When they had ceased to understand this, the bourgeois were self. conscious at least in their pride at owning wealth. Today self. on, of colour films and television, millionaire,'s magazines consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego d Toscanini. The older media, not designed for mass-production, as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one take on a new timeliness: that of exemption and of improvisation. nothing They alone could outflank the united front of trusts and technology. In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books, the In many people it is already an impertinence to sayT. real book can no longer be one. If the invention of the printing The splint our eve is the best magnifying-glass. press inaugurated the bourgeois era, the time is at hand for its repeal by the mimeograph, the only fitting, the unobtrusive means The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the of disse greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is alway in th Car out of the bag.- Even solidarity, the most honourable mode of onduct of socialism, is sick. Solidarity was once intended to make The whole is the false.l the talk of brotherhood real, by lifting it out of generality, where it was an ideology, and reserving it for the particular, the Party,as the sole representative in an antagonistic world of generality. It was manifested by groups of people who together put their lives at stake, counting their own concerns as less important in face of a Pro domo nostra. - When during the last war, -which like all tangible possibility, so that, without being possessed by an abstract others, seems peaceful in comparison to its successor-the symphony idea, but also without individual hope, they were ready to sacrifice orchestras of many countries had their vociferous mouths stopped. themselves for each other. The prerequisites for this waiving of Stravinsky wrote the Histoire du Soldat for a sparse, shock-mair self-preservation were knowledge and freedom of decision: if they chamber ensemble. It turned out to be his best score, the only con- are lacking, blind particular interest immediately reasserts itself. In vincing surrealist manifesto, its convulsive, dreamlike compulsion the course of time, however, solidarity has turned into confidence imparting to music an inkling of negative truth. The pre-condition that the Party has a thousand eyes, into enrolment in workers of the piece was poverty: it dismantled official culture so drastically battalions- long since promoted into uniform-as the stronge because, denied access to the latter,'s material goods, it also escaped the ostentation that is inimical to culture. There is here a pointer for ity gained in this way is paid for by permanent fear, by toadying, intellectual production after the present war, which has left behind manoeuvring and ventriloquism: the strength that might have been in Europe a measure of destruction undreamt of by even the voids used to test the enemy' s weakness is wasted in anticipating the in that music. Progress and barbarism are today so matted together whims of ones own leaders, who inspire more inner trembling than in mass culture that only barbaric asceticism towards the latter, and the old enemy; for one knows dimly that in the end the leaders on towards progress in technical means, could restore an unbarbaric both sides will come to terms on the backs of those yoked beneath condition. No work of art, no thought, has a chance of survival, them. A reflection of this is discernible between individuals. anyone unless it bear within it repudiation of false riches and high-class who, by the stereotypes operative today, is categorized in advance I Inversion of Hegel,s famous dictum: Das Wahre ist das ganre progressive, without having signed the imaginary declaration hole is the true(Phanomenologie des Geistes, p. 24; The Pheno that seems to unite the true believers -who recognize each other by Mind, p 81). mething imponderable in gesture and language, a kind of bluffly
obedient resignation, as by a password -will repeatedly have the same experience. The orthodox, but also the deviationists all too exclusion arouses only hate and resentment; it arouses too a posses- like them, approach him expecting solidarity. They appeal ex sive, intolerant kind of love, and those whom repressive culture has plicitly and implicitly to the progressive pact. But the moment he held at a distance can easily enough become its most diehard defen- looks for the slightest proof of the same solidarity from them, or ders. There is even an echo of this in the sententious language of mere sympathy for his own share of the social product of suffe worker who wants; as a Socialist, to "learn something, to par they give him the cold shoulder, which in the age of restored Pc ke of the so-called heritage, and the philistinism of the Bebels tiffs is all that remains of materialism and atheism. These organ lies less in their incomprehension of culture than in the alacrity with zation men want the honest intellectual to expose himself for them, hich they accept it at face value, identify with it and in so doing, but as soon as they only remotely fear having