Abstract
The Summer of Theory is an evocative and brilliant account of the 1968 generation of Marxist/post-Marxist intellectuals in West Germany. The book was published in German in 2015 to largely positive reviews. Tony Crawford’s translation is a compelling read of the rise and decline of a German genre, subversive ‘theory’. Philipp Felsch, Professor of Cultural History at the Humboldt University, Berlin, has vividly captured the milieu of a generation of German writers and their publishers, from c. 1960 to the end of the Cold War, a period that roughly can be characterized as the ‘summer of theory’. The 1960s, especially in the Federal Republic, saw the birth of a genre of what can be simply called radical ‘theory’ in the humanities. In many ways, this was a product of the meeting of German Marxism with French post-structuralist philosophy and other currents in radical thought, including Italian Marxism such as Operaism (or Workerism). But it was initially a reorientation of German Marxist thought, shorn of some of its historical baggage, and a product of a booming left-wing book market that came with the student movement.
Felsch’s book seeks to show how theory was produced and how it was read by a generation of left-wing intellectuals who sought to understand the times in which they lived by new ideas that fundamentally challenged the conservative post-war orthodoxies and the cultural sterility of the 1950s. The self-understanding of the new turn to ‘theory’ was that of a ‘counter-discourse’, which was neither pure philosophy nor theory in the scientific sense of the term as hypotheses to be tested in social research. Theory was also an expression of a dissatisfaction with literature and artistic writing in the 1960s. It was inspired by the Frankfurt School’s conception of critical theory as self-reflection and ideology critique, but had a more radical and political edge to it.
The Summer of Theory is a documentary-based historical reconstruction of the Berlin publishing house, Merve. Through its founder and publisher Peter Gente, along with his partner Heidi Paris, it shaped the New Left in West Germany over several decades. The research that was the basis of the book was a treasure trove of Gente’s papers, which had been purchased by an archive in Karlsruhe, and several interviews with key figures of the 1968 milieu. Merve Verlag – named after Peter Gente’s first wife, Merve Lowien – was the radical alternative to the more mainstream Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt. For more than two decades, since the first publication in 1970, Merve was a part of the intellectual scene in Berlin and more generally the student movement in West Germany. Gente’s innovation was the introduction of a popular low-cost pocket paperback at a time when a serious book still had to be in hardback. However, as discussed in a chapter titled Suhrkamp Culture, Suhrkamp had taken the first step with paperback in 1962 with the famous edition suhrkamp and publishing works by major German philosophers, with Marcuse’s Culture and Society in 1965 as the trailblazer, followed by a ‘theory’ series and the later more famous suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft series. But Suhrkamp was based on the academic market while Merve looked to the new student movement market that came with the massive expansion of higher education in the 1960s. The combination of the paperback and the new genre of ‘theory’ – a development that was in part due to the prodigious efforts of the influential Jacob Taubes, a Professor of Hermeneutics and Jewish Studies, who made a major impression on Gente in his formative years and who also had an editorial role with Suhrkamp – reflected an ambition to give form to a new style of thought in tune with the changing times of the 1960s.
Merve was founded by Peter Gente with a view to creating a new outlet for ‘theory’. In his view, influenced by Adorno, Barthes and later by Foucault, radical writing was not as radical as reading. This position recalls Foucault’s answer to the question who he was: ‘I am a Reader’. Readers are potential activists and there are more of them than there are authors. While Suhrkamp was publishing the great names in twentieth-century German philosophy, the Merve project was to bring new names from Paris to Berlin: such as Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau and Lucien Goldmann and avant-garde authors that Suhrkamp did not dare to publish, such as Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard. Gente and Heidi Paris, who played a key role in the editorial policy of Merve, were in touch with everyone of significance in left-wing circles, including Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the imprisoned terrorist Andreas Baader, and Toni Negri, also in jail in Italy. He established a working relationship with Althusser and later Foucault, who Heidi Paris had already met as a student and introduced him to the Berlin scene. But Gente’s first inspiration was Adorno and above all his Minima Moralia, which Suhrkamp published in 1951, and which set the terms for the birth of ‘theory’ in West Germany in the 1960s when it appeared in paperback. It also marked a turn from Marxism. The Dialectic of Enlightenment was undoubtedly the monumental legacy of critical theory, but it was for an academic readership.
