No More Learning

? Franz Biberkopf (Heinrich George) leaves the penitentiary in Tegel. From the film Berlin-Alexanderpkitz, Doblin, 1931.
noble I am and how refined, and they don't let me show what I'm really like. (pp. 388-91)
Max Hoelz, the most well known political "terrorist" of the twenties, who, af-
ter eight year's imprisonment in German penitentiaries was granted amnesty in
1928, mentions in his narration (still worth reading today) of his experiences of
youth, struggle, andprison(Fow Weissen Kreuzzur Roten Fahne [From the white
cross to the red flag], Berlin, 1929), the indescribable impression the images of
new big-city streets, the cars, display windows, and people made on him on his
4
return.
The most significant story of return has been related by Ernst Toller. After five
years' imprisonment in the notorious Bavarian fortress-penitentiary, Nieder- schonenfeld am Lech (1919-24), he himself experienced a return of this kind into the new matter-of-factly changed Weimar society. When he was released in June
clear-sighted, realism. in 1927.
Erwin Piscator staged this play at great expense in Berlin
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? ? 507
1924, the republic was approaching, for the first time since its founding, an ap- parent stabilization. In these years of the "compulsion of things," of compromises and new realisms, Toller continued his political-moral process of disillusion- ment. He inhaled thoroughly the cynical spirit of the times, studied and portrayed it with all possible means. The result of his observations is Hoppla, wir leben! (Hey, we're alive! ), one of the most impressive plays of his decade, imbued with the experience of the times and stamped by the growing pains of a bitter, but
5
"You have to learn to see and in spite of it not let yourself be pushed down," says Kroll, a worker, in the second act of the play. He who has to learn to see is the revolutionary of 1918, Karl Thomas, the returnee. He has been locked up in a madhouse for eight years. With the old ideas in his head, he now collides with the new reality of 1927. He cannot comprehend what had happened in the meantime in the minds of the leaders, the honest, and the fellow fighters of that time. For him, two developments are confounded to a horrifying snarl that over- strains his powers of understanding: on the one hand, the confrontation of the old utopian-radical Left with the painful facts of the republic's daily life; on the other, the reorientation of the mass urban climate toward consumerist, illusionist, cos- metic, and distracted forms of life. Released from the madhouse, it seems to him more than ever that he has landed in the loony bin. Nevertheless he quickly under- stands that the smiling face belongs to the new style, completely in the sense of the "moral-pink skin color" so dear to the personnel boss. Thus, he puts himself in the hands of a cosmetologist.
"Don't be scared, Mother Meller, you don't have to be afraid that I will go crazy again. Everywhere I looked for work, the bosses asked me: 'Man, what kind of a deathly bitter mien do you have? You'll scare away the customers. Nowadays, one must smile, always smile. ' So then I went . . . to a beauty specialist. Here is the new facade. Couldn't you just eat me up? "
"Yes, Karl. You will impress the girls. At first it was weird for
me . . . All the things they demand. Next you'll have to undertake by contract to smile for ten hours while you're working. " (3. 2)
Through this part of the snarl, Karl finds his way more or less, with fatalistic accommodation and irony. But things go differently for him with the political- moral changes, about which Eva Berg, his former lover, says, "The last eight years. . . have changed us more than otherwise a century would have done" (2. 1).
In a more "mature," tactical, and mournful socialism, the old moral, insurrec- tionary language fails. Karl Thomas calls the new matter-of-factness of the com-
508 D HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
mitted Left "hardening. " Is it? Eva, who understands herself to be thoroughly within the tradition of the socialist struggle, speaks of growing up.
"Once again you use concepts that no longer hold. We can no longer afford to be children. We can no longer throw clear-sightedness, knowl- edge that has grown in us, into the corner. " (2. 1)
This new experience had consumed the old political moralism just as much as the new sexual relations had overcome the old expectations of fidelity, possessive relationships, and commitment. Karl Thomas also suffers because sleeping with this woman guarantees no hopes of a future with her.