to expose themselves of course, reverse its meaning. Socialism is in general no mor they see him as the capitalist, and the same honesty on which the were speculating, as ridiculous sentimentality and stupidity. Soli into positivism. It can happen easily enough that in the Far East darity is polarized into the desperate loyalty of those who have no Marx is put in the place vacated by Driesch and Rickert. There is way back, and virtual blackmail practised on those who want some reason to fear that the involvement of non-Western peoples nothing to do with gaolers, nor to fall foul of thieves in the conflicts of industrial society, long overdue in itself, will be less to the benefit of the liberated peoples than to that of rational ed production and communications, and a modestly raised standard of living. Instead of expecting miracles of the pre-capitalist peoples, older nations should be on their guard against their un- avages are not more noble. -There is to be found in African students imaginative, indolent taste for everything proven, and for the of political economy, Siamese at Oxford, and more generally in successes of the West. diligent art-historians and musicologists of petty-bourgeois origins, a ready inclination to combine with the assimilation of new material, an inordinate respect for all that is established, accepted, acknow- ledged. An uncompromising mind is the very opposite of primi- civism, neophytism, or the non-capitalist world. It presuppose Out of the firing-Line. - Reports of air-attacks are seldom without experience, a historical memory, a fastidious intellect and above the names of the firms which produced the planes: Focke-Wulff, all an ample measure of satiety. It has been observed time and Heinkel, Lancaster feature where once the talk was of cuirassiers lancers and hussars. The mechanism for reproducing life, for dom- have defected once they felt the force of tradition. One must have inating and for destroying i, is exactly the same, and accordingly tradition in oneself, to hate it properly. That snobs show more industry, state and advertising are amalgamated. The old exagger- aptitude than proletarians for avant-garde movements in art throws ation of sceptical Liberals, that war was a business, has come true: light on politics too. Late-comers and newcomers have an alarming state power has shed even the appearance of independence from affinity to positivism, from Carnap-worshippers in India to the stalwart defenders of the German masters Matthias Grunewald and also places itself there ideologically. Every laudatory mention of Heinrich Schutz. It would be poor psychology to assume that who emigrated to the USA in 1936. Matthias Grunewald(. 1470/80-1528): 1. August Bebel was co-founder and leader of the German Soca-aa N o The sans Driesch (1867-1940) losopher and biologist, autho late Gothic painter, and Heinrich Schutz(1s85-1672): early Baroque com- anism. Heinrich Rickert (1863- 1936): Neo-Kantian philosopher epistemology
the chief contractor in the destruction of cities, helps to earn it the good name that will secure it the best commissions in their re The total obliteration of the war by information, propaganda, commentaries, with camera-men in the first tanks and war reporters deaths, of enlightened manipulation no-one will remember when it comes to an end-falls into sblc opinion and oblivious activity: all this is another expression for the withering of experience, the vacuum between men and their continuous campaigns separated by empty pauses, the Poli fate, in which their real fate lies. It is as if the reified, hardened campaign,the Norwegian, the Russian, the Tunisian, the Invasion plaster-cast of events takes the place of events themselves. Men are Its rhythm, the alternation of jerky action and total standstill for reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has lack of geographically attainable enemies, has the same mechanical no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen quality which characterizes individual military instruments and hich too is doubtless what has resurrected the pre-Liberal form "phoney war. Certainly, the term has its origin in the Fascist of the campaign. But this mechanical rhythm completely deter mines the human relation to the war, not only in the disproportion order to perpetrate it unopposed. But like all Fascist tendencies, between individual bodily strength and the energy of machines, but this too has its source in elements of reality, which assert themselves in the most hidden cells of experience. Even in the previous con only by virtue of the Fascist attitude malignantly insinuating them. fict the body s incongruity with mechanical warfare made real than all the horrors, and those who mock at it are principal con- experience impossible. No-one could have recounted it as even the tributors to disaster Artillery-General Napoleon's battles could be recalled. The long interval between the war memoirs and the conclusion of peace is Had Hegels philosophy of history embraced this age, Hitler' not fortuitous: it testifies to the painful reconstruction of memory robot-bombs would have found their place beside the early death which in all the books