Helmut Schmidt - Der letzte Raucher (German Edition) - Kindle edition by Martin Rupps. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or.
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I can only imagine how difficult it is to write yet another book about Schmidt, but the author successfully manages to have us look at this cult status personality through the lens of the common person. I was able to imagine many of the Schmidt moments described in this book. I didn't want the book to end. Buechertiger rated it really liked it Nov 13, Bahamamama rated it really liked it Mar 25, Lucas rated it did not like it Aug 27, Stephanie rated it liked it May 10, Constance rated it really liked it Dec 09, Veit marked it as to-read Jun 02, Elvis marked it as to-read Sep 25, Donald Forster marked it as to-read Jun 02, Holger added it May 11, Cristina Engel marked it as to-read Mar 31, Zenk marked it as to-read May 01, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Martin Rupps born is a German political scientist, journalist, and author. Books by Martin Rupps. The servant motioned silently, warning of the presence of a superior officer who, for his part, was already preparing a fitting response to the mutiny. Coming closer, however, the officer noted that a band bearing the Polish national colors had replaced the imperial cockade on the soldier's cap. His resolve began to waver, and now he found himself surrounded by other hostile parties, one of whom knocked the hat off his head.
Taller now than the officer, he boxed the latter resoundingly on both ears. Leaping over the tracks, he fled the scene. It is tempting to add to this story of a lightning-quick metamorphosis at the Vienna train station the inscription natura facit saltus. Sperber's emphasis therefore falls on the necessity of slow evolutionary development.
Recalling the incident from sixty years' remove, he inscribes it with the words natura non facit saltus. The scene at the North Station will remain in Sperber's memory all this time, functioning as a mythical image informing his thought: The child waits for his father to return in the more or less heroic garb of a soldier and instead experiences this scandal. It leaves its mark.
Sperber does not question the authenticity of the tale. He even accords it a certain historical legitimacy, given the dubious status of the Habsburg monarchy. More generally, however, his recollection of the scene casts it in the form of a compensatory daydream. A subject suddenly finds itself inhabiting a space where the law of gravity has been annulled. Traditional entanglements are simplified to the point of vanishing. The dense past, which has been bearing down like a knapsack on a servile back, is easily tossed aside, to be forgotten like so much cast-off baggage.
Sperber describes here a time in which the desire to be freed of the gravitational force of one's own mentality finds expression even in the jargon of soldiers. There are a number of perspectives from which we might describe such acts of instantaneous transformation.
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History, theology, the dramatic arts, and finally sociology all have their explanations of the incident at the North Station. In any case, a train station—like the Pyrenees or a bend in the Loire River—is not the sort of context that remains constant over time. By the time the event at the North Station moves into the range of the young boy's consciousness, however, it is already a repetition.
By the time his memory recomposes it, it has already been rendered in dramatic form. Were this not the case, those present at the station would not be able to recognize in concert its farcical element, which is the condition of the fun they have with the officer. We could rest content here with a note to the effect that the notion of the farce comes from Marx, writing about Bonaparte in the Eighteenth Brumaire. Since a farce's subject is always someone other than the observer, this is one of a small number of Marx's statements that generally goes uncontested.
But the larger point is that the historical understanding of the incident suggested by the physical analogy obscures a critical element. The two billiard balls—the subject of the instantaneous metamorphosis, their collision constituting the historical moment—remain beyond the reach of our analysis. Having arrived at the point of collision, they take a course we can describe in the language of stimulus and response, but only at the cost of leaving unanalyzed the inner structure of their motion. Examined in detail, the train station scene is more differentiated than the billiard ball analogy suggests.
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Since the observers' reaction at the train station is coherent and collective, it suggests that they experience in the moment of their reaction a high degree of shared awareness. But Sperber's telling of the story attributes this differentiation only to the officer. The macabre aspect of the situation, with the exception of the boy waiting for his father, escapes the rude public.
Individuals act and are utterly realistic in doing so, with no thought of snatching chestnuts out of the fire for the world spirit. Although a theory of the historical moment can help clarify dramatic instants, it leaves us wanting as soon as we inquire more deeply into the nature of the actors. The scene at the North Station raises questions that we can answer only if we know more than the tale tells us about their psychological dispositions.
For example, is the transformation reversible? Can the rebel be turned back into a Putzfleck? We must look elsewhere for answers to questions such as these. When the social sciences look for guidance to psychological theories of individual behavior, they run into problems explaining behavior in exceptional circumstances. Since a theological approach presupposes the failure of individual sovereignty, we can apply the model of revelation to the North Station only by labeling the Putzfleck a model proletarian suddenly illuminated by the spirit of revolt.
Our question pertains more to the nature of the underlying anthropology that warrants a theological assumption of abrupt changes in personal orientation. Here we come on the notion of the garment, which served for centuries, in the evidence of the Reallexikon fur Antike und Christentum, as the prevailing image of radical changes in an individual's conviction and temperament as a change of clothes. Or, also in the context of rebirth: It liked to take off the expressionistic garment of the new man in order to wrap itself in Lucifer's cloak.
