Then come Wilson's
fourteen
points!
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
None of the boys was the one who had smashed the window pane.
.
.
.
As far as Grosz is con- cerned, I do not know whether the laxity of his defense can be traced to the fact that he cannot speak.
.
.
.
His plea saved Grosz's neck and was annihilating for him and his friends.
"So that's your defense!
Did you intend it to be so?
" (Ibid.
, pp.
128-29)
Is Tucholsky here not following an outmoded moral psychology? Consistency
right up to jail and full-blooded political character? More "identity," more confes-
sion, longer sentences? Does he not see that the ruling ideology wants precisely
the same thing, namely, to isolate culprits with political persuasions? Does the
man of conviction not have an advertising function for the political opponent? In
any case, it remains remarkable that Tucholsky's demand for "character" related
to people who were just more or less in the process of consciously developing
9an ironic strategy. Instead of profiting from the new art of "sublation,"
Tucholsky relied on melancholic lethargy. Here, he missed an experience that would have saved him from certain surprises in 1933. Those who treat
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS D 403
phenomena of bluff as something one should "disregard" must remain blind to fas- cism, even if in other ways they are the bravest anti-Fascists in the world.
Klaus Mann grasped the problematic of bluff from a somewhat clearer per- spective. But he, too, sees the matter somewhat defensively.
We want to distinguish ourselves from the Nazis, for whom everything, from their "nationalism" up to their "socialism," is mere tactics (that is, bluff, trick and swindle), above all through the fact that we are serious about what we say; that we really mean the words and ideas with which we try to draw support for our cause. (Heimsuchung des europaischen Geistes, Essays [Munich, 1973], p. 49).
Klaus Mann was one of the first to view the cynical component of Fascist "ideology" clearly. He developed nothing less than the relatedness of the actor with the Fascist politician out of the spirit of bluff (see the novel Mephisto). How- ever, it remains questionable whether he, for his part, can really be serious about the antithesis to it: "to mean it seriously. " What is an antifascism and an antini- hilism that itself is essentially based on the fact that one, more sure than one can be, erects "opposed values" and behaves respectably only so as not to be cynical like the others? Is antinihilism itself not simply an obstructed nihilism?
Grosz, who had worked off the hate within himself in his early work, much later described the connection between
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nihilism and commitment (as antinihilism) as follows:
We demanded more. We did not quite know how to say what that more was; but many of my friends and I did not find any solution in the merely negative, in the rage at having been deceived and in the denial of all previous values. And so we were driven as a matter of course more and more to the Left. --
Soon I was head over heels in political currents. I gave speeches, not because of some conviction or other, but because everywhere at any hour people hung around disputing and because I had not yet learned anything from my experiences. My speeches were a stupid, parroted enlightenment babble, but when it dripped out of the mouth like honey, you could pretend that you were deeply moved. And often, your own twaddle really moved you, purely through the noise, sishing, twittering and bellowing that came out of you! (p. 115)
I never went along with the idolization of the masses, not even in those times when I still pretended to believe in certain political theories (Grosz, Ein kleines J a und ein grosses Nein [Hamburg, 1974], p. Ill)
It must be said, however, that this is a different Grosz talking, a Grosz who, in exile in America, has sat down, inwardly and outwardly, in Dadaist language, "on the chair. " What remains significant about this testimony is that it originates 404 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
from someone who ran the entire gamut of negativism, political commitment, and withdrawal and could document it as a survivor. When Grosz wrote his memoirs, the two critics of bluff, Tucholsky and Mann, had long since killed themselves.
Excursus 2. The Ice Dogs: On the Psychoanalysis of the Cynic
In everyone, the ice dogs bark. Ernst Toller, Hoppla, wir leben! (Hey, we're alive! )
(1927)
A thought-provoking coincidence: When nazism came to power, on January 30,
1933, the January-February issue of the journal Psychoanalytische Bewegung
10
(Psychoanalytic movement) appeared in which, for the first time,
Freud's addressed extensively the phenomenon of cynicism (Edmund Bergler, Zur Psychoanalyse des Zynikers I; the second part followed in the next issue).
