ecstasy of creation to strict discipline, there is no easy path. Fascism had brought ecstasy and discipline together insofar as it mobilized the tumult of power and ecstasies of destruction in its columns. It organized not only the interests of big capital but also a piece of political mysticism. Benjamin's thought-play tries to rival the Fascist threat by pointing out to the Left the necessity of tearing the ideological weapons and the psychological principle of fascism out of its hands.
Among the few philosophers of the time who did not seek the individual's sal- vation in hardenings, coolings, and solidifications, Max Scheler assumes a spe- cial place. He, too, was a great ambiguist, "double agent," and subversive citizen who took joy in confessing. The war had twisted his head, too, and moved him to horrifying exercises in thinking that affirmed war and Teutonic tumult (Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg [The genius of war and the German war], Leipzig, 1915). Later, as one of few, he expressly moved away from such "armed service with the pen," as Thomas Mann said about his own case. By 1921, in his protest against the German plague-spirit of "fulfillment of duty at any cost," he had long ceased to use martial language: "On the Betrayal of Joy. " There he provides psychological and moral arguments for an annihilating critique of the Nazi doctrine of felicity well in advance of what came later, that is, that lying philosophy of strength through joy with which the populist labor service (Arbeits- dienst) secured domination over unhappy dispositions. The Nazis knew how to mobilize the hunger for something positive that drives unhappy and disoriented individuals to become "involved" and to join ranks, to work together at a "recon- struction. " Scheler sees that all this can lead nowhere. When unhappy people "reconstruct" and get "involved," they only spread their unhappiness. " 'Only happy people are good,' Marie Ebner-Eschenbach once said rightly" (Scheler, Liebe und Erkenntnis, 2nd ed. [1970], p. 72).
As has been shown, a peculiarly ironic or cynically hard affirmation of evils as valid and ineluctable realities is part of the Weimar Zeitgeist. In the Yes, a
468 D POLITICAL ALGODICY
defensive tendency easily comes to the fore: an armoring of the ego against its suffering, a No to what would be subjective truth, No to inner wounds, to weak- ness and neediness. One begins to see this more clearly when one employs Scheler's important algodicy writing of 1916, Vom Sinn des Leidens (On the meaning of suffering) for the purpose of contrast. In this text, Scheler collects ele- ments of another ethics and politics --not hardening against suffering but exten- sion of the Yes and of recognition even to our pain. This, however, according to Scheler, is possible only in a religiously grounded life that, in its deepest spiritual layers feels itself as something indestructibly secure in Being. Scheler refers to this as "blissfulness" {Seligkeit). The secret of such an ability to suffer thus lies not in the hardening of the ego, not in political algodicies of the solid block, strength-through-joy, iron front, shoulder-to-shoulder, steel-ego, recon- struction ego type, but in the buried and forgotten Christian principle that Tolstoy revived: Do not resist evil.
An enormous relaxation of tension that in itself had to have the effect of a redemption, a relaxation through straightforward recognition, through the naive expression of pain and suffering. No longer any ancient arro- gant suffering that glories in suffering because its magnitude measures one's own power. . . . But also no pride in hiding it from oneself or others under an appearance of equanimity or under the rhetorics of suffering and dying "wisemen. " The scream of the suffering creature that was restrained for so long reverberates again freely and harshly through the universe. The deepest suffering, the feeling of being cut off from God, is expressed freely by Jesus on the cross. "Why have you forsaken me? " And no more reconstruction whatsoever: Pain is pain, evil is evil; pleasure is pleasure; and positive blissfulness, not merely "peace" or Buddha's "redemption of the heart," is the good of all goods. Also no blunting, but a soul-assuaging suffering through of the suffering in sympathy for oneself and for others! " (pp. 64-65)
Every polemical subjectivity arises in the final analysis from the struggles of denial of egos against pain, which they inevitably encounter as living beings. They carry on "reconstruction," armament, wall building, fencing in, demarca- tion, and self-hardening in order to protect themselves. However, within them, the fermentation goes on unceasingly. Those who build up and arm will one day "build down" and let loose.
Notes
1. This Gallic cynicism is related also of Napoleon after the battle of Prussian Eylau.
2. On Buergel, see Sloterdijk, Literatur und Lebenserfahrung. Autobiographien der 20er Jahre
(Munich, 1978), pp. 67ff.
Chapter 21
Asking for a Napoleon from Within. Political Cynicisms V: Training for Fact People
We Germans will manage to produce not another Goethe but a caesar.
Oswald Spengler, Pessimism?
For us, the age of warring states began with Napoleon and the violence of his measures. In his mind, the thought of a military and, at the same time, national world domination occurred for the first time. . . . This century is the century of huge stand- ing armies and universal conscription. . . . Since Napoleon, hundreds of thousands, and finally millions stand continually ready to march, enormous fleets lie at anchor that are renewed every ten years. It is a war without war, a war of outdoing the other with armaments and strike capability, a war of numbers, of tempo, of technology. . . . The longer the discharge is
postponed, the more monstrous the means become, the more unbearable the tension becomes.
. . . The great centers of power in the world capitals will dispose of smaller states, their territory, their economy and people according to whim; all that is still only province, ob-
ject, means to an end; its fate is without importance in the great course of things. In a matter of years, we have learned to scarcely notice events that before the war would have
transfixed the world. Who today still thinks seriously of the millions who perish in Russia?
Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich [1922], 1979, pp. 1097-98)
The Napoleonism of the Weimar Republic betrays the convolutions and crises with which petit-bourgeois and cultivated bourgeois people at that time entered into the century of strategy. Today that is called, often with a completely wrong
469
470 D ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
emphasis, the "politicization of the intelligentsia" or the "politicization of the masses. " In reality, the First World War had been the mass politicizer. For years on end, it had transformed the consciousnesses of the entire continent into those of observers of the front. Being schooled through war reports, every individual developed the perspective of a general; the feeling grew that those who were not generals could only be tiny cogs in the war machine. For four long years, reports on the war bombarded public consciousness. Here for the first time, that over- whelming socialization of attention characteristic of modernity took place --and what awoke in individuals and groups as "political consciousness" was the optics of the observer of catastrophes, of the war voyeur.
