The myths of
identity
crumble.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason
Richet replaces the expression with a new anthropological classi- fication: Homo stultus.
Animals are after all far more clever.
An ape can learn
ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS ? 495
to play cricket like an Englishman, but the human being does not understand "that peace deserves priority over war" (p. 62).
In the feeling of bitterness, the old man now unfurls the picture scroll of human stupidities: mutilation, circumcision, castration, celibacy, royal cults, sycophancy, subjugation, class society, drugs, alcoholism, tobacco, fashion, jewels, war and armament, superstition, bullfighting, the extinction of animal species, the destruction of forests, protective tariffs, sicknesses through negli- gence, and so on and so on. In this, he indulges in a multitude of extreme insipidi- ties in the notorious style of the nineteenth century, for which the other side, not entirely without justification, attacked him as an "enblightener" (Aujklaricht), to say nothing of his racist vulgarities about the stupidity of the Negroes and the cul- tural worthlessness of the yellow and red races.
It is fascinating to see how in this old scholar the language of ancient kynicism emerges as soon as he comes to the topic that provided the touchstone for wise teachings in antiquity: the relation of the wise person to dying. Like the ancient kynics and materialists, Richet teaches a sovereign indifference toward one's own death, no matter how much he also recognizes the mourning of the death of loved ones. He classifies every kind of death cult as stupid and as superstitious aliena- tion. The dead body, this "earthly sack of maggots" (p. 125), does not deserve any honor. In classical manner--no matter how immediately inspired he is by kynical and Stoic sources --Richet teaches an honorable death. He celebrates So- crates' death as the model of an end worthy of a human being, that is, a serene euthanasia in contrast to that tormenting dysthanasia to which doctors of his time subjected the dying (p. 127).
As far as my own corpse is concerned, I herewith quite solemnly declare that is to be thrown into the knacker's yard, burned, buried, or dissected; I don't care what happens to it, and I beseech my family not to worry themselves over it. (p. 125)
This way of thinking, oriented toward antiquity, does not hide that Richet's writing, too, belongs to the modern twilight of "stupidity. " For it pinpoints pre- cisely the dependence of stupidity on intelligence. Stupidity is an act of defiance, a refusal, a not-wanting-to-be-otherwise that advances parallel to enlightenment.
Wherever there is no reason at all, one cannot nevertheless be un- reasonable! However, the more one is gifted with intelligence, the more one is inclined to drown in a sea of banalities! (p. 13)
From the aphorisms of the novelist and psychoanalyst, Ernst Weiss (Von der Wollust der Dummheit [On the pleasure of stupidity; 1938]), who is almost for- gotten today, one can perceive an enriched echo of Richet's theses. Where Richet still cites the mundis vult decipi in classical fashion, Weiss, following Nietzsche, speaks of a "will to night" [Wille zur Nacht instead of Nietzsche's Wille zur
496 ? ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS
Macht; -- Trans. ] -- as a universal regressive tendency ("to extinguish lights, to lie down flat, to be stupid").
This is what psychologists of the masses have to take into account if they want to speak of fascism.
In the eyes of the stupid, God is stupid. The people want God to be stu- pid. A God who understood chemistry and relativity physics would not be to their liking. Luther said: Deus stultissimus. The word could come from Hitler, if he had learned Latin.
Excursus 8. Actors and Characters
That is, in fact, a fancy-dress ball and not reality! You can't get out ofyour costumes!
J. Roth, Die Flucht ohne Ende (1927)
The proletarian-revolutionary movement, which was organizing itself anew after the war, was disturbed by the ironic metamorphoses of the bourgeoisie. In bour- geois culture, atmospherically omnipresent, the ascent of the theatrical type predicted by Nietzsche had come about. And just as at the time of its militant rise against feudalism, when the bourgeoisie had set its steadfast morality against aristocratic cynicisms, the leaders of the revolutionary movement now recreated the antithesis of character and actor.
In his essay Die kulturelle Stellung des Schauspielers (The cultural position of the actor [1919]), Ludwig Rubiner, one of the heralds of expressionist activism, confirms the bourgeois success of actors as an occupational group. The bourgeois contempt for this profession ceased. But not just contempt: Today it is the "strug- gling classes" who continue to view the actor with "instinctive deprecation. " In this there is something worse than contempt, namely, mistrust of the actor.
Mistrust of his reliability, his character, of the assessment of the actor as a companion and fellow fighter. For today there is no longer any evasion: You belong either to the reaction or the revolution. The point is to make a decision. The actor has not yet decided. {Der Dichter greift in die Politik [The poet intervenes in politics], [Leipzig, 1976], pp. 318-19)
According to Rubiner, actors are not much more than "badly or well-fed circus animals" of the bourgeoisie, agents of planned diversion from real struggles. They are "capons," entertainment slaves, fools prostituting themselves, doomed to "existence as Untermenschen" because of their ambivalent position in bour- geois culture. On them falls the suspicion of being asocial --an unbearable suspi- cion in the eyes of those who speak the language of the "coming humanity. Rubiner damns the bourgeois actor by basing himself on a new sociality that looks
ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS ? 497
into the future: the "new community," the new humanity. The actor who had ceased to be merely a "hunter of roles" would have to decide in favor of this new humanity, and in doing so would again become a full fellow human and character. Rubiner's slogan was "Character is again worth something" (p. 323). In the new society, actors, as we know them, would disappear, and in their place would step the intellectually distinguished "dilettante," the "speaker," with whose emergence the "epoch of the prostitution of the actor" would end. Rubiner's text reads like a document for a new socialist moralism whose heyday was in the feverish months after the fall of Wilhelminian rule-and the young Russian Revolution close on its heels.
It is superfluous to comment on Rubiner's text; events themselves have taken over this task and have shown that the sociopsychological trend did not make ac- tors into characters once again but made more and more characters into actors. However, from the millions of little stories that have been spun together into a big story, I want to cite one related by Gustav Regler. It provides an atmospheric snapshot from the milieu of prominent Berlin Communists who at that time still believed that with mere rhetoric they could resist the victory march of the Fas- cists. The date is January 28, 1933, two days before the fateful day.
28 January 1933 was a final grotesque day in Berlin. Kantorowicz cooked up his stiff goo of oats as I sought him out to look for the mail. . . . I found an invitation to Green Week, the farmers' exhibi- tion. "Ask Dewald," said Kantorowicz. "He was here yesterday. "
Dewald, an unemployed actor, walked out of the kitchen, puffed up his cheeks, stuck out his stomach and jammed a monocle into his eye. "Quite excellent show! " he teased. . . . "Beast becomes impudent. Produces too many vegetables, too, eats less bread. Soon it will be otherwise. . . . Fourteen years of Marxism have passed, haven't they? " Dewald no longer spoke like a Junker from East Prussia; he imitated Hitler's voice. Kantorowicz stirred his porridge, which he consumed ev- ery morning as a cure for the previous night's poisoning by cigarettes. Dewald pushed a strand of hair onto his forehead. "I have waited long enough! " he cried. "I will be the Chancellor with the bow tie under his nose. My strand of hair will enchant all Germans. The bags under my eyes will become the new ideal of beauty. . . . The Social Democratic party will crawl into its mousehole. The Communist party will distrib- ute a printed protest door-to-door . . . "
"Hey! " said Kantorowicz and looked somewhat concernedly at the jester who, with all his mockery, took on the shine of a visionary.
