Counter-Cultures in Germany and Central Europe From Sturm und Drang to Baader-Meinhof von Maike Oergel, Steve Giles
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Counter-Cultures in Germany and Central Europe – Oergel / Giles schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG
Peter Lang Bern 2003 Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet: www.beck.de ISBN 978 3 03910 007 1
Inhaltsverzeichnis: Counter-Cultures in Germany and Central Europe – Oergel / Giles
STEVE GILES
Introduction: Culture as Counter-Culture
On 15 March 1920, two days after the Kapp Putsch, a painting by Rubens was damaged by a stray bullet during fighting in Dresden between opponents and supporters of the attempted right-wing coup. Oskar Kokoschka, the renowned Expressionist artist and Professor at Dresden’s Akademie der Künste, immediately issued an appeal to the combatants to relocate their conflict away from the art gallery, so as to protect works of art which – in Kokoschka’s view – were the people’s most hallowed possession. The Marxist Dadaists John Heartfield and George Grosz responded to Kokoschka’s heartfelt plea by way of a diatribe which is iconoclastic even by Dadaist standards. Decrying Kokoschka as ‘Der Kunstlump’ – the art scoundrel – they welcomed the fact that bullets were hitting artistic masterpieces instead of exploding in the dwellings of impoverished workers.1 Their article launched a scathing attack on Kokoschka, whom they took to embody the dominant views on Art typical of bourgeois culture. Art is said to provide a spiritual haven, a transcendent vantage point from which the bourgeoisie can contemplate the everyday world with delight, secure in the knowledge that aesthetic culture invests life with meaning and significance. Grosz and Heartfield, on the other hand, dismiss artistic masterpieces as mere scraps of canvas and bourgeois culture as no more than the beguiling façade of ruthless capitalist exploitation. Similarly, the RomanticIdealist concept of artistic genius is unmasked as a piece of elitist ideology which covers up the fact that the artist’s head simply recycles the world-view of his audience, much as a sausage machine
1
The key texts in the ‘Kunstlump’ debate are those by Heartfield/Grosz and Alexander; their theoretical and historical contexts are admirably documented in Fähnders/Rector, 43–103.
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processes meat. What is needed, they conclude, is the development of an authentic working-class culture which rejects the bourgeois heritage in all its oppressive manifestations. Needless to say, Grosz and Heartfield’s invective was perceived to be outrageous even in the early, revolutionary phase of the Weimar Republic. Crucially, Gertrud Alexander, the editor of the cultural section of Die Rote Fahne, the German Communist Party’s daily newspaper, was utterly appalled by their vandalistic attack on the cultural heritage, and she steadfastly defends the universal and humanist dimensions of the bourgeois artistic tradition. The ensuing debate prefigures conflicts and controversies over the bourgeois cultural heritage that were to dominate Marxist aesthetics for the next fifty years or more, and receives a provisional counter-cultural coda in the guise of Heiner Müller’s assertion in 1977 that ‘der Humanismus kommt nur noch als Terrorismus vor, der MolotowCocktail ist das letzte bürgerliche Bildungserlebnis.’ (Müller, 40) When compared to the systematic vituperation of Grosz and Heartfield, the critiques of bourgeois culture articulated by the students’ movement in the 1960s seem almost tame, but the ‘Kunstlump’ debate is significant not simply because it pre-empts the possibly parochial posturings of disaffected ‘68ers’ (see Dirke, 42–49). It also compels us to reconsider the very notion of counter-culture, which all too often has tended to be associated with American and European radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s.2 The ‘Kunstlump’ debate also maps out a terrain and delineates a series of theoretical parameters on and within which other radical critiques of bourgeois culture and politics – for example feminist, Black Power, post-colonial – were articulated, as well as inviting us to consider the extent to which the polemics of Marxist Dadaists were truly counter-cultural, as opposed to marginally sub-cultural at best. This latter dilemma is particularly important for Sabine von Dirke in her classic study of West German counter-culture, ‘All Power to the Imagination!’ As she rightly points out in her introductory comments 2
On the international dimension of these movements, see Caute. The West German context is discussed in Dirke, passim; the American situation is critically reviewed in Bell, 120–45.