The so-called politicization proceeds from a more intensive militarization and strategic mobilization of consciousnesses, and that not only on the surface. It penetrates deep into body postures and structures of perception. In 1912, Walther Rathenau had referred to an "education for becoming a politician" when the con- ceptual models of tactics, of the estimation of total situations, etc. , trickled down
1
as far as the shopkeeper. From then on, it took only a short time for
politicization --as strategic cothinking in large-scale catastrophes --to become universal consciousness. More than ever, it became a mass reality in the chaos of the Weimar system of Weltanschauung and political parties. At the same time, however, the collective consciousness displayed a tendency to resist this kind of politicization. Nausea about politics was one of the strongest psychopolitical cur- rents of those years. The populist side in particular profited from it because it recommended itself less as a "party" than as a "movement. "
As the political ego strives for hardness and agility, it is trained in the way of seeing of generals and diplomats: reconnoiter the terrain; coldly consider the given circumstances; survey the numbers; tack as long as necessary; strike as
2
soon as the time is right.
tion emphatically as "thinking in terms of relationships" and claimed that that was the "dialectical" knowledge of the whole. (See my critique in chapter 11. The rela- tionships are those Spengler startingly designated as "war without war. " In this cold romanticism of grand strategic overviews, the political camps of the Left and the Right are quite close to each other. These realpolitik ways of thinking now penetrate down to the person on the street. This "sovereign" thinking, borrowed stateman's optics and general's disposition work on posturingly, even in the minds of the impotent. The principal psychopolitical model of the coming decades is the 'cothinking' cog in the machinery. Those who are infected with the cold intoxica- tion of "thinking in terms of relationships" will more easily let themselves be made into the political tools of the future.
The Napoleon cult in the Weimar Republic belongs in this framework. It marks a phase of inner political colonization. With it, political masochism ascends to new heights. The small ego learns how to deliriously think in parallel with the trains of thought of a great strategic brain, which disposes of the former.
Communist rhetoric referred to these forms of calcula-
ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V D 471
What Ernst Jiinger had previously demonstrated on a high essayistic level (namely, the illusion-trick of being simultaneously general and victim, caterpillar and leaf) is translated onto a mediocre level by innumerable biographies, plays, and articles on Napoleon (and other "men of action" such as Cecil Rhodes and Warren Hastings). Here, educated and "semieducated" everyday sadomasochism finds expression. The leaf dreams of being the master ego of the caterpillar. The communality between the devouring and the devoured arises through the leaf feel- ing into the suffering soul of the caterpillar. Napoleon is portrayed as a demoni- cally driven person, as a sufferer who has to make others suffer. Even Goethe saw
3
Napoleon as a Prometheus figure. The Weimar biographies further reinforce
this. Napoleon races along his gleaming course like a "meteor" (Kircheissen). His glowing illuminates the more somber plight of mediocre individuals who dream themselves into the "great man. "
For Spengler--who mentions Napoleon I about forty times in the two volumes of Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The decline of the West) --the Corsican is the model figure of European fate. His emergence marks a precise moment in the biographical curve of European culture.
Now we have entered the age of enormous struggles, where we find ourselves today. It is the transition from Napoleonism to caesarism, a general stage of development encompassing at least two centuries that can be demonstrated in all cultures, (p. 1081)
In Spengler's style we find the apex of political botany that, even more radi- cally than the writings of Ernst Jiinger, brings together the perspective of the bot- anist with that of the politician, of the historian with that of the strategist in a sadomasochistic unity.
Cultures, living beings of the highest order, grow up in a noble pur- poselessness like flowers in a field. . . .
. . . But what is politics? -The art of the possible; that is an old word and with it, almost everything is said. . . . The great statesman is the gardener of the people. (Ibid. , pp. 29, 1116)
The politician of Napoleon's ilk is the "fact person" par excellence.
The fact person never comes into danger of propagating a program- matic or emotional politics. He does not believe in great words. He continually has the question of Pilate on his lips --truths --the born statesman stands beyond true and false. (Ibid. , p. 1112)
In similar tones, interspersed with liberal, individualist, psychologizing
shades, Emil Ludwig, the most famous Napoleon biographer of the Weimar
years, also painted his picture of the hero. Napoleon (1925) was one of the most
4
widely read books of the decade. It narrates-in the present tense-the epic of
472 ? ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
the modern man of action who is inspired by a "heroic cynicism" (p. 414). Through an inner drive, he burns up his life energy in a fireworks of campaigns and political actions --brilliant, sober, imaginative, positivistic, power-hungry, swayable, full of courage and calculation, and imbued with the "productive lack of conviction" of the born player and shaper who is called on to live out his "amoral act of force. "
The fortune of this man's life exhausted itself in works; he enjoyed nothing other than the completed deed. (p. 645)
Only the "new matter-of-factness" of the postwar era allowed historians and biographers to see the Napoleonic cynicisms --his sober attitude toward success whose ambitionless ambition now, in retrospect, seems to fill itself with the Wei- mar life feeling. In Napoleon one sees reflected how oneself lives, in a self- assertion that, at the same time, lets itself be driven from pillar to post by opportu- nities and circumstances --half-directing subject, half-servile instrument of historical "fate. " It is precisely this alertness in letting oneself be carried along on the stream of the possible, which is well portrayed by Ludwig, that brings the Napoleonic ego into a simultaneity with the moods, self-reflections, dreams, and plans of the Weimar life feeling: wave riding on the harsh Zeitgeist, strategic pres- ence, a cynical affirmation of all the "necessary horrors" of politics and business. Ludwig writes about the still very young Lieutenant Bonaparte in the garrison of Valence on the Rhone.
Before his decisive matter-of-factness, before this gaze of the realist, the most popular author of those years, Rousseau, wilts; the excerpts on Rousseau's origins of the human species are continually interrupted by the resolutely repeated words: I don't believe a word of it. . . . (pp. 19-20)
The biographer succeeds in drawing a fascinating parallel in his description of the famous encounter between Napoleon and Goethe, where the emperor said in reference to the poet:
"Voila un homme! "
. . . It is as if two demons recognized each other in the
vapors. . . . It is a moment in the course of millennia that is compara- ble only to the legend of the encounter between Diogenes and Alex-
5
It is particularly in misfortune, however, that the ironic gambler's nature of Napoleonic realism reveals itself--that capacity of hard egos to withstand the fail- ure of their plans and hopes. In the end, only an agile energy and a will to survive without illusions remain. Ludwig puts the following words into Napoleon's
ander, (p.
