CHAPTER 2: “All Power to the Imagination!” The Student Movement of the 1960s

In the 1960s West Germany, like many other industrialized countries, experienced a wave of protest, carried mainly by its youth, that came to be known under a variety of names: “the 68 revolt” (referring to its high point of mobilization), “the student novement” or “rebellion” because the universities were at its center, or “the New Left” in order to highlight its political agenda and at the same time distinguish it from the old, working-class left. Similar to the 1950s Halbstarken phenomenon, the dominant parent culture responded with panic to this “cultural disaffiliation” of the younger generation,1 since it sensed that this protest movement emerging rom its own center —the middle class —was more dangerous to its cultural hegemony than previous youth dissent.

In comparison to the 1950s, the 1960s social and cultural upheavals went beyond subcultural confines. It combined a revolution of lifestyles with new cultural and aesthetic paradigms as well as with political demands. The 1960s protesters refused to accept the political marginalization of the youth. Instead, they demanded a political mandate for themselves and challenged mainstream society on all grounds in the most radical manner. In other words, this generation did not just want to “drop out of circulation”2 temporarily like the existentialist youth or the Halbstarken did, but demanded change, which it tried to implement by developing its own counterculture. As a result, mainstream culture viewed even explicitly nonpolitical aspects of this middle-class counterculture—for example, a hippie lifestyle—as political and potentially dangerous for its hegemony.

The hegemonic culture had reason to be concerned because of the strategic location of middle-class youth as the future economic, political, and intellectual elites. In the case of the existentialist youth the self-recruitment process of middle-class elites had still functioned. They were granted space and time for dissent, but were reirtegrated into mainstream society as soon as they entered into the professional careers and accepted the elite status they were offered by the hegemonic culture. In the case of the 1960s counterculture this self-recruitment process was disrupted, and the equilibrium of coercion and consent necessary for hegemony was tipped off balance without immediate prospect for adjustment.

In addition, the 1960s upheavals took place precisely at the point in time when West Germany suffered its own “Sputnik crisis” an started to evaluate critically the merits and success of its educations system. Georg Picht’s assessment of the postwar school system as a educational catastrophe had triggered this scrutiny and subsequer reforms of the school system. Picht argued from the perspective of the economy’s demand for a highly qualified labor force, which the current educational system did not produce. For one, Picht attracte attention to the insufficient funding for all levels of schooling an the devastating effects it would soon have on the general educations level of the work force. Secondly, he pointed out that many your scientists left West Germany to go abroad, where they found better employment and research opportunities. Both problems of the educational sector would rather sooner than later lead to a major setback in technological development and the Federal Republic competitiveness in the world market.

The expansion of educational opportunities were initially no driven by the idea of equal opportunity (Chancengleichheit), but be mere economic interests.3 At a time when economic necessity force the ruling elites to expand higher education, that is, to allow more children from nonacademic families to go on to the university, the hitherto valid equation of upward mobility with a high degree of conformity and loyalty to the hegemonic culture broke down. It stead, critical thinking had penetrated the universities, where Martoism experienced a renaissance and called the entire value system of the hegemonic parent culture into question. A highly sophisticated theoretical discourse on all issues characterized the student movement and differentiated it from previous subcultural movement.

The student movement’s elaborate analysis of contemporary society and politics also contributed to the hegemonic culture’s taking this protest much more seriously than its youthful predecessors. Furthermore, unlike many other European countries that experienced similar upheavals during this time period, the generation gap was much more pronounced in West Germany due to the legacy of the Nazi past.4 The parents’ silence about their past had eroded trust among their children, and the images of the Holocaust overshadowed the democratic-humanitarian rhetoric of mainstream West Germany with which the youth had grown up.

Whether it is nostalgically hailed or angrily denounced, nobody can dispute the strong and enduring impact of the student movement on politics and culture in postwar West Germany. It broke with the Adenauer era’s culture of conformity and instead developed a culture appreciative of criticism and protest from which the first citizens’ initiatives could rise in the 1970s and grow into strong new social movements. In short, the student movement represented a politics of fundamental opposition interested, not in the redistribution of political power within the parameters of the established system, but in reshaping social consciousness for a lasting political and cultural revolution. It is therefore not surprising that the student movement has gained commemorative status in the Federal Republic. Taking the years 1967-68 as their cue, newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses regularly generate many pages on the anniversary of the student movement.5

Because of its lasting impact, the 1960s counterculture has already been studied, and we can keep general remarks about its focal points of criticism and it subcultural components brief. Although an alternative aesthetic articulated itself in the very lifestyle of this protest movement, the present study does not examine the subcultural elements such as the hippies and Gammler — the two main groups of dropouts during the 1960s. Instead, it focuses on the correlation between the political and cultural concepts that the student movement developed, since it is elaborate theoretical discourse that distinguishes the student movement from other subcultural youth protest and accounts for its lasting influence. As Richard McCormick points out, “aesthetic theory had a very great influence, especially as formulated by Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Benjamin, who infused art with political, indeed utopian, significance” and viewed it as a “nonalienated praxis in the midst of, and in resistance to, reified industrial society.”6

The 1960s protest rediscovered a theoretical tradition —psychoanalysis and Marxism—partially lost due to Nazism and partially repressed by the sociopolitical restoration and anticommunism of the 1950s. At first, the students’ reception of Marxism took place through the theories of the Frankfurt school, particularly through the abovementioned theorists. We therefore need to trace, on the one hand, the student movement’s adaptation and criticism of the Frankfurt school, and concentrate, on the other hand, on the specific function the students ascribed to art and culture for their revolutionary project. To put it in a nutshell: What is the correlation between the students’ political and cultural-critical claims?

Since the student movement understood itself as a counterculture, it deliberately positioned itself against the hegemonic culture, which it referred to as the “Establishment” or, with respect to aesthetic issues, as “bourgeois” culture. Though the latter is by no means a new term, the student movement pushed the notion of bourgeois culture into the limelight of contemporary debate and gave it a negative connotation. Furthermore, it challenged the Establishment’s—that is, in our terminology, the hegemonic culture’s—theory of the autonomy of art and culture by pointing to culture’s foundation in social class. The students argued for a politically committed art, and they promoted new genres that used an operative aesthetic. In the case of literature, for instance, this transformation of the aesthetic paradigm resulted in the famous debate about the “Death of Literature,” which had larger repercussions throughout the 1970s, although literature did not expire as announced.

This description of the 1960s counterculture suffers so far from the inevitable flaw of generalization, presenting it as the homogenous movement it never was. Though the protest crystallized around a common sentiment of opposition to the hegemonic parent culture and a set of focal issues and canonic texts, it exhibited at the same time a polyphony of theoretical approaches and ideological camps. Within this polyphony we can distinguish two major tendencies: a traditionalist socialist one, which competed with an antiauthoritarian one.7 As the term traditionalist implies, these student groups exhibited a stronger orientation toward the political and theoretical paradigms of the Old Left, embodied in the traditional socialism of the worker’s movement. The antiauthoritarian wing was critical of these traditions and embraced instead the critical theory of the Frankfurt school, since it was interested in both material and psychological repression in contemporary society.

As with all social movements, the student protest followed a trajectory that started long before it gained public attention. Determining the exact beginning and end of a social movement represents, therefore, a challenge because of its dynamic nature. Still, we can distinguish several phases of the student movement, which will help to structure our approach to it. The reconstruction of the repressed traditions of Marxism and psychoanalysis through the theoreticians of the Frankfurt school was at its beginnings, and the movement was most true to the epithet “antiauthoritarian” at this early point in time, when Herbert Marcuse’s work enjoyed wide popularity among the students. His theories never eliminated the individual subject but tried to locate space within the reified society, which the individual could use to overcome its alienation. He defined this strategy as the “Great Refusal,” to which we shall return later. Antiauthoritarianism, then, meant both the questioning of authority, particularly the established authorities of the Adenauer era, and the emancipation of the repressed individual in order to realize its genuine subjectivity. “Personal emancipation,” as McCormick characterizes this initial phase —included “sexual liberation, and the enjoyment of pop culture, from rock music to Louis Malle’s film Viva Maria” and “was not considered separate from political struggle. The personal and the subjective were an integral part of the movement” at this point in time.8

As the student movement ran its course, the focus shifted away from the category of individual subjectivity to that of social class and collective agency. By 1968-69 a rigid materialist approach started to win over the antiauthoritarian tendencies, conceptualizing everything only in terms of class and objectivity. Personal problems and questions of the individual constitution of subjectivity were tossed out the window as irrelevant to the international class struggle. By the early 1970s the student movement reached its final stage, dissolving into numerous orthodox political groups of a Marxist, Marxist - Leninist, or Maoist derivation. Since they had been trained in an elaborate theoretical discourse and in political activism, they appear to have dominated the university landscape into the mid-1970s. They were, however, quickly challenged by the so-called Spontis, one of the first articulations of a new era of countercultural criticism and practice, which referred back to the antiauthoritarian beginnings of the student protest. Before jumping to the end of the story, let us first take a brief look at the student movement’s focal points of criticism, which will also help to delineate the similarities and differences between it and its followers in protest—the new social movements.

