A Jubilee for Renegades

Author(s): Ernst Bloch, David Bathrick, Nancy Vedder Shults

Source: New German Critique, No. 4 (Winter, 1975), pp. 17-25
Published by: New German Critique
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/487815
Accessed: 21/09/2009 21:47

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ngc.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

New German Critique is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New German
Critique.

http://www.jstor.org
A Jubilee for Renegades*

by Ernst Bloch
A constituent and vital part of the present struggle for socialism has been
the process of critically assessing its own tradition. In this regard the Moscow
trials have served a peculiarly central and at times bizarre function. In
some instances, the attitude toward the trials has been one of exoneration,
even of glorification-an attitude which tells us more about the theoretical
and moral dislocations and the identity crises within the ranks of the Left
today than about the trials themselves. Equally revealing and equally
ahistorical has been the unqualified condemnation of anyone who
equivocated concerning the trials, regardless of the reasons and the circum-
stances in which it occurred. Both such positions represent an abdication,
for they ultimately defer treatment of the vital questions for the present
which lie imbedded in those events of the past. Concretely, what were the
alternatives within the popular front and the exile experience itself in the
face of Fascism and the incipient and at times explicit anti-communism?
More generally, what is entailed in the relationship of the intellectual to
revolution, theory to praxis-in what Bloch himself calls the concre-
tization of concept? The legacy of Stalinism, both in its concrete histo-
rical representations and in the challenges it poses for the realization of
revolutionary theory is still as much with us today as with our theoretical
forbears-Bloch, Lukdcs or Brecht. Bloch's discussion of the painful
capitulation of past German intellectuals is an equally painful expression of
his own capitulation and apology. Yet within its formulations lie the
contradictions and compromises, the living tensions of theory grounded in
historical crisis. And it is precisely because it reveals the process of concre-
tization and an image of Bloch as a philosopher in the midst of combat that
NGC has printed this essay and Oskar Negt's accompanying comments.
What Hans Mayer said of Hanns Eisler's similarly compromising theoretical
compliance to the cultural policies of the GDR is true of the Bloch essay as
well: "this is a htstorical text. "1
The Editors

* This article first appeared in Die neue Weltbiihne in December 1937. It was republished in
Ernst Bloch, Politische Messungen: Pestzeit, Vormdrz(Frankfurt am Main, 1970) and again in
Ernst Bloch, Vom Hasard zur Katastrophe (Frankfurt am Main, 1972). It appears here for the
first time in English with the permission of Suhrkamp Verlag.
1. See Hans Mayer, "An Aesthetic Debate of 1951: Comment on a Text by Hanns Eisler,"
New German Critique 2 (Spring, 1974), pp. 58-62.
18 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

There are a number of people today who seem to be somewhat

disconcerted. Although many of them may have loved the beginning of the
Russian Revolution, during the last two years they have lost their
enthusiasm. They cannot get over the fact that this 20-year-old bolshevist
child must rid itself of so many enemies, and that it discards them so
ruthlessly. They are confused, yet they never really examine the situation.
While scarcely understanding these sad events, and often admitting as
much, they nevertheless pass judgment. And so, many do not join in
celebrating the long common struggle. In fact, they almost repudiate it.
Yet if we leaf back through the pages of history, this type of desertion
does not really seem so new. Here too we find something very much like a
jubilee which may be remembered, if not with jubilation. Often the disil-
lusionment of today seems to be only the echo of an earlier loss of faith-like
the repetition of a misfortune which had beset even greater spirits of the
past. I am thinking specifically of the many German poets and thinkers who
wavered at the time of the French Revolution and of the doubts which arose
ten to twenty years after 1789. I am thinking of the shock that occurred
when winds from the West brought with them the unmistakable odor of
blood. To be sure, there are important differences (but these differences do
not shed a favorable light on the current vacillation). The French
Revolution is not the Russian Revolution; and the "Reign of Terror" is
certainly not comparable to the Moscow show trials. The French events
affected a servile and uncommitted Germany which has little in common
with the present day Germany of emigration. Moreover, the literary
renegades of today are only in part German, i.e., they only stem in part
from a politically inexperienced people. Since they do not have a Goethe or
Schiller among them, they also lack the justification which Voltaire once
conceded to genius: "It is the privilege of genius to make grand mistakes
with impunity." Nevertheless, there is a parallel between the shock of then
and the shock of today-between the shock regarding the Revolutionary
Tribunal and the shock regarding the Moscow trials. This parallel lies in the
unwillingness both then and now to comprehend the sudden radicalization
as stemming from the impact of foreign policy affairs. The similarity lies in
the hurried and almost totally unheralded desertion at the very moment the
Revolutionary Tribunal put enthusiasm to the test -to the test of a concept
rooted in the concrete.
Forget for a moment those scoundrels who looked for the first opportunity
to sell themselves to the enemy. Even the last of the Storm and Stress writers,
like the Stolberg brothers, do not belong in this category. And this is despite
the fact that they ultimately became renegades from protestantism
 A JUBILEE FOR RENEGADES 19

