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Scholarly Biography

Dubiel: In the early twenties you wrote many articles—in part politically oriented, in part oriented toward the history of ideas—that could be summed up under the bibliographical rubric "Judaica." In Jewish newspapers and community bulletins you published articles on Lassalle and Marx, on Tolstoy and the German spirit, and on the Jewish philosophy of religion of Hermann Cohen. Some of these writings on the history of ideas were systematically collected in a long omnibus article, "Judaism and the German Spirit." All these articles, if taken together, recall a thematically similar short article by Walter Benjamin on the role of the Jews in the recent German history of ideas. Could you tell me what you consider to be the uniting link of these essays?

Lowenthal: My intellectual and political interest in Jewish affairs developed very strongly in my student days by contact with the philosophy of Hermann Cohen and under the influence of his student Walter Kinkel, by contact with the Zionist student movement in Heidelberg, and by the great influence of the charismatic Rabbi Nobel. I believed that Jewish philosophy of religion, especially that of Maimonides, contains a progressive rationalism with strong secular tendencies, which, though garbed in religious symbolism, also connote the idea of a paradise on earth. At the time I

was intent on capturing in this secularly oriented redemptive thinking the utopian element that Marx, Heine, and also Freud at least inherently display. It is probably not by chance that I often gave lectures in Jewish communities and synagogues, in part to earn some money as a struggling young scholar, in part out of conviction about the Jewish element in the utopian aspect in socialism. However much I once tried to convince Martin Jay that there were no Jewish motifs among us at the Institute, now, years later and after mature consideration, I must admit to a certain influence of Jewish tradition, which was codeterminative.

Dubiel: I found among your papers the draft of a project with the title "Judaism and Jewishness in Recent German Philosophy." I read this short manuscript, as well as a few letters from Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, who reacted very positively to this idea. Was it the intent of this project to gather together in one volume your scattered works in this field as a sort of German-Jewish intellectual history?

Lowenthal: Do you have a particular year in mind?

Dubiel: Yes, 1925.

Lowenthal: That was just one year before I became associated with the Institute of Social Research. This project was an attempt to find a basis for an intellectual, perhaps even an academic, existence. At that time I was not thinking of a professorship; it had only been two years since I had received my doctorate. With Buber's and Rosenzweig's help I tried to obtain a grant for this project from the Moses Mendelssohn Foundation, which was a kind of Jewish Ford Foundation. I don't remember anymore why it failed. Maybe it wasn't judged favorably; maybe Leo Strauss didn't like it—he was very influential in the foundation at that time. In any case, my association with the Institute of Social Research began soon thereafter. I would have liked to have worked on a philosophically and politically oriented study on the interrelations of Jewish and non-Jewish philosophy and Jewish and non-Jewish intellectual life. That also

was connected with my earlier essay "The Demonic" and my dissertation on Franz von Baader. Even though nothing came of it, the moral impulses that motivated the project remained alive in me.

Dubiel: Leo, I would like a few more comments from you on those articles of yours that have a purely political orientation, especially those you wrote in the Jüdisches Wochenblatt, published by Ernst Simon. Judging by their titles, the articles are often primarily about current affairs—for example, "The Situation of the Jews in Poland" or "The Concession Law in Poland." But I'm especially interested in the essay "The Lessons of China," which contains a very sharp critique of the Jewish settlement policy in Palestine. As a reminder, I want to read you a few sentences from your article of June 25, 1925:

China's revolution must be a lesson for Palestine. If, especially in earlier years, one looked at Zionism's ideological products, it would be easy to remark ironically on what bloody laughter it would cause in the world if, for instance, a remnant of Celts scattered on a remote island were to travel to France today and claim its territory as a national property belonging to them by historical right. Zionism's dangerous vice, its ethnocentric naïveté in historical matters, found in Jewish history a fertile field. . . . The Arab question was therefore approached in about the same way the Zentralverein Deutscher Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens conceives of its relation to anti-Semites, i.e., how shall we deal with this unsavory, numerically overwhelming element? In other words, one could say that Zionism's borrowings from the arsenal of European diplomatic weapons were ill advised, that is to say, Zionism took out a larger loan than it had originally intended: for it engaged in European colonial policy against the Arabs. . . .

And on looking around with open eyes, one is keenly aware that Arab youths today are studying at European universities and working to prepare for the hour that has now struck in China. Here, too, a national majority is screaming

for justice. Here, too, a tremendous "danger" is approaching. It will require the concerted moral energy of the entire Zionist generation living today, indeed the entire world Jewish community, to demonstrate a willingness to change not merely its tactics, but its mentality as well. I am not so politically naïve as to make a favorable prognosis without hesitation.

Lowenthal: You know that in my student years in Heidelberg I was a member of the Zionist student organization. But I had joined because I believed most strongly in Judaism's messianic mission, its utopian political task. I had hoped that Eretz Israel would be the model for a just society. However, my experience with Zionism followed a path very similar to my later experience with the Communist world movement and the Communist Party. I experienced great disappointment; I felt that the Zionist movement was suffering more and more from what my friend Ernst Simon at that time so convincingly called the "intoxication with normality." Ideologically, I was not so blinded as to refuse a critical analysis of the settlement policy of the Jewish organizations in Palestine. As I saw it, the Jewish land purchases were an alliance of big Arab landowners and Jewish money at the expense of the Arab peasants and farmworkers. I instinctively foresaw that this could lead to bad conflicts, if not catastrophes. My comparison related to the occupation of China by the European powers and the establishment of extraterritorial zones. I believed that a lesson should be learned from the Boxer uprising, that a population had to be listened to and could not simply be raped. This article, which I signed "Hereticus," resulted in my abandoning the Zionist movement and also, quite concretely, the newspaper. This does not mean, I would like to repeat, that I had given up my relation to Jewish motifs or my support of Israel.

