All posts tagged Theodor Adorno

Reflections on The Age of Empire: 1875 to 1914 by Eric Hobsbawm (1987)

Critique of Hobsbawm’s Marxisant approach

In the third of his mighty trilogy of histories of the long nineteenth century, The Age of Empire: 1875 to 1914, as in its two predecessors, Hobsbawm makes no attempt to hide his strongly Marxist point of view. Every page shouts his contempt for the era’s ‘bourgeois’ men of business, its ‘capitalists’ and bankers, the despicable ‘liberal’ thinkers of the period and so on. From time to time his contempt for the bourgeoisie rises to the level of actual abuse.

The most that can be said of American capitalists is that some of them earned money so fast and in such astronomic quantities that they were forcibly brought up against the fact that mere accumulation in itself is not an adequate aim in life for human beings, even bourgeois ones. (p.186)

Replace that final phrase with ‘even Jewish ones’ or ‘even Muslim ones’ or ‘even black ones’ to get the full sense of how deliberately insulting it is intended to be and how unacceptable his invective would be if applied to any other group of people.

Hobsbawm loses no opportunity to quote Marx (who died in 1883, saddened by the failure of his communist millennium to arrive) or Lenin’s views on late capitalism and imperialism (Lenin published his first political work in 1893), and he loses absolutely no opportunity to say ‘bourgeoisie bourgeoisie bourgeoisie’ scores of times on every page till the reader is sick of the sight of the word.

Hobsbawm’s highly partisan and politicised approach has strengths and weaknesses.

Hobsbawm’s strengths

On the up side, using very simplistic binary oppositions like ‘the developed world’ and ‘the undeveloped world’, the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘proletariat’, helps him to make great sweeping generalisations which give you the impression you are gaining secret access to the engine room of history. If you ignore the complexity of the histories and very different cultures of individual nations such as America, Britain, France and Germany, and lump them altogether as ‘the West’, then you can bring out the broad-brush historical and economic developments of the era, grouping together all the developments in science, chemistry, physics, technology, industry and consumer products into great blocks, into titanic trends and developments.

This gives the reader a tremendously powerful sense of bestriding the world, taking part in global trends and huge international developments. Just as in The Age of Capitalism, the first half or so of the book is thrilling. It makes you feel like you understand for the first time the titanic historical forces directing world history, and it’s this combination of factual (there are lots of facts and figures about industrial production) and imaginative excitement which garnered the trilogy so many positive reviews.

Hobsbawm’s obsession with capitalism’s contradictions

Hobsbawm makes obeisance to the Marxist convention that ‘bourgeois’ ideology was riddled with ‘contradictions’. The most obvious one was the contradiction between the wish of national politicians to define and delimit their nations and the desire of ‘bourgeois’ businessmen to ignore all boundaries and trade and invest wherever they wanted around the globe (p.40).

Another ‘contradiction’ was the way the spread of ‘Western ideology’ i.e. education and values, to developing countries, or at least to the elites within European colonies, often led to the creation of the very Western-educated elites who then helped to overthrow it (he gives the London-trained lawyer Gandhi as the classic example, p.77, though he could as easily have mentioned Jawaharlal Nehru, educated at Cambridge, trained at London’s Inner Temple as a barrister).

Another ‘contradiction’ was the between the way the mid-century ‘bourgeois’ industrial and economic triumph rested on a mechanical view of the universe, the mechanical laws of physics and heat and chemistry underpinning the great technological advances of the later nineteenth century. Hobsbawm then delights in the way that, at the end of the century, this entire mechanistic worldview was overturned in a welter of discoveries, including Einstein’s theory of relativity, the problematic nature of the sub-atomic world which gave rise to quantum physics, and deep discoveries about the bewildering non-rational basis of mathematics.

These are just some of the developments Hobsbawm defines as ‘contradictions’ with the aim of proving that Marx’s predictions that capitalism contained within itself deep structural contradictions which would undermine it and lead inevitably to its downfall.

Why Hobsbawm was wrong

Except that Marx was wrong and Hobsbawm is wrong. His continual mentioning Marx, quoting Lenin, harking back to the high hopes of the revolutionaries of 1848, invoking the memory of the Commune (redefined, in good Marxist style, as a heroic rising of the downtrodden working classes, rather than the internecine bloodbath that it actually was), his continual harking forward to the Bolshevik revolution as somehow the climax of all the trends he describes, his insistence that we, he and his readers, all now (in the mid-1980s when he wrote this book) still live in the forbidding shadow of the Russian revolution, still haunted by the spectre of communist revolution — every aspect of his attitude and approach now seems dated and irrelevant.

Now, in 2021, it is 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites revealed:

Their complete failure to build an economic and social system which could be a serious alternative to ‘capitalism’.
The extraordinary extent to which communist regimes had to surveil, monitor and police every aspect of their populations’ behaviour, speech and thoughts, in order to prevent them relapsing into the ways of human nature – the prison camps, the psychiatric wards, the secret police. Look at China today, with its censorship of the internet and its hounding of dissidents, its suppression of Falun Gong and the Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang.

Seen from our contemporary perspective, Hobsbawm tendentious habit of naming every clash in policies, every development in cultural thinking as some kind of seismic ‘contradiction’ which will bring global capitalism tumbling down, looks like what it is, a biased obeisance to Marxist ideas which have long ago proved to be untrue.

The misleading use of terms like ‘bourgeois’

To some extent his attitude is based on one particular logical or rhetorical trick which can be proved to be false.

In the later chapters of the book, about the arts, the hard and social sciences, Hobsbawm repeatedly claims that this or that aspect of ‘bourgeois ideology’ of the mid-nineteenth century came under strain, suffered insoluble contradictions, underwent a crisis, and collapsed.

I think this is the crux of the massive mistake he makes. It consists of several steps:

identifying every element of mid-nineteenth century political and cultural theory as some universal thing called ‘bourgeois’
identifying this ‘bourgeoisie’ as the central and necessary figure of the capitalist system
and then claiming that, because in the last few decades of the nineteenth century this ‘bourgeois’ ideology came under strain and in many ways collapsed, that therefore this shows that capitalism itself, as a system, must come under strain caused by its internal contradictions and therefore must collapse

Surely anyone can see the logical error here. All you have to do is stop insistently repeating that mid-nineteenth century ideology was identical with some timeless ‘bourgeois’ ideology which necessarily and uniquely underpins all capitalism, and simply relabel it ‘mid-nineteenth century ideology’, and then all your sentences stop being so apocalyptic.

Instead of saying ‘bourgeois ideology was stricken by crisis’ as if The Great Revolution is at hand, all you need say is ‘mid-nineteenth century political and social beliefs underwent a period of rapid change at the end of the century’ and the portentous sense of impending doom hovering over the entire system vanishes in a puff of smoke – and you are left just describing a fairly banal historical process, namely that society’s ideas and beliefs change over time, sometimes in abrupt reversals resulting from new discoveries, sometimes as slow evolutionary adaptations to changing social circumstances.

Put another way, Hobsbawm identifies mid-nineteenth century liberal ideology as if it is the one and only shape capitalist thinking can possibly take and so excitedly proclaims that, by the end of the century, because mid-nineteenth century ‘bourgeois’ beliefs were quite visibly fraying and collapsing, therefore capitalism would collapse too.

But quite obviously the ‘capitalist system’ has survived all the ‘contradictions’ and ‘crises’ Hobsbawm attributes to it and many more. It is still going strong, very strong, well over a century after the period which Hobsbawm is describing and when, he implies, it was all but on its last knees.

In fact the basic idea of manufacturing products cheap and selling them for as much profit as you can, screwing the workers who make them and keeping the profits to a) enjoy yourself or b) invest in other business ventures, is probably more widespread than ever before in human history, seeing how it’s been taken up so enthusiastically in post-communist Russia but especially across hyper-modernising China.

In other words, Hobsbawm’s use of Marxist terms like ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’ may have a certain explanatory power for the era he’s describing, but after a certain point they are too simplistic and don’t describe or analyse the actual complexity of even one of the societies he describes, let alone the entire world.

At some point (which you can almost measure in Hobsbawm’s texts) they cease to be explanatory and become obfuscatory, hiding the differences which separate America, Britain and Germany much more than unite them. Use of the terms simply indicate that you have entered a certain worldview.

Imagine a Christian historian identifying mid-nineteenth century ideology as the one and only expression of ‘Christian’ ideology, an ideology which divided the population into ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers’, into the ‘saved’ and the ‘damned’. Imagine this historian went on to describe how the widespread ‘crisis’ in Christian belief at the end of the century indicated that the entire world was passing out of the phase of Christian belief and into infidel unbelief.

If you read something like that you would immediately know you are inside the particular worldview of an author, something which clearly means a lot to them, might shed light on some aspects of the period – for example trends in religious belief – but which in no way is the interpretation of world history.

a) Plenty of other interpretations are available, and b) despite the widespread laments that Christianity was dying out in the later nineteenth century, contrary to all their pessimism, Christianity now has more adherents worldwide than ever before in human history. And ditto capitalism.

The dominance of the key terms Hobsbawm deploys with such monotonous obsessiveness (capitalism, bourgeoisie, proletariat, liberal ideology) don’t prove anything except that you have entered the worldview of a particular author.

The system with the real contradictions, contradictions between a) its utopian claims for equality and the reality of a hierarchical society which privileged party membership, b) between its promises to outproduce the West and the reality of permanent shortages of consumer goods and even food, c) between its rhetoric of ‘freedom’ and the reality of the harsh repression of any kind of political or artistic unorthodoxy – was communism, whose last pitiful remnants lie rusting in a thousand statue parks across Russia and Eastern Europe.

The fundamental sleight of hand in Hobsbawm’s argument

Because Hobsbawm identifies the mid-nineteenth century worldview with the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘bourgeoisie’ as the indispensable foundation of ‘capitalism’, he tries to pull off the conjuring trick of claiming that, since the mid-nineteenth century worldview drastically changed in all kinds of ways in the last decade of the century, these change invalidate the ‘bourgeoisie’, and that this, in turn, invalidates ‘capitalism’. Proves it is wrong and doomed to collapse.