In his mind, the various aspects of modernization become blurred: Glittering transitional zones form between emancipation and decadence, progress and cor- ruption, sobriety and nihilism. Under the burden of these numerous ambiva- lences, Thomas finally breaks down. Confused and despairing, he decides to
jump off this carousel of crazy matter-of-factness. He wants to undertake one more "deed" as a finale and plans the assassination of Kilman, the Social Demo- crat minister who had tried in vain to explain to him that Social Democratic cyni- cism is down-to-earth and that progress prefers crooked paths. Thomas then hangs himself in the cell in which he had been locked in place of the real mur- derer, who naturally came from the Right. In heavy scenes, Toller outlines the panorama of a methodically inverted world. Cynically direct, the paradoxes pile up. Count Lande, who financed the murder, unveils the monument for the mur- dered man; Kilman's daughter, who confesses to lesbian tendencies, also goes to bed with this Count Lande, and so on.
If one asks for the "tendency" of this play, it is certainly to be found in a call to socialism to hold up the flame of Utopia even in the middle of tactical sobriety -- instead of turning into cynicism. The struggle must not turn the fighter for the good "goal" into a beast. The socialist flame, Eva says, is not extinguished but "glows in another way, less pathetically. " However, because this flame is no longer in a position to shed any clear light on social relations, its rays are soaked up by the general twilight. Those who still want to orient themselves with it must represent socialism with the stance of a leftist existentialism (with a pinch of so- ciology)--or they, as heroes, will be broken by despair. Toller shows both end- ings of the drama beside each other, with one half of his heart bound to those who are perishing, the other, learning further, hoping further. Even the last of the "perspectivistic worldviews" is overcome by an irrevocable emergence of the "aperspectivist world" (Gebser). The latter demands from us an unencumbered, many-sided, and continually new viewpoint. Hoppla, wir leben! is a significant document for "political cubism" in the nondogmatic Weimar intelligentsia. It shows the observer that those who value an intelligent relationship with their
times can never return to the simplicity of the relation between a naive ego and
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? D 509
? Traugott Miiller. Stage setting for Hoppla, wir leben! by Ernst Toller. Director: Erwin Piscator, 1927.
a clearly structured monoperspectivist world. The universe becomes a multiverse and the individual becomes a multividual -- a multiply divided being.
Excursus 9. Media Cynicism and Training in Arbitrariness
Yes, said Tunda, one loses one's distance. One is so close to things that they don't have anything to do with one anymore. Joseph Roth, Die Flucht ohne Ende (1927)
His head was a hot ball into which too many things had been thrown and now they were beginning to hiss and melt.
Vicki Baum, Menschen im Hotel (1931)
Modern mass media cater to a new kind of artificial acclimatization of conscious- nesses in social space. Those who are drawn into its currents experience how their "world picture" becomes more and more exclusively mediated, sold, acquired secondhand. News floods televised consciousness with world material in infor- mation particles; at the same time, the media dissolve the world into fluorescing news landscapes that flicker on the consciousness screen of the ego. The media really do possess the power to ontologically reorganize reality as reality in our heads.
It is part of all this that everything must begin quite innocently. People read
510 D HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
the newspaper, believe that they are absorbing things that "interest" them, listen to the radio from the twenties on, hurry along overpopulated streets full of adver- tising and display windows with enticing offers. They inhabit cities that are noth- ing other than constructed mass media, covered by transportation and sign net- works that direct the streams of people. The metropolis appears as a gigantic instantaneous water heater that pumps the subjective plasma through its tube and sign systems (see Rathenau's metaphors in chapter 18). Conversely, the egos, too, function as instantaneous heaters, filters, and channels for the streams of news that reach our sensory organs in the most diverse domains of broadcasts. The ego and the world thus get caught in a double state of liquefaction, in that ontological tossing that precipitates in a thousand and one modern "crisis" theories.
That with "qualities" and "character" one no longer gets very far in such a state of the world is shown by the numerous stories about character and morals that not infrequently end with the hero's downfall. Conformity becomes the psychopo- litical requirement of the times. Where could it be better practiced than in dealing with the urban media? They provide consciousness with its daily quota of gray variety, colorful uniformity, and normal absurdity that repeatedly drums anew into the head of the ego that has regressed into moralism that it should practice Brechtian "maneuvering. " We provide examples from contemporary literature of how intelligent individuals cope with the impertinence of the media world.
