Karl Thomas also suffers because
sleeping
with this woman guarantees no hopes of a future with her.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
Those who are not completely hardened feel it even today.
The contradictions had still a long way to go before they could be felt as mere differences; they were rather felt in their full harshness.
And at the same time, the leveling tendency began to mix together everything that once stood opposed into a many-sided uniformity.
Here, too, the media already took on their typical role of dedialecticizing reality (see Excursus 9).
With regard to the spiritual state of the times, Musil spoke of a "Babylonian madhouse" (Das hilflose Europa) from whose windows a thousand voices screamed.
Weimar pluralism itself had two poles: an expanding, leveling, global view, and a small-scale, atomistic, retreating pole.
While the mass media and the mass parties synchronized consciousnesses in wide dimensions, innumerable cells buried themselves in detached living spaces, microideologies, sects, subcul- tural public spheres and regional as well as cultural provinces.
Mostly the con- temporaries found out only afterward what kind of times they had really lived in--and what was simultaneous with them.
This can be studied well through the style of memoir literature that flourished particularly strongly in this decade.
The contemporaries of these pluralist realities are simultaneously forced into the role of fringe dwellers who not only live in their local and cultural provinces but also stand with one foot in the universal.
Amphibian mentalities become common- place.
The myths of identity crumble.
And the rest is done by the polarization, clearly felt from the twenties onward of labor morality and leisure morality, with which the ego falls apart into separate halves above which "character" can only try in vain to erect a director ego (Regie-Ich).
Here it becomes clear for the first time how the switches were shifted for the psychologization of society.
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The third front is directly adjoining. It is that of the consumerism and cosmetic realism crystallizing in the new middle classes, which are predestined to a new agility and a new frivolousness. For with the ascendancy of the urban civilizations of salaried workers-some particularly like to demonstrate this with the example
502 ? HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
of Berlin in the twenties --a new sociopsychological era indeed also begins. It bears unmistakable signs of Americanism. Its most significant creation is the leisure-time individual, the weekend person, who has discovered contentedness in alienation and comfort in a double life. Europe learns the first words in Ameri- can, among them one that for many symbolizes Europe's decline: weekend. Even the Comedian Harmonists celebrate its apotheosis.
Weekend and sunshine
And then alone with you in the woods I don't need anything else to be happy Weekend and sunshine. . . .
No car, no highway(! )
and nobody in our vicinity.
Deep in the woods, just me and you dear God closes an eye. . . .
The new themes are gathered: retreat into leisure time, modern turning away from the attributes of modernity, weekend vitalism, and a breath of sexual revolu- tion. How self-evidently is it presupposed that the woods can be transformed into relaxation areas for city dwellers! Imagine how, only one generation earlier, the
1Germans had still propagated forest mysticism! Sure of their instincts, the hits
of the time make use, illusionistically and ironically at the same time, of the leisure-time mentality in the new urban middle strata. For them, the world should look rosy, and for this, not only dear God closes an eye. The hits belong to a broad system of distraction that, profitably and passionately, devotes itself to the task of wallpapering the leisure-time worlds with comfortable, transparent illusions.
The ominous twenties introduce the age of mass cosmetics. From it emerges, as the main psychological type, the smiling, distracted schizoid-the "nice per- son" in the worst sense of the word. Kracauer, who pursued these phenomena at the moment of their emergence, wrote in 1929:
A piece of information that I have obtained from a well-known Berlin department store is extraordinarily instructive. "In employing sales and office personnel," says an influential gentleman in the personnel depart- ment, "we emphasize, above all, a pleasant appearance. " I ask him what he regards as pleasant; whether spicy or pretty. "Not exactly pretty. What is decisive is, rather, the moral-pink skin color, you know. " (S.
2Gustav Regler, to whom we are indebted for the surreal actors' scene in the preceding chapter, also had the opportunity of trying out at close range a metamorphosis into the nice person in the world of commodities. Married to the daughter of a large department store owner (whom he called "the wolf), the
Kracauer, Schriften I [Frankfurt, 1971], p. 223)
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? ? 503
QretelQrom gestern nochcBerliner (3ekretarin, beufe^evuekumflerm irfjiollyxvood. . .
Gretel Grow, yesterday still a Berlin secretary, today a revue artiste in Hollywood . . .
young man was imposed on by his well-meaning father-in-law to take a respecta- ble position in his firm. Regler became an apprentice in textiles and later a su- pervisor.
I learned about customer service, smiling, lying, calculation and meas- uring up, gentle and energetic behavior, feigned moods and managers' psychology, salesman's jokes and trade union demands, government decrees and taxation tricks. . . .
? I moved further and further from the people, to whom I voluntarily
504 D HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
had offered myself five years before, and I moved further and further from myself.