Domestic and International Issues of Critique and Opposition

There is no doubt that the new social movements (i.e., the countercultural activities thriving since the mid-1970s) are as unthinkable without the 1960s as the student movement itself would be without the broader context of the extraparliamentary opposition (auβerparlamentarische Opposition or APO). Andrei Markovits and Philip Gorski note that “the term APO never designated a single organization or tendency. Rather, APO was a loosely constituted negative alliance between a diffuse array of groups united against a shared opponent.”9 This opponent was the Establishment, that is the traditional party system and the parents’ hegemonic culture. The SPD’s ambiguous position on rearmament, and especially the nuclear armament, of West Germany during the 1950s and early 1960s, had alienated many of its younger supporters. The Grand Coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD, formed in 1966, epitomized for many citizens, including the students, the dysfunctionality of representative democracy in the Federal Republic. The Grand Coalition had finalized a disenchantment with the SPD as a genuine alternative within the parliamentary system.

The reason was that the Grand Coalition allowed for passing of the Emergency Laws, for which a two-thirds majority in the federa egislature was necessary. These constitutional amendments enabled the government to suspend most civil rights, such as the right of free issembly, freedom of speech (including the press), and the right to go on strike in the case of a national emergency. The government’s bill did not specify what constituted a national emergency and also called for legislation simplifying the recruitment of citizens or national service in such a situation.10 The Emergency Laws genrated a public outcry because of their similarity to the Emergency laws of the Weimar Republic, which had been the legal avenue for litler’s smooth alignment (Gleichschnltung) of all spheres of social and political life and the elimination of his opponents. Raised if not on the spirit but at least with the rhetoric of democratic rule, the students resented the Grand Coalition and the Emergency Laws as untidemocratic and viewed an extraparliamentary opposition as the call of the day, not least because of their country’s Nazi past.

Aside from the Emergency Laws, two other events of the 1960s leightened the students’ sensitivity to the double standards of the democracy they inherited and became controversial issues between them and the parent culture. Internationally, the Vietnam War became the focal point for the 1960s youth-based protest. Even before the heyday of the student movement, student associations had supported the antiarmament protests of the Easter Marchers and other disarmament advocates. The brutal warfare against the Vietnamese people, however, defied the humanitarian rhetoric of the United States —the model democracy for West Germany in the postwar period. Initially, the students hoped to generate opposition to the war by simply informing the public about its nature and the true notives behind it. In other words, they believed that the general public would join the protest against the war as soon as the curtain of deception was torn from their eyes. Yet the students’ emphatic call for an end to the Vietnam War fell on deaf ears. The majority of the West German population remained indifferent to the plight of the Vietnamese people, and the coalition government of CDU/CSU and SPD continued its support for the U.S. government. This only heightened the students’ distrust of representative democracy because “in the case of Vietnam, the social and political representatives again proved themselves not to be the honest democrats whose authority would have sufficed to soothe the emerging distrust of the official version of democracy in the FRG.”11

Distrust is indeed the key word describing the younger generation’s relationship to their elders who ran the Federal Republic. How could they believe those who had withheld from them the horrifying truth of the Holocaust? The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in 1965 against former guards of death camps introduced the majority of the German youth for the first time to the horrors of the Holocaust and heightened their sensibility for the question of historical failure and guilt, which was carried back into the families. The studies of the Frankfurt school on fascism, particularly the concept of the authoritarian personality, left a strong impression on this generation of young West Germans. Inquiry into the Holocaust and its historical and sociopsychological origins became a preoccupation for the student movement, and the students rigorously challenged their grandparents’ and parents’ amnesia about this part of German history. That a successor to Hitler’s NSDAP, the NPD, emerged again in the 1960s, was not declared unconstitutional, and was voted into several state legislatures—most notably so in Baden-Württemberg in 1968 with 10 percent of the popular vote—added to the younger generation’s anxieties that fascist mentalities had survived beyond 1945. It is therefore no surprise that students began to challenge the authoritarian structures with their probing social analysis and sweeping demands for democratization.

The university system was one of the prime targets of the students’ agitation. The analysis and criticism of the status and function of the university as an educational and social institution was central to the students’ discussion of the reorganization of social structures and values. The Frankfurt school’s critical understanding of technology, with its analysis of the dialectics of technology and domination, shaped the students’ thinking on these matters.12 With respect to the university system, the students fought on two fronts. They demanded the democratization of the old, hierarchically structured university (Ordinarienuniversitat), which did not allow for any student participation in defining the academic curriculum and gave the individual professor almost absolute power over his subordinates. At the same time they fought the growing subjugation of the university to the needs of business and industry. Although the students attacked technological rationality as supporting structures of domination, they did not denounce technology in itself, as a statement by Bernd Rabehl, one of the leading theorists among the students, shows: “Technology is essential to the bourgeois vision of the future; it means everything. Technology is part of the bureaucracy and a wasteful expense; it permanently reproduces power. It aims at the perpetuation of capitalist domination. Therefore this technology as it now exists must be destroyed, eliminated… . Not the knowledge that it contains, not its domination of nature, but its current structure and goals must be eliminated.”13

The 1960s had not yet developed an awareness for the destructive potential of technology, but followed Marcuse’s lead, who viewed technology favorably as a potential means of liberation.14 In contrast to one of the main concerns of the new social movements — preservation of nature in the face of a pending ecological disaster—the students of the late 1960s believed in the Western paradigm of progress and “that technology, under truly democratic control, … could be liberating.”15 The 1968 revolt was the last revolution that did not yet know about the depletion of the ozone layer, as Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Reinhard Mohr, both former student activists, subtitled their historical account of the student movement twenty years later. As they point out in their introduction, contrary to their successors, the generation of 1968 exhibited no traces of an APOcalyptic mood, but still believed that they could shape a brighter future.16 All it took was a little imagination. Consequently, “All Power to the Imagination!” (Phantasie an die Macht!) became their battle cry.

Imagination As a Productive Force

Behind this popular slogan lurked a much more complex and, from the perspective of the parent culture, threatening concept. “All Power to the Imagination!” was not solely an insult implicitly referring to the older generation of Germans as boring, but it did signal the student movement’s attack on the stifling authoritarian structures of the Adenauer era. The initial antiauthoritarian impetus of the student movement was strongly influenced by the discovery of Freudian psychoanalysis, which analyzes the complex structure of the individual in terms of consciousness and subconsciousness, dream and pleasure, and imagination and reality. The reconstruction of a genuine subjectivity leading to human solidarity and the unity of personal and political commitment was the big antiauthoritarian dream, which in the end lost out against Marxian concepts of class and the class struggle.

While reading Marx himself soon became a must for every politically engaged student, the reception of Freud took place almost entirely through the work of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse and not by reading the original,17 since Freud’s oeuvre did not offer itself easily to the analysis of social class. The students used Freud’s model of the Oedipus complex, but his cultural theory that all of civilization was founded on repression, or, to be more precise, on the postponement of immediate gratification of instinctual needs and desires, remained suspect.18 For the antiauthoritarian students, shaking off the shackles of internal repression and external oppression in all its contemporary forms was the preeminent goal. From their perspective, Freud’s cultural theory simply justified the repressive character of contemporary society. They were no longer willing, however, to accept renunciation as an anthropological given but insisted on the realization of their dreams, and thus, in Freudian terms, on the pleasure principle.

