"A typically Russian atmosphere,"
observed
Strom.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
" 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
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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
9were 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,
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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. . . .
. . . "You mustn't take anything to heart," said the commercial edi- tor to Fabian. "He has been a journalist for twenty years and already believes what he lies. . . "
"You disapprove of your colleague's indolence? " Fabian asked Herr Malmy. "What do you do besides that? "
The commercial editor smiled, of course only with his mouth. "I lie too," he replied. "But I know it. I know that the system is false. With us in the economy, a blind man can see that. But I serve the false sys-
"BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS ? 479
tern with devotion. For in the framework of the false system at whose disposal I place my moderate talent, the false measures are correct in the nature of things, and the correct measures are, understandably, false. I am a devotee of strict consistency, and in addition, I am . . . "
"A cynic," Miinzer threw in, without looking up.
Malmy shrugged his shoulders. "I wanted to say, a coward. That hits the mark more exactly. My character is in no way the equal of my un- derstanding. I regret that uprightly, but I no longer do anything against it. "
[Afterwards, they sat in a small wine bar. ]
"I help in doing the wrong thing consistently. Everything that as- sumes gigantic forms can impress, even stupidity. " Miinzer sat on the sofa and suddenly wept. "I am a swine," he murmured.
"A typically Russian atmosphere," observed Strom. "Alcohol, self- torture, grown men weeping. " He was touched and stroked the politi- cian's bald head.
"I am a swine," the other murmured. He said nothing more.
Malmy smiled at Fabian: "The state supports unprofitable large com- panies. The state supports heavy industry. Industry markets its products abroad below cost, but it sells them within our borders above the world market price. . . . The state accelerates the dwindling of the buying power of the masses through taxes it doesn't dare lay on the propertied classes; in any case capital flees in billions over the borders. Is that not consistent? Doesn't madness have method? There, every connoisseur's mouth waters! "
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"I am a swine," murmured Miinzer, and, with his pouting lower lip', caught the tears.
"You overestimate yourself, honorable sir," said the commercial edi- tor. " (Fabian, chapter 3)
These cynical egos are appendages of their cancer-ridden consciousness of reality, which obeys the rules of the game in the capitalist world without resis- tance. In it, there is no misery that does not reflect itself, double itself, and ironi- cally mirror itself in tormented confessions and aggressive consent. The signi- ficant writers of the time behave toward these phenomena as minute-takers. They know that the people at the center of things know what they are doing. * Journalists in particular cannot appeal to any form of ignorance. That a commercial editor makes such a confession about capitalism as the false system that he serves with lies and devotion belongs to the great moments of truth in Weimar culture. With- out insight into the reflective constitution of the cynical structure, a concept of truth for these kinds of situations can no longer be defined. Discreetly disin-
hibited, to the present day it is people of this kind who have grasped the unity
of madness and method and who will say so among friends.
2480 ? "BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS
In the "bright hour," the masks of integrated cynics crumble. Where private confidences and alcohol have helped things along, the decomposition presses threateningly and garrulously out into the open. A manufacturer's monologue from Joseph Roth's novel of 1927, Die Flucht ohne Ende. Ein Bericht (Flight without end. A report), runs along the same lines. The scene takes place at a party in a Rhenish town. People are talking about fashion, the latest models in hats from "Femina," about the workers and the "decline of Marxism," about politics and the League of Nations, about art and Max Reinhardt. The manufacturer, in a conver- sation with Tunda, the hero of the novel, loosens the laces in his patent leather shoes, undoes his collar, and stretches out on a "broad sofa. " In free association, he turns his companion into a witness of his self-analysis.
"Earlier on, I understood you perfectly, Herr Tunda. . . . As far as I am concerned, I posed my questions for a quite definite, egoistic rea- son. In a certain way, I was obliged to do this. You don't understand that yet. First, you will have to live amongst us a little longer. Then you will also have to pose certain questions and give certain answers. Everyone here lives according to eternal laws and against his will. Of course, when they began here, everyone . . . had his own will. He ar- ranged his life completely freely, nobody tried to interfere. But after some time, he did not even notice that what he had set up through a free decision became, if not written, then holy law. . . .
You don't yet know how frightfully open eyes it has. . . .
