" Be that as it may, Hitler records that on November 10, he learned from the infirmary's
chaplain
the truth about "out there" (i.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
Even the German revolution, which for the Right was otherwise nothing more than an ordeal, is there stamped with an incidental nihilist significance.
It is pitiable, petty, miserly, vengeful, envious and animated only by a diseased hatred, a miserable matter of insects. But quite by the way, it did something it had not at all intended. . . . It has cleared away all hindrances to ourselves, it has broken down a thick tangled mass. That is the best thing about it. It has washed the dirt out of our eyes. . . . (p. 381)
. . . But you see: that is the secret-that has long since become
416 ? THE FRONT AND NOTHINGNESS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS II
clear to me in my skull. Pay careful attention: we didn't have any other content at all! That is the whole secret! Indeed! .
. . The secret con- sists in the fact that there is nothing there. Nothing! Therefore nothing happened! Therefore, everywhere people gave way.
The new philosophy of the front replaces the old morality. It talks not in medi- cal images like Hitler but in moral and psychological concepts. A populist revolu- tion is supposed to result from the activism of the men with a conscience about the front. The soldiers return home, not to peace but rather they make their way from the lost war "for nothing" to the new and genuine front about conscience. "We only have to say one word, then we understand each other instinctively: the front! " (p. 381).
Today we cannot say it aloud, for it is not for everyone's ears. I don't think that it is a great disaster without meaning and without
blame. . . . We have to find out once and for all why we lost the war. Because we ourselves had the guilt in us, the emptiness, the impudence, the external power. . . .
We had to lose the war so as to win the nation, (p. 382)
Georg van der Vring, too, in his Soldat Suhren (1928) projected the Weimar feeling of the dissolution of the front back into the inner monologue of a young soldier, who in the night train rolls out to the front for his first contact with the enemy:
And I come across a knot in my tissue called: the front. That is a mili- tary expression thrown about by the newspapers and the army reports as if it were an easily comprehensible object. But it isn't. For on that front mentioned by the army reports, good fights against good, evil against evil, good against evil and evil against good. And so it is a con- fused, even thousandfold twisted front whose shape no one knows.
There is, however, one front that is clear, unambiguous and straight and I find it in a secret place--I find it in my conscience. And it is the front of good thoughts and dignified actions, of hand shakes and loyal faith, (p. 59)
The moral front floats invisibly over nations, parties, blocks, individuals, and external fronts. It remains a mystical line - -irrational and inward. "Conscience! That is the word that shines today" (Schauwecker, p. 379). The populists thus take their credentials from that authority that psychoanalysis had begun to investigate under the concept of the superego -- and all the more with its description of the cynic's weak superego that nevertheless demands its tribute. However, in fact, this conscience for its part was already drained and disoriented. Good and evil can indeed appear inverted. Conscience was supposed to be the authority that bore the inner front--but taken in isolation it had already long since been drained
THE FRONT AND NOTHINGNESS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS II D 417
and indeterminate (or the recurrence of the old order, about which it was said it had been rotten and without substance. ) This is precisely the point that Heidegger is concerned with in his epochal anal- ysis of conscience in Sein undZeit (1927), sections 55-69 (see also chapter 7 in this book, "The Cabinet of Cynics," the final section. ) He conceives conscience as the "call of care. "
What does conscience call out to the addressee? Strictly speaking - nothing. The call says nothing, gives no information about events in the world. . . . "Nothing" is called out to the addressed self, but rather it is called upon to be itself, that is, to assume its own innermost possibil- ity, (p. 273)
We observe in the populist dialectic a comparable figure of thought: the retrogres- sion to the nation's "own innermost possibility" on the path through the nothing- ness of the great catastrophe. Heidegger explicates the emptiness of the con- science in "advanced" social praxis. His analysis sounds like an echo of the movements of thought in populist nihilism-antinihilism. Karl Jaspers, however, strikes at the heart of the problem even more precisely in Zur geistigen Situation derZeit (Man in the modern age, 1932). He elevates the problematic of the front to a universal characteristic of life in the "modern order of existence. " He confirms that the function of the front--to say to people what they are to fight or work for and against, with whom they are allied and against whom or what--has been lost. In the age of tactics, everything can suddenly be turned upside down. The front melts. Under the heading, "The Struggle with No Fighting
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Front," Jaspers writes:
A struggle in which one knows with whom one has to deal is clear. In the modern order of existence, however, after every momentary clarity, one is afflicted by the confusedness of the fighting fronts. What a mo- ment before seemed to be an adversary is now an ally. What in accor- dance with the objectivity of what is willed should be an adversary is on our side; what really seems to be antagonistic refrains from fighting; what looked like a united front turns against itself. And, of course, all this occurs in turbulent commotion and change. It is something that can turn me into an adversary of those apparently closest to me and into an ally of those who are distant from me. (Berlin [1979], p. 163)
For many contemporaries, in view of the political state of affairs, the tradi- tional schema of left and right also had to lose its clarifying function. What did concepts like progress and retrogression, socialism and capitalism, say when one lived in times when one party cleverly designated itself as "National Socialist"? When tactical alliances were made between Fascists and Communists? When two large workers' parties could not build a common "front" against that other party
418 ? THE FRONT AND NOTHINGNESS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS II
that also called itself the "Workers' party" and that nevertheless knew how to make a front with the party of big capital (Deutschnationale Volkspartei) and the armed forces--the notorious Harzburger Front of 1931, from which a pretty straight line leads to the Eastern Front of 1943 --without the laughable "Iron Front" of the democrats of 1932 being able to do anything about it? (See chapter 26. )
In 1920, the Dadaist, George Grosz, yearned to join ranks with the proletarian masses.
There will come a time in which the artist will no longer be that Bohe- mian, sloppy anarchist but a bright, healthy worker in collectivist soci- ety. For as long as this goal has not been realized by the laboring masses, the intellectual will sway skeptically and cynically to and fro. (Manifeste, Manifeste 1905-1933. Schriften Deutscher Kiinstler des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, vol. 1, ed. Dieter Schmidt [Dresden, 1965], p. 261).