Next to this remarkable temporal constellation, another rather piquant obser- vation is to be noted: Here, an author has something to say about a topic that stands in a thoroughly explosive relation to his profession. For the psychoanalyst who expresses views on cynicism talks about a topic that corresponds intimately with psychoanalysis. In 1933, an analyst could actually have found himself ex- posed to the charge of reinforcing a pornographic and cynical picture of humanity (two expressions that could easily be fused with the epithet "Jewish" in a fatal way). Here, then, a psychologist has ventured into the lion's den. He tries to put the "cynicism" of analysis out of action through an analysis of cynicism. At one point, Bergler himself even betrays a powerful kynical bite, precisely when he defends himself against the charge that psychoanalysis, with its exposure of psy- chic mechanisms, could be suspected of cynicism. Psychoanalysis is none-the- less, he notes, a "respectable science" and science is no "life insurance for illu- sions" (p. 141). For the rest, Bergler's interest centers on personalities in whom cynical tendencies are striking, as his depth- psychological studies of Napoleon, Talleyrand, Grabbe, and others demonstrate. It is obvious that his reflections are motivated by current events - as shown not least of all by the fact that as examples he brings in texts and events of the most recent times, for example, Erich Kast-
11
ner's novel Fabian from 1931.
some examples, that he believes he has found traits of cynicism in some patients that, as a rule, manifest themselves in the form of aggressions against him, the analyst. To that extent, we are justified in saying that this psychoanalytic state- ment on cynicism arose in a thick mesh of current motives and stimuli that tie the text precisely to the historical moment (1932-33) and to the author's professional situation. He defends his profession against the charge of cynicism; he diagnoses some patients who attack him as having traits of cynicism ("moral insanity").
Finally, Bergler's study reveals, with the use of
a pupil of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 405
There is thus no question that here we are in the middle of things --even when they are spoken about matter-of-factly. What strikes us is the extraordinary emphasis with which the analyst proclaims cynicism, or better, the "cynical mechanisms" to be a manifestation of the uncon- scious and of the persisting infantile component in the adult. With a grand gesture the whole domain of cynical phenomena is pocketed for psychoanalysis. Bergler allows only four of the sixty-four listed forms and variants of cynicism to count as "conscious," and even behind these, insofar as they are not
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
disqualified from the beginning as "shallow" and "worthless," he conjectures that there are "grave neuroses. "
Cynicism, says Bergler, is one of the forms in which people with extremely strong emotional ambivalences (hates-loves; respects-contempts, etc. ) create a psychic possibility for discharge. Cynical "discharge" accordingly stands on the same level as classic neurotic mechanisms such as the hysterical, melancholic, compulsive, paranoid, and criminal(! ) defenses. In cynicism, the negative, ag- gressive side of the ambivalence can be expressed. However, this side alone does not characterize "cynical discharge. " In addition, an extremely strong "uncon- scious need to be punished" must be present--masochistic and exhibitionist ten- dencies (although male verbal cynics are often said to be strikingly prone to shame regarding their bodies). In cynical speech, a psychodynamic related to the compulsion to confess (Reik) is said to be at work-to know that one violates the commandments of the strict "super ego," but that one cannot refrain from the in- fringements, and so, to settle the inner conflict thus created, one resorts to truth that is now aggressively revealed. The cynic attacks the outer world in trying to overcome an "inner conflict. " "He beats the others; he wants to beat his con- science" (p. 36).
But through its aggressive, comical side cynicism is also a method of gaining pleasure, and this in a sevenfold way: (1) because cynics become temporarily free of guilt by means of an apposite remark; (2) because the rage of others amuses them (this thesis is reflected in the blurb from J. Drews [ed. ], Zynisches Worter- buch [Zurich, 1978]); (3) because they can enjoy their own exhibitionistic tenden- cies; (4) because cynicism is a method of distancing; (5) because narcissistic plea- sure can occur insofar as clever statements are admired; (6) because jokes are simply funny; (7) last of all, because thereby cynics can live out their infantile tendencies --by which are meant early infantile fantasies of grandeur, "anal" ten- dencies, and early sexual-cynical rage against the whore in the mother, said more generally, the scars of old Oedipus conflicts.
The crux of this interpretation of cynicism is the older psychoanalytic su- perego theory that sees the human being as a creature that continually cowers un- der the commands and threats of a lofty, strict, "heavenly" superego. However, it is curious that the analyst who deals with the cultural relativity of the so-called superego (which is expressed in cynicism) does not venture to think through this
406 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
? From Neue Jugend (June 1917, Malik-Verlag).
concept of the superego --as if his intellect cowered and crouched under the authority of the superfather, Freud. This is curious because Bergler comments on phenomena in which obviously the superego does not succeed in confirming itself in the cynic's behavior. Should the superego too not be something more than it once was?