. . . Now, occupation, too, as far as I'm concerned, is not such an important thing. How one makes a living is not decisive. But what is important is, for example, the love for wife and child. If you began, through your own volition, to be a good family man, do you believe thatyoucouldeverstop? . . . WhenIcamehere,Ihadalottodo;I had to borrow money, set up a factory. . . . Thus when someone came too close to me with something or other, I got him out of my hair in a coarse fashion. I thus became a boor and a man of deeds. People admired my energy. The law overpowered me, commanded me to be coarse and to act carelessly--I must, you see, talk with you as the law commands. . . .
Just like me, all people lie. Everyone says what is prescribed by law. The petite actress who asked you earlier about a young Russian writer is perhaps more interested in petroleum. But no, the roles have been allotted to everyone. The music critic and your brother, for exam- ple: both play the stock exchange, I know. What do they talk about? About cultural matters. When you come into a room and see the peo- ple, you know at once what each will say. Everyone has a role. It is so in our town. No one is in his own skin. And it is the same in our town as in all others, or at least the hundred largest towns in our country. " (Roth, Die Flucht ohne Ende, (pp. 76-79)
"BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS ? 481
? Surgeon-major Doctor Benn, 1916.
482 ? "BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS
This manufacturer even thinks through the compulsion to become cynical (boorishness)--of course, without penetrating the "compulsion" to conform to this reality as such. These are flashes of illumination after which the twilight returns. One knows what one is doing. At any time, if someone asked, one could also say what is wrong with it. One calls it the compulsion of the system, realism. Life becomes one great big agreement to collude with the half-measures and tor- por toward which the majority tends. Over the country there hangs a pseu- dorealist psychological smog, a semidarkness of hardening and demoralization, insight and resignation, drive for self-preservation and ambition. Consciousness is alert but, so as to become anesthetized, it continually casts a side-glance at the "reality that cannot be changed. " "In everyone, the ice dogs bark. "
Not everywhere do things remain on the level of lachrymose and momentary cynicism. Gottfried Benn tried to make the "great hour" out of the small "bright hour. " He outdid the vulgar schizophrenias by distilling lyrical states of the highest
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quality from the German sicknesses of modern times. From the cynic's Yes to an incurable reality, isolated "flowers of evil" can spring. Benn was one of the most significant "secret agents" of his time, who let the cat out of the bag about the collective spiritual condition and made confessions of such explicit sharpness that everyday understanding usually does not comprehend them be- cause it does not have the courage to take them literally.
"A double life in the sense claimed and lived out by me is a conscious splitting of personality, a systematic, tendentious splitting. On this, let us listen to the "Ptolemaic. " . . .
Suffering, what is that anyway? You have dammed up waters --open your sluices; the times do not suit you--: a placard on your desk, in large writing: that is no different! Composure! Things are going well for you--outwardly you earn your money, and inwardly you indulge yourself. You can't have anything more, that is the situation, recognize it, don't demand the impossible! Make do and look on the water occa- sionally, he says in conclusion, but that too is not resignation; that is eclipsed by his Dionysian motif. . . . All that together results over and over again in his principal maxim: recognize your situation -- that is, ac- commodate yourself to the situation, camouflage yourself, forget your convictions. . . . On the other hand, go along with convictions, world- views, syntheses in all directions of the weather vane when institutions and offices demand it, but: keep a cool head. (G. Benn, Doppelleben [Double life], Collected Works, vol. 8, pp. 2004-9)
Notes
1. Denn sie wissen, was sie tun (For they know what they do) is the title of a 1931 novel by Ernst Ottwald that is critical of the judiciary.
2. Another outstanding document is Erik Reger's novel Union der festen Hand, likewise from 1931.
Chapter 23
On the German Republic of Impostors: The Natural History of Deception
Orge says:
"They think of it this way:
The clever ones live off the stupid ones and the stupid from their labor. "
Bertolt Brecht, Tagebucher 1920-1922
If one wanted to write a social history of mistrust in Germany, then above all, the Weimar Republic would draw attention to itself. Fraud and expectations of being defrauded became epidemic in it. In those years, it proved to be an om- nipresent risk of existence that from behind all solid illusions, the untenable and chaotic emerged. A revolution took place in those deep regions of collective feel- ings toward life in which the ontology of everyday life was laid out: a dull feeling of the instability of things penetrated into souls, a feeling of lack of substance, of relativity, of accelerated change, and of involuntary floating from transition to transition.