But in Grosz's autobiography we read:
We were like sailing boats in the wind, with white, black, red sails. Some boats had streamers on which you could see three strokes of lightning, or a hammer and sickle, or a swastika on a steel helmet - from a distance, all these symbols looked similar. We did not have much control over the boats and had to maneuver assiduously. . . . The storm raged endlessly but we sailed off; we did not understand its melodies for our hearing had been blunted from so much "listen here for a minute. " We only knew that a wind was blowing from the east and another from the west--and that the storm blew over the entire globe. (Grosz, Ein kleines Ja und ein grosses Nein, p. 143)
Chapter 16
Dead Souls without Testaments. Political Cynicisms III: Looking after War Graves in the Empty Interior
You know, sister, . . . I am completely sober . . . but it is my deepest conviction: no one will ever really come home anymore.
Hermann Broch, Die Schlafwandler (1931-32)
How senseless is everything that was ever written, done and thought if such a thing is possible! Everything must be disin- genuous and inconsequential if the culture of millennia could not even hinder these streams of blood from being set flowing.
E. M. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1928)
In the survivors of the First World War, its dead did not come to rest. A change in the quality of dying had impinged on their consciousness: The Western Front of 1916 alone--in whose middle was the ghostly fort of Verdun --"claimed" over a million dead. For the first time in human history, a state of affairs was realized that can be designated by an expression from present-day American nuclear strategy: megadeaths (equal to one million dead). With the tactics of artillery and trench warfare, death on the battlefield was transformed from death in motion--as the storming enthusiasts of Langemarck still suffered--into a positional death. In the drumfire of Storm of Steel (Ernst Jiinger), an accidental surface death arose -- a statistical, fatalistic relation of the fighter to the shell that either misses him or turns him into dead matter.
That trauma of 1915-16 has its invisible and ubiquitous aftereffects in dyna- mism, vitalism, and the intoxication of movement of Weimar culture: getting stuck in the mud; the submersion of the attack in the trenches; the shock of im- mobilization; the fatalistic exposure to shells flying from somewhere or other; the
1decomposition of bodies in the mud of the trenches.
scarcely said) trauma of the time, but nevertheless it is everywhere at work as practiced myth. The myth works on in the protest of the fighters returning from the front against the demobilization (not to sink into the mud of civilian life), in the cult of aggression, of speed and moving on, which the contemporaries of Wei- mar prescribed for themselves; in the
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pleasure taken in the spread of the automo- bile, which starts off in an elitist fashion with the racing of the famous Mercedes Silver Arrow, anr' mixes in with popular dreams, in order to come completely
419
That is the great unsaid (or
420 D DEAD SOULS WITHOUT TESTAMENTS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS III
into its own in the program of Volkswagen (the People's Car), the power-through- joy-car. In Germany, the motorized nation was initially a Fascist dream.
The incomprehensibility and the technologized indignity of death in the mod- ern war of artillery burst all categories of conventional meaning. Absurdity elevated itself to the phenomenon par excellence, to the naked and uninterpretable fact that overwhelmed thinking with its brutal "It-is-so. " The power of this absur- dity can also be measured by the omnipresent attempts to overcome the ex- perience of senselessness with (left- and right-wing) antiabsurdist dispositions.
They did not call it "battle" or "fight"; they said "charge" and they spoke of themselves only as "we out there. " In this way, they wandered for months between the hands of death until they could say neither "yes" nor "no" to anything, until they did it without a word, a look, without a thought. . . .
They could be interchanged arbitrarily. . . . In these burning smelt- ing ovens they stripped off all differences and became like each other, until only the German front-soldier remained, who, ossified, took everything upon himself: deed and hunger, exhaustion and dirt, rain and fire, blood, horror and death. (Schauwecker, p. 228)
They sacrificed themselves day after day, night after night. . . . Many choked to death in the mud of the shell craters because they did not want to let go of the machine gun.
. . . They died in the roar, the smoke, mud and rain. They died in the dugouts, buried and suffocated. They died, gnawed away by gas. They died with gangrene in their wounds. They died everywhere, on the ground, in the ground, in the air, in dead forests, on hills, in craters.
In the end, they fought without hope. They were abandoned and each stood alone.
The only thing they possessed was this: they knew who they were. (Ibid. , p. 353)
This existentialism of the fighter at the front is already a belated retrospective bestowal of meaning from the populist perspective, as was depicted in thousands of novels and treatises. This knowing-who-they-were was carried over by the sur- vivors of the war into the Weimar peace or, more precisely, was invented in retro- spect in the latter. It is the basic figure in any bestowing of meaning from the right: Absurdity is exchanged for identity; one gains ego feelings through the denial of critical experience. "Composure. " To the present day, the neoconser- vatisms have not done anything differently.
When the regiment described by Schauwecker withdrew to German soil, it had to, on command from above, destroy all remaining weaponry, shoot it off, or sink it in a pond. Albrecht, the hero of the story, experiences this literally as self- castration. "Here, the nation, on command, deftly cut off its private parts" (p.
DEAD SOULS WITHOUT TESTAMENTS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS III ? 421
369). In the Bengal light of the last flares, an old war grave lights up before his eyes--a cross, nailed together, with the inscription:
"Rifleman Fritz Bredenstoll Infantry Regiment No. 162, 4th Company
He fell on 26 August 1914 for his Fatherland. He became a little giddy. He suddenly became a bit weak in the knees. . . . . . . a perfectly patriotic illumination over the grave of Fritz Bredenstoll who, according to the inscription, in 1914 chose to die for his Fatherland and to give himself up to this grave, while the others preferred to explode flares in the air and to throw away their ammuni- tion or organize some revolution or steal what they could get.
It was freezing. He became cold. Yes indeed --what did I want to say --I don't know anymore --it makes me so violently ill--that is all so repugnant to me --damn it! --leave me alone--it's all so horrifyingly stu- pid and childish, (pp. 370-71) Schauwecker's tortured, sarcastic tone betrays the effort of trying to outdo the objective cynicism of death in war with the subjective cynicism of nausea. His hero returns home --with a picture of "revolution" in his head that would be noth- ing other than the overcoming of absurdity through grand politics: He dreams of a "revolution on the front" in which the survivors rise up for the sake of the dead.