You can see how this is just a three-card trick which moves vague and indefinable words around on the table at speed to bamboozle the impressionable. For despite the trials and tribulations of the century of extremes which followed, ‘capitalism’ in various forms appears to have triumphed around almost the entire world, and the materialistic, conventional, liberal ‘bourgeoisie’ which Hobsbawm so despises… appears still to be very much with us, despite all Hobsbawm’s protestations about its terminal crises and death throes and contradictions and collapse.

Victimology tends to tyranny

To anyone familiar with the history of communist Russia, communist China and communist Eastern Europe, there is something unnerving and, eventually, worrying about Hobsbawm’s very broad-brush division of the entire world into victims and oppressors.

The first half of the twentieth century was the era of totalitarian governments seeking to gain total control over every aspect of their populations and mould them into better humans in a better society. The first thing all these regimes did was establish goodies and baddies, and rouse the population to be on perpetual guard against the enemy in whatever guise – ‘the bourgeoisie’, the ‘kulaks’, ‘capitalist roaders’, ‘reactionary elements’, ‘the Jews’, and so on.

Dividing the entire huge world and eight billion people into simple binaries like ‘oppressors’ and ‘victims’, ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘workers’, ‘exploiters’ and ‘exploited’, ‘white’ masters and ‘black’ victims, is worryingly reminiscent of the simplistic, binary thinking which the twentieth century showed leads to genocides and mass killing.

Hobsbawm criticises the nationalist parties of the late-nineteenth century for dividing up populations into citizens and outsiders, members of the Volk or aliens, a process of which the Jews were notable victims. And yet he enacts the very same binary oppositioning, the same outsidering of a (large) group of society, by objectifying and insulting the ‘bourgeoisie’ at every opportunity.

It’s the same old mental slum: if only we could get rid of the gypsies / homos / lefties / commies / bourgeoisie / capitalists / Catholics / Protestants / Armenians / Jews / Croats / Serbs / Tutsis / Hutus / men / whites / blacks / immigrants / refugees, then society would be alright. I call it ‘If-only-ism’.

If capitalism and imperialism were inevitable, how can anyone be guilty?

In Age of Capital Hobsbawm describes how the industrial revolution amounted to a lucky fluke, a coming together of half a dozen circumstances (of which the most important was, in his view, Britain’s command of the waves and extensive trading network between colonies) and this helps you realise that some people were able to seize the opportunity and exploit it and become masters of small firms and then of factories etc. Clever, quick, resourceful or well-placed men leapt to take advantage of new opportunities. Any history of the industrial revolution names them and gives biographies of individuals central to the series of inventions or who then set up successful firms to exploit them.

However, the tendency of Hobsbawm’s very high-level Marxist approach, his sweeping surveys which pull together evidence from Austria, or France, from north Italy or New York, is, paradoxically, to remove all sense of agency from the humans involved. Hobsbawm makes it seem almost inevitable that the first industrial revolution (textiles) would give rise to a second (iron and coal) which in turn would give rise to a third (steel, organic chemistry, electrics, oil).

And he makes it seem inevitable that, once the world was fully mapped and explored, then the other ‘western powers’ which by 1890 had more or less caught up with Britain in terms of industrialisation, would join the competition to seize territories which contained valuable minerals or exotic produce (tea, coffee, bananas). That an acceleration of imperial rivalry was inevitable.

But if it had to pan out this way, how can you blame anyone? If, viewed from this lofty godlike perspective, it was inevitable that industrialisation broke out somewhere, that it would spread to all similar regions and states, that the now numerous industrial nations would find themselves in competition for the basic resources (food) and more arcane resources (rubber, oil, rare metals) required to drive the next stage of industrial development – can you blame them?

You could call it Hobsbawm’s paradox, or Hobsbawm’s Choice. The more inevitable you make the entire process sound, the less reason you have to be so cross at the ‘bourgeoisie’.

The reality is that you can, of course, hold the western nations accountable for their actions, but only if you descend to a lower level of historical discourse than Hobsbawm’s. Only if you begin to look at specific actions of specific governments and specific men in specific times and places an you begin to make assessments and apportion praise or blame.

Responsibility and guilt can’t really exist at the level Hobsbawm is operating on because he goes out of his way to avoid mentioning individuals (with only a few exceptions; Bismarck’s name crops up more than any other politician of the period) and instead emphasises that it all unfolded according to almost unavoidable historical laws, implicit in the logic of industrial development.

If humans couldn’t avoid it, then they can’t very well be blamed for it.

In light of Hobsbawm’s theory, is equality possible?

The same set of facts give rise to a parallel thought, which dogged me throughout reading this book, which is — if what Hobsbawm says is true, if industrial and technological developments tend to be restricted to just a handful of certain nations which have acquired the technology and capital resources to acquire ‘liftoff’ to industrialisation, and if, within those nations, the benefits of industrialisation accrue overwhelming to a small proportion of the population; and if this process is so stereotyped and inevitable and unstoppable — then, well… is it even possible to be fair? Is it possible to achieve anything like ‘equality’? Surely the entire trend of the history Hobsbawm describes with so much verve suggests not.

Putting aside the issue of fairness in one nation aside in order to adopt Hobsbawm’s global perspective, he often repeats the formula that countries in the ‘undeveloped’ or ‘developing’ or ‘Third World’ (whatever you want to call it) were forced by the demands of consumer capitalism or The Market to turn themselves into providers of raw materials or a handful of saleable commodities – after all, this was era which saw the birth of the banana republic. But, I thought as I ploughed through the book… what was the alternative?

Could undeveloped nations have turned their backs on ‘international capitalism’ and continued as agrarian peasant nations, or resisted the western imperative to become ‘nations’ at all and remained general territories ruled by congeries of local sheikhs or tribal elders or whatever?

At what stage would it have been possible to divert the general trend of colonial takeover of the developing world? How would it have happened? Which British leader would have stood up and said, ‘This is wrong; we renounce all our colonies and grant them independence today?’ in the1870s or 1880s or 1890s? What would have happened to the sub-continent or all those bits of Africa which Britain administered if Britain had simply packed up and left them in 1885?

As to all the wealth accumulating in Britain, among its sizeable cohort of ship-owners, traders, factory owners, bankers, stockbrokers and what not. On what basis would you have taken their wealth away, and how much? Half? All of it and shot them, as in Bolshevik Russia?

Having seized the wealth of the entire ‘bourgeoisie’, how would you then have redistributed it to the bedouin in the desert or the native peoples of Australia or the Amazon, to the workers on the rubber plantations, in the tin and gold mines, in the sugar fields, to squabbling tribes in central Africa? How could that have been done without a vast centralised redistribution system? Without, in fact, precisely the centralising, bureaucratic tendencies of the very capitalist system Hobsbawm was criticising?

And who would administer such a thing? Having worked in the civil service for over a decade I can tell you it would take hordes of consultants, program managers, project managers and so on, who would probably be recruited from the host country and make a packet out of the process?

And when was all this meant to happen? When, would you say, the awareness of the wrongs of the empire, or the wrongs done to the ‘undeveloped world’ became widespread enough to allow such policies to be enacted in a democracy where the government has to persuade the majority of the people to go along with its policies? In the 1860s, 70s, 80s?

Live Aid was held in 1985, just as Hobsbawm was writing this book, and which I imagine brought the issue of Third World poverty and famine to the attention of even the dimmest members of the population. But did that global event abolish poverty, did it end inequality and injustice in in the Third World? No, otherwise there would have been no need for the Live 8 concerts and related charity efforts 30 years later, in 2005. Or the ongoing efforts of all the industrialised nations to send hundreds of millions of dollars of support to the Third World every year (hence the furore surrounding the UK government cutting back on its foreign aid budget this year.) Not to mention the continuous work of thousands of charities all across the ‘developing world’.

When you look at the scale of activity and the amounts of money which have been sent to developing countries since the Second World War, it makes you wonder how much would be enough? Should every citizen of every industrialised nation give, say, half their annual earnings to people in the Third World? To which people? In which countries? To India, which has invested tens of billions in a space program? To China, which is carrying out semi-genocidal policy of incarceration and mass sterilisation in its Xinjiang province? Do we need to take money from the British public to give it to Narendra Modi or Xi Jinping? Who would manage that redistribution program, for whatever civil servants and consultants you hired to make it work would earn much, much more than the recipients of the aid.

Student excitement, adult disillusion with Hobsbawm

When I was a student, reading this trilogy educated me about the broad industrial, economic and social forces which created and drove forward the industrial revolution in the Western world throughout the nineteenth century, doing so in thrilling style, and for that I am very grateful. Hobsbawm’s books highlighted the way that, through the 1850s and 1860s, capitalism created an ever-richer class of ‘owners’ set against a rapidly growing number of impoverished workers; how the industrial and financial techniques pioneered in Britain spread to other Western nations; how the industrial system evolved in the 1880s and 1890s into a) a booming consumer society in the West and b) the consolidation of a system of colonial exploitation around the world.

I had never had the broad trends of history explained so clearly and powerfully and excitingly. It was a memorable experience.

But rereading the books 40 years later, I am now painfully aware that the simplistic Marxist concepts Hobsbawm uses to analyse his period may certainly help to elucidate it, but at the same time highlight their own ineffectiveness.

The confidence that a mass working class movement which will rise up to overthrow the inequalities of the West and liberate the developing world, that this great liberation is just around the corner – which is implicit in his numerous references to 1848 and Marx and the Commune and Lenin – and that all it needs is a few more books and pamphlets to spark it off….goes beyond boring to become sad. Although the historical facts he describes remain as relevant as ever, the entire ideology the books are drenched in feels terribly out of date.

Democracy not the blessing it is cracked up to be

In chapter 4 Hobsbawm discusses the politics of democracy. Throughout he takes it for granted that extending the franchise to all adults would result in the revolutionary change he supports. He starts his discussion by referencing the powerful German Social Democratic Party (founded back in 1863) and the British Labour Party (founded in 1900) and their campaigns for universal suffrage, as if giving the vote to ‘the working class’ would immediately lead to a social revolution, the end of inequality and exploitation.

