The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  On the heights of social theory, these bodies of thought commanded the terrain. In history, the other discipline of greatest public projection, the scene was much more varied, with significant conservative figures and schools continuously active. But here, too, the cutting edge of research and intervention—the ‘societal’ history associated with Bielefeld—was a left-liberal loyalism, critical of the Second Reich as an antechamber of the Third, and tracing the path of a reactionary Sonderweg that, in separating Germany from the West, had led to disaster. Here political emphasis fell on the contrast between a calamitous past and a transfigured present: the Bonn Republic as everything that Weimar had not been—stable, consensual, faithful to the international community. As prolific as Habermas, a close friend from school-days, Hans-Ulrich Wehler was no less active a presence in the public sphere, sustaining the values of the post-war settlement with a distinctive tranchant of his own. Still more pointed as instruction for the present was the work of Heinrich Winkler on the German labour movement between the wars, dwelling on the blindness of the SPD in failing to understand that compromise with parties of the bourgeois centre could alone save German democracy, as had thankfully been upheld since the war.

  The hegemony of a left-liberal culture in essential syntony with the character of the political system—while always keeping a critical distance from its particular incumbents—was never exclusive. Powerful earlier bodies of writing, dating back to the inter-war period, continued to circulate and exercise influence to other effects, less hospitable to the status quo. The Frankfurt School had been one of these, central in detonating the rebellion of the late sixties. Consensus was not a value dear to it. But once the hyperactivist turn of the revolt had passed, or was crushed, and the legacy of Adorno and Horkheimer was put through the blender of Habermas’s philosophy of communication, little memory was left of the critical theory for which they had stood. Dissonance now increasingly came from the right. There could be found the still active figures of Heidegger, Schmitt, Jünger, Gehlen, all compromised during the Third Reich, each an intellectual legend in his own right. Of these, Heidegger, the best known abroad, was probably of least importance, his post-war reception greater in France than Germany itself, where under American influence analytic philosophy gained entry early on, and his runic ontology had only a narrow purchase on the political or social issues of the period, as one generically desolate vision of technological modernity among others.

  The other three, all—unlike Heidegger—masters of a terse, vivid German prose, were of greater moment: Schmitt, the most ruthlessly brilliant, unstable mind of his generation, for his kaleidoscopic ability to shake sovereignty, law, war, politics into sharply new and unsettling patterns; Gehlen, for his uncanny sense of the closure of ideological and artistic forms in the ‘crystallizations’ of a post-histoire, and the probability of student and guerrilla rebellions against it; Jünger, for the arresting arc of a trajectory from lyricist of a machine civilization to seer of ecological disaster. The calendars and areas of their influence were not the same, in part depending on their personal situations. Schmitt, institutionally the most ostracized, was intellectually the most consulted, constitutional lawyers flocking to his ideas early on.38 Gehlen, who died much younger, was stylized as a counter-weight to Adorno. Jünger, who lived longest, regained the most complete droit de cité, ending up with every kind of honour, indeed decorated by Mitterrand. But, though never ‘residual’, in Raymond Williams’s sense, the intellectual world such thinkers embodied could not compete with the post-war consensus as any kind of public doctrine. It was an alternative to the dominant discourse, inescapable yet peripheral, incapable of displacing it. Hegemony remained left-liberal.

  Around the mid-eighties, there were the first premonitions of a change. Habermas’s last great book, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, appeared in 1985. Intellectually, it was already on the defensive—a noble rescue operation to save the idea of modernity from the descendants of Nietzsche, from Bataille to Foucault to Derrida, who were darkening it once more into an ecstatic antinomianism. If the dangers Habermas discerned were principally French, it was not long before German sub-variants materialized. Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, greeted respectfully by Habermas himself, had set the ball rolling two years earlier: a best-seller born of a sojourn with the guru Bhagwan Rajneesh in Poona. Over the next twenty years, a torrent of sequels poured out, zig-zagging across every possible terrain of frisson or fashion, from psychotherapy to the ozone layer, religion to genetic engineering, and catapulting Sloterdijk to the status of talk-show host and popular celebrity—a Teutonic version, more erudite and bear-like, of Bernard-Henri Lévy. The sway of communicative reason could hardly survive this triumph of public relations. Habermas’s pupils Albrecht Wellmer and Axel Honneth have continued to produce honourable work, on occasion more radical in tenor than that of their mentor, of late increasingly preoccupied with religion. But the philosophical props of the peace of Bonn have gone.