The "Fiihrer" of this revolution found motivation for his political mission in a similar way. Hitler lay in the Pasewalk infirmary in Pomerania as the other revolution in Germany began. According to his own account, he was blinded by mustard gas "in the English gas bombardment on the South Front at Ypern" in mid-October. A recent psychological interpretation says, on the contrary, that Hitler's problems with his eyes at this time were a case of hysterical blinding with which he somatically staged the decision "not to look on.
" Be that as it may, Hitler records that on November 10, he learned from the infirmary's chaplain the truth about "out there" (i. e. , the capitulation in the West and revolution in
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Berlin):
When things started to go black again, I felt and reeled my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk and buried my burning head under the blanket and pillow.
Since that day when I stood at my mother's grave, I had not
wept . . . but now I could not do otherwise. So, everything had been for nothing . . . the death of the two million who died was in vain. Would not the graves of all those hundreds of thousands have to open, those who had once set off with a belief in the Fatherland? . . . Would they not have to open and send the mute, muddy and bloody heroes home as ghosts of revenge who had been so shamelessly deceived into making the greatest sacrifice a man can make for his people in this world? Had they died for that? . . . Did these boys of seventeen sink
422 ? DEAD SOULS WITHOUT TESTAMENTS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS III
into the Flemish earth for this? . . . Had he lain in the hell of the drumfire and in the fever of gas warfare for this? . . .
In these nights, the hate grew in me, the hate against the culprit be- hind this deed.
In the days following, my destiny also became clear to me. I now had to laugh(\) at the thought of my own future that a short time before had still caused me such bitter worries. Was it not a laughing matter, to want to build houses on such ground? . . .
There can be no pact with the Jew, but only the hard either-or. But I decided to become a politician. (Mein Kampf, pp. 223-25)
In these pictures, the lived myth of the Weimar Republic speaks: Politics changes into the caring for war graves by the survivors. Those who got out alive seal a pact with the dead. Hitler composes an imaginary testament of the fallen by forcing himself on them as executor. Those who had sunk into the earth and mud stand up within him and return to their people as ghosts of revenge, out of the mud, home to the purity of ideals; instead of sinking into the Flemish soil, they would storm forward in populist movements. Hitler's conceptions of the blitzkrieg that he realized from 1939 onward were a staging of this image of graves that open up in order to transform those who had sunk into them back into storm troopers. Viewed psychopolitically, the Fiihrer was such a storm trooper,
2an emissary of the war graves. The politics of the militaristically and Fascisti-
cally inspired Right rested on the motif of a double--just as Brecht has depicted it in his Ballad of the German Soldier (see also Beumelburg, Voice from the Grave, etc. ).
The pact with the dead is the psychological dynamo of the arch-Fascist. At that moment when he makes himself into the executor of those buried in the mud ("But Idecided . . . "),hisprivateneurosisdiscoversthemagicalcontactwiththena- tional neurosis. What had previously been only an individual structure-Hitler as emissary and revenger of the dead mother (see the new psychoanalytic interpreta- tions of Hitler by Stierlin and Miller) --now becomes politically generalized; Hi- tler as emissary of a higher order. He is sent, he thinks, by the war dead. They are the millions who stand behind him from the beginning. They cannot save themselves from having such a delegate. In 1930, millions of living stand behind him, the war dead of the future who gave the double their vote; only then did those millions, too, stand behind him who mustered German industry to support Hitler. (See the well-known montage by John Heartfield: "Motto: Millions stand behind me"; Hitler raises his hand for the "German salute"; a corpulent donor, larger than life, lays a bundle of thousand-mark notes in his hand; Heartfield calls the mon-
3 tage "The Meaning of Hitler's Salute. " )
In his poem Stimmen aus dem Massengrab (Voices from the Mass Grave, 1928), Erich Kastner formulated another testament of these dead millions:
DEAD SOULS WITHOUT TESTAMENTS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS III D 423
We have dirt in our mouths. We have to be silent. And want to scream until the grave breaks open! And want to climb out of the graves screaming! We have dirt in our mouths. You cannot hear us.
There we lie, our dead mouths full of dirt.
And things went differently than we thought as we were dying. We died. But we died without purpose.
You will let yourselves be slaughtered tomorrow, like we
did yesterday.
Notes
1. Bernd Weyergraf drew my attention to these points particularly in the case of several paintings by Otto Dix. See Katalog zur Ausstellung im Haus am Waldsee, Berlin 1979 Otto Dix--zwischen den Kriegen, ed. H. V. Heppe, T. Kempas, and B. Weyergraf, in particular pp. 14ff.
2. One should look at the tombs of Unknown Soldiers with this in mind. The traditional forms show heroic constructions, towering warrior statues, pyramids for the dead, flags waving, obelisks. The Munich tomb for the
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Unknown Soldier, erected in 1923 in the courtyard of the residence in front of the Army Museum, depicted the new experience. The soldier lies in a kind of crypt; he is the sunken one; his resting place is half sanctuary, half artillery dugout. All about, entrances to the monument have been left open. One has to descend to honor the dead one. But what is more, he lies in such a way that he can arise again at any time. See Die Zwanziger Jahre in Munchen. Katalog zur Ausstellung im Munchner Stadtmuseum May-September 1979, ed. C. Stolzl, p. 469.
3. See Eckard Siepmann, Montage: John Heartfield. Vom Club Dada zur Arbeiter-Illustrierten Zeitung. Dokumente, Analysen, Berichte, 3rd ed. (Berlin, 1977), pp. 204ff. : "Die Millionen- Montage. "
Chapter 17
Conspirators and Dissimulators. Political Cynicisms IV: Conviction as Disinhibition
In Germany after the war there was no revolution, but there was a counterrevolution. What is commonly designated as revolution is only the fact that on 9 November 1918, all the monarchs fled in fear of a revolution. When they assessed the real situation, it was too late to keep up the fiction that they were still monarchs. Into the vacuum that had thus arisen, as the bearer of official force, stepped the army, represented by the soldiers' councils. They delegated their power to the Na- tional Assembly and thereby committed suicide.
