No More Learning

In Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925), we find passages in which the dynamic of such denial can be grasped in crystalline form. Hitler describes how he, as loser, would have liked to dictate to the victors the conditions under which he would rather have lost the war, in any case, not this way.
Does a military defeat have to lead to a total collapse of a nation or a state? Since when is this the result of an unhappy war? (Edition of 1937, 275,000th-276,000th copies, p. 250)
Hitler proceeds from historical experiences in which the phenomenon of such total war and total defeat was not yet known. Hitler now wants to reduce this historical innovation to a well-known magnitude. He speculates that the great "collapse" is attributable to two factors: military defeat and "inner" betrayal. The first factor alone, he thinks, would have been withstood:
For, if the front as such had really failed and if, through its misfortune, the fate of the Fatherland had been put on the agenda, then the German people would have taken the defeat upon itself in quite a different way. We would have then borne the subsequent misfortune with clenched teeth. . . . Even the capitulation would have been signed only with the head while the heart would have already sounded the coming uprising. (P- 251)
And now, the myth of "inner putrefaction" follows.
Unfortunately, the military defeat of the German people is not an un- deserved catastrophe but a well-earned disciplining of an eternal retri- bution. We have more than deserved this defeat, (p. 250)
Hitler translates the political-military debacle of Wilhelminianism and the fall of German feudal capitalism into the moral language of blame and sin. For noth- ing has happened for which we ourselves were not to blame. Our offense con- sisted in not having hindered the strengthening of socialist, pacifist, liberal, democratic, and "Jewish" elements in society. The collapse, according to Hitler, was a "consequence of an ethical and moral poisoning, of a lessening of the drive for self-preservation" (p. 152). Only thus could it have come to mutinies of
412 ? THE REPUBLIC-AS-IF. POLITICAL CYNICISMS I
troops, strikes in munitions factories, etc. , toward the end of the war. The battle front was intact [sic]; only the home front had let us down and betrayed "those out there. " In this way, Hitler pushes the front inward: Outwardly, the war may be at an end; here in the interior, it goes on --as a campaign against the democrats, pacifists, and others who needed the military defeat for the victory of their con- victions.
With this, Hitler outlines unmistakably a situation of civil war: On the oppos- ing side, he sees the Jews and their "Marxist organ of struggle" as well as the en- tire horde of democrats, socialists, and company.
Did they not in some circles express downright joy at the Fatherland's tragedy? (p. 250)
Hitler even claims to have observed contemporaries who at the end of the war had "laughed and danced, who extolled their own cowardice" and had "glorified the defeat"(see also the Pasewalk infirmary anecdote, discussed later). With this, Hitler projects his own catastrophile structure onto the opponent. For the real winner as a result of the catastrophe had been he himself-- who discovered his calling in it. At the same time, in his projection he does understand parts of reality correctly. There really were many who had been awakened to political conscious- ness by the war and who were relieved that the Wilhelminian Junker regime, which had become intolerable, could be driven off. Other groups welcomed the revolution as the beginning of a new era for humanity. And others openly an- nounced that their cause would be able to succeed as a result of the catastrophe suffered by the (capitalist) nation. Something of this resounds in the tone of the "Guiding Principles of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party on the Peace of May 19, 1919":
I. The peace conditions of the alliance with respect to Germany are the balance of the inner and outer . . . situation of Germany after four and a half years of a lost imperialist war . . . (serves you right? ) . . .
III. The peace conditions of the alliance systematically exploit this in- ner and external political bankruptcy . . . .
VI. The situation is absolutely hopeless for the government of bankrupt imperialism, no matter what it undertakes. (Dokumente zur deut- schen Geschichte, 1919-1923, ed. Wolfgang Ruge and Wolfgang Schumann [Frankfurt, 1977], pp. 17-18)
The Communist party thus rejected both: the acceptance of the treaty as well as its rejection. For the German proletariat, one was as bad as the other. But what would be the alternative --or the alternative to the alternative? Is there a third road? Yes, a proletarian dictatorship, and only this could then accept or reject without it being "immediately disastrous for the proletariat. " This is how the Ian-
THE REPUBLIC-AS-IF. POLITICAL CYNICISMS I ? 413
guage of a cynical hyperrealism sounds that accepts the "fact" that the catastrophe occurred because of the "nature of things" and that those who know this can talk about it as if they were not touched by it but were in alliance with it.