Only in the chapters that follow does he slowly concede that new mass electorates also helped to create new mass, populist parties and that many of these catered not to the left at all, but to right-wing nationalist ideas of blood and Volk. For example, the notorious Karl Luger, mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910, whose Christian Social Party espoused populist and antisemitic politics which are sometimes viewed as a model for Adolf Hitler’s Nazism.

In fact it had already been shown that universal male suffrage not only didn’t lead to socialist revolution but the exact opposite, when, in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution which overthrew the French monarchy, the French granted universal male suffrage and held a presidential election in which the opera bouffe candidate, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, promptly won with 74% of the entire male adult vote, and then went on to win the plebiscite held after his 1851 anti-leftist coup with 76%.

So any educated person knew in the 1850s that extending the franchise did not, in and of itself, lead to red revolution. Often the opposite. (This is a point picked up in Richard Shannon’s book The Crisis of Imperialism 1865 to 1915 which quotes umpteen later Victorian politicians and commentators arguing against extending the franchise precisely because they’d seen what it led to in France, namely the election of a repressive, right wing autocrat.)

Hobsbawm’s excited description of the way the ‘scary’ working class were ‘threatening’ bourgeois hegemony, were on the brink of ‘seizing power’ and righting the world’s wrongs, underplays the extent to which universal suffrage led:

directly to the rise of populist nationalist anti-left wing governments
and to the fragmentation of the left into ‘reformists’, prepared to compromise their radical principles and ally with liberal parties in order to get into parliament, and the die-hards who held out for radical social change

In other words, extending the franchise led to the exact opposite of what Hobsbawm hopes. Something borne out after the Great War, when the franchise was drastically extended to almost all adults in most European countries and the majority of European governments promptly became either right-wing or out-and-out dictatorships. Mussolini won the 1924 Italian general election; Hitler won the largest share of the vote in the Weimar Republic’s last election. Or Hungary:

In January 1920, Hungarian men and women cast the first secret ballots in the country’s political history and elected a large counterrevolutionary and agrarian majority to a unicameral parliament. (Wikipedia)

Switching from Hobsbawm altogether to the present day, 2021, any reader of the English left-liberal English press must be struck how, since the Brexit vote, it has stopped being a taboo subject to suggest that quite possibly a large proportion of the British electorate is thick and uneducated (terms you frequently meet in the Guardian newspaper). You can nowadays read plenty of ‘progressive’ commentators pointing out that the great British electorate was persuaded, in voting for Brexit (2016) and Boris (2019), to vote for populist right-wing demagoguery and against their own best interests as working people. I have read so many commentators pointing out that it is the very conservative working class communities who voted for Brexit who are most likely going to suffer the prolonged consequences of economic dislocation and decline.

In other words, right now in 2021, you can read representatives of the left openly stating that universal franchise, one person one vote, not only doesn’t lead to the socialist paradise Hobsbawm implies it will, but the opposite – rule by right-wing populists.

As far as I can remember, thoughts like this would have been utterly taboo in the 1980s, or have immediately identified you as a right-wing conservative. But now I read comments like this every day in the Guardian or New Statesman.

So – this is the recent experience and current political discourse I bring to reading Hobsbawm’s chapter about democracy and which makes me think his assumption, his faith, his Marxist belief, that simply expanding the franchise to all adults would of itself bring about social revolution and justice and equality is too simplistic.

It doesn’t correlate with the historical fact that, as soon as the franchises of most European nations had been radically expanded (after the Great War), lots of them became very right-wing.
It doesn’t speak to our present situation where, it’s true that no-one is openly suggesting restricting the franchise, but many progressives are questioning whether the universal franchise produces the optimum results for a nation and its working class. Trump. Brexit.

The world is not as we would like it to be.

My opposition to Hobsbawm’s teleology

I am a Darwinian materialist. I believe there is no God and therefore no purpose or direction to human lives or events. There is no plan, divine or otherwise. Shit happens, people try to cope. Obviously shit happens within a complex web of frameworks and structures which we have inherited, it takes a lot of effort to disentangle and understand what is going on, or what we think is going on, and sometimes it may happen in ways some of which we can broadly predict. But ‘events, dear boy, events’ are the determining feature in human affairs. Take Afghanistan this past week. Who knew? Who expected such a sudden collapse?

This isn’t a very profound analysis but my aim is to contrast my preference for a theory of the unpredictable and chaotic nature of human affairs with Hobsbawm’s profound belief in Marxist teleology, meaning the very nineteenth century, rationalist, scientistic belief that there are laws of history and that human societies obey them and that they can be predicted and harnessed.

Teleology: the doctrine of design and purpose in the material world.

Teleology is the belief that if you shave away all the unfortunate details of history, and the peculiarities of culture, and the impact of charismatic individuals, in fact if you pare away enough of what makes people people and societies societies, you can drill down to Fundamental Laws of History. And that Karl Marx discovered them. And that these laws predict the coming collapse of capitalism and its replacement by a wonderful classless society. And that you, too, can be part of this future by joining the communist party today for the very reasonable online registration fee of just £12!

Anyway, the teleology (‘sense of direction, meaning or purpose’) which is a vital component of Marxism, the confidence in an inevitable advent of a future of justice and equality, which underpins every word Hobsbawm wrote, evaporated in 1991 and nothing has taken its place.

There will be no Revolution. The ‘capitalist system’ will not be overthrown. At most there will be pointless local revolts like the Arab Spring, revolts which, more than likely, end up with regimes more repressive or anarchic than the ones they overthrew (Syria, Libya, Egypt).

This sort of thing will occur repeatedly in countries which did not enjoy the early or middle benefits of the technological revolutions Hobsbawm describes, countries of the permanently developing world, which will always have largely peasant populations, which will always depend on the export of raw materials (oil being the obvious one), which will always have unstable political systems, liable to periodic upheavals.

The environmental perspective

If there is One Big Thing we do know about the future, it is something which isn’t mentioned anywhere in Hobsbawm’s book, which is that humanity is destroying the environments which support us.

My son is studying biology at university. He says it amounts to having world-leading experts explain the beauty and intricacy of various eco-systems in beautiful places around the planet – and then describing how we are destroying them.

As a result, my son thinks that human civilisation, in its present form, is doomed. Not because of global warming. But because we are killing the oceans, exterminating all the fish, destroying species diversity, wrecking agricultural land, using up all the fresh water, relying more on more on fragile monocultures, and generally devastating the complex web of ecosystems which make human existence possible.

Viewed from this perspective, human activity is, overall, fantastically destructive. And the massive ideological divide Hobsbawm makes between the tradition of the nineteenth century ‘bourgeoisie’, on the one hand, and the revolutionaries, Communards, Bolsheviks and communists he adulates, on the other, fades into insignificance.

We now know that polluting activity and environmental destruction were as bad or worse under communist regimes as they were under capitalist ones. It was the Soviet system which gave us Chernobyl and its extended cover-up. Capitalist ones are at least capable of reform in a way communist regimes turned out not to be. Green political movements are a feature of advanced ‘capitalist’ countries but were suppressed, along with every other form of deviance, under communist governments.

But then again, it really doesn’t matter from a global perspective. Looked at from the planet’s point of view, all human activity is destructive.

So this is why, looking at them from a really high-level perspective, as of aliens visiting earth and reviewing the last couple of centuries, these books no longer make me angry at the wicked ‘capitalist’ exploitation of its workers and entire colonial nations and the ‘heroic’ resistance of the proletariat and the exploited peoples of the colonial nations.

I just see a swarm of humans ruining their habitat and leading, inevitably, to their own downfall.

Hobsbawm’s style

Hobsbawm is very repetitive. He mentions bicycles and cars and so on representing new technologies at least three times. I swear he points out that imperialism was the result of increasing competition between the industrial nations at least half a dozen times. He tells us that a number of Germany’s most eminent revolutionaries came from Russia, namely Rosa Luxemburg, at least four times. He repeats President Porfirio Diaz’s famous lament, ‘Poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the United States’ twice. He tells us twice that western governments were keen to invest in medical research into tropical fevers solely because the results promised to help their officers and administrators survive longer in colonial outposts several times. He repeatedly tells us that Bismarck was the master of maintaining peace between the powers (pp.312 and 318).

The impression this gives is of rambling, repetitive and circular arguments instead of linear, logical ones.

Hobsbawm’s discussions are often very gaseous in the sense that they go on at length, use lots of highbrow terminology, but at the end it’s hard to make out or remember what he’s said. The discussion of nationalism in Age of Capital was long and serious-sounding but I emerged at the end of it none the wiser. The long discussion of sociology in chapter 11 of this book left me none the wiser about sociology except for Hobsbawm’s weird suggestion that, as a social science, it was founded and encouraged in order to protect society against Marxism and revolution. Really?

In a similar spirit, although he uses the word ‘bourgeoisie’ intensively throughout both books, I emerged with no clearer sense of what ‘bourgeoisie’ really means than I went in with. He himself admits it to be a notoriously difficult word to define and then more or less fails to define it.

On a more serious level I didn’t understand his discussion of nationalism in Age of Capital or his discussion of the increasing democratisation in the 1890s in this volume, because they were vague and waffly. It seemed to me that as soon as he left his home turf of economic development, his ideas become foggy and repetitive.

And sometimes he comes over as a hilariously out of touch old buffer:

By 1914 the more unshackled youth in the western big cities and resorts was already familiar with sexually provocative rhythmic dances of dubious but exotic origin (the Argentinian tango, the syncopated steps of American blacks). (p.204)

‘The syncopated steps of American blacks’. No wonder American capitalism was doomed to collapse.

Overall conclusion

Hobsbawm’s books are thrilling because of their scope and range and the way he pulls together heterogenous material from around the world, presenting pages of awe-inspiring stats and facts, to paint a vivid, thrilling picture of a world moving through successive phases of industrialisation.

But he is eerily bereft of ideas. This comes over in the later chapters of both books in which he feels obligated, like so many historians before him, to write a chapter about The Arts. This is not his natural territory and the reader has to struggle through turgid pages of Hobsbawm dishing up absolutely conventional judgements (Van Gogh was an unrecognised genius; the arts and crafts movement was very influential), which are so lame and anodyne they are embarrassing.