This softening of the feeling for what is reliable ends in a collectively dispersed rage of anxiety against modernity. For this is the epitome of states of affairs in which everything appears only so-so and is disposed toward change. Out of this anxious rage, a readiness is easily formed to turn away from this incommodious state of the world and to remold the hate against it into a Yes to sociopolitical and ideological movements that promise the greatest simplification and the most ener- getic return to "substantial" and reliable states of affairs. Here, the problem of ideology approaches us from a, so to speak, psychoeconomic direction. Fascism and its side currents were after all --viewed philosophically -- in large part move- ments of simplification. But that precisely the town criers of the new simplicity (good--evil, friend-foe, "front," "identity," "bond") for their part had gone through the modern nihilist school of artfulness, bluff, and deception- that was to become clear to the masses much too late. The "solutions" that sounded so sim- ple, "positiveness," the new "stability," the new essentialness and security: They
483
484 ? ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS
are but structures that, under the surface, are even more complicated than the complicatedness of modern life against which they resist. For they are defensive, reactive formations --composed of modern experiences and denials of the same. Antimodernity is possibly more modern and complex than what it rejects; in any case, it is gloomier, blunter, more brutal, and more cynical.
In such an "insecure" world, the impostor grew into a character type of the times par excellence. Cases of fraud, deception, misleading, breach of promise, charlatanism, and so forth multiplied not only in a numerical sense: The impostor also became an indispensable figure in the sense of collective self-reassurance, a model of the times and a mythical template. With a view toward the impostor, the need to clarify this ambiguous life, in which continually everything came out differently from the way it was "intended," was accommodated in the most favora- ble way. In the impostor, one found the compromise between the feeling of the times that everything was becoming "too complicated" and the need for simpli- fication. If one already no longer saw through the "great whole" and this chaos of money,
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interests, parties, ideologies, and so on, then, in the individual case, one could nevertheless get an overview of the game of facade and background. If one looked on as the defrauder went through his masked game, then this reas- sured one in the feeling that the real world must also be in the vein of such role play, especially where one achieves the least clarity. Thus, the impostor became the existentially most important and most understandable symbol for the chronic crisis of complexity of modern consciousness.
To analyze individual phenomena would be a study in itself. One would have to speak of Thomas Mann's Felix Krull and of his real-life prototype, the ingen- ious deceiver, dreamer, grand seigneur, and hotel thief, Manolescu, an elegant young Romanian who held Europe in suspense with his criminal acts of bravado and his increasingly daring confidence tricks, and who in addition wrote two volumes of memoirs in which literary swindle was added to his criminal acts. One would have to speak of the unforgettable Captain von Kopenick, the classic ple- beian impostor's comedy, with whose dramatic narration Carl Zuckmayer tri- umphed in 1931 on the Weimar stage. In the same trade the false Hohenzollern prince, Harry Domela, also made an attempt by putting the aristocratic sycophancy of Prussian reactionary snobs to the test and who likewise, in 1927, immortalized himself in his memoirs.
Even the enumeration and description of the most important affairs of swindle and deception from that time would fill a thick book. It would show that deception had become an industry and that the expectation of being deceived (in the double sense: as readiness to let oneself be deceived and as mistrust that someone would try to pull the wool over one's eyes) had become a universal state of conscious- ness. They were years of the collective dawning of an illusion in whose twilight the one side saw their chances to make a career of deceptions and promises, and the others let their readiness for an illusion become so starkly visible that the ac-
ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS ? 485
tive side only had to do what the passive side expected. Modernity establishes it- self in people's minds in the form of a permanent training in seduction and simul- taneous mistrust.
In 1923 inflation in Germany reached its peak. The state, which let its printing presses run hot without having any backing, was thereby itself caught in the role of the grand deceiver, even if it was not drawn to account, since nobody could take legal action against loss through inflation. In this year, a small Leipzig com- pany published a booklet entitled Die Psychologie des Hochstaplers (The psy- chology of the impostor). Its author was Doctor Erich Wulffen, a humanistically educated person with many interests. A former public prosecutor from Dresden, Wulffen had devoted himself to pursuing the scientific fight against crime (crimi- nology), even into the psychocultural preconditions of crime. In his chats, a new science took shape: "cultural criminology. " Wulffen provided a psychopathology of everyday life for the daily use of public prosecutors and officers of the law. He placed himself, with the title "criminal psychologist," beside Lombroso and Gross. His booklet, as innocent and humorous as it pretends to be, reads like a police anthropology of the twenties. Here, everything is revealed by someone for whom deception, because of his profession, comprises half his life and, if one also includes the exposure, then his whole life.
