Fraud and expectations of being
defrauded
became epidemic in it.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
If it's not enough, a strip of slug.
"
Herr Irrgang read what Miinzer had written and said very softly: "Almighty God" and sat down, as if he suddenly felt ill, on the chaise longue, in the middle of a crackling mountain of foreign newspapers.
Fabian bent over the sheet of paper that quivered in Irrgang's hands and read: "In Calcutta there was street fighting between Mohammedans and Hindus. Although the police soon brought the situation under con- trol, there were fourteen dead and twenty-two wounded. Order has been completely restored. "
"But in Calcutta there have been no disturbances at all," Irrgang re- plied resistingly.
"The disturbances did not happen? " Miinzer asked incensed. Would you like to prove that to me? In Calcutta, there are disturbances hap- pening all the time. Perhaps we should report that the Loch Ness mon- ster has been sighted again in the Pacific Ocean? Note the following: reports whose falsity cannot be established, or can only be established after weeks, are true. And now, get yourself out of here in a hurry, otherwise I will have you set out a matrix and add something to the lo- cal edition. "
The young man left.
"And someone like that wants to become a journalist? " sighed Miin- zer. . . . "What can you do? " he said. "By the way, why the sympathy with the people? After all, they're alive, all thirty-six, and are perfectly healthy. Believe me, my dear, what we compose in addition is not as bad as what we omit. " And with that, he struck another half a page out of the text of the chancellor's speech. . . .
. . . "You mustn't take anything to heart," said the commercial edi- tor to Fabian. "He has been a journalist for twenty years and already believes what he lies. . . "
"You disapprove of your colleague's indolence? " Fabian asked Herr Malmy. "What do you do besides that? "
The commercial editor smiled, of course only with his mouth. "I lie too," he replied. "But I know it. I know that the system is false. With us in the economy, a blind man can see that. But I serve the false sys-
"BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS ? 479
tern with devotion. For in the framework of the false system at whose disposal I place my moderate talent, the false measures are correct in the nature of things, and the correct measures are, understandably, false. I am a devotee of strict consistency, and in addition, I am . . . "
"A cynic," Miinzer threw in, without looking up.
Malmy shrugged his shoulders. "I wanted to say, a coward. That hits the mark more exactly. My character is in no way the equal of my un- derstanding. I regret that uprightly, but I no longer do anything against it. "
[Afterwards, they sat in a small wine bar. ]
"I help in doing the wrong thing consistently. Everything that as- sumes gigantic forms can impress, even stupidity. " Miinzer sat on the sofa and suddenly wept. "I am a swine," he murmured.
"A typically Russian atmosphere," observed Strom. "Alcohol, self- torture, grown men weeping. " He was touched and stroked the politi- cian's bald head.
"I am a swine," the other murmured. He said nothing more.
Malmy smiled at Fabian: "The state supports unprofitable large com- panies. The state supports heavy industry. Industry markets its products abroad below cost, but it sells them within our borders above the world market price. . . . The state accelerates the dwindling of the buying power of the masses through taxes it doesn't dare lay on the propertied classes; in any case capital flees in billions over the borders. Is that not consistent? Doesn't madness have method? There, every connoisseur's mouth waters! "
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
"I am a swine," murmured Miinzer, and, with his pouting lower lip', caught the tears.
"You overestimate yourself, honorable sir," said the commercial edi- tor. " (Fabian, chapter 3)
These cynical egos are appendages of their cancer-ridden consciousness of reality, which obeys the rules of the game in the capitalist world without resis- tance. In it, there is no misery that does not reflect itself, double itself, and ironi- cally mirror itself in tormented confessions and aggressive consent. The signi- ficant writers of the time behave toward these phenomena as minute-takers. They know that the people at the center of things know what they are doing. * Journalists in particular cannot appeal to any form of ignorance. That a commercial editor makes such a confession about capitalism as the false system that he serves with lies and devotion belongs to the great moments of truth in Weimar culture. With- out insight into the reflective constitution of the cynical structure, a concept of truth for these kinds of situations can no longer be defined. Discreetly disin-
hibited, to the present day it is people of this kind who have grasped the unity
of madness and method and who will say so among friends.
2480 ? "BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS
In the "bright hour," the masks of integrated cynics crumble. Where private confidences and alcohol have helped things along, the decomposition presses threateningly and garrulously out into the open. A manufacturer's monologue from Joseph Roth's novel of 1927, Die Flucht ohne Ende. Ein Bericht (Flight without end. A report), runs along the same lines. The scene takes place at a party in a Rhenish town. People are talking about fashion, the latest models in hats from "Femina," about the workers and the "decline of Marxism," about politics and the League of Nations, about art and Max Reinhardt. The manufacturer, in a conver- sation with Tunda, the hero of the novel, loosens the laces in his patent leather shoes, undoes his collar, and stretches out on a "broad sofa. " In free association, he turns his companion into a witness of his self-analysis.
"Earlier on, I understood you perfectly, Herr Tunda. . . . As far as I am concerned, I posed my questions for a quite definite, egoistic rea- son. In a certain way, I was obliged to do this. You don't understand that yet. First, you will have to live amongst us a little longer. Then you will also have to pose certain questions and give certain answers. Everyone here lives according to eternal laws and against his will. Of course, when they began here, everyone . . . had his own will. He ar- ranged his life completely freely, nobody tried to interfere. But after some time, he did not even notice that what he had set up through a free decision became, if not written, then holy law. . . .
You don't yet know how frightfully open eyes it has. . . .
. . . Now, occupation, too, as far as I'm concerned, is not such an important thing. How one makes a living is not decisive. But what is important is, for example, the love for wife and child. If you began, through your own volition, to be a good family man, do you believe thatyoucouldeverstop? . . . WhenIcamehere,Ihadalottodo;I had to borrow money, set up a factory. . . . Thus when someone came too close to me with something or other, I got him out of my hair in a coarse fashion. I thus became a boor and a man of deeds. People admired my energy. The law overpowered me, commanded me to be coarse and to act carelessly--I must, you see, talk with you as the law commands. . . .
Just like me, all people lie. Everyone says what is prescribed by law. The petite actress who asked you earlier about a young Russian writer is perhaps more interested in petroleum. But no, the roles have been allotted to everyone. The music critic and your brother, for exam- ple: both play the stock exchange, I know. What do they talk about? About cultural matters. When you come into a room and see the peo- ple, you know at once what each will say. Everyone has a role. It is so in our town. No one is in his own skin. And it is the same in our town as in all others, or at least the hundred largest towns in our country. " (Roth, Die Flucht ohne Ende, (pp. 76-79)
"BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS ? 481
? Surgeon-major Doctor Benn, 1916.