I had noticed his penchant for commenting on everything using numbered points (‘The bourgeois century destabilised its periphery in two main ways…’; ‘Three major forces of resistance existed in China…’, ‘Three developments turned the alliance system into a time bomb…’, and many others). Eventually it dawned on me that he produces these nifty little sets of issues or causes or effects instead of having ideas. Lists beat insights.

Considering how fertile Marxist literary and art criticism has been in the twentieth century (cf György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Frederick Jameson) it is very disappointing how flat and untheoretical and banal Hobsbawm’s comments about the arts in both books are. In these later sections of each book it is amazing how much he can write without really saying anything. He is a good example of someone who knows all the names and terminology and dates and styles and has absolutely nothing interesting to say about them.

Credit

The Age of Empire: 1875 to 1914 by Eric Hobsbawm was published in 1975 by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. All references are to the 1985 Abacus paperback.

Hobsbawm reviews

Related reviews

Reviews about Marx and communism

Karl Marx

Communism in Russia

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future @ Tate Modern (January 2018) Russian conceptual artists depict the miserable squalor of life under communism.
Red Star over Russia @ Tate Modern (January 2018) The explosion of avant-garde art after the Russian Revolution and how it was slowly strangled by Stalin’s rise to power.
Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 @ the Royal Academy (March 2017)

Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale (2016) Account of how Lenin’s journey back to Russia to lead the 1917 Bolshevik coup was funded by German Military High Command.
Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum (2012) How Russia imposed communist regimes on Eastern Europe after the Second World War.
Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89 by Rodric Braithwaite (2011) The Russians try to export communism to Afghanistan.
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (2010) includes chapters on the great famine in Ukraine caused by Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation.
The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis (2005)
Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (1957) Love story set amid the brutal violence of the Russian revolution.
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1940) Koestler’s fictional account of a Moscow show trial based on friends of his who were tried in Stalin’s Russia.
To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson (1940) Literary critic Wilson set out to make sense of the great political issue of his time.
The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov (1926) A haunting novel about post-revolutionary chaos in Kiev.
Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel (1926) Horrifyingly violent vignettes from Babel’s time with the Red Army fighting the Whites.

Communism in China

The Tragedy of Liberation by Frank Dikötter (2013) The early years of the communist revolution in China.
China’s War with Japan 1937–1945 by Rana Mitter (2013) Mainly about Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists but also describes the rising fortunes of the Chinese Communist Party under Mao.
China: A history by John Keay (2008) includes chapters about the mass murders overseen by Mao.

Communism in Vietnam

Embers of War by Frederik Logevall (2012) A brilliant account of the rise of the Vietnamese communist party and its long struggle against the French imperialists.
The Vietnam War by Mitchell Hall (2000) How the Americans lost Vietnam to the communists.

Communism in Germany

The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917-1923 by Robert Gerwarth (2016) includes chapters on the abortive communist uprisings in German cities after the Great War.
The New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1918-33 ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (2015) Essays about Weimar art which make extensive use of contemporary Marxist cultural theorists such as Walter Benjamin, György Lukács and Siegfried Kracauer.
Bauhaus by Frank Whitford (1984) Includes an account of the communist members of the Bauhaus.
The Weimar Years: A Culture Cut Short by John Willett (1984) A visual history of the German avant-garde, often communist, of the 1920s.
The New Sobriety: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period 1917 to 1933 by John Willett (1978) Willett a big fan of Brecht, Piscator and other socially committed i.e. communist artists.
Weimar: A Cultural History 1918 to 1933 by Walter Laqueur (1974) includes a detailed chapter on the German communist intelligentsia of the 1920s.
A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946) Grosz was a communist party member in the 1920s. His autobiography includes an account of a trip to Soviet Russia in 1923 where he met Lenin and was put off communism by the atmosphere of bullying and poverty.

Communism in Poland

Warsaw 1920 by Adam Zamoyski (2008) How the Polish army stopped the Red Army’s advance into Poland in 1920 preventing them pushing on to support revolution in Germany.
The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953) A devastating indictment of the initial appeal and then appalling consequences of communism in Poland: ‘Mass purges in which so many good communists died, the lowering of the living standard of the citizens, the reduction of artists and scholars to the status of yes-men, the extermination of entire national groups…’

Communism in Czechoslovakia

Communism in France

The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune (1870 to 1871) of Paris by Alistair Horne (1965) the rise and fall of the Paris Commune.
Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Sartre (1948) A play depicting vicious in-fighting among communists in a fictional East European country.
The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951) Camus’s comprehensive rejection of communism in which he seeks to prove that communist rule will be necessarily tyrannical.

Communism in Spain

The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor (2006) Comprehensive account of the Spanish civil war with much detail on how the Stalin-backed communist party put more energy into eliminating its opponents on the Left than fighting the fascists, with the result that Franco won.
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938) Orwell’s eye-witness account of how the Stalin-backed communist party turned on its left-wing allies, specifically the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification which Orwell was fighting with, and how he only just managed to escape arrest, interrogation and probable execution during the communist purges.

Communism in England

Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945) Orwell’s fable about the failure of the Russian Revolution.
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949) Orwell’s vision of an immiserated England of the future after a nuclear war has led to the rise of a totalitarian socialist regime, Ingsoc.

The New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1918-33 edited by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (2015)

This awesomely big, heavy hardback book is the catalogue published to accompany a major exhibition of Weimar Art held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2015.

It contains some 150 glossy, mostly colour reproductions of a huge variety of works (mostly paintings and drawings, but also quite a few stunning art photos from the period) by nearly 50 artists associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity movement. The main text is followed by 28 pages of potted biographies of all the main artists and photographers of the time. All very useful.

Die Begegnung by Anton Räderscheidt

I had only gleaned hints and guesses about many of these artists from the two books on the Weimar Culture by John Willetts which I read recently, and this book is exactly what I wanted – it goes to town with a really comprehensive overview of the different types of Neue Sachlichkeit and then – crucially – gives you plenty of examples so you can understand their common themes but diverse styles for yourself.

As I’d begun to figure out for myself in my post about New Objectivity, the phrase Neue Sachlichkeit was never a movement in the way Impressionism, Fauvism, Futurism or Dada were, never a self-conscious tag used by a cohort of allied artists. As so often, it was an attempt by critics to make sense of what was going on, in this case in post-war German art.

Weimar art came in a lot of varieties but what they all had in common was a rejection of the strident emotionalism and deliberately expressive style of German Expressionism, and a return to figurative painting, generally done to a meticulous and painterly finish. A rejection of utopian spiritualism, or apocalyptic fantasies, or the deep existential angst of the artist – and a sober, matter-of-fact depiction of the actual modern world in front of them.

Self-portrait with Ophthalmological Models by Herbert Ploberger 91928)

Self-portrait with Ophthalmological Models by Herbert Ploberger (1928)

The term Neue Sachlichkeit (as we are told in virtually every one of the book’s 14 essays, pp.6, 17-18, 105, 126, 203) was coined by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, the director of the Kunsthalle in Mannheim. He used it as the title for a 1925 exhibition which for the first time brought many of the new artists working in the Weimar Republic bringing together in the same exhibition space. (The introduction explains that the new trend had already been spotted by, among others, critic Paul Westheim who labelled it Verism in 1919 and tried again with New Naturalism in 1922, by Paul Schmidt who suggested Sachlichkeit in 1920, and by the critic Franz Roh whose 1925 book, Post-Expressionism: Magic Realism (which was sold to accompany Hartlaub’s exhibition when it went on tour of German galleries) presented two possible terms.)

Roh included in his book a table with two columns, in one an Expressionist characteristic, next to it its post-Expressionist equivalent. There were 22 qualities in all. According to Roh Magical Realist paintings were notable for their: accurate detail, smooth photographic clarity, painterly finish, and portrayal of the ‘magical’ nature of the rational world. They reflect the uncanniness of people and our modern technological environment. In all these ways Roh’s phrase is arguably a better descriptor for the majority of the hyper-accurate but subtly distorted and unnerving paintings of the period. But Neue Sachlichkeit stuck.

Self-portrait by Christian Schad (1927)

In fact this book makes clear that the terminology has gone on being debated, refined, rejected and refreshed right down to the present day. Maybe a word cloud or, more precisely, a phrase cloud summarise some of the ways various writers have sought to characterise it. According to various writers, New Objective paintings display:

an alienated relationship to the real… a disenchanted experiential world…detached alienated people…anti-human… treating humans like objects… lack of empathy…. excessively German objectification… a cold passion for the exactness of clichés… an aesthetics of the ugly… [according to Roh] abstraction instead of empathy… [according to critic Wilhelm Michel] the rediscovery of the ‘thing’ after the crisis of the ‘I’…

The nine essays

Of the book’s 14 essays, nine on specific academic subjects, while the last five are about the five themes which the exhibition was divided into. The nine essays are:

1. New Objectivity – by Stephanie Barron introducing us to the timeframe, the basic ideas, the origins of the term and so on.

2. A Lack of Empathy by Sabine Eckmann – looking back at 19th century Realism to conclude that the New Realism turned it inside out, concentrating on surfaces but deliberately lacking old-style empathy for the subjects.

3. Hartlaub and Roh by Christian Fuhrmeister – a dry, scholarly examination of the working relationship between the museum director Hartlaub who organised the famous 1925 show and the art critic Roh, who wrote the book which introduced Magical Realism.