("Unfreie"), and that the term "Huns of the West" was coined in their
circle. Only the really important errors are instructive in this regard-those
misgivings which followed the great jubilation. Here Klopstock's desertion is
of central concern to us. This poet had a preconceived notion of freedom
which he could not bear to see compromised. This notion was directed less
at oppression and the feudal degradation of humanity than it was against
"wild behavior" in any form and against the "monster of all monsters--
war." France seemed to promise the immediate restoration of human
paradise - "humanity with a palm branch in its hand," as Schiller later
elegized this concept. For this reason, the 63-year-old Klopstock greeted the
first signs of the revolution with ecstasy. An ode entitled "Die Etats
GCneraux"(1787) begins:

"The daring parliament of Gaul begins to dawn,

The morning shudder penetrates the waiting ones
To the marrow and to the bone: o come, you new,
Refreshing, never dreamed of sunl"

The storming of the Bastille inspired another ode with the revealing title,
"They and Not We" (1790):

"Had I one hundred voices, I'd not extol the freedom

of Gaul with fitting song, if this godly one sang weakly.
O what has not been accomplishedl Even the cruelest of all
Monstrosities, war, is bound in chains."

To be sure not through any effort on the part of Germany. An ode written
at the same time, "Know Yourselves," paints a bitter picture of the German
misery and calls for revolution.

"France created itself in freedom. The century's noblest deed

Lifted itself to Olympian heights.
Are you so narrow-sighted you fail to see this?
And does this dawn becloud your vision still?
This very night: go wander through the annals of history
And find therein its equal
If you can. O destiny! There they are, they are
Our brothers, the Franks; and we?
Ah, I ask in vain: you are speechless, Germans. What does
Your silence mean? The weary sorrow
20 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

Of aged endurance? Or does it announce a change as close

As stillness before the storm,
Which whirls the thunderclouds before it, until they turn
To fire, and turn to shattering ice."

In 1792 the singer of such odes was made an honorary French citizen by
the National Assembly. In the same year he warned the Duke of Brunswick
not to wage a war of intervention against "the blood of that people which
leads all peoples in approaching the cherished goal." But a short time
thereafter came the turnabout. Classical greatness grew pale at the very
moment when "thunderclouds" and "shattering ice" crashed in upon the
aristocrats and when the cries of freedom, equality and brotherhood no
longer included the arch enemies of the revolution. What then followed
were odes full of despair and finally bitterness. Verses of blind hate can be
found alongside expressions of extreme sorrow and mourning. ("For me the
loved one lives no more, the only son is dead.") In a terrifying ode entitled
"The Ruins" (1794), the poet completely loses himself in a fit of negativity:

"Was gloriousness ever so completely profaned? The sublime,

Has it ever sunk so low?
Was beauty so shriveled, pale from the deathly purulence,
Fading, a furtive spectre?
Has wisdom become such utter folly? Was humanity
Ever so dehumanized?
Thrown down, destroyed is the sovereignty of law
Through the ruling sword.
Screaming contradiction: free state and a state which
Founds itself on murder. Who will name
This skeleton, this "republic"with a single name? Do not flee,
Speakl Name it with usl
State of executioners is its first name, and its second, state of
Slaves. Those who name it also, now grow dumb."