The problem lay in not being able to discount the possibility of a merely external change in attitude. They put considerable stress on inner motivation, so, even while compelling the conversion of lower-class types bound for the gallows, they viewed with mistrust any signs of overly rapid changes. They could not altogether still their suspicion that what motivated the sinners was the prospect of being led to their execution in the white robes of the converted.
The idea of a complicated mechanism of self-direction as part of individual psychology—David Ries-man's inner compass, which resists any sudden change of orientation brought about by an external stimulus—s a later product of bourgeois modernity, laid superficially over an archaic constitution but never entirely popular with the lower classes. Norbert Elias, reconstructing martial scenes from the Middle Ages, depicts the psychological apparatus of self-control as scarcely developed.
Finding evidence of rapid reorientation on the part of soldiers leads us back to the behavior of the character allotted the more differentiated role in our scene at the North Station, namely, the officer. In accomplishing sudden shifts from the formality of etiquette to barbarism, leaders did not distinguish themselves from the team; it would be more accurate to say that it was incumbent upon officers to be able to make just that shift expertly. When the ego, the supposed guarantor of coherence, balance, and continuity, loses its direction, quick transformations and discontinuities of motion become possible.
The military has need of people who are specialized in quick adaptation to extremely rapidly changing situations. They had no need to reach back to prebourgeois sources in their search for representational devices; images of a more archaic individual constitution, wholly suitable for producing uncanny effects, were ready to hand in the horror literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and keep us relatively well informed about such changes of persona in the upper class.
But when we turn to the proletarian literature of the time, it disappoints our expectations. Since the characters of proletarian literature are more often rooted in notions of a shared mentality, the few quick shifts we do find tend to be bound more to the image of betrayal or ascribed to the anarchism of marginalized groups. The functionary, on the other hand, although belonging to the other-directed type, presents us with an exemplary model of long-term internal affective stabilization: Nevertheless, it is finally in the literature of the avant-garde that our findings become really rich.
The artistic figure of the prebourgeois subject was as if magnetically drawn to the military, less in pursuit of enlightenment than a kind of wake-up call. But a simple transfer of Bohrer's theory of suddenness to our scene at the train station would force a drastic change in it. Sperber, the theorist of evolutionary historical change, composes the scene as a panorama.
To turn the tale into a document in the history of the horror aesthetic, we would have to limit the narrative perspective exclusively to the officer's perception. Thus we can frame the anecdote in a way that directly counters the theory of suddenness; in the end the theory serves only to double the perspectives of the self-assured actors it describes. And yet we could, from Bohrer's standpoint, raise an objection to Sperber's recall of the scene from memory: What best serves our purpose here, however, is a closer look at the rebellious young soldier's statement.
Against the backdrop of the era's characteristic speed fetish, his intervention may have been sudden, but the burden of it was not: For Marx, revolutions were the speeding locomotives of history, but the soldier asks, why hurry? Unlike the avant-garde, the soldier is not obsessed with tying his action to the forward point of the arrow of time. He acts instead from the standpoint of a multinational space, and his subversive action lays no claim to harmony with the accelerating thrust of modernization. With the disintegration of a larger transnational political space, the factor of national space comes to play a critical role.
Did the European avant-garde, in the decades from to , suffer a similar fate? Do the spatial categories with which Braudel operates even retain any validity for bourgeois modernity? What seems to comprise the larger space today is the world market, which reincorpo-rates the other that it itself produces. The sociology of shame tells us that his mood at this moment is shot through by two simultaneous sensations, both dreadfully certain, of being discriminated against, on the one hand, and of being exposed just as ruthlessly, on the other.
Shame is a reaction to the perception of having been degraded in the eyes of others. In Sperber's scene, all the elements of a theatrics of disgrace are visible. The signs of disgrace are bound to bodies in action, so that few words are required for its expression. The nearly mute constellation of power is static, like a woodcut. There is a tragic quality to the events from the viewpoint of the officer and those who sympathize with him; paralyzing horror, however, is reserved for the boy waiting on the platform.
Every disgrace seeks its genre, the most popular of which is the farce. The sociology of shame could take the scene at the North Station as a textbook example of the way external regulators of social behavior function. The mechanics of the interaction proceed without a hitch; internal guides to behavior are imperceptible, though their concealment in no way interferes with understanding the scene. Among the antagonists in the critical instant there is no misunderstanding. Such communication in exceptional circumstances is as unfamiliar to the officer as it is to the servant, yet both react automatically with the respective gestures of their stations.
The captain reaches for his sword, the underling strikes a blow. The Putzfleck responds with an action that an officer in more stable times would reserve for punishing an insult delivered by someone unworthy of offering further satisfaction. By boxing the officer's ears, the servant manifests the sudden exchange of power positions. The officer's disgrace consists in having lost face, having been relieved precipitously of the command he was in the act of exercising.
