Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (45 page)

In its early years the school was known for its revival of the concept of alienation. This, a term originally coined by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, was taken up and refined by Marx but, for half a century, from the 1870s, ignored by philosophers. ‘According to Marx, “alienation” was a socio-economic concept.’
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Basically, Marcuse said, alienation meant that under capitalism men and women could not, in their work, fulfil their own needs. The capitalist mode of production was at fault here, and alienation could only be abolished by radically changing this mode of production. The Frankfurt School, however, developed this idea so that it became above all a
psychological
entity, and one, moreover, that was not necessarily, or primarily, due to the capitalist mode of production. Alienation, for the Frankfurt School, was more a product of all of modern life. This view shaped the school’s second and perhaps most enduring preoccupation: the attempted marriage of Freudianism and Marxism.
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Marcuse took the lead to begin with, though Erich Fromm wrote several books on the subject later. Marcuse regarded Freudianism and Marxism as two sides of the same coin. According to him, Freud’s unconscious primary drives, in particular the life instinct and the death instinct, are embedded within a social framework that determines how they show themselves. Freud had argued that repression necessarily increases with the progress of civilisation; therefore aggressiveness must be produced and released in ever greater quantities. And so, just as Marx had predicted that revolution was inevitable, a dislocation that capitalism must bring on itself, so, in Marcuse’s hands, Freudianism produced a parallel, more personal backdrop to this scenario, accounting for a buildup of destructiveness – self-destruction and the destruction of others.
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The third contribution of the Frankfurt School was a more general analysis of social change and progress, the introduction of an interdisciplinary approach – sociology, psychology, philosophy – to examine what the school regarded as the vital question of the day: ‘What precisely has gone wrong in Western civilisation, that at the very height of technical progress we see the negation of human progress: dehumanisation, brutalisation, revival of torture as a “normal” means of interrogation, the destructive development of nuclear energy, the poisoning of the biosphere, and so on? How has this happened?’
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To try to answer this question, they looked back as far as the Enlightenment, and then traced events and ideas forward to the twentieth century. They claimed to discern a ‘dialectic,’ an interplay between progressive and repressive periods in the West. Moreover, each repressive period was usually greater than the one before, owing to the growth of technology under capitalism, to the point where, in the late 1920s, ‘the incredible social wealth that had been assembled in Western civilisation, mainly as the achievement of Capitalism, was increasingly used for preventing rather than constructing a more decent and human society.’
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The school saw fascism as a natural development in the long history of capitalism after the Enlightenment, and in the late 1920s earned the respect of colleagues with its predictions that fascism would grow. The Frankfurt School’s scholarship most often took the form of close readings of original material, from which views uncontaminated by previous analyses were formed. This proved very creative in terms of the new understanding it produced, and the Frankfurt method became known as critical theory.
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Adorno was also interested in aesthetics, and he had his own socialist view of the arts. He felt that there are insights and truths that can be expressed only in an artistic form, and that therefore the aesthetic experience is another variety of liberation, to put alongside the psychological and political, which should be available to as many people as possible.

The Psychoanalytic Institute, the Warburg Institute, the Deutsche Hochschule fur Politik, and the Frankfurt School were all part of what Peter Gay has called ‘the community of reason,’ an attempt to bring the clear light of scientific rationality to communal problems and experiences. But not everyone felt that way.

One part of what became a campaign against the ‘cold positivism’ of science in Weimar Germany was led by the
Kreis
(‘circle’) of poets and writers that formed around Stefan George, ‘king of a secret Germany.’
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Born in 1868, George was already fifty-one when World War I ended. He was very widely read, in all the literatures of Europe, and his poems at times bordered on the precious, brimming over with an ‘aesthetic of arrogant intuitionism.’ Although led by a poet, the
Kreis
was more important for what it stood for than for what it actually produced. Most of its writers were biographers – which wasn’t accidental. Their intention was to highlight ‘great men,’ especially those from more ‘heroic’ ages, men who had by their will changed the course of events. The most successful book was Ernst Kantorowicz’s biography of the thirteenth-century emperor Frederick II.
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For George and his circle, Weimar Germany
was a distinctly unheroic age; science had no answer to such a predicament, and the task of the writer was to inspire others by means of his superior intuition.

