The New Old World (48 page)

In the gradual change of intellectual atmosphere, one catalyst stands out. Since the war, Germany's leading journal of ideas has been
Merkur
, which can claim a record of continuous distinction arguably without equal in Europe. Its remarkable founding editor, Hans Paeschke, gave it an interdisciplinary span—from the arts through philosophy and sociology to the hard sciences—of exceptional breadth, canvassed with consistent elegance and concision. But what made it unique was the creed of its editor. Inspired by Wieland's encyclopaedism, Paeschke gave the ecumenical range of his Enlightenment model a more agonistic twist, combining the capacity for
Gegenwirkung
that Goethe had praised in Wieland—who had published Burke and Wollstonecraft alike—with a
Polarisierung
of his own, as twin mottos for the journal. These remained the constants in
Merkur
's changeable liberalism—first conservative, then national, then left, as Paeschke later described its phases: an editorial practice welcoming opposites, and setting them in play against each other. ‘The more liberal, the richer in tensions.'
⁴¹
At one time or another Broch, Arendt, Curtius, Adorno, Heidegger, Brecht, Gehlen, Löwith, Weizsäcker, Voegelin, Borkenau, Bloch, Schmitt, Habermas, Weinrich, Benn all appeared in its pages. Uninterested in the
Wirtschaftswunder
, hostile to the Cold War, regarding Adenauer's Germany as a ‘pseudomorphosis', Paeschke maintained good relations with writers in the East, and when the political scene changed in the sixties, was sympathetic to both the student revolt and the turn to an
Ostpolitik
. Averse to any kind of
Syntheselei
, he conceived the journal socratically, as a dialectical enterprise, in keeping with the dictum
Der Geist ist ein Wühler
.
⁴²
Spirit is not a reconciler, but a trouble-maker.

Paeschke retired in the late seventies, and in 1984 the succession passed to Karl-Heinz Bohrer, pre-eminently equipped for the role of
Wühler
. A student of German Romanticism, and theorist of Jünger's early work, Bohrer made his début in
Merkur
in 1968, with a defence of the student revolt against liberal
attacks in the mainstream press, praising it as the expression, at its best, of an eclectic anarchism.
⁴³
Not the Frankfurt School, he argued, but the French Surrealism that Benjamin had admired and Adorno dismissed, was the appropriate inspiration for rebellion against the detestable
juste milieu
of the Bonn system.
⁴⁴
These were the sentiments of a writer who was soon making a name for himself as editor of the literary section of the country's leading conservative newspaper, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, before falling out with his superiors and being packed off as correspondent to London. A decade later, he returned to the charge in
Merkur
with a bravura survey of the fate of the movements of 1968—compared with those of 1848 and 1870–1—as uprising and counter-culture, covering politics, theatre, film, art, theory and music, and marking 1974 as the end of a revolutionary epoch in which Blake's tiger had stalked the streets. A mere restoration of ‘old-bourgeois cultural piety' was no longer possible, but the new culture had by now lost its magnetism: only an artist like Beuys retained an anarchic force of subversion.
⁴⁵
Bohrer's own deepest allegiances were to ‘suddenness' as the dangerous moment, without past or future, in which true aesthetic experience ruptures the continuity of existence, and so, potentially, the social fabric. Captured by Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Hofmannsthal, and Jünger—in their own ways Woolf or Joyce, too—the sudden found its political expression in the decisionism of Schmitt.
⁴⁶
The central figure in this pantheon, combining more than any other its aesthetic and political moments—epiphany and act—remained Jünger, the subject of Bohrer's
Ästhetik des Schreckens
, the work that won him a chair in modern German literary history at Bielefeld.

On taking charge of
Merkur
soon afterwards, Bohrer opened his editorship in spectacular fashion, with a merciless satire on the petty-bourgeois philistinism, provincialism and consumerism of Bonn politics and culture, complete with a ruinous portrait of Kohl as the personification of a mindless gluttony.
⁴⁷
This was a state,
wanting all aesthetic form, that could only be described in the spirit of the early Brecht, or Baudelaire on Belgium. A three-part pasquinade on the German political class followed, depicting both the new-found CDU–FDP coalition and the SPD opposition to it with blistering derision.
⁴⁸
Time did not soften these judgements. At the turn of the nineties, Bohrer unleashed another ferocious fusillade against German provincialism, in a six-part series covering government, literature, television, advertising, press, songs, stars, movies, cityscapes, and culminating in special scorn for delusions that the enthusiasm of his compatriots for Europe was anything other than a tourist form of the same parochialism. From the ‘pastoral boredom' of
Die Zeit
and the
FAZ
, to the ‘fussy sentimentalism' of Grass or Walser, to the grotesqueries of Kohl as ‘Giant of the Caucasus', and Genscher as his Sancho Panza, little escaped Bohrer's scathing report. At best, the Frankfurt of the sixties had not been quite so dreary as Düsseldorf or Munich, and Fassbinder was a bright spot.
⁴⁹