Hitler likewise tries on the role of the great diagnostician. For him, too, the catastrophe was a necessity, and as such it reveals an aspect that points toward the future.
For the German people, we can almost regard it as a great fortune that the period of its insidious disease was suddenly shortened by such a ter- rible catastrophe; for otherwise, the nation would probably have perished more slowly, but all the more surely. . . .
It is then already--of course, a bitter--fortune when destiny decides to intervene into this slow process of putrefaction and, with a sudden stroke, presents the end of the sickness to those suffering from it. . . . For this is not the first time that such a catastrophe has come down to this. It can then easily become the cause of a cure that sets to work with extreme resoluteness, (pp. 243-54)
"Bitter fortune": This is the sharpest expression of populist dialectics. Political sadism in medical metaphors? Pathological cynicism in political metaphors? Al- ready at the hour of birth of the republic, the political surgeons on the far right and the far left have taken their positions and sharpened the ideological scalpels with which they want to cut the cancerous growth out of the German patient. Both are scarcely interested in the current situation in Germany. They look into the fu- ture and dream of the day when the grand operation can take place.
Thus the struggle goes on. The faint-hearted spirit of the New Beginning -- however it may have looked--which, in the seven months between the capitula- tion in November 1918 and the signing of the Versailles Treaty in May 1919, had had its small chance, from then on was pulverized between a multitude of real- isms, sophisticated tricks, defiant postures, and duplicitous thoughts about the fu- ture. Ernst Toller has one of the men who was there during the revolution of 1918 say in 1927, "It is all a matter of tactics, my dear. " Ten years later, he was practic- ing realpolitik. {Hey, we're alive! )
Notes
1. President Wilson presented on January 8, 1918 a peace program that called for the evacuation of occupied territories, arms limitations, freedom of the seas and world trade, the right of self- determination for all people, and the founding of the League of Nations. Wilson's idealistic line could not gain acceptance at the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Versailles (January-May 1919).
2. The great majority of the Weimar National Assembly, elected in January 1919, was still prodemocratic. The first Reichstag of 1920 was already clearly dominated by antidemocratic forces.
Chapter 15
The Front and Nothingness. Political Cynicisms II: Populist Dialectics and the Dissolution of the Front
Everyone was hated: the Jews, the capitalists, the Junkers, the Communists, the military, the landlords, the workers, the un- employed, the Black Reichswehr, the controlling commissions, the politicians, the department stores, and once more, the Jews. It was an orgy of incitement and the republic was weak, scarcely perceptible. . . . It was a completely negative world with colorfulfoam on top.
G. Grosz, Ein kleines J a und ein grosses Nein (Hamburg, 1974), p. 143
From the end of the war it took about ten years until, in the Weimar Republic, a regular military nostalgia broke out. "Front" became a magic word for clarity in political relations. Us here; them over there. We know exactly in which direc- tion we have to shoot. The apprentices of democracy who had been frustrated by politics began to yearn for the "clear relations" of war. Toward the end of the twenties, the horrors of the battles seemed to be, even psychically, integrated or pushed into the distance or reinterpreted to the extent that numerous authors ven- tured an account of the war: Remarque, Renn, Glaeser, Zweig, van der Vring, Goebbels, Schauwecker, Beumelburg, and others.