325)
ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V D 473
mouth during the retreat from Moscow through Poland, after his Russian cam- paign had sacrificed half a million lives:
That is a grand political drama! He who risks nothing, gains nothing. From the sublime to the ridiculous is only a small step . . . ! Who could have reckoned with the burning of Moscow . . . ! " Napoleon becomes an adventurer. To the Poles he pretended to have an army that had long since perished. . . . In the meantime, he lets historical com- parisons of global expansiveness light up, takes what is happening at the moment as past history, relies on premonitions and repeats four times the cynically grandiose sentence about the sublime and the ridicu- lous, which anticipates any critique. The world and what he does with it begin to become a drama for the great realist, and so, Napoleon slowly ascends the stage of elevated irony as his success descends, (pp. 416-17)
With such psychological sketches, Emil Ludwig shows himself to be far su- perior to Spengler's brutal realism. At the highest point of realism it is revealed how a hard sense for the facts slides over into the fictional, the histrionic, bluff and irony. With this, Ludwig touches on the blind spot in the consciousness of the philosopher of history, Spengler, who was so proud of his hard posture and his Prussian and Roman ethics with which he wanted to cover up just how much vulnerability, softness, and unhappiness, just how many suppressed tears and how much resentment there had been in his life.
He was right in seeing himself as the "congenial" successor of Nietzsche. Spen- gler was driven into the arms of the Right because after his success, he repressed within himself by force the self-experience of doubt and weakness, which for him
6
had been extraordinarily strong before his big breakthrough in 1918. The
Literat, Ludwig, saw a series of traits in the fact person, Napoleon, that escaped Spengler's notice--precisely the con man's element, the factors of seduction and drama, of diplomacy and cynical flight into a false candidness. Spengler should have had every reason to take more notice of such phenomena. His self- observation failed from that moment on when he began to stage the drama of the great theoretician and friend of the powerful. This lie in dealing with himself also tainted his theory of caesarism. With a little more honestly regarding his own psy- chic structure, Spengler could have easily known that the Germans would bring forth not another caesar but a sick, lachrymose actor who, to the applause of con-
7
fused masses, would oblige with a suicidal caesar number.
In these times, only a psychologist or a dramatist has a chance of remaining
a realist. Nietzsche's prognosis of the ascent of the dramatic character type de- grades the "respectable" forms of realism to positivistic, one-dimensional world- views of a premodern type. Those who do not see the histrionics in reality also
474 ? ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
do not see reality. Emil Ludwig, in any case, is on the right track when he describes Napoleon's death scene on St. Helena.
Napoleon's mood swings between pathos and irony. When a servant an- nounces the passage of a comet, the emperor says, "That was the sign before the death of Caesar! " But when the doctor maintained that he found nothing wrong, the patient said, "It can be done without comets, too. " (pp. 649-50)
The year is 1925. It is the year of Reich president Friedrich Ebert's death, with whose name the Social Democratic pseudorealism in the Weimar Republic will always be connected. It is the year in which Hindenburg, "the victor of Tannen- burg," is elected as Ebert's successor. Whether the aged officer ever understood at all the time and the realities in which he was living is questionable. It is the year in which the Communists, by putting up Thalmann, a symbolic candidate with no chance of winning, brought the senile, reactionary Hindenburg into the presidential office because they withdrew their support from the promising oppos-
8 ingcandidate,aCentristpoliticianbythenameofMarx. However,theypursued
a "grand" strategy with hyperrealistic traits that hindered them from correctly un- derstanding their role in these kinds of trivial "surface phenomena. "
Heinrich Mann, too, is connected with this date. He, too, had been named as a symbolic presidential candidate by certain leftist groups and some "intellec- tuals. " In this year, Mann wrote an essay on Napoleon's memoirs. For him, Bonaparte embodies a Utopian dimension. The Corsican is a projection figure for Left-liberal dreams of realpolitik in which the otherwise scarcely thinkable could happen: the union of spirit and deed, ideas and canons. Heinrich Mann looks resolutely past the emperor's "productive cynicism" and his misanthropic traits. Even the fact that Napoleon had contempt for "intellectuals" is no longer a draw- back. In viewing the emperor of the French people, the liberal intelligentsia of Weimar--not at all far removed from Jiinger's sturdiness --got the idea that the "bloody incision" must be consented to if it is executed by a man of this caliber. Under the sign of Napoleon, the liberal horror of Machiavellianisms slackens off when the latter know how to conceal themselves by citing great ideas and hard necessities.
The book to which I return most frequently is Napoleon's memoirs. He wrote them in the third person, which has, and is supposed to have, the effect of divine impersonality. In them, he has not so much glorified himself as honored destiny, which wanted such great things from him and which justified him in everything. From a vantage point that is unique and is called St. Helena, he showed the becoming and consum- mation of the great man.
The great man, whom this writer knew, came into the world like a
ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V D 475
cannonball into a battle. The revolution sent him in this way. In life he was one with his idea, had the same body, the same path. . . .
. . . The liberal idea dies, it no longer exists. But Napoleon grows incessantly. Europe finally approaches the United States, which he had wanted. . . . The genius of Europe begins a hundred years too late to reach what is due him. . . .
The genius of Europe now understands here and there dictatorship as well. His liberal contemporaries only bore it without understanding
it. . . . He was the protector of the property less. What he delayed with his dictatorship was precisely what stormed in after his downfall, the rule of money. . . . National military dictatorship erected against all merely material powers by a power of spirit. . . .
He himself is the leader of today, the intellectual who reaches for force. Wherever today a kind of leader has a go at the future of human- ity, it is always this kind of leader. His memoirs are our handbook; we automatically are on his side.
It is all too clear that he would hate and overthrow what is now called democracy and which would seem to him like its disfigured mask. (H. Mann, Geist und Tat, Essays [Munich, 1963], pp. 125-29)
Such trains of thought were later referred to by Herbert Marcuse as "self- dissolution of liberalism. " Around 1925, even liberal intellects of high standing
9
were prepared to throw their own traditions of ideas overboard like illusions. Spengler saw before us only a Prussian perseverance in the evening twilight of a civilization with rigor mortis. Heinrich Mann dreamed of a bright future. When the first volume of Untergang des Abendlandes appeared in 1918, Heinrich
Mann caused a French revolutionary to say in a scene he wrote at that time:
"It [the power of reason], however, grows secretly in all of us. Catas- trophes only accelerate its growth. Catastrophes thus bring us closer to happiness. We want the catastrophes basically not because we are de- praved but because we want happiness. " (Geist und Tat, p. 137)
Notes
1. In the same year, Ludwig Rubiner wrote his famous article, "Der Dichter greift in die Politik. " See the collection of Rubiner's writings with the same title, 1908-19 (Leipzig, 1976), pp. 251ff. Der Dichter als Sprengmeister, Vitalisator, Erzeuger von Erschiltterungen: "What counts now is move- ment, intensity and the will to catastrophe. "
2. This concerns the spectacular main aspect of politics. That at the same time politics turned more and more into administration, remained largely alien to those politicians who had been stamped by military ways. They count on "mass movements," and they would rather form a "front" than a "coali- tion. " They also would rather give commands than laws. They prefer to go onto the streets than into parliament and the ministries.