These are truly dreadful words. It is a song of total senselessness and

injustice and is based on an equally total misunderstanding of the political
situation. For as we see in the ode "The Word of the Germans" (1793),
Klopstock'spoetry stands in absolute conformity with the war designs of the
enemy. (Who can overlook the parallels to the contemporary situation?)
Here Klopstock threatens and at the same time lures the Jacobins by acting
as a bard for the gathering armies of intervention.
 A JUBILEE FOR RENEGADES 21

"Purify yourselvesl
We come with weapon and with sword,
But also with the olive branch in hand,
We come to form with you the state,
Which you yourselvesonce formed,
To firm the ground of this great structure:
Without the deeper ground the gleaming battlements will totter soon."

Thus Klopstock separated the cause of freedom from its motherland. He

also attempted to establish here a "deeper ground"-with the help of
German feudalism. Of course, throughout all this, he never completely
forgot the once "glorious dawn of a new day," this "most human of plans."
Yet what disturbed the plan for Klopstock was not the victory of the
bourgeoisie over the dream of a citoyen republic. (This kind of real disap-
pointment is to be found for the first time in H5lderlin, who, however
late, seriously and knowledgeably attempted to take refuge in the
conception of a truly free Greek citizenry.) No, Klopstock was upset solely
because of the broken palm branch, the "lawlessness," the contradiction
between revolutionary self-defense and the abstract pacificism of his poetry.
This was Klopstock'sthoroughly unnerving and unjust attitude- an attitude
full of romantic dreaming in both the positive and the negative sense; an
attitude lacking the marrow of conceptual rigor. And yet he did not become
completely embittered with his original love: "With tears in my eyes not
anger, my brothers, I take leave of you." In fact, at a much later point he
even says of himself: "There is probably no one who was more intensely
involved in the revolution and who suffered more as a result of it." Such love
and moving testimony are rare today. However, as far as his limited insight
into the revolution is concerned, some may even praise their Klopstock
today, if not outdo him in this regard.
The influences of this period are still apparent today: almost no German
poet stood fast or really understood the French Revolution. In fact, when it
came to the events in France, the greatest of them proved to be the weakest.
Here Schiller as well as Goethe were simply not themselves. Like Klopstock,
Schiller, too, was driven to desertion by the "lawlessness,"the "cries of the
rabble," by the "misdeeds of raving fools." And added to this is a special
attachment to petty bourgeois morality and order ("The Bell" ["Lied von
der Glocke"] ), something which was alien to Klopstock and surprising to
find in Schiller. For him this morality and order appear simply as a
"natural" condition. The strange caricatures of French street fighting in
"The Bell" are familiar enough. So is Schiller's dictum: "If the people
22 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

liberate themselves, then public well-being cannot flourish"-a dictum

which is difficult to understand and even totally incomprehensible if one
considers Schiller, the historian. To be sure, Schiller pays greater heed to
social and religious freedom than does Klopstock, as we can see in the poem
"Promenade"(1795 ["Der Spaziergang"] ):

"The mist of illusion dissolves before the wondering glance,

And the images of night give way to dawning light.
The human being, the blessed one, destroys its chains."

However, the retraction, indeed the reaction follows immediately:

"May he not break

With the chains of fear, the reins of shame as welll
Freedom summons reason, Freedom summons wild lust,
And they wrest themselves free from holy nature."