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on culture and hegemony, the investigation of counter-culture immediately raises fundamental theoretical questions. These concern the nature of culture; the relationship between culture and politics; the distinction between sub-cultures and counter-cultures; the class basis of culture and counter-culture; and the broader sociological frameworks within which culture, politics, class and dominant institutions may be configured. At the same time, because Dirke focuses on counter-cultural movements in West Germany from the late 1960s through to the mid 1980s, she does not engage with a variety of issues which are relevant from a more expansive historical and theoretical perspective. Taking the historical dimension first, there is a case for arguing that all the ground-breaking cultural developments in Germany and central Europe from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism may be construed as counter-cultures – not in the perhaps trivial sense that any ‘new’ cultural development is critical of its predecessors, but in the more drastic and fundamental sense that modern German culture has been characterised by a series of paradigm shifts, or even caesuras, whereby the conceptual and institutional presuppositions of the prior cultural formation have been decisively rejected. Moreover, deploying the category of counter-culture as a tool of historical analysis also enables us to rethink contemporary controversies concerning, for example, the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, or the relative priority of the avant-garde – as opposed to counter-cultural manifestations – in initiating and defining radical artistic movements from the late nineteenth century onwards.3 At the same time, rethinking counter-culture as a historical category also has theoretical implications. Instead of approaching the historical development of culture in linear or evolutionary terms, as one formation is succeeded by another in a process of inheritance or Aufhebung, the counter-cultural perspective outlined above suggests that our primary object of analysis might be not artistic evolution, but cultural revolution. Similarly, attending to radical shifts and ruptures at the overarching historical or chronological level also raises questions concerning the internal cohesiveness of any particular cultural formation if such fundamental changes are to be possible. In 3
For further discussion, see the essays compiled in Giles, Theorizing Modernism.
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other words, the underlying dynamic of endogenous cultural development might itself be counter-cultural, in the sense that the domain of – say – artistic phenomena is constantly reshaped, as the centre becomes the periphery, ‘low’ culture is transmuted into ‘high culture’, and vice-versa. Defining and deploying the category of counter-culture in these various ways would suggest that counter-culture can be conceived of in critical, historical, and even methodological terms. In the remainder of this Introduction, I shall first flesh out the notion of counter-culture with reference to Dirke’s very helpful theoretical discussion. In order to consider in more detail the sociological and aesthetic issues highlighted in her argument, I shall then examine a series of perspectives – Marxism, Russian Formalism, Czech Structuralism, and Rezeptionsästhetik – which are particularly apposite when conceptualising counterculture, by drawing on the work of Jameson, Tynjanov, Mukarovsky, and Jauß. This discussion will be informed by the general assumption that cultural analysis must avoid the pitfalls noted by Adorno in his critique of traditional approaches to the sociology of music: Je gesicherter soziologische Befunde über Musik, desto ferner und äußerlicher sind sie ihr selbst. Je tiefer aber sie in spezifisch musikalische Zusammenhänge sich versenken, desto ärmer und abstrakter drohen sie als soziologische zu werden. (Adorno, ‘Vermittlung’, 209)
Finally, I shall give a brief overview of the essays compiled in this volume – all of which were first presented at an International Symposium on Counter-Cultures at the University of Nottingham in September 2001 – indicating in particular the generic concerns which they address. Sabine von Dirke’s approach to counter-culture draws heavily on the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s, especially its pioneering appropriation of Antonio Gramsci’s account of hegemony. She begins, though, by considering in more general terms the relationships between subcultures and counter-cultures, and culture and society. While the term culture is often used, particularly in literary circles, to refer to the more elevated and edifying manifestations of human creative endeavour, it
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may also be employed in a more comprehensive manner to designate the variety of ways in which we make sense of social relations. Moreover, she continues, the precise character of the inter-connections between culture and society is complicated by the fact that society may well not be a homogeneous or harmonious entity, but a site of struggle where different social groups seek to achieve cultural dominance or – to use Gramsci’s term – hegemony. The term hegemony refers to the ways in which dominant groups in a society establish the legitimacy of their position by means of consent rather than coercion, as the rest of society is encouraged to share in their views and values. The emergence of counter-cultural groupings or beliefs implies at least a partial breakdown in hegemony, whilst the appearance of subcultures may question dominant values only marginally. Dirke’s argumentation is quite emphatic in this area, in that she advocates what one might call a maximalist conception of counter-culture, in order to distinguish it more sharply from merely sub-cultural phenomena and thus underscore the radicality of West German counter-culture in the 1960s and 1970s. In her view, Countercultures position themselves explicitly and fundamentally against their dominant counterpart and try to develop an alternative way of life. They challenge the hegemonic culture with a holistic approach, negating all of its values and traditions and struggling for radical and comprehensive change. (Dirke, 4)