"I will not stand for any backtalk! " Dewald screamed in the monoto- nous but nevertheless hysterical tone of the "Fuhrer. " "There is no proletariat, I will send it to Moscow; there is only the German people, and they will follow me into the deepest misery because they are loyal and recognize their Fuhrer and like being kicked in the behind. This
498 ? ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS
Schleicher has been at the helm now for one month and twenty-four days, but it belongs to me. . . . I will put a stop to his cheating and, before the week is out, there will be one general less and a great Fuhrer in Wilhelmstrasse, so help me my bow tie and my shock of hair . . . "
The telephone rang. Kantorowicz lifted the receiver, listened with his raven's face at first as if he were asleep, tapped with his fingers, then he wrinkled his forehead, nodded several times and hung up. His face seemed to have grown older as he said, looking up at Dewald: "Schleicher has resigned. Hitler will become chancellor. "
Dewald hastily pushed the strand of hair from his forehead. He looked as if he was scared that we would beat him to death. {Das Ohr desMalchus [Frankfurt, 1975], pp. 189-90)
Notes
1. Plagiarism was, by the way, the point of access of the psychoanalyst, E. Bergier, to his analysis of cynicism (see chapter 13, Excursus 2). Bergier boggled at the answer of plagiarists: for them, the concept of "intellectual private property" is nonsense; see Brecht's reply to the proof of his borrowings from Villon in the Threepenny Opera.
2. References to Mann's autobiography are provided in my book Literatur und Lebenserfahrung. Autobiographien der20er Jahre (Munich, 1978). pp. 145ff. , 166ff. ("AufdemZauberberg der Puber- tal"), pp. 275f.
3. In 1911, the spectacle of the "panther leap" to Agadir had ignited the second Moroccan crisis, the prelude to the now "unavoidable" world war. This was a coincidence rich in its many connections: Through the Agadir crisis, through becoming conscious of the approaching Great War, Oswald Spen- gler came for the first time in his cultural historical studies definitively onto the political track.
4. See Bruno Frank's Politische Novelle of 1928, where likewise, with Italian material, the specta- cle of caesarism in the Fascist Duce is depicted.
hapter 24
ey! Are We Alive? New Matter-of- Fact Cynicisms and Stories about the Difficulties of Life
Since then, 10 years have gone by. Where we saw absolutely straight paths, relentless reality came and made them crooked. Nevertheless, things are moving forward. . . . It is a matter of tactics, my dear.
Social Democrat minister Kilman, in Ernst Toller, Hoppla, wir leben! (1927)
In me grows a tiny feeling against dichotomies (strong-weak; big-small; happy-unhappy; ideal-not ideal). It is so only be- cause people cannot think more than two things. More does not
fit into a sparrow's brain. But the healthiest thing is simply: maneuver.
Bertolt Brecht, Tagebucher 1920-1922
If the revolutionary period had been a time of abrupt contrasts and absolute alter- natives in which black and white reigned, ten years later, a game of gray-in-gray nuances, complicated to excess, ruled. By 1928, the people of November 1918 had long since become caught up in the shoving of "hard facts" and the "lesser evil. " An all-pervading moral and tactical relativism gnawed away on older im- ages of "identity. " Literary expressionism had been a final rearing up of the will to simplify--an uprising of modern means of expression against modern ex- periences, against complexity, relativity, perspectivism. By contrast, the cubist tendency in painting seemed adequate to modernity in that it took account of the experience that things looked different from different perspectives.
In the age of tactics, advertising, propaganda, a cubist "mentality" becomes a general fact of intelligence. With it, from now on, older models of identity and character seem archaic or folkloric, if not narrow-minded. Under such circum- stances, it becomes an existential problem how what tradition called the "humane" can be saved from a total emptying and destruction. It is, to use Thomas Mann's words, the "suffering and greatness" of late-bourgeois art that it let itself in for
499
500 ? HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
the torment of such questions and the psychopolitical perceptions that force one to them. I want to try to describe some of these perceptions and, with their help, to render intelligible the meaning and the painfulness of such questions about the humane and the inhumane. In doing so, I initially work with some very bold ab- stractions that are meant to clarify the modern splitting apart of "systems" and "sensibilities. "
Weimar "social character" was formed under the pressure of a threefold front of complexity. The first front imposed itself on the contemporaries as a downright depressing confusion of political structures and power relations. What has been investigated as "antidemocratic thinking in the Weimar Republic" (Sontheimer and others) is only the tip of the iceberg of social skepticism and private reserva- tions about politics. In it there was a component of reason that to the present day cannot be overlooked. At no time did the transmission of any kind of political will --"mandate"--function in the government's policy in a way that would have allowed reliable loyalties to be formed between the voters and the elected. The "politicization" of the masses was accompanied from the beginning by a sublimi- nal antipolitics and was influenced by disappointment, confusion, resentment, and anxious rage as well as by a profound split between liberal conceptions and a reactionary state apparatus. Between continual foreign-political blackmail and extraparliamentary radicalism, the republic was put into a state of permanent weakness and lack of respectability. Large social groups did not want to ac- knowledge at any time "political achievement" on the part of the government (in spite of Rathenau and Stresemann, Rapallo and Locarno). This unstable, unat- tractive state of affairs effected a psychopolitical polarization between a--let us say --new matter-of-factness and an old moralist type. Where the former, in part
cynically maneuvering, in part realistically dutiful, tried to come to terms with circumstances in order to make the best of them, the other, far more powerful wing rehearsed an uprising of convictions against the facts; the putsch of charac- ter against the complications. We have already spoken about fascism as a sugges- tive political movement of simplification. As such it participates in a global psy- chopolitical problematic of modernity. For the pain of modernization pervades the life feelings of all social groups subjected to technical and political adjourn- ment. A particularly German inheritance is also noticeable here --that compulsion to final explanations and to ideological overstatement of even the most banal prac- tical questions. In the friction with American pragmatism that was streaming in mightily at that time as the New Matter-of-Factness, the metaphysical sense of the politicized educated German citizen was provoked to its ultimate extremes. Today, after decades of planning and sobering up, we can no longer picture the haze of worldviews that overshadowed the political-metaphysical superstructure in the twenties. In it, though for us today it is almost invisible, the actual sociopsy- chological drama of the Weimar Republic is played out: It unfolds on a subliminal but nevertheless very real front between yes-men and no-men, tacticians and
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? ? 501
characters, cynics and consistent people, pragmatists and idealists. It was perhaps the triumphant secret of the Fascists that they succeeded in bursting this psy- chopolitical front and in inventing a cynical idealism, a consistent maneuvering, a colluding full of character and a nihilistic affirmation. The success of populist nihilism was based not least of all on the seductive trick of enticing the bulk of the refusers, the unhappy, and the no-men with the prospect that they themselves are the true realists and summoned coshapers of a new, grandiose, and simplified world.
