The Summer of Theory. Philipp Felsch

by their mother organization, the students turned their backs on the dogmas of Social Democratic folklore, sized up the conformism of the West German proletariat and, making a virtue out of necessity, rolled up their sleeves as revolutionary subjects. Thus, the early sixties saw the formation of the ‘student movement’, so named in analogy to the ‘labour movement’. The distinguishing characteristic that set it apart from the classical left – especially in West Germany – was theory.⁴

      ‘What is to be done?’ cried the literature student Elisabeth Lenk at the 17th regular delegates’ conference of the SDS in October 1962. Her answer to Lenin’s famous question: work on theory. In the face of union officials who proudly claimed not to read books, in the face of a Social Democratic Party that was throwing itself at the petite bourgeoisie, the path of the New Left must lead into the vineyard of texts. Lenk urgently warned her comrades against the casual cultural critique of the nonconformists, who ‘think they are performing a revolutionary act by sitting in a basement jazz bar with their Enzensberger haircuts’. The SDS needed hard, ‘socialist theory’. Lenk’s speech gives voice to the need for fundamental research of a kind that the Left had last undertaken in the 1920s. ‘But what is socialist theory?’ she asked her comrades. ‘Is it the same as unadulterated Marxism? Or is it a revised Marxism, and if so, which one? Bernstein’s, Kautsky’s, Lenin’s, or that of some Marxist-Existentialist? Or is it just the eclectic interconnection of handy bits of theory?’⁵

From this vantage, we can already see looming on the horizon the craggy ridge of text that the students of the coming years would have to climb. Under the eyes of these readers, the revolution metamorphosed into textual analysis.⁶ Until its creeping exhaustion, the Left’s theoretical discourse was dominated by a powerful fantasy of reprieve which looks startlingly similar to Adorno’s ‘breathing space’: there could be no revolution, according to the credo of these years, without a theory of revolution, which neither Marx nor his successors had supplied. And building such a theory would take longer than a five-year plan. The SDS ‘study groups’ proposed by Elisabeth Lenk were given relatively short deadlines. Hans-Jürgen Krahl, on the other hand, the intellectual head of Frankfurt’s anti-authoritarians, estimated in 1969 that it would take several decades to develop a theory of revolution.⁷ That was the same year, by the way, in which Niklas Luhmann at the University of Bielefeld estimated a development time of thirty years for his ‘theory of society’. After ’68, once the messianic expectations had been dispelled, theory developed staying power – and not just on the left. As the catalogue of available classics grew longer, the network of references denser and the political hopes more cloudy, the practice of difficult thinking transformed into a process whose end was hardly foreseeable.

He Didn’t Write

Peter Gente’s path through the Red decade opens the Bildungsroman of the ’68 generation. At Freie Universität, he came into contact with the West Berlin wing of the SDS; joined the cleverest leftists at Argument Club, led by the editors of Das Argument, Margherita von Brentano and Wolfgang Fritz Haug; read every line of Adorno ever printed; and then began a critique of the ‘superstructure catechists’.⁸ Back issues of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung turned up which showed that Critical Theory had been outspokenly Marxist before the war. In the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Horkheimer had put these issues under lock and key, but a connoisseur in West Berlin could find them in the estate of the German Jewish political scientist Franz Neumann, the author of Behemoth, one of the first structural analyses of the Third Reich, published in 1942.⁹ The Left’s slow separation from Critical Theory in the second half of the sixties took place in the form of such archaeological digs, as students eagerly sifted the contents of the libraries and second-hand bookshops to unearth the buried truth of the labour movement.¹⁰ Such a tranquil, studious radicalization must have suited Gente’s disposition. His investigative reconstruction of Adorno’s œuvre had long since made him an eminent authority in the parallel universe of obscure sources. He would later refer to himself, in a letter to his author Pierre Klossowski, as a ‘monomaniacal collector’.¹¹ His fanatical collecting is somewhat reminiscent of the Milanese publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who drove his Citroën DS all over Europe in the 1950s to accumulate a library of the labour movement – from a first edition of More’s Utopia to the correspondence of Palmiro Togliatti. (Later, Feltrinelli went underground, and he blew himself up under mysterious circumstances at the foot of a high-voltage pylon near Milan.)¹² In contrast to Feltrinelli, however, Gente had no penchant for luxurious or antique editions. Nor did he ever take the leap into activism. Rather, he supplied Berlin’s leftist students with dangerous reading material as an ‘encyclopaedist of rebellion’.¹³