And nature, employed by Schiller in a new way as a shibboleth for

repudiation, is no longer the "unviolated"nature of Rousseau, which breaks
off the social contract the moment it goes bad. Here nature has become the
patriarchal nature of the Restoration, it is ancestral tradition, "ancient
law." It is the same "slowly forming," completely non-"volcanic" nature
which sustained Schiller's mentor, Goethe, for an entire lifetime, and which
led him to have more tolerance for injustice than for disorder. In this regard
Goethe very clearly led Schiller astray. The creator of Prometheus, Gotz and
Egmont no longer saw in the French Revolution an image of freedom as he
once had. And so the great man added to his desertion--a touch of
interested ridicule. It is certainly true that in the Grosskophta (1789), a
dramatic rendering of the necklace affair of Marie Antoinette, Goethe had
laid bare the depraved conditions of the ancien regime. It is also true that
he reflected on the bombardment of Valmy and the whole unfortunate war
of intervention, which he himself had experienced with Karl August, and
which he summarized in the famous and politically incisive sentence: "From
this moment on a new epoch of history begins, and you will be able to say
you were present." However Goethe's other contributions to the French
Revolution- The Excited Ones (Die Aufgeregten) and certainly The
Citizen General (Der Birgergeneral), a so-called comedy-were hardly up
with the times, indeed were not even up with the forces of reaction which at
that time were already gathering momentum in the inner reaches of the
 A JUBILEE FOR RENEGADES 23

courts and in the machinations of "Traditionalism." In The Citizen General

a certain Cousin Schnaps is presented as an "agent of the famous Jacobins."
This scoundrel breaks into cabinets and attacks the milk cans in order to
instruct us in freedom and equality. He is of course a fraud, but Goethe
makes it clear that Cousin Schnaps differs from his Jacobin original only in
being a shabbier representation thereof. Even in the original, the Phrygian
cap and the national cockade are but the garments of robbers and thieves.
That is the obvious conclusion at the end of the play, and when the
plundered peasant complains about how badly off he is because of the
scoundrel, the nobleman comforts him by saying (completely in accord with
Schiller's notion of "holy nature"): "Not nearly so badly off as in the
provinces where his kind have wreaked havoc; where goodnatured fools
joined up with them in the beginning, where they began with flattery and
promises and finished with violence, robbery, the banishment of honest
people and all sorts of ugly happenings." That is the perspective of the
ruling class. It is a perspective that knocked the robber romanticism out of
Schiller and completely distorted the motto "in tyrannos." In the long run it
made the world of Schiller's "Robbers" completely unrecognizable. Of
course this transition was never a total one: even under the taboo of the
Reign of Terror, the creator of The Robbers retained and brought to
maturity within himself something of the spirit of the great events in
France; he remained a traitor, but an ambivalent one. In Wilhelm Tell
Ruodi, the fisher, expresses dryly in one iambic verse a certain functional
connection which Schiller had previously not wanted to acknowledge: "The
tyrant is dead, the day of freedom has come." The Parricida scene of act
five in Tell strikes one today as particularly noteworthy, intended as it was
to illustrate for the audience the difference between murder and political
self-defense (which sheds blood). Theatrical producers working in peacetime
and even teachers have seldom appreciated this scene, and from their
standpoint justifiably so, since from a technical point of view the scene is
superfluous, although its political meaning is an integral part of the text.
Tell does not permit the confusion of the "bloody guilt of ambition,"
Parricida's "frantic, wild deed of insanity" with his own deed, "the
legitimate self-defense of a father" who has "averted the most terrible, the
ultimate evil from his own." How far Tell was from putting common
murder on the same level with the defense of a republic and the trial of its
enemiesl For this reason one may well doubt whether Schiller would have
stayed with the messages of horror found in "The Bell" or "The Promenade"
had he learned the truth and the real causes behind the situation. Certainly
24 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