The second front of complications, under whose pressure the ego of the times was deformed, was the nerveracking particularism and syncretism of political and ideological groups that screamed at one another in public. This experience has today been buried under a gravestone with the inscription: "Pluralism. " However, at that time, as the masses were still in no way inclined to grant everything its validity or rather, to view everything with indifference, "pluralism" was still something that must have caused pain for the contemporaries. Those who are not completely hardened feel it even today. The contradictions had still a long way to go before they could be felt as mere differences; they were rather felt in their full harshness. And at the same time, the leveling tendency began to mix together everything that once stood opposed into a many-sided uniformity. Here, too, the media already took on their typical role of dedialecticizing reality (see Excursus 9). With regard to the spiritual state of the times, Musil spoke of a "Babylonian madhouse" (Das hilflose Europa) from whose windows a thousand voices screamed. Weimar pluralism itself had two poles: an expanding, leveling, global view, and a small-scale, atomistic, retreating pole. While the mass media and the mass parties synchronized consciousnesses in wide dimensions, innumerable cells buried themselves in detached living spaces, microideologies, sects, subcul- tural public spheres and regional as well as cultural provinces. Mostly the con- temporaries found out only afterward what kind of times they had really lived in--and what was simultaneous with them. This can be studied well through the style of memoir literature that flourished particularly strongly in this decade. The contemporaries of these pluralist realities are simultaneously forced into the role of fringe dwellers who not only live in their local and cultural provinces but also stand with one foot in the universal. Amphibian mentalities become common- place.
The myths of identity crumble. And the rest is done by the polarization, clearly felt from the twenties onward of labor morality and leisure morality, with which the ego falls apart into separate halves above which "character" can only try in vain to erect a director ego (Regie-Ich). Here it becomes clear for the first time how the switches were shifted for the psychologization of society.
The third front is directly adjoining. It is that of the consumerism and cosmetic realism crystallizing in the new middle classes, which are predestined to a new agility and a new frivolousness. For with the ascendancy of the urban civilizations of salaried workers-some particularly like to demonstrate this with the example
502 ? HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
of Berlin in the twenties --a new sociopsychological era indeed also begins. It bears unmistakable signs of Americanism. Its most significant creation is the leisure-time individual, the weekend person, who has discovered contentedness in alienation and comfort in a double life. Europe learns the first words in Ameri- can, among them one that for many symbolizes Europe's decline: weekend. Even the Comedian Harmonists celebrate its apotheosis.
Weekend and sunshine
And then alone with you in the woods I don't need anything else to be happy Weekend and sunshine. . . .
No car, no highway(! )
and nobody in our vicinity.
Deep in the woods, just me and you dear God closes an eye. . . .
The new themes are gathered: retreat into leisure time, modern turning away from the attributes of modernity, weekend vitalism, and a breath of sexual revolu- tion. How self-evidently is it presupposed that the woods can be transformed into relaxation areas for city dwellers! Imagine how, only one generation earlier, the
1
Germans had still propagated forest mysticism! Sure of their instincts, the hits
of the time make use, illusionistically and ironically at the same time, of the leisure-time mentality in the new urban middle strata. For them, the world should look rosy, and for this, not only dear God closes an eye. The hits belong to a broad system of distraction that, profitably and passionately, devotes itself to the task of wallpapering the leisure-time worlds with comfortable, transparent illusions.
The ominous twenties introduce the age of mass cosmetics. From it emerges, as the main psychological type, the smiling, distracted schizoid-the "nice per- son" in the worst sense of the word. Kracauer, who pursued these phenomena at the moment of their emergence, wrote in 1929:
A piece of information that I have obtained from a well-known Berlin department store is extraordinarily instructive. "In employing sales and office personnel," says an influential gentleman in the personnel depart- ment, "we emphasize, above all, a pleasant appearance. " I ask him what he regards as pleasant; whether spicy or pretty. "Not exactly pretty. What is decisive is, rather, the moral-pink skin color, you know. " (S.
2
Gustav Regler, to whom we are indebted for the surreal actors' scene in the preceding chapter, also had the opportunity of trying out at close range a metamorphosis into the nice person in the world of commodities. Married to the daughter of a large department store owner (whom he called "the wolf), the
Kracauer, Schriften I [Frankfurt, 1971], p. 223)
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? ? 503
QretelQrom gestern nochcBerliner (3ekretarin, beufe^evuekumflerm irfjiollyxvood. . .
Gretel Grow, yesterday still a Berlin secretary, today a revue artiste in Hollywood . . .
young man was imposed on by his well-meaning father-in-law to take a respecta- ble position in his firm. Regler became an apprentice in textiles and later a su- pervisor.
I learned about customer service, smiling, lying, calculation and meas- uring up, gentle and energetic behavior, feigned moods and managers' psychology, salesman's jokes and trade union demands, government decrees and taxation tricks. . . .
? I moved further and further from the people, to whom I voluntarily
504 D HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
had offered myself five years before, and I moved further and further from myself.
My nervous system developed what was later called "managers' dis- ease": the office became my refuge. . . . It was the flight into activity, the stagnation of the soul. Around public holidays and vacations there was a dangerous stillness. . . .
. . . I was not myself. To managers' disease belongs also that split consciousness that no longer permits one to concentrate on what is es- sential. A shock had to occur in order to weld the two parts together again. (Das Ohr des Malchus [Frankfurt, 1975], pp. 134, 138-39, 140)
It was in the twenties that the sociopsychological design of the competent "nice person" was carried into the middle-class masses. It created the psychological ba- sis of the New Matter-of-Factness, namely, that accommodating realism with which the urban cultured strata tried to give a first positive echo to the unalterable and in part welcome facts of modernity. It is not easy to say when the contem- poraries consciously registered the change in the sociopsychological climate. What is beyond doubt is that between 1921 and 1925, it must have spread so far that from the middle of the decade onward, a conscious, indeed even program- matic, restyling of the culture industry and of psychic reflexes could set in with a tendency toward "matter-of-factness. " During the hot inflation years of 1921-23, literature and the "history of morals" registered a first flickering of crass neohedonistic currents. In the provinces, the concepts Berlin, prostitution, and speculation become firmly associated. In the strong economic upturn of the infla-
tionary period, which was accompanied by an intense concentration of capital and an export boom, a new middle-class illusionism celebrated a dress rehearsal while the zeroes on the banknotes galloped on. The show began. American revues made inroads into the German public's expectations. With naked legs and breasts, the new, American, way of being "shameless" triumphed. Cries of distress from the Fulda Bishop's Conference could do nothing against it. From 1923 on, public en- tertainment radio also began to cater to the new stage in the socialization of atten- tiveness.