3. See Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt, 1979), pp. 504ff. 4. In 1931, the publisher organized a special edition of 100,000 copies.
476 D ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
5. The Goethe-Diogenes parallel is as bold as it is apposite. See my earlier remarks on Goethe's role in the bourgeois neokynicism of Sturm und Drang, chapter 5.
6. See A. M. Koktanek, Oswald Spengler in seiner Zeit (Munich, 1968).
7. Thomas Mann called Spengler a "detestable Nietzsche parodist"; Mann, Briefe 1889-1936 (Frankfurt, 1962), p. 321.
8. This is not to say that the deplorableness of SPD politicians in this election should be played down.
9. Ten years later-Hitler was already in power-Thomas Mann wrote in a letter (1935): "But can one still have many objections today to an enlightened dictator? " Mann, Briefe 1889-1936, pp. 397ff.
Chapter 22
"Bright Hour": Great Confessions of a Split Consciousness
Do you live today? No, you don't--you wander like a ghost. I have only seldom met an intellectual who would not have ad- mitted this in a bright hour. Only a few have acted on this knowledge. They went on wandering hauntingly, thrown hither and thither, defenseless victims of an insoluble contradiction.
Johannes R. Becher, Der Weg zur Masse in Die Rote Fahne Oct. 4, 1927
In the twilight of the cynical structure, confessions often anticipate possible ex- posures. They are the rides of bravado of an irritated consciousness that now and then violently seeks out "confession" (T. Reik's "compulsion to confess") in order to find an excuse and achieve a catharsis and an inner equalization of pressure. Those who live with their times are acquainted with such cynical confessions -- which also do not alter anything. Perhaps they are the most prominent element in what today we can call Zeitgeist. Unhappy consciousness too knows its most developed and most typical outgrowths that bear the color of the decade more than anything else.
The phenomenon of the "bright hour" strikes the eye of the historian who reads the traces. In several ways, Weimar is a nudist era, an era of exposure: politi- cally, sexually, in sport, psychologically, morally. The nudist and confessional urge is the obverse side of all the sophisticated inconsequentialities, strenuous pseudorealisms, and artificially construed ideologies. The best authors were ac- tive even at that time as phenomenologists of cynicism--Brecht, Toller, Kastner, Roth, Doblin, T. Mann, Feuchtwanger, von Horvath, Broch, to name a few. To the present day, they maintain a lead in this area over professional philosophy.
The "brightest" hour was described by Erich Kastner in his Fabian (1931). The scene takes place in the editorial office of a Berlin newspaper (see chapter 9, "School of Arbitrariness"). Kastner possessed an intimate first-hand knowledge of the milieu. The participants are Doctor Fabian, Germanist, moralist; Munzer, the political editor; Malmy, the economics editor--both dyed-in-the-wool cynics; as well as Doctor Irrgang [literally, erring walk;-Trans. ], unsalaried clerk, a
477
478 ? "BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS
young man too unstable for the milieu; later, Strom, the theater critic, joins in. It begins with a search for a news item to be printed in place of five lines that have been struck out of a speech by the chancellor. Nothing suitable can be found in the brushproofs. Irrgang thinks that something appropriate could perhaps still come in.
"You should have become a stylite," said Miinzer. "Or a person de- tained by the police, or some other kind of person with lots of time. When you need a report and you don't have one, you invent it. Pay at- tention. " He sat down, quickly wrote a couple of lines, without think- ing, and gave the young man the sheet of paper. "Now, get along with you, column-filler. If it's not enough, a strip of slug. "
Herr Irrgang read what Miinzer had written and said very softly: "Almighty God" and sat down, as if he suddenly felt ill, on the chaise longue, in the middle of a crackling mountain of foreign newspapers.
Fabian bent over the sheet of paper that quivered in Irrgang's hands and read: "In Calcutta there was street fighting between Mohammedans and Hindus. Although the police soon brought the situation under con- trol, there were fourteen dead and twenty-two wounded. Order has been completely restored. "
"But in Calcutta there have been no disturbances at all," Irrgang re- plied resistingly.
"The disturbances did not happen? " Miinzer asked incensed. Would you like to prove that to me? In Calcutta, there are disturbances hap- pening all the time. Perhaps we should report that the Loch Ness mon- ster has been sighted again in the Pacific Ocean? Note the following: reports whose falsity cannot be established, or can only be established after weeks, are true. And now, get yourself out of here in a hurry, otherwise I will have you set out a matrix and add something to the lo- cal edition. "
The young man left.
"And someone like that wants to become a journalist? " sighed Miin- zer. . . . "What can you do? " he said. "By the way, why the sympathy with the people? After all, they're alive, all thirty-six, and are perfectly healthy. Believe me, my dear, what we compose in addition is not as bad as what we omit. " And with that, he struck another half a page out of the text of the chancellor's speech. .