It seems that Bergler begins, against his will, to give an account of this. Cyni- cism is after all a phenomenon that belongs to the "dialectic of culture," and inso- far as psychoanalysis as a theory of psychic processes is inevitably a theory of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 407
culture, in the long run, it cannot pretend that cultural phenomena such as cyni- cism can be treated merely psychodynamically. In fact, this is precisely the topic through which psychoanalysis sublates itself. The individual psyche has to be grasped just as much from the cultural aspect as the latter has to be grasped from the psychic aspect. The universal, transtemporal, strict superego is a superseded analytic fiction. In most of Bergler's examples --there are some very nice ones among them, and they alone make the reading rewarding --we can say that the mechanisms of the cynics' statements were hidden to them only if we do violence to these examples. They know what they say and they say it not so much on the basis of "unconscious" mechanisms but because they have become conscious of real contradictions. Thus they often express a contradiction kynically, or they ex- press one of the many forms of mauvaise foi cynically. The unconscious scarcely has to make an effort. The conscious participation of the ego is objective immoral- isms and the obvious fragmentation of morals explain the matter much more effectively than does the depth- psychological theory. Only at one point does the analyst widen his field of view.
The flooding of the entire culture with fear of one's conscience (Gewis- sensangst) leads to the circumstance that even there, where persons seek to rid themselves of their fetters in thought, as in cynicism, noth- ing other(! ) than a compromise with the superego comes about. One is thus not very far removed from reality when one says that cynicisms are profoundly also a bowing before the superego and compromises with the inner voice of conscience. "Not all those are free who mock their chains," taught a poet-philosopher. But that even in this mockery people pay tribute to the superego is grotesque, (p. 166)
It cannot be better said: "One is thus not very far removed from real- ity . . . ," but still pretty far away. Bergler understands that many forms of cynicism are efforts to strip oft fetters--consequently, that cynicism belongs to the dynamic of cultural liberation struggles and the social dialectic of values and that it is one of the most important methods of working through ambivalences in a culture. The expression "compromise" indeed hints in this direction.
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With something that stood "above" me, no compromises could be concluded; then it would just be a matter of obeying. The compromise is concluded with an authority that has no penetrating imper- ative force --with a weak superego and a conscience that only pricks but can no longer give orders. Bergler shows involuntarily that analysts and cynics are in a way the last real moralists. They let themselves be reminded now and again of the commandments of conscience and morality, even if only when a conflict arises between reality and morality. For the rest of the world, morality is always and everywhere not broken with such matter-of-factness, but split, so that one no longer even feels the "inner conflict" with it. With its theory of the superego, psy-
408 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
choanalysis gives the "moralists of the last days" a medium in which they can ex- press themselves. However, the collective decomposition of the superego is al- ways a step further along than the moralists think. Objective cynicism has a head start on subjective cynicism which can never be made good. When cynics make malicious jokes, when they give morality the cold shoulder, when they demon- strate an icy coldness with which they anaesthetize themselves against the amoral- ism of the world, indeed when they even want to outdo its amoralism --then the subjective coldness toward morality reflects a general social freezing over. The
joke that comes out of the cold at least reminds us in its aggressivity of a more vital living. The "ice dogs" still have the energy to bark and still possess enough bite to want to make things clear. Psychoanalysis, which is "precisely not life in- surance for illusions," also has it in its better half. The scientific embalming can- not erase the fact that enlightenment, as Kant and many others emphasized, is just as much, if not more, a matter of courage as of intellect and that those who want to say the truth will not be able to avoid conflicts.
The date is January 1933. Psychoanalysis reflects on cynicism. Soon it will have to emigrate. It is done with the analytic explanation of cynicism. It becomes evident that what was supposed to have been the solution has been overwhelmed by the problem.
Notes
1. Otto Flake (1923): "Dada is the same thing as was earlier the famous, little understood roman- tic irony --a dissolution. The seriousness, not only of life, is dissolved. " Das Logbuch (Giitersloh, 1970), p. 295.
2. This seems to be a basic factor of Left morality. See G. Regler's statement: "Those who did not participate in their times were poor-hearted. This became an unwritten law, then a pressure, and finally moral blackmail. " Das Ohr des Malchus (Frankfurt, 1975), p. 161.
3. Dada could be understood essentially as a school of "subjective" positivism, in contrast to the "objective" positivism of logical empiricism. Both positivisms intersect in their radical semantic cyni- cism. Dada speaks of nonsense in an existential regard; the logical positivists speak of senselessness with regard to (e. g. , metaphysical) statements.