Erich Kastner's outstanding novel of the times, Fabian, begins, unavoidably, with such a snapshot.
Fabian sat in a cafe called Split Wood and read the headlines of the evening papers: English airship explodes over Beauvais, strychnine stored next to lentils, nine-year-old girl jumps out of window, another unsuccessful prime ministerial election, the murder in the Lainz zoo, scandal in the town requisitions office, the artificial voice in the vest pocket, Ruhr coal sales decline, gifts for Neumann, the director of the federal railways, elephants running loose on the streets, nervousness on the coffee markets, scandal around Clara Bow, impending strike of one hundred and forty thousand metal workers, dramatic crime in Chicago, negotiations in Moscow about timber dumping, Starhemberg hunters re- volt. The daily quota. Nothing special, (p. 7)
In the linear sequencing of great, small, important, unimportant, crazy, seri- ous, and so on, what is "special" and "actual reality" disappears. Those who have to live continually in this false sameness of values lose the capacity to recognize, in the eternally gloomy light, things in their individuality and essentialness; through every particular, one sees only the basic tone, the gray, care, absurdity. (A scene comparable to the one quoted can be found at the very beginning of Irm- gard Keun's contemporaneous novel Gilgi -- eine von uns [Gilgi -- one of us; 1931]. )
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? D 511
The returned soldiers in particular see through this media world very clearly. One of them is Lieutenant Tunda, the main character in Joseph Roth's important novel Die Flucht ohne Ende {1927). He, too, sees with the eyes of someone com- ing from outside; he returns from the fighting of the Russian Revolution in Siberia to Western Europe to find a world in which a homecoming is no longer possible. What he brings with him is the power of estrangement.
"He saw the improbable events and facts because the usual events and facts too seemed remarkable to him. . . . He possessed the uncanny ability to understand the uncannily rational madness of this city. (p. 94)
Of course, here Berlin is being described once again as the "European Chi- cago" (Mark Twain).
"Within a few days we saw: someone running amok and a procession; a film premiere, a film shoot, the death jump of a performer on Unter den Linden, someone mugged, the asylum for the homeless, a love scene in the zoo in broad daylight, rolling advertising pillars drawn by donkeys, thirteen pubs for homosexual and lesbian couples, . . . a man who had to pay a fine because he jaywalked across a square in- stead of walking at right angles, a meeting of the onion eaters' sect and the Salvation Army. . . .
It was the time when the literati, the actors, the film directors, the painters earned money again. It was the time after the stabilization of the German currency, in which new bank accounts had been opened, even the most radical periodicals had well-paid advertisements and the radical writers earned honoraria in the literary supplements of the bour- geois newspapers. The world was already so consolidated that the feuilletons were allowed to be revolutionary, (pp. 95-96)
Besides this, Toller's model returnee, Karl Thomas, discovers as a waiter in the Grand Hotel the new radio reality. He listens for the first time to the cynical synchronizing of all events and texts in the news ether.
KARL THOMAS: Does one really hear the whole world here? TELEGRAPHIST: IS that something new for you?
KARL THOMAS: Whom are you listening to now?
TELEGRAPHIST: New York. Widespread flooding on the Mississippi
reported.
KARL THOMAS: When?
TELEGRAPHIST: NOW, in the last hour.
KARL THOMAS: While we are speaking?
TELEGRAPHIST: Yes, while we are speaking, the Mississippi is bursting
its levees, people are fleeing. . . . I'll switch over. Latest news
from all the world.
LOUDSPEAKER: Attention! Attention! Unrest in India . . . Unrest in
512 D HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
China . . . Unrest in Africa . . . Paris Paris Houbigant, the sophisticated perfume . . . Bucharest, Bucharest, food shortage in Romania . . . Berlin Berlin The elegant woman prefers green wigs . . . New York New York The largest bomber in the world invented. Able to reduce Europe's capitals to rubble in one sec-
ond . . . Attention! Attention! Paris London Rome Berlin Calcutta Tokyo New York The cavalier drinks Mumm Extra Dry . . .
