PART III—
ONGOING CONVERSATIONS

10—
The Utopian Motif in Suspension:
A Conversation with Leo Lowenthal:
Interview with W. Martin Lüdke

What has not been lost is, of course, the critical approach: the process of analysis, retaining the good and rejecting the bad, the need to accuse, the indictment of all that exists . . . , but without explicit hopes. What has occurred is not a retreat into skepticism or cynicism, but sadness. The utopian motif has been suspended.

These remarks by Leo Lowenthal may have the ring of resignation, and not surprisingly so. At the beginning of the war, according to an anecdote told by Hanns Eisler, some members of the Institute of Social Research were standing on the shore of the Pacific when suddenly Adorno, seized by melancholy, said: "We should throw out a message in a bottle." Eisler remarked dryly that he already knew how the message should read: "I feel so lousy." This

kind of resignation, however, is not at all characteristic of Lowenthal. His sentences are marked by sober objectivity: they aim to destroy possible illusions in order to promote political action.

To be sure, Lowenthal's thinking is deeply rooted in the framework of Critical Theory, which he helped establish and develop; however, pragmatic tendencies are also evident, as well as an inclination to redirect speculative flights of intellectual fancy back to the path of existing conditions. For him, thinking the possible has always meant thinking within the bounds of present conditions, without, of course, reducing it to that alone. Perhaps his humor also plays a role in this.

For the first issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Lowenthal wrote the programmatic essay "On the Social Situation of Literature," an essay that is now recognized as a milestone in the history of the sociology of literature. His attempt in this essay to develop a social conception of literature necessarily takes issue with the objections that were raised against a materialistic theory. "By no means," Lowenthal points out, "does every causal question demand an infinite regression." For example, he continues, "An investigation into the causes that led Goethe to Weimar hardly requires a study of the medieval origins of German cities."

In his eighties, Leo Lowenthal has lost neither his vitality nor his quickness—and certainly not his sense of humor. He remains a scholar of the old school, in the positive sense of the term, who has nonetheless retained a touch of roguishness. Herbert Marcuse had a similar disposition, though he was perhaps a bit more sarcastic. Coping with these two, who spent much time together over several decades, must have been a trying experience for humorless erudite scholarly experts.

Today Lowenthal still lives in the middle of town, close to the Berkeley campus of the University of California. He has an open house, open for both visitors and students. When one sits in the

living room, gazing at the well-kept yet exuberantly lush garden, all semblance of utopia is destroyed by the constant ringing of the telephone: a German student not long in California who wants to locate a certain book, students who want to discuss their work with him, colleagues, friends, and, day in, day out, members of the families of those colleagues from the Institute who remained in the United States after the war. Now, following Marcuse's death, Lowenthal is the last survivor from the inner circle of the founders of the Frankfurt School (a designation, incidentally, that he strictly rejects).

The methodology of the critique of ideologies, that is, the determination of the "socially necessary illusion," a central motif of Critical Theory, also occupies a position of central importance for Lowenthal's work in the sociology of literature. To be sure, his studies never follow a simplistic base-superstructure schema; they never aim to reduce literature to ideology but, on the contrary, always attempt to describe the "authentic element" in "false consciousness."

Now as much as ever, Lowenthal insists on the need for ideology critique. When I brought up some contemporary objections, referring to the "obsolescence" of this technique, he demurred: "In that respect I can't agree with you at all." Especially in the examination of "mass media, mass culture," he continued, ideology critique is needed more urgently than ever before—now is not the time to take the aesthetic dimension of mass media more seriously, as is so often demanded. Of course, the mass media have changed, but the tendencies leading to the enslavement and stultification of humanity have become even stronger. In an earlier period, when mass media offered the possibility of escape from the oppressiveness of everyday life, a "certain amount of free play for the imagination" was still left, whereas "the present-day phenomenon of the mass medium really doesn't leave any freedom at all for the imagination. I would

be more inclined to consider it criminal to bury ideology critique now." In this situation, that is, in competition with mass media, art has been driven into a strictly defensive position.

Speaking of the resulting dilemma, that as the critical meaning of art increases its affirmative tendencies become correspondingly stronger and art becomes increasingly integrated into "the system," Lowenthal emphasizes the difference between the historically oriented analysis of past great works of bourgeois art and the art of the present day. The great art of the past has by no means lost its significance. "However," says Lowenthal, "my suspicion is that great literary art doesn't exist today." Of course, even today art is created that is oppositional or at least intends to be oppositional, but it has "only a very slight impact."

Our conversation then turned to those tendencies that might point beyond bourgeois, late-bourgeois, or late-capitalist society. Already in the mid-thirties, Critical Theory came increasingly to doubt the existence of a historical, revolutionary subject and rejected any hope of salvation founded on historical-philosophical theories, all because of the looming threat of a relapse into barbarism. To quote Lowenthal: "I would begin first of all by saying that one of the factors that brought the fathers or forefathers of Critical Theory together was a political-revolutionary consciousness. With the possible exception of Adorno, all of these men—Hork-heimer, Pollock, Marcuse, even Fromm (he, of course, was more interested in the Jewish-utopian side)—were politically active and had strongly developed activist characteristics and ideas."