The openly propagated sexual revolution was only one aspect of the actualization of the pleasure principle. Thanks to the now readily available oral contraceptives and Reichian sexual theories, the generation of 1968 was the first in postwar West Germany to freely practice what their predecessors—the existentialist youth—only theoretically discussed, namely, sex. Up to this point in time, control over its progeny’s sexuality represented an expression of parental authority. Now a significant element of social control had slipped out of the parents’ hands and raised worries that the youth’s predilection for the pleasure principle would lead to an unabashed hedonism threatening the Protestant work ethic on which not only the “economic miracle” but all of the parent culture’s hegemony rested.

For our focus on cultural politics and aesthetic concepts, not Reich but Marcuse’s adaptation of Freud is more significant. In his study Eros and Civilization,19 Marcuse attempted to reverse the Freudian theorem of “an irreversible and unavoidable interdependency between progress in the evolution of society and unhappiness in the repressed psyche of individual man, between individual self- denial and the diversion of psychic energy for collective purposes.”20 Marcuse inquired into the psychological foundations of a nonrepressive culture that at the same time does not fall prey to repressive desublimation. Picking up on Freud’s metapsychology, which constructed imagination as a mental process not totally subjected to the reality principle, Marcuse describes the fate of the psychic economy in late capitalism as one in which “reason prevails: it becomes unpleasant but useful and correct; phantasy remains pleasant but becomes useless, untrue—a mere play, daydreaming. As such, it continues to speak the language of the pleasure principle, of freedom from repression, of uninhibited desire and gratification, but reality proceeds according to the laws of reason, no longer committed to the dream language.”21 In other words, imagination had not totally vanished from late capitalism, but had lost its power to the reality principle.

According to Freud, the gratification that is necessary for the functioning of the psychic economy can take three different forms: dream, fantasy or imagination, and neurosis. Whereas Freud claimed that all three modes of gratification are regressive, Marcuse defined imagination as the only one of these three that has a progressive and therefore liberating potential. He derives from Freud, and at the same time places in opposition to Freud, the statement that fantasy “has a truth value of its own, which corresponds to an experience of its own —namely, the surmounting of the antagonistic human reality.”22 Fantasy or imagination articulates itself beyond the individual’s dreams collectively in art. Art does not succumb to the contemporary reality principle —instrumental rationality—because it follows a different logic, namely, that of the pleasure principle.

Marcuse therefore criticized the bourgeois approach to aesthetic culture, which led to the loss of the unity of cognitive processes and aesthetic-sensuous experience. Using the transformation of the notion of aesthetic in the history of philosophy to demonstrate “the repressive treatment of the sensuous (and thereby corporeal) cognitive processes,”23 he sharply criticized bourgeois ideology, which has transformed the original concept of art as a philosophical discipline of sensuous cognition into a separate science of art. He viewed Kant’s aesthetic theory as an attempt to save the genuine content of the notion of aesthetic as pertaining to the senses exactly at that point in time when the reductive bourgeois understanding of aesthetic as pertaining to beauty and art became dominant. Marcuse claimed that aesthetic experience represents for Kant the mediator between the intellect and the senses, thereby reinstituting human sensuousness in its cognitive function. He picks up on the Kantian theorem and deduces an emancipatory claim from it: “The philosophical effort to mediate, in the aesthetic dimension, between sensuousness and reason thus appears as an attempt to reconcile the two spheres of the human existence which were torn asunder by a repressive reality principle. The mediating function is performed by the aesthetic faculty, which is akin to sensuousness, pertaining to the senses. Consequently, the aesthetic reconciliation implies strengthening sensuousness as against the tyranny of reason, and, ultimately, even calls for the liberation of sensuousness from the repressive domination of reason.”24

It was precisely this aspect of Marcuse’s redefinition of Freud that made him attractive for the student movement’s own conceptualizations. Marcuse’s theory held the promise to overcome alienation and create a human society through the integration of sensuous experience, imagination, and abstract thought. While Marcuse’s emphasis on the cognitive function of sensuousness found practical expression in the hippie subculture, it did not enter the student movement’s theoretical plan. As the student movement ran its course, an abstract theoretical language deprived of any sensuous and concrete aspects won the upper hand, as many former student activists sadly acknowledge in retrospect.25

The narrow focus on the revolution and the primacy of the Marxist concept of class struggle obstructed a more comprehensive adaptation of Marcusian theorems. This became clear in a seminal article written by Peter Schneider on imagination in late capitalism, emphasizing Freud’s understanding of imagination as the substitute of unconscious desires on the level of consciousness.26 Schneider argues that in contrast to dream or neurosis, imagination can indeed overcome the censorship that controls and ultimately represses the unconscious desires. Going beyond Marcuse, Schneider maintains that imagination has therefore a revolutionary potential and can pave the way to action. “Unlike dreams, once the imagination has overcome censorship,… the wishes contained in the imagination can acquire, with the support of the conscious mind, material to satisfy themselves in reality and to develop further. In contrast to dreams, the wishes of the imagination can separate themselves from their infantile objects and establish a historical relationship to reality.”27 For Schneider, emancipation from capitalist repression represents only a question of turning imagination into a productive force against the repressive reality principle. The student movement’s emphasis on imagination, which Schneider’s essay articulates, reflects its demand for the transformation of society through the liberation of the creative faculties and the libidinal energies of the human being. The slogan “All Power to the Imagination!” calls for the transformation of imagination into revolutionary energy and aims at overcoming the repressive reality principle on the individual as well as on the collective level.

Both Freud and Marcuse saw in art the social space where imagination found refuge because of its autonomy from other spheres of society. For Freud, art represented the only possible escape from neurosis, that is, from the inevitable result of a repressive social reality. It has this potential because of its autonomous status vis-á-vis the reality principle. Marcuse follows Freud, maintaining that only art has been able to resist capitalism’s reality principle—instrumental rationality. He views aesthetic form as the essential category that prevents art from falling prey to this dominant reality principle, since “behind the sublimated aesthetic form, the unsublimated content shows forth: the commitment of art to the pleasure principle.”28 In other words, art preserves the unfulfilled humanitarian ideals. It is therefore through aesthetic form that autonomous art represents the “Great Refusal,” the “protest against the unnecessary repression”29 imposed on the individual by late capitalism.

Marcuse argues that “form is the negation, the mastery of disorder, violence, suffering, even when it presents disorder, violence, suffering. This triumph of art is achieved by subjecting the content to the aesthetic order, which is autonomous in its exigencies. The work of art sets its own limits and ends, it is sinngebend [creates meaning] in relating the elements to each other according to its own law:… The content is thereby transformed: it obtains a meaning (sense) which transcends the elements of the content, and this transcending order is the appearance of the beautiful as the truth of art.”30 Marcuse was, however, fully aware of the ambivalence of form. Since it at the same time criticizes and reconciles social reality, form has an affirmative moment as well. The positive examples of form he cites as his models of an authentic and emancipatory art —surrealism, Brecht’s theater of estrangement and serial music —demonstrate that it is not form in itself but only the most advanced aesthetic form that transcends the reality principle in his eyes.31

Marcuse’s defense of the autonomy of art and privileging of most avant-garde art (i.e., of abstract modernism—typical also of Adorno’s aesthetic) caused his aesthetic theory to fall out of favor with the students. They saw him in this regard as a representative of the bourgeois aesthetic that they so vigorously resented. The students were no longer content with art’s function as a sanctuary for desires and ideals repressed by the hegemonic bourgeois culture. Instead of aesthetic ersatz, they demanded the fulfillment of the utopian images. Schneider, for example, criticized bourgeois art for preaching denial and renunciation, since it presents utopian images of freedom and happiness only in the separate sphere of aesthetic culture without reference to their realization. Hence bourgeois art directly feeds into the capitalist order. It shows the masses their suffering solely for the purpose of adjusting them to it. For the students, even the most avant-garde forms of bourgeois art no longer represented an alternative, as Schneider’s criticism of serial music—one of Marcuse’s positive examples—demonstrates. Schneider perceived serial music as an expression of capitalism that reinforces class structures with its elitist attitudes.32

This kind of antielitism was characteristic of the student movement and inspired much of its aesthetic theory and cultural politics. In contrast to the cultural politics and organizations of the traditional labor movement such as the SPD, which cultivated bourgeois culture and strove to educate the working class to appreciate it, the students argued for an art genuine to the working masses. Schneider’s article cites the concert of Moscow’s factory sirens that a worker conducted the day after the revolution as an example and opposes it to a showpiece of bourgeois culture, the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Schneider argues that the music of the factory sirens represents, not merely a substitute for “the impossible desires of the isolated individual, but the expression of their social gratification and the hope for such future gratification.”33 Using instruments of their own life world, the masses can develop their own authentic art and realize its liberating potential. Schneider saw this kind of mass art as emancipatory mainly for two reasons. It does not require specialized knowledge, because it is produced by the workers themselves and with means genuine to them. Second, this art is no longer simply an aesthetic illusion but articulates the reality of the working class.