That this new media-ontological situation deals the death blow to classical metaphysics has been formulated by no one as clearly as Robert Musil. The fifty- fourth chapter in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The man without qualities; 1930) presents an attempt, on the highest level of irony, to play out the new decen- tered, virtually subjectless media ontology against the old holistic ontology. In doing so, the conventional concept of the bourgeois individual, who wanted to be whole and indivisible, dissolves. The climax of the dialogue between Walter and Ulrich is as follows:
"One has to treasure it, if today a man still strives to be something whole," said Walter.
"That doesn't exist anymore," Ulrich pronounced. "You only have to look into a newspaper. It is filled with an immeasurable opacity. There, so many things are spoken about that it would exceed the thinking ca- pacity of a Leibniz. But one doesn't even notice it; we have changed.
No longer does a whole person confront a whole world, but a human 6
something moves around in a universal nutritional fluid. " (p. 217)
Excursus 10.
People in a Hotel
In this hotel on earth
The cream of society was guest--
It bore with an effortless composure The heavy burden of life!
Walter Mehring in
Hoppla, wir leben!
At a time when the people's horizon was admittedly extended into the cosmopoli- tan realm without letting them really share in the good of happiness of the big world, the hotel had to become a mythical place. It symbolized a dream of social heights on which the modern ephemerality of existence could at least be compen- sated for with worldly, comfortable glamour. In the hotel, the world chaos seemed to organize itself once more into a scintillating cosmos. Like a last or- ganic form, it resisted the confounding and arbitrariness of events. This elevated
7 thehoteltoacentralaestheticideaofmodernity; asifofitself,itsuitstherevue-
like, polythematic, simultaneous forms of experience in the big city and neverthe-
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? ? 513
less, as a factor of unity, possesses its own myth, the genius loci and its inner order.
In these hotels of the world theater, exotic and typical characters of the times, driftwood and wave caps of society hurry about, every one of them bizarre and nostalgically individual, and every one of them also representative and fluoresc- ing in the multivalent milieu. Each represents a species, as if the hotel were a Noah's ark of the last individualities. The authors are given the opportunity of presenting the great menagerie of character types one more time--reception managers, false barons, aging female dancers from Russia, one-armed elevator operators, homosexual English lords, manufacturers' wives with curious predilections, financiers who transact business around the world from the desk telephone, histrionically talented sons of champagne factory owners, pensioned officials, and moribund people who look on at the glitter world with downturned mouths and feverish eyes, knowing that things are coming to an end and that not all that glitters is gold.
Just such an interestingly nauseous character is Doctor Otternschlag in Vicki Baum's successful novel, Menschen im Hotel (People in a hotel; 1931), a person destroyed by life who believes he knows that "real life" for us always lies in the future, the past, or somewhere else, can never be grasped, and finally, through all the waiting, has already flown by. His eyes do not allow themselves to be de- ceived by the spell of the Grand Hotel, especially in a slow hour for business, when the whole world pursues its vices and business interests.
Things stood about him like dummies. Whatever he took to hand crum- bled into dust. The world was a brittle affair, not to be grasped, not to be held onto. One fell from emptiness to emptiness. One carried a sack full of darkness around within oneself. This Doctor Otternschlag lives in the deepest of loneliness, although the world is full of his kind. . . .
In the newspapers he found nothing that satiated him. A typhoon, an earthquake, a moderately large war between black and white. Arson, murders, political struggles. Nothing. Too little. Scandals, panic on the stock exchange, losses of enormous fortunes? What did it have to do with him, what did he feel of it? Transoceanic flight, speed records, inch-high sensational headings. One paper cried louder than the other, and in the end, one did not listen to any of them, became blind and deaf and numb due to the loud activity of the century. Pictures of naked women, thighs, breasts, hands, teeth, they offered themselves in pretty piles, (pp. 11-12)
Otternschlag is the professional melancholy hotel cynic, a dejected realist who provides knowledge of decay.
"When you leave, someone else comes and lies in your bed. That's that. Why don't you sit yourself down for a couple of hours in the foyer and
514 ? HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
observe closely: the people don't have faces! They are only dummies, every one of them. They're all dead and don't even know
it . . . Grand Hotel, bella vita, eh? Oh well, the main thing is that one must have one's suitcase packed. " (p. 36)
Notes
1. On this see Jean Amery, Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre (Stuttgart, 1970).
2. Ernst Bloch remarks pertinently on this (1929): "Kracauer has journeyed to the center of this
way of not being there. " Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt, 1977), p. 33.