With the right-wingers, two motifs are unmistakable: They long for the ex- perience of comradeship on the front--above all as antithesis to the bickering state of affairs of Weimar political sects and right-wing parties; they yearned for the "front" as that line where one still knew "who one was. " In the meantime, even the conservatives and the young nationalists had comprehended that war and domestic politics were two different things. With a military nostalgia, they enun- ciated this experience concisely: Soldiers are apparently heroic, clear, hard, brave, big on withstanding, obeying, serving and persevering- in a word, manly- The politicians, by contrast, were slippery, sly, frivolous, opportunistic, cowardly, compromising, small, unclear, ambiguous, soft-in short, unmanly- The nostalgia for war, among other things, was a restoration of manliness, but even more the restoration of a declining sociopsychological type, the "unambigu- ous character. " To have fought on the front, that gave the militarist nationalists a recollection of how it was when one still felt safe in the psychical armoring of
414
THE FRONT AND NOTHINGNESS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS II ? 415
one's own "identity. " Already with the dissolution of the regiments in the gloomy November and in the dismal Weimar peace, the soldiers often did not quite know which world --after all that had happened--they should return to. For them, the republic was the place where they lost what they held to be their "identity. " In retrospect, the dream of the front grew in them, where everything had still seemed so clear.
In 1929, Franz Schauwecker, one of the more intelligent authors in the populist camp, sketched a highly significant scene: a parting of soldiers into a peace with which scarcely anyone is pleased. The author ascribes an awareness to his figures that belongs more to the year 1929 than to November 1918. As with Hitler, the great misfortune is now, in retrospect, attributed an equally great sig- nificance. Here, too, the end of the "real" war is denied.
But do you know how all that appears to me? ! The proper war is only just beginning, the real war, you know. Now there are no more explo-
sions, now everything goes on silently. That gets on one's nerves. . . . . . . We have learned all sorts of things from each other that we
can use. For this peace is the continuation of the war through other means. Each goes to his own front. The front is now secret. Live well, comrades. . . .
Now we begin to notice how difficult things are. . . . Until now, on the front, we always obeyed. . . . Duty does not decide for itself, but is decided. Do you see --and then it is basically extremely easy to fol- low one's duty- . . . And there we have it, the great German legend of today, the German mystique of the simple soldier. They had to knowingly do something which was practically completely useless] And they did it. There you have the greatness and the tragedy of the Ger- man frontline soldier. (Schauwecker, Aufbruch der Nation [Berlin,
1929], pp. 375-78)
Schauwecker grasps the point the populists otherwise deny: The German sa- crifices of the war were senseless. However, this senselessness has to be over- come because one wants to. One overcomes it by demanding that it must have a meaning -- even if one has to bring it about personally by force. Nihilistic antini- hilism. Schauwecker construes a new positivity in the middle of the collapse. Even the German revolution, which for the Right was otherwise nothing more than an ordeal, is there stamped with an incidental nihilist significance.
It is pitiable, petty, miserly, vengeful, envious and animated only by a diseased hatred, a miserable matter of insects. But quite by the way, it did something it had not at all intended. . . . It has cleared away all hindrances to ourselves, it has broken down a thick tangled mass. That is the best thing about it. It has washed the dirt out of our eyes. . . . (p. 381)
. . . But you see: that is the secret-that has long since become
416 ? THE FRONT AND NOTHINGNESS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS II
clear to me in my skull. Pay careful attention: we didn't have any other content at all! That is the whole secret! Indeed! . . . The secret con- sists in the fact that there is nothing there. Nothing! Therefore nothing happened! Therefore, everywhere people gave way.
The new philosophy of the front replaces the old morality. It talks not in medi- cal images like Hitler but in moral and psychological concepts. A populist revolu- tion is supposed to result from the activism of the men with a conscience about the front. The soldiers return home, not to peace but rather they make their way from the lost war "for nothing" to the new and genuine front about conscience. "We only have to say one word, then we understand each other instinctively: the front! " (p. 381).
Today we cannot say it aloud, for it is not for everyone's ears.
I don't think that it is a great disaster without meaning and without
blame. . . . We have to find out once and for all why we lost the war. Because we ourselves had the guilt in us, the emptiness, the impudence, the external power. . . .
We had to lose the war so as to win the nation, (p. 382)
Georg van der Vring, too, in his Soldat Suhren (1928) projected the Weimar feeling of the dissolution of the front back into the inner monologue of a young soldier, who in the night train rolls out to the front for his first contact with the enemy:
And I come across a knot in my tissue called: the front. That is a mili- tary expression thrown about by the newspapers and the army reports as if it were an easily comprehensible object. But it isn't. For on that front mentioned by the army reports, good fights against good, evil against evil, good against evil and evil against good. And so it is a con- fused, even thousandfold twisted front whose shape no one knows.
