For Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
Slogans make themselves suspect not just because they serve to degrade thoughts into mere game-playing chips; they are also the index of their own untruth. What the public, and particularly the revivalist vogue, nowadays thinks belonged to the nineteen-twenties was in fact already fading at that time, by 1924 at the latest. The heroic age of the new art was actually around 1910: synthetic cubism, early German expressionism, the free atonalism of Schönberg and his school. Adolf Frisé has noted this fact in a recent radio interview with Lotte Lenya.1 I can clearly remember that after an IGNM festival in Frankfurt in 1927 I published an article entitled “The Stabilized Music.”2 It was not, as is usually assumed, the pressure exerted by the National Socialist terror that brought regression, neutralization, and a funereal silence to the arts, for these phenomena had already taken shape in the Weimar Republic, and in liberal continental European society generally. The dictatorships did not swoop down upon this society from outside in the way Cortez invaded Mexico; rather they were engendered by the social dynamic following the First World War, and they cast their shadows before them.
This is immediately evident in the products of mass culture manipulated by a highly centralized economic power. One has only to listen to the record albums that are now being revived as the hits, songs, and chansons from the twenties to be astonished at how little has changed in this whole sphere. As with fashion, the packaging changes; but the thing itself, a conventional language composed of signals to suit the conditioned reflexes of consumers, essentially remained the same, as jazz, for instance, was a perennial fashion.3 While it seems that such past fashions have a naive and awkward aspect in comparison with the current trend—that they are what the slang* of American light music calls corny*—this is due less to the substance of what is disseminated than to the time factor in abstracto, at most to the progressive perfecting of the machinery and of social-psychological control. The quality of being not yet quite so smart, which provokes smiles from the same type of people who in those days acclaimed Mistinguett and Marlene, is of the same nature as the idealizing nostalgia that clings to those same products today. The period’s comparative backwardness in the techniques of consumer culture is misinterpreted as though to mean it was closer to the origins, whereas in truth it was just as much organized to grab customers as it is in 1960. In fact, it is a paradox that anything at all changes within the sphere of a culture rationalized to suit industrial ideals; the principle of ratio itself, to the extent that it calculates cultural effects economically, remains the eternal invariant. That is why it is somewhat shocking whenever anything from the sector of the culture industry becomes old-fashioned. The shock value of this paradox was already exploited by the surrealists in the twenties when they confronted the world of 1880; in England at that time a book like Our Fathers by Allan Bott had caused a similar effect.4 Today the shock effect is produced by the twenties, similar to the effect the world of images of the 1880s produced around 1920. But the repetition deadens the shock effect. The defamiliarization5 of the twenties is the ghost of a ghost.
In the German-speaking world the imago of the twenties is probably not so strongly marked by the intellectual movements of the period. Expressionism and the new music at the time probably found far less resonance than do the radical aesthetic tendencies of today. It was rather an imagistic world of erotic fantasy, and was nourished by theatrical works that at the time stood for the spirit of the age and that today still easily pass for the same, even though their composition does not have anything especially avant-garde about it. The Songspiele that Brecht and Weill composed together, The Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny, and Ernst Krenek’s Jonny are representative of this sphere.6 The subsequent discontent with civilization’s progressive desexualizing of the world, which at the same time paradoxically keeps pace with the lifting of taboos, transfers onto the twenties romantic desires for sexual anarchy, the red light district* and the wide open city*. There is something immeasurably mendacious in all this. The enthusiasm for barroom Jennys goes together with the persecution of prostitutes, who catch it from society’s crystal-clear order when no more suitable targets are at hand. If life in the twenties had really been so nice, then it would be enough to leave the floozies in peace and stop trying to clean up the streets. Instead, antiseptically erotic films are made about the naughty twenties*, or better still, about the Toulouse-Lautrec of our grandparents’ time. And yet even back then those girls weren’t doing it for free. The wretched commercialized sex industry of the Kurfürstendamm, as portrayed by George Grosz and transfixed by the words of Karl Kraus, was no closer to utopia than is the sterilized atmosphere of today.