The polemical élan of such broadsides was never just destructive. From the beginning, Bohrer had a normative ideal in mind. Germany was in need of a creative aesthetics of the state. It was the absence of one that produced the dismal landscape scanned in his first editorial, and its many sequels. To those who taxed him with that ‘aestheticization of politics' which Benjamin had identified as peculiar to fascism, he replied that in fact every democratic state that respected itself had its own aesthetic, expressed in its capital city, public buildings, ceremonies, spaces, forms of rule and rhetoric—contemporary America, England, France or Italy supplied the evidence, to which a special issue of
Merkur
was devoted.
⁵⁰
It was in these that the identity of the nation acquired tangible legitimacy, and shape: a state without its own distinctive symbolic forms, in which politics was reduced to mere social assistance, was hardly worth the name. It was time for Germany to put the stunted half-life of the Bonn Republic behind it.

When the Berlin Wall came down five years later, but reunification was still quite uncertain, and resisted by the liberal left in the West, Bohrer was thus well positioned to publish, in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine
, perhaps the most powerful single essay of the time in favour of German unity, ‘Why We Are Not a Nation—and Why We Should Become One'.
⁵¹
His leading adversary was Habermas, treated with the respect Bohrer had always shown him. The contribution to
Merkur
immediately following his famous ‘Aesthetics of the State' had, indeed, been an article by Habermas on the peace demonstrations against the stationing of Pershing missiles, and when the
Historikerstreit
came two years later, Bohrer had not hesitated to side with him. But Habermas's resistance to unification, worthy though his notion of a disembodied constitutional patriotism might be as an abstract ideal, was a delusion. Behind it lay a ‘negative chiliasm', in which the Judeocide stood as the unconditional event of the German past, barring the country from any recovery of a traditional national identity, with its own psychic and cultural forms. ‘Did our specifically “irrational” tradition of Romanticism have to be so thoroughly destroyed by the bulldozers of a new sociology?', he asked pointedly.

With reunification and the transfer of the capital to Berlin came possibilities of another kind of Germany, for which Bohrer had polemicized. For with them faded the intellectual nimbus of the old order. But if the arrival of the Berlin Republic marked the passage to a new situation, it was not one which Bohrer viewed in any spirit of complacent vindication. When
Merkur
took stock of the country in late 2006 with a book-length special issue, ‘On the Physiognomy of the Berlin Republic', under the rubric
Ein neues Deutschland?
—a virtuoso composition, containing essays on everything from ideology to politics, journalism to architecture, slums to managers, patriots to professors, legitimacy to diplomacy—Bohrer's editorial, ‘The Aesthetics of the State Revisited', made clear how little he had relented.
⁵²
Germany was now a sovereign nation once more; it had
a proper capital; and globalization ruled out any retreat into the self-abasing niche of the past. These were welcome changes. But in many respects the lowering heritage of the Bonn era lived on. In Berlin itself, the new government quarter was for the most part a vacuous desolation, inviting mass tourism, redeemed only by the restoration of the Reichstag—even that banalized by fashionable bric-a-brac and political correctness, not to speak of the droning addresses delivered within it.
⁵³
Alone in its dignity was the ensemble of Prussian classicism, at length recovered, extending east from the Brandenburg Gate to the Gendarmenmarkt. Nor had Berlin's return to the position of a national capital had any transformative effect on other German cities, or even aroused their interest: if anything, each had become more regional, the country more centrifugal, than ever. The feel-good patriotism of the World Cup of 2006, with its sea of fresh-faced flag-waving youth, as vapid as it was vulgar, was the obverse of the lack of any serious statecraft at the helm of the republic, of which Merkel was only the latest dispiriting, institutionally determined, incarnation. Missing in this order was any will to style. The expressive deficit of the Bonn Republic had not been overcome.