On the planetarium If, as Hillel once had to do with the Jewish doctrine, one had to express
the doctrine of antiquity very briefly, standing on one leg, the sentence would have to read: "The earth will belong to them alone who live from the forces of the cosmos. " Nothing distinguishes the human being of an- tiquity from the human being of modernity more than the former's sur- render to a cosmic experience the latter hardly knows. Its disappearance can already be noticed in the blossoming of astronomy at the beginning of modern times. . . . Antiquity's way of dealing with the cosmos was effected differently: in ecstasy. Ecstasy is, indeed, the only experience in which we reassure ourselves about what is nearest to us and what is farthest from us, and never the one without the other. That means, however, that the human being can communicate ecstatically with the cosmos only in a community. It is the threatening error of modernity to regard this experience as irrelevant or avoidable and to leave it to the individual as revelry on beautiful starry nights. No, it becomes due
over and over again, and then peoples and lineages elude it just as little as in the last war, when it made itself felt in the most fearful way, as an attempt at a new, unheard-of wedding with the cosmic powers. Masses of people, gases, electrical forces were set free, high-frequency currents traversed the countryside, new stars lit up in the sky, airspace and the depths of the sea hummed with propellors, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were bored into Mother Earth. This great wooing of the cosmos took place for the first time on a planetary scale, namely, in the spirit of technology. However, because the greed for profit of the ruling class thought of atoning for its will to profit with it, technology betrayed humanity and transformed the bridal setting into a sea of blood. Domination of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the meaning of all technology. But who would want to trust a disciplinary master who explained that the meaning of education is the domination of chil- dren by adults? . . . The thrill of genuine cosmic experience is not bound to that tiny fragment of nature that we are used to calling "na- ture. " In the nights of annihilation during the last war, a feeling shook the frame of humanity that resembled the fortune of epileptics. And the revolts that followed this feeling were the first attempt to bring the new
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 467
body under its control. The power of the proletariat is the measure of its becoming healthy. If its discipline does not grab this body to the marrow, no pacifist reasoning will be able to save it. What is living will only overcome the tumult of annihilation in the ecstasy of creation, (pp. 123-26)
Benjamin succeeds in doing something no mere analyst of struggle, strategist, or ideologue of hardness could do. In the course of his meditation, a piece works itself loose from the hardening cramp of the subject. Ecstasy, the dissolution of the ego, is recognized as the precondition for cosmic communication. At the same time, it provides a presentiment of the reconciliation of human beings with one another. The ambiguity of the topic does not let go of Benjamin either. He speaks of proletarian discipline that has to grab the social body "to the marrow. " The en- tire contradiction lies there openly in a nutshell. From the ecstasy of creation to strict discipline, there is no easy path. Fascism had brought ecstasy and discipline together insofar as it mobilized the tumult of power and ecstasies of destruction in its columns. It organized not only the interests of big capital but also a piece of political mysticism. Benjamin's thought-play tries to rival the Fascist threat by pointing out to the Left the necessity of tearing the ideological weapons and the psychological principle of fascism out of its hands.
Among the few philosophers of the time who did not seek the individual's sal- vation in hardenings, coolings, and solidifications, Max Scheler assumes a spe- cial place. He, too, was a great ambiguist, "double agent," and subversive citizen who took joy in confessing. The war had twisted his head, too, and moved him to horrifying exercises in thinking that affirmed war and Teutonic tumult (Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg [The genius of war and the German war], Leipzig, 1915). Later, as one of few, he expressly moved away from such "armed service with the pen," as Thomas Mann said about his own case. By 1921, in his protest against the German plague-spirit of "fulfillment of duty at any cost," he had long ceased to use martial language: "On the Betrayal of Joy. " There he provides psychological and moral arguments for an annihilating critique of the Nazi doctrine of felicity well in advance of what came later, that is, that lying philosophy of strength through joy with which the populist labor service (Arbeits- dienst) secured domination over unhappy dispositions. The Nazis knew how to mobilize the hunger for something positive that drives unhappy and disoriented individuals to become "involved" and to join ranks, to work together at a "recon- struction. " Scheler sees that all this can lead nowhere. When unhappy people "reconstruct" and get "involved," they only spread their unhappiness. " 'Only happy people are good,' Marie Ebner-Eschenbach once said rightly" (Scheler, Liebe und Erkenntnis, 2nd ed. [1970], p. 72).
As has been shown, a peculiarly ironic or cynically hard affirmation of evils as valid and ineluctable realities is part of the Weimar Zeitgeist. In the Yes, a
468 D POLITICAL ALGODICY
defensive tendency easily comes to the fore: an armoring of the ego against its suffering, a No to what would be subjective truth, No to inner wounds, to weak- ness and neediness. One begins to see this more clearly when one employs Scheler's important algodicy writing of 1916, Vom Sinn des Leidens (On the meaning of suffering) for the purpose of contrast. In this text, Scheler collects ele- ments of another ethics and politics --not hardening against suffering but exten- sion of the Yes and of recognition even to our pain. This, however, according to Scheler, is possible only in a religiously grounded life that, in its deepest spiritual layers feels itself as something indestructibly secure in Being. Scheler refers to this as "blissfulness" {Seligkeit). The secret of such an ability to suffer thus lies not in the hardening of the ego, not in political algodicies of the solid block, strength-through-joy, iron front, shoulder-to-shoulder, steel-ego, recon- struction ego type, but in the buried and forgotten Christian principle that Tolstoy revived: Do not resist evil.
An enormous relaxation of tension that in itself had to have the effect of a redemption, a relaxation through straightforward recognition, through the naive expression of pain and suffering. No longer any ancient arro- gant suffering that glories in suffering because its magnitude measures one's own power. . . . But also no pride in hiding it from oneself or others under an appearance of equanimity or under the rhetorics of suffering and dying "wisemen. " The scream of the suffering creature that was restrained for so long reverberates again freely and harshly through the universe. The deepest suffering, the feeling of being cut off from God, is expressed freely by Jesus on the cross. "Why have you forsaken me? " And no more reconstruction whatsoever: Pain is pain, evil is evil; pleasure is pleasure; and positive blissfulness, not merely "peace" or Buddha's "redemption of the heart," is the good of all goods. Also no blunting, but a soul-assuaging suffering through of the suffering in sympathy for oneself and for others! " (pp. 64-65)
Every polemical subjectivity arises in the final analysis from the struggles of denial of egos against pain, which they inevitably encounter as living beings. They carry on "reconstruction," armament, wall building, fencing in, demarca- tion, and self-hardening in order to protect themselves. However, within them, the fermentation goes on unceasingly. Those who build up and arm will one day "build down" and let loose.
Notes
1. This Gallic cynicism is related also of Napoleon after the battle of Prussian Eylau.
2. On Buergel, see Sloterdijk, Literatur und Lebenserfahrung. Autobiographien der 20er Jahre
(Munich, 1978), pp. 67ff.
Chapter 21
Asking for a Napoleon from Within. Political Cynicisms V: Training for Fact People
We Germans will manage to produce not another Goethe but a caesar.
Oswald Spengler, Pessimism?
For us, the age of warring states began with Napoleon and the violence of his measures. In his mind, the thought of a military and, at the same time, national world domination occurred for the first time. . . . This century is the century of huge stand- ing armies and universal conscription. . . . Since Napoleon, hundreds of thousands, and finally millions stand continually ready to march, enormous fleets lie at anchor that are renewed every ten years. It is a war without war, a war of outdoing the other with armaments and strike capability, a war of numbers, of tempo, of technology. . . . The longer the discharge is
postponed, the more monstrous the means become, the more unbearable the tension becomes.
. . . The great centers of power in the world capitals will dispose of smaller states, their territory, their economy and people according to whim; all that is still only province, ob-
ject, means to an end; its fate is without importance in the great course of things. In a matter of years, we have learned to scarcely notice events that before the war would have
transfixed the world. Who today still thinks seriously of the millions who perish in Russia?
Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich [1922], 1979, pp. 1097-98)
The Napoleonism of the Weimar Republic betrays the convolutions and crises with which petit-bourgeois and cultivated bourgeois people at that time entered into the century of strategy. Today that is called, often with a completely wrong
469
470 D ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
emphasis, the "politicization of the intelligentsia" or the "politicization of the masses. " In reality, the First World War had been the mass politicizer. For years on end, it had transformed the consciousnesses of the entire continent into those of observers of the front. Being schooled through war reports, every individual developed the perspective of a general; the feeling grew that those who were not generals could only be tiny cogs in the war machine. For four long years, reports on the war bombarded public consciousness. Here for the first time, that over- whelming socialization of attention characteristic of modernity took place --and what awoke in individuals and groups as "political consciousness" was the optics of the observer of catastrophes, of the war voyeur.
The so-called politicization proceeds from a more intensive militarization and strategic mobilization of consciousnesses, and that not only on the surface. It penetrates deep into body postures and structures of perception. In 1912, Walther Rathenau had referred to an "education for becoming a politician" when the con- ceptual models of tactics, of the estimation of total situations, etc. , trickled down
1
as far as the shopkeeper. From then on, it took only a short time for
politicization --as strategic cothinking in large-scale catastrophes --to become universal consciousness. More than ever, it became a mass reality in the chaos of the Weimar system of Weltanschauung and political parties. At the same time, however, the collective consciousness displayed a tendency to resist this kind of politicization. Nausea about politics was one of the strongest psychopolitical cur- rents of those years. The populist side in particular profited from it because it recommended itself less as a "party" than as a "movement. "
As the political ego strives for hardness and agility, it is trained in the way of seeing of generals and diplomats: reconnoiter the terrain; coldly consider the given circumstances; survey the numbers; tack as long as necessary; strike as
2
soon as the time is right.
tion emphatically as "thinking in terms of relationships" and claimed that that was the "dialectical" knowledge of the whole. (See my critique in chapter 11. The rela- tionships are those Spengler startingly designated as "war without war. " In this cold romanticism of grand strategic overviews, the political camps of the Left and the Right are quite close to each other. These realpolitik ways of thinking now penetrate down to the person on the street. This "sovereign" thinking, borrowed stateman's optics and general's disposition work on posturingly, even in the minds of the impotent. The principal psychopolitical model of the coming decades is the 'cothinking' cog in the machinery. Those who are infected with the cold intoxica- tion of "thinking in terms of relationships" will more easily let themselves be made into the political tools of the future.
The Napoleon cult in the Weimar Republic belongs in this framework. It marks a phase of inner political colonization. With it, political masochism ascends to new heights. The small ego learns how to deliriously think in parallel with the trains of thought of a great strategic brain, which disposes of the former.
Communist rhetoric referred to these forms of calcula-
ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V D 471
What Ernst Jiinger had previously demonstrated on a high essayistic level (namely, the illusion-trick of being simultaneously general and victim, caterpillar and leaf) is translated onto a mediocre level by innumerable biographies, plays, and articles on Napoleon (and other "men of action" such as Cecil Rhodes and Warren Hastings). Here, educated and "semieducated" everyday sadomasochism finds expression. The leaf dreams of being the master ego of the caterpillar. The communality between the devouring and the devoured arises through the leaf feel- ing into the suffering soul of the caterpillar. Napoleon is portrayed as a demoni- cally driven person, as a sufferer who has to make others suffer. Even Goethe saw
3
Napoleon as a Prometheus figure. The Weimar biographies further reinforce
this. Napoleon races along his gleaming course like a "meteor" (Kircheissen). His glowing illuminates the more somber plight of mediocre individuals who dream themselves into the "great man. "
For Spengler--who mentions Napoleon I about forty times in the two volumes of Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The decline of the West) --the Corsican is the model figure of European fate. His emergence marks a precise moment in the biographical curve of European culture.
Now we have entered the age of enormous struggles, where we find ourselves today. It is the transition from Napoleonism to caesarism, a general stage of development encompassing at least two centuries that can be demonstrated in all cultures, (p. 1081)
In Spengler's style we find the apex of political botany that, even more radi- cally than the writings of Ernst Jiinger, brings together the perspective of the bot- anist with that of the politician, of the historian with that of the strategist in a sadomasochistic unity.
Cultures, living beings of the highest order, grow up in a noble pur- poselessness like flowers in a field. . . .
. . . But what is politics? -The art of the possible; that is an old word and with it, almost everything is said. . . . The great statesman is the gardener of the people. (Ibid. , pp. 29, 1116)
The politician of Napoleon's ilk is the "fact person" par excellence.
The fact person never comes into danger of propagating a program- matic or emotional politics. He does not believe in great words. He continually has the question of Pilate on his lips --truths --the born statesman stands beyond true and false. (Ibid. , p. 1112)
In similar tones, interspersed with liberal, individualist, psychologizing
shades, Emil Ludwig, the most famous Napoleon biographer of the Weimar
years, also painted his picture of the hero. Napoleon (1925) was one of the most
4
widely read books of the decade. It narrates-in the present tense-the epic of
472 ? ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
the modern man of action who is inspired by a "heroic cynicism" (p. 414). Through an inner drive, he burns up his life energy in a fireworks of campaigns and political actions --brilliant, sober, imaginative, positivistic, power-hungry, swayable, full of courage and calculation, and imbued with the "productive lack of conviction" of the born player and shaper who is called on to live out his "amoral act of force. "
The fortune of this man's life exhausted itself in works; he enjoyed nothing other than the completed deed. (p. 645)
Only the "new matter-of-factness" of the postwar era allowed historians and biographers to see the Napoleonic cynicisms --his sober attitude toward success whose ambitionless ambition now, in retrospect, seems to fill itself with the Wei- mar life feeling. In Napoleon one sees reflected how oneself lives, in a self- assertion that, at the same time, lets itself be driven from pillar to post by opportu- nities and circumstances --half-directing subject, half-servile instrument of historical "fate. " It is precisely this alertness in letting oneself be carried along on the stream of the possible, which is well portrayed by Ludwig, that brings the Napoleonic ego into a simultaneity with the moods, self-reflections, dreams, and plans of the Weimar life feeling: wave riding on the harsh Zeitgeist, strategic pres- ence, a cynical affirmation of all the "necessary horrors" of politics and business. Ludwig writes about the still very young Lieutenant Bonaparte in the garrison of Valence on the Rhone.