The monarchists, after 9 November, played dead, so to speak, and claimed that they only wanted to intervene to estab- lish calm and order. Therefore, they supported the Social Democratic government in the struggle it wanted to have with the Left. In this way, the politically anemic forces and the resolute opponents of the republic again gained power. Im- mediately, the dictatorship of means revealed itself. The government of 1919 could not get rid of the spirits it had sum- moned. The armed forces removed the soldier's councils, they removed the leader of the republic, literally, by having him murdered.
E. J. Gumbel, Verschworer. Zur Geschichte und Soziologie der deutschen nationalistischen Geheimbunde 1918-1924, new ed. (Heidelberg, 1979, p. 13; see also the new edition of Vier Jahre politischer Mord [1922], 1980)
With a steady hand, Emil Julius Gumbel, a privatdozent in statistics in Heidel- berg, as well as pacifist, radical democrat, and documenter of the injustice current in his time, sketches the outlines of the German Revolution of 1918- 19. Its course was dominated by the interplay of social democracy with the reactionaries, the anemics with the bloodstained forces. What crystallized as the new political order
424
CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV ? 425
in Germany was a dubious interaction of official parliamentary forces with an- tidemocratic and secret organizations. In the latter gathered those who wanted to pursue a politics of refusal. The officials allowed themselves in all this to bite into the sour apple of the given facts: capitulation, the Weimar National Assembly, extorted acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles.
Social democracy had let itself be made a fool of by the political opponent or had offered itself as fool and stopgap measure. It took over the opponent's political inheritance without having looked to see whether it was really dead. Whereas those who were responsible for the war and the defeat had settled outside the country or had submerged in the blustering national opposition, the Social Democrats, with Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Noske at the helm, risked presenting themselves as the force of law and order in a situation of volatile revolutionary- counterrevolutionary ambiguity. They allowed themselves to be used to perform the work of the reaction. An older social democratic conviction complex seemed to emerge here once again. As early as 1914, social democracy had proved that it was prepared to fall into the patriotic line when it was a matter of clearing the way for the war. Thus, in 1919, it wanted to prove how efficient it was at ruling when it was a matter of administering the catastrophes of the other side. Twice within four years it said yes, gritting its teeth, to things that were irresponsible. Both times it showed itself to be the party of tragic illusory realism in Germany. In order to appear completely responsible and realistic, it accepted the responsi- bility for the mistakes and crimes of others, became a collaborator of Wilhel- minianism, and then, after the war, the business partner of military, bourgeois, and populist reaction. In its behavior, it carried to the point of absurdity the an- tithesis described by Max Weber between the ethics of conviction ("the pure line") and the ethics of responsibility ("the view of what is given"). For it practiced a conviction of responsibility, a readiness to accept responsibility as a substitute for conviction, formal realism as substitute for constructive, relevant action. It did not try to understand that even a simple real reform needs a revolutionary core, and thus after 1918, it bloodily choked off the democratic forces in Germany that wanted change. It wanted reforms without real interventions and thereby achieved the highest possible degree of conservation, indeed, restoration.
In this, a basic feature of Weimar mentalities is reflected: illusory realism, false sobriety, self-deception under the facade of the grand overview, positive conviction about the innermost disorientation, nihilistic antinihilism, a reckless readiness to assume responsibility. The naive pretended to be respectable and without illusions. The vengeful
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disappointed played innocent.
After the pause for reflection until May 1919-by which time the German ex- periments with council-republics also had failed-the men of the reaction had set their sights more clearly on their goals; Down with the props of the republic. The heads of the national and military camps were dreaming, already quite some time
426 ? CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV
before the first serious counterrevolutionary coup, the Kapp putsch (March 1920), of a great blow.
From a memorandum for General von Lossow
It is divided into a purely military part and a civil-political-economic part. The aim of both parts is to prime the entire people for the blow and to psychologically prepare them for the work, for the spirit re- quired after the executed blow.
I. Military Part
. . . An improvement of the state of affairs can only rely on weapons. The armed forces execute the first blow, clear the air, eliminate
quickly and ruthlessly everything that through weakness and criminality suffocates the people. After the executed blow, the part of the people at
arms builds the tatorship. . . .
a) Mobilization b) Mobilization d) Compilation
main force for the so-called civil and economic dic-
3. Preparations
of the armed forces and students(! ) . . , of the citizenry . . .
of black lists
II. The Civil Part The Press
Certain signs and mute indications, often quite harmless hints, as soon as they again and again race(! ) through the pages of the press, will to a large extent help solve the task of the education of the people. (Gumbel, Verschworer, pp. 28-30) Under the cover of secrecy, the military Right finds its true language. The con- spiracy suspends the compulsion to dissemble in its interior. Outwardly innocent; inwardly, cynicism as the normal tone. On February 11, 1920, a certain Lieu- tenant Mayerl wrote from Wurzburg to the commander of the Berthold Armored Division, a volunteer corps, which around 1919-20 mulled over plans for a great "blow. "
It is to be hoped that the coming dictatorship will not forget to declare open season on the Jews. --One night would suffice to exterminate these dogs. Here, I have already started compiling a black list so that the "right ones" will be beaten to death. . . .
For many a non-Jew also deserves it. (Gumbel, Verschworer, 23)
From the start, the German conspirators practice a game with masks. Only those who can look innocent will be in a position to let fly when the moment is ripe. The philistine cynicism, as it is revealed in Lossow's memorandum, presup- poses for its dictatorship of means a propaganda of pure conviction; the civil
CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV ? 427
preparations for the "blow" are thus necessarily respectable and publicly idealis- tic, apparently innocent. "The work is carried on publicly under the sign of the 'Antibolshevist League' " (Gumbel, p. 30). ' The higher the public goals, the more secretive the cynical means.
Just how strongly the ways of acting and thinking of the German Right were imbued with military cynicism is revealed by documents on the most spectacular action of the populist "idealists"--the murder of the German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, in Berlin on June 24, 1922.
Just as Rathenau . . . wanted to drive from his villa in Grunewald to the Foreign Office, his car was overtaken by another car, driven by a student, Ernst Werner Techow, in which the former first lieutenant, Er- win Kern, and Hermann Fischer also sat. Kern and Fischer fired a ma- chine gun at Rathenau and threw a hand grenade at him. Rathenau was killed instantly. . . .