3. From Hans Henny Jahnn's review (1929): "In any case, it is terrible. And inescapable. And
only the one lesson is etched in fanatically: affirm lousy life, because it is nevertheless and at least life. And death comes soon enough anyway. It really comes and is introduced to us. Here it must be said what pain is. As with every greater book, also with this one, one will have to make some deci- sions, because one has experienced some things that were not made of cardboard. " Jahnn, Werke u. Tagebttcher, vol. 7 (Hamburg, 1974), p. 253.
4. On Hoelz, see Sloterdijk, Literatur und Lebenserfahrung (Munich, 1978), pp. 190ff. , 202ff. , 31 Iff.
5. How Toller's insights as a "free man" are linked with the learning processes and sensitizations "characteristic of prison experience" can be seen by going back to his prison writings. Kurt Kreiler refers to them in the sections devoted to Toller in his excellent documentation: "Sie machen uns lang- sam tot . . . Zeugnisse politischer Gefangener in Deutschland 77S0-198O, ed. K. Kreiler (Neu- wied, 1983). The documents in this volume can be read as a secret history of "systemic" cynicism from the inner perspective of its victims.
6. I describe these texts somewhat more at length in "Die Krise des Individuums-studiert im Medium der Literatur," in J. Schulte-Sasse (ed. ), Political Tendencies in the Literature of the Weimar Republic (Minneapolis, Minn. , 1982).
7. See Vicki Baum, Menschen in Hotel (1931); Joseph Roth, Hotel Savoy; Thomas Mann, Felix Krull; the Zauberberg sanatorium as hotel for the sick; Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, to name a few.
Chapter 25
Postcoital Twilight: Sexual Cynicism and Stories of Intractable Love
With what right do you call deflorations experiences? Arnolt Bronnen, Exzesse (1923)
Woman are remarkable animals, Gaigern thought behind his curtain. Completely strange animals, they are. What does she see in the mirror then, that she makes such a gruesome face?
Vicki Baum, Menschen im Hotel (1931) . . . into the sun with the animal! Pay up! Bring love into
the daylight!
Bertolt Brecht, Baal (1922)
In some erotic scenes from Weimar literature --as a rule, they are not the happiest--something of the heartbeat of freshly gained experience is expressed. In becoming cleverer, lust, melancholy, and brutality are scarcely separable. The same is true when authors write of lovers who separate on the morning after spending their first night together. Man and woman in postcoital sobriety, lost in thought, summarizing experiences, clarifying expectations. The theme is not love itself but what makes it so intractable and fragile. In the morning, the old con- tradictions of union and separation, lust and strangeness, passion and the flow of time again become visible.
In his novel about Lieutenant Tunda, Joseph Roth has tried to provide an epic portrait of the German present. In it there is to be found a diary entry of the hero that records a scene from the new matter-of-fact sexual everyday.
The entire lower part of their bodies is earthly, but from the hands up- ward, they no longer live in terrestrial layers of air. Everyone consists of two halves. . . . They have two lives. The inferior, lower parts ex- ecute eating, drinking and lovemaking, the upper parts pursue their vo- cation. . . .
I slept with a woman who woke me after an hour to ask me whether my spiritual love for her corresponded to my bodily performance. For without the "spiritual" element, she would feel "soiled. " I had to get dressed very quickly, and while I looked under the bed for my lost shirt button, I explained to her that my soul always lives in those parts of the
515
516 ? POSTCOIT AL TWILIGHT
body that I need at a given moment to carry out a certain activity. Thus, when I go for a walk, in the feet, and so on.