Dubiel: As I was going through your papers from the 1920s I found, in addition to the manuscript of your dissertation, many

other manuscripts testifying to your philosophical activity. One feels in all your writings not only that you studied philosophy but also that philosophical orientations are present in all your scientific works, even though you did not write a philosophical treatise in the strict sense, apart from your dissertation. In the 1920s you wrote about the political philosophy of the Enlightenment. I also found a manuscript on Thomas More and Campanella, and one entitled "Power and Law in Rousseau's Philosophy of State and in German Idealist Philosophy." Then I found a longer manuscript on Helvétius's philosophy, a manuscript that was projected to be your inaugural dissertation but could not be completed because of your emigration. First, comment a bit on the works just named.

Lowenthal: You have traced something decisive in my intellectual life. You know that here in the United States one often has to present one's professional calling card. Someone asks, "What do you do?" and then I say, "I'm really a philosopher." My relation to philosophy began very early through my father's influence, especially through his recommendation that I read Schopenhauer, and it continued throughout my intellectual youth. There is no semester in which I did not register for a few classes and seminars in philosophy. As a very young man I went to Giessen just to study neo-Kantian philosophy. Hermann Cohen was very reactionary and nationalistic, but it must not be forgotten that one of his greatest students was Paul Natorp, who at that time was a socialist. Walter Kinkel was himself a socialist. Natorp and Kinkel have shown that Kantian ethics and socialist consciousness are compatible. The interest in Enlightenment philosophy you were just speaking of came about mainly through my Marxist orientation. You know that Marx was indebted to the Enlightenment; he criticized the Enlightenment philosophers only because, although they postulated the right goals of society theoretically, they did not state practically how these goals can be translated into revolutionary praxis. This subject has always interested me; therefore, I studied the left

wing of Enlightenment philosophy very intensively: Holbach, Helvétius, La Mettrie, Diderot. You see here in my library the first editions of Holbach, La Mettrie, and Helvétius, which were dearly paid for with my scanty savings. In the mid-1920s there were no good German books about the French Enlightenment in existence. There were hardly any modern translations—for example, no translation of the introduction to the Encyclopédie, no translation of Helvétius, hardly any of Diderot. If you look at my bibliography in the Helvétian manuscript, you'll see how scanty the secondary literature was. It was also politically interesting that in Germany the mostly trivial German Enlightenment philosophers, such as Wolff, were praised to the sky, but the French Enlightenment was almost totally ignored. After all, Helvétius was one of the sharpest critics of German class society.

Thus the philosophical motifs in me always remained alive. Look at my later literary studies. When I write about Corneille, I also write about Descartes. When I write about Molière, I also write about Gassendi, and when I write about popular culture, I also write about Pascal and Montaigne. For me, philosophy is still the queen of the sciences, and, like most who think as I do, I mourn the present situation in which philosophy is undergoing a decline. If metaphysics is still being taught in the universities here, then it is mostly by arrogant, old, boring "nuts," while fashionable interest is inclined toward linguistic analysis, which in most (although not all) cases is a technically oriented methodology of the sciences and shares with authentic philosophy only the name.

Dubiel: In the years 1928 and 1931 you wrote a few works that were not published, I believe, until 1971, under the title Erzählkunst und Gesellschaft [Narrative Art and Society]. These essays show Lowenthal as he would later be known. Indeed, these writings comprise a first and very self-confident realization of a program for a materialistically oriented study of literary history. The volume contains something like an ideologically critical reconstruction of

bourgeois class consciousness in terms of its most prominent literary representatives.

Lowenthal: Yes, with the exception of the first essay in that volume, on the social situation of literature, which first appeared in 1932 in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the other essays originated from a compendious lecture series I had developed in the League for Popular Lectures. I lectured on all areas of European literature, although my main interest was German literature, because as a good Marxist I acted according to the principle of beginning with criticism at home, and at that time Germany was causing me to lose a lot of sleep. In its methodology this work is characterized by an as yet—how should I put it?—unmediated Marxism. Maybe I am doing myself an injustice by this judgment, for in these works I also apply the psychological mechanism of mediation, particularly by taking into account the socially codetermined private reactions of the literary personae. Most of what I wrote or began writing in Germany before my emigration expresses the attempt to track down the decline and disintegration of bourgeois consciousness and to delineate it in a critique of ideology. My special interest concerned the documents of literature and the documentations of literary influence. And if you take a look at the subtitles added fifty years later to these sections, they express this theoretical intention: for example, for the chapter on Goethe I choose the title "Bourgeois Resignation"; for Gottfried Keller, "Bourgeois Regression"; and so forth. These studies are part of a larger project to describe and analyze the specific course of German bourgeois consciousness and why there was no bourgeois revolution in Germany. As I said, these essays were motivated by political critique. As far as I can remember I stopped working on this material in 1930, because I was then too burdened with Institute business, especially with the founding of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung .

Dubiel: On reading these old works I had the impression of a specific continuity and discontinuity, similarity and dissimilarity,

with the essays that appeared a few years later in the Zeitschrift . As regards your early work, I would speak of a methodological indifference. But the studies that appeared in the Zeitschrift can be summed up under the intention of a study of literary history based on the materialistic and social-psychological study of the history of literature. I like the freshness of those early works and the unself-consciousness with which cultural processes were related to the substructure. I always asked myself, how does he do that, what methodological authorities does he refer to? Do these works comprise a sort of Nullpunkt [moment of absolute beginning], or in what theoretical, or more precisely, literary-critical, tradition does he really stand? You yourself name Georg Brandes in connection with these questions, and of course Franz Mehring; you also name contemporary Russian literary studies—very heterogeneous points of reference in time and content. So, in brief, I had the impression that you were just rolling up your sleeves and beginning to write.

Lowenthal: Precisely, Helmut, a fresh dilettantism, if you wish, though originating in a political attitude and on the basis of a more or less solid knowledge of literature, but still in the sense of a fresh impressionistic discourse—I let myself be carried by my own enthusiasm. That was the case to some extent with the work on Baader and the works on Enlightenment philosophy. Although at that time I did not yet know Walter Benjamin's wonderful statement that history is always written by the victors, I was always interested in writing the history of the losers. Baader was such a loser—a lone figure of German Restoration philosophy.

In this book we have been talking about, Erzählkunst und Gesellschaft, I speak of the literature of the Young Germany [Junges Deutschland] movement in light of the history of the revolution that didn't take place. The essay on Mörike traces the state of melancholy of the great German poets, who did not get from their public anything near the resonance that would have been matter-of-course

in France or England. There was no public in Germany such as Victor Hugo had in France or Shelley and Byron had in England. And last but not least, I wrote on Friedrich Spielhagen, who, though he was no great artist, was a very conscious, independent, and radical analyst of bourgeois society. I was intrigued with dealing a blow to the widespread reception of Gottfried Keller's and C. F. Meyer's so-called greatness and with honoring the lost and neglected streams of German literature.

Dubiel: Thus documenting again and again the thesis that there was no genuine bourgeois consciousness in Germany, or in sociological terms, that there was no significant and influential carrier group of a liberal worldview.

Lowenthal: And consequently no carrier group of a political liberalism, either, or any historical chance of an alliance between socialists and enlightened liberals, who could have prevented the disaster in Germany. That is again the theme of my works on fashions in biographical subjects.

Dubiel: Leo, I'd like to come now to the essays you wrote in the Zeitschrift: first the essay "On the Social Situation of Literature," which appeared in 1932, then the 1933 essay on Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, then the 1934 study on Dostoevsky, the 1936 essay on Ibsen entitled "The Individual in Individualistic Society," and the famous 1938 essay on Knut Hamsun. The 1932 essay does, to a considerable extent, contain a methodological program in which literary history is conceived as the critique of ideology. Compared to those earlier works in Erzählkunst und Gesellschaft, one might say that the articles in the Zeitschrift, under the influence of Max Horkheimer's ideas on the critique of ideology, have a sharpened methodological consciousness. Would you agree with that?

Lowenthal: Yes, one can certainly say that. You know how these things originated historically. The first volume, no, the very first number of the Zeitschrift, was supposed to contain a sort of program, a position adopted by all the major collaborators of the

Zeitschrift concerning what united them—namely, the materialistic conception of history—focused on and applied to the fields they understood best. Horkheimer wrote about philosophy, Adorno about music, Pollock about the economy, Fromm about psychology, and I about literature. I challenged established literary scholarship, its idealistic arrogance, its distinctively political reactionary function. At the same time I tried to develop a kind of program for a set of studies I considered important. When the next essays appeared—you have just named them, the one on Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and the other on the Dostoevsky reception (this was, so to speak, a pioneer work)—they also fit into the analysis of the decline of the bourgeoisie: C. F. Meyer's heroes and their exemplary attempts to magnify themselves as symbols of the superior, sovereign, and leading class; and the enthusiastic reception of Dostoevsky, who was the most widely read author after Goethe, or at least the most published novelist in Germany, as a reflection of what Fromm called the anal and sadomasochistic character of the petit bourgeoisie, if not of the broad strata of the middle classes in general.

Dubiel: Does your work on Ibsen also fit into the framework of the critique of the disintegrating bourgeois consciousness?

Lowenthal: Yes! I was not naïve about Ibsen's patriarchal character. The essence of Ibsen's drama, his method, as it were, consists of taking bourgeois consciousness completely seriously on the level at which it articulates itself and then showing how hollow, fallacious, and in every sense untenable it is. Death, deception, bankruptcy, and the smashing of all interhuman relations among friends, between husband and wife, between parents and children, are the price that must be paid for the bourgeois system of competition. His decisive statement is that the bourgeois principle of competition penetrates into the intimacy of human relations and destroys them and—very important in Ibsen—that those who are furthest removed from the competitive struggle and at the same

time most deprived of rights in a society based on the principle of competition, namely women, are the bearers and heralds of a better system. This then belongs to the context of my theory of marginality, which we should speak about when we come to Literature and the Image of Man .

Dubiel: Yes, let us now speak about your Hamsun study. This study to some extent goes beyond the methodological program of a critique of ideology. I have frequently found it listed under the rubric "Theory of Fascism" and not as an inherently literary-sociological work, which it claims to be. To my disgrace I must admit that in my late puberty I was a great, almost rapturous admirer of Hamsun. . . .

Lowenthal: A pardonable offense! You weren't the only one!

Dubiel: Your essay had an enormous prognostic quality. For Hamsun's sympathy with the Nazis became manifest—as far as I remember—only in 1940, when the German troops invaded Norway.