Nevertheless, the idea that the twenties were a world where, as Brecht puts it in Mahagonny, “everything may be permitted,”7 that is, a utopia, also has its truth. At that time, as again shortly after 1945, there seemed to be a real possibility of a politically liberated society. But it only seemed so: already in the twenties, as a consequence of the events of 1919, the decision had fallen against that political potential that, had things gone otherwise, with great probability would have influenced developments in Russia and prevented Stalinism. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this twofold aspect—on the one hand, a world that could have taken a turn for the better and, on the other, the extinguishing of that hope by the establishment of powers that later revealed themselves fully in fascism—also expressed itself in an ambivalence in art, which in fact is quite specific to the twenties and has nothing to do with the vague and self-contradictory idea of the modern classics. Precisely those operatic works that earned fame and scandal then seem now, in their ambiguous stance toward anarchy, as though their main function was to furnish National Socialism with the slogans it later used to justify its cultural terrorism, as though that assiduously exaggerated disorder was already lusting for the order Hitler subsequently imposed across Europe. This is not something for the twenties to boast of. The catastrophe that followed the period was engendered by its own societal conflicts, even in what is customarily called the cultural sphere.
The extent to which the nostalgia for the twenties in fact clings to something intellectual, and not merely to a fata morgana of a period supposed to be at once both avant-garde and not yet enwrapped in the cellophane of modernity, is decided less by the level and quality of what was produced at the time than by the true or putative intellectual posture itself. Preconsciously one senses how much the revived culture is being absorbed by the ideology it had never ceased to be. Since one does not dare to acknowledge this, one projects an ideal image8 of a past condition in which spirit supposedly had not yet been forced to admit its incongruity with the forces of reality. In comparison to what has happened since then, spirit altogether takes on an aspect of triviality. It feels culpable because it could not prevent the horror; but its own tenderness and fragility in turn presuppose a reality that could have escaped barbarism. The imago of the time immediately preceding the catastrophe is invested with everything spirit nowadays is felt to be denied. The absence of intellectual movements that can intervene today—even the existentialism of the first years after the war was nothing more than a resuscitative renaissance—awakens even in the most naive people the sentiment of sterility. It contributes to the legend of the twenties as the time when the very domain of spirit tottered, while still maintaining its earlier relevance to people’s lives. The fact that after 1918 cubism lost its appeal is certainly a symptom that can be diagnosed only postmortem. Kahnweiler reports: “Picasso me dit encore bien souvent à l’heure actuelle que toute ce qui a été fait dans les années de 1907 à 1914 n’a pu être fait que par un travail d’équipe. D’être isolé, seul, cela a dû l’inquiéter énormément et c’est alors qu’il y a eu ce changement.”a The isolation that destroyed the continuity of the painter’s work and brought him, and not only him, to start revising, was hardly the fate of a contingent biography. That isolation reflects the loss of the collective energies that had produced the great innovations in European art. The shift in the relationship between the individual spirit and society extended even into the secret-most impulses of those for whom any adaptation to the demands of society was anathema. There was no lack here of what the naive faith in culture calls creative gifts. The very idea of intellectual production had been poisoned. Its self-confidence, the certainty that it is making history, is undermined. This accords with the fact that, precisely to the extent that it is assimilated, intellectual production no longer has any actual effect. Even its most extravagant expressions are no longer safe from being integrated into industrialized culture. Because the world spirit no longer coincides with spirit, the latter’s last days shine resplendently as though they had been the golden age that in fact they never were. What remains is more an echo of fascist authority than anything itself living: the cultural respect for received values, even if they are merely touted as being important. Better would be a consciousness that realized its own diminished potential: Beckett has it. It would no longer be a culture of renewed deception, but instead one that would express in its structure what denigrates spirit to the level of such deception. The only means by which culture can cure its curse of futility is by submitting that curse to interrogation.
The uncertain relationship between the present day and the twenties is conditioned by a historical discontinuity. Whereas the fascist decade in all its essential aspects was established in the epoch immediately preceding it, with roots deep within expressionism—one of whose spokesmen, Hanns Johst, rose to become a Nazi celebrity, and incidentally was already being parodied in the twenties by Brecht, who had good instincts9—the popular Nazi phrase “clean break”10 sadly turned out to be right. The tradition, including the tradition of anti-traditionalism, was broken off, and half-forgotten tasks remain. And whatever now is artistically engaged with that epoch not only eclectically reaches back to a creative productivity that has died in the meantime, but at the same time also obeys an obligation not to forget those things that remain unfinished. It is necessary to pursue to its own logical consequences what was buried in the explosion of 1933, which itself in an entirely different sense was a consequence of that epoch.