482 ? "BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS
This manufacturer even thinks through the compulsion to become cynical (boorishness)--of course, without penetrating the "compulsion" to conform to this reality as such. These are flashes of illumination after which the twilight returns. One knows what one is doing. At any time, if someone asked, one could also say what is wrong with it. One calls it the compulsion of the system, realism. Life becomes one great big agreement to collude with the half-measures and tor- por toward which the majority tends. Over the country there hangs a pseu- dorealist psychological smog, a semidarkness of hardening and demoralization, insight and resignation, drive for self-preservation and ambition. Consciousness is alert but, so as to become anesthetized, it continually casts a side-glance at the "reality that cannot be changed. " "In everyone, the ice dogs bark. "
Not everywhere do things remain on the level of lachrymose and momentary cynicism. Gottfried Benn tried to make the "great hour" out of the small "bright hour. " He outdid the vulgar schizophrenias by distilling lyrical states of the highest
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
quality from the German sicknesses of modern times. From the cynic's Yes to an incurable reality, isolated "flowers of evil" can spring. Benn was one of the most significant "secret agents" of his time, who let the cat out of the bag about the collective spiritual condition and made confessions of such explicit sharpness that everyday understanding usually does not comprehend them be- cause it does not have the courage to take them literally.
"A double life in the sense claimed and lived out by me is a conscious splitting of personality, a systematic, tendentious splitting. On this, let us listen to the "Ptolemaic. " . . .
Suffering, what is that anyway? You have dammed up waters --open your sluices; the times do not suit you--: a placard on your desk, in large writing: that is no different! Composure! Things are going well for you--outwardly you earn your money, and inwardly you indulge yourself. You can't have anything more, that is the situation, recognize it, don't demand the impossible! Make do and look on the water occa- sionally, he says in conclusion, but that too is not resignation; that is eclipsed by his Dionysian motif. . . . All that together results over and over again in his principal maxim: recognize your situation -- that is, ac- commodate yourself to the situation, camouflage yourself, forget your convictions. . . . On the other hand, go along with convictions, world- views, syntheses in all directions of the weather vane when institutions and offices demand it, but: keep a cool head. (G. Benn, Doppelleben [Double life], Collected Works, vol. 8, pp. 2004-9)
Notes
1. Denn sie wissen, was sie tun (For they know what they do) is the title of a 1931 novel by Ernst Ottwald that is critical of the judiciary.
2. Another outstanding document is Erik Reger's novel Union der festen Hand, likewise from 1931.
Chapter 23
On the German Republic of Impostors: The Natural History of Deception
Orge says:
"They think of it this way:
The clever ones live off the stupid ones and the stupid from their labor. "
Bertolt Brecht, Tagebucher 1920-1922
If one wanted to write a social history of mistrust in Germany, then above all, the Weimar Republic would draw attention to itself.
Fraud and expectations of being defrauded became epidemic in it. In those years, it proved to be an om- nipresent risk of existence that from behind all solid illusions, the untenable and chaotic emerged. A revolution took place in those deep regions of collective feel- ings toward life in which the ontology of everyday life was laid out: a dull feeling of the instability of things penetrated into souls, a feeling of lack of substance, of relativity, of accelerated change, and of involuntary floating from transition to transition.
This softening of the feeling for what is reliable ends in a collectively dispersed rage of anxiety against modernity. For this is the epitome of states of affairs in which everything appears only so-so and is disposed toward change. Out of this anxious rage, a readiness is easily formed to turn away from this incommodious state of the world and to remold the hate against it into a Yes to sociopolitical and ideological movements that promise the greatest simplification and the most ener- getic return to "substantial" and reliable states of affairs. Here, the problem of ideology approaches us from a, so to speak, psychoeconomic direction. Fascism and its side currents were after all --viewed philosophically -- in large part move- ments of simplification. But that precisely the town criers of the new simplicity (good--evil, friend-foe, "front," "identity," "bond") for their part had gone through the modern nihilist school of artfulness, bluff, and deception- that was to become clear to the masses much too late. The "solutions" that sounded so sim- ple, "positiveness," the new "stability," the new essentialness and security: They
483
484 ? ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS
are but structures that, under the surface, are even more complicated than the complicatedness of modern life against which they resist. For they are defensive, reactive formations --composed of modern experiences and denials of the same. Antimodernity is possibly more modern and complex than what it rejects; in any case, it is gloomier, blunter, more brutal, and more cynical.
In such an "insecure" world, the impostor grew into a character type of the times par excellence. Cases of fraud, deception, misleading, breach of promise, charlatanism, and so forth multiplied not only in a numerical sense: The impostor also became an indispensable figure in the sense of collective self-reassurance, a model of the times and a mythical template. With a view toward the impostor, the need to clarify this ambiguous life, in which continually everything came out differently from the way it was "intended," was accommodated in the most favora- ble way. In the impostor, one found the compromise between the feeling of the times that everything was becoming "too complicated" and the need for simpli- fication. If one already no longer saw through the "great whole" and this chaos of money,
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
interests, parties, ideologies, and so on, then, in the individual case, one could nevertheless get an overview of the game of facade and background. If one looked on as the defrauder went through his masked game, then this reas- sured one in the feeling that the real world must also be in the vein of such role play, especially where one achieves the least clarity. Thus, the impostor became the existentially most important and most understandable symbol for the chronic crisis of complexity of modern consciousness.
To analyze individual phenomena would be a study in itself. One would have to speak of Thomas Mann's Felix Krull and of his real-life prototype, the ingen- ious deceiver, dreamer, grand seigneur, and hotel thief, Manolescu, an elegant young Romanian who held Europe in suspense with his criminal acts of bravado and his increasingly daring confidence tricks, and who in addition wrote two volumes of memoirs in which literary swindle was added to his criminal acts. One would have to speak of the unforgettable Captain von Kopenick, the classic ple- beian impostor's comedy, with whose dramatic narration Carl Zuckmayer tri- umphed in 1931 on the Weimar stage. In the same trade the false Hohenzollern prince, Harry Domela, also made an attempt by putting the aristocratic sycophancy of Prussian reactionary snobs to the test and who likewise, in 1927, immortalized himself in his memoirs.
Even the enumeration and description of the most important affairs of swindle and deception from that time would fill a thick book. It would show that deception had become an industry and that the expectation of being deceived (in the double sense: as readiness to let oneself be deceived and as mistrust that someone would try to pull the wool over one's eyes) had become a universal state of conscious- ness. They were years of the collective dawning of an illusion in whose twilight the one side saw their chances to make a career of deceptions and promises, and the others let their readiness for an illusion become so starkly visible that the ac-
ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS ? 485
tive side only had to do what the passive side expected. Modernity establishes it- self in people's minds in the form of a permanent training in seduction and simul- taneous mistrust.