The origins of deception, according to Wulffen, lie in the drive structure of human beings. Namely, nature has given human beings an inherent instinct for secrecy and dissimulation that aids the general drive for self-preservation. But traces of deception can also be found even in nonhuman domain: Bears, apes, horses, and other creatures have been caught dissimulating. Thus, the "begin- nings of the psychology of the impostor" (p. 7) are present even in the brains of lower animals. In human beings such beginnings have unfolded in a specific way. Children are born deceivers. Their drive to play, their talent for "apparent lies," their capacity for imitation, and their penchant for experimenting with mental constructions provide the public prosecutor with proof of their "inherited instinct for dissimulation. " As a psychologist, Wulffen knows that all crimes grow out of "quite modest beginnings. " Normality is the breeding ground of crime. "A child, likewise in order to have a change, pretends to have a need so as to be taken out of the crib, carriage or chair" (p. 8). In the need for change are to be found the seeds of later bourgeois disorder, which is often nothing other than the acting out of dreams that life simultaneously wakens and prohibits in individuals. With the impostor, the transition from the drive and the dream into crime is accomplished as is, at the same time, a metamorphosis of the mere crime into an aesthetic phenomenon. That is what evidently fascinates the former public prosecutor so much about his topic. By pursuing criminal psychology, Wulffen coquets with high culture: He recognizes the crime of the impostor basically as a practiced piece of art. Of course, in this connection he cites Goethe, Nietzsche, and Lom- broso, and again and again he touches on the relations between the talent of the
486 ? ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS
impostor and the artist--not only from the perspective of plagiarism.
like poetry and dramaturgy, is dominated by the pleasure principle. It obeys the magical spell of great roles, the pleasure in playing games, the need for self- aggrandizement, the sense of improvisation. The great impostors build up noth- ing more than the stages for their roles.
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
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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
9were 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,
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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
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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. . . .
. . . "You mustn't take anything to heart," said the commercial edi- tor to Fabian. "He has been a journalist for twenty years and already believes what he lies. . . "
"You disapprove of your colleague's indolence? " Fabian asked Herr Malmy. "What do you do besides that? "
The commercial editor smiled, of course only with his mouth. "I lie too," he replied. "But I know it. I know that the system is false. With us in the economy, a blind man can see that. But I serve the false sys-
"BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS ? 479
tern with devotion. For in the framework of the false system at whose disposal I place my moderate talent, the false measures are correct in the nature of things, and the correct measures are, understandably, false. I am a devotee of strict consistency, and in addition, I am . . . "
"A cynic," Miinzer threw in, without looking up.
Malmy shrugged his shoulders. "I wanted to say, a coward. That hits the mark more exactly. My character is in no way the equal of my un- derstanding. I regret that uprightly, but I no longer do anything against it. "
[Afterwards, they sat in a small wine bar. ]
"I help in doing the wrong thing consistently. Everything that as- sumes gigantic forms can impress, even stupidity. " Miinzer sat on the sofa and suddenly wept. "I am a swine," he murmured.
"A typically Russian atmosphere," observed Strom. "Alcohol, self- torture, grown men weeping. " He was touched and stroked the politi- cian's bald head.
"I am a swine," the other murmured. He said nothing more.
Malmy smiled at Fabian: "The state supports unprofitable large com- panies. The state supports heavy industry. Industry markets its products abroad below cost, but it sells them within our borders above the world market price. . . . The state accelerates the dwindling of the buying power of the masses through taxes it doesn't dare lay on the propertied classes; in any case capital flees in billions over the borders. Is that not consistent? Doesn't madness have method? There, every connoisseur's mouth waters! "
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"I am a swine," murmured Miinzer, and, with his pouting lower lip', caught the tears.