In describing the later development of this circle in his conversations with Helmut Dubiel, Lowenthal used the phrase "we did not abandon the revolution; the revolution abandoned us." He remains, in his words, "a revolutionary," but "without any possibilities of revolution, and thus, if you will, politically apathetic." He is aware of the contradiction—and that the exaggerated formulation is somewhat off the mark. "I believe that today it is very difficult to

imagine what a shock the disappointment over developments in the Soviet Union meant for intellectuals, much earlier in Germany than in the United States, where this realization came only after the Moscow trials. I would go almost so far as to say that the belief in the possibility of change through political action, in the direct influence of theory on politics, was destroyed. It took us some time to realize this. At first, of course, the revolution was seen as the beginning of a process whereby politics would recede behind theory and theory would, as it were, assume the place of politics. At the same time, this theory must also always be clearly differentiated from the so-called Communist reality in the Soviet Union. As Horkheimer so rightly remarked, 'One cannot criticize the Communists without simultaneously criticizing the anti-Communist critique of the anti-Communists.'" The Institute's work crystallized around this problematic of ideological criticism of bourgeois society and criticism of false revolution—still based on the hope that this work would contribute to change. This was also, Lowenthal continued, the real meaning of Adorno's 'message in a bottle': "The symbol of the message in a bottle and its esoteric message arose, after all, out of the feeling that one could contribute to change, that the message would get through to the right people, that possibilities would once again arise."

What came instead was the second great shock, namely the end of World War II, which ended not with the total, shattering destruction of fascism through the triumph of democracy by a democratic movement, but rather with a military defeat. "That was," Lowenthal asserts, "possibly the greatest tragedy of our time. Now, even in our theoretical work, trust in change increasingly has been lost. What has not been lost is the critical approach, the process of analysis, the need to accuse, to say no, the indictment of the status quo ." No system will last forever, including this bourgeois-capitalist society, but "I can no longer believe in the transformation of this social order into a new one." One possibly decisive insight was the

"realization that the ideal of a future socialist or communist society, in which man's mastery over nature is, after all, further increased, can itself exert a corrupting effect on humanity"; that is, even this ideal will not lead to a society that is more humane than the existing one.

Here Lowenthal remembers Herbert Marcuse, with whom he shared a close friendship from the early thirties until Marcuse's death in 1979: "The least pessimistic friend in our group was probably Herbert Marcuse. But if you take a look at the groups Marcuse singled out as the hopeful builders of a new society—women, the counterculture, people in the Third World—it is hard to imagine that these groups would form a politically viable synthesis. After all, these are completely heterogeneous elements. They could be used as symbols of negation, but hardly as a basis for positive political action. . . . Historical-political coherence is dwindling; yes, it is gone," says Lowenthal, summing up.

Lowenthal then explained again one central concept of Critical Theory: the unity of progress and regression. The formulation is Adorno's, who said that the path of progress leads not from savagery to humanity but from the slingshot to the H-bomb. Progress in man's control over nature, that is, manifests itself at the same time in the oppression of human nature.

I asked him whether he could see the ecological movement, the Greens in Germany, as a factor that could point the way beyond this social order. Lowenthal answered dryly, "I wish you and myself luck. But I can't believe it. I see no possibility by which the ecological movement could really ally with the decisive forces in modern society in a way that would be more than a band-aid for society's wounds. I find the Green movement extraordinarily attractive, but I fear that here it's all too easy to talk oneself into believing in illusions that are comparable to those of radical theater or even of religious cults. The ecologists aren't so very different from them; it's just like with the bike riders and vegetarians. To be sure, the ecological movement has achieved much: the protection of the environment,

greater caution in the construction of nuclear power plants—all of that is very good, but it will remain at that level. I don't believe there will be a great qualitative leap. The ecological movement is, I believe, an essentially bourgeois movement—a continuation of the best characteristics of European liberalism of the second half of the nineteenth century, fundamentally a movement for enlightenment. But after all, by now we know enough to realize the illusory character of mere enlightened movements."

I asked Lowenthal about the possible influence cooperative interdisciplinary work might have on present social science; here I referred specifically to the cooperative effort that characterized the Institute, which he joined in the mid-twenties, and that was reflected so clearly in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , which he edited for several years.

Lowenthal first explained the inappropriateness of the term "interdisciplinary" to describe what the Institute did: "Actually, that means nothing more than to leave the disciplines as they are while developing certain techniques that foster a kind of acquaintance among them without forcing them to give up their self-sufficiency or individual claims." More decisive for the Institute—its actual founding idea—was the interconnection of theory and praxis, the attempt to mediate between the two by means of work carried out according to a program dictated by the theory of social change. The list of themes researched at that time contains most significantly those that were produced by the state of social development, of history.

"In practice this had the result that nothing I witnessed being produced at the Institute in, shall we say, its 'classical' years, between 1926 and 1945, was not to a great extent a communal effort. To be sure, each of us wrote his own books and articles, but nothing was published before all the others had read it and criticized it."

Lowenthal prefers not to commit himself on the question of the influence this "attitude" has exerted; here he remains rather skeptical. Certainly there exist in the United States, especially at the

better universities, many forms of interdisciplinary cooperative work, as well as institutionalized forms, that definitely aim for critical consciousness; ultimately, however, these too are little more than "band-aids." "Nonetheless," he repeats, "a band-aid is better than nothing at all."

We turned then to the Jewish-messianic element in the speculative concepts of a critical social theory. Not just representatives of Critical Theory, including Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Pollock, Fromm, and even Benjamin, but nearly all the philosophers of our century who made radical change of social relations a key element of their philosophical "program"—Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács—came from Jewish backgrounds. To what extent, I asked Lowenthal, had this Jewish religious heritage, in a more or less secularized form, found its way into these utopian concepts?