And there is no conceivable ritual that could restore his wounded honor before this public. The diffuse gathering of the urban masses here is as typical as it is accidental and formless; nevertheless, its laughter suddenly lends it the appearance of homogeneity. Only the laughter makes it possible to talk of a collective subject: The officer persists in his domination past the moment of the train's arrival: In being shamed at precisely that moment, he suffers a paramount disgrace.
He is deluged, swept away, in his defeat by the perceptions of countless witnesses. His habitus—his constitution or demeanor; in this case the unstoppable momentum of his stride, the watchful gaze he tosses back at the crowd—is subverted, violated: Perhaps the boy blushes in his stead, but the officer, in the grip of his reflex to flee, spares himself the sight. As we know, the scene is a harmless prelude to disgrace of a wholly different caliber. Disgrace— Blamage —is one of the key words of the postwar turmoil, and the officers' revenge was not long in coming. From the battles that took place in the Berlin newspaper district in to the Reichstag session in that passed the enabling acts of the dictatorship, we find scenes of horrific shaming and disgrace.
To overcome shame, the offended parties donned the masks of the new political movements. Members of the intelligentsia sought—as the young Sperber did in our scene-to remove themselves from the mechanisms of disgrace by becoming observers. Their success in doing so depended largely on being able to distinguish their own self-image from the frightening image they constructed of the masses. Like the officer, the readers of Gustave Le Bon's study of mass psychology will learn to see in the servant a mere automaton with no will of his own, dominated by base drives and destructive energy.
Among the distinguishing characteristics of the reaction to the shocking experience of slaughter in World War I is an absence of tribunals, which are among the rituals of a culture based on guilt. The fact that civilized nations could engage in such horror, that individuals were able to suspend conscience for the sake of military operations neither informed introspection nor generated confessions. We would be much nearer the mark in saying that the collective gaze following World War I was averted from the complex of issues identified by a guilt culture.
Perhaps, in this averting of the gaze, a marginal artistic movement such as dadaism coincides with the postwar mood of the simple infantryman. Certainly, research identifies more and more signs that the peripheral current of dadaism lent expression to a widespread unwillingness to go on applying the internalized lash of a guilt culture.
The crisis of conscience produces a longing for the externalities of a shame culture. This is not a new motif, and certainly Friedrich Nietzsche had been there all along to reinforce it. Now, however—following the debacle of the guilt culture in the world war—the motif falls on particularly favorable ground. In new objectivity's images, individuals are no more than motion-machines, feelings are mere motor reflexes, and character is a matter of what mask is put on.
External judgments and rules guide individual behavior, and response to the web of others' perceptions helps define the self. The noise of the street penetrates into the house of the psyche. Benjamin notes in ,. It is not possible to define a concept of an outer world in juxtaposition to the bounded concept of the effect-producing individual. The outer found by the acting individual can in principle be referred back in whatever degree one likes to the inner, the inner in whatever degree back to the outer.
Critical contemporaries trace the change in norms to various factors. The gaze turns outward; attention turns to the origins of moral norms and the genesis of the conscience as their supervisory apparatus in violent society. Here in and again in , at greater length in Civilization and Its Discontents , Freud maintains that the conscience, which in a guilt culture acquires the function of an internal regulator, actually develops only in an advanced stage in the history of civilization.
This insight, the late internalization of external authorities, inspired the cultural anthropology of the interwar years. It guided their search for examples of societies still in an earlier evolutionary stage, in which individual consciousness of guilt, a result of the tension existing between a strict superego and a subordinate ego, had not yet taken form. Although research since the Second World War has made it evident that the strict polarization of guilt cultures and shame cultures cannot be maintained on empirical grounds, it remains instructive for our purposes as a historical model.
The construction of the antithesis in pure form will enable us to see anew certain cultural aspects of the period following the First World War. Looking at these aspects in combination with the other reigning dichotomy of the Weimar period, between culture and civilization, we see a shift. The concept of culture, as developed in the German tradition, encompasses the intellectual, religious, and moral sphere, in sharp distinction to the sphere of the economy and technology. The concept of civilization, in contrast, favored in the English and French traditions, encompasses technology, science, and more diffuse worldviews.
Alongside these collective human accomplishments, the concept of civilization also includes behavior. As a cultural ideal, civilization seemed to negate interiority, authenticity, and the subtleties of truth that are not manifest in behavior. In the decade of this new objectivity, from —30, the disappointment caused by a culture at war informs the intelligentsia's critique, which stresses the uncivilized nature of a culture capable of conducting war.
In the ideological sphere, the critique exposes the degree to which culture allows barbarism and owes its existence to violence; in the sphere of the sociology of knowledge, it concentrates attention on the functional accomplishment of cultural values within civilization. The turn of the new objectivity from a concept of culture, with a focus on the superego, to civilization keyed to behavior, does not escape the polar tension; the exaggerated welcome bestowed upon civilization itself betrays the unbroken presence of the German culture complex.