There is, however, one front that is clear, unambiguous and straight and I find it in a secret place--I find it in my conscience. And it is the front of good thoughts and dignified actions, of hand shakes and loyal faith, (p. 59)
The moral front floats invisibly over nations, parties, blocks, individuals, and external fronts. It remains a mystical line --irrational and inward. "Conscience! That is the word that shines today" (Schauwecker, p. 379). The populists thus take their credentials from that authority that psychoanalysis had begun to investigate under the concept of the superego --and all the more with its description of the cynic's weak superego that nevertheless demands its tribute. However, in fact, this conscience for its part was already drained and disoriented. Good and evil can indeed appear inverted. Conscience was supposed to be the authority that bore the inner front--but taken in isolation it had already long since been drained
THE FRONT AND NOTHINGNESS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS II D 417
and indeterminate (or the recurrence of the old order, about which it was said it had been rotten and without substance. )
This is precisely the point that Heidegger is concerned with in his epochal anal- ysis of conscience in Sein undZeit (1927), sections 55-69 (see also chapter 7 in this book, "The Cabinet of Cynics," the final section. ) He conceives conscience as the "call of care. "
What does conscience call out to the addressee? Strictly speaking - nothing. The call says nothing, gives no information about events in the world. . . . "Nothing" is called out to the addressed self, but rather it is called upon to be itself, that is, to assume its own innermost possibil- ity, (p. 273)
We observe in the populist dialectic a comparable figure of thought: the retrogres- sion to the nation's "own innermost possibility" on the path through the nothing- ness of the great catastrophe. Heidegger explicates the emptiness of the con- science in "advanced" social praxis. His analysis sounds like an echo of the movements of thought in populist nihilism-antinihilism. Karl Jaspers, however, strikes at the heart of the problem even more precisely in Zur geistigen Situation derZeit (Man in the modern age, 1932). He elevates the problematic of the front to a universal characteristic of life in the "modern order of existence. " He confirms that the function of the front--to say to people what they are to fight or work for and against, with whom they are allied and against whom or what--has been lost. In the age of tactics, everything can suddenly be turned upside down. The front melts. Under the heading, "The Struggle with No Fighting Front," Jaspers writes:
A struggle in which one knows with whom one has to deal is clear. In the modern order of existence, however, after every momentary clarity, one is afflicted by the confusedness of the fighting fronts. What a mo- ment before seemed to be an adversary is now an ally. What in accor- dance with the objectivity of what is willed should be an adversary is on our side; what really seems to be antagonistic refrains from fighting; what looked like a united front turns against itself. And, of course, all this occurs in turbulent commotion and change. It is something that can turn me into an adversary of those apparently closest to me and into an ally of those who are distant from me. (Berlin [1979], p. 163)
For many contemporaries, in view of the political state of affairs, the tradi- tional schema of left and right also had to lose its clarifying function. What did concepts like progress and retrogression, socialism and capitalism, say when one lived in times when one party cleverly designated itself as "National Socialist"? When tactical alliances were made between Fascists and Communists? When two large workers' parties could not build a common "front" against that other party
418 ? THE FRONT AND NOTHINGNESS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS II
that also called itself the "Workers' party" and that nevertheless knew how to make a front with the party of big capital (Deutschnationale Volkspartei) and the armed forces--the notorious Harzburger Front of 1931, from which a pretty straight line leads to the Eastern Front of 1943 --without the laughable "Iron Front" of the democrats of 1932 being able to do anything about it? (See chapter 26. )
In 1920, the Dadaist, George Grosz, yearned to join ranks with the proletarian masses.
There will come a time in which the artist will no longer be that Bohe- mian, sloppy anarchist but a bright, healthy worker in collectivist soci- ety. For as long as this goal has not been realized by the laboring masses, the intellectual will sway skeptically and cynically to and fro. (Manifeste, Manifeste 1905-1933. Schriften Deutscher Kiinstler des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, vol. 1, ed. Dieter Schmidt [Dresden, 1965], p. 261).