Lowenthal's reaction made it clear that he did not take to this particular question. "I am always somewhat ill at ease concerning this problem," he said, pointing out that the alleged specifically Jewish nonconformist and radical motivations in the theories of Marx and Freud were shared by "many who were not Jews." "Still," he admitted, "there may be something to your assertion." Continuing, he alluded to Jewish messianism and its historical consciousness, according to which history is seen as a process that can lead only to something better. The fundamental idea of Christianity—that the main historical event already occurred, in the middle of the course of history, so to speak, and that thereafter there is nowhere to go but downhill—goes totally against Jewish religious or secular "theology."

"My grandfather was a pious Jew, but my father rebelled against Judaism. The fact that at one point I had a positive attitude toward Judaism, and even observed religious and dietary laws for a time, was for my father quite dreadful. Erich Fromm was the only one from the circle of Institute members who came from an orthodox background, and he also lived much longer by the rules of the

Jewish religion than the others. As for myself, I am of Jewish origin, a German Jew, who is today an American citizen. Nothing more.

"But certainly for Benjamin, and also for Bloch and Marcuse, the Jewish-messianic motif played a significant role. In his later years, when for my tastes he became a bit too involved in religious symbolism, Horkheimer once said—and I believe we were all in complete agreement with him on this—that the Jewish article of faith that one may not pronounce the name of God is very decisive. The unattainable, the unapproachable, the unnameable, which nonetheless contains a sense of longing that one may finally reach the goal, may ultimately speak its name. This conception is certainly very Jewish; it is a motif in our thought even today."

Suddenly Lowenthal turned the tables on me: "Why do you ask? It sounds to me as though you were a Jew fighting for the cause." I expressed the concern that with the death of Adorno, Horkheimer, Bloch, and Marcuse this motif could disappear from social-philosophical thought. Lowenthal dismissed the possibility: "Once something has been contributed by the Jewish element to the arsenal of progressive thought, it can no more disappear than can the concept of love, caritas , among Christians, even though there are many fewer practicing Christians today. If the concept were really as fragile as you suggest, then it was never really alive."

I objected that Habermas, who after all had held very consistently to the intentions of Critical Theory, had, in his own words, "uncoupled" his variant of Critical Theory precisely at the point of "unfounded hope": that is, from the speculative-utopian call for a resurrection of nature, a reconciliation between man and nature. Habermas discarded this motif as a kind of ballast.

Lowenthal responded, "Maybe he is right. Perhaps it is ballast. Possibly that is all for the best. When I speak of such things, I feel a bit old and obsolete. After all, one cannot live only on utopian hopes based in never-never land, whose realization seems scarcely within

the realm of the possible. Maybe this is a cause of the sadness I spoke of at the outset. But perhaps the theoretical realism I sense in Habermas is the only means of salvaging the motifs present in Critical Theory and thereby of protecting them from a complete disintegration into an empty, melancholy pessimism."

11—
The Left in Germany Has Failed:
Interview with Peter Glotz

Peter Glotz: Mr. Lowenthal, we are having this discussion for the Neue Gesellschaft/Frankfurter Hefte , the theoretical periodical of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and, in a roundabout way, successor to Neue Zeit . I would therefore like to ask you about your experiences with the cultural politics of the SPD. I know your experiences lie in the distant past. Walter Benjamin once spoke of the bad positivism of worker-education policies, and in a conversation with Matthias Greffrath you spoke of the "cultural philistines of the movement for a Volksbühne [people's theater]," in which you were involved during the 1920s. What were your experiences, more than fifty years ago, concerning the Social Democratic Party's ability for self-representation? How did it deal with the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie, which certainly existed in the Weimar Republic?

Leo Lowenthal: I was never at the center of Social Democratic politics and was never a member of the party; I merely participated

in various assemblies and helped organize certain associations that were closely tied to the party, for example the Frankfurt group of the Volksbühne movement and the league for Volksvorlesungen [lectures for the people], and I served as the so-called cultural counsel to the chief of police, who was a Social Democrat.

Glotz: And he was supposed to be advised on cultural matters?

Lowenthal: It never happened. They gave me this handsome title and also a document stating that I was the police chief's advisor on cultural affairs. Seriously, though, my experiences with the Volksbühne and the Volksvorlesungen were a lot of fun for a cultured, leftist member of the bourgeoisie, but I didn't see anything in it that had to do with Social Democratic politics or even with the labor movement. Much of my time, outside my regular professional obligations, was spent on lectures that were financed essentially by Social Democratic circles. I very much enjoyed giving educational lectures on world literature, all the way from Shakespeare and Cervantes to the present. To what extent that contributed toward raising the political and moral consciousness of labor circles, however, I can't say. I saw Horkheimer in my audience, but not the weary face of the proletarian. It's almost a sad joke; the one time I can remember being directly involved with labor organizations was when the German publishers association invited me to give a formal address. The topic: "The German Language as Reflected by Social Developments." Even the title shows you I was pursuing a lost cultural ideal with no specific connection to the tasks of a radical political party or labor union. I felt that the top party or labor union management who would be interested in this kind of cultural activity were really acting like conformists. They simply wanted to be part of what was going on and to do exactly what the others had presumably done ever since idealism's beginnings at the turn of the nineteenth century.