A further expression of the persisting tension is the hybrid structure of new objectivity jargon, which continues to betray the pull exerted by two poles, even if its typical formulations blatantly discount culture: Radio, Marconigram, and telephoto release us from national isolation into the world community. Our dwellings will become more mobile than ever: The specific energy channeled by Emil Fischer in synthesizing grape sugar is a match for the greatest human accomplishments [].
The proof that a newspaper is right is that someone buys it []. Looking at the turn toward a code of civil behavior in terms of a schematic polarization between guilt and shame cultures, we can glimpse aspects of postwar German thought that its practitioners were less aware of as they focused on civilization.
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Their exaggerated affirmation of a culture of exteriority, rooted in shame, could not nullify the effects of a persisting internalized culture of guilt. As contemporary anthropologists defined it, a shame culture amounted to a transparent complex of conventions, in which the external compulsions regulating behavior are visible. Dignity is the keyword. The appraisal of others' visible behavior and reactions takes the place of self-knowledge; subjective motives carry little or no weight for purposes of public judgment, which, when it is negative, plunges the individual in question into a profound sense of shame.
During the interwar years, critical minds found variants of a shame culture captivating for a number of reasons. Fixing the genesis of internal authority in social violence, a shame culture enabled them to subvert the fiction of the self-made individual that is part of the concept of a guilt culture; and it offered a context for the construction of a self more able to bear the immense pressures that rapid modernization placed on the bourgeois individual.
What we would now describe as a mythical wish projection was made up of both destructive elements and aspects of a necessary adaptation to modernization. The image of a society that had moved beyond a culture of conscience held out to new objectivity intellectuals the considerable and widespread appeal of suggesting the possibility of realizing social civility. Thus we find surprising correspondences between the cultural anthropologists' polarized schematic and the polarity that Peter Suhrkamp and Bertolt Brecht proposed as the foundation for epic theater.
In both cases, attention is turned to external influence of convention, which has the virtue of appearing artificial and potentially subject to change. Interior signs refer back to where they are grounded in the body; feelings are expressed through physical gestures. In reality, what film requires is external action and nothing in the way of introspective psychology…. Seeing from outside is appropriate to film and is what makes it important…. If the individual appears as an object, causal interrelations become decisive. The great American comedies also present the individual as an object, and might as well have audiences made up entirely of reflexologists.
If the projections of the civilized shame culture tend toward the exclusivity of an isolated observer, they have the merit of offering insight into the mechanisms of mass society, which can be studied with relatively little anxiety. In the eyes of new objectivity artists, the masses at least have the advantage that their being is easily decipherable, appearing to them in the status of an open book of gestures. It is at this point, however, that minds begin to diverge. A comparison of images of a shame culture arising in the German context with the even-tempered registration of mass social phenomena on the part of American sociologists such as George Herbert Mead, David Riesman, and Erving Goffman reveals that German writers, as a rule, present shame culture as a model of modern behavior in a heroic world and conceive of its inhabitants either in the context of a prebourgeois anthropology or in anticipation of a futuristic machine man.
The achievement of American sociologists in the consists in perceiving the phenomena of mass society without deploring the loss of the subject or referring to a heroic past and future while keeping an awareness of the genesis of ethical norms in social force. There are two explanations for the typical German weakness for heroism. Second is the felt experience that heroism is necessary: It bears the marks of a heroi-zing shame culture. A favored slogan in this context, which can be read in schematic polarization within the opera Mahagonny, runs natura fa-cit saltus.
The sentimental jargon of new objectivity thinkers, however, cuts both ways, and in this it becomes apparent that their forthright attitudes could do no more than draw a thin veil over the culture of guilt. Remarkably enough, the Weimar Republic, a time of extreme instability, burgeoning status insecurity, and dramatic oppositional tension, offered fertile ground for highly artificial elaborations of shame-based cultures.
The loss of undisputed legitimacy on the part of social institutions was compensated for by the proliferation of codes of conduct, which in times of normative transformation are generally produced in great number. When social crisis takes hold, the external voices to which individuals have attended are no longer clearly audible and the interior seat of judgment is no longer credited.
In such circumstances, codes of conduct operate as written receptacles for external directives to guide individual behavior. They appear in a number of forms: The dynamic element in these codes of conduct is a desire for masking and concealment, which, in situations threatening shame, offers protection:. The mask transforms a person who has been exposed in a shaming way into a shameless performer; it turns one who is afraid of being perceived as weak into someone who is seen and feared as being strong.
Amid the unmanageable complexity of postwar society, in situations of economic insecurity and uncertain social status, the rules inscribed in codes of conduct operate to draw elementary distinctions: They mark separate spheres; they regulate forms of expression and realize the self's equilibrium. They recommend and describe techniques of mimicry in the face of a violent world, subordinating everything to the protection of an individual's defenseless objectivity. They promise to lessen vulnerability, suggesting measures that will immunize people against the shame to which the collective subjects them.
