The avant-garde of decline: Karl Heinz Bohrer’s essays on England

Abstract

Karl Heinz Bohrer’s Ein bißchen Lust am Untergang: englische Ansichten is a collection of essays on England originally published in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and in the monthly Merkur between 1968 and 1981. This article explores these and subsequent essays by Bohrer. At the heart of Ein bißchen Lust am Untergang is the concept of decadence as a positive – or at least ambivalent – concept: it is ‘the highly stylized capacity for enjoyment after so much imperial exertion’. Marx described England as the ‘demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos’, and for Bohrer even in decline the country remains the avant-garde of the Western world, in contrast to hard-working, but un-decadent Germany. The Falklands War (1982) marked the end of this specifically English form of ‘enjoyment in decline’. More recent reflections on British, German and European politics reveal tensions and inconsistencies in Bohrer’s characterization of decadence. In reconstructing Bohrer’s work a number of concepts alongside decadence are discussed: the agonal; political aesthetics; closed form; and nostalgic modernism.