"You overestimate yourself, honorable sir," said the commercial edi- tor. " (Fabian, chapter 3)
These cynical egos are appendages of their cancer-ridden consciousness of reality, which obeys the rules of the game in the capitalist world without resis- tance. In it, there is no misery that does not reflect itself, double itself, and ironi- cally mirror itself in tormented confessions and aggressive consent. The signi- ficant writers of the time behave toward these phenomena as minute-takers. They know that the people at the center of things know what they are doing. * Journalists in particular cannot appeal to any form of ignorance. That a commercial editor makes such a confession about capitalism as the false system that he serves with lies and devotion belongs to the great moments of truth in Weimar culture. With- out insight into the reflective constitution of the cynical structure, a concept of truth for these kinds of situations can no longer be defined. Discreetly disin-
hibited, to the present day it is people of this kind who have grasped the unity
of madness and method and who will say so among friends.
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In the "bright hour," the masks of integrated cynics crumble. Where private confidences and alcohol have helped things along, the decomposition presses threateningly and garrulously out into the open. A manufacturer's monologue from Joseph Roth's novel of 1927, Die Flucht ohne Ende. Ein Bericht (Flight without end. A report), runs along the same lines. The scene takes place at a party in a Rhenish town. People are talking about fashion, the latest models in hats from "Femina," about the workers and the "decline of Marxism," about politics and the League of Nations, about art and Max Reinhardt. The manufacturer, in a conver- sation with Tunda, the hero of the novel, loosens the laces in his patent leather shoes, undoes his collar, and stretches out on a "broad sofa. " In free association, he turns his companion into a witness of his self-analysis.
"Earlier on, I understood you perfectly, Herr Tunda. . . . As far as I am concerned, I posed my questions for a quite definite, egoistic rea- son. In a certain way, I was obliged to do this. You don't understand that yet. First, you will have to live amongst us a little longer. Then you will also have to pose certain questions and give certain answers. Everyone here lives according to eternal laws and against his will. Of course, when they began here, everyone . . . had his own will. He ar- ranged his life completely freely, nobody tried to interfere. But after some time, he did not even notice that what he had set up through a free decision became, if not written, then holy law. . . .
You don't yet know how frightfully open eyes it has. . . .
. . . Now, occupation, too, as far as I'm concerned, is not such an important thing. How one makes a living is not decisive. But what is important is, for example, the love for wife and child. If you began, through your own volition, to be a good family man, do you believe thatyoucouldeverstop? . . . WhenIcamehere,Ihadalottodo;I had to borrow money, set up a factory. . . . Thus when someone came too close to me with something or other, I got him out of my hair in a coarse fashion. I thus became a boor and a man of deeds. People admired my energy. The law overpowered me, commanded me to be coarse and to act carelessly--I must, you see, talk with you as the law commands. . . .
Just like me, all people lie. Everyone says what is prescribed by law. The petite actress who asked you earlier about a young Russian writer is perhaps more interested in petroleum. But no, the roles have been allotted to everyone. The music critic and your brother, for exam- ple: both play the stock exchange, I know. What do they talk about? About cultural matters. When you come into a room and see the peo- ple, you know at once what each will say. Everyone has a role. It is so in our town. No one is in his own skin. And it is the same in our town as in all others, or at least the hundred largest towns in our country. " (Roth, Die Flucht ohne Ende, (pp. 76-79)
"BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS ? 481
? Surgeon-major Doctor Benn, 1916.
482 ? "BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS
This manufacturer even thinks through the compulsion to become cynical (boorishness)--of course, without penetrating the "compulsion" to conform to this reality as such. These are flashes of illumination after which the twilight returns. One knows what one is doing. At any time, if someone asked, one could also say what is wrong with it. One calls it the compulsion of the system, realism. Life becomes one great big agreement to collude with the half-measures and tor- por toward which the majority tends. Over the country there hangs a pseu- dorealist psychological smog, a semidarkness of hardening and demoralization, insight and resignation, drive for self-preservation and ambition. Consciousness is alert but, so as to become anesthetized, it continually casts a side-glance at the "reality that cannot be changed. " "In everyone, the ice dogs bark. "
Not everywhere do things remain on the level of lachrymose and momentary cynicism. Gottfried Benn tried to make the "great hour" out of the small "bright hour. " He outdid the vulgar schizophrenias by distilling lyrical states of the highest
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quality from the German sicknesses of modern times. From the cynic's Yes to an incurable reality, isolated "flowers of evil" can spring. Benn was one of the most significant "secret agents" of his time, who let the cat out of the bag about the collective spiritual condition and made confessions of such explicit sharpness that everyday understanding usually does not comprehend them be- cause it does not have the courage to take them literally.
