Addendum to the protohistory: on an agent provacateur

Gersholm Scholem, in his exchange of letters with Hannah Arendt, accused her of being one of those Weimar leftwing Jews who objectively strenghthened  anti-semitism. Specifically, he referred to Kurt Tucholsky: “I cannot refute those who say the Jews deserved their fate, because they did not take earlier steps to defned themselves, because they were cowardly, etc. I came across this argument only recently in a book by that honest Jewish anti-semite, Kurt Tucholsky.”

Surprisingly, Arendt not only replied that she was not an anti-semite at all, but that Tucholsky was not one, either: Besides, I am happy that I misunderstood your phrase about my belonging to the Jewish people. You mention the « antisemite Tucholsky, and if I undestand correctly, established a link between the two. In as far as Tucholsky is concerned, I do not at all share your opinion. An antisemite is an antisemite and not a Jew for whom it may happen, sometimes, that he expresses himself in critical terms on Jewish matters, and it doen’t make any difference if he is right or wrong.”

There is a lot of bad faith in Scholem’s mention of Tucholsky. I don’t believe he just recently came across some “argument” by Tucholsky recently; Tucholsky, after all, was one of the targets of Walter Benjamin’s Left Melancholy review-essay, in 1931; moreover, Tucholsky’s satire of the upper class bourgeois Jewish German culture, in the Mr. Wendriner stories, were not about “Jews” as such, but about how a particular class, invested in German nationalism, refused to recognize the seriousness of anti-Semitism and was compliant with a call to order that ran counter to the enlightenment ideal of tolerance for all creeds. That ideal was, of course, also one that Israel was countering in its own way in Scholem’s time – and seventy years later, the ethno-state that has emerged in Israel finds its allies more in Hungary and Saudi Arabia than in any distant descendent of the enlightenment.

For German intellectuals, Tucholsky is a sort of touchstone. Unlike Karl Kraus,  Tucholsky has never made any serious inroad into the Anglosphere: there’s no Jonathan Franzen translation of Tucholsky. But Benjamin’s 1931 Left Melancholy essay, ostensibly a review of Eric Kästner’s poems that groups  Kästner  with Tucholsky,  has left a mark.

To my mind, the Left melancholy article is Benjamin at his Zhdanovian worst. Although ostensibly a review of Kästner’s poems, it does not mention a single poem, or quote a single line. It dismisses the job of, well, actually reviewing the poems by saying that these poems flit through newspapers and magazines like fish flit through dirty water: in the claustrophobic space of a book, the poems are out of place. That is a promising start that goes nowhere, because Benjamin wants to use Kästner as a type – the literary Leftist. Unserious, disengaged from working class politics, a product of the decayed bourgeoisie. That Benjamin is himself a member of the decayed bourgeoisie, the son of a prosperous assimilated German Jew, is left aside. The mention of Tucholsky is definitely flitting – like a minnow darting through cloudy invective: “With the worker’s movement they had little to do. They are much more the counterpart to the feudal mimicry that was so admired in the Wilhelmine era among reserve officers, a phenomenon of bourgeois disintegration. The left radical journalists of the type of Kästner, Mehring or Tucholsky are the proletarian mimicry of the bourgeois collapse. Their function is, from the political point of view, to make cliques instead of parties, and from the literary point of view, to make fashions instead of schools, while economically, they are not producers but agents.”

The argument that a group known for its anti-military activity are really analogous to reserve officers  thuds along, using a paradoxical rhetoric of saying that x, which claims to be the opposite of y, is really in cahoots with y, and takes its job as making  analogies, not arguments. The analogies, in the time honoured tropes of the demagogue, can then be used to condemn.  The honor and hierarchy, feudal values to which the officers pretended to adhere, are one thing; what values are being mimicked – and in a proletarian way – by the left radical authors? As we peer into that analogy, we see that it is made more for the insult and injury, and less for the concept: it is impossible to make sense of a proletarian mimicry of bourgeois collapse, unless what is being hinted at here is that these authors are adopting the values of a lumpen proletariat of pimps, prostitutes and hoods. This is one way of explaining the left radical demand for sexual freedom and the abolition of laws against abortion and homosexuality, and it would go along with the reactionary tendencies in Stalin’s Soviet Union at the time. But Benjamin himself can’t get that out of his mouth – because he knows that saying it explicitly would align him with the worst characteristics of the right.

Benjamin’s whole essay is composed in this din, where argument gets lost in aggression. At its lowest point, when Benjamin compares the suicide of an expressionist poet to “dumping” stock on the stock market, the Zhdanovian polemic truly takes on the mask of  the gutter press, in which Tucholsky and other left radicals are “Jewish swine.” Benjamin should have been more superstitious:  can only write such things if one is certain of never committing, or having to commit, suicide. A curse is unleashed here which comes back to haunt both the victim and the perpetrator of this essay.