Hence pushing art from the pedestal on which bourgeois aesthetic had placed it was one of the main concerns of the students. They wanted to reintegrate art as an emancipatory practice into the life world of the working masses. Because of their extensive study of Marx, the students knew at the same time that their emancipatory project would fail without a social revolution. They challenged, however, the traditional Marxian notion that the revolution needs to be based on the socioeconomic situation and the working class. They developed their own theory of what the revolution should look like in a Western industrialized country like the Federal Republic and called it the cultural revolution.

The Concept of the Cultural Revolution and Its Revolutionary Subjects

The student movement derived its notion of the cultural revolution from Mao, as many implicit and explicit references to the leader of the Chinese Revolution show, though they did not copy Mao step by step.34 Historically, the term denotes a specific time period —September 1965 to April 1969 —and a specific event in the long process of the Chinese Revolution: the concerted effort of the Chinese Red Army to purge the culture of revolutionary China of all bourgeois elements. Mao developed and applied the concept of cultural revolution in order to affirm his power against opposing groups within the political leadership of the People’s Republic.

The Chinese revolutionary project was of particular interest to the students for several reasons. First, it represented an existing counterexample to the orthodox Marxist revolutionary theory, which the student movement rejected. Mao’s revolution took place in a country without a class-conscious proletariat and was nevertheless successful. Second, China functioned as an alternative model to the existing socialism in Eastern Europe. Despite the myth spread about the student movement, that it was a devotee of Moscow, the students criticized the Soviet Union and its satellite states’ political and social policies as not truly socialist.35 Finally, Mao’s concept of the cultural revolution was antibourgeois, aiming at the remnants of a bourgeois ideology after the socioeconomic revolution had taken place. This antibourgeois tendency was attractive for the students, since they saw the hegemonic bourgeois culture at the root of all alienation and oppression.

The notion of cultural revolution means therefore a radical attack on all of the hegemonic culture’s norms and values, a revolution that goes far beyond the material expropriation of the dominant social classes. At its foundation lies a comprehensive concept of culture in contrast to the traditional notion that reduces culture to the intellectual and artistic expression of a people. Schneider’s article on imagination in late capitalism contains the most widely accepted definition of the students’ concept of the cultural revolution:

The cultural revolution is therefore not an aesthetic substitute for the revolution, a revolt in the museum, an assault in the park, an outrage in the theater. Such a definition would leave culture in the ghetto where capitalism has imprisoned it. The cultural revolution in late capitalism is more impatient, more generous, less easily satisfied than the economic-political revolution. It includes not only a sublation [Aufhebung] of all capitalist relationships but also a revolution of all relationships in which the human being becomes a commodity and the commodity becomes a subject: the relationship between the sexes, between parents and children, between neighbor and neighbor, between the car and its owner. It asks, for example, whether we can still tolerate cars. The cultural revolution leaves nothing untouched.36

The advocates of the cultural revolution did not argue that it can indeed replace the political and economic one, but rather that it is its absolutely necessary complement. Schneider, for instance, explicates the dialectics of the socioeconomic and cultural revolution with respect to the May events of 1968 in Paris. He maintains that the tanks that de Gaulle had sent to the rebellious working- class neighborhoods show the insufficiency of the merely cultural revolution. The cultural revolution alone cannot succeed without the revolutionary transformation of the material conditions, that is, the social and political structures of society. The socioeconomic revolution is necessary in order to seize power from the repressive state apparatus.37 But the socioeconomic revolution alone cannot generate the revolutionary consciousness necessary for a successful completion of the revolutionary process. The political and economic revolution needs to start with a cultural revolution and needs to be transformed back into a cultural revolution. In this model, the cultural revolution represents either a continuation of socioeconomic changes or their anticipation, depending on the historical moment and the particular social context.38

The adaptation of a Maoist notion of a cultural revolution indicates that not all was well with traditional Marxism and that the students had a clear understanding of the specific socioeconomic conditions in postwar West Germany. Marx’s theory of pauperization (Verelendundgstheorie), which predicted that the impoverished proletariat would rise up against its bourgeois oppressors, had no bearing on postwar reality. The Federal Republic of the “economic miracle” showed no signs of an increasing material misery of its working class, the revolutionary subject according to Marx, but rather of a growing embourgeoisement of the revolutionary subject. This posed the question, Who was supposed to carry out the cultural revolution the students envisioned?

That the Frankfurt school presented a Marxism rethought from the perspective of advanced capitalism accounts for its attraction among the students. It indeed offered theoretical help in explaining why the working class could no longer function as the revolutionary subject and who might take its place today. Marcuse’s cultural theory in particular exhibits a strong belief in the possibility of change in spite of the apparent solidity of late capitalist society. It locates moments of resistance and change within society by dismantling the myth of the broad and content middle class and the liberal argument that a pluralist society represents a maximization of individual freedom. Instead, Marcuse demonstrates how the consumer is trapped in a web of commercial manipulation that has only one goal: to pacify the individual and thereby safeguard the status quo. Moreover, his One-Dimensional Man explains why Marx’s revolutionary subject, the proletariat, failed, while at the same time exonerating it. Hence Marcuse does not have to give up the idea of revolutionary change but shifts the focus of the struggle.

Based on the deception theory of the Frankfurt school, his One- Dimensional Man analyzes in detail how the various channels of consumer culture manipulate human desire. For Marcuse, capitalism’s force of commodification has less to do with its appetite for goods than with the reproduction of cultural hegemony. “The means of mass transportation and communication, the commodities of lodging, food, and clothing, the irresistible output of the entertainment industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers, and, through the latter, to the whole. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood.”39 Marcuse explains the failure of the working class as the revolutionary subject with the inescapability of the vicious cycle of manipulation and deception in late capitalism. Hence the working class “no longer appears to be the living contradiction to society.”40 It is rather as integrated and therefore as unable to break through the universal system of deception as any other social class.

In spite of this devastating analysis of contemporary society, Marcuse’s work offered hope. In his article “Repressive Tolerance” he points to contemporary social forces that represent a new revolutionary potential.41 Influenced by the civil rights movement in the United States, he argues that marginalized social groups are the only ones that could possibly ignite revolutionary transformation, provided they are able to achieve unity for the political struggle. Marcuse’s “theory of marginalized groups” (Randgruppentheorie) became the steppingstone for the students’ reconceptualization of the revolutionary subject.

The students, however, did not apply Marcuse’s theory to the social conditions and the political situation in West Germany in a simplistic manner. Bernd Rabehl, Christian Semler, and Rudi Dutschke, leading activists of the student movement, show in a discussion published in the Kursbuch — the main public forum for the student movement—that they were aware of the differences between the United States and the Federal Republic.42 They refrain from identifying themselves as a marginalized group. Instead, they identify suddenly unemployed workers —a reality during the recession of 1967 —as a potentially militant force, since these workers have been unexpectedly pushed to the margins from a central and secure position within society. Rabehl, Semler, and Dutschke argue that these unemployed workers cannot bring about the revolution by themselves. Even if they were to be radicalized by the threat to their immediate material existence and become militant, they lack recognition of the social totality; in other words, they are crippled by the false consciousness that the one-dimensional society imposes on them.

Here the students saw themselves and the academic intelligentsia come into play. Since the students have already developed a consciousness for the repressive and exploitive character of late capitalism, they are in an avant-garde position. The student movement has therefore the role to revitalize the emancipation of the crippled consciousness among the workers in order to develop a countercultural environment from which the revolution can finally arise. Marcuse’s exoneration of the working class allowed the students to think about a new revolutionary subject as the alliance of the working class and themselves, or even the entire intelligentsia. While the working class still functions as the mass basis necessary for the revolution, the intelligentsia (i.e., the student movement) functions as a kind of midwife for the revolutionary consciousness among the proletariat.