She therefore implies not only that counter-cultures are either intrinsically rejectionist or revolutionary, but also that they do not operate simply at the artistic or intellectual level: they call into question the entirety of social and political relations. Such a conception of counter-culture may well apply to alternative social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, and evidently characterises proletarian cultural manifestations in the 1920s, particularly in the early years of the Soviet Union.4 But this
4
See in particular the excellent compilation of primary materials in Gorsen/Knödler-Bunte.
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conception is perhaps too stark to be able to take proper account of less fundamentalist counter-cultural developments which certainly have more than a tangential sub-cultural impact, yet may operate primarily in the artistic sphere, or stop short at rejecting the entirety of hegemonic views and values that permeate a particular social formation. Dirke’s maximalist approach to counter-culture also adumbrates the notion of cultural revolution, not just as historical event but also as a structural principle of cultural development in the manner outlined by Fredric Jameson. Towards the end of ‘On Interpretation’,5 the theoretical monograph which forms the opening section to The Political Unconscious, Jameson invites us to entertain the proposition that the overarching category in literary history should be cultural revolution. He had previously argued that a Marxist critique of cultural texts should operate at three distinct levels, construed as concentric frameworks, first, of political history, in the narrow sense of punctual event and a chroniclelike sequence of happenings in time; then of society, in the now already less diachronic and timebound sense of a constitutive tension and struggle between social classes; and, ultimately, of history now conceived in its vastest sense of the sequence of modes of production and the succession and destiny of the various social formations. (Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 75)
Cultural revolution is located in this third framework, and Jameson implicitly assents to the view that historically significant events are ‘those which initiate or constitute ruptures, mutations or more generally transformations in social forms’ (Bhaskar, 47).6 Such transformations are generated by contradictions within social formations that are overlaid by antagonistic modes of production. Jameson now proposes that the emergence of all previous modes of production has been associated with cultural revolution, but goes on to 5 6
Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 17–102; my discussion is based primarily on pp. 95–100. Bhaskar also gives a particularly sophisticated account of Marx’s transformational model of social activities in the course of his general discussion of societal structures and relations in classical sociological theory (see Bhaskar, 34–56).
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insist that the category of cultural revolution does not only apply to transitional epochs. This is because any society is characterised by a permanent process of conflict and struggle between antagonistic modes of production. Jameson therefore concludes that the individual cultural text – whether it be a play, a painting or a poem – must now be reconfigured as ‘a field of force in which the dynamics of sign systems of several distinct modes of production can be registered and apprehended’ (Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 98). Moreover, these sign systems operate both in society in general and within particular artistic processes, so that, he continues, formal features of texts themselves transmit ideological messages which may be at odds with a text’s ostensible content. Although Jameson’s argument appears at various points to be indebted to Adorno’s account of artistic mediation, it also bears a striking resemblance to the early work of the Russian Formalist Jurij Tynjanov; indeed, it might almost be seen as providing a materialist foundation for Tynjanov’s otherwise overly abstract conception of dialectic.7 In his brilliant but neglected essay ‘Das literarische Faktum’ of 1924, Tynjanov rejects the view that literary evolution is a straightforwardly linear process. He concentrates instead on categories such as interruption and disjunction, and argues that innovations in the literary sphere involve a fundamental shift in the terms of reference of the literary system: ‘Das ist nicht planmäßige Evolution, sondern Sprung, nicht Entwicklung, sondern Verschiebung’ (Tynjanov, ‘Das literarische Faktum’, 395). In other words, literary ‘evolution’ does not move in a straight line, but is broken and disrupted. Similarly, new artistic developments do not modify or amplify a tradition, but supplant existing forms. In fact, at one point in this essay, Tynjanov’s terminology seems to be implicitly Marxist, when he suggests that the underlying principles of literary development are struggle and supersession (401). Elsewhere, however, the implication seems to be that the dynamics of literary change are rather more abstract, and
7
See Adorno, ‘Vermittlung’; Jameson’s account of mediation is discussed in Giles, ‘Against Interpretation’. Jameson briefly considers Tynjanov’s work in The Prison-House of Language, 91–95, but does not refer to the ‘Literary Fact’ essay, possibly as it has never been translated into English.