One of my functions at the Volksbühne was to negotiate with the

producers for the program we wanted for our members. There I felt I had to maneuver a bit, since the "comrades" always tended to produce Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller; Georg Kaiser or Carl Sternheim were evidently too risky. For my part, I tried to convey to the Volksbühne audience a politically and morally oriented attitude through my program notes. Today as well, I fail to see any significant structural changes. I find the word Bildungspolitik [politics of education] very problematic.

Glotz: Kulturpolitik [politics of culture] has been absorbed by Bildungspolitik .

Lowenthal: Kulturpolitik is a word I can't at all recall being used in the Weimar Republic. I think we see here an aspect of the very interesting but tragic history of the SPD.

Glotz: I'd say the concept of Kulturpolitik came into being in the Federal Republic's first decade through the efforts of several men in the SPD—Waldemar von Knoeringen and Willi Eichler, for example. But then the concept quickly disappeared into Schulpolitik [politics of schools]. There was a debate on comprehensive schools, on a three-tiered system, on the system itself, but for all intents and purposes the subject of culture didn't come up again in the Federal Republic for decades.

Lowenthal: That's really quite typical. Whenever you use the word "Kulturpolitik "—however problematic the word "culture" may be—you establish an agenda that touches the entire social complex. The concept of Kulturpolitik has something slightly esoteric about it; it means that you draw on economic elements on the one hand, and on historical and ideological elements on the other. Just look at current neoconservative movements. It's simply not possible to fight neoconservatism unless you approach the whole problem from the vantage point of Kulturpolitik, since in the final analysis we're talking about values, about tendencies aimed at change, about an emphasis on ethics, about notions of a new order.

None of this can be accomplished without "culture" being placed at the center as a key concept.

Glotz: We'll come back to the subject of neoconservatism. I read in connection with Neue Zeit that you place special emphasis on a very characteristic experience. The critiques of Hamsun in the Neue Zeit of the 1890s were thoroughly critical, as you yourself said. The literary critics of the SPD wrote there that one doesn't find living people portrayed in Hamsun, only atmospherics. But then after World War I there came the usual clichés about "gripping images of life and the soul." What I'd like to ask is, does this suggest an erosion in aesthetic theory, an early conformity to bourgeois cultural standards already in the years from the 1890s to the decade between 1910 and 1920? Of course, in Franz Mehring you can identify a Social Democratic position on literary criticism.^[1] Even in World War I you wouldn't find that, much less today. My question then is—and I refer explicitly to the present—has the independent aesthetic position disappeared along with a socialist party that had its own worldview and class-standpoint? Has aesthetic agnosticism become necessary for a modern party?

Lowenthal: I see in the way the critical reception of Hamsun changed something closely linked to Social Democracy and to the entire left, namely an involuntary process of becoming more and more bourgeois. All these things have to do with the fact that historical development in Germany has been nonsynchronous [ungleichzeitig ].

Glotz: You mean Bloch's concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit?

Lowenthal: Yes, he said that, in essence, a bourgeois revolution

never took place. I feel this stronger than ever now. I've lived for over fifty years in America, a very bourgeois country indeed; there the word "Staat " [the state] is, in the German sense of the word, practically untranslatable.

Glotz: "Government" is something different.

Lowenthal: Right. And one doesn't speak there of the administration [Regierung ] in power as, for example, "the English"; it's simply "the Thatcher administration." But in Germany people say to me, "you" Americans—and I really don't know why I should be held responsible for Reagan's domestic and international policies. This situation is also reflected in the sad history of the SPD's relationship to literature and art. The uncertainty of judgment about what is bourgeois and what transcends the bourgeoisie stems not from the Enlightenment but from a version of German idealism. Much more than the historical Enlightenment, it is the schoolmaster, with his talk of great cultural values, great ideas, Kantian ethics, and so on, who lurks behind Social Democratic cultural imagery.

Glotz: The influence of Schiller on the bourgeoisie . . .

Lowenthal: Yes, it is Schiller's influence on the bourgeoisie more than Lessing's. If you look at developments in England and France, you see quite clearly the extent to which aesthetic valuations have been assumed by politicians and political theorists as well. There, literature mirrors not only progressive or regressive developments but a country's evolution as well. It's different in Germany—and this lack of the aesthetic in political culture is almost unique for a civilized nation.

Glotz: You have often represented the problematic of art and mass culture as a fictive dialogue between Montaigne and Pascal. Montaigne was capable of appreciating that man wants to escape social pressure and that he needs diversions, whereas Pascal gives us the famous saying "All strong diversions are a danger for Christian life!" If I may begin by asking a general question, isn't it logical that

the left would of course assume Montaigne's position in this dialogue?

Lowenthal: I have great sympathy for Montaigne, and Montaigne had great sympathy for people who need diversion because the pressure of circumstances, the pressure of labor, the pressure within relationships is so frightfully great. Sometimes people have to—how shall I put it—grasp for soporific measures in order to go on facing the enormous strains of everyday existence. Yet this fundamental sympathy for the humane, realistic, wise position of Montaigne (who knowingly withdrew from his world) does not justify contemporary commercialization—of which neither Pascal nor Montaigne, of course, could have had any knowledge; it doesn't justify the complete and total planning of a person's entire leisure time through the "leisure industry," all the way from the printed word to television.