In 1923 inflation in Germany reached its peak. The state, which let its printing presses run hot without having any backing, was thereby itself caught in the role of the grand deceiver, even if it was not drawn to account, since nobody could take legal action against loss through inflation. In this year, a small Leipzig com- pany published a booklet entitled Die Psychologie des Hochstaplers (The psy- chology of the impostor). Its author was Doctor Erich Wulffen, a humanistically educated person with many interests. A former public prosecutor from Dresden, Wulffen had devoted himself to pursuing the scientific fight against crime (crimi- nology), even into the psychocultural preconditions of crime. In his chats, a new science took shape: "cultural criminology. " Wulffen provided a psychopathology of everyday life for the daily use of public prosecutors and officers of the law. He placed himself, with the title "criminal psychologist," beside Lombroso and Gross. His booklet, as innocent and humorous as it pretends to be, reads like a police anthropology of the twenties. Here, everything is revealed by someone for whom deception, because of his profession, comprises half his life and, if one also includes the exposure, then his whole life.
The origins of deception, according to Wulffen, lie in the drive structure of human beings. Namely, nature has given human beings an inherent instinct for secrecy and dissimulation that aids the general drive for self-preservation. But traces of deception can also be found even in nonhuman domain: Bears, apes, horses, and other creatures have been caught dissimulating. Thus, the "begin- nings of the psychology of the impostor" (p. 7) are present even in the brains of lower animals. In human beings such beginnings have unfolded in a specific way. Children are born deceivers. Their drive to play, their talent for "apparent lies," their capacity for imitation, and their penchant for experimenting with mental constructions provide the public prosecutor with proof of their "inherited instinct for dissimulation. " As a psychologist, Wulffen knows that all crimes grow out of "quite modest beginnings. " Normality is the breeding ground of crime. "A child, likewise in order to have a change, pretends to have a need so as to be taken out of the crib, carriage or chair" (p. 8). In the need for change are to be found the seeds of later bourgeois disorder, which is often nothing other than the acting out of dreams that life simultaneously wakens and prohibits in individuals. With the impostor, the transition from the drive and the dream into crime is accomplished as is, at the same time, a metamorphosis of the mere crime into an aesthetic phenomenon. That is what evidently fascinates the former public prosecutor so much about his topic. By pursuing criminal psychology, Wulffen coquets with high culture: He recognizes the crime of the impostor basically as a practiced piece of art. Of course, in this connection he cites Goethe, Nietzsche, and Lom- broso, and again and again he touches on the relations between the talent of the
486 ? ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS
impostor and the artist--not only from the perspective of plagiarism.
like poetry and dramaturgy, is dominated by the pleasure principle. It obeys the magical spell of great roles, the pleasure in playing games, the need for self- aggrandizement, the sense of improvisation. The great impostors build up noth- ing more than the stages for their roles. To riches and material incentives they have--disturbingly unbourgeois -- an
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
illusionist relationship. The money they swindle is never recognized as capital but is always only a means for procuring atmosphere, a part of the scenery that belongs to the criminal-fantastic self- representation. This holds for phony counts, marriage swindlers of distinction, and false chief doctors just as for fantasy bankers, mundane matchmakers, and princesses who are not listed in the Who's Who of the aristocracy.
Wulffen knows how to treat the ambivalence of his material skillfully. As a psychologist, he certainly recognizes the role of education in the development of the child's behavior in play and in fantasy. The initially innocent "talent" first spe- cifies itself in a "certain atmosphere of lies" of the educators as a "conscious drive. " Educators themselves often surround children with an illusory reality made of lies and threats, pretenses and double standards. In such a climate, the jump to a "precriminal disposition" is not great. Cheating, bragging, exaggera- tion, misrepresentation, flattery-they are the human excitations well known to general psychology from which the transition into the impostor's trade can be eas- ily made. It is also known that in the "crisis of puberty" (where it eventuates), behavior patterns can arise that occasionally lead to habitual swindling. Anyone looking for a literary witness's report of such pubertal amoralism and youthful double-living can read in Klaus Mann's first autobiography Kind dieser Zeit (Child of these times, 1932) how the Mann children at that time "went about things. " The twenty-six-year-old author provides --the title alludes to it -- themes for a social psychology of the present and simultaneously a kind of history of phi- losophy for the sins of his own youth. He cites Hofmannsthal's verse: "Look out,
2look out, the times are peculiar / And peculiar children they have: us. " From
the erotic sphere, too, phenomena are known that spill over into that of the impostor--the seducer as Don Juan, as marriage swindler; the double-life of up- right married couples.
Impostors invent criminal variants of what is officially called careers. For they make a career, but in a different way from those who are assimilated. Their mo- tives are "peculiar" and are comparable to those of the gambler, the mountain climber, and the hunter, and in large numbers they become unwilling victims of their own talents, among which stand out agility, a talent for languages, charm, the power of seduction, a feel for situations, presence of mind, and imagination. Rhetoricians are represented among them just as much as mimes. They are often subject to strong autonomous dynamics of the "articulatory organs" and to a drive to carry things out that comes from their ability to perceive their own fantasies
1Swindle,
ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS D 487
with an extremely plausible degree of probability and to latch onto all things from the angle of their feasibility. Through their behavior, they are highly successful at extinguishing the everyday ontological boundaries between the possible and the real. They are the inventors in the existential domain.
Wulffen now comes to the ticklish side of the topic: He establishes connections to social and political phenomena. He gives the impression that he sees what is decisive but is not inclined to discuss it. He mentions in passing the swindling side of all modern advertising and the "disreputable" side of the modern business world as such, where there are bankrupt entrepreneurs who, three days before they register their bankruptcy, "clothe wife and daughter once again in velvet and satin" and continue to live in luxury until the police arrive. Wulffen even concedes a certain sociopolitical protest value to swindling because it is in fact not infre- quently the children of poor people who in this way fulfill everyone's dream of ascent into the big time. But Wulffen avoids looking at the current social situation and the most recent political past. He is silent about inflation with all its mental consequences; not only does he pass over the thoroughly deceitful, improvising, and hectically "imaginative" atmosphere of the year 1923, but he also neglects the concrete political application of his cultural criminology. True, he, too, refers to Napoleon, who, according to him, was an adventurer and a "fool of fortune," but for a German at that time, that was an accepted example and in any case was part of the general atmosphere. However, the account makes a discreet detour around Kaiser Wilhelm II. Those kinds of associations, at least in public, were not per- mitted for a former public prosecutor. That this theme nevertheless must also be present as the "unsaid" is self-evident when connections between swindling and society, theater, and politics are investigated seriously. The acting out of dreams and fantasies in grand gestures, since Wilhelm II, had become an element of Ger-
3man politics transparent from all sides. In November 1923, a populist associa-
tion of impostors gave its first unsuccessful performance in the Munich Hitler- Ludendorff putsch.
Thomas Mann-whose Felix Krull, a high-society impostor's story, had ap- peared in the right atmospheric moment in 1922 (in its first version) --also had a clear view of the political-symbolic dimension of the phenomenon of the impos-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
tor. From the Italian novelle Mario und der Zauberer (Mario and the magician; 1930) on, the conventional Thomas Mann stories about the artist and the citizen, the actor and the charlatan, and about the ambiguity of the artist's life which oscil- lates between people of rank and conjurers in the "green wagon," took on new dimensions. He now turned his attention to the political field and made the mod- ern demagogue, hypnotist, and mass conjurer recognizable as a twin of the actor and the artist. Thomas Mann's narration represents the deepest probe of literary
4diagnostics of the times for that period. It explores the histrionic-charlatanistic
areas of transition between the political and the aesthetic, between ideology and
488 ? ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS
trickery, seduction and criminality. Later Mann even wrote a sketch with the provocative title, Bruder Hitler (Brother Hitler).