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virtually automatic. He observes that any dynamic system necessarily generates its opposite within itself thanks to a dialectical process governed by chance developments, errors in and violations of that system (409), rather than referring to a properly Marxian dialectic grounded in the conflict between forces and relations of production. In fact, the motor of literary change almost seems to resemble a cultural tumbler dryer, given Tynjanov’s emphasis on the constant interchange between the centre and the peripheries of a system which is clearly in a condition of endemic flux (399). Tynjanov’s model of the literary system can be seen as countercultural in both synchronic and diachronic terms, so much so that the very categorisation of literature becomes an essentially contested domain. In that respect, his theoretical position is comparable to that of the Czech Structuralist Jan Mukarovsky, who takes on board many of Tynjanov’s central precepts but also – in the mid 1930s at least – provides them with a more substantial sociological foundation, as well as applying them to the cultural sphere in general.8 Mukarovsky contends that the history of art involves a series of rebellions against ruling norms, in that there is a constant tension between old and new, between tradition and innovation. Indeed, the development of modern art in particular seems to presuppose that the aesthetic value of a work entails a rejection of existing aesthetic norms, the consequence being that aesthetic value – and the nature of art – is inherently mutable. The dynamics of normative change are dialectical in the manner outlined by Tynjanov, as Mukarovsky indicates that the aesthetic realm of culture is governed by a series of opposing factors whose conflictual and contradictory interaction generates cultural development. At the same time, though, Mukarovsky also presents a more concrete and specific account of the societal dimension of aesthetic norms. Mukarovsky shows that in any social formation there simultaneously exists a variety of systems of aesthetic norms, which are in conflict and competition with one another. These normative systems are dynamic, ever-changing and permeable, so that norms may, for instance, shift from the aesthetic realm to the domain of 8
For a more detailed analysis of Mukarovsky’s work in this area see Giles, ‘Sociological Aesthetics’. My discussion here is based on Mukarovsky, 33–66.