4. New Women, New Men, New Objectivity by Maria Makela – Makela describes the prominence of gay and lesbian people in many Weimar portrait

Portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden by Otto Dix (1926)

I enjoyed this article hugely for the sheer unimaginative repetitiveness of its ‘ideas’. Here are choice snippets:

a mannish lesbian who cares little for the traditional codes of femininity… images of women who blurred clear-cut gender boundaries…women’s participation in sport undermined traditional gender roles… the 1920s independent young woman who undermined traditional gender roles… the prevalence of caricatures about New Women in the illustrated mass media considerable anxiety about the breakdown of traditional gender roles… the transgression of traditional gender codes was more threatening in Germany than elsewhere… clear-cut gender boundaries were being eroded in all industrialised countries… the horrible physical and psychic maladies [caused by the war] were intolerable for many German men whose gender identity was in tatters… sex, sexual alterity and gender ambiguity… an era of gender confusion… multiple and mobile gender positionalities…

5. The Politics of New Objectivity by James A. van Dyke. Van Dyke examines this potentially huge subject via the rather small example of the 1927 exhibition of 140 New Objective art works put on by the Berlin art dealer Karl Nierendorf for which the ubiquitous art critic, Franz Roh, wrote the programme. What comes over is that as early as 1927 both left-wing and right-wing critics had begun to turn against the style, accusing it of shallowness, fashionableness and petit-bourgeois crowd-pleasing.

6. New Objectivity and ‘Totalitarianism’ by Olaf Peters – A look at how the artists and idioms of New Objectivity lived on into Hitler’s Reich and then into the East German communist dictatorship. The left-wing artists fled Hitler immediately – Grosz most famously of all, managing to flee the country only weeks before the Leader’s accession. But plenty stayed behind and Peters shows how some of the blander ‘classicists’ managed to sustain careers, some even garnering commissions from powerful Nazi figures. Politicians and some artists for a while cooked up a new movement called New German Romanticism…

The situation in post-war East Germany was even more complex, as artists attempted either to deny their Objectivist pasts or to rehabilitate Objectivism as a precursor of the state-favoured style of Socialist Realism. Peters shows artists, critics, historians and scholars bending over backwards to try and rehabilitate some of the more extreme Objectivist works with the narrow Party line. In practice this seems to have been done by examining the artists’ origins: if he was the son of working class parents his art must be proletariat, and so on. It occurred to me that one reason why Weimar is such a popular period to write about is because it was the last time German writers and artists didn’t have to lie and feel compromised about their political beliefs. It was (briefly) a vibrantly open society. Post-war both East and West Germany were more crippled and constrained by their historical legacies.

7. Painting abroad and its nationalist baggage by Keith Holz looks at the way New Objective art was perceived abroad, by the neighbouring Czechs, by the French, but mostly by the Americans.

8. Middle-class montage by Matthew S. Wittkovsky – Wittowksy suggests that montage, among many other things, can be a way of allowing the real world back into a medium torn up by modernist experiments. In other words, a cubist effect is created but with elements which are hyper-realistic (photographs).

Metropolis by Paul Citroen (1923)

Wittowksy points out that both Christian Schad and Otto Dix made collages during their Dada years and tries to show that the collage mentality – conceiving the painting as an assemblage of disparate elements – underpins their oil paintings. He uses Schad’s self portrait (shown above) to suggest that 1. the two human figures are disconnected. 2. They are separated from the Paris skyline by some kind of gauze. 3. Even the body of the main figure is distanced by the odd translucent chemise he’s wearing. He pushes the idea of layers into history, suggesting that there is a collage-like superimposition between Schad’s painterly finish, derived from Northern Renaissance painters, and the 20th century subject matter.

9. Writing photography by Andreas Huyssen – This essay is not at all about Weimar photography but about the conflicted opinions about photography of a couple of Weimar-era writers and critics, namely the super-famous (if you’ve studied critical theory) Walter Benjamin, his colleague Siegfried Kracauer, the right-wing warrior and writer Ernst Jünger, and the Austrian philosophical novelist, Robert Musil. It’s always good to be reminded how culturally right-wing even Marxist sociologists and theorists are: thus both Kracauer and Benjamin thought that photography was just one of the mass media, or instruments of distraction, which were undermining older human skills and values. Huyssen is concerned with the fact that all these writers wrote collection of short pieces, short feuilletons, prose pieces and fragments, which they published in various collections, to try to convey the Modernist notion of the fragmented quality of life in the ‘modern’ city. (Wonder what any of them would make of life in Tokyo 2018.)

Like Benjamin’s buddy, Theodor Adorno, their brand of Marxism amounted to a continual lament for the good old values which were being overthrown by the triviality and vulgarity of the ‘entertainment industry’ promulgated by the hated capitalist system.

And yet…. when Hitler rose to power they all emigrated to the heart of capitalism, America, where they spent the war in exile happily slagging off the vulgarity of American culture while 300,000 American boys died in combat to liberate their culturally superior Europe.

Once Europe had been made safe again for Marxist philosophers they went back to Germany and set up the Frankfurt School for Social research where they spent the rest of their careers criticising the economic and legal system which made their cushy, professorial lives possible.

Criticisms

1. I have tried to make these essays sound interesting, and they certainly address interesting topics, but in every case the authors are more interested in the work of curators, critics, gallery owners, art dealers and so on than in the art. This means you have to wade through quite a lot of stuff about particular critics and how their views changed and evolved. Thus the art scholar Keith Holz gives us his interpretation of the German curator Fritz Schmalenbach’s essay on the changing ways in which the German curator Gustav Hartlaub used the expression Neueu Sachlichkeit. Which is of, well, pretty specialist interest shall we say.

The essay on how New Objectivism was perceived abroad, maybe inevitably, is more about galleries and curators and critics than about the work or ideas or style of particular artists.

The essay about New Objectivity in Eastern Germany is mainly about the efforts of various critics and theorists to incorporate it into narratives of German art which would be acceptable in a communist regime.

After a while you begin to wish you could read something about the artworks themselves.

The Dreamer by Heinrich Maria Davringhausen ( 1919)

2. You get the strong sense most of the essays are not written for a general public, for us who know little or nothing about the twists and turns of abstruse debates among art historians for the past forty years. They are not written in a spirit of introducing and explicating the art or the artists, or of giving a history of the reception of Weimar paintings abroad to the likes of you or me. No, the dominant feeling is that the essays are overwhelmingly written by art historians and scholars for other art historians and scholars.

3. Therefore all of the essays are written in the kind of semi-sociological jargon which is uniform among art scholars and historians these days, a prose style which rejoices in ‘projects’ and ‘negotiations’ and ‘situating’ debates and ‘transgressing gender norms’, the tired critical theory style which makes them not exactly incomprehensible, but simply boring.

The prose often sounds like the annual reports of company accountants, like the kind of corporate brochures I helped to write and distribute when I worked in the civil service. Here’s a sliver from Olaf Peters describing how difficult East German art historians found it to include New Objectivity in their orthodox Marxist narratives of German art.

The fear of the so-called bourgeois formalist tradition in art history indeed made it impossible for art historians in East Germany to appropriately analyse the artistic potential of New Objectivity. The GDR was hardly prepared aesthetically or theoretically to reflect adequately on the phenomenon of New Objectivity as an all-encompassing presence in the interwar period. (p.86)

Maybe that’s not long enough to give you the taste of crumbling concrete which so many of these essays leave behind on the palate. Here’s a slice of Keith Holz.

The comparative manoeuvres that art historians are enticed to make between New Objectivity and its apparent variations (or influences) outside Germany are not new, nor are they likely to subside. A more comprehensive approach might ask what is at stake in such comparisons by noting similarities between, say, American, Czech, French or Italian paintings of the 1920s and early 1930s and paintings associated with German New Objectivity. On the German-American front, this ground is well traversed, nowhere more critically or richly than in recent work by Andrew Hemingway. Based on substantial original research, Hemingway has recently reconstructed the careers of Stefan Hirsch, George Ault, and Louis Lozowick in relation to German art of the 1920s. Relating the German-born Hirsch to the public face of Precisionism, Hemingway stations the artist’s incipient career within a history of the promotion and reception of New Objectivity in the United States. For Hemingway, the link between these Precisionist-allied artists and German New Objectivity is the representational function of their artworks within international capitalism, particularly the reification of people and objects within this system. (p.93)

You will be thrilled to learn that Hemingway’s ‘trenchant interventions’ represent a ‘methodological paradigm shift’ in historical research. Phew.

My point is – I can read and understand the words, and I understand that these essays are (disappointingly) snippets and excerpts from long and specialised scholarly conversations about the historical interpretation of Weimar art among scholars and historians, living and dead, but — hardly any of it takes me one millimetre closer to the actual works of art.

Quite the opposite, fairly often as I waded through this prose I had to remind myself that the authors were talking about art at all, and not production figures for concrete pipes.

The Parents by Otto Dix (1921)

4. Repetition. Lots of short essays means lots of generalising introductions and lots of vapid conclusions. This helps to explain why they feel very repetitive. For example, the passage here the curator Hartlaub distinguished between left or verist painters (who use harsh satire, fierce colours and ugly caricature to make a political point) and right or classical artists (who take a more cool and detached view of the world) is explained in detail at least five times (pp.17, 29, 42, 126, 263). The idea that the Weimar era was one of political and economic turmoil is repeated in some form in most of the essays. The idea that capitalism is nasty and exploitative is repeated in almost all of them. The following quote from Walter Benjamin, about Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photo album, The World is Beautiful, is repeated three times:

In it is unmasked the posture of a photography that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists. (p.213)

In one long text like Walter Laqueur’s account of Weimar culture (which reads like a masterpiece of calm authority next to many of these works) basic ideas and events need only be mentioned once. In these dozen or more essays you find the same basic ideas (1920s city life was faster and more disorientating than ever before, women had more rights than before the war) being stated again and again and again.

In the wake of the war and in light of the rapid modernisation of working life, increased gender equality and sexual emancipation, and ongoing political uncertainty, artists sought to redefine their role in society. (p.260)

I wonder which decade from the last hundred and fifty years that hasn’t been true of.

Conclusions are hard enough to write at the best of times: it’s difficult to sum up the content of an essay without repeating it. It’s bad enough reading the conclusion of a single book, but reading 15 essays means reading 15 conclusions which, by their nature, tend to be very generalised: again and again they say that ‘more work’ needs to be done to properly understand or fully explore or adequately decode the multiple streams of art of the time. Just like any other time, then.