4. They constitute the most prominent phenomena in the area of semantic cynicism; see also Car- nap's Scheinprobleme; Theodor Lessing's Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen; Mauthner's Sprachkritik: Wittgenstein's Tractatus.
5. If M. Rutschky could write in his essay about the seventies, Erfahrungshunger (Cologne, 1980), that it was a time in which the "utopia of universal concepts" melted away, then he designates something common to the German Federal Republic and the Weimar Republic. In the former, of course, it was a matter of Left sociological universal concepts; Weimar struggled more against ethical
ghosts. Both stressed subjective positivism, sensousness instead of sense.
6. This refers to Peter Burger's much discussed Theorie der Avantgarde. In my opinion, he ap-
proaches the problem wrongly, namely, from the sociological side. However, this cannot be debated here. For the Dadaists, art is not an "institution. " Art is a meaning machine-it should be disturbed or destroyed in its functioning. Hence semantic cynicism. Art is a superego sector, a piece of authority: That should disappear. Hence the anarchistic gestures. The urge toward life, toward subla- tion in realization, by contrast, is an old inheritance: neokynicism of the eighteenth century. In this
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 409
sense, significant bourgeois art is "avant-garde" for as long as it has existed: pioneer of truth, of vital- ity in modern society.
7. Weimar/FRG: In Peter Handke's development, we can observe the stages subjective positiv- ism can run through: language critique, language-game actions, logical treatment of nausea; then from senselessness to faint-hearted sensuousness, to new narration; circling around the first "true feel- ing"; labor of recollection. Nausea and meaning cannot coexist in the long run. In understanding this, Handke is on the way to becoming a significant writer.
8. All Dada quotes that are not cited more explicitly are from the easily accessible Reclam selec- tion, Dada Berlin. Texte Manifeste Aktionen, ed. H. Bergius and Karl Riha (Stuttgart, 1977).
9. One should write a history of ideology on the struggle between irony and identity, talent and character (see Heinrich
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Heine's trouble with the German public of characters. See also Excursus 8. Actors and Character. )
10. With the exception of some remarks of Freud, Reik, and others.
11. See here chapter 22, "Bright Hour," where I quote the same passage Bergler cites as an exam- ple of a "cynic who revels in his own shabbiness" (K. Kraus).
Chapter 14
The Republic-as-If. Political Cynicisms I: The Struggle Goes On
Swindle! Concocted swindles! They all have their national colors. They will take care not to hoist the colors. They wouldn't even dream of it. Pay attention to what comes after-
1 ward! I'll tell you . . .
Then come Wilson's fourteen points!
Fourteen times fourteen, they won't give a damn about us. Franz Schauwecker, Aufbruch der Nation (1928), p. 372 George Grosz has just provided the slogan of the epoch: "the rage at having been deceived. " Disappointment, disillusionment, resolutions not to let oneself be de- ceived again: These are the psychopolitical fundamental motifs of the Weimar Republic. They intensify the reflectively cynical disposition of society into mani- fest aggression. Everywhere the bitter feeling of having been deceived hung in the air of the new beginning. The war was over, but the state did not manage a demobilization. The Weimar peace became a continuation of war through other means.
Today's research is in agreement that the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 represents the earth-shattering diplomatic mistake of the century. In it, it became clear for the first time that under modern capitalist-imperialist premises, the rela- tion of war and peace had become something different from what it previously had been in (European) history. If the First World War had already introduced a new quality of international warfare, then, in the Treaty of Versailles a "harsher" quality of peace was hinted at. The victors had already won in principle a "total war," without, however, demonstrating their success through a "total vic- tory" (invasion, occupation, foreign administration, etc. ). The German capitula- tion came a little before the collapse of the Western Front and the invasion of Ger- many by the Allies. Thus, the Allies' victory was indeed unambiguous, but not fought out to the last military consequence. The German capitulation happened, as we know from numerous sources, to a large extent in the expectation of a bearable peace --an expectation that burst in the early summer of 1919 as the con- ditions of the Treaty of Versailles became known. Here it was demonstrated that
410
THE REPUBLIC-AS-IF. POLITICAL CYNICISMS I D 411
the victors did not have in mind any chivalrous gestures of honor toward the con-
quered and that they thought of transforming the total war into a total victory as
well through diplomatic means. From this moment on, the despondency of the
losers, who by that time for the most part had become thoughtful and were
2prepared todiscussasensiblenewbeginning,begantodissolveintoanoutraged
refusal. The Versailles treaty had the same effect on the losers as if the victors had broken the "real" truce. From now on, the dull impulses to deny what had happened received their external seed for crystallization. From then on, an out- break into aggressive defiance became objectively possible.