It is quite clear how contemporary art, in view of its own problematic, should behave in regard to the avant-gardism of the past, and the artists of importance know this well. Anti-conventionalism remains indispensable; forms return only within the interior of works, not as something imposed upon them heteronomously. Such works must consciously measure themselves against the historical situation of their material: they must neither abandon themselves blindly and fetishistically to the material nor mold it from outside with subjective intentions. Only what is free from cowardice and ego-weakness and advances without protection, refusing everything indicated in the German language of the post-Hitler epoch by that loathsome expression “guiding image,”11 has a chance of creating something that is not superfluous. Every consideration of possible effects, even under the pretext of social function or regard for the so-called human being, is untenable, but then so is the highhanded imperiousness of both the subject and its expression from the heroic days of modern art. It is no longer possible to evade the aspect of paradox in all art itself: this paradox, and not any existential philosopheme, is what the label “absurd” means. In every one of its elements contemporary artistic production must bear in mind the crisis of meaning: the meaning subjectively given a work of art as well as the meaningful conception of the world. Otherwise artistic creativity sells its services to legitimation. The only legitimately meaningful artworks today are those opposing the concept of meaning with the utmost recalcitrance.
The impulses must be recovered that in the vaunted twenties were already threatening to petrify or dissipate. From the distance of the present one may observe how many artists whose aura is identified with that of the twenties had in fact already passed their peak in that decade, in any case toward the end of it; Kandinsky, surely Picasso, Schönberg, even Klee. Just as it is beyond question that Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique developed completely logically from his own earlier achievement, from the emancipation from tonal language as well as the radicalization of motive-thematic work, so it is equally certain that some of the best was lost in the transition to systematic principles. Despite the material having been revolutionized, the musical language aligned itself with that of the tradition more than in Schönberg’s best works before the First World War; the unfettered spontaneity and independence of the compositional subject was restrained by a need for order that revealed itself to be problematical, because the order it produced was born of that need, not of the matter itself. The appearance of stagnation in the music of the last decades, the often and somewhat maliciously observed risk of the avantgarde’s becoming a second orthodoxy, is largely the legacy of this need for order. The musical task bequeathed to us from the twenties seems to be precisely the revision of that need for order: the pursuit of a musique informelle.12 This idea of order passed down from the twenties can only be warmed over, not taken up productively. It was nothing other than the abstract negation of the supposed state of chaos that was feared far too much for it to have actually existed.
What requires reflection is both the necessity of pursuing without compromise the process that was suspended internally and externally and the limits of a possible resumption. It is perfectly self-evident that after thirty or forty years, after the absolute break, one cannot simply pick up where things were left off. The significant works of that epoch owed much of their power to the productive tension with a heterogeneous element: the tradition against which they rebelled. This was still a force confronting them, and it was precisely the most productive artists who had a great deal of that tradition within them. Much of the constraint that inspired those works was lost when the friction with this tradition disappeared. Freedom is complete, but threatens to become freewheeling without its dialectical counterpart, whereas that counterpart cannot be maintained simply by an act of the will. Contemporary art must become conscious not only of its technical problems, but also of the conditions of its own existence, so that it does not become a mere rehash of the twenties, does not degrade into precisely what it refused to be: cultural property. Art’s social arena is no longer an advanced or perhaps even decayed liberalism, but rather a fully manipulated, calculated, and integrated society, the “administered world.” Whatever protest is made against this in terms of artistic form—and it is no longer possible to conceive of an artistic form that is not a protest—itself becomes integrated into the universal planning it is attacking and bears the marks of this contradiction. Since their material has been emancipated and processed in every dimension nowadays, artworks evolve purely from their own formal laws, without any heterogeneous element, and so they tend to become all too shiny, tidy, and innocuous. In this sense, wallpaper swatches are the writing on the wall. It is precisely the discomfort caused by this that draws attention back to the twenties but without this nostalgic yearning being satisfied. Anybody who is sensitive to such things need only examine the titles of the innumerable books, paintings, and compositions of the past few years to have the sobering feeling of the secondhand. It is so unbearable because every work created nowadays makes its entrance—whether intentionally or not—as though it owed its existence to itself alone. The desire that proved fatal, namely, the absence of a work’s necessity to exist, gives way to the abstract consciousness of up-to-dateness. This ultimately reflects the absence of any political relevance. When it is completely transposed into the aesthetic domain, the concept of radicalness becomes an ideological distraction, a consolation for the real powerlessness of political subjects.
However, there is no more compelling evidence of the contemporary cultural aporia than the fact that the critique of this ideological aspect of a sanitized, pure aesthetic progress itself immediately becomes ideology again. In the entire Eastern bloc such a critique serves simply to make the conformity total by stifling the last unruly stirrings that have taken refuge in art. This surely means nothing less than that the foundation of art itself has been shaken, that an unrefracted relation to the aesthetic realm is no longer possible. The concept of a cultural resurrection after Auschwitz is illusory and absurd, and every work created since then has to pay the bitter price for this. However, because the world has survived its own downfall, it nonetheless needs art to write its unconscious history. The authentic artists of the present are those in whose works the uttermost horror still quivers.