"A double life in the sense claimed and lived out by me is a conscious splitting of personality, a systematic, tendentious splitting. On this, let us listen to the "Ptolemaic. " . . .
Suffering, what is that anyway? You have dammed up waters --open your sluices; the times do not suit you--: a placard on your desk, in large writing: that is no different! Composure! Things are going well for you--outwardly you earn your money, and inwardly you indulge yourself. You can't have anything more, that is the situation, recognize it, don't demand the impossible! Make do and look on the water occa- sionally, he says in conclusion, but that too is not resignation; that is eclipsed by his Dionysian motif. . . . All that together results over and over again in his principal maxim: recognize your situation -- that is, ac- commodate yourself to the situation, camouflage yourself, forget your convictions. . . . On the other hand, go along with convictions, world- views, syntheses in all directions of the weather vane when institutions and offices demand it, but: keep a cool head. (G. Benn, Doppelleben [Double life], Collected Works, vol. 8, pp. 2004-9)
Notes
1. Denn sie wissen, was sie tun (For they know what they do) is the title of a 1931 novel by Ernst Ottwald that is critical of the judiciary.
2. Another outstanding document is Erik Reger's novel Union der festen Hand, likewise from 1931.
Chapter 23
On the German Republic of Impostors: The Natural History of Deception
Orge says:
"They think of it this way:
The clever ones live off the stupid ones and the stupid from their labor. "
Bertolt Brecht, Tagebucher 1920-1922
If one wanted to write a social history of mistrust in Germany, then above all, the Weimar Republic would draw attention to itself. Fraud and expectations of being defrauded became epidemic in it. In those years, it proved to be an om- nipresent risk of existence that from behind all solid illusions, the untenable and chaotic emerged. A revolution took place in those deep regions of collective feel- ings toward life in which the ontology of everyday life was laid out: a dull feeling of the instability of things penetrated into souls, a feeling of lack of substance, of relativity, of accelerated change, and of involuntary floating from transition to transition.
This softening of the feeling for what is reliable ends in a collectively dispersed rage of anxiety against modernity. For this is the epitome of states of affairs in which everything appears only so-so and is disposed toward change. Out of this anxious rage, a readiness is easily formed to turn away from this incommodious state of the world and to remold the hate against it into a Yes to sociopolitical and ideological movements that promise the greatest simplification and the most ener- getic return to "substantial" and reliable states of affairs. Here, the problem of ideology approaches us from a, so to speak, psychoeconomic direction. Fascism and its side currents were after all --viewed philosophically -- in large part move- ments of simplification. But that precisely the town criers of the new simplicity (good--evil, friend-foe, "front," "identity," "bond") for their part had gone through the modern nihilist school of artfulness, bluff, and deception- that was to become clear to the masses much too late. The "solutions" that sounded so sim- ple, "positiveness," the new "stability," the new essentialness and security: They
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are but structures that, under the surface, are even more complicated than the complicatedness of modern life against which they resist. For they are defensive, reactive formations --composed of modern experiences and denials of the same. Antimodernity is possibly more modern and complex than what it rejects; in any case, it is gloomier, blunter, more brutal, and more cynical.
In such an "insecure" world, the impostor grew into a character type of the times par excellence. Cases of fraud, deception, misleading, breach of promise, charlatanism, and so forth multiplied not only in a numerical sense: The impostor also became an indispensable figure in the sense of collective self-reassurance, a model of the times and a mythical template. With a view toward the impostor, the need to clarify this ambiguous life, in which continually everything came out differently from the way it was "intended," was accommodated in the most favora- ble way. In the impostor, one found the compromise between the feeling of the times that everything was becoming "too complicated" and the need for simpli- fication. If one already no longer saw through the "great whole" and this chaos of money,
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interests, parties, ideologies, and so on, then, in the individual case, one could nevertheless get an overview of the game of facade and background. If one looked on as the defrauder went through his masked game, then this reas- sured one in the feeling that the real world must also be in the vein of such role play, especially where one achieves the least clarity. Thus, the impostor became the existentially most important and most understandable symbol for the chronic crisis of complexity of modern consciousness.