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
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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.
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{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.
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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. . . .
Is Tucholsky here not following an outmoded moral psychology? Consistency
right up to jail and full-blooded political character? More "identity," more confes-
sion, longer sentences? Does he not see that the ruling ideology wants precisely
the same thing, namely, to isolate culprits with political persuasions? Does the
man of conviction not have an advertising function for the political opponent? In
any case, it remains remarkable that Tucholsky's demand for "character" related
to people who were just more or less in the process of consciously developing
9an ironic strategy. Instead of profiting from the new art of "sublation,"
Tucholsky relied on melancholic lethargy. Here, he missed an experience that would have saved him from certain surprises in 1933. Those who treat
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS D 403
phenomena of bluff as something one should "disregard" must remain blind to fas- cism, even if in other ways they are the bravest anti-Fascists in the world.
Klaus Mann grasped the problematic of bluff from a somewhat clearer per- spective. But he, too, sees the matter somewhat defensively.
We want to distinguish ourselves from the Nazis, for whom everything, from their "nationalism" up to their "socialism," is mere tactics (that is, bluff, trick and swindle), above all through the fact that we are serious about what we say; that we really mean the words and ideas with which we try to draw support for our cause. (Heimsuchung des europaischen Geistes, Essays [Munich, 1973], p. 49).
Klaus Mann was one of the first to view the cynical component of Fascist "ideology" clearly. He developed nothing less than the relatedness of the actor with the Fascist politician out of the spirit of bluff (see the novel Mephisto). How- ever, it remains questionable whether he, for his part, can really be serious about the antithesis to it: "to mean it seriously. " What is an antifascism and an antini- hilism that itself is essentially based on the fact that one, more sure than one can be, erects "opposed values" and behaves respectably only so as not to be cynical like the others? Is antinihilism itself not simply an obstructed nihilism?
Grosz, who had worked off the hate within himself in his early work, much later described the connection between
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nihilism and commitment (as antinihilism) as follows:
We demanded more. We did not quite know how to say what that more was; but many of my friends and I did not find any solution in the merely negative, in the rage at having been deceived and in the denial of all previous values. And so we were driven as a matter of course more and more to the Left. --
Soon I was head over heels in political currents. I gave speeches, not because of some conviction or other, but because everywhere at any hour people hung around disputing and because I had not yet learned anything from my experiences. My speeches were a stupid, parroted enlightenment babble, but when it dripped out of the mouth like honey, you could pretend that you were deeply moved. And often, your own twaddle really moved you, purely through the noise, sishing, twittering and bellowing that came out of you! (p. 115)
I never went along with the idolization of the masses, not even in those times when I still pretended to believe in certain political theories (Grosz, Ein kleines J a und ein grosses Nein [Hamburg, 1974], p. Ill)
It must be said, however, that this is a different Grosz talking, a Grosz who, in exile in America, has sat down, inwardly and outwardly, in Dadaist language, "on the chair. " What remains significant about this testimony is that it originates 404 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
from someone who ran the entire gamut of negativism, political commitment, and withdrawal and could document it as a survivor. When Grosz wrote his memoirs, the two critics of bluff, Tucholsky and Mann, had long since killed themselves.
Excursus 2. The Ice Dogs: On the Psychoanalysis of the Cynic
In everyone, the ice dogs bark. Ernst Toller, Hoppla, wir leben! (Hey, we're alive! )
(1927)
A thought-provoking coincidence: When nazism came to power, on January 30,
1933, the January-February issue of the journal Psychoanalytische Bewegung
10
(Psychoanalytic movement) appeared in which, for the first time,
Freud's addressed extensively the phenomenon of cynicism (Edmund Bergler, Zur Psychoanalyse des Zynikers I; the second part followed in the next issue).