Where the everyday ontological border between game and seriousness is blurred and the safety gap between fantasy and reality has melted away, there the relation between what is respectable and what is bluff slackens. To the ambitious, publicity-hungry characters falls the task of demonstrating this "slackening" (see Serner's Final Slackening, discussed earlier) in the public sphere. This is called a sense for representation. An aspect of illusionism, pose, and deception always clings to everything representative in service of the public. Representers are the character actors of orderliness, and, with the best among them --Thomas Mann's behavior permits us to include him here--they openly show themselves to be gamblers.
Where insights of this kind are dawning, cynicism cannot be far behind. Manolescu, the impostor of the century, toward the end of his short life came up with the equally coquettish and serious thought of donating his unique (or so he probably thought) brain to scientific research in order to complete his existence in the representational sphere. As an anatomical-psychological specimen, his brain was supposed to go down in anthropology. With this in mind, he offered his body to the world-famous criminal psychologist, Lombroso. However, the scientist, whose fame was based precisely on the "respectable" investigation of the ambiguity between genius and madness, giftedness and criminality, probably had no desire to see his fame tainted by that of this impostor. He answered the mortally ill Manolescu on a postcard: "Keep your skull! "
Addendum:
That today there is not so much talk about impostors only proves the onward
march of respectability in this area. The uneducated impostors of yesteryear have become the professional impostors of today. What counts today is not the spec- tacular effects but the solid facades, respectability. What was earlier called swin- dle today is called expert advice. Is it a matter of educational economics or of technical progress? Today, without an academic education one cannot even be- come a swindler anymore.
Excursus 6. Political Coueism: The Modernization of Lying
When, however, people struggle for existence on this planet, and consequently the fateful question of being or nonbeing con-
fronts them, all considerations of humanity or aesthetics col- lapse into nothing. For all these considerations do not float in the ether but stem from human fantasy and are bound to the human. . . .
. . . If however these viewpoints of humanity and beauty
ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS ? 489
are suspended provisionally during the struggle, they cannot be employed as a yardstick for propaganda. . . . The most horri- ble weapons were humane if they led to a speedier victory, and only those methods were beautiful that helped the nation secure the dignity of freedom. . . .
The masses are not now in the position to distinguish where the other's injustice ends and one's own begins. In such a case, they become insecure and mistrustful. . . .
That at the decisive places, it is of course not meant in this way does not occur to the consciousness of the masses. The people, in the overwhelming majority, are . . . femininely in- clined. . . .
. . . In this there are not many differentiations but only a positive or a negative, love or hate, right or wrong, truth or
lie, however never half-and-half or partially, etc.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, excerpts from chapter 6
What Hitler presents here may be read as a program for an artful primitivization of consciousness. With a high degree of consciousness it is shown how experience can be extinguished in people. Experience furthers differentiations, reflective- ness, doubt, and the awareness of ambivalences. In the interest of struggle, this is supposed to be voided. In the fateful year 1925, Hitler published in Mein Kampf the grammar of stupefaction; this may be understood as a great act of involuntary enlightenment.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
However, it was not understood, and Hitler knew from the start that it would not be understood. "That this will not be comprehended by our smart alecks proves only their mental laziness, or conceit" (ibid. p. 198). Hitler realized that the consciousness of the cynic possesses an entire dimension in addition to that of the normal intellectual, educated, or "conceited" person. The fighting ego in the cynic looks over the shoulder of the ego of experience and thinking and sorts the experiences into what can be used and what cannot. It proceeds from the idea that things have to be simplified. Hitler's recipe is therefore: First simplify, then repeat endlessly. This will be effective. However, one can only simplify what one has already grasped as something ambiguous, multifaceted, multivalent. So that politicians can make an impression on the masses, they must learn to hide that "more" that they know and outwardly identify themselves with their own simpli- fications. With the concept of playacting, this procedure is not yet fully grasped. Thomas Mann hit the mark very clearly not only by describing the vaudeville character of political seduction but also and especially by emphasizing the sugges- tive and hypnotic aspects of these phenomena. The suggestion, however, begins in the politicians themselves, and their own consciousness is the first addressee of suggestive persuasion. In the beginning, rhetoricians must, as they say, "con-
490 ? ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS
centrate," that is, collect themselves through autosuggestion and make themselves one with the pretended simplicity and unambiguity of their theses. In the vernacu- lar, we say of such phenomena: They are beginning to believe their own lies. Hit- ler had command of this autosuggestive ability to such an extraordinary extent that, being sure of his cause, he could afford to reveal his recipe.
He rightly assumed that the artful person is superior to the merely "intelligent" person. The intelligent person knows how to gain experience and to think it through in a differentiated way. The artful person knows how the differentiations can be thrown overboard again.
The Weimar Republic may be understood as an age of a universal dawning of reflection, insofar as at that time, such tactics and theories of artfulness and of "simplicity with duplicity" were developed on all levels. We have already dis- cussed Dada and logical positivism. One would have to discuss further the depth psychologies of Freud, Jung, and Adler, among others. Critique of ideology, so- ciology of knowledge, and psychotechnology open up additional dimensions. All these phenomena have multiple meanings. They can serve to simplify the com- plex or to restore the apparently simple to its real complexity. The consciousness of contemporaries becomes a battlefield on which the means of simplification and those of complication struggle. Both can be based on "realism," albeit on different realisms, of course. In general, it holds that the simplifications are of a polemical nature and correspond to a realism of struggle. The complications are rather of a more integrative and conciliatory nature and evidence a therapeutic realism, or a "learning. " They can, of course, also lead to confusion and excessive com- plexity.
Among the therapeutic methods of suggestion during the Weimar period, the Coueian technique, is particularly worth mentioning. It was widely discussed at that time and represented a very simple and effective tool for positive autosugges- tion. It represents a transformation and watering-down of hypnosis to an autosug- gestive procedure, and as such enjoyed in those years extraordinary public in- terest. One bibliography lists for the period of the Weimar Republic alone around seven hundred scientific or popular publications on the themes of Coueism, hyp- nosis, autohypnosis, and suggestion. This enormous interest is proof of a, I would like to say, realist countercurrent to the partly too contemplative, partly too vola- tile discussion of psychoanalysis, in which one could retreat into a rather comfort- able "interpretation" of "symbols" and could look past the real dynamic of the con- scious and the unconscious.
At one point, Hitler even has a go at playing anthropologist:
The first step that visibly separated the human being from the animal was that to invention. Invention itself rests on the discovery of sly tricks and ruses whose application facilitates the struggle against other beings for life. {Mein Kampf, p.