Lowenthal: Yes, precisely. This prognosis of mine did not go uncontested in our circle. Marcuse and Walter Benjamin both defended Knut Hamsun. But I insisted that the subtitle of this essay, "On the Prehistory of Authoritarian Ideology," was not accidental. I tried to document my thesis not only with what Hamsun had produced in manifest political statements, but also by an immanent analysis of his characters and his principles of literary construction. It was an immanent critique, an experiment carried out in the spirit of Adorno's beautiful statement: "Art does not come to society, but society comes to art: society should originate in the work of art and not the other way around." In the Hamsun essay, and even in the Ibsen essay, one of my methodological convictions is developed—namely, that the private is unmasked as the socially mediated. Works of art can give us information about the social dimension in the private sphere of men, how society is present in the love relationship of two people, in friendship, and in an individual's

return to nature. Hence, literature is treated as the documentation of social representation in the psyche of the individual. In later works I once formulated this to the effect that literature provides the best source of data for information on a society's pattern of socialization.

Dubiel: May I rephrase this in order to appropriate it? So literary sociology is meant not in the sense of a sociology of literature, its production and circulation; rather, it means understanding literature as the material, along with other cultural documentation, in which social and cultural structures can be identified. Such a kind of literary study uses literature as the medium and material for an analysis of society.

It was also then, the second half of the 1930s, that those discussions about the relation between aesthetics and politics appeared in the Zeitschrift . I am referring to Benjamin's essay "On Art in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility" and Adorno's essay criticizing it, "The Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Hearing." Also, if I'm not mistaken, Herbert Marcuse's essay on "Affirmative Culture" appeared in the same volume as your Hamsun essay. All these essays, even if they are not as explicitly interrelated as is often underscored in contemporary literature, really constitute the three sides of a problem triangle. This could be designated as, first, the relation of art and science; second, the relation of art and mass culture; and third, the relation of art and politics. I want to describe quickly, in very crude simplification, three possible approaches to this problem and then hear from you how you classify yourself in this scheme.

Marcuse defended the thesis, and actually maintained it until his death, that art has a dual function in bourgeois society, an ideological one and a utopian one. Art is ideologically functional in the sense that it constitutes the realm of all collective imaginations and desires, whose political realization is denied in society. All unrealized possibilities of action in bourgeois society are repressed in their political-practical frame of action and banished to the realm of art.

The great classical bourgeois works of art represent at the same time the bourgeoisie's utopian consciousness. Marcuse, at least in his writings of the 1930s—and this distinguished him then from Benjamin and especially from Adorno—was not interested in the way the aesthetic consciousness of bourgeois society could be transposed into politics directly and without consideration of the evolutionary difference between culture and politics. I am alluding to the fascist propagation of mass art, indeed to the aesthetization of political life and war that Benjamin noted about fascism in general. Thus, fascism represents the false abolition of the relation between art and politics. Benjamin—this is his most famous thesis—ultimately interpreted the development of the relation of esoteric art to a mass culture made technically possible with political optimism. In crude terms, by smashing the uniqueness and almost cultic aura of works of art through new techniques of reproduction, new historical chances for the politicization of art are released. All the same, no one saw more clearly than Benjamin himself the danger posed by the political instrumentalization of mass art in fascism. Adorno, who formulated exactly the opposite thesis, thinks of mass art as the degeneration of art only in the framework of a repressive ideological exercise of domination, and consequently he attaches political intentions only to that art and those forms of art that refuse to serve mass culture. The utopian functions of art noted by Marcuse in the late-bourgeois epoch, that is, under the conditions of a mass culture, can be realized only through extremely esoteric art.

I came across this problem in an unexpected way when I read your book Literature, Popular Culture, and Society . I hadn't known that the phenomenon of mass culture is not at all a phenomenon that first emerged in late-bourgeois society. In fact, you show that mass culture, and also the political problem of the relation of the esoteric and exoteric, goes back far into the eighteenth century. The whole problem we are speaking of is not necessarily typical only of mass societies. The three authors I was speaking of apparently assume

that the whole problem first arose when the means of reproduction were technically revolutionized. Now, Leo, can a point be given in the history of bourgeois society, and particularly in aesthetics, when autonomous art was forced to define its relation to mass culture? Or is it just a matter of the gradual evolution of an intrinsic, ever-present tension?

Lowenthal: I would say this is another leap from quantity to quality. But I first want to respond to what you said before. I naturally find it very hard to take as clear a stand as you demand. Of course I agree with much of what Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse said, although I never wrote about it systematically except in the foreword to the book you just mentioned. So first of all on the Benjamin thesis, to the extent that we perceive his position accurately: he really seems to say that the dissemination of works of art made possible by mechanical and electronic means of reproduction can also have a positive political effect. I consider this wrong. It runs counter to all our political experiences. But it is possible that we have misunderstood him. If you read this Benjamin essay closely, he himself moves very quickly away from the positive aspects of the technical revolution and describes the aesthetization of politics as it had become manifest in fascism. He definitely saw this more clearly than others. But he also said that in Communism art is equally politicized.