On a more practical level, the question arose as to how the students could reach out to and unite with the working class. In response, student activists left the university and sought employment as assembly line workers in order to agitate the proletariat at its workplace. They set up socialist cells (Basisgruppen), small groups consisting of workers and students, which read and discussed Marxist theories together in order to develop a revolutionary consciousness and strategy. While the pragmatists among the student activists got their hands dirty in the factories, the theorists of the student movement focused on the strategic location of the intelligentsia in order to analyze where structural changes could be implemented most effectively. For the latter, art and the entire sphere of culture gained significance for the student movement’s cultural- revolutionary theory, since art participates in the production and circulation of images, values, and public opinion, or, in other words, in the production of consciousness.

The student movement’s concept of cultural revolution did not advocate the abolition of artistic production or deny the emancipatory and utopian images contained in older works of arts. Its concept of art differed from that of the hegemonic culture in its insistence on an art that leads to the realization of these utopian images, that is, an art that leads to practice. The student movement developed a concept of a politically engaged or committed art that negates the bourgeois paradigm of aesthetic culture as a separate sphere from that of politics and economics. This concept was not original to the student movement, but had been debated since the 1920s by Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, to name only the most prominent German proponents.

The students’ concept of an engaged art ascribed to aesthetic culture two particular functions: agitation and propaganda for the revolution.43 Agitation means the mobilization of the desires and imagination against the repressive reality of late capitalism. The art of agitation needs to represent, on the one hand, the desires of humankind and, on the other hand, the actual conditions of life in late capitalism. It requires that art compare images of real life to those that show new and better conditions of life.44 This comparison dispenses, however, with artistic form, since it was with form that a bourgeois aesthetics trapped imagination in the ghetto of art. In its propagandistic function, art revitalizes human desires that in the past had been neutralized in the work of art. Schneider, for example, writes: “Art as propaganda would select utopian images from the written history of human desire and liberate them from the formal distortions imposed upon them by the conditions of material life, and it would finally show these desires the path to their realization that has now opened up. It is clear that art as propaganda needs to be subjected to stronger formal requirements than art as agitation. In contrast to all previous art, these new forms must keep the demand for realization alive; this aesthetic must be a strategy for the realization of the desires.”45

As Barbara Büscher and Andreas Huyssen correctly point out, the student movement’s concept of aesthetic culture has much in common with the aesthetic of the historical avant-garde as well as with pop art and the art happenings of the 1960s, since both of these movements strove for a reintegration of life world and art.46 The concert of the factory sirens, which Schneider cites, functions as an example of a collective aesthetic practice that explodes the bourgeois concept of aesthetic culture by integrating the life world into art. The same holds true for Schneider’s citation of Bosch’s, Breughel’s, and Goya’s paintings as blueprints for a human urban environment as well as his understanding of Brecht’s and Majakowski’s poems as guidelines for political theory. The student movement’s concept of aesthetic culture aimed at a sublation of bourgeois art as an individualized and consumptive social practice in favor of a collective, creative cultural practice. In this sense the cultural revolution incorporated the erasure of the border between producer and recipient, petween culture and life world.47

Adorno, Benjamin, and the Culture Industry

The Frankfurt school supplied most of the key concepts for the student movement’s analysis of cultural hegemony. Perhaps the most significant and at the same time most controversial one was Adorno’s notion of the culture industry, which defines all mass culture as a mode of deception. Adorno’s negative stance regarding mass entertainment dates back to the 1930s and his controversy with Walter Benjamin, to whose positive evaluation of mechanically reproduced art Adorno responded with his essay “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” The fact that Horkheimer and Adorno devoted a whole chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment to the culture industry, and that the latter reissued these thoughts during the 1960s in his essay “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” demonstrates the significance of this concept for the Frankfurt school.48 Adorno argues that in contrast to authentic art, which maintains an autonomous status, the economic principles of capitalism permeate all mass culture production. In the culture industry, as in the marketplace in general, the use value is not of interest but only the exchange value, since the market is driven by one goal only—the maximization of profit. Commodification is the central category for all mass culture products, Adorno concludes, and “cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through.”49

The culture industry’s marketing efforts do not, however, stop here. The culture industry sells more than entertainment for a high profit margin. It sells first and foremost premanufactured models of identification, thereby confirming and reinforcing submissive attitudes. The totalitarian character of the culture industry does not leave any space for the development of a genuine subjectivity, but constructs the individual as a consumer not only for its material products but for its ideology. For Adorno, the culture industry is nothing but a surreptitious sales pitch for the adjustment of the individual to the powers that be. “In contrast to the Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway, and to that which everyone thinks anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.”50

For Adorno, like Marcuse, aesthetic form represents the central category for the production of authentic art. Only by developing a distinct aesthetic form, by becoming more and more hermetic, can art withstand penetration by the culture industry.51 Adorno therefore justifies hermetic art —the most avant-garde articulations of aesthetic culture —as the only “successful model of enlightenment”52 in a society dominated by the deceptive practices of the culture industry. He emphatically rejects any aesthetic concept that prescribes for art a didactic or other instrumental function, such as the students’ understanding of art as agitation and propaganda. From Adorno’s perspective, art ceases to exist and deteriorates into the culture industry as soon as it gives up its autonomy in order to become politically engaged, or, negatively phrased, tendentious.

The student movement followed Adorno’s analysis of the culture industry closely, as a programmatic article by members of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS, or Socialist German Student Association) demonstrates. The article, “Art As a Commodity of the Mind Industry,” was published in the West German weekly Die Zeit in the fall of 1968.53 The SDS followed Adorno’s basic tenets of the total commodification of products of the culture industry and their deceptive power, but it disapproved of his distinction between authentic art and the products of the culture industry as elitist. At the core of the students’ problem with the later Frankfurt school and especially Adorno was the latter’s rejection of any immediate political application of his theoretical insights. As Peter Uwe Hohendahl points out, this refusal to move from theory to praxis was the logical consequence of Adorno’s social theory.54 Adorno saw no possibility for change in the reified social reality of late capitalism, and he therefore could not appreciate the student movement’s call for a cultural revolution. Permanent critical reflection and authentic art represented for Adorno the only effective modes of resistance to late capitalism. As was the case with Marcuse, the students clashed with Adorno’s aesthetic theory because it was grounded in the dichotomy of “high” and “low” culture, which the student movement wanted to overcome.

Disgruntled by Adorno’s refusal to move from theory to praxis, the students pushed Adorno’s approach a step further by combining it “with a version of Marcuse’s thesis of the affirmative character of high art —a reductionist version, in which high art, viewed as nothing but a means of domination, is deprived of its utopian and anticipatory element,” as Huyssen critically comments.55 Collapsing the binary model of “high” versus “low” culture —that is, treating “high” and “low” culture alike—the students claimed that late capitalism does not offer any escape from the universal system of deception, not even for products of “high” culture. The SDS article therefore incited passionate responses by numerous well-known critics and writers of all political views precisely for subsuming the elite, avant-garde culture sanctioned by these very critics to the concept of the culture industry.56

In addition, the students’ claim that “high” culture serves as a means to intimidate the masses was scandalous because it contradicted the ideology of bourgeois art’s emancipatory function. The SDS maintained that the majority of the people are excluded from genuine participation in “high” culture because of the expert knowledge it requires. “High” culture consolidates class distinctions and functions as a means to demonstrate and safeguard the hegemony of the ruling elites. “The production of art becomes an instrument of domination, which has been accepted as legitimate in the public sphere. This domination —intellectual domination —is the precondition for domination in all other areas. It produces a general willingness on the part of the dominated to acknowledge the competence of the dominant class. By stripping rationality from the experience of art, art becomes intimidating and thus consolidates the consciousness of subordination.”57

For the SDS, elite culture represents the true culprit because its principles—originality, virtuosity, and spontaneity—are the foundation of the repressive nature of bourgeois art. It is not surprising that the student movement denounced originality and virtuosity, because their valuation ran counter to its antielitism. More interesting is the students’ negative response to the category of spontaneity, which gained in value only a few years later as one of the fundamental elements of the post-1968 counterculture. The shift toward privileging the collective over the individual made spontaneity suspect. The SDS, for example, equated it with the cult of the genius (Geniekult), which since the eighteenth-century Sturm und Drang novement had put the individual on a pedestal and scorned the collective.