Herr Irrgang read what Miinzer had written and said very softly: "Almighty God" and sat down, as if he suddenly felt ill, on the chaise longue, in the middle of a crackling mountain of foreign newspapers.
Fabian bent over the sheet of paper that quivered in Irrgang's hands and read: "In Calcutta there was street fighting between Mohammedans and Hindus. Although the police soon brought the situation under con- trol, there were fourteen dead and twenty-two wounded. Order has been completely restored. "
"But in Calcutta there have been no disturbances at all," Irrgang re- plied resistingly.
"The disturbances did not happen? " Miinzer asked incensed. Would you like to prove that to me? In Calcutta, there are disturbances hap- pening all the time. Perhaps we should report that the Loch Ness mon- ster has been sighted again in the Pacific Ocean? Note the following: reports whose falsity cannot be established, or can only be established after weeks, are true. And now, get yourself out of here in a hurry, otherwise I will have you set out a matrix and add something to the lo- cal edition. "
The young man left.
"And someone like that wants to become a journalist? " sighed Miin- zer. . . . "What can you do? " he said. "By the way, why the sympathy with the people? After all, they're alive, all thirty-six, and are perfectly healthy. Believe me, my dear, what we compose in addition is not as bad as what we omit. " And with that, he struck another half a page out of the text of the chancellor's speech. . . .
. . . "You mustn't take anything to heart," said the commercial edi- tor to Fabian. "He has been a journalist for twenty years and already believes what he lies. . . "
"You disapprove of your colleague's indolence? " Fabian asked Herr Malmy. "What do you do besides that? "
The commercial editor smiled, of course only with his mouth. "I lie too," he replied. "But I know it. I know that the system is false. With us in the economy, a blind man can see that. But I serve the false sys-
"BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS ? 479
tern with devotion. For in the framework of the false system at whose disposal I place my moderate talent, the false measures are correct in the nature of things, and the correct measures are, understandably, false. I am a devotee of strict consistency, and in addition, I am . . . "
"A cynic," Miinzer threw in, without looking up.
Malmy shrugged his shoulders. "I wanted to say, a coward. That hits the mark more exactly. My character is in no way the equal of my un- derstanding. I regret that uprightly, but I no longer do anything against it. "
[Afterwards, they sat in a small wine bar. ]
"I help in doing the wrong thing consistently. Everything that as- sumes gigantic forms can impress, even stupidity. " Miinzer sat on the sofa and suddenly wept. "I am a swine," he murmured.
"A typically Russian atmosphere," observed Strom. "Alcohol, self- torture, grown men weeping. " He was touched and stroked the politi- cian's bald head.
"I am a swine," the other murmured. He said nothing more.
Malmy smiled at Fabian: "The state supports unprofitable large com- panies. The state supports heavy industry. Industry markets its products abroad below cost, but it sells them within our borders above the world market price. . . . The state accelerates the dwindling of the buying power of the masses through taxes it doesn't dare lay on the propertied classes; in any case capital flees in billions over the borders. Is that not consistent? Doesn't madness have method? There, every connoisseur's mouth waters! "
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
"I am a swine," murmured Miinzer, and, with his pouting lower lip', caught the tears.
"You overestimate yourself, honorable sir," said the commercial edi- tor. " (Fabian, chapter 3)
These cynical egos are appendages of their cancer-ridden consciousness of reality, which obeys the rules of the game in the capitalist world without resis- tance. In it, there is no misery that does not reflect itself, double itself, and ironi- cally mirror itself in tormented confessions and aggressive consent. The signi- ficant writers of the time behave toward these phenomena as minute-takers. They know that the people at the center of things know what they are doing. * Journalists in particular cannot appeal to any form of ignorance. That a commercial editor makes such a confession about capitalism as the false system that he serves with lies and devotion belongs to the great moments of truth in Weimar culture. With- out insight into the reflective constitution of the cynical structure, a concept of truth for these kinds of situations can no longer be defined. Discreetly disin-
hibited, to the present day it is people of this kind who have grasped the unity
of madness and method and who will say so among friends.
2480 ? "BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS
In the "bright hour," the masks of integrated cynics crumble. Where private confidences and alcohol have helped things along, the decomposition presses threateningly and garrulously out into the open. A manufacturer's monologue from Joseph Roth's novel of 1927, Die Flucht ohne Ende. Ein Bericht (Flight without end. A report), runs along the same lines. The scene takes place at a party in a Rhenish town. People are talking about fashion, the latest models in hats from "Femina," about the workers and the "decline of Marxism," about politics and the League of Nations, about art and Max Reinhardt. The manufacturer, in a conver- sation with Tunda, the hero of the novel, loosens the laces in his patent leather shoes, undoes his collar, and stretches out on a "broad sofa. " In free association, he turns his companion into a witness of his self-analysis.
"Earlier on, I understood you perfectly, Herr Tunda. . . . As far as I am concerned, I posed my questions for a quite definite, egoistic rea- son. In a certain way, I was obliged to do this. You don't understand that yet. First, you will have to live amongst us a little longer. Then you will also have to pose certain questions and give certain answers. Everyone here lives according to eternal laws and against his will. Of course, when they began here, everyone . . . had his own will. He ar- ranged his life completely freely, nobody tried to interfere. But after some time, he did not even notice that what he had set up through a free decision became, if not written, then holy law. . . .
You don't yet know how frightfully open eyes it has. . . .
. . . Now, occupation, too, as far as I'm concerned, is not such an important thing. How one makes a living is not decisive. But what is important is, for example, the love for wife and child. If you began, through your own volition, to be a good family man, do you believe thatyoucouldeverstop? . . . WhenIcamehere,Ihadalottodo;I had to borrow money, set up a factory. . . . Thus when someone came too close to me with something or other, I got him out of my hair in a coarse fashion. I thus became a boor and a man of deeds. People admired my energy. The law overpowered me, commanded me to be coarse and to act carelessly--I must, you see, talk with you as the law commands. . . .
Just like me, all people lie. Everyone says what is prescribed by law. The petite actress who asked you earlier about a young Russian writer is perhaps more interested in petroleum. But no, the roles have been allotted to everyone. The music critic and your brother, for exam- ple: both play the stock exchange, I know. What do they talk about? About cultural matters. When you come into a room and see the peo- ple, you know at once what each will say. Everyone has a role. It is so in our town. No one is in his own skin. And it is the same in our town as in all others, or at least the hundred largest towns in our country. " (Roth, Die Flucht ohne Ende, (pp. 76-79)
"BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS ? 481
? Surgeon-major Doctor Benn, 1916.
