Lowy - Redemption and Utopia

Our generation has learnt the hard way that the only image we shall leave is that of a vanquished generation. That will be our legacy to those who follow.

Walter Benjamin

Thesis XII, from On the Philosophy of History, 1940

The term Central Europe or Mitteleuropa refers to a geographical, cultural and historical area united by German culture that of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From the middle of the nineteenth century up to 1933, the culture of the Central European Jewish community blossomed in the most extraordinary way, experiencing a Golden Age comparable to that of the Judeo-Arab community in twelfth-century Spain. It was the product of a spiritual synthesis unique in its kind, which gave the world Heine and Marx, Freud and Kafka, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin. Today this German-Jewish culture seems like a vanished world, a continent erased from history, an Atlantis engulfed by the ocean, along with its palaces, temples and monuments. It was destroyed by the Nazi tide, surviving only in scattered pockets or in exile, and its last representatives Marcuse, Fromm and Bloch have now passed away, like the final embers of a huge spiritual fire. It did, however, leave its mark on twentieth-century culture, in its richest and most innovative accomplishments in the sciences, literature and philosophy.

This book studies a generation as well as a particular current within the Jewish cultural universe of Mitteleuropa: a generation of intellectuals born during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, whose writings were inspired by both German (romantic) and Jewish (messianic) sources. Their thinking was profoundly, organically and inseparably Judeo-Germanic, whether they accepted this syncretism with pride (Gustav Landauer) or with wrenching pain (Franz Kafka), whether they tried to deny their German sources (Gershom Scholem) or their Jewish identity (Georg Lukcs). Their thinking took shape around the Jewish (cabbalistic) idea of Tikkun, a polysemic term for redemption (Erlsung), restoration, reparation, reformation and the recovery of lost harmony.

Theirs was a generation of dreamers and utopians: they aspired to a radically other world, to the kingdom of God on earth, to a kingdom of the spirit, a kingdom of freedom, a kingdom of peace. An egalitarian community, libertarian socialism, anti-authoritarian rebellion and a permanent revolution of the spirit were their ideals. Several fell like lonely soldiers in a twentieth-century Thermopylae, victims of a barbarism that was either still budding (Gustav Landauer, Munich 1919) or already triumphant (Walter Benjamin, Port-Bou 1940). For the most part, they were unarmed prophets. One episode from the life of Georg Lukcs could apply to many of them. Following the defeat of the Hungarian revolution in November 1956 (in which he had participated as Minister of Culture in the Imre Nagy government), Lukcs found himself under arrest. A Soviet officer, brandishing his machine gun, ordered: Hand over your weapons immediately! Not having any choice, the old Jewish-Hungarian philosopher took his pen from his pocket and handed it over to the forces of order.

Their generation were the defeated of history. It is not surprising that so many of them chose suicide: Tucholsky, Toller, Wolfenstein, Carl Einstein, Hasenclever, Benjamin.

In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin insisted that history be written from the point of view of the defeated. This book tries to apply that method.

Through a paradox that is more apparent than real, it is precisely because they were the defeated, because they were outsiders going against the tide of their era, and because they were obstinate romantics and incurable utopians, that, as we approach the end of the twentieth century, their work is becoming increasingly relevant and meaningful.

It goes without saying that the romantic and messianic generation contained the most diverse and contradictory political and ideological currents. The aim of this book is not to resolve its debates or to take a stand in the controversies, but rather to understand the overall movement, its genesis in Central Europe at an historical and social conjuncture of crisis and renewal for both the Jewish tradition and German culture. Written within the framework of the sociology of culture, it analyses the development of a new social category, the Jewish intelligentsia, and the conditions that favoured the dawning within that group of a twofold spiritual configuration of romantic utopia and restorative messianism. The key concept, which may open up new and still largely unexplored possibilities for the sociology of culture, is that of elective affinity a concept which appeared in the works of Goethe and Max Weber, but which I have formulated differently in this analysis. In studying the works of more than a dozen authors, both known and unknown, famous and obscure, revered and forgotten, I do not intend to sketch the history of their ideas, nor to present a short philosophical monograph on each of them; rather, I shall attempt to reconstruct an entire socially-conditioned cultural universe in its multidimensional unity. This approach seeks to throw new light on a broad expanse of modern European culture by identifying a subterranean network of correspondences linking several of the most creative intellects. I shall also try to account for the eruption, within a magnetic field polarized by libertarian romanticism and Jewish messianism, of a new concept of history, including a new perception of temporality at variance with evolutionism and the philosophy of progress.

The author who formulated this heretical concept this new mode of perceiving history and time in the deepest, most radical and subversive way was Walter Benjamin. For that reason, and because all the tensions, dilemmas and contradictions of the German-Jewish cultural universe were concentrated in his person, he takes centre stage in this essay. He is, in effect, at the heart of the messianic-romantic generation; and his thinking, though slightly out-of-date and strangely anachronistic, is also the most topical and the most charged with utopian explosiveness. His work clarifies the thinking of the others within the group; and they in turn illuminate his work, in a two-way game not of endlessly reflecting mirrors but of mutually questioning looks.