True independence of mind, Bohrer would subsequently remark, was to be found in those thinkers—Montaigne, Schlegel, Nietzsche—who replaced
Sinnfragen
with
Formfragen,
⁵⁴
a substitution that could be taken as the motto of his own work. But
Sinn
and
Form
are not so easily separated. Bohrer's critique of the deficiencies of the German state, both before and after the move to Berlin, could by its own logic never remain a purely formal matter, of aesthetics alone. From the beginning, his editorial interventions in
Merkur
had a substantive edge. A state that respected itself enough to develop a symbolic form was one that knew how to assert itself, where required, in the field of relations between states. From his post in London, Bohrer had admired British resolve in the Falklands War, and he thereafter consistently backed Western military interventions, in the Balkans and the Middle East. The deficit of the German state was thus not just a matter of buildings or speeches, it was also one of arms. Bohrer was a scathing critic of Kohl's failure to join in Operation Desert Storm; advocated the
dispatch of German ground troops to Yugoslavia; and handed Schröder a white feather over Iraq. With such belligerence has gone a shift of cultural reference. Paeschke subtitled
Merkur
‘A German Journal of European Thought', and kept his word—Gide, Eliot, Montale, Ortega, Russell appearing alongside his native eminences. Few German intellectuals of his generation were as well equipped to maintain this tradition as Bohrer, whose contempt for the provincialism of Bonn and all it stood for was rooted in personal experience. Steeped in Anglo-French culture, after working in London, he later lived much of the time in Paris.

But by the turn of the century, a change had come over the journal under him. The presence of Europe faded. Contributors, topics and arguments were now more and more insistently American. Bohrer had never been an enthusiast for the EU, his view of it close to a British scepticism—he liked to invoke the
Spectator—
he had long admired. Intellectual sources in the United States, however, were something new. The combination of a hawkish
Aussenpolitik
and multiplying signatures from the Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute can give the impression that a German version of US-style neo-conservatism has of late taken shape in
Merkur
. Bohrer rejects any such classification. If he is to be labelled at all, it should be as a ‘neo-liberal' in the spirit, not of the IMF, but of Richard Rorty, at once patriot and ironist. That he cannot, in fact, be aligned with either kind of transatlantic import is clear not only from his more accurate self-description elsewhere as an ‘anti-authoritarian, subjectivist liberal', but from the occasion that produced it, an essay on the fortieth anniversary of the student revolt in Germany.

‘Eight Scenes from Sixty-Eight'—clipped reminiscences of that year: so many strobe-lit flashes of Dutschke and Krahl, Enzensberger and Adorno, Habermas and Meinhof—is sometimes acerbic, but for the most part unabashedly lyrical in its memories of the intellectual and sensual awakening of that year: ‘Who has not known those days and nights of psychological, and literal, masquerade and identity-switching, does not know what makes life exciting, to vary Talleyrand's phrase'.
⁵⁵
Reitz's
Zweite Heimat
offered an unforgettable re-creation of them. The worst that could be said of '68-ers was that they destroyed what was left of symbolic
form in Germany. The best, that they were never
Spiesser
. If they left a residue of fanaticism, today that had perhaps become most conspicuous in root-and-branch denunciations of '68 by former participants in it. Bohrer had little time for such renegades. He was not Daniel Bell: the antinomian held no fears for him.

Looking back on Paeschke's command at
Merkur
, Bohrer once remarked of it that though Schlegel's
Athenaeum
was a much more original journal than Wieland's
Teutsche Merkur
, it was the latter—which lasted so much longer—that marked its epoch; regularity and consistency requiring that eccentricity be curbed, if authority was to be gained. This was a lesson Paeschke had learnt. He himself, however, came out of the Romantic, not the Enlightenment tradition, and took some time to see it, before attempting to conjugate them.
⁵⁶
As Bohrer's tenure moved towards its appointed end, the results of that effort were visible. In intention, at any rate, authority has increasingly materialized, in the shape of contributors from just those organs of opinion Bohrer had once castigated as the voices of a pious
ennui
: editors and columnists from
Die Zeit, Die Welt
, the
FAZ
, coming thick and fast in the pages of the journal. Here a genuinely neo-liberal front, excoriating the lame compromises of the Schröder–Merkel years, is on the attack, aggressively seeking to replace one ‘paradigm' with another. Flanking it, if at a slight angle, is the journal's theorist of geopolitics, Herfried Münkler, author of an ambitious body of writing on war and empire,
⁵⁷
whose recent essays in
Merkur
offer the most systematic prospectus for returning Germany, in the new century, to the theatre of
Weltpolitik
.