Читать книгу The Summer of Theory - Philipp Felsch - Страница 20

Peter Gente’s path through the Red decade opens the Bildungsroman of the ’68 generation. At Freie Universität, he came into contact with the West Berlin wing of the SDS; joined the cleverest leftists at Argument Club, led by the editors of Das Argument, Margherita von Brentano and Wolfgang Fritz Haug; read every line of Adorno ever printed; and then began a critique of the ‘superstructure catechists’.⁸ Back issues of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung turned up which showed that Critical Theory had been outspokenly Marxist before the war. In the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Horkheimer had put these issues under lock and key, but a connoisseur in West Berlin could find them in the estate of the German Jewish political scientist Franz Neumann, the author of Behemoth, one of the first structural analyses of the Third Reich, published in 1942.⁹ The Left’s slow separation from Critical Theory in the second half of the sixties took place in the form of such archaeological digs, as students eagerly sifted the contents of the libraries and second-hand bookshops to unearth the buried truth of the labour movement.¹⁰ Such a tranquil, studious radicalization must have suited Gente’s disposition. His investigative reconstruction of Adorno’s œuvre had long since made him an eminent authority in the parallel universe of obscure sources. He would later refer to himself, in a letter to his author Pierre Klossowski, as a ‘monomaniacal collector’.¹¹ His fanatical collecting is somewhat reminiscent of the Milanese publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who drove his Citroën DS all over Europe in the 1950s to accumulate a library of the labour movement – from a first edition of More’s Utopia to the correspondence of Palmiro Togliatti. (Later, Feltrinelli went underground, and he blew himself up under mysterious circumstances at the foot of a high-voltage pylon near Milan.)¹² In contrast to Feltrinelli, however, Gente had no penchant for luxurious or antique editions. Nor did he ever take the leap into activism. Rather, he supplied Berlin’s leftist students with dangerous reading material as an ‘encyclopaedist of rebellion’.¹³

In 1960, Peter Gente married the pedicurist Merve Lowien. The intellectual and the proletarian: to his comrades in the SDS, the alliance amounted to a political statement.¹⁴ Gente’s commitment went so far as to include starting a family. While others of his generation, taking advantage of the Pill, plunged into serial one-night stands, Gente became a father in 1962. In any case, his intellectual development during these years did not permit a hedonistic lifestyle. Acquiring a moustache and metal-rimmed glasses, he was gradually morphing into Walter Benjamin.¹⁵ Such mimicry was a common phenomenon among Berlin students in those days – not only because Benjamin, a Berlin native, was a suitable candidate for the role of the local hero,¹⁶ but because, in his later, materialist writings, Benjamin had created a revolutionary type of author, a language engineer who placed his typewriter at the service of the struggling working class: ‘Does he succeed in promoting the socialization of the intellectual means of production? Does he see how he himself can organize the intellectual workers in the production process? Does he have proposals for transforming the function of the novel, the drama, the poem?’¹⁷ Compared with the radicalism which such questions expressed, Adorno, with his penchant for Stifter and Beethoven, suddenly looked like one of the reactionary bourgeoisie.¹⁸ Didn’t the ‘meditation of powerlessness’ that his texts demonstrated stifle every impulse to act?¹⁹ Wasn’t the revolutionary Brecht better than Adorno’s preference, Beckett? The letter that Gente wrote to Adorno in 1965 already betrays the politicization of his aesthetic repertoire. Shortly thereafter, Gente worked openly against his former favourite author in supplying the editors of the literary journal Alternative with original publications by Benjamin from the 1930s to demonstrate that the Frankfurt editors of Benjamin’s collected works – Adorno and his student Rolf Tiedemann – were carrying out a questionable policy. The allegation that the Suhrkamp edition, principally edited by Adorno, downplayed Benjamin’s conversion to Marxism by retouching key sentences caused a stir in philological politics. To his growing numbers of followers in the student movement, Benjamin was being martyred once more by the injustice of his executors.²⁰

While the leftist press drew on his expertise, Gente’s studies made only modest progress. The seminar papers he wrote on materialist aesthetics did not arouse his professors’ enthusiasm. Peter Szondi found a 1965 paper on Lukács to contain ‘approaches and suggestions that sometimes overstep the boundary between research and journalism’, and marked it ‘satisfactory’.²¹ In spite of modest marks, Gente thought about going on to do a doctorate. The dissertation he had in mind, inspired by his reading of Benjamin, would be devoted to the failure of the bourgeois arts. But Szondi was not receptive to the topic. ‘He didn’t really understand what I actually wanted, and I couldn’t really explain it to him, you see’, Gente recalled. The idea of the end of art must have sounded as strange to Szondi as it did to Adorno.²² Yet it was what everyone had been talking about since May ’68, under the label of ‘cultural revolution’. ‘L’art est mort’, the Parisian students had written on the walls of the Sorbonne, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger had continued their eulogy in his monthly cultural journal Kursbuch: ‘In our day, it is not possible to identify a significant social function of literary works of art’, he pronounced, causing an uproar among publishers and authors. As examples for a revolutionary literature to come, Enzensberger named the politically engaged writers Günter Wallraff and Ulrike Meinhof.²³ In view of their public reception, however, his theses were no longer suitable as a topic for a dissertation. It looks as though Peter Gente had come too late to his academic career. Or perhaps he had merely realized since his arrival at the university that he had no talent as a writer.

‘He didn’t write’, the New York theory publisher Sylvère Lotringer would recall about his friend many years later.²⁴ The statement hits the central issue of Gente’s life on the head – perhaps even the issue of his generation. As a budding intellectual, he had not only penetrated into the nexus of leftist tradition during the sixties, but had also been looking for his own voice. For lack of a better label, Gente identified himself at the time of Merve’s founding as a ‘freelance writer’,²⁵ but, except for an article on the ‘Bitterfeld Way’, a current in East German workers’ literature, he had written practically nothing.²⁶ Publishing other people’s writing suited him better. At a time when the air was filled with editorial projects, there were many opportunities to do so. Gente scored his first modest coup as an editor in 1965 with a theme issue of Alternative on Parisian essayists. By that time, he had extended his mania for collecting to include French journals, and had unearthed texts by Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lucien Goldmann and others. Hardly anyone in Berlin knew these theoreticians, and the issue was a great success. Two years later, Gente would again demonstrate his advanced knowledge by providing the key evidence in the dispute over the Suhrkamp edition of Benjamin. Helmut Lethen, who also contributed to Alternative at that time, found Gente and his encyclopaedic knowledge a ‘tremendous source of inspiration’. Nevertheless, Gente did not become a regular member of the editorial team: the editor-in-chief, Hildegard Brenner, would not accept the fact that he could not be persuaded to write.²⁷