Next to this remarkable temporal constellation, another rather piquant obser- vation is to be noted: Here, an author has something to say about a topic that stands in a thoroughly explosive relation to his profession. For the psychoanalyst who expresses views on cynicism talks about a topic that corresponds intimately with psychoanalysis. In 1933, an analyst could actually have found himself ex- posed to the charge of reinforcing a pornographic and cynical picture of humanity (two expressions that could easily be fused with the epithet "Jewish" in a fatal way). Here, then, a psychologist has ventured into the lion's den. He tries to put the "cynicism" of analysis out of action through an analysis of cynicism. At one point, Bergler himself even betrays a powerful kynical bite, precisely when he defends himself against the charge that psychoanalysis, with its exposure of psy- chic mechanisms, could be suspected of cynicism. Psychoanalysis is none-the- less, he notes, a "respectable science" and science is no "life insurance for illu- sions" (p. 141). For the rest, Bergler's interest centers on personalities in whom cynical tendencies are striking, as his depth- psychological studies of Napoleon, Talleyrand, Grabbe, and others demonstrate. It is obvious that his reflections are motivated by current events - as shown not least of all by the fact that as examples he brings in texts and events of the most recent times, for example, Erich Kast-
11
ner's novel Fabian from 1931.
some examples, that he believes he has found traits of cynicism in some patients that, as a rule, manifest themselves in the form of aggressions against him, the analyst. To that extent, we are justified in saying that this psychoanalytic state- ment on cynicism arose in a thick mesh of current motives and stimuli that tie the text precisely to the historical moment (1932-33) and to the author's professional situation. He defends his profession against the charge of cynicism; he diagnoses some patients who attack him as having traits of cynicism ("moral insanity").
Finally, Bergler's study reveals, with the use of
a pupil of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 405
There is thus no question that here we are in the middle of things --even when they are spoken about matter-of-factly. What strikes us is the extraordinary emphasis with which the analyst proclaims cynicism, or better, the "cynical mechanisms" to be a manifestation of the uncon- scious and of the persisting infantile component in the adult. With a grand gesture the whole domain of cynical phenomena is pocketed for psychoanalysis. Bergler allows only four of the sixty-four listed forms and variants of cynicism to count as "conscious," and even behind these, insofar as they are not
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disqualified from the beginning as "shallow" and "worthless," he conjectures that there are "grave neuroses. "
Cynicism, says Bergler, is one of the forms in which people with extremely strong emotional ambivalences (hates-loves; respects-contempts, etc. ) create a psychic possibility for discharge. Cynical "discharge" accordingly stands on the same level as classic neurotic mechanisms such as the hysterical, melancholic, compulsive, paranoid, and criminal(! ) defenses. In cynicism, the negative, ag- gressive side of the ambivalence can be expressed. However, this side alone does not characterize "cynical discharge. " In addition, an extremely strong "uncon- scious need to be punished" must be present--masochistic and exhibitionist ten- dencies (although male verbal cynics are often said to be strikingly prone to shame regarding their bodies). In cynical speech, a psychodynamic related to the compulsion to confess (Reik) is said to be at work-to know that one violates the commandments of the strict "super ego," but that one cannot refrain from the in- fringements, and so, to settle the inner conflict thus created, one resorts to truth that is now aggressively revealed. The cynic attacks the outer world in trying to overcome an "inner conflict. " "He beats the others; he wants to beat his con- science" (p. 36).
But through its aggressive, comical side cynicism is also a method of gaining pleasure, and this in a sevenfold way: (1) because cynics become temporarily free of guilt by means of an apposite remark; (2) because the rage of others amuses them (this thesis is reflected in the blurb from J. Drews [ed. ], Zynisches Worter- buch [Zurich, 1978]); (3) because they can enjoy their own exhibitionistic tenden- cies; (4) because cynicism is a method of distancing; (5) because narcissistic plea- sure can occur insofar as clever statements are admired; (6) because jokes are simply funny; (7) last of all, because thereby cynics can live out their infantile tendencies --by which are meant early infantile fantasies of grandeur, "anal" ten- dencies, and early sexual-cynical rage against the whore in the mother, said more generally, the scars of old Oedipus conflicts.
The crux of this interpretation of cynicism is the older psychoanalytic su- perego theory that sees the human being as a creature that continually cowers un- der the commands and threats of a lofty, strict, "heavenly" superego. However, it is curious that the analyst who deals with the cultural relativity of the so-called superego (which is expressed in cynicism) does not venture to think through this
406 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
? From Neue Jugend (June 1917, Malik-Verlag).
concept of the superego --as if his intellect cowered and crouched under the authority of the superfather, Freud. This is curious because Bergler comments on phenomena in which obviously the superego does not succeed in confirming itself in the cynic's behavior. Should the superego too not be something more than it once was?