Peter Zadek, whom the hegemonic culture highly praised in the 960s as a progressive theater director, represented for the SDS a perfect example of this oppressive bourgeois aesthetic.58 The students charged him with replacing realistic details of the plays, which are necessary for a communicative reception, with his subjective whims. In other words, the students accused Zadek of stripping the theater of its concreteness, which points beyond itself to a larger social reality. Instead, his theatrical productions are absorbed in self-referentiality. Since they smooth over the antagonism between material and social reality, the theater remains nothing but theater and, from the perspective of the SDS, represents just another branch of the entertainment industry. The students criticized Zadek’s production aesthetic primarily for remaining on the level of mere beautiful illusion (schöner Schein), instead of revealing the alienation and contradictions of the present day. “The theater does not allow for ny inference back to reality, but pretends that it is a part of reality, it suggests that the problem is solved by concentrating on oneself and retreating from a disappointing daily existence.”59 The student novement was at the same time concerned about the response that his kind of art promotes, namely, an individualized reception that lemanded the suspension of rationality. The SDS argued that spontaneity withdraws from the sphere of rational discourse, thereby undermining a critical assessment of the aesthetic product. It turns the recipient into a passive consumer exposed to an onslaught of he artist’s subjective and spontaneous ideas, which are left to be affirmed as strokes of genius.60

The SDS article still bears witness to the strong influence of Adorno on the students and their difficulty in developing an alternative esthetic. It does not, however, provide suggestions that go beyond the Frankfurt school-styled critique of ideology, although the article halls for a “progressive” art. The article implicitly alludes to a few categories for a new aesthetic in its critique of Zadek. These categories are not new but based on bourgeois realism and reminiscent of the aesthetic paradigm of socialist realism in the Eastern Bloc.

Whether these categories are useful in forging a progressive or even revolutionary aesthetic out of the existing one is highly questionable Huyssen, in particular, points out the contradiction between the “gloomy picture” of contemporary art that the article paints an the call “for the creation of a progressive art.”61

As the students’ antiauthoritarian ideals receded into the bad ground and concrete political activism and the desire for a revolutionary alliance with the working class became the dominant paradigm, the student movement’s positive attitude to the Frankfut school of Adorno began to change. As already mentioned, Adorno analysis of the interdependence of technology, oppression, and aliencation in capitalism precluded developing a concrete strategy for change. Instead, Adorno’s generally bleak outlook seemed to ship off all hope that the hegemonic culture could be overthrown. The students recognized the position of impotence into which they has maneuvered themselves with these concepts both practically are theoretically. They did not completely abandon Adornian critic theory but instead turned to the early Frankfurt school of the 1930 especially Walter Benjamin’s work.

The students’ discussion of Adorno and Benjamin continued debate these two Frankfurt school theorists carried on in the 1930 At stake then and in the 1960s were the status and function of the culture industry. The debate pitted an Adornian perspective, which viewed all modern technology from photography and radio to fil and television as nothing but cogs in capitalism’s deception machinery, against a Benjaminian position that technology has a liberati potential as well. The evaluation of modern technology represent an important issue for the student movement in many ways. ON a personal level, popular culture, especially rock ’n’ roll, film, at television, played a significant role in the life of West German you in the postwar period. The 1968ers were children of the electror media and grew up with the offerings of the culture industry. To simply dismiss it was unthinkable. In terms of the students’ antielitis it was equally problematic simply to ignore those leisure activities wored by the masses. Benjamin’s work provided a new critical frame work because of his belief in the liberating potential of mechanic reproduction techniques. The students’ almost verbatim adoption. Benjamin’s theorems was motivated by their desire to get out of the lead end that Adorno’s concept of the culture industry represented.

As Ansgar Hillach points out, Benjamin’s theory prophesied that an alliance of the working class and the new technologies is possible, even if the culture industry applies those technologies for its own ends, and that the intelligentsia would play a significant role on this revolutionary process.62 In particular, two of Benjamin’s essays published in the 1930s caught the eye of the students: “The Author As Producer” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In these essays, Benjamin took an overtly materialist turn in order to derive from the historical changes of art those progressive moments that could become the foundation or a materialist aesthetic.63 He based his theory on the Marxian concept of the conditions of production (Produktionsbedingungen) nd Marx’s claim that capitalism breeds the contradictions that will head to its own demise. Benjamin, like Marcuse, whom many see as Bienjamin’s successor, generated hope that revolutionary change is after all possible and that the modern technologies of mechanical reproduction could play a vital role in this process.

Mechanical reproduction represents for Benjamin a chance to explode the hegemony of an affirmative bourgeois aesthetic in two ways. First, the new technology alters already existing works of high culture by destroying their aura of uniqueness through their mass reproduction. When integrated into the production of art itself, the technology thus breaks with “the referential mimetic aesthetic and its notion of the autonomous and organic work of art.”64 Second, technology generates a different mode of reception. Cultural production that is based on mechanical reproduction —film, for example —replaces the bourgeois individual and contemplative repeption with a collective and distracted reception, which Benjamin believed to have instructional and organizational power. In contrast to bourgeois modes of reception, which function as ersatz for the unfulfilled desires of the masses and so protects the status quo, collective reception has the potential to lead to a social praxis that ealizes change.

Overcoming the status quo was the student movement’s goal, and has initial emphatic embrace of Benjamin’s aesthetic theory is best expressed in Helmut Lethen’s contribution to the debate in 1967 “The dignity of this ‘materialist theory of art’ consists precisely in its refusal to accept the social impotence of bourgeois art and in its insistence that the promise of art be materially realized. The violence contained in his ideal of collective reception is not just Benjamin’s irritated reaction to the cynicism of those who maintain that only a private-elitist reception of art is adequate even during the class struggle. This is also the decisive difference from the aesthetic theory of Adorno, who feared the eruption of aesthetic barbarism if all privileged aesthetic education were to be abandoned.”65

While some student movement theorists, such as Lethen, followed Benjamin very closely and sometimes got swept up in a polemic against Adorno, others developed a more critical approach. Michae Scharang, for instance, accounts for the historical difference between the 1930s and postwar West Germany and problematizes Benjamin’s basic Marxist assumption that capitalism creates the contradictions that lead to its own demise. He maintains that late capitalism is more or less shielded from revolutionary change despite recurring economic recession. Because of capitalism’s hegemony, everything can be reintegrated into the existing order through the process of rationalization. He argues that “the dominant want to remain dominant. All changes within systems of domination take place under this law. That which is changed is nothing but the rationalized old.”66 Hence there is no guarantee that technology inevitably functions as a progressive force, certainly not as long as it is at the disposal of the hegemonic powers.

Even for Scharang’s critical approach to Benjamin, technology remains a central category, and he agrees with Benjamin that the relationship between art and technology poses not only new political but aesthetic issues as well. It has superseded the nineteenth-century aesthetic paradigm, which denied the sociohistorical foundation of its artifacts and identified the aesthetic as “the eternally functioning harmony, the essence of which appears in that which manifests itself as beautiful beyond social reality.”67 For the “Adornian” Scharang both art and social reality appear as second nature. While Benjamir saw this alliance broken thanks to mechanical reproduction, whicl emancipated art from ritual, Scharang views contemporary art stil as trapped in its illusionary character. Not surprising for a student movement theorist, Scharang rejects a return to traditional forms of “high art” as an alternative. He insists on art’s shedding its illusionary character, that is, its ideology of autonomy, in favor of an art of praxis.