In 1960, Peter Gente married the pedicurist Merve Lowien. The intellectual and the proletarian: to his comrades in the SDS, the alliance amounted to a political statement.¹⁴ Gente’s commitment went so far as to include starting a family. While others of his generation, taking advantage of the Pill, plunged into serial one-night stands, Gente became a father in 1962. In any case, his intellectual development during these years did not permit a hedonistic lifestyle. Acquiring a moustache and metal-rimmed glasses, he was gradually morphing into Walter Benjamin.¹⁵ Such mimicry was a common phenomenon among Berlin students in those days – not only because Benjamin, a Berlin native, was a suitable candidate for the role of the local hero,¹⁶ but because, in his later, materialist writings, Benjamin had created a revolutionary type of author, a language engineer who placed his typewriter at the service of the struggling working class: ‘Does he succeed in promoting the socialization of the intellectual means of production? Does he see how he himself can organize the intellectual workers in the production process? Does he have proposals for transforming the function of the novel, the drama, the poem?’¹⁷ Compared with the radicalism which such questions expressed, Adorno, with his penchant for Stifter and Beethoven, suddenly looked like one of the reactionary bourgeoisie.¹⁸ Didn’t the ‘meditation of powerlessness’ that his texts demonstrated stifle every impulse to act?¹⁹ Wasn’t the revolutionary Brecht better than Adorno’s preference, Beckett? The letter that Gente wrote to Adorno in 1965 already betrays the politicization of his aesthetic repertoire. Shortly thereafter, Gente worked openly against his former favourite author in supplying the editors of the literary journal Alternative with original publications by Benjamin from the 1930s to demonstrate that the Frankfurt editors of Benjamin’s collected works – Adorno and his student Rolf Tiedemann – were carrying out a questionable policy. The allegation that the Suhrkamp edition, principally edited by Adorno, downplayed Benjamin’s conversion to Marxism by retouching key sentences caused a stir in philological politics. To his growing numbers of followers in the student movement, Benjamin was being martyred once more by the injustice of his executors.²⁰

      While the leftist press drew on his expertise, Gente’s studies made only modest progress. The seminar papers he wrote on materialist aesthetics did not arouse his professors’ enthusiasm. Peter Szondi found a 1965 paper on Lukács to contain ‘approaches and suggestions that sometimes overstep the boundary between research and journalism’, and marked it ‘satisfactory’.²¹ In spite of modest marks, Gente thought about going on to do a doctorate. The dissertation he had in mind, inspired by his reading of Benjamin, would be devoted to the failure of the bourgeois arts. But Szondi was not receptive to the topic. ‘He didn’t really understand what I actually wanted, and I couldn’t really explain it to him, you see’, Gente recalled. The idea of the end of art must have sounded as strange to Szondi as it did to Adorno.²² Yet it was what everyone had been talking about since May ’68, under the label of ‘cultural revolution’. ‘L’art est mort’, the Parisian students had written on the walls of the Sorbonne, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger had continued their eulogy in his monthly cultural journal Kursbuch: ‘In our day, it is not possible to identify a significant social function of literary works of art’, he pronounced, causing an uproar among publishers and authors. As examples for a revolutionary literature to come, Enzensberger named the politically engaged writers Günter Wallraff and Ulrike Meinhof.²³ In view of their public reception, however, his theses were no longer suitable