That a change of climate of grand dimensions had really taken place was felt particularly by those contemporaries who, as prisoners of war, had been cut off for years from the new everyday life of the Weimar Republic. Shocked, they now experienced their return to worlds that had become alien. More strongly than the others, they registered the increasingly impudent demands the ambivalences and cynicisms of capitalist modernity placed on individuals' will to life and their ca- pacity for affirmation. In Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), Doblin narrates just such a story of the return of an individual, Franz Biberkopf. It begins with an impres- sive description of Biberkopf s journey through the city he had not seen for a long time, during which he becomes giddy. The novel carries on medicocynical and
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? ? 505
? . SCUlpurgisnacbt auf FicnUcllsfcId"
Walpurgis Night on Henkel's Field (May 1928). ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/ V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
military-cynical lines from the war. In the big city, too, the struggle goes on.
3
Biberkopf becomes a one-armed man.
on which anyone who wants to have "character" and be an "upright person" has to lose himself. With Biberkopf, the failure of self-preservation and wanting-to- be-strong is gruesomely exercised. In the end, as he lies dying in a madhouse, his death reveals to him what he has done wrong.
You have cramped yourself into strength, and the cramp has still not evaporated, and it's no use. . . . You just want to be strong . . . Just blabbed: "Poor me, poor me" and "How unjust that I suffer" and how
The city befalls him like a shattered front
506 ? HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
? Franz Biberkopf (Heinrich George) leaves the penitentiary in Tegel. From the film Berlin-Alexanderpkitz, Doblin, 1931.
noble I am and how refined, and they don't let me show what I'm really like. (pp. 388-91)
Max Hoelz, the most well known political "terrorist" of the twenties, who, af-
ter eight year's imprisonment in German penitentiaries was granted amnesty in
1928, mentions in his narration (still worth reading today) of his experiences of
youth, struggle, andprison(Fow Weissen Kreuzzur Roten Fahne [From the white
cross to the red flag], Berlin, 1929), the indescribable impression the images of
new big-city streets, the cars, display windows, and people made on him on his
4
return.
The most significant story of return has been related by Ernst Toller. After five
years' imprisonment in the notorious Bavarian fortress-penitentiary, Nieder- schonenfeld am Lech (1919-24), he himself experienced a return of this kind into the new matter-of-factly changed Weimar society. When he was released in June
clear-sighted, realism. in 1927.
Erwin Piscator staged this play at great expense in Berlin
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? ? 507
1924, the republic was approaching, for the first time since its founding, an ap- parent stabilization. In these years of the "compulsion of things," of compromises and new realisms, Toller continued his political-moral process of disillusion- ment. He inhaled thoroughly the cynical spirit of the times, studied and portrayed it with all possible means. The result of his observations is Hoppla, wir leben! (Hey, we're alive! ), one of the most impressive plays of his decade, imbued with the experience of the times and stamped by the growing pains of a bitter, but
5
"You have to learn to see and in spite of it not let yourself be pushed down," says Kroll, a worker, in the second act of the play. He who has to learn to see is the revolutionary of 1918, Karl Thomas, the returnee. He has been locked up in a madhouse for eight years. With the old ideas in his head, he now collides with the new reality of 1927. He cannot comprehend what had happened in the meantime in the minds of the leaders, the honest, and the fellow fighters of that time. For him, two developments are confounded to a horrifying snarl that over- strains his powers of understanding: on the one hand, the confrontation of the old utopian-radical Left with the painful facts of the republic's daily life; on the other, the reorientation of the mass urban climate toward consumerist, illusionist, cos- metic, and distracted forms of life. Released from the madhouse, it seems to him more than ever that he has landed in the loony bin. Nevertheless he quickly under- stands that the smiling face belongs to the new style, completely in the sense of the "moral-pink skin color" so dear to the personnel boss. Thus, he puts himself in the hands of a cosmetologist.
"Don't be scared, Mother Meller, you don't have to be afraid that I will go crazy again. Everywhere I looked for work, the bosses asked me: 'Man, what kind of a deathly bitter mien do you have? You'll scare away the customers. Nowadays, one must smile, always smile. ' So then I went . . . to a beauty specialist. Here is the new facade. Couldn't you just eat me up? "
"Yes, Karl. You will impress the girls. At first it was weird for
me . . . All the things they demand. Next you'll have to undertake by contract to smile for ten hours while you're working. " (3. 2)
Through this part of the snarl, Karl finds his way more or less, with fatalistic accommodation and irony. But things go differently for him with the political- moral changes, about which Eva Berg, his former lover, says, "The last eight years. . . have changed us more than otherwise a century would have done" (2. 1).
In a more "mature," tactical, and mournful socialism, the old moral, insurrec- tionary language fails. Karl Thomas calls the new matter-of-factness of the com-
508 D HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
mitted Left "hardening. " Is it? Eva, who understands herself to be thoroughly within the tradition of the socialist struggle, speaks of growing up.
"Once again you use concepts that no longer hold. We can no longer afford to be children. We can no longer throw clear-sightedness, knowl- edge that has grown in us, into the corner. " (2. 1)
This new experience had consumed the old political moralism just as much as the new sexual relations had overcome the old expectations of fidelity, possessive relationships, and commitment. Karl Thomas also suffers because sleeping with this woman guarantees no hopes of a future with her.
In his mind, the various aspects of modernization become blurred: Glittering transitional zones form between emancipation and decadence, progress and cor- ruption, sobriety and nihilism. Under the burden of these numerous ambiva- lences, Thomas finally breaks down. Confused and despairing, he decides to
jump off this carousel of crazy matter-of-factness. He wants to undertake one more "deed" as a finale and plans the assassination of Kilman, the Social Demo- crat minister who had tried in vain to explain to him that Social Democratic cyni- cism is down-to-earth and that progress prefers crooked paths. Thomas then hangs himself in the cell in which he had been locked in place of the real mur- derer, who naturally came from the Right. In heavy scenes, Toller outlines the panorama of a methodically inverted world. Cynically direct, the paradoxes pile up. Count Lande, who financed the murder, unveils the monument for the mur- dered man; Kilman's daughter, who confesses to lesbian tendencies, also goes to bed with this Count Lande, and so on.
If one asks for the "tendency" of this play, it is certainly to be found in a call to socialism to hold up the flame of Utopia even in the middle of tactical sobriety -- instead of turning into cynicism. The struggle must not turn the fighter for the good "goal" into a beast. The socialist flame, Eva says, is not extinguished but "glows in another way, less pathetically. " However, because this flame is no longer in a position to shed any clear light on social relations, its rays are soaked up by the general twilight. Those who still want to orient themselves with it must represent socialism with the stance of a leftist existentialism (with a pinch of so- ciology)--or they, as heroes, will be broken by despair. Toller shows both end- ings of the drama beside each other, with one half of his heart bound to those who are perishing, the other, learning further, hoping further.
ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS ? 495
to play cricket like an Englishman, but the human being does not understand "that peace deserves priority over war" (p. 62).
In the feeling of bitterness, the old man now unfurls the picture scroll of human stupidities: mutilation, circumcision, castration, celibacy, royal cults, sycophancy, subjugation, class society, drugs, alcoholism, tobacco, fashion, jewels, war and armament, superstition, bullfighting, the extinction of animal species, the destruction of forests, protective tariffs, sicknesses through negli- gence, and so on and so on. In this, he indulges in a multitude of extreme insipidi- ties in the notorious style of the nineteenth century, for which the other side, not entirely without justification, attacked him as an "enblightener" (Aujklaricht), to say nothing of his racist vulgarities about the stupidity of the Negroes and the cul- tural worthlessness of the yellow and red races.
It is fascinating to see how in this old scholar the language of ancient kynicism emerges as soon as he comes to the topic that provided the touchstone for wise teachings in antiquity: the relation of the wise person to dying. Like the ancient kynics and materialists, Richet teaches a sovereign indifference toward one's own death, no matter how much he also recognizes the mourning of the death of loved ones. He classifies every kind of death cult as stupid and as superstitious aliena- tion. The dead body, this "earthly sack of maggots" (p. 125), does not deserve any honor. In classical manner--no matter how immediately inspired he is by kynical and Stoic sources --Richet teaches an honorable death. He celebrates So- crates' death as the model of an end worthy of a human being, that is, a serene euthanasia in contrast to that tormenting dysthanasia to which doctors of his time subjected the dying (p. 127).
As far as my own corpse is concerned, I herewith quite solemnly declare that is to be thrown into the knacker's yard, burned, buried, or dissected; I don't care what happens to it, and I beseech my family not to worry themselves over it. (p. 125)
This way of thinking, oriented toward antiquity, does not hide that Richet's writing, too, belongs to the modern twilight of "stupidity. " For it pinpoints pre- cisely the dependence of stupidity on intelligence. Stupidity is an act of defiance, a refusal, a not-wanting-to-be-otherwise that advances parallel to enlightenment.
Wherever there is no reason at all, one cannot nevertheless be un- reasonable! However, the more one is gifted with intelligence, the more one is inclined to drown in a sea of banalities! (p. 13)
From the aphorisms of the novelist and psychoanalyst, Ernst Weiss (Von der Wollust der Dummheit [On the pleasure of stupidity; 1938]), who is almost for- gotten today, one can perceive an enriched echo of Richet's theses. Where Richet still cites the mundis vult decipi in classical fashion, Weiss, following Nietzsche, speaks of a "will to night" [Wille zur Nacht instead of Nietzsche's Wille zur
496 ? ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS
Macht; -- Trans. ] -- as a universal regressive tendency ("to extinguish lights, to lie down flat, to be stupid").
This is what psychologists of the masses have to take into account if they want to speak of fascism.
In the eyes of the stupid, God is stupid. The people want God to be stu- pid. A God who understood chemistry and relativity physics would not be to their liking. Luther said: Deus stultissimus. The word could come from Hitler, if he had learned Latin.
Excursus 8. Actors and Characters
That is, in fact, a fancy-dress ball and not reality! You can't get out ofyour costumes!
J. Roth, Die Flucht ohne Ende (1927)
The proletarian-revolutionary movement, which was organizing itself anew after the war, was disturbed by the ironic metamorphoses of the bourgeoisie. In bour- geois culture, atmospherically omnipresent, the ascent of the theatrical type predicted by Nietzsche had come about. And just as at the time of its militant rise against feudalism, when the bourgeoisie had set its steadfast morality against aristocratic cynicisms, the leaders of the revolutionary movement now recreated the antithesis of character and actor.
In his essay Die kulturelle Stellung des Schauspielers (The cultural position of the actor [1919]), Ludwig Rubiner, one of the heralds of expressionist activism, confirms the bourgeois success of actors as an occupational group. The bourgeois contempt for this profession ceased. But not just contempt: Today it is the "strug- gling classes" who continue to view the actor with "instinctive deprecation. " In this there is something worse than contempt, namely, mistrust of the actor.
Mistrust of his reliability, his character, of the assessment of the actor as a companion and fellow fighter. For today there is no longer any evasion: You belong either to the reaction or the revolution. The point is to make a decision. The actor has not yet decided. {Der Dichter greift in die Politik [The poet intervenes in politics], [Leipzig, 1976], pp. 318-19)
According to Rubiner, actors are not much more than "badly or well-fed circus animals" of the bourgeoisie, agents of planned diversion from real struggles. They are "capons," entertainment slaves, fools prostituting themselves, doomed to "existence as Untermenschen" because of their ambivalent position in bour- geois culture. On them falls the suspicion of being asocial --an unbearable suspi- cion in the eyes of those who speak the language of the "coming humanity. Rubiner damns the bourgeois actor by basing himself on a new sociality that looks
ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS ? 497
into the future: the "new community," the new humanity. The actor who had ceased to be merely a "hunter of roles" would have to decide in favor of this new humanity, and in doing so would again become a full fellow human and character. Rubiner's slogan was "Character is again worth something" (p. 323). In the new society, actors, as we know them, would disappear, and in their place would step the intellectually distinguished "dilettante," the "speaker," with whose emergence the "epoch of the prostitution of the actor" would end. Rubiner's text reads like a document for a new socialist moralism whose heyday was in the feverish months after the fall of Wilhelminian rule-and the young Russian Revolution close on its heels.
It is superfluous to comment on Rubiner's text; events themselves have taken over this task and have shown that the sociopsychological trend did not make ac- tors into characters once again but made more and more characters into actors. However, from the millions of little stories that have been spun together into a big story, I want to cite one related by Gustav Regler. It provides an atmospheric snapshot from the milieu of prominent Berlin Communists who at that time still believed that with mere rhetoric they could resist the victory march of the Fas- cists. The date is January 28, 1933, two days before the fateful day.
28 January 1933 was a final grotesque day in Berlin. Kantorowicz cooked up his stiff goo of oats as I sought him out to look for the mail. . . . I found an invitation to Green Week, the farmers' exhibi- tion. "Ask Dewald," said Kantorowicz. "He was here yesterday. "
Dewald, an unemployed actor, walked out of the kitchen, puffed up his cheeks, stuck out his stomach and jammed a monocle into his eye. "Quite excellent show! " he teased. . . . "Beast becomes impudent. Produces too many vegetables, too, eats less bread. Soon it will be otherwise. . . . Fourteen years of Marxism have passed, haven't they? " Dewald no longer spoke like a Junker from East Prussia; he imitated Hitler's voice. Kantorowicz stirred his porridge, which he consumed ev- ery morning as a cure for the previous night's poisoning by cigarettes. Dewald pushed a strand of hair onto his forehead. "I have waited long enough! " he cried. "I will be the Chancellor with the bow tie under his nose. My strand of hair will enchant all Germans. The bags under my eyes will become the new ideal of beauty. . . . The Social Democratic party will crawl into its mousehole. The Communist party will distrib- ute a printed protest door-to-door . . . "
"Hey! " said Kantorowicz and looked somewhat concernedly at the jester who, with all his mockery, took on the shine of a visionary.