My nervous system developed what was later called "managers' dis- ease": the office became my refuge. . . . It was the flight into activity, the stagnation of the soul. Around public holidays and vacations there was a dangerous stillness. . . .
. . . I was not myself. To managers' disease belongs also that split consciousness that no longer permits one to concentrate on what is es- sential. A shock had to occur in order to weld the two parts together again. (Das Ohr des Malchus [Frankfurt, 1975], pp. 134, 138-39, 140)
It was in the twenties that the sociopsychological design of the competent "nice person" was carried into the middle- class masses. It created the psychological ba- sis of the New Matter-of-Factness, namely, that accommodating realism with which the urban cultured strata tried to give a first positive echo to the unalterable and in part welcome facts of modernity. It is not easy to say when the contem- poraries consciously registered the change in the sociopsychological
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climate. What is beyond doubt is that between 1921 and 1925, it must have spread so far that from the middle of the decade onward, a conscious, indeed even program- matic, restyling of the culture industry and of psychic reflexes could set in with a tendency toward "matter-of-factness. " During the hot inflation years of 1921-23, literature and the "history of morals" registered a first flickering of crass neohedonistic currents. In the provinces, the concepts Berlin, prostitution, and speculation become firmly associated. In the strong economic upturn of the infla-
tionary period, which was accompanied by an intense concentration of capital and an export boom, a new middle-class illusionism celebrated a dress rehearsal while the zeroes on the banknotes galloped on. The show began. American revues made inroads into the German public's expectations. With naked legs and breasts, the new, American, way of being "shameless" triumphed. Cries of distress from the Fulda Bishop's Conference could do nothing against it. From 1923 on, public en- tertainment radio also began to cater to the new stage in the socialization of atten- tiveness.
That a change of climate of grand dimensions had really taken place was felt particularly by those contemporaries who, as prisoners of war, had been cut off for years from the new everyday life of the Weimar Republic. Shocked, they now experienced their return to worlds that had become alien. More strongly than the others, they registered the increasingly impudent demands the ambivalences and cynicisms of capitalist modernity placed on individuals' will to life and their ca- pacity for affirmation. In Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), Doblin narrates just such a story of the return of an individual, Franz Biberkopf. It begins with an impres- sive description of Biberkopf s journey through the city he had not seen for a long time, during which he becomes giddy. The novel carries on medicocynical and
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? ? 505
? . SCUlpurgisnacbt auf FicnUcllsfcId"
Walpurgis Night on Henkel's Field (May 1928). ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/ V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
military-cynical lines from the war. In the big city, too, the struggle goes on.
3Biberkopf becomes a one-armed man.
on which anyone who wants to have "character" and be an "upright person" has to lose himself. With Biberkopf, the failure of self-preservation and wanting-to- be-strong is gruesomely exercised. In the end, as he lies dying in a madhouse, his death reveals to him what he has done wrong.
You have cramped yourself into strength, and the cramp has still not evaporated, and it's no use. . . . You just want to be strong . . . Just blabbed: "Poor me, poor me" and "How unjust that I suffer" and how
The city befalls him like a shattered front
506 ? HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
? 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
4return.
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
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
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
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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. . . .
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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,
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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.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
The third front is directly adjoining. It is that of the consumerism and cosmetic realism crystallizing in the new middle classes, which are predestined to a new agility and a new frivolousness. For with the ascendancy of the urban civilizations of salaried workers-some particularly like to demonstrate this with the example
502 ? HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
of Berlin in the twenties --a new sociopsychological era indeed also begins. It bears unmistakable signs of Americanism. Its most significant creation is the leisure-time individual, the weekend person, who has discovered contentedness in alienation and comfort in a double life. Europe learns the first words in Ameri- can, among them one that for many symbolizes Europe's decline: weekend. Even the Comedian Harmonists celebrate its apotheosis.
Weekend and sunshine
And then alone with you in the woods I don't need anything else to be happy Weekend and sunshine. . . .
No car, no highway(! )
and nobody in our vicinity.
Deep in the woods, just me and you dear God closes an eye. . . .
The new themes are gathered: retreat into leisure time, modern turning away from the attributes of modernity, weekend vitalism, and a breath of sexual revolu- tion. How self-evidently is it presupposed that the woods can be transformed into relaxation areas for city dwellers! Imagine how, only one generation earlier, the
1Germans had still propagated forest mysticism! Sure of their instincts, the hits
of the time make use, illusionistically and ironically at the same time, of the leisure-time mentality in the new urban middle strata. For them, the world should look rosy, and for this, not only dear God closes an eye. The hits belong to a broad system of distraction that, profitably and passionately, devotes itself to the task of wallpapering the leisure-time worlds with comfortable, transparent illusions.