Tucholsky, of course, could take care of himself. I do not know if Tucholsky mentioned this essay in some letter. I doubt it, as the “review” was refused by the Frankfurter Zeitung, Kracauer’s paper, and published in Gesellschaft, which I believe was edited by Horkheimer. Tucholsky in 1931 was a much bigger personality than Benjamin; but the terms of Benjamin’s criticism converge, in an odd  way, with Scholem’s latter accusation that Tucholsky was “objectively anti-semitic”. It is an odd thing, and perhaps due to the perverse power of the satirist’s negativity, that these criticisms seem by some fate to tread in the rhythms of  Tucholsky’s own satires. Around the time  Scholem and Arendt were discussing Tucholsky,  Golo Mann, that pompous cold warrior, summed up the problem with Tucholsky in rhetoric that uncannily sounds like the plea for a gentleman’s agreement – that is, for   a quota system for Jews. Mann does use the J word. What he says is there is a place for these nay-sayers like Tucholsky and, before him, Heine, writers who “in the positive sense of the word believe in nothing… men of high gifts, we are thinking for instance of Kurt Tucholsky. We confess that he lacks the tact, modesty,  and restraint of a firmly affirmative tradition, even a creative one; yet in the in spiritual household of the nation it is good there are some such critics, some such verse makers, some such sociologists, but not too many of them, and that in the twenties there were rather too much than too few.”

Yes, it wasn’t the authoritarian judges letting those paramilitaries go free who murdered leftists, but it was those without a sense of, well, restraint who satirized these judges who made it all go to hell. Perhaps called their fate up on themselves!
Twelve years before Benjamin’s Left Melancholy article, Tucholsky published what some of his critics consider to be a manifesto – in the key of Nein. It appeared in the journal he co-edited, the Weltbuehne: Wir Negative.

Tucholsky starts out by an implicit question: is it just his character, or has there emerged, in post-war Germany, a collective spiritual negation? From his experience as an editor, he finds that the negations to which he is attached seem to pop up in the work of his contributors. Of course, this is an elementary survey bias, but nevertheless there is something this bias touches.

His starting point is revolution. In 1919, Revolution did not seem so far away – one could take a train to Russia and see it in action. Tucholsky did not: instead, he looked around Germany.

“If Revolution means collapse, we we had one: but one must not expect that the ruins will look different than the old buildings. We had failure and hunger, and those responsible have gotten away with it. And there stand the people: they have ripped down the old banners, but there haven’t been any new ones. “

In 1931, from Tucholsky’s viewpoint, the people who got away have now come back, twice as bad, and the positive response on the left, the opposition in particular of the Communists,  has been grossly inadequate. For all Benjamin’s talk of the writer as producer versus the writer as agent, the social fact of a changed media system made the productivist notion archaic. The nineteenth century, where Victor Hugo could plausibly dream of employing his pen to overturn a government, had been buried by a new, symbol-pushing form of capitalist enterprise.

It is not that Tucholsky was not an activist. In fact, his book against the German culture and military was so disturbing to the system that even after World War II and the fall of the Berlin wall, Kohl’s government was trying to censor Tucholsky’s phrase: Soldiers are murderers with laws making it against the law to “discredit the military.” This was in the 90s, when Benjamin had long been absorbed into academia.
Tucholsky proposes, in this essay, a thought experiment: suppose the war had gone another way, and Germany had won? Would the people have been happy? And his answer is that, given the situation today, in 1919, given the spiritual conditions, many of them, including the workers, probably would have.

It is a rabble rousing document, this manifesto for the negatives, but it is very conscious that it has no rabble to rouse – that the point is to make that rabble. To raise its consciousness.
“We cannot yet say yes. We cannot reinforce a consciousness that forgets from on high the humanity in human beings. We cannot encourage a people to do its duty only because for every toiler a mirage of honor has been created that only hinders essential work. We cannot say yes to a people who remain today in the frame of mind that, had the war somehow come to a happier end, would have justified our worst fears. We cannot say yes to a country obsessed with collectives and for whom corporate bodies are elevated far above the individual. Collectives merely provide assistance to the individual. We cannot say yes to those whose fruits are now  displayed by the younger generation: a lukewarm and vapid species infected with an infantile hunger for power at home and an indifference toward things abroad, more devoted to bars than to bravery, with unspeakable antipathy for all Sturm und Drang—no longer bearable today— without fire and without dash, without hate and without love. We are supposed to walk, but our legs are bound with cords. We cannot yet say yes.“

This is much more predictive of the world Benjamin was entering in the 30s than his dismissal of left melancholics as a slumming annex to the bourgeoisie. Like many manifestos, it dates itself; and yet the heart of the thing – the refusal to accept the idea that the world that exists at present is our only alternative and the goal towards which we have been striving – is still hopelessly valid. If Tucholsky was “mourning”, it was not because he had some love for a dead and gone thing, but for a thing that never came to be, even as it obviously should have been. What obviously should have been is, I would say, the crisis we face on all fronts today. Tucholsky is still relevant, not as an academic good but as an agent provocateur.