"I will not stand for any backtalk! " Dewald screamed in the monoto- nous but nevertheless hysterical tone of the "Fuhrer. " "There is no proletariat, I will send it to Moscow; there is only the German people, and they will follow me into the deepest misery because they are loyal and recognize their Fuhrer and like being kicked in the behind. This
498 ? ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS
Schleicher has been at the helm now for one month and twenty-four days, but it belongs to me. . . . I will put a stop to his cheating and, before the week is out, there will be one general less and a great Fuhrer in Wilhelmstrasse, so help me my bow tie and my shock of hair . . . "
The telephone rang. Kantorowicz lifted the receiver, listened with his raven's face at first as if he were asleep, tapped with his fingers, then he wrinkled his forehead, nodded several times and hung up. His face seemed to have grown older as he said, looking up at Dewald: "Schleicher has resigned. Hitler will become chancellor. "
Dewald hastily pushed the strand of hair from his forehead. He looked as if he was scared that we would beat him to death. {Das Ohr desMalchus [Frankfurt, 1975], pp. 189-90)
Notes
1. Plagiarism was, by the way, the point of access of the psychoanalyst, E. Bergier, to his analysis of cynicism (see chapter 13, Excursus 2). Bergier boggled at the answer of plagiarists: for them, the concept of "intellectual private property" is nonsense; see Brecht's reply to the proof of his borrowings from Villon in the Threepenny Opera.
2. References to Mann's autobiography are provided in my book Literatur und Lebenserfahrung. Autobiographien der20er Jahre (Munich, 1978). pp. 145ff. , 166ff. ("AufdemZauberberg der Puber- tal"), pp. 275f.
3. In 1911, the spectacle of the "panther leap" to Agadir had ignited the second Moroccan crisis, the prelude to the now "unavoidable" world war. This was a coincidence rich in its many connections: Through the Agadir crisis, through becoming conscious of the approaching Great War, Oswald Spen- gler came for the first time in his cultural historical studies definitively onto the political track.
4. See Bruno Frank's Politische Novelle of 1928, where likewise, with Italian material, the specta- cle of caesarism in the Fascist Duce is depicted.
hapter 24
ey! Are We Alive? New Matter-of- Fact Cynicisms and Stories about the Difficulties of Life
Since then, 10 years have gone by. Where we saw absolutely straight paths, relentless reality came and made them crooked. Nevertheless, things are moving forward. . . . It is a matter of tactics, my dear.
Social Democrat minister Kilman, in Ernst Toller, Hoppla, wir leben! (1927)
In me grows a tiny feeling against dichotomies (strong-weak; big-small; happy-unhappy; ideal-not ideal). It is so only be- cause people cannot think more than two things. More does not
fit into a sparrow's brain. But the healthiest thing is simply: maneuver.
Bertolt Brecht, Tagebucher 1920-1922
If the revolutionary period had been a time of abrupt contrasts and absolute alter- natives in which black and white reigned, ten years later, a game of gray-in-gray nuances, complicated to excess, ruled. By 1928, the people of November 1918 had long since become caught up in the shoving of "hard facts" and the "lesser evil. " An all-pervading moral and tactical relativism gnawed away on older im- ages of "identity. " Literary expressionism had been a final rearing up of the will to simplify--an uprising of modern means of expression against modern ex- periences, against complexity, relativity, perspectivism. By contrast, the cubist tendency in painting seemed adequate to modernity in that it took account of the experience that things looked different from different perspectives.
In the age of tactics, advertising, propaganda, a cubist "mentality" becomes a general fact of intelligence. With it, from now on, older models of identity and character seem archaic or folkloric, if not narrow-minded. Under such circum- stances, it becomes an existential problem how what tradition called the "humane" can be saved from a total emptying and destruction. It is, to use Thomas Mann's words, the "suffering and greatness" of late-bourgeois art that it let itself in for
499
500 ? HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
the torment of such questions and the psychopolitical perceptions that force one to them. I want to try to describe some of these perceptions and, with their help, to render intelligible the meaning and the painfulness of such questions about the humane and the inhumane. In doing so, I initially work with some very bold ab- stractions that are meant to clarify the modern splitting apart of "systems" and "sensibilities. "
Weimar "social character" was formed under the pressure of a threefold front of complexity. The first front imposed itself on the contemporaries as a downright depressing confusion of political structures and power relations. What has been investigated as "antidemocratic thinking in the Weimar Republic" (Sontheimer and others) is only the tip of the iceberg of social skepticism and private reserva- tions about politics. In it there was a component of reason that to the present day cannot be overlooked. At no time did the transmission of any kind of political will --"mandate"--function in the government's policy in a way that would have allowed reliable loyalties to be formed between the voters and the elected. The "politicization" of the masses was accompanied from the beginning by a sublimi- nal antipolitics and was influenced by disappointment, confusion, resentment, and anxious rage as well as by a profound split between liberal conceptions and a reactionary state apparatus. Between continual foreign-political blackmail and extraparliamentary radicalism, the republic was put into a state of permanent weakness and lack of respectability. Large social groups did not want to ac- knowledge at any time "political achievement" on the part of the government (in spite of Rathenau and Stresemann, Rapallo and Locarno). This unstable, unat- tractive state of affairs effected a psychopolitical polarization between a--let us say --new matter-of-factness and an old moralist type. Where the former, in part
cynically maneuvering, in part realistically dutiful, tried to come to terms with circumstances in order to make the best of them, the other, far more powerful wing rehearsed an uprising of convictions against the facts; the putsch of charac- ter against the complications. We have already spoken about fascism as a sugges- tive political movement of simplification. As such it participates in a global psy- chopolitical problematic of modernity. For the pain of modernization pervades the life feelings of all social groups subjected to technical and political adjourn- ment. A particularly German inheritance is also noticeable here --that compulsion to final explanations and to ideological overstatement of even the most banal prac- tical questions. In the friction with American pragmatism that was streaming in mightily at that time as the New Matter-of-Factness, the metaphysical sense of the politicized educated German citizen was provoked to its ultimate extremes. Today, after decades of planning and sobering up, we can no longer picture the haze of worldviews that overshadowed the political-metaphysical superstructure in the twenties. In it, though for us today it is almost invisible, the actual sociopsy- chological drama of the Weimar Republic is played out: It unfolds on a subliminal but nevertheless very real front between yes-men and no-men, tacticians and
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? ? 501
characters, cynics and consistent people, pragmatists and idealists. It was perhaps the triumphant secret of the Fascists that they succeeded in bursting this psy- chopolitical front and in inventing a cynical idealism, a consistent maneuvering, a colluding full of character and a nihilistic affirmation. The success of populist nihilism was based not least of all on the seductive trick of enticing the bulk of the refusers, the unhappy, and the no-men with the prospect that they themselves are the true realists and summoned coshapers of a new, grandiose, and simplified world.