The ominous twenties introduce the age of mass cosmetics. From it emerges, as the main psychological type, the smiling, distracted schizoid-the "nice per- son" in the worst sense of the word. Kracauer, who pursued these phenomena at the moment of their emergence, wrote in 1929:
A piece of information that I have obtained from a well-known Berlin department store is extraordinarily instructive. "In employing sales and office personnel," says an influential gentleman in the personnel depart- ment, "we emphasize, above all, a pleasant appearance. " I ask him what he regards as pleasant; whether spicy or pretty. "Not exactly pretty. What is decisive is, rather, the moral-pink skin color, you know. " (S.
2Gustav Regler, to whom we are indebted for the surreal actors' scene in the preceding chapter, also had the opportunity of trying out at close range a metamorphosis into the nice person in the world of commodities. Married to the daughter of a large department store owner (whom he called "the wolf), the
Kracauer, Schriften I [Frankfurt, 1971], p. 223)
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? ? 503
QretelQrom gestern nochcBerliner (3ekretarin, beufe^evuekumflerm irfjiollyxvood. . .
Gretel Grow, yesterday still a Berlin secretary, today a revue artiste in Hollywood . . .
young man was imposed on by his well-meaning father-in-law to take a respecta- ble position in his firm. Regler became an apprentice in textiles and later a su- pervisor.
I learned about customer service, smiling, lying, calculation and meas- uring up, gentle and energetic behavior, feigned moods and managers' psychology, salesman's jokes and trade union demands, government decrees and taxation tricks. . . .
? I moved further and further from the people, to whom I voluntarily
504 D HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
had offered myself five years before, and I moved further and further from myself.
My nervous system developed what was later called "managers' dis- ease": the office became my refuge. . . . It was the flight into activity, the stagnation of the soul. Around public holidays and vacations there was a dangerous stillness. . . .
. . . I was not myself. To managers' disease belongs also that split consciousness that no longer permits one to concentrate on what is es- sential. A shock had to occur in order to weld the two parts together again. (Das Ohr des Malchus [Frankfurt, 1975], pp. 134, 138-39, 140)
It was in the twenties that the sociopsychological design of the competent "nice person" was carried into the middle- class masses. It created the psychological ba- sis of the New Matter-of-Factness, namely, that accommodating realism with which the urban cultured strata tried to give a first positive echo to the unalterable and in part welcome facts of modernity. It is not easy to say when the contem- poraries consciously registered the change in the sociopsychological
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climate. What is beyond doubt is that between 1921 and 1925, it must have spread so far that from the middle of the decade onward, a conscious, indeed even program- matic, restyling of the culture industry and of psychic reflexes could set in with a tendency toward "matter-of-factness. " During the hot inflation years of 1921-23, literature and the "history of morals" registered a first flickering of crass neohedonistic currents. In the provinces, the concepts Berlin, prostitution, and speculation become firmly associated. In the strong economic upturn of the infla-
tionary period, which was accompanied by an intense concentration of capital and an export boom, a new middle-class illusionism celebrated a dress rehearsal while the zeroes on the banknotes galloped on. The show began. American revues made inroads into the German public's expectations. With naked legs and breasts, the new, American, way of being "shameless" triumphed. Cries of distress from the Fulda Bishop's Conference could do nothing against it. From 1923 on, public en- tertainment radio also began to cater to the new stage in the socialization of atten- tiveness.
That a change of climate of grand dimensions had really taken place was felt particularly by those contemporaries who, as prisoners of war, had been cut off for years from the new everyday life of the Weimar Republic. Shocked, they now experienced their return to worlds that had become alien. More strongly than the others, they registered the increasingly impudent demands the ambivalences and cynicisms of capitalist modernity placed on individuals' will to life and their ca- pacity for affirmation. In Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), Doblin narrates just such a story of the return of an individual, Franz Biberkopf. It begins with an impres- sive description of Biberkopf s journey through the city he had not seen for a long time, during which he becomes giddy. The novel carries on medicocynical and
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? ? 505
? . SCUlpurgisnacbt auf FicnUcllsfcId"
Walpurgis Night on Henkel's Field (May 1928). ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/ V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
military-cynical lines from the war. In the big city, too, the struggle goes on.
3Biberkopf becomes a one-armed man.
on which anyone who wants to have "character" and be an "upright person" has to lose himself. With Biberkopf, the failure of self-preservation and wanting-to- be-strong is gruesomely exercised. In the end, as he lies dying in a madhouse, his death reveals to him what he has done wrong.
You have cramped yourself into strength, and the cramp has still not evaporated, and it's no use. . . . You just want to be strong . . . Just blabbed: "Poor me, poor me" and "How unjust that I suffer" and how
The city befalls him like a shattered front
506 ? HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
? 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
4return.
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
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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
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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. . . .
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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,
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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.