.
It is pitiable, petty, miserly, vengeful, envious and animated only by a diseased hatred, a miserable matter of insects. But quite by the way, it did something it had not at all intended. . . . It has cleared away all hindrances to ourselves, it has broken down a thick tangled mass. That is the best thing about it. It has washed the dirt out of our eyes. . . . (p. 381)
. . . But you see: that is the secret-that has long since become
416 ? THE FRONT AND NOTHINGNESS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS II
clear to me in my skull. Pay careful attention: we didn't have any other content at all! That is the whole secret! Indeed! .
. . The secret con- sists in the fact that there is nothing there. Nothing! Therefore nothing happened! Therefore, everywhere people gave way.
The new philosophy of the front replaces the old morality. It talks not in medi- cal images like Hitler but in moral and psychological concepts. A populist revolu- tion is supposed to result from the activism of the men with a conscience about the front. The soldiers return home, not to peace but rather they make their way from the lost war "for nothing" to the new and genuine front about conscience. "We only have to say one word, then we understand each other instinctively: the front! " (p. 381).
Today we cannot say it aloud, for it is not for everyone's ears. I don't think that it is a great disaster without meaning and without
blame. . . . We have to find out once and for all why we lost the war. Because we ourselves had the guilt in us, the emptiness, the impudence, the external power. . . .
We had to lose the war so as to win the nation, (p. 382)
Georg van der Vring, too, in his Soldat Suhren (1928) projected the Weimar feeling of the dissolution of the front back into the inner monologue of a young soldier, who in the night train rolls out to the front for his first contact with the enemy:
And I come across a knot in my tissue called: the front. That is a mili- tary expression thrown about by the newspapers and the army reports as if it were an easily comprehensible object. But it isn't. For on that front mentioned by the army reports, good fights against good, evil against evil, good against evil and evil against good. And so it is a con- fused, even thousandfold twisted front whose shape no one knows.
There is, however, one front that is clear, unambiguous and straight and I find it in a secret place--I find it in my conscience. And it is the front of good thoughts and dignified actions, of hand shakes and loyal faith, (p. 59)
The moral front floats invisibly over nations, parties, blocks, individuals, and external fronts. It remains a mystical line - -irrational and inward. "Conscience! That is the word that shines today" (Schauwecker, p. 379). The populists thus take their credentials from that authority that psychoanalysis had begun to investigate under the concept of the superego -- and all the more with its description of the cynic's weak superego that nevertheless demands its tribute. However, in fact, this conscience for its part was already drained and disoriented. Good and evil can indeed appear inverted. Conscience was supposed to be the authority that bore the inner front--but taken in isolation it had already long since been drained
THE FRONT AND NOTHINGNESS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS II D 417
and indeterminate (or the recurrence of the old order, about which it was said it had been rotten and without substance. ) This is precisely the point that Heidegger is concerned with in his epochal anal- ysis of conscience in Sein undZeit (1927), sections 55-69 (see also chapter 7 in this book, "The Cabinet of Cynics," the final section. ) He conceives conscience as the "call of care. "
What does conscience call out to the addressee? Strictly speaking - nothing. The call says nothing, gives no information about events in the world. . . . "Nothing" is called out to the addressed self, but rather it is called upon to be itself, that is, to assume its own innermost possibil- ity, (p. 273)
We observe in the populist dialectic a comparable figure of thought: the retrogres- sion to the nation's "own innermost possibility" on the path through the nothing- ness of the great catastrophe. Heidegger explicates the emptiness of the con- science in "advanced" social praxis. His analysis sounds like an echo of the movements of thought in populist nihilism-antinihilism. Karl Jaspers, however, strikes at the heart of the problem even more precisely in Zur geistigen Situation derZeit (Man in the modern age, 1932). He elevates the problematic of the front to a universal characteristic of life in the "modern order of existence. " He confirms that the function of the front--to say to people what they are to fight or work for and against, with whom they are allied and against whom or what--has been lost. In the age of tactics, everything can suddenly be turned upside down. The front melts. Under the heading, "The Struggle with No Fighting
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Front," Jaspers writes:
A struggle in which one knows with whom one has to deal is clear. In the modern order of existence, however, after every momentary clarity, one is afflicted by the confusedness of the fighting fronts. What a mo- ment before seemed to be an adversary is now an ally. What in accor- dance with the objectivity of what is willed should be an adversary is on our side; what really seems to be antagonistic refrains from fighting; what looked like a united front turns against itself. And, of course, all this occurs in turbulent commotion and change. It is something that can turn me into an adversary of those apparently closest to me and into an ally of those who are distant from me. (Berlin [1979], p. 163)
For many contemporaries, in view of the political state of affairs, the tradi- tional schema of left and right also had to lose its clarifying function. What did concepts like progress and retrogression, socialism and capitalism, say when one lived in times when one party cleverly designated itself as "National Socialist"? When tactical alliances were made between Fascists and Communists? When two large workers' parties could not build a common "front" against that other party
418 ? THE FRONT AND NOTHINGNESS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS II
that also called itself the "Workers' party" and that nevertheless knew how to make a front with the party of big capital (Deutschnationale Volkspartei) and the armed forces--the notorious Harzburger Front of 1931, from which a pretty straight line leads to the Eastern Front of 1943 --without the laughable "Iron Front" of the democrats of 1932 being able to do anything about it? (See chapter 26. )
In 1920, the Dadaist, George Grosz, yearned to join ranks with the proletarian masses.
There will come a time in which the artist will no longer be that Bohe- mian, sloppy anarchist but a bright, healthy worker in collectivist soci- ety. For as long as this goal has not been realized by the laboring masses, the intellectual will sway skeptically and cynically to and fro. (Manifeste, Manifeste 1905-1933. Schriften Deutscher Kiinstler des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, vol. 1, ed. Dieter Schmidt [Dresden, 1965], p. 261).