Modern codes of conduct encourage people to acquire the skills they need for strategic self-enactment; the aim is the training of a functional ego. The codes represent an attempt to turn the effects of social distinction over to the personal direction of the individual, transforming the convivial arts of separating and combining into learnable techniques.
In doing so, they generate two paradoxes, which typify the dual nature of objectivity. On the one hand, codes imply an acceptance of the individual's status as an object; on the other, they stubbornly hold out the possibility of making that same individual the master of his or her fate. Their affirmation represents a desperate attempt on the part of the new objectivity generation to restore to itself a sense of agency by exploring possible interventions into the workings of external influences. The goal is, through the cunning of concession, to participate in the forces that drive the historical process.
The strict observance of rules designed to vouchsafe distinction, however, necessarily causes the individual to lose hold of the levers of direction. Because the essence of the culture of conscience consists in the expectation that people will behave according to norms even without the threat of external sanctions, the new rules of behavior must keep consciousness alert to the uninterrupted presence of the supervisory gaze of the other see Figure 1. While suggesting the possibility of successful individual interventions into the social power struggle through the mediation of rules , all codes actually occasion is the self-expression of a lifestyle.
In the the description of the great shaming theater of social struggle rises to its literary high point. Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power offers a panoramic depiction of the mute constellations of power. Here is a comprehensive interpretive analysis of body positions that builds on descriptions of the shame culture by writers in the , os. They are relieved of the discipline of distancing themselves; there is no need to practice personal techniques of separation to mark off areas of trust from areas of otherness, because that task is taken over by the mass formation itself, which simultaneously holds out the promise of an enormous expansion of the boundaries of individual personality.
His book on gestures becomes in fact a contribution to natural history. What he holds up to view are creatures failing to escape the dictates inscribed schematically in their bodies. In the image of the creature, the cool persona's central ambition to become a self-conscious agent of history deteriorates into its opposite. The suppressed sense of remaining subject to blind fate is the underlying motivation for its magical thinking. What the present book demonstrates is how uncannily close the two images are: Beauty is either the end result of a parallelogram of forces, or it does not exist at all.
On ii March ,, the Frankfurter Zeitung published a sketch by Siegfried Kracauer of a gloomy railway underpass near the Charlottenburg Station in Berlin. The ceiling, constructed of countless riveted iron girders, appears to the author to sink gradually deeper and deeper into the earth, prompting comparison to a nightmare. Pedestrians passing through the tunnel seemed gripped in permanent displeasure. A few chronic inhabitants—a baker in white, a beggar with a harmonica, an old woman-are reduced to reliefs against sooty brick walls, absorbed into the functionality of the underpass while others, bent on their individual courses, lacking the purposefulness of a crowd, quicken their steps.
What strikes him is the junction of the compact functional structure and the fragmented crowd, the systematicity of dead material and living chaos, the claim the underpass itself stakes on brute endurance, in contrast to the transience of generations passing through it. Sixty-five years later it is still there, as a trip to Stuttgarter Platz will confirm. Kracauer's sensitivity might point to a bad case of claustrophobia if the philosophical element in the sketch were not also evident.
Still, the plunge into childish fears the author reports, from simply crossing through a cellarlike passage, scarcely seems an adequate ground for his horror. A polarity Kracauer believed he had long since overcome in his encounter with philosophical vitalism confronts him anew from without, as the irrefutable power of the object world.
The crass polarization of Kracauer's sketch reflects the specific coloration of thought in the year ,. The sketch is informed by a vision. Crystalline housings, phalansteries in the spirit of the French Utopians a century past? What mass ornaments could he have had in mind that would promise an anxiety-free passage through history, apparently transcending the indifference of metallic systems and lived meaning?
If a power structure is rocked by social change and if, as a result, the conformity-inducing pressure of established living schemata suddenly declines-then there will be some recoil. When the external moorings of convention relax, when the blurring of familiar boundaries and roles and ideological constellations stimulate fear, elements of ideological stabilization and schematicism come more forcefully into play.
If we had hopes that literature in such times managed to avoid the schematicism of public discourse, the literature of the new objectivity quickly disappoints these hopes. The arts of the new objectivity respond to the times with a paradoxical maneuver. They react to schematicism, on the one hand, by affirming the transitory reality of life in the industrial world, which continues to go without its appropriate symbolic representation.
The arts formulate their opposition to the rigidity of the old symbolic order by mimetically appropriating the forces of social disorganization, particularly whenever it appears in the form of the capitalist market. On the other hand, they respond by formulating a logic that outbids the popular mania for classification, raising schematicism to the verge of dead rigidity. Doing so, they expose the dubiousness of the maneuver.
The images of human being conceived under the sign of the new objectivity are marked by the climate of polarization. The converse is also true: We see humanity represented in the form of media idols and earth spirits, as isolated moralists or collective beings unburdening their conscience in social groups. Like flaneurs, they display their eccentricities among the crowds, appearing lost in the anonymity of a sociological type.