It seems that Bergler begins, against his will, to give an account of this. Cyni- cism is after all a phenomenon that belongs to the "dialectic of culture," and inso- far as psychoanalysis as a theory of psychic processes is inevitably a theory of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 407
culture, in the long run, it cannot pretend that cultural phenomena such as cyni- cism can be treated merely psychodynamically. In fact, this is precisely the topic through which psychoanalysis sublates itself. The individual psyche has to be grasped just as much from the cultural aspect as the latter has to be grasped from the psychic aspect. The universal, transtemporal, strict superego is a superseded analytic fiction. In most of Bergler's examples --there are some very nice ones among them, and they alone make the reading rewarding --we can say that the mechanisms of the cynics' statements were hidden to them only if we do violence to these examples. They know what they say and they say it not so much on the basis of "unconscious" mechanisms but because they have become conscious of real contradictions. Thus they often express a contradiction kynically, or they ex- press one of the many forms of mauvaise foi cynically. The unconscious scarcely has to make an effort. The conscious participation of the ego is objective immoral- isms and the obvious fragmentation of morals explain the matter much more effectively than does the depth- psychological theory. Only at one point does the analyst widen his field of view.
The flooding of the entire culture with fear of one's conscience (Gewis- sensangst) leads to the circumstance that even there, where persons seek to rid themselves of their fetters in thought, as in cynicism, noth- ing other(! ) than a compromise with the superego comes about. One is thus not very far removed from reality when one says that cynicisms are profoundly also a bowing before the superego and compromises with the inner voice of conscience. "Not all those are free who mock their chains," taught a poet-philosopher. But that even in this mockery people pay tribute to the superego is grotesque, (p. 166)
It cannot be better said: "One is thus not very far removed from real- ity . . . ," but still pretty far away. Bergler understands that many forms of cynicism are efforts to strip oft fetters--consequently, that cynicism belongs to the dynamic of cultural liberation struggles and the social dialectic of values and that it is one of the most important methods of working through ambivalences in a culture. The expression "compromise" indeed hints in this direction.
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With something that stood "above" me, no compromises could be concluded; then it would just be a matter of obeying. The compromise is concluded with an authority that has no penetrating imper- ative force --with a weak superego and a conscience that only pricks but can no longer give orders. Bergler shows involuntarily that analysts and cynics are in a way the last real moralists. They let themselves be reminded now and again of the commandments of conscience and morality, even if only when a conflict arises between reality and morality. For the rest of the world, morality is always and everywhere not broken with such matter-of-factness, but split, so that one no longer even feels the "inner conflict" with it. With its theory of the superego, psy-
408 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
choanalysis gives the "moralists of the last days" a medium in which they can ex- press themselves. However, the collective decomposition of the superego is al- ways a step further along than the moralists think. Objective cynicism has a head start on subjective cynicism which can never be made good. When cynics make malicious jokes, when they give morality the cold shoulder, when they demon- strate an icy coldness with which they anaesthetize themselves against the amoral- ism of the world, indeed when they even want to outdo its amoralism --then the subjective coldness toward morality reflects a general social freezing over. The
joke that comes out of the cold at least reminds us in its aggressivity of a more vital living. The "ice dogs" still have the energy to bark and still possess enough bite to want to make things clear. Psychoanalysis, which is "precisely not life in- surance for illusions," also has it in its better half. The scientific embalming can- not erase the fact that enlightenment, as Kant and many others emphasized, is just as much, if not more, a matter of courage as of intellect and that those who want to say the truth will not be able to avoid conflicts.
The date is January 1933. Psychoanalysis reflects on cynicism. Soon it will have to emigrate. It is done with the analytic explanation of cynicism. It becomes evident that what was supposed to have been the solution has been overwhelmed by the problem.
Notes
1. Otto Flake (1923): "Dada is the same thing as was earlier the famous, little understood roman- tic irony --a dissolution. The seriousness, not only of life, is dissolved. " Das Logbuch (Giitersloh, 1970), p. 295.
2. This seems to be a basic factor of Left morality. See G. Regler's statement: "Those who did not participate in their times were poor-hearted. This became an unwritten law, then a pressure, and finally moral blackmail. " Das Ohr des Malchus (Frankfurt, 1975), p. 161.
3. Dada could be understood essentially as a school of "subjective" positivism, in contrast to the "objective" positivism of logical empiricism. Both positivisms intersect in their radical semantic cyni- cism. Dada speaks of nonsense in an existential regard; the logical positivists speak of senselessness with regard to (e. g. , metaphysical) statements.
4. They constitute the most prominent phenomena in the area of semantic cynicism; see also Car- nap's Scheinprobleme; Theodor Lessing's Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen; Mauthner's Sprachkritik: Wittgenstein's Tractatus.