The second front of complications, under whose pressure the ego of the times was deformed, was the nerveracking particularism and syncretism of political and ideological groups that screamed at one another in public. This experience has today been buried under a gravestone with the inscription: "Pluralism. " However, at that time, as the masses were still in no way inclined to grant everything its validity or rather, to view everything with indifference, "pluralism" was still something that must have caused pain for the contemporaries. Those who are not completely hardened feel it even today. The contradictions had still a long way to go before they could be felt as mere differences; they were rather felt in their full harshness. And at the same time, the leveling tendency began to mix together everything that once stood opposed into a many-sided uniformity. Here, too, the media already took on their typical role of dedialecticizing reality (see Excursus 9). With regard to the spiritual state of the times, Musil spoke of a "Babylonian madhouse" (Das hilflose Europa) from whose windows a thousand voices screamed. Weimar pluralism itself had two poles: an expanding, leveling, global view, and a small-scale, atomistic, retreating pole. While the mass media and the mass parties synchronized consciousnesses in wide dimensions, innumerable cells buried themselves in detached living spaces, microideologies, sects, subcul- tural public spheres and regional as well as cultural provinces. Mostly the con- temporaries found out only afterward what kind of times they had really lived in--and what was simultaneous with them. This can be studied well through the style of memoir literature that flourished particularly strongly in this decade. The contemporaries of these pluralist realities are simultaneously forced into the role of fringe dwellers who not only live in their local and cultural provinces but also stand with one foot in the universal. Amphibian mentalities become common- place.
The myths of identity crumble. And the rest is done by the polarization, clearly felt from the twenties onward of labor morality and leisure morality, with which the ego falls apart into separate halves above which "character" can only try in vain to erect a director ego (Regie-Ich). Here it becomes clear for the first time how the switches were shifted for the psychologization of society.
The third front is directly adjoining. It is that of the consumerism and cosmetic realism crystallizing in the new middle classes, which are predestined to a new agility and a new frivolousness. For with the ascendancy of the urban civilizations of salaried workers-some particularly like to demonstrate this with the example
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of Berlin in the twenties --a new sociopsychological era indeed also begins. It bears unmistakable signs of Americanism. Its most significant creation is the leisure-time individual, the weekend person, who has discovered contentedness in alienation and comfort in a double life. Europe learns the first words in Ameri- can, among them one that for many symbolizes Europe's decline: weekend. Even the Comedian Harmonists celebrate its apotheosis.
Weekend and sunshine
And then alone with you in the woods I don't need anything else to be happy Weekend and sunshine. . . .
No car, no highway(! )
and nobody in our vicinity.
Deep in the woods, just me and you dear God closes an eye. . . .
The new themes are gathered: retreat into leisure time, modern turning away from the attributes of modernity, weekend vitalism, and a breath of sexual revolu- tion. How self-evidently is it presupposed that the woods can be transformed into relaxation areas for city dwellers! Imagine how, only one generation earlier, the
1
Germans had still propagated forest mysticism! Sure of their instincts, the hits
of the time make use, illusionistically and ironically at the same time, of the leisure-time mentality in the new urban middle strata. For them, the world should look rosy, and for this, not only dear God closes an eye. The hits belong to a broad system of distraction that, profitably and passionately, devotes itself to the task of wallpapering the leisure-time worlds with comfortable, transparent illusions.
The ominous twenties introduce the age of mass cosmetics. From it emerges, as the main psychological type, the smiling, distracted schizoid-the "nice per- son" in the worst sense of the word. Kracauer, who pursued these phenomena at the moment of their emergence, wrote in 1929:
A piece of information that I have obtained from a well-known Berlin department store is extraordinarily instructive. "In employing sales and office personnel," says an influential gentleman in the personnel depart- ment, "we emphasize, above all, a pleasant appearance. " I ask him what he regards as pleasant; whether spicy or pretty. "Not exactly pretty. What is decisive is, rather, the moral-pink skin color, you know. " (S.
2
Gustav Regler, to whom we are indebted for the surreal actors' scene in the preceding chapter, also had the opportunity of trying out at close range a metamorphosis into the nice person in the world of commodities. Married to the daughter of a large department store owner (whom he called "the wolf), the
Kracauer, Schriften I [Frankfurt, 1971], p. 223)
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? ? 503
QretelQrom gestern nochcBerliner (3ekretarin, beufe^evuekumflerm irfjiollyxvood. . .
Gretel Grow, yesterday still a Berlin secretary, today a revue artiste in Hollywood . . .
young man was imposed on by his well-meaning father-in-law to take a respecta- ble position in his firm. Regler became an apprentice in textiles and later a su- pervisor.
I learned about customer service, smiling, lying, calculation and meas- uring up, gentle and energetic behavior, feigned moods and managers' psychology, salesman's jokes and trade union demands, government decrees and taxation tricks. . . .
? I moved further and further from the people, to whom I voluntarily
504 D HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
had offered myself five years before, and I moved further and further from myself.
My nervous system developed what was later called "managers' dis- ease": the office became my refuge. . . . It was the flight into activity, the stagnation of the soul. Around public holidays and vacations there was a dangerous stillness. . . .
. . . I was not myself. To managers' disease belongs also that split consciousness that no longer permits one to concentrate on what is es- sential. A shock had to occur in order to weld the two parts together again. (Das Ohr des Malchus [Frankfurt, 1975], pp. 134, 138-39, 140)
It was in the twenties that the sociopsychological design of the competent "nice person" was carried into the middle-class masses. It created the psychological ba- sis of the New Matter-of-Factness, namely, that accommodating realism with which the urban cultured strata tried to give a first positive echo to the unalterable and in part welcome facts of modernity. It is not easy to say when the contem- poraries consciously registered the change in the sociopsychological climate. What is beyond doubt is that between 1921 and 1925, it must have spread so far that from the middle of the decade onward, a conscious, indeed even program- matic, restyling of the culture industry and of psychic reflexes could set in with a tendency toward "matter-of-factness. " During the hot inflation years of 1921-23, literature and the "history of morals" registered a first flickering of crass neohedonistic currents. In the provinces, the concepts Berlin, prostitution, and speculation become firmly associated. In the strong economic upturn of the infla-
tionary period, which was accompanied by an intense concentration of capital and an export boom, a new middle-class illusionism celebrated a dress rehearsal while the zeroes on the banknotes galloped on. The show began. American revues made inroads into the German public's expectations. With naked legs and breasts, the new, American, way of being "shameless" triumphed. Cries of distress from the Fulda Bishop's Conference could do nothing against it. From 1923 on, public en- tertainment radio also began to cater to the new stage in the socialization of atten- tiveness.