conveys a sense of impotence and even false- of Alexander and similar images, as one of the selected empiric ness, no matter what terrors the writers have passed through. But facts by which the state of the world-spirit manifests itself directly he Second Wa ar is as totally divorced from experience as is the in symbols. Like Fascism itself, the robots career without a subject Like it they combine utmost technical perfection with total blind only begins to resemble it in pathological states. Just as the war ness. And like it they arouse mortal terror and are wholly futile.'I lacks continuity, history, an 'epic'element, but seems rather to ave seen the world spirit, not on horseback, but on wings and start anew from the beginning in each phase, so it will leave behind without a head, and that refutes, at the same stroke, Hegel,'s philo- no permanent, unconsciously preserved image in the memory phy of Everywhere, with each explosion, it has breached the barrier The idea that after this war life will continue'normally or even oblivion and healing recollection, forms. Life has changed into a that culture might be rebuilt'-as if the rebuilding of culture were timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed not already its negation-is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered. and this is trophe itself. What more is this culture waiting for? And even if than the fact that, quite literally, these things will soon be past thinking on, for each trauma of the returning combatants, each ountless people still have time to wait, is it conceivable that what shock not inwardly absorbed, is a ferment of future destruction. appened in Europe will have no consequences, that the quantity Karl Kraus was right to call his play The Last Days of mankind. cims will not be transformed into a new quality of society at What is being enacted now ought to bear the title: 'After Dooms- large, barbarism? As long as blow is followed by counter-blow, da catastrophe is perpetuated. One need only think of revenge for the urdered. If as many of the others are killed, horror will be 55
institutionalized and the pre-capitalist pattern of vendettas, confine from time immemorial to remote mountainous regions, will be a pathological case, his pronouncement may ultimately be con- re-introduced in extended form, with whole nations as the sub. firmed by clinical findings, but its incongruity with the objective calamity visited on the world in the name of that paranoiac renders he diagnosis ridiculous, mere professional preening.Perhaps scot-free, and, having once been shown so easy, will be continued is in-himself a pathological case, but certainly not'for-him.The elsewhere. The logic of history is as destructive as the people that vanity and poverty of many of the declarations against Fascism by it brings to prominence: wherever its momentum carries it, it emigres is connected with this. People thinking in the forms of free, reproduces equivalents of past calamity. Normality is death detached, disinterested appraisal were unable to accommodate with- in those forms the experience of violence which in reality annuls ch thinking. The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power could say only two things in reply. Firstly: at no price, on no co f others, nor our own powerlessness, ditions, would i wish to be an executioner or to supply legitimations for executioners. Secondly: I should not wish, least of all with legal machinery, to stay the hand of anyone who was avenging past misdeeds. This is a thoroughly unsatisfactory, contradictory an swer, one that makes a mockery of both principle and practice. Back to culture.- The claim that Hitler has destroyed German cul But perhaps the fault lies in the question and not only in me. ture is no more than an advertising stunt of those who want to Cinema newsreel: the invasion of the Marianas, incl The impression is not of battles, but of civil engin feda g and blast. exterminated by Hitler had long been leading a severed and apo- cryphal existence, whose last hideouts Fascism swept out. Anyone also of fumigation, insect-extermination on a terrestrial scale who did not play the game was forced into inner emigration years Works are put before the Third Reich broke out: at the latest with the stabilization in hand, until no grass grows. The enemy acts as ressionismn, atient and corpse. Like the Jews under Fascism, he features now of the German currency, coinciding with the end of Expr German culture stabilized itself in the spirit of the Berlin illustrated should he defend himself, his own action immediately takes on the magazines, which yielded little to that of the Nazis' Strength same character. Satanically, indeed, more initiative is in a sense demanded here than in old-style war: it seems to cost the subject cism. The whole span of German culture was languishing, precisely where it was most liberal. for its Hitler, and it is an injustice to the his whole energy to achieve subjectlessness. Consummate in editors of Mosse and Ullstein or to the reorganizers of the Frank- humanity is the realization of Edward Greys humane dream, war without hatred furter Zeitung, to reproach them with time-serving under Nazism They were always like that, and their line of least resistance to the Autumn 1944 line of least resistance to a political regime among whose ideo- logical methods. as the Fuhrer himself declared, comprehensibility st stupid ranked highest. This has led to fatal confu! Hitler eradicated culture, Hitler drove Mr X into exile, therefore Johnny-Head-in-dir. -The relation of knowledge not only of servility but of truth. Much knowledg Mr X is culture. He is indeed. a glance at the literary output of portion to the disposition of forces, is invalid, formall I. Mosse-Verlag and Ullstein-Verlag were the two largest press combines correct it may be. If an emigre doctor says: For me, Adolf Hitler magazines and publishing houses. Both were taken over by the Nazis