The icons of an armored ego go on parade see Figure 2,. A new type joins them, the white-collar employee. As models for sociological construction, these figures turn up in billboard simplicity and in intricate dialectical images: The representational maneuver signals at once a defense against and a lust for the de-centering of the subject. The climate of polarization has a complex relation to the ideology of vitalism, which is widespread among intellectuals at the time.
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Life, in this sense, has a polar structure, whereby polarity implies neither mechanical separation nor dualism. It is comparable instead to the polar opposition found in magnetic fields, which, in their very polarity, represent an indivisible unity. The most primal being of the individual is polar: This testimony from the decade of expressionism allows us to identify a sense of life's dynamism as an oscillation between two poles. A central characteristic of the cool persona's habitus is its marking of boundaries between spheres, causing the polar attraction to operate secretly beneath the surface.
Before the new objectivity construction, polarization was a surface aspect of the life stream; now, as either a gradual development of the concept or an abrupt effect of the shock of world war, the polarity has worked its way into life itself, splitting it in two. Moreover, phenomena produced by radical separation, in contradiction to the idea of wholeness, begin now to exert a great aesthetic appeal. Literary characters carry about with them the shadow of their counter-poles: A complex man is depicted in flight through a gallery of women.
The restless street poet is surrounded by sedentary hordes. The arsenal of human images compiled by new objectivity artists lives off contrast:. On the one hand, glass—on the other, blood. On the one hand, fatigue—on the other, ski jumps. On the one hand, archaic—on the other, contemporary, with a hat from Bond Street and a pearl tie tack from the rue de la Paix.
Should a character, contrary to the rule, appear as a torn and problematic individual, what the narrative represents is his inevitable downfall. Characters conceived as survivors lose all trace of individuality. What we shall see in the two images are symbolic sleights-of-hand designed to free people of the anxieties induced by the process of modernization, to open up for them areas of free movement.
But anxiety falls away from the figure of the cool persona only to return in that of the Kreatur. The image of the creature was known from primal sources; it was readily available for reuse. The process of thinking it through once again, in the absence of institutionalized ameliora-tives not even social welfare or therapy represented a new challenge.
The arrow of progress now turns back on itself, describing a circle.
The new topos redirects wartime mobilization to civilian tracks; when the period of stability and neutrality runs its course, the traffic flow will be militarized once again. Yet for the time, in the peaceful middle years of the republic, traffic suggests the civilian sensitivity that blends functionalist perception and the idea of systems with revaluation of codes of conduct and a delight in urban circulation.
In every aspect of the traffic system, the lawfulness of pure values must be sacrificed to the idea of a completely realizable order. The medium, the clear light of which both distracts and obscures, is the inescapable disconnectedness among individuals operating in the existential sphere bounded on the one side by familiarity and, on the other, by objectivity. Intersubjective traffic systems may be mechanical, but they safeguard distance, which is to say, freedom of movement.
The functional topos of traffic promises to vent some of the heat generated by the oppositional constellation of the postwar years. The function of the state is to facilitate traffic, i. And the effects of the topos are considerable: Taking part in traffic is a provisional status; inserted in the prescribed current, the individual derives from it a feeling of freedom. It is not a place to put down roots. Expressive behavior, moreover, is of interest only as the play of gesture. In traffic, an arena is identified in which every sign is a signal guiding motion: Points of rest are provisional: What causes discontent is the sudden interruption of the flow, the occurrence of tedious traffic jams.
Such blockages, in turn, can be referred back to some disturbance, the elimination of which can be effected by technical means. That the traffic circulates around an empty center is all right, is not a distraction. On the contrary, the loss of a center is animating; it allows the senses to focus on circulation itself. To be mentioned above all in this connection is the penetration from all sides of rhythmic processes, and then the ensuing changes, how they give rise to high speeds.
There are already major areas in which our actions are becoming increasingly oscillatory, becoming reflex; this is true in particular of traffic. Kracauer observes an astounding array of communicational forms in the signs of traffic in The simple gesture with which a greeting is exchanged between taxi drivers and traffic police, for example, transcends the familiar categories we usually use to describe relations between state agents and private persons:. It is scarcely possible to measure how fleetingly the greeting is accomplished.
The policeman is occupied with difficult arm movements, which he must execute according to rigorously standardized stipulations. The driver, let us call him A. Neither a hierarchical nor a collegial relationship characterizes their greeting; Kracauer is more concerned to emphasize the context of the encounter as effected by the system:. What connects the driver with the traffic police is the constant utilization of the roadways for the sake of the generality of traffic.
These two categories of work contribute more to maintaining the flow than any others. New objectivity writers always observe traffic with an ambiguous grin; nothing must escape the functionalist gaze. Thus the term Verkehrsro-man traffic novel accounts for a good portion of the prose, and we can view both Kastner's Fabian and Bronnen's O. Whether behavior is appropriate or not, extending all the way through to entire lifestyles, is judged according to the model of traffic.