  In the historical field, the story was different. There the mid-eighties saw a more direct assault on left-liberal heights, which was successfully repulsed, but marked a shift of acceptable opinion all the same. The Historikerstreit of 1986 was set off by Ernst Nolte’s argument that Nazi atrocities were a reaction to prior Bolshevik crimes, and should not be treated as either unique, or as absolute definitions of the German past. But it soon involved a wider group of conservative historians, making less extreme claims, but in the eyes of their critics—Wehler and Habermas among them—nonetheless not only palliating the criminality of the Third Reich, but undermining the necessary centrality of the Judeocide to the identity of post-war Germany, as memory and responsibility.39 National rehabilitation was not to be had in this fashion. There could be no question who won this dispute. Soon afterwards, however, the tables were turned, when in their zeal to preclude any revival of national sentiment the leading lights of left-liberalism—Winkler, Wehler, Habermas—expressed their reserve or opposition to reunification of the country, even as it was plainly about to become a reality. However justified were their objections to the form it took, there was no concealing the fact that this was a transformation of Germany they had never conceived or wished for, as their antagonists had. Here too the dominant had dissolved.40

  4

  In the gradual change of intellectual atmosphere, one catalyst stands out. Since the war, Germany’s leading journal of ideas has been Merkur, which can claim a record of continuous distinction arguably without equal in Europe. Its remarkable founding editor, Hans Paeschke, gave it an interdisciplinary span—from the arts through philosophy and sociology to the hard sciences—of exceptional breadth, canvassed with consistent elegance and concision. But what made it unique was the creed of its editor. Inspired by Wieland’s encyclopaedism, Paeschke gave the ecumenical range of his Enlightenment model a more agonistic twist, combining the capacity for Gegenwirkung that Goethe had praised in Wieland—who had published Burke and Wollstonecraft alike—with a Polarisierung of his own, as twin mottos for the journal. These remained the constants in Merkur’s changeable liberalism—first conservative, then national, then left, as Paeschke later described its phases: an editorial practice welcoming opposites, and setting them in play against each other. ‘The more liberal, the richer in tensions.’41 At one time or another Broch, Arendt, Curtius, Adorno, Heidegger, Brecht, Gehlen, Löwith, Weizsäcker, Voegelin, Borkenau, Bloch, Schmitt, Habermas, Weinrich, Benn all appeared in its pages. Uninterested in the Wirtschaftswunder, hostile to the Cold War, regarding Adenauer’s Germany as a ‘pseudomorphosis’, Paeschke maintained good relations with writers in the East, and when the political scene changed in the sixties, was sympathetic to both the student revolt and the turn to an Ostpolitik. Averse to any kind of Syntheselei, he conceived the journal socratically, as a dialectical enterprise, in keeping with the dictum Der Geist ist ein Wühler.42 Spirit is not a reconciler, but a trouble-maker.

  Paeschke retired in the l
ate seventies, and in 1984 the succession passed to Karl-Heinz Bohrer, pre-eminently equipped for the role of Wühler. A student of German Romanticism, and theorist of Jünger’s early work, Bohrer made his début in Merkur in 1968, with a defence of the student revolt against liberal attacks in the mainstream press, praising it as the expression, at its best, of an eclectic anarchism.43 Not the Frankfurt School, he argued, but the French Surrealism that Benjamin had admired and Adorno dismissed, was the appropriate inspiration for rebellion against the detestable juste milieu of the Bonn system.44 These were the sentiments of a writer who was soon making a name for himself as editor of the literary section of the country’s leading conservative newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, before falling out with his superiors and being packed off as correspondent to London. A decade later, he returned to the charge in Merkur with a bravura survey of the fate of the movements of 1968—compared with those of 1848 and 1870–1—as uprising and counter-culture, covering politics, theatre, film, art, theory and music, and marking 1974 as the end of a revolutionary epoch in which Blake’s tiger had stalked the streets. A mere restoration of ‘old-bourgeois cultural piety’ was no longer possible, but the new culture had by now lost its magnetism: only an artist like Beuys retained an anarchic force of subversion.45 Bohrer’s own deepest allegiances were to ‘suddenness’ as the dangerous moment, without past or future, in which true aesthetic experience ruptures the continuity of existence, and so, potentially, the social fabric. Captured by Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Hofmannsthal, and Jünger—in their own ways Woolf or Joyce, too—the sudden found its political expression in the decisionism of Schmitt.46 The central figure in this pantheon, combining more than any other its aesthetic and political moments—epiphany and act—remained Jünger, the subject of Bohrer’s Ästhetik des Schreckens, the work that won him a chair in modern German literary history at Bielefeld.