No, what I wanted to point out were two tendencies moving counter to each other, tendencies that have been around as long as civilization. I have always tried to think historically. And I'd like to add: this is one of the great dangers in the present situation, especially in the Federal Republic—that historical consciousness is taking on frightfully revisionist characteristics.

Glotz: Then isn't your position quite different from that presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, by your friends Adorno and Horkheimer, or from some positions of the second generation, say of Jürgen Habermas in his book Structural Change of the Public Sphere ? For Adorno at least, mass culture can be nothing other than a degeneration of art.

Lowenthal: You've maneuvered me into a curious position. But so be it—I find it stimulating. In no way do I differ radically from my colleagues and friends in the critique of mass culture. However, I do believe that we have to distinguish between mass culture and technologies used by mass culture. I think that's some-

thing that Adorno and Horkheimer, in their programmatic research, placed less value on than I do. There is in my opinion a radical difference between art and mass culture, a difference we shouldn't want to eliminate. Art is not mere subjectivity. An artist communicates something that cannot be represented through other intellectual means. Art expands our experience, it expands our knowledge, it adds something to our quality of life that other intellectual methods—whether organized science or philosophy—cannot. Furthermore, what we've been calling mass culture, or as Adorno and Horkheimer more appropriately dubbed it, the culture industry, is a business. Whether the business is run by parties or warehouses or chemical concerns is irrelevant. It is not the advancing of new knowledge that counts, but the introduction of products into the market. This difference between art and mass culture must be maintained—especially in the current situation, which tends to a relativization of all values, to a nihilism of an unbelievable kind, where people like myself are maneuvered into positions in which they seem completely reactionary because they stubbornly maintain a notion of autonomous art and criticize mass culture as an ever greater enslavement of all people.

Glotz: All right, let's retain the concept of autonomous art. But might I suggest a more differentiated analysis of mass culture? I'd propose the following thesis: mass culture makes possible a wider reception of cultural products than ever before.

Lowenthal: What do you mean by that?

Glotz: Thanks to paperback books, and inexpensive books in general, thanks in part too to book clubs, works of world literature as well as new theoretical works have become inexpensively available for the first time. Today you can buy for a relatively small amount of money a tape of Mozart, Mahler, Wagner, or Alban Berg, in the finest imaginable performance, and play it at home. Yet at one time in history, Mozart was court music. Isn't there a positive

element in spreading the possibility of participating in the cultural process?

Lowenthal: You're making it a bit too easy for yourself. Certainly it's a good thing when important works of literature are made more accessible. Certainly it's a good thing that there are fine recordings. (Adorno disputed that playing records and listening to live music are equivalent, but I don't want to get into that now.) It's a good thing when records or tapes are accessible. But the question is, what's really taking place? If Mozart and Beethoven are played over and over again for a listener who isn't able to appreciate the music, or if they're played as background music in cafés, department stores, restaurants, at the hairdresser's or dentist's, then I fail to see anything particularly valuable in it. That's really nothing but the desire to be part of the action.

Glotz: Sure, but you can't say that people buy records solely to distract themselves from the dentist's drilling. It's now possible for someone to experience the music of, say, Mahler at home, whereas earlier, before the technical capacity to reproduce artwork was developed, this wasn't possible.

Lowenthal: I'd like to become your ally. But give me a minute. If you look more closely at the phenomenon we've provisionally been calling the culture industry or mass culture, it's not decisive that people are buying pocket books of Kant and Merleau-Ponty or tapes of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schönberg. Rather, the phenomenon is characterized by "Dallas" and "Dynasty" and God knows how many other shows—I mean that ninety percent of the output of so-called mass culture are products of this kind. Back to my original comment: I'd like to become your ally, but I don't know if you'll have me. I place value on the following factors. I'm of the opinion—and here I part from Adorno and Horkheimer—that you shouldn't make the media as such, the technology of the media, responsible. On the contrary, as a consequence of the capital structure within which these media are used, as a consequence of the

political-economic form, the entire technological arsenal has been appropriated. The aesthetic and cognitive potential of film, radio, and television hardly gets a chance. Of course, there are the art films and the radio and television plays, but even then, in terms of their diffusion, they're only peripheral phenomena. People have abandoned the field to the enemy. The last thing I'd advise a Social Democratic Kulturpolitiker to do would be to continue abandoning the field. Of course, one should be concerned about this threat, but what really matters is how to avoid it. My feeling is that two things should be linked: first, continued advancement of the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the media, which in the case of film wouldn't be all that hard and would also foster a good newspaper and magazine press; and second, a consistent effort analytically to grasp that which is being cheaply propagandized and which ultimately harms us all. There must be both: the appropriate utilization of the new media and a radical critique of a mass culture that just stultifies our intelligence.

Glotz: I'd like to talk about a concept I sometimes think could become—and probably should have long ago—a central concept of Social Democratic Kulturpolitik: popularization. I know there's the old-fashioned schoolmaster (you mentioned this earlier) who popularizes in the wrong way, and I also know there's autonomous art that doesn't allow popularization, or not very easily. Nevertheless, I wonder whether the German resignation vis-à-vis popularization, which I find quite different from the Anglo-Saxon tendency, isn't somehow wrong. Is there a reasonable, thoughtful form of popularization?

Lowenthal: What is popularization? What do you mean by that?

Glotz: To provide more people access to a serious experience of autonomous art.