But in Grosz's autobiography we read:
We were like sailing boats in the wind, with white, black, red sails. Some boats had streamers on which you could see three strokes of lightning, or a hammer and sickle, or a swastika on a steel helmet - from a distance, all these symbols looked similar. We did not have much control over the boats and had to maneuver assiduously. . . . The storm raged endlessly but we sailed off; we did not understand its melodies for our hearing had been blunted from so much "listen here for a minute. " We only knew that a wind was blowing from the east and another from the west--and that the storm blew over the entire globe. (Grosz, Ein kleines Ja und ein grosses Nein, p. 143)
Chapter 16
Dead Souls without Testaments. Political Cynicisms III: Looking after War Graves in the Empty Interior
You know, sister, . . . I am completely sober . . . but it is my deepest conviction: no one will ever really come home anymore.
Hermann Broch, Die Schlafwandler (1931-32)
How senseless is everything that was ever written, done and thought if such a thing is possible! Everything must be disin- genuous and inconsequential if the culture of millennia could not even hinder these streams of blood from being set flowing.
E. M. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1928)
In the survivors of the First World War, its dead did not come to rest. A change in the quality of dying had impinged on their consciousness: The Western Front of 1916 alone--in whose middle was the ghostly fort of Verdun --"claimed" over a million dead. For the first time in human history, a state of affairs was realized that can be designated by an expression from present-day American nuclear strategy: megadeaths (equal to one million dead). With the tactics of artillery and trench warfare, death on the battlefield was transformed from death in motion--as the storming enthusiasts of Langemarck still suffered--into a positional death. In the drumfire of Storm of Steel (Ernst Jiinger), an accidental surface death arose -- a statistical, fatalistic relation of the fighter to the shell that either misses him or turns him into dead matter.
That trauma of 1915-16 has its invisible and ubiquitous aftereffects in dyna- mism, vitalism, and the intoxication of movement of Weimar culture: getting stuck in the mud; the submersion of the attack in the trenches; the shock of im- mobilization; the fatalistic exposure to shells flying from somewhere or other; the
1
decomposition of bodies in the mud of the trenches.
scarcely said) trauma of the time, but nevertheless it is everywhere at work as practiced myth. The myth works on in the protest of the fighters returning from the front against the demobilization (not to sink into the mud of civilian life), in the cult of aggression, of speed and moving on, which the contemporaries of Wei- mar prescribed for themselves; in the pleasure taken in the spread of the automo- bile, which starts off in an elitist fashion with the racing of the famous Mercedes Silver Arrow, anr' mixes in with popular dreams, in order to come completely
419
That is the great unsaid (or
420 D DEAD SOULS WITHOUT TESTAMENTS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS III
into its own in the program of Volkswagen (the People's Car), the power-through- joy-car. In Germany, the motorized nation was initially a Fascist dream.
The incomprehensibility and the technologized indignity of death in the mod- ern war of artillery burst all categories of conventional meaning. Absurdity elevated itself to the phenomenon par excellence, to the naked and uninterpretable fact that overwhelmed thinking with its brutal "It-is-so. " The power of this absur- dity can also be measured by the omnipresent attempts to overcome the ex- perience of senselessness with (left- and right-wing) antiabsurdist dispositions.
They did not call it "battle" or "fight"; they said "charge" and they spoke of themselves only as "we out there. " In this way, they wandered for months between the hands of death until they could say neither "yes" nor "no" to anything, until they did it without a word, a look, without a thought. . . .
They could be interchanged arbitrarily. . . . In these burning smelt- ing ovens they stripped off all differences and became like each other, until only the German front-soldier remained, who, ossified, took everything upon himself: deed and hunger, exhaustion and dirt, rain and fire, blood, horror and death. (Schauwecker, p. 228)
They sacrificed themselves day after day, night after night. . . . Many choked to death in the mud of the shell craters because they did not want to let go of the machine gun.