  On taking charge of Merkur soon afterwards, Bohrer opened his editorship in spectacular fashion, with a merciless satire on the petty-bourgeois philistinism, provincialism and consumerism of Bonn politics and culture, complete with a ruinous portrait of Kohl as the personification of a mindless gluttony.47 This was a state, wanting all aesthetic form, that could only be described in the spirit of the early Brecht, or Baudelaire on Belgium. A three-part pasquinade on the German political class followed, depicting both the new-found CDU–FDP coalition and the SPD opposition to it with blistering derision.48 Time did not soften these judgements. At the turn of the nineties, Bohrer unleashed another ferocious fusillade against German provincialism, in a six-part series covering government, literature, television, advertising, press, songs, stars, movies, cityscapes, and culminating in special scorn for delusions that the enthusiasm of his compatriots for Europe was anything other than a tourist form of the same parochialism. From the ‘pastoral boredom’ of Die Zeit and the FAZ, to the ‘fussy sentimentalism’ of Grass or Walser, to the grotesqueries of Kohl as ‘Giant of the Caucasus’, and Genscher as his Sancho Panza, little escaped Bohrer’s scathing report. At best, the Frankfurt of the sixties had not been quite so dreary as Düsseldorf or Munich, and Fassbinder was a bright spot.49

  The polemical élan of such broadsides was never just destructive. From the beginning, Bohrer had a normative ideal in mind. Germany was in need of a creative aesthetics of the state. It was the absence of one that produced the dismal landscape scanned in his first editorial, and its many sequels. To those who taxed him with that ‘aestheticization of politics’ which Benjamin had identified as peculiar to fascism, he replied that in fact every democratic state that respected itself had its own aesthetic, expressed in its capital city, public buildings, ceremonies, spaces, forms of rule and rhetoric—contemporary America, England, France or Italy supplied the evidence, to which a special issue of Merkur was devoted.50 It was in these that the identity of the nation acquired tangible legitimacy, and shape: a state without its own distinctive symbolic forms, in which politics was reduced to mere social assistance, was hardly worth the name. It was time for Germany to put the stunted half-life of the Bonn Republic behind it.

  When the Berlin Wall came down five years later, but reunification was still quite uncertain, and resisted by the liberal left in the West, Bohrer was thus well positioned to publish, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, perhaps the most powerful single essay of the time in favour of German unity, ‘Why We Are Not a Nation—and Why We Should Become One’.51 His leading adversary was Habermas, treated with the respect Bohrer had always shown him. The contribution to Merkur immediately following his famous ‘Aesthetics of the State’ had, indeed, been an article by Habermas on the peace demonstrations against the stationing of Pershing missiles, and when the Historikerstreit came two years later, Bohrer had not hesitated to side with him. But Habermas’s resistance to unification, worthy though his notion of a disembodied constitutional patriotism might be as an abstract ideal, was a delusion. Behind it lay a ‘negative chiliasm’, in which the Judeocide stood as the unconditional event of the German past, barring the country from any recovery of a traditional national identity, with its own psychic and cultural forms. ‘Did our specifically “irrational” tradition of Romanticism have to be so thoroughly destroyed by the bulldozers of a new sociology?’, he asked pointedly.