5. The fourth really irritating aspect about the essays is how many of these scholars appear to live in the 1970s as far as ‘capitalism’ is concerned. They all breezily refer to the evil affects of ‘capitalism’ as if we’re all a bit silly for not choosing one of the countless other economic systems we could be using, like… like, er… And quite a few deploy the word ‘bourgeois’ as if it still means anything. Witkovsky in particular is lavish with the expression:

The new realism could continue the avant-garde attack on bourgeois subjectivity while simultaneously addressing the incipient subjugation of all subjectivity by the seductions of capital and by political dictatorship. (p.106)
[Schad’s subjects] belong to a decadent social space removed from the normative bourgois economy of labour and domestic comforts. (p.106)
[Schad’s paintings] are montages of different social spaces. They mask the materiality of that conflict [between the different social spaces] which the photograms laid bare, but they also suggest its social dimension more directly, through the illusions of figuration. This scrambling of the separations effected by bourgeois society makes the paintings discomfiting. (p.108)
Sander, like the artists of the New Objectivity, fully inhabited the bourgeoisie. His chosen portrait locations likewise emanate a degree of comfort and intimacy typically associated with the private home, the single most vaunted bourgeois setting. (p.112)
[The photographer August Sander embarked on a project to photograph all possible job types in 1920s Germany, a project he never completed.] In the necessary incompleteness of Sander’s project lies, perversely, its greatest promise of enlightenment – a realisation that modern society is grounded in accumulation without end. Infinitude may be implicit in the foundational bourgeois idea of capital accumulation, but to put such an idea on display – and to depict it, moreover, through portraiture of the citizenry – forces a rupture with the equally bourgeois ideals of closure, separation and control. (p.113)

In short, if you like your Marxism shorn of any connection with an actual political party or programme i.e. any risk of ever being put into practice, but you still want to enjoy feeling smugly superior to ‘bourgeois’ society with its vulgar ideas of ‘capital accumulation’ and its ghastly ‘gender stereotyping’, then being a white, middle-class art historian in a state-funded university is the job for you. Your sense of irony or self-awareness will be surgically removed upon entry.

It’s not just that this anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist view seems so rife among these art scholars now, in 2018, thirty years after the collapse of communism – it’s that they’re all based in America. America. The centre of global capitalism for the past century. Do they not own private property, cars and houses and mobile phones? Are the art galleries and colleges they work for not funded and supported by big banks and finance houses (as most exhibitions are). If they’re so disgusted by capitalism and the revolting bourgeoisie why don’t they go to a country where neither exist. North Korea is lovely this time of year. The people there are wonderfully free of the reification and alienation and objectification which make life in Southern California so unbearable.

The five thematic essays

The second part of the book consists of five thematic essays, each of which is nine or ten pages long and followed by 40 or so full colour, full page reproductions. This, then, is the visual core of the book. I hoped the essays would be a bit more general and informative. Alas no.

1. Life in the Democracy and the Aftermath of War by Graham Bader. Bader invokes the usual suspects among contemporary Marxist thinkers (György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer) to declare that the art of the period reflected a new level of capitalism (‘this process of capitalist rationalisation appeared to have triumphed in the interwar period’ it was ‘rationalisation run amok’, p.125). Capitalism depersonalised people, reducing them to objects with no centre, to collections of surfaces. Bodies were ‘colonised and deformed’. Lukács lamented:

capitalist rationalisation’s penetration and capture of the human body, its dismissal of the ‘qualitative essences’ of the individual subject in the process of transforming human beings into abstractions, mere numbers for a general’s war plans or a pimp’s balance sheet. (p.131, 182, 228)

Like Lukács, Kracauer:

understood industrial capitalism’s ‘murky reason’ – its faith in a totalising abstractness that has ‘abandoned the truth in which it participates… and does not encompass man‘ – as having come to colonise rather than liberate the subjects it ostensibly served.

Among all this regurgitation of 100-year-old communist rhetoric Bader makes a simple point. The war and the crushing post-war poverty left highly visible marks on people’s bodies. The streets were full of maimed soldiers and the impoverished unemployed, and also a flood of women driven by poverty to prostitution. Hence the huge number of sketches, drawings and paintings of prostitutes and war cripples among Neue Sachlichkeit artists.

Two victims of capitalism by Otto Dix (1923) According to Bader, ‘the paradigmatic couple of the age’ (p.130)

It doesn’t occur to Bader, any more than it occurred to any of the Weimar artists, that this situation wasn’t brought about by capitalism; it was the result of Germany losing the war. Their idiotic military leaders decided to take advantage of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to implement their long-cherished plan to knock out France in a few weeks and then grab loads of lebensraum off Russia. That resulted in a social and economic cataclysm. If lots of men were war cripples it was because they fought in a stupid war. If lots of women became prostitutes that is because Germany’s economy was brought to its knees by its leaders’ stupidity, by the fact that they were undergoing a military blockade because they lost the war.

If capitalism was always and everywhere so utterly exploitative and destructive how do you account for the experience of the 1920s in the world’s most capitalist country, America – the decade they called ‘the Roaring Twenties’, a decade of unparalleled economic growth and a huge expansion in consumer products and liberated lifestyles?

In fact the Weimar Republic experienced its golden years (1924 to 1929) precisely when it was at its most capitalistic, when it received huge loans from capitalist America and its capitalist factory owners were able to employ millions of people.

Art historians cherry pick the evidence (using a handful of paintings to represent a nation of 60 million people), quote only from a self-reinforcing clique of Marxist writers (Benjamin, Kracauer, Lukács, over and over again) and ignore the wider historical context in way which would get any decent historian sacked.

2. The City and the Nature of Landscape by Daniela Fabricius. Fabricius quotes the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch who pointed out the fairly obvious idea that different groups of people live in different ‘nows’ i.e. city dwellers live in a more technologically and culturally advanced ‘now’ than isolated country dwellers. This leads her into a consideration of different types of ‘space’, inparticular the new suburbs which sprang up outside German cities, generally of modernist architecture, which lent themselves to stylish modern photography by the likes of Arthur Köster, Werner Mantz and Albert Renger-Patzsch.

St Georgs-Garten Housing Settlement, 1926 by Arthur Köster

Albert Renger-Patzsch published a photo album called the World is Beautiful which the egregious Walter Benjamin disliked for showing the world as beautiful and therefore not ‘problematising’ it, not subjecting it to the kind of dialectical analysis which would have shown that in fact the World Needs a Communist Revolution. Renger-Patzsch stayed in Germany during the Nazi years and was commissioned to do idealised studies of the German regions by the Nazis.

Fabricius ends her essay with a rare piece of useful information about a specific artist rather than an analysis of other art historians – by telling us a little about George Schrimpf, a self-taught painter who spent his early years bumming round south Germany, eventually getting involved with artistic and anarchist circles in Munich. All this is completely absent from his naive paintings of women in interiors with views of perfect landscapes or outside among the perfect landscapes.

On the Balcony by Georg Schrimpf (1929)

3. Man and Machine by Pepper Stetler. Stetler explores the way the word Sachlichkeit was used as early as 1902 (by architect Hermann Muthesius) to describe a no-frills, functionalist aesthetic derived from the way machines are designed, built and work. The architecture critic Adolf Behne in the 1920s tried to shift the term to refer not to a visual style but to a way of working with machines, a way for humans to interact via machines. These were just some of the people debating this word when Hartlaub used it as the title for his famous 1925 exhibition. As well as Muthesius, Hartlaub and Behne, we are also introduced to the art historian Carl Georg Heise, the art critic Wilhelm Lot, the art critic Kurt Wilhelm-Kästner, the art critic Justus Bier, the critic Walter Benjamin and the Marxist philosopher, György Lukács. Again. Maybe the editors stipulated that Benjamin, Kracauer and Lukacs had to be referenced in every essay.

Stetler doesn’t mention it but the Dadaists had already conceived all kinds of man-machine combinations, and Dix and Grosz produced some grotesque caricatures of maimed war veterans who were more false limbs, artificial eyes, springs and contraptions, than men.

But the main thrust of this piece is to introduce a selection of wonderful paintings and photos of machinery. They demonstrate the way the machinery is 1. painted in punctiliously accurate engineering detail. 2. Is often depicted isolated, clean, often seen from below, as if it is an art work placed on a plinth for aesthetic enjoyment. 3. No people, no workers, no mess. Frozen in time. The star of the machine artists is Carl Grossberg, who trained as an architect and draftsman.

The paper machine by Carl Grossberg (1934)

It is interesting to learn how systematic and methodical these German artists were: Albert Renger-Patzsch’s project was to take 100 photographs of the modern germany for The World Is Beautiful. August Sandler’s Face of our Time (1929) contains a selection of 60 portraits from the larger project, People of the 20th Century which he intended to include 600 portrait photographs. Grossberg set out to do a series of twenty-five monster paintings which would provide a survey of Germany’s most important industries (p.209). Grosz published his drawings in themed portfolios.

4. Still Lifes and Commodities by Megan R. Luke. Luke scores full marks for mentioning Walter Benjamin early on in her essay about the New Objectivity’s use of still lives, and for slipping in a steady stream of Marxist terminology: in Weimar ‘the commodity reigned supreme’; there was a ‘general cultural anxiety’. She quotes the historian Herbert Molderings who, if not a Marxist, is happy to use Marxist terminology, on the still life photos of Neue Sachlichkeit:

‘They are the modern still lifes of the twentieth century: the expression of exchange value incarnate, the detached form of the fetish character of commodities.’ (quoted p.231)

She also takes the time to explain that photographs in adverts are designed to make us want to buy the products.

Advertising seeks not to show products of our labour or need but rather to excite and choreograph a desire that has the power to overwhelm us. (p.231)

Where would we be without art scholars to guide us through the confusing modern world?

This is the third essay in a row to tell us that the photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch’s produced a photo album titled The World is Beautiful (p.236).

The only useful idea I found was that objects were somehow cleansed of all significance, hollowed out, and subjected to ‘suffocating scrutiny’. Now wonder the Walter Benjamins of this world were so deeply ambivalent about photography: it revealed the complexity of the world in a way the human eye isn’t designed to (something pointed out by Moholy-Nagy in his book on photography) and yet this new type of image runs the risk of claiming to capture or depict reality and thus – as Benjamin and Brecht emphasised – completely erasing the web of human relationships it appears amid.