482 ? "BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS
This manufacturer even thinks through the compulsion to become cynical (boorishness)--of course, without penetrating the "compulsion" to conform to this reality as such. These are flashes of illumination after which the twilight returns. One knows what one is doing. At any time, if someone asked, one could also say what is wrong with it. One calls it the compulsion of the system, realism. Life becomes one great big agreement to collude with the half-measures and tor- por toward which the majority tends. Over the country there hangs a pseu- dorealist psychological smog, a semidarkness of hardening and demoralization, insight and resignation, drive for self-preservation and ambition. Consciousness is alert but, so as to become anesthetized, it continually casts a side-glance at the "reality that cannot be changed. " "In everyone, the ice dogs bark. "
Not everywhere do things remain on the level of lachrymose and momentary cynicism. Gottfried Benn tried to make the "great hour" out of the small "bright hour. " He outdid the vulgar schizophrenias by distilling lyrical states of the highest
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
quality from the German sicknesses of modern times. From the cynic's Yes to an incurable reality, isolated "flowers of evil" can spring. Benn was one of the most significant "secret agents" of his time, who let the cat out of the bag about the collective spiritual condition and made confessions of such explicit sharpness that everyday understanding usually does not comprehend them be- cause it does not have the courage to take them literally.
"A double life in the sense claimed and lived out by me is a conscious splitting of personality, a systematic, tendentious splitting. On this, let us listen to the "Ptolemaic. " . . .
Suffering, what is that anyway? You have dammed up waters --open your sluices; the times do not suit you--: a placard on your desk, in large writing: that is no different! Composure! Things are going well for you--outwardly you earn your money, and inwardly you indulge yourself. You can't have anything more, that is the situation, recognize it, don't demand the impossible! Make do and look on the water occa- sionally, he says in conclusion, but that too is not resignation; that is eclipsed by his Dionysian motif. . . . All that together results over and over again in his principal maxim: recognize your situation -- that is, ac- commodate yourself to the situation, camouflage yourself, forget your convictions. . . . On the other hand, go along with convictions, world- views, syntheses in all directions of the weather vane when institutions and offices demand it, but: keep a cool head. (G. Benn, Doppelleben [Double life], Collected Works, vol. 8, pp. 2004-9)
Notes
1. Denn sie wissen, was sie tun (For they know what they do) is the title of a 1931 novel by Ernst Ottwald that is critical of the judiciary.
2. Another outstanding document is Erik Reger's novel Union der festen Hand, likewise from 1931.
Chapter 23
On the German Republic of Impostors: The Natural History of Deception
Orge says:
"They think of it this way:
The clever ones live off the stupid ones and the stupid from their labor. "
Bertolt Brecht, Tagebucher 1920-1922
If one wanted to write a social history of mistrust in Germany, then above all, the Weimar Republic would draw attention to itself.
Fraud and expectations of being defrauded became epidemic in it. In those years, it proved to be an om- nipresent risk of existence that from behind all solid illusions, the untenable and chaotic emerged. A revolution took place in those deep regions of collective feel- ings toward life in which the ontology of everyday life was laid out: a dull feeling of the instability of things penetrated into souls, a feeling of lack of substance, of relativity, of accelerated change, and of involuntary floating from transition to transition.
This softening of the feeling for what is reliable ends in a collectively dispersed rage of anxiety against modernity. For this is the epitome of states of affairs in which everything appears only so-so and is disposed toward change. Out of this anxious rage, a readiness is easily formed to turn away from this incommodious state of the world and to remold the hate against it into a Yes to sociopolitical and ideological movements that promise the greatest simplification and the most ener- getic return to "substantial" and reliable states of affairs. Here, the problem of ideology approaches us from a, so to speak, psychoeconomic direction. Fascism and its side currents were after all --viewed philosophically -- in large part move- ments of simplification. But that precisely the town criers of the new simplicity (good--evil, friend-foe, "front," "identity," "bond") for their part had gone through the modern nihilist school of artfulness, bluff, and deception- that was to become clear to the masses much too late. The "solutions" that sounded so sim- ple, "positiveness," the new "stability," the new essentialness and security: They
483
484 ? ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS
are but structures that, under the surface, are even more complicated than the complicatedness of modern life against which they resist. For they are defensive, reactive formations --composed of modern experiences and denials of the same. Antimodernity is possibly more modern and complex than what it rejects; in any case, it is gloomier, blunter, more brutal, and more cynical.
In such an "insecure" world, the impostor grew into a character type of the times par excellence. Cases of fraud, deception, misleading, breach of promise, charlatanism, and so forth multiplied not only in a numerical sense: The impostor also became an indispensable figure in the sense of collective self-reassurance, a model of the times and a mythical template. With a view toward the impostor, the need to clarify this ambiguous life, in which continually everything came out differently from the way it was "intended," was accommodated in the most favora- ble way. In the impostor, one found the compromise between the feeling of the times that everything was becoming "too complicated" and the need for simpli- fication. If one already no longer saw through the "great whole" and this chaos of money,
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
interests, parties, ideologies, and so on, then, in the individual case, one could nevertheless get an overview of the game of facade and background. If one looked on as the defrauder went through his masked game, then this reas- sured one in the feeling that the real world must also be in the vein of such role play, especially where one achieves the least clarity. Thus, the impostor became the existentially most important and most understandable symbol for the chronic crisis of complexity of modern consciousness.
To analyze individual phenomena would be a study in itself. One would have to speak of Thomas Mann's Felix Krull and of his real-life prototype, the ingen- ious deceiver, dreamer, grand seigneur, and hotel thief, Manolescu, an elegant young Romanian who held Europe in suspense with his criminal acts of bravado and his increasingly daring confidence tricks, and who in addition wrote two volumes of memoirs in which literary swindle was added to his criminal acts. One would have to speak of the unforgettable Captain von Kopenick, the classic ple- beian impostor's comedy, with whose dramatic narration Carl Zuckmayer tri- umphed in 1931 on the Weimar stage. In the same trade the false Hohenzollern prince, Harry Domela, also made an attempt by putting the aristocratic sycophancy of Prussian reactionary snobs to the test and who likewise, in 1927, immortalized himself in his memoirs.
Even the enumeration and description of the most important affairs of swindle and deception from that time would fill a thick book. It would show that deception had become an industry and that the expectation of being deceived (in the double sense: as readiness to let oneself be deceived and as mistrust that someone would try to pull the wool over one's eyes) had become a universal state of conscious- ness. They were years of the collective dawning of an illusion in whose twilight the one side saw their chances to make a career of deceptions and promises, and the others let their readiness for an illusion become so starkly visible that the ac-
ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS ? 485
tive side only had to do what the passive side expected. Modernity establishes it- self in people's minds in the form of a permanent training in seduction and simul- taneous mistrust.
In 1923 inflation in Germany reached its peak. The state, which let its printing presses run hot without having any backing, was thereby itself caught in the role of the grand deceiver, even if it was not drawn to account, since nobody could take legal action against loss through inflation. In this year, a small Leipzig com- pany published a booklet entitled Die Psychologie des Hochstaplers (The psy- chology of the impostor). Its author was Doctor Erich Wulffen, a humanistically educated person with many interests. A former public prosecutor from Dresden, Wulffen had devoted himself to pursuing the scientific fight against crime (crimi- nology), even into the psychocultural preconditions of crime. In his chats, a new science took shape: "cultural criminology. " Wulffen provided a psychopathology of everyday life for the daily use of public prosecutors and officers of the law. He placed himself, with the title "criminal psychologist," beside Lombroso and Gross. His booklet, as innocent and humorous as it pretends to be, reads like a police anthropology of the twenties. Here, everything is revealed by someone for whom deception, because of his profession, comprises half his life and, if one also includes the exposure, then his whole life.
