The Summer of Theory. Philipp Felsch

The Summer of Theory - Philipp Felsch


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by their mother organization, the students turned their backs on the dogmas of Social Democratic folklore, sized up the conformism of the West German proletariat and, making a virtue out of necessity, rolled up their sleeves as revolutionary subjects. Thus, the early sixties saw the formation of the ‘student movement’, so named in analogy to the ‘labour movement’. The distinguishing characteristic that set it apart from the classical left – especially in West Germany – was theory.4

      ‘What is to be done?’ cried the literature student Elisabeth Lenk at the 17th regular delegates’ conference of the SDS in October 1962. Her answer to Lenin’s famous question: work on theory. In the face of union officials who proudly claimed not to read books, in the face of a Social Democratic Party that was throwing itself at the petite bourgeoisie, the path of the New Left must lead into the vineyard of texts. Lenk urgently warned her comrades against the casual cultural critique of the nonconformists, who ‘think they are performing a revolutionary act by sitting in a basement jazz bar with their Enzensberger haircuts’. The SDS needed hard, ‘socialist theory’. Lenk’s speech gives voice to the need for fundamental research of a kind that the Left had last undertaken in the 1920s. ‘But what is socialist theory?’ she asked her comrades. ‘Is it the same as unadulterated Marxism? Or is it a revised Marxism, and if so, which one? Bernstein’s, Kautsky’s, Lenin’s, or that of some Marxist-Existentialist? Or is it just the eclectic interconnection of handy bits of theory?’5

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


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