Lowenthal: Mr. Glotz, every word in that sentence is burdened. Popularization has a positive connotation only when it

broadens the experiential base of those for whom something is being popularized. Let me give you an example. Last night I suggested you have a look at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. You'll go there, and since you're a man of great learning, you'll continuously make intellectual associations. But if you take someone to the collection who lacks this background, it won't lead to anything. I can't provide any recipes; I only know that if you don't want to teach a person how to experience aesthetic products, then all this information—mere popularization—backfires and only strengthens the tendency toward cheap, passively enjoyable amusement. Hence, without a genuine—if you'll excuse the word—education of people to aesthetic experience, then a kind of popularization that would be at all meaningful is impossible.

In my studies on political agitation I've tried to formulate it like this: the essence of the agitator, in principle the essence of the fascist leader, is to try to perpetuate himself and not to become superfluous. "I'm the only one in possession of the truth"—that's the attitude. But if we turn this around, we can say that the essence of the legitimate elite consists in a pedagogical ideal, which is ultimately to make yourself superfluous as a teacher. But at the beginning you must act as a teacher, and if you don't have the courage to acknowledge this elitist concept of the instructor who expands experience and transmits knowledge and demonstrates models, then you're abandoning the field to those who are seeking to fill a vacuum.

Glotz: I agree with your thesis. But consider two examples. For decades, even centuries, there have been museums in Germany that offer no help at all to those who visit them; instead, these museums presuppose that as a child you had exposure to a bourgeois library in your parent's house. But in many cases no such library exists, for example in the working-class family. Today, however, we have modern museum didactics seeking to lead people without a high school or college background into new realities. A

second example: there are enormously successful book associations that make millions, Bertelsmann for example. I wouldn't describe that as an example of Social Democratic Bildungspolitik, but I think it's catastrophic that, time and again, the labor movement almost let the Gutenberg Book Guild [a progressive, SPD-sponsored book club] fall apart. I consider it a failure of the labor movement that Bertelsmann [one of the largest publishing companies in Germany] is so large and the Gutenberg Book Guild so small. Wouldn't you concur on these two examples?

Lowenthal: I agree completely. But then, why don't enterprises like the Gutenberg Book Guild succeed? They don't succeed in part simply because there is not enough interest among those to whom your political efforts are dedicated. Such success is possible only by means of a major educational effort, but how that could be realized I don't know. I know only that Germans today recoil even from the word "education."

Glotz: Particularly the left . . .

Lowenthal: The left, Mr. Glotz, especially the leftist intelligentsia in Germany, has failed; indeed, it is also failing, more and more, in the United States and France. Those in Germany who identify as leftist intelligentsia or seek to do so—a movement that is widely documented in journals—much too often celebrate a nihilistic departure from everything that could lead them in the right direction. A lot of things, indeed too many things, are problematized, but the wrong things are problematized: the concepts of enlightenment, of reason, of the individual; the concepts of history, of morality, of an independent art. All of these things are being problematized, all lumped together; completely arbitrary topics are being conceived; the modern age is being sold out. You have written, quite rightly, that the project of the modern age is far from being completed, but that fact is continually denied.

Today many "postmodern" architects want to construct buildings and living spaces that seem to have more of a mythological than

a functional significance. Objective reality seems to have evaporated. This tendency, which I find most disturbing, is equally striking in postmodern literature. Its seeming concreteness is phony—we are confronted with distorting mirrors, or picture puzzles that whirl and swirl the dead about. To me this represents an unreflected revelry abounding in irrationalist concepts, an ever-present flirtation with mythology.

Unfortunately, this "mythology" characterizes a certain so-called leftist intelligentsia much more than a rightist one. The right, the neoconservatives, are in fact quite positivistic, oriented toward the practical; the left, however, loses itself in intellectual meanderings that can only make the situation worse. If it's not possible to form a really new leftist intelligentsia, one that continues to grow theoretically, as Critical Theory tried to do, then I expect only the worst for Western Europe's future—not so much its industrial future, but its cultural, moral, and political one.

Glotz: I don't know to what extent you follow what this "leftist" intelligentsia in the Federal Republic has been producing in new literature. I'll mention four important names, two from the younger, two from the older generation: Botho Strauß, Peter Handke, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass. You once wrote, "Art is the great reservoir of the creative protest against social misery which allows the prospect of social happiness to shine dimly through." Or again: "The voice of the loser in the world process articulates itself in the work of art." That refers to the marvelous sentence of Walter Benjamin, that history is always written from the perspective of the victor. But you say that literature should be written from the perspective of the loser. These two sentences contain an implicit aesthetic; if you apply them to the contemporary literary production, what's your impression of German literature in the 1980s?

Lowenthal: I don't want to treat all of it as the same thing. I have a strong aversion to the kind of literature that loses itself in the private sphere to such an extent that it no longer has any connection

to the public, social sphere—and no longer wants any such connection. That's not at all true of Böll and Grass, but I think it is true of Strauß and the later Handke. I don't mean that these authors possess no literary qualities; in fact, they are highly talented and describe a certain contemporary situation quite accurately. But unfortunately, I feel compelled to see this literature in a context of other currents, more diffuse, obscure, and underground in nature. These are currents of irrationalization and privatization, the significance of which the leading political parties don't seem to have grasped yet. Good examples of such currents are certain German literary journals with such titles as Konkursbuch [Bankruptcy Book] and Tumult . They're essentially saying: not only do we have to place everything in doubt, we've got to throw everything overboard, we've got to start over.