The origins of deception, according to Wulffen, lie in the drive structure of human beings. Namely, nature has given human beings an inherent instinct for secrecy and dissimulation that aids the general drive for self-preservation. But traces of deception can also be found even in nonhuman domain: Bears, apes, horses, and other creatures have been caught dissimulating. Thus, the "begin- nings of the psychology of the impostor" (p. 7) are present even in the brains of lower animals. In human beings such beginnings have unfolded in a specific way. Children are born deceivers. Their drive to play, their talent for "apparent lies," their capacity for imitation, and their penchant for experimenting with mental constructions provide the public prosecutor with proof of their "inherited instinct for dissimulation. " As a psychologist, Wulffen knows that all crimes grow out of "quite modest beginnings. " Normality is the breeding ground of crime. "A child, likewise in order to have a change, pretends to have a need so as to be taken out of the crib, carriage or chair" (p. 8). In the need for change are to be found the seeds of later bourgeois disorder, which is often nothing other than the acting out of dreams that life simultaneously wakens and prohibits in individuals. With the impostor, the transition from the drive and the dream into crime is accomplished as is, at the same time, a metamorphosis of the mere crime into an aesthetic phenomenon. That is what evidently fascinates the former public prosecutor so much about his topic. By pursuing criminal psychology, Wulffen coquets with high culture: He recognizes the crime of the impostor basically as a practiced piece of art. Of course, in this connection he cites Goethe, Nietzsche, and Lom- broso, and again and again he touches on the relations between the talent of the
486 ? ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS
impostor and the artist--not only from the perspective of plagiarism.
like poetry and dramaturgy, is dominated by the pleasure principle. It obeys the magical spell of great roles, the pleasure in playing games, the need for self- aggrandizement, the sense of improvisation. The great impostors build up noth- ing more than the stages for their roles. To riches and material incentives they have--disturbingly unbourgeois -- an
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
illusionist relationship. The money they swindle is never recognized as capital but is always only a means for procuring atmosphere, a part of the scenery that belongs to the criminal-fantastic self- representation. This holds for phony counts, marriage swindlers of distinction, and false chief doctors just as for fantasy bankers, mundane matchmakers, and princesses who are not listed in the Who's Who of the aristocracy.
Wulffen knows how to treat the ambivalence of his material skillfully. As a psychologist, he certainly recognizes the role of education in the development of the child's behavior in play and in fantasy. The initially innocent "talent" first spe- cifies itself in a "certain atmosphere of lies" of the educators as a "conscious drive. " Educators themselves often surround children with an illusory reality made of lies and threats, pretenses and double standards. In such a climate, the jump to a "precriminal disposition" is not great. Cheating, bragging, exaggera- tion, misrepresentation, flattery-they are the human excitations well known to general psychology from which the transition into the impostor's trade can be eas- ily made. It is also known that in the "crisis of puberty" (where it eventuates), behavior patterns can arise that occasionally lead to habitual swindling. Anyone looking for a literary witness's report of such pubertal amoralism and youthful double-living can read in Klaus Mann's first autobiography Kind dieser Zeit (Child of these times, 1932) how the Mann children at that time "went about things. " The twenty-six-year-old author provides --the title alludes to it -- themes for a social psychology of the present and simultaneously a kind of history of phi- losophy for the sins of his own youth. He cites Hofmannsthal's verse: "Look out,
2look out, the times are peculiar / And peculiar children they have: us. " From
the erotic sphere, too, phenomena are known that spill over into that of the impostor--the seducer as Don Juan, as marriage swindler; the double-life of up- right married couples.
Impostors invent criminal variants of what is officially called careers. For they make a career, but in a different way from those who are assimilated. Their mo- tives are "peculiar" and are comparable to those of the gambler, the mountain climber, and the hunter, and in large numbers they become unwilling victims of their own talents, among which stand out agility, a talent for languages, charm, the power of seduction, a feel for situations, presence of mind, and imagination. Rhetoricians are represented among them just as much as mimes. They are often subject to strong autonomous dynamics of the "articulatory organs" and to a drive to carry things out that comes from their ability to perceive their own fantasies
1Swindle,
ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS D 487
with an extremely plausible degree of probability and to latch onto all things from the angle of their feasibility. Through their behavior, they are highly successful at extinguishing the everyday ontological boundaries between the possible and the real. They are the inventors in the existential domain.
Wulffen now comes to the ticklish side of the topic: He establishes connections to social and political phenomena. He gives the impression that he sees what is decisive but is not inclined to discuss it. He mentions in passing the swindling side of all modern advertising and the "disreputable" side of the modern business world as such, where there are bankrupt entrepreneurs who, three days before they register their bankruptcy, "clothe wife and daughter once again in velvet and satin" and continue to live in luxury until the police arrive. Wulffen even concedes a certain sociopolitical protest value to swindling because it is in fact not infre- quently the children of poor people who in this way fulfill everyone's dream of ascent into the big time. But Wulffen avoids looking at the current social situation and the most recent political past. He is silent about inflation with all its mental consequences; not only does he pass over the thoroughly deceitful, improvising, and hectically "imaginative" atmosphere of the year 1923, but he also neglects the concrete political application of his cultural criminology. True, he, too, refers to Napoleon, who, according to him, was an adventurer and a "fool of fortune," but for a German at that time, that was an accepted example and in any case was part of the general atmosphere. However, the account makes a discreet detour around Kaiser Wilhelm II. Those kinds of associations, at least in public, were not per- mitted for a former public prosecutor. That this theme nevertheless must also be present as the "unsaid" is self-evident when connections between swindling and society, theater, and politics are investigated seriously. The acting out of dreams and fantasies in grand gestures, since Wilhelm II, had become an element of Ger-
3man politics transparent from all sides. In November 1923, a populist associa-
tion of impostors gave its first unsuccessful performance in the Munich Hitler- Ludendorff putsch.
Thomas Mann-whose Felix Krull, a high-society impostor's story, had ap- peared in the right atmospheric moment in 1922 (in its first version) --also had a clear view of the political-symbolic dimension of the phenomenon of the impos-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
tor. From the Italian novelle Mario und der Zauberer (Mario and the magician; 1930) on, the conventional Thomas Mann stories about the artist and the citizen, the actor and the charlatan, and about the ambiguity of the artist's life which oscil- lates between people of rank and conjurers in the "green wagon," took on new dimensions. He now turned his attention to the political field and made the mod- ern demagogue, hypnotist, and mass conjurer recognizable as a twin of the actor and the artist. Thomas Mann's narration represents the deepest probe of literary
4diagnostics of the times for that period. It explores the histrionic-charlatanistic
areas of transition between the political and the aesthetic, between ideology and
488 ? ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS
trickery, seduction and criminality. Later Mann even wrote a sketch with the provocative title, Bruder Hitler (Brother Hitler).