. . . They died in the roar, the smoke, mud and rain. They died in the dugouts, buried and suffocated. They died, gnawed away by gas. They died with gangrene in their wounds. They died everywhere, on the ground, in the ground, in the air, in dead forests, on hills, in craters.
In the end, they fought without hope. They were abandoned and each stood alone.
The only thing they possessed was this: they knew who they were. (Ibid. , p. 353)
This existentialism of the fighter at the front is already a belated retrospective bestowal of meaning from the populist perspective, as was depicted in thousands of novels and treatises. This knowing-who-they-were was carried over by the sur- vivors of the war into the Weimar peace or, more precisely, was invented in retro- spect in the latter. It is the basic figure in any bestowing of meaning from the right: Absurdity is exchanged for identity; one gains ego feelings through the denial of critical experience. "Composure. " To the present day, the neoconser- vatisms have not done anything differently.
When the regiment described by Schauwecker withdrew to German soil, it had to, on command from above, destroy all remaining weaponry, shoot it off, or sink it in a pond. Albrecht, the hero of the story, experiences this literally as self- castration. "Here, the nation, on command, deftly cut off its private parts" (p.
DEAD SOULS WITHOUT TESTAMENTS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS III ? 421
369). In the Bengal light of the last flares, an old war grave lights up before his eyes--a cross, nailed together, with the inscription:
"Rifleman Fritz Bredenstoll Infantry Regiment No. 162, 4th Company
He fell on 26 August 1914 for his Fatherland. He became a little giddy. He suddenly became a bit weak in the knees. . . .
. . . a perfectly patriotic illumination over the grave of Fritz Bredenstoll who, according to the inscription, in 1914 chose to die for his Fatherland and to give himself up to this grave, while the others preferred to explode flares in the air and to throw away their ammuni- tion or organize some revolution or steal what they could get.
It was freezing. He became cold. Yes indeed --what did I want to say --I don't know anymore --it makes me so violently ill--that is all so repugnant to me --damn it! --leave me alone--it's all so horrifyingly stu- pid and childish, (pp. 370-71)
Schauwecker's tortured, sarcastic tone betrays the effort of trying to outdo the objective cynicism of death in war with the subjective cynicism of nausea. His hero returns home --with a picture of "revolution" in his head that would be noth- ing other than the overcoming of absurdity through grand politics: He dreams of a "revolution on the front" in which the survivors rise up for the sake of the dead.
The "Fiihrer" of this revolution found motivation for his political mission in a similar way. Hitler lay in the Pasewalk infirmary in Pomerania as the other revolution in Germany began. According to his own account, he was blinded by mustard gas "in the English gas bombardment on the South Front at Ypern" in mid-October. A recent psychological interpretation says, on the contrary, that Hitler's problems with his eyes at this time were a case of hysterical blinding with which he somatically staged the decision "not to look on. " Be that as it may, Hitler records that on November 10, he learned from the infirmary's chaplain the truth about "out there" (i. e. , the capitulation in the West and revolution in Berlin):
When things started to go black again, I felt and reeled my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk and buried my burning head under the blanket and pillow.
Since that day when I stood at my mother's grave, I had not
wept . . . but now I could not do otherwise. So, everything had been for nothing . . . the death of the two million who died was in vain. Would not the graves of all those hundreds of thousands have to open, those who had once set off with a belief in the Fatherland? . . . Would they not have to open and send the mute, muddy and bloody heroes home as ghosts of revenge who had been so shamelessly deceived into making the greatest sacrifice a man can make for his people in this world? Had they died for that? . . . Did these boys of seventeen sink
422 ? DEAD SOULS WITHOUT TESTAMENTS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS III
into the Flemish earth for this? . . . Had he lain in the hell of the drumfire and in the fever of gas warfare for this? . . .
In these nights, the hate grew in me, the hate against the culprit be- hind this deed.
In the days following, my destiny also became clear to me. I now had to laugh(\) at the thought of my own future that a short time before had still caused me such bitter worries. Was it not a laughing matter, to want to build houses on such ground? . . .
There can be no pact with the Jew, but only the hard either-or. But I decided to become a politician. (Mein Kampf, pp.