Before his decisive matter-of-factness, before this gaze of the realist, the most popular author of those years, Rousseau, wilts; the excerpts on Rousseau's origins of the human species are continually interrupted by the resolutely repeated words: I don't believe a word of it. . . . (pp. 19-20)
The biographer succeeds in drawing a fascinating parallel in his description of the famous encounter between Napoleon and Goethe, where the emperor said in reference to the poet:
"Voila un homme! "
. . . It is as if two demons recognized each other in the
vapors. . . . It is a moment in the course of millennia that is compara- ble only to the legend of the encounter between Diogenes and Alex-
5
It is particularly in misfortune, however, that the ironic gambler's nature of Napoleonic realism reveals itself--that capacity of hard egos to withstand the fail- ure of their plans and hopes. In the end, only an agile energy and a will to survive without illusions remain. Ludwig puts the following words into Napoleon's
ander, (p.
325)
ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V D 473
mouth during the retreat from Moscow through Poland, after his Russian cam- paign had sacrificed half a million lives:
That is a grand political drama! He who risks nothing, gains nothing. From the sublime to the ridiculous is only a small step . . . ! Who could have reckoned with the burning of Moscow . . . ! " Napoleon becomes an adventurer. To the Poles he pretended to have an army that had long since perished. . . . In the meantime, he lets historical com- parisons of global expansiveness light up, takes what is happening at the moment as past history, relies on premonitions and repeats four times the cynically grandiose sentence about the sublime and the ridicu- lous, which anticipates any critique. The world and what he does with it begin to become a drama for the great realist, and so, Napoleon slowly ascends the stage of elevated irony as his success descends, (pp. 416-17)
With such psychological sketches, Emil Ludwig shows himself to be far su- perior to Spengler's brutal realism. At the highest point of realism it is revealed how a hard sense for the facts slides over into the fictional, the histrionic, bluff and irony. With this, Ludwig touches on the blind spot in the consciousness of the philosopher of history, Spengler, who was so proud of his hard posture and his Prussian and Roman ethics with which he wanted to cover up just how much vulnerability, softness, and unhappiness, just how many suppressed tears and how much resentment there had been in his life.
He was right in seeing himself as the "congenial" successor of Nietzsche. Spen- gler was driven into the arms of the Right because after his success, he repressed within himself by force the self-experience of doubt and weakness, which for him
6
had been extraordinarily strong before his big breakthrough in 1918. The
Literat, Ludwig, saw a series of traits in the fact person, Napoleon, that escaped Spengler's notice--precisely the con man's element, the factors of seduction and drama, of diplomacy and cynical flight into a false candidness. Spengler should have had every reason to take more notice of such phenomena. His self- observation failed from that moment on when he began to stage the drama of the great theoretician and friend of the powerful. This lie in dealing with himself also tainted his theory of caesarism. With a little more honestly regarding his own psy- chic structure, Spengler could have easily known that the Germans would bring forth not another caesar but a sick, lachrymose actor who, to the applause of con-
7
fused masses, would oblige with a suicidal caesar number.
In these times, only a psychologist or a dramatist has a chance of remaining
a realist. Nietzsche's prognosis of the ascent of the dramatic character type de- grades the "respectable" forms of realism to positivistic, one-dimensional world- views of a premodern type. Those who do not see the histrionics in reality also
474 ? ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
do not see reality. Emil Ludwig, in any case, is on the right track when he describes Napoleon's death scene on St. Helena.
Napoleon's mood swings between pathos and irony. When a servant an- nounces the passage of a comet, the emperor says, "That was the sign before the death of Caesar! " But when the doctor maintained that he found nothing wrong, the patient said, "It can be done without comets, too. " (pp. 649-50)
The year is 1925. It is the year of Reich president Friedrich Ebert's death, with whose name the Social Democratic pseudorealism in the Weimar Republic will always be connected. It is the year in which Hindenburg, "the victor of Tannen- burg," is elected as Ebert's successor. Whether the aged officer ever understood at all the time and the realities in which he was living is questionable. It is the year in which the Communists, by putting up Thalmann, a symbolic candidate with no chance of winning, brought the senile, reactionary Hindenburg into the presidential office because they withdrew their support from the promising oppos-
8 ingcandidate,aCentristpoliticianbythenameofMarx. However,theypursued
a "grand" strategy with hyperrealistic traits that hindered them from correctly un- derstanding their role in these kinds of trivial "surface phenomena. "
Heinrich Mann, too, is connected with this date. He, too, had been named as a symbolic presidential candidate by certain leftist groups and some "intellec- tuals. " In this year, Mann wrote an essay on Napoleon's memoirs. For him, Bonaparte embodies a Utopian dimension. The Corsican is a projection figure for Left-liberal dreams of realpolitik in which the otherwise scarcely thinkable could happen: the union of spirit and deed, ideas and canons. Heinrich Mann looks resolutely past the emperor's "productive cynicism" and his misanthropic traits. Even the fact that Napoleon had contempt for "intellectuals" is no longer a draw- back. In viewing the emperor of the French people, the liberal intelligentsia of Weimar--not at all far removed from Jiinger's sturdiness --got the idea that the "bloody incision" must be consented to if it is executed by a man of this caliber. Under the sign of Napoleon, the liberal horror of Machiavellianisms slackens off when the latter know how to conceal themselves by citing great ideas and hard necessities.
The book to which I return most frequently is Napoleon's memoirs. He wrote them in the third person, which has, and is supposed to have, the effect of divine impersonality. In them, he has not so much glorified himself as honored destiny, which wanted such great things from him and which justified him in everything. From a vantage point that is unique and is called St. Helena, he showed the becoming and consum- mation of the great man.
The great man, whom this writer knew, came into the world like a
ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V D 475
cannonball into a battle. The revolution sent him in this way. In life he was one with his idea, had the same body, the same path. . . .
. . . The liberal idea dies, it no longer exists. But Napoleon grows incessantly. Europe finally approaches the United States, which he had wanted. . . . The genius of Europe begins a hundred years too late to reach what is due him. . . .
The genius of Europe now understands here and there dictatorship as well. His liberal contemporaries only bore it without understanding
it. . . . He was the protector of the property less. What he delayed with his dictatorship was precisely what stormed in after his downfall, the rule of money. . . . National military dictatorship erected against all merely material powers by a power of spirit. . . .