Art is really the message of resistance, of the socially unredeemed. Art is in fact the great reservoir of creative protest against social misery; it allows the prospect of social happiness to shine dimly through. I myself indeed tried to show that even in works of art that in their ideological coloring, with regard to author and target group, are very conformist and conservative—such as Lope de Vega in Spain, Corneille and Racine in France, also Goethe in many respects—the protest shines through in many a passage. The most important thing about bourgeois art is that it depicts the individual as threatened by bourgeois society. The best works of art

are, in my opinion, those that do not stand in a conformist framework: Cervantes, most of Shakespeare, Racine, and later Ibsen, not to mention Romanticism. It is precisely the marginal minor characters in such great works that often become decisive bearers of utopian protest. I therefore have essentially tried, as Adorno says, to proceed "micrologically" and to analyze intimate, private, personal situations and modes of behavior in order to uncover in them just those unredeemed utopian elements that await social happiness. For I really believe that Walter Benjamin's thesis that history is always written by the victors is refuted in works of art. The work of art gives voice to the losers in history, who, it is hoped, will someday be the victors. A secular philosophy of redemption is visible in this theoretical nexus of aesthetics and politics. In mass culture, on the contrary, nothing is ever redeemed, everything always stays the same because it ought to remain the way it is. In Hamsun, for example, even the minor characters are scoundrels; there is absolutely no redemptive phenomenon, no assertion anywhere that things could and should be different. And that was a touchstone for me to use in distinguishing between what is and what is not genuine art.

But now to the other part of your question, the relation of art and mass culture. As long as art has existed as an institution, there has also been its opposite, in Greek antiquity as well as the Middle Ages—for example, the entertainments in the church square after the religious service presented by jugglers and performers to entertain the masses. But the essential thing is the development of this relation of high and low art, which can be observed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when in many countries of Europe the predominantly agricultural mode of production was complemented by the urban forms of production of manufacturing and industry. In short, with the beginning of bourgeois forms of life and thought, an ambiguous philosophy about the role of art also begins to develop—or perhaps one should say the role of leisure, of

which art seemed to be an essential part. In my book I expressed this symbolically through the counterposition of the philosophies of Pascal and Montaigne. Montaigne suggests that man needs relaxation and distraction under the pressure of modern life, whereas Pascal says that if you seek distraction you lose your life's meaning. This motif of Montaigne's, that the greater burden of life in the bourgeois age is eased through distraction, namely, distraction through art, occurs again and again in literature—for example, in Schiller in the speech of the "weary citizen"; and Goethe, too, in his "Prologue at the Theater," speaks of how "the men arrive bored, the women to show their beautiful fashions."

Dubiel: But the joke in this linkage of art and leisure against mass culture is probably that this function of distraction must not be detached from the ethical function of art, isn't it?

Lowenthal: Quite right, exactly. Art is here a kind of mental hygiene, an ethically important leisure occupation. In the eighteenth century in England, where bourgeois forms of life and ideology developed the fastest and strongest, there was clearly a great movement among the intellectuals to elevate the citizens' taste. Many of these authors, like Richardson and Oliver Goldsmith, are quite schizophrenic on this point; they are uncertain whether what they produce as literature is art or not, written for the market or for art's sake. Goldsmith says that the time of literary patrons is over and that the market is now the patron. Marjorie Fiske and I studied the literary scene in eighteenth-century England. There already existed literary genres that have become quite popular today, such as, for example, books on love, on how to win friends, on how to obtain a big dowry, popular and popularized versions of Homer and other items of classical literature, a whole world of journals and libraries with literature for entertainment. In short, all these phenomena of an ultimately market-oriented mass culture were already taking shape at that time.

Dubiel: Can you give a reasonably accurate dating of the origin of this contrast between art and mass culture?

Lowenthal: Certainly! That begins with the Spectator and the Tatler, Addison and Steele's journals, and it reaches its peak in Romanticism and also in German classicism. Wordsworth and Coleridge then first declared war on melodrama and shallow entertainment-literature. They decried the fact that now everything is written from the standpoint of quick comprehension and enjoyment so that one wouldn't have to exert oneself.

Dubiel: But the development of this relation of high and low art, of esoteric art and mass culture, can be derived not only from the perspective of the development of mass art itself, but especially also from just the opposite perspective. For the phenomenon of an autonomous art following only its own laws is a relatively late product of bourgeois consciousness. So, if it is true that an esoteric art conscious of its own laws arose only relatively late, then that must affect their relation to so-called low art. I mean that in the period we were talking about, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the difference between high and low art must have been much more indefinite than in the late nineteenth century.

Lowenthal: Yes, much more gradual, of course. In any case, the concept of mass art is rather complex. When we speak of masses we mean of course only certain bourgeois strata in a few urban cultural centers, although Ian Watt maintains the interesting thesis that the reading strata in eighteenth-century England included not only the well-to-do housewives but also their personal maids. But aside from that, of course, there can be absolutely no question of reading in petit-bourgeois circles and the proletarian masses, for they were completely overworked and did not even have the money to buy themselves candles for reading. There is a marked change, however, in the course of the nineteenth century as literary and reading material rapidly increased. We enter the era of a big culture industry that is made possible because printing techniques become cheaper. More and more books, booklets, magazines, and newspapers became available in large quantities before radio and cinema were introduced.

On art and culture industry all of us generally held the same position, although there once was a period in the development of Marcuse's thinking in which he put greater value on partisan literature and spontaneous political art. He later abandoned this view and came around again to a firm belief in the utopian character and independence of the great work of art. Adorno's position that art has been pressed more and more into defensive positions is in my view perfectly justified. The greater the dangers and seductions become for an artist, who after all is also a member of the bourgeois-capitalist world, to earn money through circulation figures, film rights, and so on, the more difficult it becomes to preserve the integrity of artistic consciousness. The artists and writers of the nineteenth century worried about this constantly. I mean, it is trivial, but in such a situation the technique of esoteric communication becomes the weapon for the integrity of the artist; I am thinking of Kafka, Joyce, and Proust, who are "inaccessible" in a certain respect, but precisely this "inaccessibility" is their goal. The same thing applies to abstract painting. But bourgeois society has a big stomach; we have always underestimated how much it can assimilate and digest.