As Scharang points out, art can no longer adhere to a pretechnological concept of production because of the historical development of the forces of its production. Instead, he attempts to salvage modern reproduction techniques by introducing a subtle but significant distinction. He argues that two modes, or rather two uses, of mechanical reproduction exist. One is indeed Adorno’s understanding of technology as a means of domination. The repressive use of contemporary technology generates a mode of reproduction that “forces an the affected society the character of being a reproduction, a linear reproduction, which creates the eternal return of the same and a hetrograde consciousness that is denied the prospect that it could be otherwise.”68 The culture industry operates on this principle, scharang calls the other option “technical reproduction” or “the technique of reproduction,” which is distinct from the previous form with respect to the application of new technologies and the receptive ittitude it promotes. This new type of aesthetic production articulates the historical position of the forces of production, but it reflects it the same time the repressive moments of contemporary technology. Hence art reflects upon its own status, thereby transcending tself, and thus can no longer function as a sublimation of unfulfilled lesires in a realm beyond reality. “With regard to art, the meaning of nechanical reproduction could instead be seen in the destruction of a pure sphere of art by the desublimation of the aesthetic dimension. Progressive desublimation means the making available of a repressed dimension of reality for a truly liberated society.”69

We have previously seen that art had a significant role to play on the emancipatory and revolutionary project of the student movemnent. Benjamin’s thesis of the politicization of art in response to fastism’s aestheticization of politics represents the key concept for the tudents and their attempts to develop a new materialist aesthetic.70 for many student movement theorists, the materialist approach exhausted itself in this aspect of Benjamin’s theory—the politicization of the work of art. The focus was on the similar situation of the working class and the intellectuals, namely, that neither has control over the means of production because they do not own them. Interpreted as a natural affinity between these two social groups, the students foresaw a new alliance between workers and intellectuals that was destined to bring about the revolution. Benjamin did not go far enough for Scharang, however, and he disagrees with Benjamin’s basic theorem that mechanical reproducibility has emancipated art from the realm of ritual. He argues that as long as art cannot liberate itself from its illusionary character, it remains tied to ritual, even if a secularized one. That art sheds its illusory nature can therefore no longer be discussed in terms of the emancipation of art, but in terms of its end.

Scharang’s article reflects an important aspect of the 1960s aesthetic discussion —the debate about the death of literature. On the other hand, and quite similar to the contradictory nature of the SDS article on art as commodity, Scharang still tries to develop a strategy that aims at transforming art into an emancipatory and revolution ary instrument. Following Benjamin, Scharang expects the artist to take an engaged position. Artistic means or techniques that reflec the difference between that which is and that which ought to be should be developed in order to restore art’s rational quality. Second Scharang calls upon the artists to seize ownership of their means o production in order to control them.

Postulating revolutionary solidarity between workers and students because of their analogous position vis-á-vis the means of production did not solve the problems confronting the student movement’s revolutionary theory. The question remains, What is precisely the relationship between these two social groups? We have previously discussed the students’ self-understanding as a kind of midwife for the revolutionary consciousness that the West German working class lacked. The concept of the culture industry rendered the function of the intelligentsia even more complicated. The Benjaminian turn of the student movement was a response to this dilemma, not only because of his call for partisanship in artistic and cultural production, but also because of the materialist dialectic that his reception reintroduced.

This turn and the student movement’s ambivalent approach to Adorno is also reflected in the SDS article. The article does not use the Adornian term “culture industry” but rather Hans Magnus En- zensberger’s term “mind” or “consciousness industry” (Bewuβtseinsindustrie). Enzensberger developed this term in his 1962 essay “Industrialization of the Mind,” following in parts Adorno’s line of argument. He criticizes, however, the Adornian term “culture industry” as deceptive because it still veils the fact that the consciousness industry is immediately and purposefully entwined with the economic and political makeup of society.71 The main difference between these two theorists consists, however, in Enzensberger’s basic assumption that capitalism creates the contradictions that will lead to its own demise. His affinity to Benjamin’s cultural theory made Enzensberger attractive for the SDS group. Enzensberger presupposes an inherent dialectic of the mind industry, which simultaneously generates moments of affirmation and negation of the existing social order. He argues that the mind industry needs to grant certain liberties at least on a theoretical level in order to be effective. For instance, the consciousness industry needs to pay lip service to basic human rights, particularly freedom and equality. According to Enzensberger, people’s belief in the fiction that they freely determine their own fate and that of their community is cultivated because it in fact makes them susceptible to domination. The consciousness industry cannot function successfully without propagating false consciousness. Hence it is in a permanent flux, producing and multiplying its own contradictions, since it can never truly grant that which it promises.

For Enzensberger, hope for change rests precisely in this dialectic inherent to the mind industry. While deceiving the masses, it at the same time cracks open its own smooth surface and exposes its immanent contradictions. Thus Enzensberger locates a moment of resistance in the space that opens up between these contradictions. He maintains that although the means of production of the consciousness industry are not in the hands of the intelligentsia, this intelligentsia still represents the productive force on which the culture industry has to rely.72 If the intelligentsia refuses to work for the culture industry, it ultimately breaks down. This is precisely the point where the intelligentsia gains power to shape at least part of the culture industry, even if they do not own the means of production. Like Benjamin, Enzensberger calls on the artists and intellectuals to make use of the space of resistance that is inherent to the consciousness industry.

Art Is Dead! Long Live the Street Theater!

By 1968 Enzensberger seemed to have changed his optimistic tune and was accused of sounding the death knell for literature in the journal Kursbuch, which he edited. This charge stemmed from a profound misreading of his position. Kursbuch simply spelled out the crisis of literature in contemporary society in two contributions to its November 1968 issue by Karl Markus Michel and Enzensberger himself. Michel’s article “Ein Kranz fur die Literatur” (A wreather for literature) focused on the French student movement, but it; analysis also applied to West Germany, while Enzensberger’s article “Commonplaces on the Newest Literature” discussed specifically West German literary culture. Both essays raised much controversy for three reasons. First, their evaluation of postwar literary culture in West Germany was extremely negative and was subsequently mistaken as a pronouncement of literature’s death. Second, they viewed the student movement as a positive influence on German culture In comparison to the students, the left-liberal literary establishmen came out badly in Michel’s and Enzensberger’s essays. Finally, this metaphor of the death of literature, which these articles used, challenged the self-understanding of the West German literary intelligentsia as an oppositional force within society.

Michel, for instance, harshly criticized experimental literature á 1a Heissenbüttel, which had been cherished by the cultural elites as the most avant-garde mode of literary writing. Michel argued that this so-called avant-garde literature was progressive only with respect to form. Its content was, however, far removed from social reality, am he concluded that “the regions into which [this literature] advanced cannot be found on any utopian atlas and much less so on any atla of society.”73 West German literature in the postwar period thus functioned only as a “social clue like magic, myth, religion in the past,” even when it tried to strike a critical pose.74

While the socioeconomic and political restoration ran its full course, literature began to compensate for a number of historical, political, and social shortcomings, which Enzensberger poignantly summarized as “the wish to compensate, at least intellectually, for the complete bankruptcy of the German Reich; the evidently urgent need, regardless of the great collective crime, to once again be regarded as a cultured people”; and finally as “a form of anti-fascism, that satisfied itself with having better taste than the Nazis and that manifested its democratic mentality by buying what the former called ‘degenerate’: pictures on which nothing can be recognized and poems with nothing in them.”75

To put it in a nutshell: literature and its authors became institutionalized as the social conscience of the German nation, but at the same time neutralized as a political force. Still, neither Michel nor Enzensberger had suggested that literature was dead. Instead, they claimed, it was simply useless: “Literary works cannot be accorded m essential social function under present conditions.”76

The French student movement had originally disseminated the slogan “L’art est mort, ne consommez pas son cadavre,” which was quickly picked up by the West German students and was also at the heart of the misunderstanding about the death of literature. Both inzensberger and Michel emphasized that this slogan was nothing lew, but represented an old metaphor deeply rooted in the Western radition. Michel points out that the students draw in their slogans ind graffiti on such canonic names as Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Camus, md Rimbaud, and not solely on such heroes of the proletarian evolution as Mao and Che Guevara. He argues that “this is all Dccident, and even the line about the death of art has belonged or at least 150 years to the sacred inventory of the very culture gainst which it is now played; it is part of a beautiful ritual of nelancholic lament or prophetic promise—lament for a world that las no more dreams, and a promise of another world that will no anger need any.”77

Unraveling the cultural heritage of the student movement’s protest ras not an attempt to belittle the students as lacking originality. On the contrary, for both Michel and Enzensberger, the studen movement’s use of these traditions for their graffiti had a mud larger import than they ever had when published in more customary places such as books. The space in or on which the graffiti were written—walls of houses and other public edifices—was itself mean ingful. The strength of the graffiti does not arise from the bourgeois category of originality, but from its omnipresence. The message itself is not novel either; it is a call for the political realization of the alway promised but never fulfilled gratification of social and individual de sires.78 Michel, viewing the developments of the student movement and the changes it initiated with great hope, maintained that thi decay of literature was not initiated by the students’ criticism. Hi argued that the student movement’s protest against and criticisn of established literary culture had a positive effect on it, even if it exposed literature’s impotence.79