those emigres who, by discipline and a sharp separation of spl of influence, performed the feat of representing the German mind shows what is to be expected of a happy reconstruct hygiene, has been confirmed. The brightest rooms are the secret es: "Wretchedness remains. When all is duction of Broadway methods on the Kurfurstendamm, wh differed from the former in the Twenties only through domain of faeces. The s of the psychic economy than of the id, It cannot be uprooted, live or dead. / So it is made invisible eans, not its better intentions. Those who oppose cultural Fascism instead, are still more tr should start with Weimar, the'Bombs on Monte Carlo and the sphere where abundance of goods may temporarily obscure con- Press Ball, if they do not wish to finish by discovering that equivo. stantly increasing material inequalities. No science has yet explored he inferno in which were forged the deformations that later emerge cal figures like Fallada spoke more truth under Hitler than the to daylight as cheerfulness, openness, sociability, successful adap- unambiguous celebrities who successfully transplanted their pres. tation to the inevitable, an equable, practical frame of mind. There earlier phases of childhood development than are neuroses: if the latter result from a confict in which instinct is defeated, the former from what might be called a prehistoric surgical intervention, which The Health unto Death. -If such a thing as a psycho-analysis of incapacitates the opposing forces before they have come to grips today's prototypical culture were possible; if the absolute with each other, so that the subsequent absence of conficts reflects a predetermined outcome, the a priori triumph of collective author- conditions by the psychic life of their victims; and if the psycho. ity, not a cure effected by knowledge. Unruffled calm, already a prerequisite for applicants receiving highly-paid posts, is an image such an investigation would needs show the sickness proper to the of the stifled silence that the employers of the personnel manager time to consist precisely in normality. The libidinal achievements only later impose politically. The only objective way of diagnosing demanded of an individual behaving as healthy in body and mind, the sickness of the healthy is by the incongruity between their are such as can be performed only at the cost of the profoundest rational existence and the possible course their lives might be given mutilation, of internalized castration in extroverts, beside which the by reason. All the same, the traces of illness give them away: their 令 which ciation of identification with the father is the child;p skin seems covered by a rash printed in regular patterns, like a it was first rehearsed. The regular guy, the popular girl, camouflage of the inorganic. The very people who burst with ve to repress not only their desires and insights, but even the proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared orpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease as the old injustice is not changed by a lavish display of light, air has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the of rationalized big business, the inner health of our time has been efilex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating. secured by blocking fight into illness without in the slightest Scarcely ever does an unhappily furrowed brow, bearing witness to altering its aetiology. The dark closets have been abolished as a terrible and long-forgotten exertions, or a moment of pathic stu- troublesome waste of space, and incorporated in the bathroom pidity disrupting smooth logic, or an awkward gestu re、 embarras What psycho-analysis suspected, before it became itself a part of singly preserve a trace of vanished life. For socially ordained sacrifice is indeed so universal as to be manifest only in society as a 1. Hans fallada (1893-1942: social novelist of reportorial realism, whos whole, and not in the individual. Society has, as it were, assumed works enjoyed great popular success in the last years of the Weimar period, and who continued to write novels in Germany under the Nazi regime the sickness of all individuals, and in it, in the pent-up lunacy of asist acts and all their innumerable precursors and mediators, the Fa 2. Inversion of the title of Kierkegaard's work The Sickness unto Death subjective fate buried deep in the individual is integrated with its 59