Dubiel: If we examine the objects of your literary analysis, it is always a matter of paradigms of the bourgeois consciousness that didn't come about in Germany. That is really relevant only in the framework of the critique of ideology. In positive paradigms, for example in Ibsen, it is only the depiction of immanent bourgeois self-critique. What we have just formulated in positive terms about the political purpose of esoteric art is, in your case—in contrast, for example, to Adorno—not positively stated in individual studies. You have never written about avant-garde literature. Sometimes I wonder, when you make such an emphatic distinction between the cognitive and the symptomatic significance of art, whether that can still be maintained for avant-garde literature.

Lowenthal: Yes, I plead guilty. Adorno urged me repeatedly to write about contemporary literature. I didn't do it. Perhaps I am

more a literary historian in the conventional sense. At any rate, to this day I refuse to make binding "sociological" statements about modern literature. I have two reasons for that. The first is that modern literature has not yet passed through the sieve of history and it is more difficult to distinguish what, in the Lukácsian sense, will one day be typologically significant for a knowledge of social contexts. The other reason is that, for me, sociology of literature is supplementary to a purely aesthetic contemplation. If, for example, I want to examine changes in the relationship of genders or of generations, I do not need literature, which, after all, provides only indirect access. I can study these phenomena empirically. They are accessible, whereas the human phenomena I have analyzed in my writings have become inaccessible; my studies are, if you wish, great obituaries on the patterns of socialization and acculturation of former centuries. I can only repeat: other sources are available to analyze our modern situation.

Dubiel: I just want to make sure I've understood you correctly. The specific nature of your social-scientific study of literature consisted of using literary historical documents as material for your sociological interpretations. To judge the representativeness and validity of this material, the sieve of history—as you so beautifully put it—is indeed indispensable. Now this type of study of contemporary and avant-garde art is impossible, not because it would be impossible to distinguish whether we are dealing with real art or not, but because it cannot be determined to what extent these documents of modern art really stand in a reciprocal connection to significant social tendencies. I have sometimes been bothered by the self-assuredness with which Adorno identified, for example in Stravinsky, certain decoded sound patterns with political options. Adorno did not seem to have the same scruples you have just formulated. The combination of immanent analysis of avant-garde art and political attribution he practiced sometimes seems questionable to me.

Lowenthal: Well, I don't know. Of course I was very happy when he was so friendly as to add a footnote on Sibelius to my essay on Hamsun, showing that the same symptoms I discovered in Hamsun's work could also be seen in Sibelius's. I wanted to point out one other aspect, since we happen to be engaged in assigning grades. I always asked myself whether I'm not smart enough to apply my analysis to modern materials. Let's take Kafka. People say that this or that in his work reflects the alienation of the modern world, the entanglement in the bureaucratic maze of highly industrialized civilizations, the administrated world. They say that absurd theater critically reflects the impossibility of real communication in the modern world. And that Thomas Mann reflects the disintegration of the bourgeoisie. So what? What has been said? Certainly nothing about the artistic value of these products, and from an advanced vantage point of social philosophy you're still in the realm of banalities.

Dubiel: I'm glad that our prejudices on this point coincide.

Lowenthal: I would only apply to this literature something I have already experienced elsewhere. It is quite different when I write about Shakespeare. I know what happens to Romeo and Juliet only from this source itself.

Dubiel: Leo, I would like to talk with you about your two biographical studies. By that I mean first the essay on the "Biographical Fashion," which appeared in 1955 in the first volume of Sociologica, the festschrift for Horkheimer, although it was written much earlier. The English version of this essay appeared in a festschrift for Marcuse. The other essay I am alluding to is one with which you made a name for yourself here in the United States, "Biographies in Popular Magazines." How did you come to write these?

Lowenthal: Well, the essay that appeared under the title "Biographical Fashion" deals with popular biographies of German writers, such as Emil Ludwig and Stefan Zweig. I would like to

mention here two motives for writing it. The first is interest in the genre; I wondered what kind of literary form popular literature uses. One of the least understood problems of the sociology of literature is precisely genre. This was first developed magnificently in Lukács's Theory of the Novel . Generally in the sociological analysis of literature it is a matter of content aesthetics. My biographical works are thus a parallel case to my Dostoevsky study. Dostoevsky was the most widely received novelist in Germany, at least shortly before the end of World War I. And biography was the most widespread form of nonfiction writing. And so I asked myself why, which leads to my second motive for writing about this. If you ask what really was the common denominator of the people at the Institute, the answer would probably be the shared concern for the fate of the individual. Horkheimer's "Egoism and the Freedom Movement" or Marcuse's "Affirmative Culture," some works by Fromm, and my own literary studies are variations on the theme of the increasing fragility of the bourgeois individual. And here, biographies seem to me to be an especially characteristic genre, in which individuality makes an appearance and is at the same time destroyed. The German popular biographies combine two extremes: while describing the heroes with tremendous superlatives as creators of something unique, they at the same time bring those same heroes down to the level of ordinary people. This coincidentia oppositorum, that they are on the one hand unique and on the other hand like everyone else, deadens our consciousness of history and politics. The repetitiveness of this literature has a lulling effect. Just as, for example, entire passages in various novels of Hamsun could be interchanged, so could various biographies. The representation of Hindenburg at that time was barely different from that of Jesus. With great glee, I compiled entire lists of superlatives and other stereotypes that were repeated over and over again. Historical data was debased to the level of commodities for mass consumption. I finished writing the essay in the 1930s. We did not publish it then

out of courtesy, for a good many of the authors I analyzed were German-Jewish emigrants who were having great difficulties at the time. Some even committed suicide. I first published it only after the direct references to contemporary authors had lost their sting.