According to Felsch, the popularity of Minima Moralia when it was finally discovered by a new student readership, which included the young Peter Gente, was an expression of the demand in the post-war years for a different kind of theory that was initially disguised as a poetic critique of the falseness of society, but which was also not pure philosophy. Minima Moralia had a transformative effect on German left-wing thought, making Adorno famous, but it also marked a disenchantment with Marxism, which was reflected in Merve’s publications. The Marxist past of the Frankfurt School was downplayed, if not hidden, in order to accommodate the new fame and status Adorno enjoyed as the quasi-spiritual leader of the Federal Republic and the desire to avoid association with communism. There is a particularly interesting account in the first chapter, titled Federal Republic of Adorno, about how Adorno supressed his authorship of Composing for the Films with Gerhart Eisler so not to attract attention of having Marxist sympathies at a time in the United States when there was a purge of supposed communists. Adorno in the 1960s embodied the turn to ‘theory’ and the idea that the task is not to change the world before interpreting it, in a reversal of Marx’s adage. The present, he said, is the time for theory.
For the Berlin New Left, despite the fascination with Adorno, this was not enough and many intellectuals, such as Gente, were unhappy with the downplaying of Marxism in critical theory, but the cultural turn in critical theory did provide a reorientation from the older Marxism that seemed to offer little by way of interpretation of the times and the idea of ‘damaged life’ that Adorno saw everywhere. Adorno did not of course give up on dialectics and worked on the dense Negative Dialectics, which appeared in 1966, but his late philosophical opus had little relation to Marxism in any discernible sense. Another problem was that Adorno’s somewhat blanket notion of the culture industry also cast a doubt on the low-cost paperback revolution that Merve represented and depended on, since it suggested something popular, which was inadmissible in Adorno’s critique of culture, despite the high sales of the paperback edition of Minima Moralia, which presumably even the unworldly Adorno appreciated. Yet, something more was needed than a return to the old left and class struggle. The new developments in critical theory did not offer an alternative. Habermas’s retreat to Starnberg to pursue social scientific research at the Max Planck Institute and his earlier complaint of ‘left-wing fascism’ did not endear him to the more radical figures, such as Gente. Max Horkheimer, who was surely a major figure in critical theory, is hardly mentioned in the book (except as having kept under lock and key anything that would reveal the Marxist background of the Frankfurt School), perhaps because he was too orthodox and retreated to Montagnola, after serving as the Rector of the University of Frankfurt. The emergence of the West German New Left in part drew from the particular kind of critical theory that Adorno still represented but in search of radicalization it drew on Walter Benjamin, who for many was the real hero, and Italian Marxism as represented by Negri, but this was dangerous territory. The key ingredient was the German appropriation of French post-structuralist philosophy. Felsch’s book provides significant insight into the way German leftist intellectuals drew on French philosophy to create the new genre of ‘theory’. As he writes, there was a mission: ‘to jump start German Marxism out of its dogmatic standstill with boosts from Italy and France’.
Merve was eventually to embrace post-structuralism and became known in Germany as the publisher of postmodernism and popularized the notion of ‘discourse’. Merve’s first publication was a translation of Althusser’s How to Read Marx’s Capital. For Gente, Althusser was an exemplar of theory that remained true to Marxism while at the same time demonstrating a form of critical practice that critical theory – whether in Adorno or Habermas – had seemingly given up on. After Althusser’s descent into insanity, following the murder of his wife in 1980, he had to be forgotten, but by then he had outlived his use. Merve created a space for Left Nietzscheans who dominated the scene already in the 1970s. This turn was marked by the entry of Foucault and Deleuze to German publishing, which Suhrkamp had already begun but confined its scope to the more mainstream figures, including Derrida. The communication paradigm that was emerging with the New Left in opening up new spaces of critique through discussion and critique was animated by the French master-concept of discourse, which injected something into communication that was absent from the new ideas of Habermas and Luhmann, different as these were. The waning influence of critical theory, which was opposed to the French thinkers, created a space for new ideas that Habermas’s new theory of communication did not reach. Felsch tells another side to the communication paradigm in a somewhat sardonic account of how the ‘empowerment to speak’, one of the achievements of the student movement, occurred in the new bar culture of West Berlin. This makes interesting reading. What resulted in any case from the work of the Merve group was a creative cross-fertilization of intellectual traditions which was very much the achievement of Peter Gente and Heidi Paris. Critical theory, as espoused by Adorno and Habermas, did not succeed in this dialogue of French and German radical thought. It is a further matter if anything enduring actually emerged from this dialogue.