If Expressionist paintings screamingly overflowed with the artist’s distraught emotions, Sachlichkeit still lives seem to have been magically drained of all passion or emotion. It is this erasure of human presence, of human touch and context, which makes so much of the photography and painting of buildings and machinery both powerfully evocative, charged with mystery and yet bereft: all at the same time.

Insulated High Tension Wires from Die Welt Ist Schon by Albert Renger-Patzsch (1928)

5. New Identities: Type and Portraiture by Lynette Roth. Amid the politically correct commonplaces (Dix’s portrait of Sylvia von Harden ’embodies the masculinised woman whose appearance challenged norms of sexual difference’), Roth brings out how a notable aspect of Neue Sachlichkeit was the interest in types. August Sander’s project to photograph 600 ‘types’ of profession and trade is the locus classicus, but the painters Grosz or Dix also offered combinations of the same ‘types’ over and again (war cripples and prostitutes throng their works).

She suggests the use of types and sterotypes was a way of addressing, sorting out, the post-war chaos. Thin ice, because the Nazis also were keen on types, notably the good Aryan and the bad Jew. And Roth definitely doesn’t mention this, but one of the easiest stereotypes in the world is the bad capitalist and the poor innocent proletarian ‘alienated’ from his work.

I am astonished how from start to finish all the art historians and scholars in this book make extensive and unquestioning use of Marxist terminology based on a fundamentally anti-capitalist worldview. On the last page she is quoting a fellow ‘scholar’ who suggests that some of Sanders’s photographs ‘challenge hegemonic bourgeois structures’.

Quite breath-taking.

Painterly finish

In 1921 Max Doerner published a popular handbook The Materials of the Artist and Their Use in Painting which provided information and guidance for artists wishing to use the techniques of the Old Masters, info about oil, tempera, fresco and other methods of artists like Jan van Eyck, Holbein, Rembrandt and Rubens.

Doerner’s book helped artists who were committed to painting works with hyper-realistic attention to detail and smooth invisible finish (compared to the deliberately obvious brush strokes of the impassioned Expressionists). The emphasis on portraiture of so many works of this era recall the portraits of Northern Renaissance painting.

It can be summed up in one word – painterliness – what Roth lists as ‘careful finish, attention to detail and smooth finish’ (p.263).

The current Van Eyck show at the National Gallery is focused round his wondrous use of a concave mirror, showing how this motif was picked up by later painters. I wonder if Herbert Ploberger is deliberately referencing it in the convex reflection in the powder case, middle left, in this painting.

Dressing Table by Herbert Ploberger (1926)

Kanoldt and O’Keeffe

Doesn’t Alexander Kanoldt’s Olveano II from 1925…

… look like Georgia O’Keeffe’s Black Mesa Landscape (1930)?

The spirit of the age. A parallel tendency towards cartoon simplification, of both landscape and colour.

Last words

While both an aesthetics of the ugly and modernist innovation dovetail with nineteenth-century Realism, interestingly enough it is the specific German mentality and political context that is seen as necessitating a new form of realism characterised by unconditional attack, excessive exposure, and radical critique transgressing the paradigm of empathy. (Sabine Eckmann, p.35)

Related reviews

The Rest Is Noise 8: Post-War World

To the South Bank for the eighth study weekend in their year-long The Rest Is Noise festival; this weekend it’s the Post-War World ie the radical avant-garde music created in Europe immediately after World War II, focusing on composers from the Darmstadt School and especially on Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. As usual Saturday and Sunday kicked off at 10am and each day was packed with lectures, workshops, film screenings leading up to an evening performance of key works.

Saturday 5 October

Breakfast with Stockhausen Enthusiastic animateur Fraser Trainer gave us a thorough backgrounding in the birth of electronic music. In 1945 music was a vacuum in Europe. Key composers had fled to America – Stravinsky, Bartok, Hindemith. Strauss was old and discredited. From the gap emerged an angry young generation determined to turn their back on the traditions of Romanticism and nationalism which had brought Europe to destruction. Stockhausen was drafted, aged 16, to ambulance duty where he saw horrors. The electronic manipulation of sound was just beginning, pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer in Paris. Radio was improving its technology. Long playing records were introduced in 1948. Stockhausen in particular took to this brave new technological environment and immersed himself in the physics of sound, using the new devices to investigate the properties of frequency, phase and amplitude, as well as the overtones created by the human voice – analysing the colour components of every noise the human voice can make, defining every element and then cunningly combining them in new and completely abstract ways. An early result was Gesang der Jünglinge (1956), which took over a year to create note by note, phrase by phrase, effect by effect. He recorded a 12 year old choir boy singing phrases from the book of Daniel, then manipulated them to be broadcast through 5 loudspeakers.

Fraser’s assistant got a volunteer from the audience to say a few words and then used her laptop music editing program to quickly create the kind of sound affects it took Stockhausen and his engineers weeks to create 60 years ago.

Donald Sassoon – from the War to the Wall Despite his name Donald turned out to be Italian, smooth, witty, charming, he took us on an entertaining tour of post war popular culture (top grossing films, James Bond novels etc), comparing Western with Eastern cultural products: his conclusion was that, whatever politicians and newspapers blared about the Cold War, on the level of popular culture both Eastern and Western popular culture largely ignored the Cold War; in fact popular narratives often shared the same shapes of lone heroes overcoming either i) the Nazis (everyone’s favourite baddies) ii) the bureaucracy; fighting the system. Suggestive thought that at bottom both sides of the iron Curtain were experiencing the same Rise of Managerial Bureaucracy.

Robert Worby – the Birth of Electronic Music By far the best presentation of the day, composer, writer and Radio 3 broadcaster Worby went back to basics: he showed just one slide which listed the physical characteristics of sound: Pitch (described by physicists as sine waves). Duration. Volume (described by physicists as amplitude). Timbre (also known in music jargon as ‘colour’). Location. Stockhausen et al set out to investigate the physical properties and combinatorial possibilities of each of these elements.

Worby explained there is a lack of vocabulary to describe these scientific elements of music; the old Italian words derive from the Renaissance; Romantic critics added vague impressionist terms; the terminology of physics is hard to manage without being an actual physicist. Anyway, sounds are not things; all sounds are processes over time.

In Paris Pierre Schaefer went out and recorded trains and street noise then manipulated them in a primitive studio, creating Musique concrète. In Germany, in the studios of Cologne Radio, Stockhausen experimented with isolating pure sine waves and then treating, combining, distorting them etc.

At this abstract level, melody is pitch mediated by duration. Stockhausen himself told Worby that, of course, you can make a ‘melody’ by varying location, as you can by varying all the other 4 elements of noise. At a stroke this explains the thinking behind Gruppen, where three orchestras play from different locations around the auditorium.

Worby did a great job of easing his audience into the world of music as seen by physicists and scientists and making us realise that, suddenly seen from this perspective, the possibilities for experimentation are endless.

Jonathan Meades – Le Corbusier and Niemayer Typifying the arrogance of most of the architects I’ve met, interviewed or read about, this lecture wasn’t at all about Le Corbusier but seemed to be Meades’ defence of Brutalist architecture made from concrete. I learned that a lot of the design and aesthetic went back to the Nazi defences along coastal France against Allied invasion. Meades referred to lots of buildings and housing estates and so on but didn’t explain the history or background of any of them and didn’t show pictures of any of them, so I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about until after he’d finished speaking and opened it up to questions from the floor when suddenly we were shown a loop of a dozen or so buildings on a screen but, typically, still with no explanation of what they were. As he proceeded Meades began to criticise more and more things, English Heritage for failing to save Brutalist buildings which have been demolished, modern architecture for its infantile colours, spineless developers, the childishness of our entire culture where adults read Harry Potter.

By the end I knew nothing whatsoever more about Le Corbu. In Lily Allen’s words, Meades was having “a little whine and a moan”. I wish I’d gone to see Tom Service playing and discussing extracts from Stockhausen, Nono, Xenakis et al which was on at the same time slot.

Meades was promoting his new book, Museum Without Walls, which this talk comprehensively put me off reading. Jeremy Clarkson for arty types. Meades’ “talk” was introduced by young Owen Hatherley whose made a name with his architecture criticism, which is collected into several recent books including A New Kind of Bleak. His “chairing” of the talk left a bit to be desired. His idea of starting the audience Q&A was to mutter, “You lot”. I’ve toyed with buying his books but, flicking through the opening chapters in Foyles, I realised his texts also amount to one long moan. Why become an architecture critic if you think so much modern architecture is ****?

Fear of Music: Why people get Rothko but don’t get Stockhausen My heart always sinks when I see ‘panel discussion’. People in the arts are all pretty much the same, middle class, middle aged, white and polite so they tend to end up agreeing and being nice about everything and this panel was a good example. It was based on a recent book (as so many of these sessions are) by David Stubbs, Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen. Every time he was getting into his stride he was interrupted by the moderator who went to another speaker. Maybe it would have been better as a one-man presentation with musical examples.

But some ideas struggled through:

a) Pop versus the avant-garde music

Accessibility: people consume pop music in a million ways, via TV shows, adverts, in films, on TV, their ipods, the internet etc. Stockhausen is hard to access. Not least because it is
Expensive: Stockhausen’s CDs are published by his own company and generally cost £15. Not much is on YouTube. Let alone Maderna, Nono, Xenakis.
Ubiquity: and you can listen to pop music in the car, at home, in the kitchen, in clubs and pubs and cinemas, almost everywhere (whether you want to or not). Modernist music – Stockhausen, Boulez – is best heard live, but it is very rarely performed anywhere. You have to really search it out to find it. It is expensive to attend. And it is in forbidding and offputting concert halls.

b) Rothko versus Stockhausen

Convenience: you can go to Tate Modern any day of the week, at any time that suits you, with anyone you fancy eg with kids, stroll around and wander into the Rothko room and spend as little or as long as you like, ie a few seconds, a minute if you want to. But these concert pieces can only be seen extremely rarely, in a concert hall setting, and at a time and place and date not of your choosing.
Ubiquity of the image: images bombard us all day long, on TV, on billboards and hoardings, in magazines and newspapers and on the internet. We are used to assimilating all kinds of weird and wonderful images in split seconds. But this music is a process which takes time. In our day and age not many people are prepared or able to invest the time required.