To analyze individual phenomena would be a study in itself. One would have to speak of Thomas Mann's Felix Krull and of his real-life prototype, the ingen- ious deceiver, dreamer, grand seigneur, and hotel thief, Manolescu, an elegant young Romanian who held Europe in suspense with his criminal acts of bravado and his increasingly daring confidence tricks, and who in addition wrote two volumes of memoirs in which literary swindle was added to his criminal acts. One would have to speak of the unforgettable Captain von Kopenick, the classic ple- beian impostor's comedy, with whose dramatic narration Carl Zuckmayer tri- umphed in 1931 on the Weimar stage. In the same trade the false Hohenzollern prince, Harry Domela, also made an attempt by putting the aristocratic sycophancy of Prussian reactionary snobs to the test and who likewise, in 1927, immortalized himself in his memoirs.
Even the enumeration and description of the most important affairs of swindle and deception from that time would fill a thick book. It would show that deception had become an industry and that the expectation of being deceived (in the double sense: as readiness to let oneself be deceived and as mistrust that someone would try to pull the wool over one's eyes) had become a universal state of conscious- ness. They were years of the collective dawning of an illusion in whose twilight the one side saw their chances to make a career of deceptions and promises, and the others let their readiness for an illusion become so starkly visible that the ac-
ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS ? 485
tive side only had to do what the passive side expected. Modernity establishes it- self in people's minds in the form of a permanent training in seduction and simul- taneous mistrust.
In 1923 inflation in Germany reached its peak. The state, which let its printing presses run hot without having any backing, was thereby itself caught in the role of the grand deceiver, even if it was not drawn to account, since nobody could take legal action against loss through inflation. In this year, a small Leipzig com- pany published a booklet entitled Die Psychologie des Hochstaplers (The psy- chology of the impostor). Its author was Doctor Erich Wulffen, a humanistically educated person with many interests. A former public prosecutor from Dresden, Wulffen had devoted himself to pursuing the scientific fight against crime (crimi- nology), even into the psychocultural preconditions of crime. In his chats, a new science took shape: "cultural criminology. " Wulffen provided a psychopathology of everyday life for the daily use of public prosecutors and officers of the law. He placed himself, with the title "criminal psychologist," beside Lombroso and Gross. His booklet, as innocent and humorous as it pretends to be, reads like a police anthropology of the twenties. Here, everything is revealed by someone for whom deception, because of his profession, comprises half his life and, if one also includes the exposure, then his whole life.
The origins of deception, according to Wulffen, lie in the drive structure of human beings. Namely, nature has given human beings an inherent instinct for secrecy and dissimulation that aids the general drive for self-preservation. But traces of deception can also be found even in nonhuman domain: Bears, apes, horses, and other creatures have been caught dissimulating. Thus, the "begin- nings of the psychology of the impostor" (p. 7) are present even in the brains of lower animals. In human beings such beginnings have unfolded in a specific way. Children are born deceivers. Their drive to play, their talent for "apparent lies," their capacity for imitation, and their penchant for experimenting with mental constructions provide the public prosecutor with proof of their "inherited instinct for dissimulation. " As a psychologist, Wulffen knows that all crimes grow out of "quite modest beginnings. " Normality is the breeding ground of crime. "A child, likewise in order to have a change, pretends to have a need so as to be taken out of the crib, carriage or chair" (p. 8). In the need for change are to be found the seeds of later bourgeois disorder, which is often nothing other than the acting out of dreams that life simultaneously wakens and prohibits in individuals. With the impostor, the transition from the drive and the dream into crime is accomplished as is, at the same time, a metamorphosis of the mere crime into an aesthetic phenomenon. That is what evidently fascinates the former public prosecutor so much about his topic. By pursuing criminal psychology, Wulffen coquets with high culture: He recognizes the crime of the impostor basically as a practiced piece of art. Of course, in this connection he cites Goethe, Nietzsche, and Lom- broso, and again and again he touches on the relations between the talent of the
486 ? ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS
impostor and the artist--not only from the perspective of plagiarism.
like poetry and dramaturgy, is dominated by the pleasure principle. It obeys the magical spell of great roles, the pleasure in playing games, the need for self- aggrandizement, the sense of improvisation. The great impostors build up noth- ing more than the stages for their roles.