"You're a cynic," said the woman. (Roth, Flucht ohne Ende [1927] (pp. 88-89)
We encounter the man here in his "ancestral" role of the sexual cynic, who thinks he has enough with pure sex and who flees as soon as the woman demands something more. In this flight, a genuinely new motif of matter-of-factness is announced--that evasion into understatement that for the style of eroticism in the twenties is so thoroughly typical. In this area, too, the impulse of the times to dis- pense with superstructures asserts itself. The wave of new matter-of-factness-if this word is apposite here--washes old sexual-romantic jetsam ashore. A new spirit of experience, which is psychoanalytic, treated hygienically within mar- riage, and emancipatively inspired, now pushes toward a more "matter-of-fact" treatment of this entire area, which is so beset by dreams and secrets, tensions and longings. That at the same time, as always, erotic illusionism triumphs in mass media does not change anything in the tendency. The intelligentsia, in any case, already begins to orient itself in things dealing with love, existentially- analytic, reflective, experimental, decisionistic, melancholy, cynical. Musil's play Die Schwdrmer (The enthusiasts; 1921) superbly documents this swelling of a stimulating reflectiveness. One starts to take leave of the cult of pure "ex- perience" and to realize that in our experiences, a kind of grammar of experience and feeling comes into effect. An adult consciousness can only be a consciousness
that takes notice of this. If one puts erotic idealism to one side, firmer contours in personal transactions become visible. The erotic barter comes more clearly to light; the animal, capricious side of sexual energy makes itself felt; the projective components of being in love and the resignative components of fidelity cannot be overlooked in the long run. And like everywhere else where ideals collapse, cyni- cism, which lives out its disappointment by pushing over what is already falling, is not far behind.
The young Brecht moves with a quite special virtuosity and alertness on this terrain. He discovers a new tone for cynicisms of this type --a poetry of the ordi- nary and brutal. It is the language of the Baalian life feeling, which celebrates a cynically vital masculinity. For Baal --poet, eroticist, vagabond, existentialist, and lyrical-instinctual subject--women, the young ones, are nothing other than poetic or hormonal stimuli, nothing other than hole, patch of color, odor, play- thing, animal, white thighs. To be sure, this masculinism is lyrically ennobled by Brecht. It possesses --besides the manifestly cynical aspect --also a kynical, productive, antibourgeois aspect. The powerful nature of the elementary, bril- liant man recalls the "alternative life" that is not mutilated by time allocations and regulations but instead flows on in the stream of moods and energies. Brecht lets
POSTCOIT AL TWILIGHT ? 517
? Otto Dix, Melancholy, 1930.
sexuality and poetry flow into each other in imaginary currents. If Baal has hauled "someone" from the street into his room with the excuse "It's New Year. There has to be something white in this damned hole. A cloud! "-he nevertheless does not accept any resistance from the woman.
"You're a woman like any other. The head is different. The knees are all weak . . . that's the way it is with animals. "
Where Roth's cynicism remains ironically, politely, and melancholically masked, Brecht uses the figure of the powerful genius to openly mount an attack. Under the protection of aesthetic vitalism, sexual cynicism begins the flight to the fore in lyric.
518 ? POSTCOIT AL TWILIGHT
? ? Karl Hubbuch, Lovers' Death in Jager Street, 1922.
Baal's attic room
I
Dawn. Baal and Johanna sitting on the edge of the bed.
JOHANNA: Oh, what have I done! I'm bad.
BAAL: Wash yourself instead! . . .
JOHANNA: Don't you want to open the window?
BAAL: I love the smell. What would you say to a new edition? What's
done is done.
POSTCOITAL TWILIGHT ? 519
JOHANNA: How can you be so mean?
BAAL: [lazing on the bed]: White and washed pure by the Deluge, Baal
lets his thoughts fly, like doves over the black waters.
JOHANNA: Where is my bodice? Like this I can't . . .
BAAL: [holding it out to her]: Here! What can't you do, darling? JOHANNA: GO home. [Lets it fall, but gets dressed. ]
BAAL: [whistles]: A wild tomboy! I feel every bone in my body. Give
me a kiss!
JOHANNA: [on the table in the middle of the room]: Say something! [Baal
is silent. ] Do you still love me? Tell me! [Baal whistles. ] Can't you
say it?
BAAL: [looking at the ceiling]: I've had it up to here.
JOHANNA: What was that then last night? And before that?
BAAL: Johannes might make a row. Emilie too walks around like a scut-
tled sailing ship. I could die of hunger here. You don't lift a finger
for anyone.