Dubiel: Let us now get to the second work on biography, "Biographies in Popular Magazines." The extraordinarily positive reception of this essay by American social scientists somehow illustrates its genesis. Wasn't this essay the result of a suggestion by Paul Lazarsfeld?

Lowenthal: Lazarsfeld knew of the unpublished essay on biographies we were just talking about. He asked me whether I would be interested in doing that sort of thing in the framework of American literature. This coincided with my experience at the time, that every single issue of the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's, extraordinarily popular consumer magazines then, always contained biographies. I looked at all the issues from 1901 to 1940 from the methodological viewpoint of their "symptomatic" significance and reflected on the extent to which these market products might be indicators of social processes. I found that in the first twenty years of this century the heroes of these biographies were taken from the field of production: successful merchants, professionals, inventors, and entrepreneurs. In brief, it soon became clear to me that these biographies served as political-educational stimuli. Their motto was "It can be done"—in short, the unbroken Horatio Alger myth. These heroes were models, and to follow them meant to join the competition of the free enterprise system. Not everyone could be a general, but every dishwasher had a chance to amass the bank account of a millionaire.

That situation changed radically at the end of the thirties. The so-called heroes were suddenly people from show business: movie actors, radio stars, famous impresarios, singers, in other words, people from the entertainment field. A good number of sports heroes were also featured, as well as a whole group of freaks, mean-

ing people who were carrying on some kind of business or had invented something odd or comical. In short, the heroes were no longer the heroes of production. The theme was no longer the industry of individual enterprise but a matter of characters who were supposed to entertain us. But that was only one side of it; the other side was the change in categories through which people were portrayed biographically. Their consumer habits, their hobbies, were particularly stressed. Whereas in the first phase you had producers, about whose productive qualities statements—however banal—were made, in the later period the consumer hero, with consumer needs and preferences, became the theme. This corresponded exactly to two modern tendencies: first, that in the society of corporate capitalism the rise of the entrepreneur increasingly becomes a pure fiction; and second, that bourgeois society turns into a consumer society. People are interested essentially only in consumption. This theory of consumption-heroes can be harmonized with David Riesman's typology, and also with Fromm's "market-oriented personality." Anyway, Robert Merton, one of the most cultured and progressive American sociologists of the late forties, praised this essay as one of the few successful examples of a synthesis of the European theoretical stance and American empirical research. I was very proud of this. My friend Paul Lazarsfeld, who unfortunately died a few years ago, then said to me, in his typically empiricist-positivist way: "So far you have shown what a bad biography is; now you ought to demonstrate what a good biography is." Thus he failed to see the political and analytical meaning of my study.

Dubiel: I would now like to discuss the Prophets of Deceit . This study appeared here in America in the year 1949, as a single volume in the series Studies in Prejudice . In 1970 Prophets of Deceit was reissued in the United States with a very now-oriented introduction by Herbert Marcuse. I will first try to characterize this book, and if this description stimulates or annoys you, feel free to react to it. It is

a reconstruction of the typology of fascist agitators, collated from speeches and articles by American agitators of the interwar period. Do you agree with my characterizations that in this book you essentially limited yourself to grasping typologically and collecting the usual topoi, figures of argumentation, and rhetorical figures of agitators?

Lowenthal: Yes, we tried to collect the rhetorical stimuli on the basis of speeches, pamphlets, journals, and similar materials. I would characterize the technique of agitation basically as turning psychoanalysis on its head. Moreover, I would say this of mass culture in general. It makes people neurotic and psychotic and finally completely dependent on so-called leaders. I tried to translate the manifest stimuli of these agitators into what they actually mean. My purpose was to unmask the aggressive and destructive impulses hidden behind that rhetoric. The American edition has as an introduction a kind of ideal-typical montage of an agitator's speech. This montage, incidentally, was constructed by Irving Howe, one of the best-known intellectuals of this country, following our detailed instructions. At the end of the book we added a speech that decodes the introductory one, to show what the agitator really means: kill the Jews, destroy the democratic institutions, follow me and no one else, and so forth.

Dubiel: An essay from this time that impressed me very much, despite its small size, appeared—as far as I remember—in January 1947 in Commentary . Its title was "Terror's Atomization of Man." In it you write about the disintegrative tendencies of man under the terroristic conditions of concentration camp internment. As far as I know, this essay goes back to a lecture you gave at Columbia University during the war.