There is no room left here for an alternative to a functionalist descriptive vocabulary. When the Berlin city planner Martin Wagner defends his concept for the reconstruction of Alexanderplatz, his new objectivity squares render excellent service:. The major urban square is a nearly continually busy traffic channel, a clearing-point for a network of arteries of the first magnitude….
The capacity of a square to bear traffic is in turn a function of the traffic capacity of the streets leading into and out of the square…. Traffic flow on the square must be set in relation to stationary traffic, which attracts the consumption power of the masses of people crossing through the square shops, bars, warehouses, offices, and such …. A major urban square is both a stopping-off point and a channel for flowing traffic. Motion diagrams also set efficient mobility patterns between table, stove, and pantry.
Making work easier is equivalent to accelerating the pace. Traffic does not oblige its participants to a heroic pose: The lady at the wheel of a car must at every moment maintain her elegance unblemished by exertion. The acceptance of reflex goes hand in hand with another insight: The simple observation of a traffic signal leads to penetrating insights:.
On the most important intersections in Berlin, as we know, colored signal lights regulate traffic. The red stoplight does not, however, switch immediately to green, which signals the right of way, but changes first to a glowing yellow. Yellow signals a transition from one determinate state to another. It admonishes pedestrians and drivers to pay attention and relieves them of the need to consider people and vehicles that a sudden change of signals would otherwise require. To a certain extent, the use of a transitional light objectifies consideration and takes the initiative out of human hands.
Not only the engineer in general but the traffic engineer in particular becomes a prominent figure. When traffic becomes the central topos, beings who want to put down roots do not fare well: In a certain sense, the civilian traffic topos of the middle phase of the republic had a moderating effect: The attack on the idea of the republic as a neutral space for traffic ensues from two sides.
By the beginning of the , new objectivity writers are themselves discovering the traffic paradigm's dark side. Images of life pulsing through rationalized traffic constellations, unified and coherent in their mid presentation, now fall apart again. The vitalist ideal of a dynamic flow, the sense of civilization as the circulation of commodities, labor power, and money, which had for a moment blended seamlessly together, now fractures irreconcilably.
Kracauer's image of the underpass introduces the split. Does the traffic topos form the background structure of modernization, with the agonistic images of polarization, armoring, and schemati-cism occupying the symbolic foreground? The decade of the republic offers no bounded horizon within which homogenous images could ever arise.
What it produces is much more in the way of a mixing. In the literature of the new objectivity, the distant structure of circulation—which is indeed impartial but also civil—moves for a historical moment into the foreground. At the beginning of the , a militarization of the traffic paradigm begins. As Arnold Bronnen remarks in ,. The German, whose warrior nature embraces all its mutations, such as ambition, a challenging disposition, greedy commercialism, and contempt for death, apprehends traffic, in the first instance, as a warlike state.
He scouts out suspicious signs of hostile intent in every passerby, in order to be able to reciprocate immediately. In disastrous fashion, the dictatorship realizes the synthesis of people and traffic constructions Kracauer hoped for. Quite understandably, the externalities of visible behavior attract attention.
Surface psychology comes to dominate the field. In the expressionist portrait of the individual, contours fragment, as if the body's surface were splintering under the force of energy radiating out from a central stimulus. In the new objectivity model, contours hold. Eyes peer out like spotlights from beneath a shielding brow, to interrogate space; the body usually encased in a uniform, for quick sociological ranking presents an occupational and class affiliation to the gaze of others, who similarly present and interrogate others' performance.
The dadaists had prepared the change of perspective. Setting aside the expressionist representation, in which the head stores expressive energies, they opened skulls and put newspapers inside; they networked brains with signs from the print and electronic media. The decade of the new objectivity introduces a figure with his hat pulled down over eyes that, in their expressive dimension, are no longer of interest. The pose of indignation—raised head and steady gaze lending expression to the figure's discontent—becomes antediluvian, an object of parody:.
In new objectivity contexts the individual appears primarily as agent. The category of social interaction models the characters of literary representation. A single deed is not enough; instead, the restlessness of constant activity. The codes' schematicism keeps people from getting lost in the frenzy of circulation. Observing processes of repetitive motion and specifying radii of action move to the forefront in new objectivity literature: Rather than introspection, the motto now is movement.
And the new medium of film intensifies the shift we trace here. The dispute has no place for subtleties: The turn inward has become a turning out. An exploration of the orienting mechanisms of the outside world emerges as the reversal of psychoanalysis. A street had been run through the house of the psyche. Instead of answers to inquiry into the nature of human beings, our investigation of the period leads to a telling disappointment. There is no anthropology to be found; instead, codes of conduct.
The historical avant-garde of the years —30 is fascinated by characters with simple contours. If they should happen to suffer fatigue, they say only, with Charles Lindbergh in Brecht's Ozeanflug: What they decide on remains in the first instance abstract; what they want is to be in motion inside a process that compels mobility.
Avant-garde literature fills out the image, testing out how it will function in the organic world defined by the body. Ultimately I began an academic work about [Balthasar] Gracian's life precepts, which shortened for me many a dreadful hour. Our question now concerns Krauss's interest in The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Gracian's midseventeenth-century code of conduct, which he reconstructs in the extreme isolation of his prison cell.