5. If M. Rutschky could write in his essay about the seventies, Erfahrungshunger (Cologne, 1980), that it was a time in which the "utopia of universal concepts" melted away, then he designates something common to the German Federal Republic and the Weimar Republic. In the former, of course, it was a matter of Left sociological universal concepts; Weimar struggled more against ethical
ghosts. Both stressed subjective positivism, sensousness instead of sense.
6. This refers to Peter Burger's much discussed Theorie der Avantgarde. In my opinion, he ap-
proaches the problem wrongly, namely, from the sociological side. However, this cannot be debated here. For the Dadaists, art is not an "institution. " Art is a meaning machine-it should be disturbed or destroyed in its functioning. Hence semantic cynicism. Art is a superego sector, a piece of authority: That should disappear. Hence the anarchistic gestures. The urge toward life, toward subla- tion in realization, by contrast, is an old inheritance: neokynicism of the eighteenth century. In this
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 409
sense, significant bourgeois art is "avant-garde" for as long as it has existed: pioneer of truth, of vital- ity in modern society.
7. Weimar/FRG: In Peter Handke's development, we can observe the stages subjective positiv- ism can run through: language critique, language-game actions, logical treatment of nausea; then from senselessness to faint-hearted sensuousness, to new narration; circling around the first "true feel- ing"; labor of recollection. Nausea and meaning cannot coexist in the long run. In understanding this, Handke is on the way to becoming a significant writer.
8. All Dada quotes that are not cited more explicitly are from the easily accessible Reclam selec- tion, Dada Berlin. Texte Manifeste Aktionen, ed. H. Bergius and Karl Riha (Stuttgart, 1977).
9. One should write a history of ideology on the struggle between irony and identity, talent and character (see Heinrich
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Heine's trouble with the German public of characters. See also Excursus 8. Actors and Character. )
10. With the exception of some remarks of Freud, Reik, and others.
11. See here chapter 22, "Bright Hour," where I quote the same passage Bergler cites as an exam- ple of a "cynic who revels in his own shabbiness" (K. Kraus).
Chapter 14
The Republic-as-If. Political Cynicisms I: The Struggle Goes On
Swindle! Concocted swindles! They all have their national colors. They will take care not to hoist the colors. They wouldn't even dream of it. Pay attention to what comes after-
1 ward! I'll tell you . . .
Then come Wilson's fourteen points!
Fourteen times fourteen, they won't give a damn about us. Franz Schauwecker, Aufbruch der Nation (1928), p. 372 George Grosz has just provided the slogan of the epoch: "the rage at having been deceived. " Disappointment, disillusionment, resolutions not to let oneself be de- ceived again: These are the psychopolitical fundamental motifs of the Weimar Republic. They intensify the reflectively cynical disposition of society into mani- fest aggression. Everywhere the bitter feeling of having been deceived hung in the air of the new beginning. The war was over, but the state did not manage a demobilization. The Weimar peace became a continuation of war through other means.
Today's research is in agreement that the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 represents the earth-shattering diplomatic mistake of the century. In it, it became clear for the first time that under modern capitalist-imperialist premises, the rela- tion of war and peace had become something different from what it previously had been in (European) history. If the First World War had already introduced a new quality of international warfare, then, in the Treaty of Versailles a "harsher" quality of peace was hinted at. The victors had already won in principle a "total war," without, however, demonstrating their success through a "total vic- tory" (invasion, occupation, foreign administration, etc. ). The German capitula- tion came a little before the collapse of the Western Front and the invasion of Ger- many by the Allies. Thus, the Allies' victory was indeed unambiguous, but not fought out to the last military consequence. The German capitulation happened, as we know from numerous sources, to a large extent in the expectation of a bearable peace --an expectation that burst in the early summer of 1919 as the con- ditions of the Treaty of Versailles became known. Here it was demonstrated that
410
THE REPUBLIC-AS-IF. POLITICAL CYNICISMS I D 411
the victors did not have in mind any chivalrous gestures of honor toward the con-
quered and that they thought of transforming the total war into a total victory as
well through diplomatic means. From this moment on, the despondency of the
losers, who by that time for the most part had become thoughtful and were
2prepared todiscussasensiblenewbeginning,begantodissolveintoanoutraged
refusal. The Versailles treaty had the same effect on the losers as if the victors had broken the "real" truce. From now on, the dull impulses to deny what had happened received their external seed for crystallization. From then on, an out- break into aggressive defiance became objectively possible.
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
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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.
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{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
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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.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
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. . . .