That a change of climate of grand dimensions had really taken place was felt particularly by those contemporaries who, as prisoners of war, had been cut off for years from the new everyday life of the Weimar Republic. Shocked, they now experienced their return to worlds that had become alien. More strongly than the others, they registered the increasingly impudent demands the ambivalences and cynicisms of capitalist modernity placed on individuals' will to life and their ca- pacity for affirmation. In Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), Doblin narrates just such a story of the return of an individual, Franz Biberkopf. It begins with an impres- sive description of Biberkopf s journey through the city he had not seen for a long time, during which he becomes giddy. The novel carries on medicocynical and
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? ? 505
? . SCUlpurgisnacbt auf FicnUcllsfcId"
Walpurgis Night on Henkel's Field (May 1928). ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/ V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
military-cynical lines from the war. In the big city, too, the struggle goes on.
3
Biberkopf becomes a one-armed man.
on which anyone who wants to have "character" and be an "upright person" has to lose himself. With Biberkopf, the failure of self-preservation and wanting-to- be-strong is gruesomely exercised. In the end, as he lies dying in a madhouse, his death reveals to him what he has done wrong.
You have cramped yourself into strength, and the cramp has still not evaporated, and it's no use. . . . You just want to be strong . . . Just blabbed: "Poor me, poor me" and "How unjust that I suffer" and how
The city befalls him like a shattered front
506 ? HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
? Franz Biberkopf (Heinrich George) leaves the penitentiary in Tegel. From the film Berlin-Alexanderpkitz, Doblin, 1931.
noble I am and how refined, and they don't let me show what I'm really like. (pp. 388-91)
Max Hoelz, the most well known political "terrorist" of the twenties, who, af-
ter eight year's imprisonment in German penitentiaries was granted amnesty in
1928, mentions in his narration (still worth reading today) of his experiences of
youth, struggle, andprison(Fow Weissen Kreuzzur Roten Fahne [From the white
cross to the red flag], Berlin, 1929), the indescribable impression the images of
new big-city streets, the cars, display windows, and people made on him on his
4
return.
The most significant story of return has been related by Ernst Toller. After five
years' imprisonment in the notorious Bavarian fortress-penitentiary, Nieder- schonenfeld am Lech (1919-24), he himself experienced a return of this kind into the new matter-of-factly changed Weimar society. When he was released in June
clear-sighted, realism. in 1927.
Erwin Piscator staged this play at great expense in Berlin
HEY! ARE WE ALIVE? ? 507
1924, the republic was approaching, for the first time since its founding, an ap- parent stabilization. In these years of the "compulsion of things," of compromises and new realisms, Toller continued his political-moral process of disillusion- ment. He inhaled thoroughly the cynical spirit of the times, studied and portrayed it with all possible means. The result of his observations is Hoppla, wir leben! (Hey, we're alive! ), one of the most impressive plays of his decade, imbued with the experience of the times and stamped by the growing pains of a bitter, but
5
"You have to learn to see and in spite of it not let yourself be pushed down," says Kroll, a worker, in the second act of the play. He who has to learn to see is the revolutionary of 1918, Karl Thomas, the returnee. He has been locked up in a madhouse for eight years. With the old ideas in his head, he now collides with the new reality of 1927. He cannot comprehend what had happened in the meantime in the minds of the leaders, the honest, and the fellow fighters of that time. For him, two developments are confounded to a horrifying snarl that over- strains his powers of understanding: on the one hand, the confrontation of the old utopian-radical Left with the painful facts of the republic's daily life; on the other, the reorientation of the mass urban climate toward consumerist, illusionist, cos- metic, and distracted forms of life. Released from the madhouse, it seems to him more than ever that he has landed in the loony bin. Nevertheless he quickly under- stands that the smiling face belongs to the new style, completely in the sense of the "moral-pink skin color" so dear to the personnel boss. Thus, he puts himself in the hands of a cosmetologist.
"Don't be scared, Mother Meller, you don't have to be afraid that I will go crazy again. Everywhere I looked for work, the bosses asked me: 'Man, what kind of a deathly bitter mien do you have? You'll scare away the customers. Nowadays, one must smile, always smile. ' So then I went . . . to a beauty specialist. Here is the new facade. Couldn't you just eat me up? "
"Yes, Karl. You will impress the girls. At first it was weird for
me . . . All the things they demand. Next you'll have to undertake by contract to smile for ten hours while you're working. " (3. 2)
Through this part of the snarl, Karl finds his way more or less, with fatalistic accommodation and irony. But things go differently for him with the political- moral changes, about which Eva Berg, his former lover, says, "The last eight years. . . have changed us more than otherwise a century would have done" (2. 1).
In a more "mature," tactical, and mournful socialism, the old moral, insurrec- tionary language fails. Karl Thomas calls the new matter-of-factness of the com-
508 D HEY! ARE WE ALIVE?
mitted Left "hardening. " Is it? Eva, who understands herself to be thoroughly within the tradition of the socialist struggle, speaks of growing up.
"Once again you use concepts that no longer hold. We can no longer afford to be children. We can no longer throw clear-sightedness, knowl- edge that has grown in us, into the corner. " (2. 1)
This new experience had consumed the old political moralism just as much as the new sexual relations had overcome the old expectations of fidelity, possessive relationships, and commitment. Karl Thomas also suffers because sleeping with this woman guarantees no hopes of a future with her.
In his mind, the various aspects of modernization become blurred: Glittering transitional zones form between emancipation and decadence, progress and cor- ruption, sobriety and nihilism. Under the burden of these numerous ambiva- lences, Thomas finally breaks down. Confused and despairing, he decides to
jump off this carousel of crazy matter-of-factness. He wants to undertake one more "deed" as a finale and plans the assassination of Kilman, the Social Demo- crat minister who had tried in vain to explain to him that Social Democratic cyni- cism is down-to-earth and that progress prefers crooked paths. Thomas then hangs himself in the cell in which he had been locked in place of the real mur- derer, who naturally came from the Right. In heavy scenes, Toller outlines the panorama of a methodically inverted world. Cynically direct, the paradoxes pile up. Count Lande, who financed the murder, unveils the monument for the mur- dered man; Kilman's daughter, who confesses to lesbian tendencies, also goes to bed with this Count Lande, and so on.
If one asks for the "tendency" of this play, it is certainly to be found in a call to socialism to hold up the flame of Utopia even in the middle of tactical sobriety -- instead of turning into cynicism. The struggle must not turn the fighter for the good "goal" into a beast. The socialist flame, Eva says, is not extinguished but "glows in another way, less pathetically. " However, because this flame is no longer in a position to shed any clear light on social relations, its rays are soaked up by the general twilight. Those who still want to orient themselves with it must represent socialism with the stance of a leftist existentialism (with a pinch of so- ciology)--or they, as heroes, will be broken by despair. Toller shows both end- ings of the drama beside each other, with one half of his heart bound to those who are perishing, the other, learning further, hoping further.