Electronic Music Hub Concert In a small dingy concrete room underneath the Purcell Rooms there was a concert by Royal College of Music students. This was very, very good:

Nono – La Fabbrica Illuminata – performed by soprano Josephine Goddard
Alvarez – Temazcal – maracas performed by Alun McNeil-Watson
Reich – New York Countrpoint – clarinet performed by Benjamin Mellfont

Evening Concert in the Queen Elizabeth Hall:

Sunday 6 October

Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, Helmut Lachenmann and Christopher Fox in conversation. Smooth, polite, urbane Mr Fox gave a very good introduction to the Darmstadt International School of Music. (Odd that there wasn’t a simple lecture/presentation on this central subject all weekend.) Maderna and Nono go in 1950, Stockhausen in 1951, Boulez in 1952. Only in 1957 does Nono refer to there being a ‘Darmstadt school’ as a style or movement. A landmark concert in 1956 of Stockhausen’s Gesang and Nono’s Il Canto Sospeso. 1958 John Cage visited.

Nuria Schoenberg-Nono is a central figure. She is Schoenberg’s daughter and she married Luigi Nono one of the central figures of the 1950s avant-garde. Brought up in her father’s Los Angeles exile she was relaxed and American and funny. Two things she said struck me: 1. it would be nice if people booed for once at a music concert; nowadays everyone is so polite and open-minded and there is no edge, no controversy, no vision or excitement. 2. The music of her father and Berg and Webern was about passion and emotion. At Darmstadt and beyond it was treated as if it was physics. Only in recent years, she said, as orchestras have become completely familiar with it, has some of the emotion and expressiveness come out which was always meant to be there.

Helmut Lachenmann is a composer from that period, a little younger the the Big Names. His German accent was thick so it was hard to hear a lot of what he said, but he a) really doesn’t like the book, the Rest Is Noise, which he thought was superficial and inaccurate – he was angry that Maderna isn’t even mentioned in it; b) he’s unhappy at the generally negative image of Darmstadt in the UK aUS, the Anglo-Saxon world: he emphasises that it wasn’t a monolithic dictatorship, there was all kinds of experimentation going on; and that all of them were united in wanting to escape from Magic Music. he recalled being a boy at the end of the War and listening to a broadcast by Goebels frothing with Nazi lies which was rounded off by a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. For them, the entire tradition was contaminated and they were trying to create a genuinely new world.

Lachenmann’s positive vision was rather dented by a comment from the floor by someone who had attended new music festivals in Scandinavia in the 50s and compared the open, relaxed atmosphere of these with arriving at Darmstadt to find an atmosphere of tension, competition and criticism, backstabbing and rivalry. Ho hum.

Ian Buruma: Year Zero Also promoting his new book, Year Zero: A History of 1945, Buruma was brilliant. A mild-mannered, urbane man who radiated intelligence and knowledge, he chose a few themes from the book to expand:

People rarely study what happens after wars end. Peace in 1945 really meant chaos and confusion. It led to brutal civil war in Greece which could also easily have broken out in Italy or France. In each country the right wing had sided with the Nazis, the resistance tended to be left wing, and neither side forgot. France was saved by de Gaulle who combined right wing politics with impeccable resistance credentials, thus squaring the circle. In one sense civil wars never really go away and that explains the rise of Golden Dawn in Greece.
Very widespread violence against women who had collaborated. Buruma sees this as a way for guilty men who failed to resist, taking out their resentment, and also restoring the status quo ante.
We can now see the end of the USSR in 1989 leading to the death of Social Democracy across Europe, the triumph of neo-Liberal economics and cultural worldview, the unravelling of the post-war consensus and the end of the optimism which fueled the avant garde.

Lunchtime Concert: Music of Change by the Guildhall Percussion Ensemble

Cage – Second Construction
Xenakis – Okho
Xenakis – Psappha
Cage – Credo in US

Lots of drumming.

Black Mountain College: by Alyce Mahon, scholar Peter Jaeger and poet Tim Atkins. This was a very good panel: Alyce gave a good history of the idealist and utopian Black Mountain college, set up in 1933 to educate without the traditional gap between teachers and students, no hierarchy, minimal fees, no payment to the tutors who got room and board, an experiment in arts education which was forced to close in 1957, set up as a kind of Bauhaus for the States. Cage and Cunningham arrived in 1948. In 1951 there was the first ever ‘happening’. In the same month Cage’s 4’33” was a homage to the influence of Rauschenberg with his all-white paintings. Cage’s music, Cunningham’s dance, Rauschenberg and de Kooning painting, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley poetry.

Jaeger was promoting his book, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, and was wonderfully calm, lucid, intelligent and informative. He compared some of Cage’s works and saying with Zen teachings and koans. Cage said 1950s avant garde was a reincarnation of 1910s Dada; that new music was about Time not melody and that Beethoven had dulled music by obsessing about Melody and harmony, taking German music down a dead end. A very informative and civilised and well-organised session.

When asked about the influence of Olsen and Creeley’s Open or open Notation verse on English poetry, enthusiastic and tremendously knowledgeable poet Tim Atkins said, well it hasn’t really arrived here yet. Like so much 20th century art, it has just passed by an England dominated by its public school elite who continue to like traditional games, traditional values and traditional art.

Introduction to Adorno: Elise ? and Nick Lezard At university back in the 80s, because I had studied German, I sought out and read Benjamin and Adorno (and Bloch and Lukaczs) who weren’t on my English syllabus and weren’t taught. For a season Minima Moralia was my constant companion. Theodor Adorno is immersed in the German philosophical tradition whose colossus is Hegel and after Hegel, Marx. Only if you have a feel for this tradition as well as the phenomenology of the 30s and 40s, for the bitter infighting between post-Hegelians and Marxists in those stricken decades, can you get a sense of how embattled Adorno felt when he fled Germany and settled in California.

In his native land the battle for Culture was literal – degenerate artists were being executed, banned, exiled – and the Great German Musical Tradition had undergone the sweeping revolution of Schoenberg’s twelve tone system. For Adorno the High Culture of his childhood, the Seriousness of Art which led to Schoenberg in music and Kandinsky in Art, all this was under threat, was a matter of life and death. Only by committing to the highest standards, to the most difficult and recondite Literature and Music, could artists and those who love Art possibly escape the flood of totalitarian propaganda, military marches, the dreck of jazz and pop music which was flooding the world.

Coming to California then was a profound shock. People were cruising round in big cars, having barbeques, surfing, making brainless movies about love and big musicals. America represented the death of High Culture because it provided consumers with vast floods of brainless pap. Hence Adorno’s fierce abreaction in books like Minima Moralia (a collection of aphorisms and short essays) and The Culture Industry. Typical quote: “Already for many people it is an impertinence to say ‘I'” by which he means that most people are just robots, their brains filled with the mindless newsprint, cartoons, pop music and rubbish movies churned out by the Culture Industry which is itself just an aspect of the complete triumph of consumer capitalism.

Unfortunately, none of the power, the depth, the totality of Adorno’s critique of the way consumer capitalism has curdled and corrupted our most fundamental being came over in this presentation. Adorno isn’t an author you read. He is a complete reassessment of the culture we live in and our own personal values. Nick Lezard said he thought we could still really use Adorno as a mirror to our times, and he cited the X Factor as an example. This is vastly too shallow and obvious. Adorno is saying that to the depths of our souls all of us are slaves to the shallow lying garbage of the Culture Industry. Almost none of us can have an original thought, can escape our slavery and that escape is only possible via the most severe, intense, difficult and demanding Art, which for him was Schoenberg’s Serialism. For Adorno, in the 1940s, it was all over, the Soul of the West was corrupted beyond redemption. In which case, here and now in 2013, it must be even more all over.

But it isn’t. The fundamental flaw in Adorno’s position is his False Model of Culture: it is based entirely on the strict High Art of his childhood: Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, it is the German tradition or nothing.

But of course there are thousands of traditions. At the same time Offenbach was writing his comedies and Gilbert & Sullivan theirs. As well as Schoenberg the world contained Poulenc and Vaughan Williams and Satie. My break with Adorno came when I read his criticism of Jazz which he thought embodied and continued negro slavery with its limited rhythms, its limited instrumentation and the soloist trapped within hackneyed chord sequences.

Putting down Adorno’s book, you walk away into a world full of beauty, of blue skies and flowers and the joyful sounds of all kinds of pop and rock and disco music, of musicals and world music and jazz and Burt Bacharach, let alone the thousands of types of art which blend and merge into advertising or magazine design, posters and internet layouts or apps or games.

The world is wonderfully big and rich and strange and so are the thousands of artistic and musical traditions which we can now experience more than any previous generations in human history. Adorno’s work is an intellectual and emotional and aesthetic dead end, a document from a terrible period of history shaped and constricted by the very totalitarianism impulses he was trying to escape.

Evening Concert in the Queen Elizabeth Hall with Martyn Brabbins, the London Sinfonietta & Royal Academy of Music musicians

Karlheinz Stockhausen: Gruppen
Luigi Nono: Canti per 13
Interval
Luigi Nono: Polifonica – monodia – ritmica
Karlheinz Stockhausen: Gruppen

Stockhausen said the concert halls hadn’t been built to properly perform his music and this was sadly true as the three orchestras performing Gruppen were located on the stage along the flanks of the hall under the boxes ie only those in the expensive Stalls seats got the full ‘in-the-round’ experience. The rest of us, the majority, in the auditorium heard the music all coming from in front of us. Ho hum. Deploying such large forces for a piece which is only twenty minutes has led to the tradition of always performing it twice in concerts, at the beginning and end.

All of these pieces benefit hugely from being heard live where you can see the effort it takes to create and co ordinate the music and where you get the full aural impact.

You can listen to almost all the sessions I list here as South Bank podcasts and make your own mind up.

Karlheinz Stockhausen en surimpression de la partition d’une de ses composition, Strasbourg, 1980 (Wikimedia Commons)

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Theodor Adorno