Where the everyday ontological border between game and seriousness is blurred and the safety gap between fantasy and reality has melted away, there the relation between what is respectable and what is bluff slackens. To the ambitious, publicity-hungry characters falls the task of demonstrating this "slackening" (see Serner's Final Slackening, discussed earlier) in the public sphere. This is called a sense for representation. An aspect of illusionism, pose, and deception always clings to everything representative in service of the public. Representers are the character actors of orderliness, and, with the best among them --Thomas Mann's behavior permits us to include him here--they openly show themselves to be gamblers.
Where insights of this kind are dawning, cynicism cannot be far behind. Manolescu, the impostor of the century, toward the end of his short life came up with the equally coquettish and serious thought of donating his unique (or so he probably thought) brain to scientific research in order to complete his existence in the representational sphere. As an anatomical-psychological specimen, his brain was supposed to go down in anthropology. With this in mind, he offered his body to the world-famous criminal psychologist, Lombroso. However, the scientist, whose fame was based precisely on the "respectable" investigation of the ambiguity between genius and madness, giftedness and criminality, probably had no desire to see his fame tainted by that of this impostor. He answered the mortally ill Manolescu on a postcard: "Keep your skull! "
Addendum:
That today there is not so much talk about impostors only proves the onward
march of respectability in this area. The uneducated impostors of yesteryear have become the professional impostors of today. What counts today is not the spec- tacular effects but the solid facades, respectability. What was earlier called swin- dle today is called expert advice. Is it a matter of educational economics or of technical progress? Today, without an academic education one cannot even be- come a swindler anymore.
Excursus 6. Political Coueism: The Modernization of Lying
When, however, people struggle for existence on this planet, and consequently the fateful question of being or nonbeing con-
fronts them, all considerations of humanity or aesthetics col- lapse into nothing. For all these considerations do not float in the ether but stem from human fantasy and are bound to the human. . . .
. . . If however these viewpoints of humanity and beauty
ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS ? 489
are suspended provisionally during the struggle, they cannot be employed as a yardstick for propaganda. . . . The most horri- ble weapons were humane if they led to a speedier victory, and only those methods were beautiful that helped the nation secure the dignity of freedom. . . .
The masses are not now in the position to distinguish where the other's injustice ends and one's own begins. In such a case, they become insecure and mistrustful. . . .
That at the decisive places, it is of course not meant in this way does not occur to the consciousness of the masses. The people, in the overwhelming majority, are . . . femininely in- clined. . . .
. . . In this there are not many differentiations but only a positive or a negative, love or hate, right or wrong, truth or
lie, however never half-and-half or partially, etc.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, excerpts from chapter 6
What Hitler presents here may be read as a program for an artful primitivization of consciousness. With a high degree of consciousness it is shown how experience can be extinguished in people. Experience furthers differentiations, reflective- ness, doubt, and the awareness of ambivalences. In the interest of struggle, this is supposed to be voided. In the fateful year 1925, Hitler published in Mein Kampf the grammar of stupefaction; this may be understood as a great act of involuntary enlightenment.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
However, it was not understood, and Hitler knew from the start that it would not be understood. "That this will not be comprehended by our smart alecks proves only their mental laziness, or conceit" (ibid. p. 198). Hitler realized that the consciousness of the cynic possesses an entire dimension in addition to that of the normal intellectual, educated, or "conceited" person. The fighting ego in the cynic looks over the shoulder of the ego of experience and thinking and sorts the experiences into what can be used and what cannot. It proceeds from the idea that things have to be simplified. Hitler's recipe is therefore: First simplify, then repeat endlessly. This will be effective. However, one can only simplify what one has already grasped as something ambiguous, multifaceted, multivalent. So that politicians can make an impression on the masses, they must learn to hide that "more" that they know and outwardly identify themselves with their own simpli- fications. With the concept of playacting, this procedure is not yet fully grasped. Thomas Mann hit the mark very clearly not only by describing the vaudeville character of political seduction but also and especially by emphasizing the sugges- tive and hypnotic aspects of these phenomena. The suggestion, however, begins in the politicians themselves, and their own consciousness is the first addressee of suggestive persuasion. In the beginning, rhetoricians must, as they say, "con-
490 ? ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC OF IMPOSTORS
centrate," that is, collect themselves through autosuggestion and make themselves one with the pretended simplicity and unambiguity of their theses. In the vernacu- lar, we say of such phenomena: They are beginning to believe their own lies. Hit- ler had command of this autosuggestive ability to such an extraordinary extent that, being sure of his cause, he could afford to reveal his recipe.
He rightly assumed that the artful person is superior to the merely "intelligent" person. The intelligent person knows how to gain experience and to think it through in a differentiated way. The artful person knows how the differentiations can be thrown overboard again.
The Weimar Republic may be understood as an age of a universal dawning of reflection, insofar as at that time, such tactics and theories of artfulness and of "simplicity with duplicity" were developed on all levels. We have already dis- cussed Dada and logical positivism. One would have to discuss further the depth psychologies of Freud, Jung, and Adler, among others. Critique of ideology, so- ciology of knowledge, and psychotechnology open up additional dimensions. All these phenomena have multiple meanings. They can serve to simplify the com- plex or to restore the apparently simple to its real complexity. The consciousness of contemporaries becomes a battlefield on which the means of simplification and those of complication struggle. Both can be based on "realism," albeit on different realisms, of course. In general, it holds that the simplifications are of a polemical nature and correspond to a realism of struggle. The complications are rather of a more integrative and conciliatory nature and evidence a therapeutic realism, or a "learning. " They can, of course, also lead to confusion and excessive com- plexity.
Among the therapeutic methods of suggestion during the Weimar period, the Coueian technique, is particularly worth mentioning. It was widely discussed at that time and represented a very simple and effective tool for positive autosugges- tion. It represents a transformation and watering-down of hypnosis to an autosug- gestive procedure, and as such enjoyed in those years extraordinary public in- terest. One bibliography lists for the period of the Weimar Republic alone around seven hundred scientific or popular publications on the themes of Coueism, hyp- nosis, autohypnosis, and suggestion. This enormous interest is proof of a, I would like to say, realist countercurrent to the partly too contemplative, partly too vola- tile discussion of psychoanalysis, in which one could retreat into a rather comfort- able "interpretation" of "symbols" and could look past the real dynamic of the con- scious and the unconscious.
At one point, Hitler even has a go at playing anthropologist:
The first step that visibly separated the human being from the animal was that to invention. Invention itself rests on the discovery of sly tricks and ruses whose application facilitates the struggle against other beings for life. {Mein Kampf, p.