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ethics, and vice-versa. Crucially, aesthetic norms share a key property of all norms, as they are organised on the basis of societal stratification and differentiation. Just as we are able to express ourselves linguistically in various social dialects, so too, Mukarovsky maintains, we may well be conversant with a variety of aesthetic norms. Moreover, he continues, social stratification must be defined both vertically – in traditional social class terms – and horizontally, with reference to categories such as age, gender and occupational group (categories which might, of course, be supplemented with others, such as religion and ethnicity). It therefore follows that not only different social strata, but also different sectors within the same social stratum, may adhere to different and conflicting sets of aesthetic norms, so much so that they may even construct alternative artistic canons. The interplay between social stratification, aesthetic norms and cultural canons also has an institutional dimension. Society has developed a range of agencies which, for example, regulate the evaluation of art-works and thus enable society to influence aesthetic value. These institutional forms include literary criticism, public libraries, museums, academies, prizes, and even censorship. Although the primary role of these and other agencies may well not be to influence aesthetic value, in that they in fact carry out a range of societal functions and mediate a variety of societal tendencies, their regulation of aesthetic value is closely connected with general social developments. Mukarovsky thus provides us with a more sophisticated and differentiated way of characterising the shifts and gradations between sub-cultures and counter-cultures through his account of the relationship between social stratification, aesthetic norms and cultural canons. He also emphasises that the societal mediation of those norms and canons involves institutional structures which play a crucial role in the reproduction of the cultural sphere. How, though, are we to establish whether a specific cultural development or seeming innovation is merely reproductive of dominant modes of discourse, rather than being transformative or even revolutionary? This question was addressed in a particularly instructive fashion by Hans Robert Jauß in his classic essay ‘Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft’, where
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he attempted to transcend and supersede the supposed limitations of Marxism and Formalism, and thereby heal the rift between the sociological and the aesthetic in modern literary studies and, by extension, in cultural inquiry in general. At the same time, Jauß does nonetheless endorse certain key premises of Russian Formalism, starting with the notion that the course of literary history does not proceed in a smooth, linear or teleological manner, but is permeated instead by discontinuities, conflict and revolution. In view of the fact that Jauß maintains that epochal shifts in literary history and the artistic value of specific works both depend on their rejection of prevailing aesthetic norms, his theoretical approach could be characterised as being intrinsically counter-cultural, as the category of counter-culture implicitly informs his historiographical and his evaluative presuppositions. From Jauß’s own standpoint, however, his key theoretical notion and his most innovative contribution to cultural inquiry is the horizon of expectations, or Erwartungshorizont. Jauß contends that readers and audiences always perceive literary texts against the background of a series of assumptions which establish the nature of literature. But, in order to escape the accusation that such assumptions are merely arbitrary or subjective, he proposes that they are in fact embedded in an objectifiable referential system of coordinates or expectations, namely an Erwartungshorizont. The Erwartungshorizont of a particular grouping of readers – or even writers and critics – incorporates elements such as a prior understanding of genre conventions, formal and thematic aspects of texts already known to the reader, and the opposition between practical and poetic language. Epochal change – or, we might say, a counter-cultural shift – involves a fundamental transformation in the Erwartungshorizont, inaugurated by texts which radically reject or deconstruct prevailing artistic conventions. Basic structural changes in the Erwartungshorizont can, Jauß proposes, be identified by establishing the existence of ruptures and discontinuities between those dominant referential schemas which happen to be in force at different points in time. Rather like a cultural gardener digging with an analytical spade, the literary historian would make a vertical slice through a particular cultural formation in order to reveal a cross-section of aesthetic space which incorporates the variety
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of oppositional and hierarchical normative structures in evidence at a particular social moment. This initial slice or cross-section would then be followed up by further slices from earlier and later periods, so as to enable comparisons to be made between these various moments in order to establish the extent of normative change. At the same time, the foundation would be laid for a new type of literary or cultural history which focuses on diachronic ruptures rather than underlying continuities. Although Jauß’s new mode of literary history appears to lend itself particularly well to counter-cultural analysis, it does have certain shortcomings. First, Jauß takes certain contentious Russian Formalist precepts – such as the opposition between poetic and practical language – to be self-evident, and he incorporates them into his general schema of readerly expectations even though they are historically specific and intimately associated with late modernism.9 Second, whereas he insists that such expectations are not subjective or psychologistic, his evidence for their objectivity is not derived from systematic investigations into the underlying structures of readers’ responses but refers instead to the occurrence of certain stylistic features in parodistic texts. And, thirdly, the core components of the Erwartungshorizont are restricted to aesthetic norms and conventions. Nevertheless, his revamped methodology for literary history still provides a productive starting-point for counter-cultural analysis, and I would propose modifying Jauß’s theoretical model in three principal ways. First, Jauß’s emphasis on expectations should be replaced by a focus on discursive presuppositions, so that instead of establishing the constitutive features of the reader’s horizon of expectations, we would seek to reconstruct the relevant horizons of discourse which underpin readers’ perceptions of texts.10 Second, the key conceptual components in a particular horizon of discourse should be identified on a
9 10
On Russian Formalism and late modernism, see my essay on Kracauer in this volume. I use the term discourse not in the Foucauldian sense, but to designate the set of implicit and explicit beliefs and presuppositions which inform and constitute a domain in their textual embodiment, eg in terms of figurative language, rhetoric and syntax.