Merve was an avant-garde publisher of radical theoretical literature, much of it German translations of French texts or debates relating to post-structuralist topics. Peter Gente and Heidi Paris positioned themselves not in Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, which was based on the bourgeois public sphere, but the ‘proletarian public sphere’, as advanced by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge in their Suhrkamp book of that title in 1972. This became a key reference for the Merve mission for whom it signalled a more radical notion of communication that could not be easily domesticated by capitalism nor be subject of a revolutionary avant-garde. Of the old critical theory, only Herbert Marcuse was interested in unintegrated outsiders. These ideas were given a new significance by Deleuze and Guattari with the notion of the ‘micro-politics of desire’ as well as Barthe’s concept of the partisan activity of reading and the political nature of the ‘pleasure of the text’. Such supposedly subversive ideas, attractive to the student movement, could not be accommodated so easily in the mature critical theory of the Frankfurt School as represented by Adorno who saw the signs of catastrophe everywhere. Yet, one wonders how the concern with death and madness in the works of the Parisian intellectuals was really in the service of radical politics. Apparently, Althusser spent May 1968 in a mental asylum, Deleuze took his own life and Barthes, whose key concept was the ‘death of the author’, was killed by a laundry van.
It was Foucault who replaced Adorno as the really major thinker of the 1970s. Gente had met him in Paris and hosted him in Berlin in 1977. The fascinating account offered by Felsch reveals a remarkably receptive Foucault to the Berlin context. Foucault’s writings showed a more decisive route out of Marxism, but at the costs of substituting discourse for dialectics. In this respect, the Left Nietzscheans represented a different response to the crisis of Marxism than the position taken by Habermas, who rejected too quickly the post-structuralist movement (though it should be acknowledged that he did engage with Derrida in the 1980s in Frankfurt and probably would have with Foucault had he not died prematurely in 1984). The reason for Habermas’s stance was not because of the obscurantist nature of much of their work but because it did not serve his project, later abandoned for political philosophy, to advance a sociological research programme based on a reconstruction of Marxism.
The 1960s was the summer of theory, which entered its autumn in 1977, the so-called German Autumn, when it suffered its first setback in the wake of the terrorist activities of the Red Army Faction (RAF), leading to a backlash from the state. The right found an easy target in the New Left’s celebration of ideas that apparently motivated Andreas Baader (who had some 400 books in his cell, many provided by Peter Gente) and Ulrike Meinhof, though the Merve circle did not embrace or endorse armed struggle, preferring the medium of theoretical practice. Baader in any case did most of his reading in prison and, with other members of group, committed collective suicide in Stammheim Prison in 1977. The arrest in 1979 of Antonio Negri brought an end to Merve’s flirtation with Italian Marxism. Felsch shows in an interesting chapter, Foucault and Terrorism, that Foucault’s response to the Baader-Meinhof gang was that they were operating with a pre-modern notion of politics as violence and failed to see the advent of biopolitics and a kind of that power lay on the streets waiting for anyone to pick it up. This beckoned a new politics for the Merve collective to capture. But in some ways the political moment failed to be realized.
The 1980s saw a certain tiredness with theory and the pure text. Felsch notes that in many of the new publications of the 1980s, there was a turn to images with the new mode of bricolage. The move away from the primacy of pure text to juxtapositions of texts and images in books was part of a new interest in art, which had played no part in the student movement. Heidi Paris did not share Gente’s lack of interest in aesthetic transgression and worked as a curator organizing exhibitions situated somewhere between theory and art. Merve broadened its perspective beyond Paris and the occasional foray to Turin and Milan with collaboration with Semiotext(e) in New York to explore how theory could be brought into the domain of art. As Felsch strikingly puts it: ‘In the 1980s, theory migrated into the white cubes of the art galleries, where it is still most comfortable today’. But, ‘the aestheticization of truth’ was also an expression of the new sense of Posthistoire, the notion that history does not offer any meaning and that the present is disconnected from the past as well as the future. This led to a certain sense of a loss of purpose for the 1968 intellectuals, a waning of dialectics, sending them in a new direction: reading the works of the political Right to discern a truth that escaped the Right but could be appropriated by the New Left. Felsch is very interesting and perceptive on the attraction of the thinkers of the right for the renegades from Marxism. The writings of Ernst Jünger was the first to attract the interest of the German New Left, but it was Carl Schmitt whose Theory of the Partisan in 1963 opened up a new avenue of theory in the 1980s for left-wing theory. He was seen to offer an alternative view on the possibility of militancy, for Schmitt had shown how declaring an enemy was an essentially political act.