But what we're supposed to start over with is never determined. And this element of arbitrariness is also present in the literature of inwardness, the so-called New Subjectivity. What took place in the Federal Republic in connection with the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II, on May 8, 1985, illustrates what I mean: a terrible orgy, an attempt to rewrite history from point zero, a kind of history of negative salvation. Once again thoughts are being formulated that you would think were no longer thinkable—for example, a mythological neonationalism. And formulations of this kind have once again achieved a level of public exposure that would have been impossible just a couple of years ago. Take the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in which leading articles appear about a people that persecutes others "unto the seventh generation." Unbelievable! Or a mass-circulation, illustrated magazine such as Quick, which can so arrange the title page that on the bottom right, next to the picture of a half-naked woman, the title of an article appears—"The Power of the Jews"—an article that shamelessly distorts the so-called Jewish influence in the United States and hence the world. There you can read the usual anti-Semitic clichés, including: "Four

million Jews—Jewish sources speak of six—perished." These, Mr. Glotz, are things that contribute to a corruption of historical consciousness. Here I'll restrain myself lest I find myself in the grotesque situation of making a connection between Konkursbuch or Botho Strauß and such vulgar political tendencies. That would be sheer nonsense. However, I must say that the current atmosphere in the Federal Republic is confusing. I regret that there appears to be no clearly defined movement opposed not only to those I mentioned but also to the so-called Wende [turnabout].^[2] It is with some bitterness that I add: I'm afraid the intellectual left has failed thus far.

12—
Against Postmodernism:
Interview with Emilio Galli Zugaro

Zugaro: Professor Lowenthal, you spent three months in Berlin as a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg [Institute for Advanced Studies]. Did you pursue a defined research project during this period?

Lowenthal: "Research project" is perhaps too large a word. What currently interests me are certain literary, philosophical, intellectual currents condensed in the not entirely transparent word "postmodernism." Since my interests have always been in literature and the sociology of literature, I wanted to study the extent to which deconstructionist theory, which is very influential in the United States today, has made inroads in the Federal Republic as well. I wanted to draw parallels.

Zugaro: Do these tendencies exist in Germany, too?

Lowenthal: To my surprise I found that this particular approach to literary texts is almost unknown in the Federal Republic; in any case, it hasn't had any resonance. Rather, I found a different kind of critical stance toward modernity, one that is spreading. Although it is much less interesting theoretically than what is tak-

ing place in literary theory in the United States, politically, morally, culturally, it may be even more significant—if only in a negative sense. As an intellectual from the Critical Theory tradition, as someone interested in problems that do not come up arbitrarily within institutionalized scholarship but that possess a topical, directly relevant meaning, this discovery was something of a godsend, so to speak. I began to study this movement—if it is one—in written works as well as through conversations with its proponents and opponents. I didn't arrive at any final conclusions, of course—the time was too short for that. But if I live long enough I'll try to write something on this.

Zugaro: Did I understand you to mean that these currents, although they have no solid theoretical foundation in Germany, are nonetheless influential politically?

Lowenthal: I don't think they're politically influential at this time; in fact, I think they're completely impotent politically. I'm of the opinion, however, that these tendencies—which to some extent are reflected in journals and which correspond to similar movements in architecture, film, and theater—could potentially exercise a direct or indirect political influence. Of course, that's not at all the case right now, but we've learned to be vigilant.

To get to the point: the spread of irrational and neomythological concepts, or "nonconcepts"—this thoughtless and irresponsible choice of thoroughly arbitrary topics that are not rooted in any rational and moral tradition—is something I think deserves attention.

Zugaro: What kind of statements are you referring to specifically?

Lowenthal: The statement that the age of enlightenment has come to an end, that we're in the age of post-histoire . I can't imagine what that's supposed to mean; history continues with every new day! Sometimes you have the feeling that this new irrationalism has completely lost all faculty for common sense, that the concepts of

history, progress, autonomous art—which, perhaps, have become untenable—no longer have any meaning at all. People are satisfied with a loosely conceived concept of "subjectivity," where whatever happens to be going through your head at the moment is considered meaningful. People write about and discuss—if they discuss at all—controversial topics such as terror, horror, deterioration, passion, intimacy, and God knows what else without committing themselves to any position at all. I sometimes describe this manner of writing, which is found in such journals as Konkursbuch and Tumult, as a trite version of écriture automatique . The difference is, the surrealists tied it to a very definite—I'd almost say moral, if not revolutionary—concept, whereas this contemporary orientation is fundamentally apolitical and wants to be.

Zugaro: In the 1930s you caused an uproar with a study on Knut Hamsun. At that time you maintained that in Hamsun, nature represents a flight from any kind of socially critical position. Could one say that there are art movements today that, for the same reason, seek refuge in themselves without recourse to psychoanalysis or to any historical, critical position?

Lowenthal: I think that's a very important topic. What you say is quite correct. This so-called postmodernity is a pseudo-philosophical orientation that would base itself—I think without justification—on Nietzsche, who was much more a moralist than an immoralist. It sees itself connected to or having points in common with the literature of new interiority.