He himself is the leader of today, the intellectual who reaches for force. Wherever today a kind of leader has a go at the future of human- ity, it is always this kind of leader. His memoirs are our handbook; we automatically are on his side.
It is all too clear that he would hate and overthrow what is now called democracy and which would seem to him like its disfigured mask. (H. Mann, Geist und Tat, Essays [Munich, 1963], pp. 125-29)
Such trains of thought were later referred to by Herbert Marcuse as "self- dissolution of liberalism. " Around 1925, even liberal intellects of high standing
9
were prepared to throw their own traditions of ideas overboard like illusions. Spengler saw before us only a Prussian perseverance in the evening twilight of a civilization with rigor mortis. Heinrich Mann dreamed of a bright future. When the first volume of Untergang des Abendlandes appeared in 1918, Heinrich
Mann caused a French revolutionary to say in a scene he wrote at that time:
"It [the power of reason], however, grows secretly in all of us. Catas- trophes only accelerate its growth. Catastrophes thus bring us closer to happiness. We want the catastrophes basically not because we are de- praved but because we want happiness. " (Geist und Tat, p. 137)
Notes
1. In the same year, Ludwig Rubiner wrote his famous article, "Der Dichter greift in die Politik. " See the collection of Rubiner's writings with the same title, 1908-19 (Leipzig, 1976), pp. 251ff. Der Dichter als Sprengmeister, Vitalisator, Erzeuger von Erschiltterungen: "What counts now is move- ment, intensity and the will to catastrophe. "
2. This concerns the spectacular main aspect of politics. That at the same time politics turned more and more into administration, remained largely alien to those politicians who had been stamped by military ways. They count on "mass movements," and they would rather form a "front" than a "coali- tion. " They also would rather give commands than laws. They prefer to go onto the streets than into parliament and the ministries.
3. See Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt, 1979), pp. 504ff. 4. In 1931, the publisher organized a special edition of 100,000 copies.
476 D ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
5. The Goethe-Diogenes parallel is as bold as it is apposite. See my earlier remarks on Goethe's role in the bourgeois neokynicism of Sturm und Drang, chapter 5.
6. See A. M. Koktanek, Oswald Spengler in seiner Zeit (Munich, 1968).
7. Thomas Mann called Spengler a "detestable Nietzsche parodist"; Mann, Briefe 1889-1936 (Frankfurt, 1962), p. 321.
8. This is not to say that the deplorableness of SPD politicians in this election should be played down.
9. Ten years later-Hitler was already in power-Thomas Mann wrote in a letter (1935): "But can one still have many objections today to an enlightened dictator? " Mann, Briefe 1889-1936, pp. 397ff.
Chapter 22
"Bright Hour": Great Confessions of a Split Consciousness
Do you live today? No, you don't--you wander like a ghost. I have only seldom met an intellectual who would not have ad- mitted this in a bright hour. Only a few have acted on this knowledge. They went on wandering hauntingly, thrown hither and thither, defenseless victims of an insoluble contradiction.
Johannes R. Becher, Der Weg zur Masse in Die Rote Fahne Oct. 4, 1927
In the twilight of the cynical structure, confessions often anticipate possible ex- posures. They are the rides of bravado of an irritated consciousness that now and then violently seeks out "confession" (T. Reik's "compulsion to confess") in order to find an excuse and achieve a catharsis and an inner equalization of pressure. Those who live with their times are acquainted with such cynical confessions -- which also do not alter anything. Perhaps they are the most prominent element in what today we can call Zeitgeist. Unhappy consciousness too knows its most developed and most typical outgrowths that bear the color of the decade more than anything else.
The phenomenon of the "bright hour" strikes the eye of the historian who reads the traces. In several ways, Weimar is a nudist era, an era of exposure: politi- cally, sexually, in sport, psychologically, morally. The nudist and confessional urge is the obverse side of all the sophisticated inconsequentialities, strenuous pseudorealisms, and artificially construed ideologies. The best authors were ac- tive even at that time as phenomenologists of cynicism--Brecht, Toller, Kastner, Roth, Doblin, T. Mann, Feuchtwanger, von Horvath, Broch, to name a few. To the present day, they maintain a lead in this area over professional philosophy.
The "brightest" hour was described by Erich Kastner in his Fabian (1931). The scene takes place in the editorial office of a Berlin newspaper (see chapter 9, "School of Arbitrariness"). Kastner possessed an intimate first-hand knowledge of the milieu. The participants are Doctor Fabian, Germanist, moralist; Munzer, the political editor; Malmy, the economics editor--both dyed-in-the-wool cynics; as well as Doctor Irrgang [literally, erring walk;-Trans. ], unsalaried clerk, a
477
478 ? "BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS
young man too unstable for the milieu; later, Strom, the theater critic, joins in. It begins with a search for a news item to be printed in place of five lines that have been struck out of a speech by the chancellor. Nothing suitable can be found in the brushproofs. Irrgang thinks that something appropriate could perhaps still come in.
"You should have become a stylite," said Miinzer. "Or a person de- tained by the police, or some other kind of person with lots of time. When you need a report and you don't have one, you invent it. Pay at- tention. " He sat down, quickly wrote a couple of lines, without think- ing, and gave the young man the sheet of paper. "Now, get along with you, column-filler. If it's not enough, a strip of slug. "
Herr Irrgang read what Miinzer had written and said very softly: "Almighty God" and sat down, as if he suddenly felt ill, on the chaise longue, in the middle of a crackling mountain of foreign newspapers.
Fabian bent over the sheet of paper that quivered in Irrgang's hands and read: "In Calcutta there was street fighting between Mohammedans and Hindus. Although the police soon brought the situation under con- trol, there were fourteen dead and twenty-two wounded. Order has been completely restored. "
"But in Calcutta there have been no disturbances at all," Irrgang re- plied resistingly.
"The disturbances did not happen? " Miinzer asked incensed. Would you like to prove that to me? In Calcutta, there are disturbances hap- pening all the time. Perhaps we should report that the Loch Ness mon- ster has been sighted again in the Pacific Ocean? Note the following: reports whose falsity cannot be established, or can only be established after weeks, are true. And now, get yourself out of here in a hurry, otherwise I will have you set out a matrix and add something to the lo- cal edition. "
The young man left.
"And someone like that wants to become a journalist? " sighed Miin- zer. . . . "What can you do? " he said. "By the way, why the sympathy with the people? After all, they're alive, all thirty-six, and are perfectly healthy. Believe me, my dear, what we compose in addition is not as bad as what we omit. " And with that, he struck another half a page out of the text of the chancellor's speech. .