But in Grosz's autobiography we read:
We were like sailing boats in the wind, with white, black, red sails. Some boats had streamers on which you could see three strokes of lightning, or a hammer and sickle, or a swastika on a steel helmet - from a distance, all these symbols looked similar. We did not have much control over the boats and had to maneuver assiduously. . . . The storm raged endlessly but we sailed off; we did not understand its melodies for our hearing had been blunted from so much "listen here for a minute. " We only knew that a wind was blowing from the east and another from the west--and that the storm blew over the entire globe. (Grosz, Ein kleines Ja und ein grosses Nein, p. 143)
Chapter 16
Dead Souls without Testaments. Political Cynicisms III: Looking after War Graves in the Empty Interior
You know, sister, . . . I am completely sober . . . but it is my deepest conviction: no one will ever really come home anymore.
Hermann Broch, Die Schlafwandler (1931-32)
How senseless is everything that was ever written, done and thought if such a thing is possible! Everything must be disin- genuous and inconsequential if the culture of millennia could not even hinder these streams of blood from being set flowing.
E. M. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1928)
In the survivors of the First World War, its dead did not come to rest. A change in the quality of dying had impinged on their consciousness: The Western Front of 1916 alone--in whose middle was the ghostly fort of Verdun --"claimed" over a million dead. For the first time in human history, a state of affairs was realized that can be designated by an expression from present-day American nuclear strategy: megadeaths (equal to one million dead). With the tactics of artillery and trench warfare, death on the battlefield was transformed from death in motion--as the storming enthusiasts of Langemarck still suffered--into a positional death. In the drumfire of Storm of Steel (Ernst Jiinger), an accidental surface death arose -- a statistical, fatalistic relation of the fighter to the shell that either misses him or turns him into dead matter.
That trauma of 1915-16 has its invisible and ubiquitous aftereffects in dyna- mism, vitalism, and the intoxication of movement of Weimar culture: getting stuck in the mud; the submersion of the attack in the trenches; the shock of im- mobilization; the fatalistic exposure to shells flying from somewhere or other; the
1decomposition of bodies in the mud of the trenches.
scarcely said) trauma of the time, but nevertheless it is everywhere at work as practiced myth. The myth works on in the protest of the fighters returning from the front against the demobilization (not to sink into the mud of civilian life), in the cult of aggression, of speed and moving on, which the contemporaries of Wei- mar prescribed for themselves; in the
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pleasure taken in the spread of the automo- bile, which starts off in an elitist fashion with the racing of the famous Mercedes Silver Arrow, anr' mixes in with popular dreams, in order to come completely
419
That is the great unsaid (or
420 D DEAD SOULS WITHOUT TESTAMENTS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS III
into its own in the program of Volkswagen (the People's Car), the power-through- joy-car. In Germany, the motorized nation was initially a Fascist dream.
The incomprehensibility and the technologized indignity of death in the mod- ern war of artillery burst all categories of conventional meaning. Absurdity elevated itself to the phenomenon par excellence, to the naked and uninterpretable fact that overwhelmed thinking with its brutal "It-is-so. " The power of this absur- dity can also be measured by the omnipresent attempts to overcome the ex- perience of senselessness with (left- and right-wing) antiabsurdist dispositions.
They did not call it "battle" or "fight"; they said "charge" and they spoke of themselves only as "we out there. " In this way, they wandered for months between the hands of death until they could say neither "yes" nor "no" to anything, until they did it without a word, a look, without a thought. . . .
They could be interchanged arbitrarily. . . . In these burning smelt- ing ovens they stripped off all differences and became like each other, until only the German front-soldier remained, who, ossified, took everything upon himself: deed and hunger, exhaustion and dirt, rain and fire, blood, horror and death. (Schauwecker, p. 228)
They sacrificed themselves day after day, night after night. . . . Many choked to death in the mud of the shell craters because they did not want to let go of the machine gun.
. . . They died in the roar, the smoke, mud and rain. They died in the dugouts, buried and suffocated. They died, gnawed away by gas. They died with gangrene in their wounds. They died everywhere, on the ground, in the ground, in the air, in dead forests, on hills, in craters.
In the end, they fought without hope. They were abandoned and each stood alone.
The only thing they possessed was this: they knew who they were. (Ibid. , p. 353)
This existentialism of the fighter at the front is already a belated retrospective bestowal of meaning from the populist perspective, as was depicted in thousands of novels and treatises. This knowing-who-they-were was carried over by the sur- vivors of the war into the Weimar peace or, more precisely, was invented in retro- spect in the latter. It is the basic figure in any bestowing of meaning from the right: Absurdity is exchanged for identity; one gains ego feelings through the denial of critical experience. "Composure. " To the present day, the neoconser- vatisms have not done anything differently.
When the regiment described by Schauwecker withdrew to German soil, it had to, on command from above, destroy all remaining weaponry, shoot it off, or sink it in a pond. Albrecht, the hero of the story, experiences this literally as self- castration. "Here, the nation, on command, deftly cut off its private parts" (p.
DEAD SOULS WITHOUT TESTAMENTS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS III ? 421
369). In the Bengal light of the last flares, an old war grave lights up before his eyes--a cross, nailed together, with the inscription:
"Rifleman Fritz Bredenstoll Infantry Regiment No. 162, 4th Company
He fell on 26 August 1914 for his Fatherland. He became a little giddy. He suddenly became a bit weak in the knees. . . . . . . a perfectly patriotic illumination over the grave of Fritz Bredenstoll who, according to the inscription, in 1914 chose to die for his Fatherland and to give himself up to this grave, while the others preferred to explode flares in the air and to throw away their ammuni- tion or organize some revolution or steal what they could get.
It was freezing. He became cold. Yes indeed --what did I want to say --I don't know anymore --it makes me so violently ill--that is all so repugnant to me --damn it! --leave me alone--it's all so horrifyingly stu- pid and childish, (pp. 370-71) Schauwecker's tortured, sarcastic tone betrays the effort of trying to outdo the objective cynicism of death in war with the subjective cynicism of nausea. His hero returns home --with a picture of "revolution" in his head that would be noth- ing other than the overcoming of absurdity through grand politics: He dreams of a "revolution on the front" in which the survivors rise up for the sake of the dead.