This cult of the purely subjective—and it really doesn't matter whether it's a cult of the hedonistic or of the tragic, since neither one has any connection to the social—feeds orgiastically on the raptures, ecstasies, derangements, or ensnarements of pure subjectivity. You referred to Hamsun, probably because you know I predicted fifty years ago that he was a fascist, at a time when no one was willing to believe it. I certainly don't want to make such claims about the personalities involved in postmodernism, who, as per-

sons, are quite harmless. That would be downright absurd. But I am concerned that certain tones are being heard again. For me it's a kind of déjà vu phenomenon, as if the bohème of the first half of the twentieth century was forming itself anew. Of course, some of their representatives, in their irrational, pseudo-romantic stance, have become harbingers of fascist or National Socialist ideologies. But it's certainly not true that we're living today in a situation where fascism is just around the corner. Nonetheless as a gebranntes Kind [literally: a "burned child"; i.e., once burned, twice shy]—please excuse the harsh metaphor—one has to be more alert than ever vis-à-vis movements that add yet another burden to an already diseased and, in the negative sense of the word, materialistic atmosphere. Perhaps I reveal an exaggerated self-confidence because, as a surviving representative of Critical Theory, I can go somewhat further back in time, and so by means of my historical consciousness I can call attention to a phenomenon deserving attention. Perhaps some of the representatives of this new irrationalism, this new mythology, could be persuaded to rethink their position, given the responsibility that a theory propagating irresponsibility must assume.

Zugaro: Could one say that the postmoderns filled a vacuum resulting from the transformation of Critical Theory into a culture industry after the student revolts, or, as you termed it, the "rebellion of the sons"?

Lowenthal: That's a thoroughly legitimate hypothesis. I believe such tendencies always arise where a vacuum occurs, especially a political vacuum. It's the third time in this century, after all. First came the period when people realized that the dreams of bourgeois moralism simply cannot be realized. Here you have the reactionary schools of France in the first decades of the twentieth century, you have the mythological tendencies à la Moeller van den Bruck and others, and you have parts of the youth movement—

these all became established in Germany before and immediately after World War I.

Then you find a second period: the deep disappointment, especially among the younger motivated intellectual circles in Germany—the insight that the Soviet Union most certainly can't be the avant-garde of revolutionary social change. It was a time of sobering up. This took place in Germany much earlier than, for example, in the United States, where it was twenty years before people finally realized what was what. In this situation of disappointment in the revolution, new and exceedingly nihilistic movements started to spread again. Or else something quite unique developed: a stance, as represented by Critical Theory, that insisted that the whole problem of social change and of the intellectual's perspective had to be completely rethought.

Now we're so to speak in the third phase. This can be substantiated with historical details, for I believe that many of the movements we're discussing are directly or indirectly connected with the collapse of the student movement in the sixties and early seventies. Here, too, the imagination once existed to forge a new political will, an alliance of the so-called proletariat (which no longer existed in the strict sense) and the intellectuals, the students. But after the complete internal and external psychological collapse of this idea, there arose a colossal need for the vacuum to be filled. Since other credible tools and ideologies were not available, a large part of the intelligentsia slowly sank into this irrational and mythological behavior, into this dangerous swamp.

Of course, one shouldn't moralize. These aren't evil people. But in my opinion they're victims of a desperate situation in which the impatience, the expectation that something has to happen—even if that means that nothing at all should happen—overwhelms the rationally advisable attitude of waiting, of critical thought.

Zugaro: You think, then, there's no hope at all?

Lowenthal: Here I would agree with Walter Benjamin, whose words at the end of his analysis of Goethe's Elective Affinities have been quoted a thousand times, namely, that we're given hope solely for the sake of those who are without hope. This is the source of my irritation, not to say my obstinancy, regarding these postmodernist movements. You simply cannot abandon the critical thoughtfulness of a nay-sayer if you want to remain a yea-sayer. As a human being, you don't have the right to teach almost systematically that the end of humanity in history has already occurred and that human energies capable of changing what Georg Lukács calls the "infamy of the status quo" can no longer be developed. As Ernst Bloch would say, you must remain true to this "utopian spark"; the situation may well call for sorrow, melancholy, and doubt, but never despair.

Zugaro: During this time in Berlin, what was your impression about the Germans' relationship to their past? I'm referring to the period of Reagan's latest visit [in 1985], when these topics were raised once again.

Lowenthal: First of all, I'm not so sure that you can observe things better at the scene itself than from a distance. My situation was privileged only insofar as more press information was available to me than would have been possible in the United States. I was quite shocked by everything that took place in connection with May 8 [the fortieth anniversary of the official end of World War II]. But it wouldn't be honest to say that it completely surprised me. It was merely further documentation of the fact that the Germans, at least in the Federal Republic, want to finish with their history by subjugating and raping it rather than confronting it. I am tempted to say that they practice post-histoire by saying: "We've heard enough of that," or: "We'll simply leap over these twelve years." At the same time, things come to light again, things that have not been repressed, I think, but simply swept under the carpet. I mean these

very suggestive anti-Semitic voices and sentiments, which were expressed particularly in the press.

Zugaro: Which newspapers are you referring to?

Lowenthal: All the way up to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , not to mention such mass publications as Quick . They demonstrated to me that no process of genuine moral rehabilitation took place following the National Socialist period. On the contrary, these voices still contribute to a covering-up, and thus they terrify the wounded. Reagan's visit to Germany and the scene at the military cemetery resulted from conniving manipulations by governments and media. The irony is that Reagan, who himself makes superb use of the media for the purpose of political manipulation, was the one taken in. In essence, he became the one manipulated, and he in turn was unable to manipulate public opinion in his own country—this was confirmed by large portions of the American public, not only Jews, but also, for instance, most conservative senators.

Zugaro: Professor Lowenthal, thank you for this interview.