In this situation, morality is not a compass you grip in your hand. These few words from Krauss's Lebenslehre may suggest the reason for the resistance fighter's interest in the Spanish Jesuit. In a letter of 26 March to Erich Auerbach, who was living in Istanbul in exile, he offers a succinct account of the reasons for his imprisonment:. At the instigation of the former Dean Tra'ger [dean of the Philosophische Fa-kulta't at the University of Marburg], who wanted to get rid of me, I was conscripted into the army in Ad arma cucurri, and I made it all the way to lance corporal.
But my brilliant career met a sudden end when I was arrested at the end of In January I was sentenced to death, along with countless others, by the Reich war tribunal.
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In May, after the judgment had been confirmed, I was moved to Plotzensee for execution…. It was possible to manage a transfer and, with the assistance of one of the tribunal justices who committed suicide after 20 July , to arrange for my psychiatric examination. I was moved from one prison to the other. Only at the end of was the death sentence commuted to confinement in a penitentiary. New danger from the Gestapo, which wanted to get me out of the military sentence and send me to Buchen-wald. My salvation was the hasty evacuation of the Torgau fortress, when I was able to take advantage of the confusion and flee in a hospital train.
A list of fourteen of the three hundred behavioral precepts from the Art of Worldly Wisdom will help clarify the reasons for Krauss's attraction. The criteria of selection reflect their astounding correspondence with precepts current in the Hope is a great falsifier of truth; let skill guard against this by ensuring that.
Find out each Man's Thumbscrew. Have resort to primary motors, which are not always the highest but more often the lowest part of his nature, no. One should be able to snatch a triumph at the end. Get used to the failings of your familiars, as you do to ugly faces. It is indispensable if they depend on us, or we on them. There are wretched characters with whom one cannot live, nor yet without them. To complain always brings discredit. Better be a model of self-reliance opposed to the passion of others than an object of their compassion. For it opens the way for the hearer to what we are complaining of, and to disclose one insult forms an excuse for another, no.
The other enters without anxiety; having lost everything, including shame, he has no further loss to fear. Make an Obligation beforehand of what would have to be a Reward afterwards. The same gift which would afterwards be merely a reward is beforehand an obligation, no. The Art of getting into a Passion. If possible, oppose vulgar importunity with prudent reflection; it will not be difficult for a really prudent man. The first step toward getting into a passion is to announce that you are in a passion.
By this means you begin the conflict with command over your temper, for one has to regulate one's passion to the exact point that is necessary and no further, no. Nothing depreciates a Man more than to show he is a Man like other Men. As the reserved are held to be more than men, so the frivolous are held to be less.
Be able to Forget. It is more a matter of luck than of skill. The things we remember best are those better forgotten. Memory is not only unruly, leaving us in the lurch when most needed, but stupid as well, putting its nose into places where it is not wanted, no. All the core ideas of the cult of objectivity are present here: Much of the advice is difficult of access.
Become what you are not. Thence man, rather than condition existence on change, draws change into his own ego, making of himself a monad determined by laws of change specific only to itself, which transforms the outer world in the process into a space for personal development. The innocence of becoming, as Nietzsche nicely blasphemed. What interests us here is Krauss's interpretation of the subject in the courtly codes of conduct.
I want to build a bridge from his construct to the philosophical anthropology of the and then to track the codes' fate in new objectivity narratives. At issue for Krauss and his contemporaries is nothing less than an experimental attempt to Jepsychol-ogize the modern concept of the subject. The inner regulator, the conscience, is precisely what the Jesuit has removed from the subject, because the conscience restricts freedom of movement.
Introspection is available to the persona as little as is the direction of conscience, raising the question of how it can establish identity. The only guarantee of mobility is a high-strung alertness and readiness to cut ties at any time. The complete persona, therefore, must never allow others to affix any firm characteristics on it. A total absence of characteristics increases the radius of action. A strain of authenticity could in easier times serve both uprightness and distinction, or even garner prestige. And the maxims of the courtly mobility doctrine reconstructed by Krauss do in fact reappear in the literature of the The most extreme version of the code at that time is found in Brecht:.
Why such audacity is useful emerges from a review of Krauss's book in , in the journal Romanische Forschung. But when the Christian goal starts losing its power to illuminate, the result can easily be double-entry bookkeeping for the conscience. For if every political path to the goal is justifiable, means and ends have no necessary ties between them. So goals become interchangeable, an outcome with unfathomable consequences:. Writers eagerly took up the dubious etymology that derived persona from personare: One is a person to the extent of one's success in arriving at the self by way of roles and their realizations.
Existence in the form of a persona fixes the individual's reactive character and dependent status in relation to others:. An activating stimulus is necessary-for the only way a person can achieve value is by going into the world. And there is no existence outside this value. The existence of a person is grounded in the unconditioned processes of social behavior.