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strictly historical basis, so that inappropriate or anachronistic normative and analytic categories are not built into the horizon of discourse on an a priori basis. And, thirdly, the horizon of discourse should not be construed essentially or primarily in aesthetic terms. Jauß is right to argue that reading – and writing – is located within an objectifiable referential framework of norms and conventions, so that no act of reading is theory-neutral. But the discursive presuppositions which inform particular readings may also be ethical, political, sociological, or even metaphysical, whether we are investigating key moments in literary history or cultural transformations. To give but one example, it would be illuminating to compare the contemporary reception of, say Schlink’s Der Vorleser and Grass’s Im Schneckengang, with the contemporary reception of Grass’s Die Blechtrommel and Weiss’s Die Ermittlung, in order to develop a critique of the discursive presuppositions of the various sectors of the German reading public and their shifting horizons. It might then be possible to fulfil the stringent criteria set out by Adorno in his specification of reception research: Das kunstsoziologische Ideal wäre, objektive Analysen – das heißt, solche der Werke – , Analysen der strukturellen und spezifischen Wirkungsmechanismen und solche der registrierbaren subjektiven Befunde aufeinander abzustimmen. Sie müßten sich wechselseitig erhellen. (Adorno, ‘Thesen zur Kunstsoziologie’, 206)
In the closing session of the Nottingham Counter-Cultures Symposium, which involved a wide-ranging discussion of general implications arising from the papers which had been presented, various questions were posed to which I was invited to respond in this Introduction. Is counter-culture positional or relative, in other words is one person’s culture another person’s counter-culture? Is counterculture intrinsically marginal or temporary? Is counter-culture only valid as a polemical term, rather than as an analytic category? Does counter-culture have to be explicitly political or politicised? If we focus on the aesthetic dimensions of a counter-culture, must we inevitably underplay its theoretical and political dimensions? While I would hope that this Introduction has provided at least some useful theoretical reflections on these issues, the papers that follow address
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them rather more concretely. Chronologically, they cover aspects of German and central European culture from the 1770s to the 1990s, whilst in genre terms they deal with narrative, theatre, poetry, photography, and a variety of counter-cultural institutional and theoretical initiatives. Thematically, they engage with a similarly broad range of concerns: the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century roots of counter-culture and terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s; anti-modern, anti-urban, and green movements since the turn of the twentieth century; new conceptions of art and the relationship between aesthetics and politics on the left and the right which emerged in the wake of modernism; and alternative political movements since the 1960s, notably the Red Army Faction and its literary affiliations. Finally, the editors wish to note that the Counter-Cultures Symposium was overshadowed by the horrific and traumatic events of 11 September 2001 which had taken place three days earlier. Several US delegates were unable to attend, and discussions of terrorist violence and the Red Army Faction proved to be particularly difficult. Participants took the view, nonetheless, that it was important to grapple with such issues in the hope of throwing some light at least on their causes and contexts.
Works Cited Adorno, T.W. ‘Thesen zur Kunstsoziologie’, in Bürger, P. (Hg) Seminar: Literaturund Kunstsoziologie (Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, 1978), 204–11. —— ‘Vermittlung’, in Adorno, T.W. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1968), 208–33. Alexander, G.G.L. ‘Herrn John Heartfield und George Grosz’, Die Rote Fahne, 9 June 1920. Reprinted in Fähnders/Rector, 50–53. —— ‘Kunst, Vandalismus und Proletariat. Erwiderung’, Die Rote Fahne, 23/24 June 1920. Reprinted in Fähnders/Rector, 56–60. Bell, D. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (London, Heinemann, 1976). Bhaskar, R. The Possibility of Naturalism. A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (Brighton, Harvester, 1979). Caute, D. Sixty-Eight. The Year of the Barricades (London, Paladin, 1988).