The "Fiihrer" of this revolution found motivation for his political mission in a similar way. Hitler lay in the Pasewalk infirmary in Pomerania as the other revolution in Germany began. According to his own account, he was blinded by mustard gas "in the English gas bombardment on the South Front at Ypern" in mid-October. A recent psychological interpretation says, on the contrary, that Hitler's problems with his eyes at this time were a case of hysterical blinding with which he somatically staged the decision "not to look on.
" Be that as it may, Hitler records that on November 10, he learned from the infirmary's chaplain the truth about "out there" (i. e. , the capitulation in the West and revolution in
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Berlin):
When things started to go black again, I felt and reeled my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk and buried my burning head under the blanket and pillow.
Since that day when I stood at my mother's grave, I had not
wept . . . but now I could not do otherwise. So, everything had been for nothing . . . the death of the two million who died was in vain. Would not the graves of all those hundreds of thousands have to open, those who had once set off with a belief in the Fatherland? . . . Would they not have to open and send the mute, muddy and bloody heroes home as ghosts of revenge who had been so shamelessly deceived into making the greatest sacrifice a man can make for his people in this world? Had they died for that? . . . Did these boys of seventeen sink
422 ? DEAD SOULS WITHOUT TESTAMENTS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS III
into the Flemish earth for this? . . . Had he lain in the hell of the drumfire and in the fever of gas warfare for this? . . .
In these nights, the hate grew in me, the hate against the culprit be- hind this deed.
In the days following, my destiny also became clear to me. I now had to laugh(\) at the thought of my own future that a short time before had still caused me such bitter worries. Was it not a laughing matter, to want to build houses on such ground? . . .
There can be no pact with the Jew, but only the hard either-or. But I decided to become a politician. (Mein Kampf, pp. 223-25)
In these pictures, the lived myth of the Weimar Republic speaks: Politics changes into the caring for war graves by the survivors. Those who got out alive seal a pact with the dead. Hitler composes an imaginary testament of the fallen by forcing himself on them as executor. Those who had sunk into the earth and mud stand up within him and return to their people as ghosts of revenge, out of the mud, home to the purity of ideals; instead of sinking into the Flemish soil, they would storm forward in populist movements. Hitler's conceptions of the blitzkrieg that he realized from 1939 onward were a staging of this image of graves that open up in order to transform those who had sunk into them back into storm troopers. Viewed psychopolitically, the Fiihrer was such a storm trooper,
2an emissary of the war graves. The politics of the militaristically and Fascisti-
cally inspired Right rested on the motif of a double--just as Brecht has depicted it in his Ballad of the German Soldier (see also Beumelburg, Voice from the Grave, etc. ).
The pact with the dead is the psychological dynamo of the arch-Fascist. At that moment when he makes himself into the executor of those buried in the mud ("But Idecided . . . "),hisprivateneurosisdiscoversthemagicalcontactwiththena- tional neurosis. What had previously been only an individual structure-Hitler as emissary and revenger of the dead mother (see the new psychoanalytic interpreta- tions of Hitler by Stierlin and Miller) --now becomes politically generalized; Hi- tler as emissary of a higher order. He is sent, he thinks, by the war dead. They are the millions who stand behind him from the beginning. They cannot save themselves from having such a delegate. In 1930, millions of living stand behind him, the war dead of the future who gave the double their vote; only then did those millions, too, stand behind him who mustered German industry to support Hitler. (See the well-known montage by John Heartfield: "Motto: Millions stand behind me"; Hitler raises his hand for the "German salute"; a corpulent donor, larger than life, lays a bundle of thousand-mark notes in his hand; Heartfield calls the mon-
3 tage "The Meaning of Hitler's Salute. " )
In his poem Stimmen aus dem Massengrab (Voices from the Mass Grave, 1928), Erich Kastner formulated another testament of these dead millions:
DEAD SOULS WITHOUT TESTAMENTS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS III D 423
We have dirt in our mouths. We have to be silent. And want to scream until the grave breaks open! And want to climb out of the graves screaming! We have dirt in our mouths. You cannot hear us.
There we lie, our dead mouths full of dirt.
And things went differently than we thought as we were dying. We died. But we died without purpose.
You will let yourselves be slaughtered tomorrow, like we
did yesterday.
Notes
1. Bernd Weyergraf drew my attention to these points particularly in the case of several paintings by Otto Dix. See Katalog zur Ausstellung im Haus am Waldsee, Berlin 1979 Otto Dix--zwischen den Kriegen, ed. H. V. Heppe, T. Kempas, and B. Weyergraf, in particular pp. 14ff.
2. One should look at the tombs of Unknown Soldiers with this in mind. The traditional forms show heroic constructions, towering warrior statues, pyramids for the dead, flags waving, obelisks. The Munich tomb for the
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Unknown Soldier, erected in 1923 in the courtyard of the residence in front of the Army Museum, depicted the new experience. The soldier lies in a kind of crypt; he is the sunken one; his resting place is half sanctuary, half artillery dugout. All about, entrances to the monument have been left open. One has to descend to honor the dead one. But what is more, he lies in such a way that he can arise again at any time. See Die Zwanziger Jahre in Munchen. Katalog zur Ausstellung im Munchner Stadtmuseum May-September 1979, ed. C. Stolzl, p. 469.
3. See Eckard Siepmann, Montage: John Heartfield. Vom Club Dada zur Arbeiter-Illustrierten Zeitung. Dokumente, Analysen, Berichte, 3rd ed. (Berlin, 1977), pp. 204ff. : "Die Millionen- Montage. "
Chapter 17
Conspirators and Dissimulators. Political Cynicisms IV: Conviction as Disinhibition
In Germany after the war there was no revolution, but there was a counterrevolution. What is commonly designated as revolution is only the fact that on 9 November 1918, all the monarchs fled in fear of a revolution. When they assessed the real situation, it was too late to keep up the fiction that they were still monarchs. Into the vacuum that had thus arisen, as the bearer of official force, stepped the army, represented by the soldiers' councils. They delegated their power to the Na- tional Assembly and thereby committed suicide.