Felsch does not cast his historical reconstruction of the German New Left in the terms of cultural translation. Something more than the linguistic translation of texts was going in Franco-German left-wing intellectual exchanges. The appropriation of the writings of the Right – which extends to Luhmann, who figures a lot in the book – can be compared to the way the French left appropriated German thinkers, such as Heidegger and Nietzsche and, of course, Freud, to plot a course out of the ruins of Marxism. Heidegger remained a suspect for the German Left, who were also wary of Nietzsche, but the French post-structuralists found an alternative reading was possible of these German thinkers. When Merve brought post-structuralism to the German student movement, they were in a sense reintroducing earlier German ideas in a new format that oddly was compatible with the allure of the major figures of the right, such as Schmitt and, increasingly, Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann’s key concept that the complexity of society requires its differentiation undermined the Marxist notion of totality, the idea of looking at society as a whole.
The Summer of Theory is a fascinating reconstruction of the German New Left through a reading of one of its iconic publishers and the mission of its pivotal figures, Peter Gente and Heidi Paris. The book shows the promises of theory to a generation who had naive faith in the possibility of emancipation and that it could be delivered by texts and the act of reading. Admittedly, scepticism set in at some point. The Merve publishing house represented just one strand in that generation’s conception of theory – one that was heavily influenced by post-structuralism and the general movement of what became known as postmodernism – and, inevitably, it suffered the fate of the decline of postmodern thought in the past two decades. Felsch concludes the book with a short and somewhat cryptic Epilogue on the theme of ‘after theory’, perhaps the ‘winter of theory’. The notion of ‘after theory’, as in Terry Eagleton’s 2003 book, After Theory, was a farewell to a particular tradition of theory that Merve represented. Heidi Paris took her life in 2002 and Peter Gente retired to Thailand some years later (he died at the age of 78 in 2015). It becomes clear at this point that what Felsch calls ‘theory’ is in effect ‘French Theory’, a brand of theory that is not French as such but a German appropriation, one too that was appropriated in the Anglo-American academia, in much the same time frame. In the latter context, Derrida had a stronger influence that would appear to be the case from the German scene as outlined in this book. Felsch’s book reminds me of François Cusset’s similar work on the appropriation of post-structuralism in the United States (French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and C. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Translated by Jeff Fort. Minnesota University Press, 2008).
The strength of Felsch’s book is also its weakness: the history of rebellion around the rise of ‘French theory’ in Berlin, while brilliantly reconstructed, is just too one-sided to account for the wider interest in theory. Not surprisingly, it is more a history of the decline of a particular genre of theory. It was undoubtedly radical in its day but has now become too much part of late twentieth-century culture to be radical. There is little consideration of the great German tradition of sociological theory and social theory (Gesellschaftstheorie), which contributed the rise of theory more generally, as well as providing the foundations of social theory today. Sociologists are not mentioned. The 1990s (the spring of theory?) was a period of the flourishing of social theory, not its demise. Habermas is a minor figure in this book and Honneth is not mentioned, perhaps because they were marginal to the concerns of Merve, confined as it was to French theory in the humanities. The 1980s also witnessed major developments in political theory, especially since the publication in 1971 of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. In this period, there was considerable cross-fertilization of social theory and political theory, at least in Frankfurt. While Merve reached out to Semiotext(e) in New York, the real revolution in theory was in the United States. Yet, one gets the impression that the Merve circle were oblivious to what was going on there. Felsch acknowledges that the world of theory discussed in this book is irretrievably over. But, by way of conclusion he also notes the return of theory in the context of the post-2008–2010 financial crisis and a new interest in theories of capitalism. That is true; however, the theory that has returned is not ‘French theory’ in any significant sense but older social and political theories of capitalism as well as ones of a more recent origin. It is difficult to locate theory in the social sciences within the compass of Merve’s iconoclastic postmodernism, which also overstated the case for a break from older traditions of social and political thought.
The rebellion that the ‘theory’ was concerned with also turns out to be a very Western Europe preoccupation. There is little sense of the tremendous transformations in the developing world having any impact at all on the theory debates. Felsch is not to be blamed for this blind spot in German thought, but it would have been interesting to have had more reflection on the limitations of the wider global relevance of the 1968 generation. Then, there is the question of feminism. The summer of theory after all was the period in which feminist scholarship arose, due too in no small part to the appropriation of Freud and Foucault. Heidi Paris herself was a key player in the Merve publishing house, named after another woman, but one does not get any sense of female authors entering the compass of left-wing publishing. Where were the women? They were not all in the RAF, which reportedly had more female members and supporters than any other terrorist organization of the era.
These are minor critical comments on what is an insightful and expertly written account of subversive theory in the heyday of the Berlin of the 1968 generation.