Enzensberger too endorsed the student movement’s turn away from literature (i.e., from belles lettres) in favor of operative genres.80 He nevertheless took an equally critical look at the West German literary elite and the student movement. He criticized the latter for taking aim at the wrong target—the older generation of West German authors. He suggested instead that the students focus their attention and revolutionary energies on cultural institutions, sine it was not literary writing in itself that Enzensberger viewed as the problem but its incorporation into the culture industry.81 Enzens berger attracted attention to the institutionalized structures of domination and called on the students for a revolutionary transformation of the cultural institutions. His criticism of the student movement attack on various authors was not a defense of the literary status quo Instead, he appealed to members of the West German intelligentsi to support the student movement with their literary efforts. The should participate in what Enzensberger called a political literacy program for Germany. They should begin to use so-called operative genres, that is, politically committed texts stripped of any fictionality, along the lines of Günter Walraff’s reports about factory world Ulrike Meinhof’s political commentaries, or Bahman Nirumand book on Persia.82 For Enzensberger, not all literature was dead, but only that which claimed fictionality and autonomy. He too argue for a committed literature and supported the students’ call for documentary genres with his own works.

The student movement’s preference for documentary literature did not, however, come out of nowhere. The reemergence of a documentary literature expressed the crisis of literary writing in postwar West Germany even before the students’ attack on bourgeois culture articulated it most radically.83 The discussion about operative genres had dominated the literary discourse since the early 1960s, primarily based on the success of the documentary theater. Documentary theater historically precedes the student movement and anticipated some of the issues that became pertinent for the latter as well. As early as 1962 Rolf Hochhut’s documentary drama The Deputy posed the question of the responsibility for the Nazi past and the Holocaust, which preoccupied the students. The student movement’s protest could reciprocate by stimulating documentary theater. The best examples are perhaps author Peter Weiss’s play on the Vietnam War as well as Enzensberger’s documentary play on the revolution in Cuba and his documentary novel on the Spanish revolutionary Durruti.84

In spite of their radical slogan about the death of art, the students did not abandon it altogether. They used aesthetic means to articulate their demands. Their protest marches were colorful, and they used satire and parody to ridicule the authorities. They wanted to endow art again with a social function: no longer beautiful illusion but partisan witness to the real world and its injustices. This function required art to leave its ghetto, which the hegemonic culture had ideologically cloaked as the autonomy of art. The student movement therefore tried to develop its own artistic expressions as an alternative to the hegemonic bourgeois culture. Street theater is a good case in point for illustrating the student movement’s struggle for an alternative aesthetic praxis.85

At the heart of the street theater was its emergence from a specific political situation—the extraparliamentary opposition in the 1960s, of which the student movement was a significant part—and its foundation on an operative aesthetic. It is related to the documentary theater in that it also uses authentic documents and the principle of montage and has a similar didactic impetus. Like the documentary theater, street theater aimed to inform its audience about sociopolitical issues and to encourage critical assessment of them. Street theater was, however, more radical than the documentary theater. For one, it abandoned the entire institution of the theater instead of trying to work within its parameters, as the documentary playwrights did. Second, it aimed at eventually transforming the audience from passive spectators to actors in the political arena. Since the street theater started as a mode of political activism, it had little to do with the crisis of the established and publicly financed theaters, the Staatstheater, in the Federal Republic. Still, these public theaters’ immediate response to street theater demonstrates that the hegemonic culture felt threatened by the students’ experiments in alternative artistic practices.86

As with many aspects of the student movement, the street theater is a complicated phenomenon. The borders between street theater in the narrow sense of the word—theater groups that performed only on the street —and independent theater groups, the number of which increased dramatically in the 1970s, are fuzzy.87 The motivation, aesthetic strategies, and goals of street theater and other independent theater groups were very similar if not identical. They developed out of the same political milieu, and in some cases street theater groups turned into permanent independent groups, addressing a more specific audience such as apprentices or prison inmates.

This retreat from the streets, which provides the most general audience, had several reasons. Many street theater groups had sprung up in the struggle against the Emergency Laws.88 Once those laws had been passed by the federal legislature, these street theater groups were faced with the bitter recognition that their mode of protest had had little impact on parliamentary decisions. In addition, many street theater groups experienced a high degree of hostility from the men and women on the streets they tried to address. For instance, one such organization, the Socialist Street Theater Berlin (West), reports that their theatrical events were successful only with already politicized high school and university students, but failed miserably with the depoliticized larger public, particularly with workers: “Our early morning attempts to perform our plays in front of factories in Berlin failed miserably, not only because anticommunist and antistudent prejudices were particularly stubborn in Berlin, but also because the workers did not have any desire —for understandable reasons—to watch our plays at six o’clock in the morning. We were lucky if we got away without being beaten up.”89

Within the street theater movement we can distinguish two main tendencies: the action-oriented street theater (aktionistisches Straβentheater) strongly inspired by antiauthoritarian ideals, and agitprop theater in the tradition of workers’ theaters during the Weimar Republic. The action-oriented street theater did not use any theatrical codes that might have marked the event as theater, since it wanted to prevent the passersby from easily slipping into a passive spectator role. The goal was to eliminate the separation of spectators and actors and to turn the spectators into actors in order to channel the audience’s energy into direct political actions. The action-oriented theater was controversial within the student movement. While some groups saw the transformation of the audience from spectators to actors as the essential role of street theater and as an element of the overall cultural revolution,90 others were more critical. The latter, more attuned to the fact that no class-conscious proletariat existed in West Germany, cautioned against premature attempts at agitation.91 Since action-oriented theater groups were met with lack of understanding and therefore with much hostility on the part of the audience, it proved to be short-lived.

Agitprop theater groups were much more positively received on the streets. Their success had to do with their reliance on the same theatrical means as those of their predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s; that is, they drew on already established, recognizable, and accepted aesthetic codes.92 Descriptions of the agitprop theaters emphasize the stereotypical presentation of the dramatis personae by the use of props and masks —the workers in hard hats and overalls, the capitalist with a potbelly, cigar, and top hat —exaggerated acting, and visual aids such as photographs and posters articulating the political message of the performance.93 These plays or revues were always based on a topical issue and used the technique of montage, interrupting the flow of the plot with songs and spoken texts, thereby feeding quotations and other informational material into the play, often by means of a chorus. This kind of theatrical presentation aimed at preventing an individualized and psychological identification with the characters of the performance, in which the political content could be lost.

One of the most difficult problems for most street theaters was the dialectic of form and content. They were either carried away by the artistic component, resulting in the reception of the performance as an entertaining spectacle, or by the political content, in which case the performance became a mere oral recitation (Sprechstück) with no aesthetic appeal and thus often unable to attract the attention of passersby. Though most street theater groups came to understand the significance of the dialectical relationship of aesthetic form and political content by way of trial and error, they insisted on the primacy of the political. The aesthetic means had no value in themselves but were first and foremost a vehicle for the political end; as one group phrased it, “to promote changing our society absolutely must be the focal point of each and every performance.”94 For this and other groups, street theater should remain on the level of agitation and propaganda.

Not every street theater group was so ambitious. Some were critical of such a sweeping endorsement of agitation and saw themselves more in an Enlightenment tradition. They rejected pure agitatior and propaganda as tantamount to the manipulative strategies of the culture industry. For them, the educational impetus of their theater had to prevail by providing the audience with an opportunity to take an informed position. They took to the street because they saw the streets as the last censorship-free environment and street theater at the only possible space for developing an alternative public sphere.95 The biggest problem, which led to much frustration, was the inability of most groups to reach beyond the community of the already converted. Street theater ran the danger of quickly deteriorating into a politically ineffective, mere “culinary pleasure at political event of the left,” as one street theater group critically assessed their own work.96 Whether the efforts of the street theater and other aesthetic practices of the student movement restored a genuine social function to art is questionable. Aesthetic issues played, however, a significan role for the conceptual framework of the student movement and it goal of cultural revolution.