George never had the influence that he expected because he was overshadowed by a much greater poetic talent, Rainer Maria Rilke. Born René Maria Rilke in Prague in 1875 (he Germanised his name only in 1897), Rilke was educated at military school.
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An inveterate traveder and something of a snob (or at least a collector of aristocratic friendships), his path crossed with those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gerhart Hauptmann, Oskar Kokoschka, and Eden Key (author of
The Century of the Child.,
see chapter 5).
³³
Early in his career, Rilke tried plays as well as biography and poetry, but it was the latter form that, as he grew older, distinguished him as a remarkable writer, influencing W. H. Auden, among others.
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His reputation was transformed by
Five Cantos/August 1914,
which he wrote in response to World War I. Young German soldiers ‘took his slim volumes with them to the front, and his were often the last words they read before they died. He therefore had the popularity of Rupert Brooke without the accompanying danger, becoming … “the idol of a generation without men.” ‘
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Rilke’s most famous poems, the
Duino Elegies,
were published in 1923 during the Weimar years, their mystical, philosophical, ‘oceanic’ tone perfectly capturing the mood of the moment.
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The ten elegies were in fact begun well before World War I, while Rilke was a guest at Duino Castle, south of Trieste on the Adriatic coast, where Dante was supposed to have stayed. The castle belonged to one of Rilke’s many aristocratic friends, Princess Marie von Thum und Taxis-Hohenlohe. But the bulk of the elegies were ‘poured out’ in a ‘spiritual hurricane’ in one week, between 7 and 14 February 1922.
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Lyrical, metaphysical, and very concentrated, they have proved lastingly popular, no less in translation than in the original German. After he had finished his exhausting week that February, he wrote to a friend that the elegies ‘had arrived’ (it had been eleven years since he had started), as if he were the mouthpiece of some other, perhaps divine, voice. This is indeed how Rilke thought and, according to friends and observers, behaved. In the elegies Rilke wrestles with the meaning of life, the ‘great land of grief,’ casting his net over the fine arts, literary history, mythology, and the sciences, in particular biology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis.
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The poems are peopled by angels, lovers, children, dogs, saints, and heroes, reflecting a very Germanic vision, but also by more down-to-earth creatures such as acrobats and the
saltimbanques
Rilke had seen in Picasso’s early work. Rilke celebrates life, heaping original image upon original image (in a slightly uncomfortable rhythm that keeps the reader focused on the words), and yet juxtaposes the natural world with the mechanics of modernity. At the same time that he celebrates life, however, Rilke reminds us of its fragility, the elegiac quality arising from man’s unique awareness among life forms of his approaching death. For E. M. Butler, Rilke’s biographer, the poet’s concept of ‘radiant angels’ was his truest poetical creation; not ‘susceptible of rational interpretation … they stand like a liquid barrier of fire between man and his maker.’

Delivering a eulogy after Rilke’s death, Stefan Zweig accorded him the accolade of
Dichter.
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For Rilke, the meaning of life, the sense that could be made of it, was to be found in language, in the ability to speak or ‘say’ truths, to transform machine-run civilisation into something more heroic, more spiritual, something more worthy of lovers and saints. Although at times an obscure poet, Rilke became a cult figure with an international following. Thousands of readers, mostly women, wrote to him, and when a collection of his replies was published, his cult received a further boost. There are those who see in the Rilke cult early signs of the
völkisch
nationalism that was to overtake Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s. In some ways, certainly, Rilke anticipates Heidegger’s philosophy. But in fairness to the poet, he himself always saw the dangers of such a cult. Many of the young in Germany were confused because, as he put it, they ‘understood the call of art as a call
to
art.’
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This was an echo of the old problem identified by Hofmannsthal: What is the fate of those who cannot create? For Rilke, the cult of art was a form of retreat from life, by those who wanted to
be
artists rather than lead a life.
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Rilke did not create the enthusiasm for spirituality in Weimar Germany; it was an old German obsession. But he did reinvigorate it. Peter Gay again: ‘His magnificent gift for language paved the way to music rather than to logic.’
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Whereas Rilke shared with Hofmannsthal the belief that the artist can help shape the prevailing mentality of an age, Thomas Mann was more concerned, as Schnitzler had been, to describe that change as dramatically as possible. Mann’s most famous novel was published in 1924.
The Magic Mountain
did extremely well (it was published in two volumes), selling fifty thousand copies in its first year. It is heavily laden with symbolism, and the English translation has succeeded in losing some of Mann’s humour, not exactly a rich commodity in his work. But the symbolism is important, for as we shall see, it is a familiar one.
The Magic Mountain
is about the wasteland that caused, or at least preceded,
The Waste Land.
Set on the eve of World War I, it tells the story of Hans Castorp, ‘a simple young man’ who goes to a Swiss sanatorium to visit a cousin who has tuberculosis (a visit Alfred Einstein actually made, to deliver a lecture).
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Expecting to stay only a short time, he catches the disease himself and is forced to remain in the clinic for seven years. During the course of the book he meets various members of staff, fellow patients, and visitors. Each of these represents a distinct point of view competing for the soul of Hans. The overall symbolism is pretty heavy-handed. The hospital is Europe, a stable, long-standing institution but filled with decay and corruption. Like the generals starting the war,
Hans expects his visit to the clinic to be short, over in no time.
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Like them, he is surprised – appalled – to discover that his whole time frame has to be changed. Among the other characters there is the liberal Settembrini, anticlerical, optimistic, above all rational. He is opposed by Naphta, eloquent but with a dark streak, the advocate of heroic passion and instinct, ‘the apostle of irrationalism.’
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Peeperkorn is in some ways a creature out of Rilke, a sensualist, a celebrant of life, whose words come tumbling out but expose him as having little to say. His body is like his mind: diseased and impotent.
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Clawdia Chauchat, a Russian, has a different kind of innocence from Hans’s. She is self-possessed but innocent of knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge. Hans assumes that by revealing all the scientific knowledge he has, he will possess her. They enjoy a brief affair, but Hans no more possesses her mind and soul than scientific facts equal wisdom.
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Finally, there is the soldier Joachim, Hans’s cousin, who is the least romantic of all of them, especially about war. When he is killed, we feel his loss like an amputation. Castorp is redeemed – but through a dream, the sort of dream Freud would have relished (but which in fact rarely exists in real life), full of symbolism leading to the conclusion that love is the master of ad, that love is stronger than reason, that love alone can conquer the forces that are bringing death all around. Hans does not forsake reason entirely, but he realises that a life without passion is but half a life.
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Unlike Rilke, whose aim was to transform experience into art, Mann’s goal was to sum up the human condition (at least, the Western condition), in detail as well as in generalities, aware as Rilke was that a whole era was coming to an end. With compassion and an absence of mysticism, Mann grasped that heroes were not the answer. For Mann, modern man was self-conscious as never before. But was self-consciousness a form of reason? Or an instinct?