The monarchists, after 9 November, played dead, so to speak, and claimed that they only wanted to intervene to estab- lish calm and order. Therefore, they supported the Social Democratic government in the struggle it wanted to have with the Left. In this way, the politically anemic forces and the resolute opponents of the republic again gained power. Im- mediately, the dictatorship of means revealed itself. The government of 1919 could not get rid of the spirits it had sum- moned. The armed forces removed the soldier's councils, they removed the leader of the republic, literally, by having him murdered.
E. J. Gumbel, Verschworer. Zur Geschichte und Soziologie der deutschen nationalistischen Geheimbunde 1918-1924, new ed. (Heidelberg, 1979, p. 13; see also the new edition of Vier Jahre politischer Mord [1922], 1980)
With a steady hand, Emil Julius Gumbel, a privatdozent in statistics in Heidel- berg, as well as pacifist, radical democrat, and documenter of the injustice current in his time, sketches the outlines of the German Revolution of 1918- 19. Its course was dominated by the interplay of social democracy with the reactionaries, the anemics with the bloodstained forces. What crystallized as the new political order
424
CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV ? 425
in Germany was a dubious interaction of official parliamentary forces with an- tidemocratic and secret organizations. In the latter gathered those who wanted to pursue a politics of refusal. The officials allowed themselves in all this to bite into the sour apple of the given facts: capitulation, the Weimar National Assembly, extorted acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles.
Social democracy had let itself be made a fool of by the political opponent or had offered itself as fool and stopgap measure. It took over the opponent's political inheritance without having looked to see whether it was really dead. Whereas those who were responsible for the war and the defeat had settled outside the country or had submerged in the blustering national opposition, the Social Democrats, with Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Noske at the helm, risked presenting themselves as the force of law and order in a situation of volatile revolutionary- counterrevolutionary ambiguity. They allowed themselves to be used to perform the work of the reaction. An older social democratic conviction complex seemed to emerge here once again. As early as 1914, social democracy had proved that it was prepared to fall into the patriotic line when it was a matter of clearing the way for the war. Thus, in 1919, it wanted to prove how efficient it was at ruling when it was a matter of administering the catastrophes of the other side. Twice within four years it said yes, gritting its teeth, to things that were irresponsible. Both times it showed itself to be the party of tragic illusory realism in Germany. In order to appear completely responsible and realistic, it accepted the responsi- bility for the mistakes and crimes of others, became a collaborator of Wilhel- minianism, and then, after the war, the business partner of military, bourgeois, and populist reaction. In its behavior, it carried to the point of absurdity the an- tithesis described by Max Weber between the ethics of conviction ("the pure line") and the ethics of responsibility ("the view of what is given"). For it practiced a conviction of responsibility, a readiness to accept responsibility as a substitute for conviction, formal realism as substitute for constructive, relevant action. It did not try to understand that even a simple real reform needs a revolutionary core, and thus after 1918, it bloodily choked off the democratic forces in Germany that wanted change. It wanted reforms without real interventions and thereby achieved the highest possible degree of conservation, indeed, restoration.
In this, a basic feature of Weimar mentalities is reflected: illusory realism, false sobriety, self-deception under the facade of the grand overview, positive conviction about the innermost disorientation, nihilistic antinihilism, a reckless readiness to assume responsibility. The naive pretended to be respectable and without illusions. The vengeful
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disappointed played innocent.
After the pause for reflection until May 1919-by which time the German ex- periments with council-republics also had failed-the men of the reaction had set their sights more clearly on their goals; Down with the props of the republic. The heads of the national and military camps were dreaming, already quite some time
426 ? CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV
before the first serious counterrevolutionary coup, the Kapp putsch (March 1920), of a great blow.
From a memorandum for General von Lossow
It is divided into a purely military part and a civil-political-economic part. The aim of both parts is to prime the entire people for the blow and to psychologically prepare them for the work, for the spirit re- quired after the executed blow.
I. Military Part
. . . An improvement of the state of affairs can only rely on weapons. The armed forces execute the first blow, clear the air, eliminate
quickly and ruthlessly everything that through weakness and criminality suffocates the people. After the executed blow, the part of the people at
arms builds the tatorship. . . .
a) Mobilization b) Mobilization d) Compilation
main force for the so-called civil and economic dic-
3. Preparations
of the armed forces and students(! ) . . , of the citizenry . . .
of black lists
II. The Civil Part The Press
Certain signs and mute indications, often quite harmless hints, as soon as they again and again race(! ) through the pages of the press, will to a large extent help solve the task of the education of the people. (Gumbel, Verschworer, pp. 28-30) Under the cover of secrecy, the military Right finds its true language. The con- spiracy suspends the compulsion to dissemble in its interior. Outwardly innocent; inwardly, cynicism as the normal tone. On February 11, 1920, a certain Lieu- tenant Mayerl wrote from Wurzburg to the commander of the Berthold Armored Division, a volunteer corps, which around 1919-20 mulled over plans for a great "blow. "
It is to be hoped that the coming dictatorship will not forget to declare open season on the Jews. --One night would suffice to exterminate these dogs. Here, I have already started compiling a black list so that the "right ones" will be beaten to death. . . .
For many a non-Jew also deserves it. (Gumbel, Verschworer, 23)
From the start, the German conspirators practice a game with masks. Only those who can look innocent will be in a position to let fly when the moment is ripe. The philistine cynicism, as it is revealed in Lossow's memorandum, presup- poses for its dictatorship of means a propaganda of pure conviction; the civil
CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV ? 427
preparations for the "blow" are thus necessarily respectable and publicly idealis- tic, apparently innocent. "The work is carried on publicly under the sign of the 'Antibolshevist League' " (Gumbel, p. 30). ' The higher the public goals, the more secretive the cynical means.
Just how strongly the ways of acting and thinking of the German Right were imbued with military cynicism is revealed by documents on the most spectacular action of the populist "idealists"--the murder of the German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, in Berlin on June 24, 1922.
Just as Rathenau . . . wanted to drive from his villa in Grunewald to the Foreign Office, his car was overtaken by another car, driven by a student, Ernst Werner Techow, in which the former first lieutenant, Er- win Kern, and Hermann Fischer also sat. Kern and Fischer fired a ma- chine gun at Rathenau and threw a hand grenade at him. Rathenau was killed instantly. . . .
.