Lowenthal: Yes, that was in 1944 as part of a whole series of lectures at Columbia University on National Socialism by Pollock, Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer, and myself. This essay, which stemmed from that lecture—I don't find it easy to talk about—is an

analysis of the first terrible reports about what was going on in the concentration camps. I got hold of this material even before the end of the war. I then tried to describe how, under the conditions of totalitarian terror, the victimized individual completely disintegrates, how he almost takes on the features of the murderer, how under such conditions any sense of solidarity with other people ceases to exist so that humans seem to regress to an animal phase. I was much inspired by Bruno Bettelheim's important article on behavior under extreme conditions. Apparently my lecture was very effective. The audience consisted mainly of Columbia University students and professors, that is, people of good will who were very shaken by what they heard. One of the best-known professors, Robert Lynd, author of the famous study Middletown, told me that I absolutely had to publish my lecture manuscript. At his suggestion it was then sent to the American Journal of Sociology in Chicago for publication. The editor at that time was a teacher of a whole generation of sociologists in America. He sent the manuscript back to me with the statement that unfortunately it could not be published because the empirical data base was too slight. I then wrote back to him and sarcastically excused myself that I was not in the concentration camp myself and so could not have gathered my data right on the spot. I often since had to shake my head at this political and historical naïveté not untypical of American social scientists. I then sent the piece to Elliot Cohen, the editor and founder of Commentary, and that is where it was published.

Dubiel: Leo, can you again give us some information on the Studies in Prejudice series in general? The institutional framework in which these studies were made was the research department of the American Jewish Committee. Did this integration of many members of your former group with another research team really mean a substantive break with your theoretical past?

Lowenthal: No, the task of this research department consisted basically in applying to the area of anti-Semitism all the decisive

theoretical and empirical insights we had developed in the Institute over the decades. It was also similar to the format at the Institute and on the journal in that essentially the work was done by members of the group, but other intellectually friendly scholars could be called upon to collaborate. We had already worked with Marie Jahoda before; then Bruno Bettelheim, with whom we had also had contact, joined, and Morris Janowitz in Chicago, and the psychoanalyst Nathan Ackermann. We wanted—quite in line with Critical Theory—to accomplish scientifically meaningful work in a manner that would allow its application to political praxis. Horkheimer's dream, which was never fulfilled, was that each of these books in the series Studies in Prejudice should be rewritten in the form of small booklets in popular format for distribution in a given situation of anti-Semitic political outbreaks or the like here in America—namely, to teachers, students, politicians, that is, to so-called multiplicators. That was sort of the idea of a political-educational mass inoculation program, a "fire brigade," as the Americans say. Unfortunately, it never materialized.

Dubiel: That's interesting, I didn't know that. I do remember the introduction to The Authoritarian Personality, in which the idea of a preventive democratic mass-education is formulated, but I considered that to be just a rhetorical ornament.

Lowenthal: No, that was meant quite seriously. You're talking about a foreword by Max Horkheimer not only to The Authoritarian Personality but to all the volumes of Studies in Prejudice . We meant that quite seriously.

Dubiel: Were these various volumes of Studies in Prejudice conceived in relation to each other only in their original conception, or also in the actual execution of the research—be it methodologically, or by the exchange of materials, or in drawing up the analytical framework? Did you, for example, try to coordinate your work with that for The Authoritarian Personality ?

Lowenthal: Now, these are all very different questions. On the

whole it was a research strategy about which Horkheimer consulted a few leading people in the American Jewish Committee and us. The Authoritarian Personality is really a direct continuation of our interests, which started with the Studies on Authority and the Family . In California Horkheimer met Nevitt Sanford, the founder and first president of the Wright Institute and a good friend of mine. Sanford took a great interest in our problems and subsequently brought us together with two of his colleagues, Else Frenkel-Brunswick and Daniel Levinson. I participated in the preliminary discussions for The Authoritarian Personality , and at Horkheimer's request came to California to discuss with Sanford the general organization of the entire research project.

Dubiel: Prophets of Deceit became quite well known in its time. You once showed me the folder with the reviews of this book. It got a lot of attention, not only in scientific circles but also among the nonscientific general public. Might one say that Prophets of Deceit is better known in the United States than The Authoritarian Personality , or is that a false compliment?

Lowenthal: I must reject that compliment in all modesty and with indignation. The most important book was The Authoritarian Personality , which still has strong influence today. Compared with that, Prophets of Deceit had a relatively modest influence; one might even say that it stood in the shadow of The Authoritarian Personality . But I don't want to understate my book's influence. It did have an influence, especially among students and instructors in the field of mass communications research.

Dubiel: Now we come to the 1950s. The appearance of Studies in Prejudice coincides with the beginning of your work with the Voice of America; we spoke about your various activities there on another occasion. I suppose it would be accurate to describe the nature of your work basically as research organization, as a result of which you produced only a few scholarly products during that period. Do you agree that we now skip that time?

Lowenthal: Yes, let's speak of the time after that, when I have a much better conscience about my output. That was 1955–1956, when I was working in Stanford at the Center for Advanced Studies. My ever-faithful friend Paul Lazarsfeld, who had been instrumental in getting me invited to the Center, said to me then: "In this research year you have the alternative of either embarking on what the Americans call 'having a good time,' and at the end of the year you can become a dog-catcher in Palo Alto; or you can write a few books and subsequently become a professor." Lazarsfeld's advice really proved to be sound. Since I was not very interested in catching dogs, I sat down to write. In that year I wrote the book Literature and the Image of Man . The German title, Das Menschenbild in der Literatur , originated in part from the revision and systematization of older essays that had already appeared in the Zeitschrift . The Shakespeare chapter in the book was completely new, as was the one on the French drama. The chapter on Goethe already existed in a rough version but had not yet been published. In addition I wrote the longer study with Marjorie Fiske on the relation of art and mass culture in England during the eighteenth century. Immediately afterward, in the fall of 1956, I was appointed professor at the University of California in Berkeley.