Читать книгу Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893 - 1933 - Bernd Bocian - Страница 12

Friedrich Salomon Perls was born in Berlin in the year 1893 as the third child and only son of a Jewish family from the Eastern part of the German Empire. This date and origin place him in a certain social and historical context. In answer to the question of which formative social influences Perls’s generation assimilated, I would like to cite the following important spheres of influence – naturally, from a focused perspective based on my knowledge of the later course of his life.

1) Fritz Perls was a member of the so-called »front generation,« those born in the 80s and 90s of the 19^th century. During their youth, these people experienced the euphoric upswing and anxiety about the future that was part of the years leading up to the First World War, and they numbered among the age group »that was most frequently posted to the front lines, spent the longest amount of time there, and were therefore a ›front generation‹ in a special sense« (Peukert 1987, 30). As a rule, it was only after completing their military service that these young men gathered experience with politics, started families, or launched their careers which were generally delayed until they returned home from the war (see Peukert ibid.).

Moreover, the experience of war surely allowed virtually none of the soldiers to return home without traumatic experiences from the bulletriddled trenches that were glutted with corpses. But after the revolution and collapse of the emperor’s ancient imperial world, »home« no longer consisted of the accustomed social order and its specific values. The majority of young men who served in the war and stemmed from middle class backgrounds reacted to the experience of war, the experience of defeat, their disappointed fantasies of grandeur, and the loss of time-honored social and human orientations by seeking and finding new support in right-wing »volkish«¹ ideologies. Perls’s mode of reaction took a different course, with his socialization in the bohemian circles of Berlin playing a decisive role.

2) Many representatives of avant-garde culture in the Weimar Republic stemmed from the front generation. This movement of innovators created works of lasting effect along the sidelines of established institutions, and it was »a place where genuine alliance took place between Jews and Germans as they encountered one another on the terrain of a common revolt« (Traverso 1993, 53). The underlying influence was that of Expressionism, which was already exerting an effect during the days of the empire. As a designation of an epoch, it comprised the period from 1910 to 1925, at the latest (see Vietta 1994). The so-called Expressionist generation was »chaotically torn by its experience of destroyed tradition and lost identity« (Glaser 1976, 200). After the First World War, this part of the front generation regained its identity through revolt; it searched for the »new man« in a socialist »brotherhood« that lay beyond the patriarchal social order and the struggle against the patriarchal father, beyond the self-constraint mechanisms of the super-ego and a mentality of social subservience.

Here, I attach importance to the interpretational approach suggested by Vietta (1994) who attempted to grasp the manifold artistic styles and phenomena of the age by filtering out an inner cohesiveness. For Vietta, the hallmark of the Expressionist epoch is the dialectic between the personal experience of ego-dissociation and the yearning for a renewal of humanity, or, between the experience of alienation and the messianic call for individual transformation (see ibid., 22). Seen in this light, the core of Expressionism is not the actual artistic act, but rather a specific experience of the self and the world.² As I will demonstrate, this experience can also be found in Perls who moved in the artistic and bohemian circles implied here during the years in question.

In this milieu, philosophy and epistemology were often not studied in the actual sense but rather assimilated through »osmosis« to a large extent and »existentially anticipated« (ibid, 151). The philosophical foundation of the Expressionist groups (and indeed of all oppositional circles from left to right) was Lebensphilosophie, which was synonymous, particularly in its Nietzschean form, with an anti-bourgeois position and criticism of the Wilhelminian value system. This philosophical foundation will require our attention, as will the most succinct expression of the avant-garde movement with its anti-bourgeois self-image, to the extent it transpired within the field of lived art or philosophical action. Here, I am referring to Dadaism in Berlin, with which Perls was affiliated through Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona, his first »guru« (see Erlhof in Hausmann, 228; Exner 1996, 264 f.). Perls, who was truly a follower of Diogenes, a neo-kynic, in terms of Sloterdijk (1983b, 711 f.), was one of the few people to retain the spirit of Dada until the end of his life. For Raoul Hausmann, the most important representative of the Dada group in our context, Dada was »a state of being, more a form of inner mobility than an art movement« (Hausmann 1982b, 229). I will posthumously proclaim Perls the first and only Gestalt-Dada.

3) Furthermore, Perls belonged to the very small faction of »Freudian psychoanalysts with a leftist political orientation« (Jacoby 1990, 65), whom I would like to term the »Berlin character analysts« based on their innovative treatment techniques.³ This was another group whose members were born around the turn of the century and found themselves in the midst of their professional training when National Socialism drove them into exile. Along with these individuals, Freudian psychoanalysis lost its culturally and socially critical element for years, and its center of gravity now shifted from Europe to America.⁴ In this regard, I would like to recall the anarchistic psychoanalyst Otto Gross. He was a forerunner of the leftist Freudians and was responsible for the influence of psychoanalysis, although in a radical culturally critical form, in the bohemian circles of Munich and Berlin prior to the First World War. We will show how much this almost forgotten man’s thinking continued to have an effect – even on Gestalt therapy. In my opinion, the blueprint for Gestalt therapy that was mutually developed with anarchist writer Paul Goodman at the end of the 1940s, in some respects represented a continuation of attempts begun in Berlin to develop a socially critical, active, emotion-oriented psychoanalysis which also incorporated body language to a greater degree.

The course of Perls’s life in Germany passed through all of the formative stages that were typical for the left-leaning urban intelligentsia that thought of itself as anti-bourgeois: rebellion against the suffocating domestic and social patriarchy of Wilhelminian society; the traumatic experiences of the First World War; the German »November Revolution« and the gory counter-revolution; the years of success for the cultural avant-garde; political radicalization and, finally, emigration. His participation in the small leftist Freudian movement in connection with his professional training must be added to the list.

For Perls and many of the protagonists with this background, all of these influence factors must be complemented by the fact that he was born in Germany as the child of Jewish parents. Due to the subsequent course of German history, this influence factor must also be examined, regardless of the respective identities of the individuals depicted. In this context, I would like to undertake this examination in relative detail, not only because Perls’s German-Jewish background is absolutely key to understanding him and has been generally neglected, but also because I consider it important to remember this world and its significance for Germany and European culture.