  With reunification and the transfer of the capital to Berlin came possibilities of another kind of Germany, for which Bohrer had polemicized. For with them faded the intellectual nimbus of the old order. But if the arrival of the Berlin Republic marked the passage to a new situation, it was not one which Bohrer viewed in any spirit of complacent vindication. When Merkur took stock of the country in late 2006 with a book-length special issue, ‘On the Physiognomy of the Berlin Republic’, under the rubric Ein neues Deutschland?—a virtuoso composition, containing essays on everything from ideology to politics, journalism to architecture, slums to managers, patriots to professors, legitimacy to diplomacy—Bohrer’s editorial, ‘The Aesthetics of the State Revisited’, made clear how little he had relented.52 Germany was now a sovereign nation once more; it had a proper capital; and globalization ruled out any retreat into the self-abasing niche of the past. These were welcome changes. But in many respects the lowering heritage of the Bonn era lived on. In Berlin itself, the new government quarter was for the most part a vacuous desolation, inviting mass tourism, redeemed only by the restoration of the Reichstag—even that banalized by fashionable bric-a-brac and political correctness, not to speak of the droning addresses delivered within it.53 Alone in its dignity was the ensemble of Prussian classicism, at length recovered, extending east from the Brandenburg Gate to the Gendarmenmarkt. Nor had Berlin’s return to the position of a national capital had any transformative effect on other German cities, or even aroused their interest: if anything, each had become more regional, the country more centrifugal, than ever. The feel-good patriotism of the World Cup of 2006, with its sea of fresh-faced flag-waving youth, as vapid as it was vulgar, was the obverse of the lack of any serious statecraft at the helm of the republic, of which Merkel was only the latest dispiriting, institutionally determined, incarnation. Missing in this order was any will to style. The expressive deficit of the Bonn Republic had not been overcome.

  True independence of mind, Bohrer would subsequently remark, was to be found in those thinkers—Montaigne, Schlegel, Nietzsche—who replaced Sinnfragen with Formfragen,54 a substitution that could be taken as the motto of his own work. But Sinn and Form are not so easily separated. Bohrer’s critique of the deficiencies of the German state, both before and after the move to Berlin, could by its own logic never remain a purely formal matter, of aesthetics alone. From the beginning, his editorial interventions in Merkur had a substantive edge. A state that respected itself enough to develop a symbolic form was one that knew how to assert itself, where required, in the field of relations between states. From his post in London, Bohrer had admired British resolve in the Falklands War, and he thereafter consistently backed Western military interventions, in
the Balkans and the Middle East. The deficit of the German state was thus not just a matter of buildings or speeches, it was also one of arms. Bohrer was a scathing critic of Kohl’s failure to join in Operation Desert Storm; advocated the dispatch of German ground troops to Yugoslavia; and handed Schröder a white feather over Iraq. With such belligerence has gone a shift of cultural reference. Paeschke subtitled Merkur ‘A German Journal of European Thought’, and kept his word—Gide, Eliot, Montale, Ortega, Russell appearing alongside his native eminences. Few German intellectuals of his generation were as well equipped to maintain this tradition as Bohrer, whose contempt for the provincialism of Bonn and all it stood for was rooted in personal experience. Steeped in Anglo-French culture, after working in London, he later lived much of the time in Paris.

  But by the turn of the century, a change had come over the journal under him. The presence of Europe faded. Contributors, topics and arguments were now more and more insistently American. Bohrer had never been an enthusiast for the EU, his view of it close to a British scepticism—he liked to invoke the Spectator—he had long admired. Intellectual sources in the United States, however, were something new. The combination of a hawkish Aussenpolitik and multiplying signatures from the Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute can give the impression that a German version of US-style neo-conservatism has of late taken shape in Merkur. Bohrer rejects any such classification. If he is to be labelled at all, it should be as a ‘neo-liberal’ in the spirit, not of the IMF, but of Richard Rorty, at once patriot and ironist. That he cannot, in fact, be aligned with either kind of transatlantic import is clear not only from his more accurate self-description elsewhere as an ‘anti-authoritarian, subjectivist liberal’, but from the occasion that produced it, an essay on the fortieth anniversary of the student revolt in Germany.