even the most reactionary Schiller would not have confused the French
revolutionary army with the Russian Cossacks of the Czar or the National
Convention with the Holy Synod. The discovery of the ultimate sameness of
all dictatorships- despite their differing class contents--this tremendous
discovery was reserved for our own time and indicates clearly how much
superior our Gides and Silones are to the poet of the Parricida scene when it
comes to generosity.
Once again twenty years have passed since a great and liberating event.
Once again revolutionary defense (although not terror) has produced shock
beyond its own borders. But insight into the threats to the revolution are
more easily accessible today than during the twenty years after 1789. This is
one advantage that our writers could have over the erring greats of that
time. And they have one other advantage as well: the decaying world of
1789 had a certain charm which is totally absent from the system presently
in decline. Nietzsche summed up these attractions in one cursory statement:
the melodies of Mozart represent a final farewell from the beautiful, old
European order. The melody issuing forth from today's ruling Rococo is
considerably less seductive; in other words: monopoly capitalism does not
engender ambivalence-the choice between it and the socialist cause of the
people is an easy one. In today's situation it should be clearly evident that
anti-bolshevist statements serve only the devil himself. Contrary to what
Klopstock and Schiller were still able to believe, senselessly exaggerated
criticism of the homeland of the revolution will not benefit the ideal of
revolution. This ideal can be furthered only by the popular front. And a
popular front does not require a fervent or absolute commitment to Russia,
but rather the modest, and one would think perfectly acceptable
realization: there can be no struggle, there can be nothing good without
Russia. Yet the importance of the will to understand is shown above all by
the fact that the philosophers of Schiller and Klopstock's time did not join
the general defection. Despite his adherence to the Prussian ideology of
duty, Kant wrote the following as late as 1798 in the second part of The
Dispute of the Faculties: "The revolution of an imaginative people which we
have seen taking place before our eyes may succeed or it may collapse. It
may be so filled with misery and horrible deeds that a right-thinking person,
if he could attempt it for a second time with the hope of success, might
decide never to go through with the experiment at such a high cost. Never-
theless this revolution finds a wishful sympathy in the hearts of its spectators
(who themselves are not involved in the game) which borders on enthusiasm,
and whose open expression is frought with danger-proof that this sympathy
can have nothing less than a basic moral disposition in the human race as its
 A JUBILEE FOR RENEGADES 25

cause."
And the Hegel of the Phenomenology, much less tentative than Kant, sees
in the French Reign of Terror (as a Robespierrean virtue) a necessary
transitional moment of the spirit on its course to the world of morality. The
young Hegel had once erected a Maypole in Tiibingen with his friends
Holderlin and Schelling. To be sure, the Prussian state philosopher of a
later period took a different path. But he forgot neither this enthusiasm nor
the other "transitional moment of the spirit;" he fulfilled the mandate that
Schiller had issued to Don Carlos: "Tell him that he ought to bear respect
for the dreams of his youth." Looking back upon the French Revolution
after more than twenty years, Hegel wrote these words at the close of
his Philosophy of History: "The conception, the idea of right suddenly
asserted its authority and the old framework of injustice could offer
no resistance to its onslaught. A constitution was therefore established in
harmony with the concept of right, and on this foundation all future
legislation was to be based. As long as the sun has stood in the firmament
and the stars have revolved around it, it has not been perceived that man's
existence centers in his head, i.e., in his thoughts, and that he constructs
reality in accordance with that thought. Anaxagorus was the first to say that
the Nus governs reality. Only now has man come to recognize that thought
should rule the mental world. This was accordingly a glorious dawn.
Emotions of a lofty character stirred men's minds at that time; a special
enthusiasm thrilled the world as if a real reconciliation between the divine
and the secular had finally been accomplished."
These are different considerations and reconsiderations than one finds in
Klopstock and Schiller; even though here the enthusiasm and rejoicing over
the reasoned planning lies in the past, i.e., in that which has not actually
come into being. But contrary to the beliefs of the abstract idealists, the
French Revolution did not die because of the terror but because of the
bourgeoisie, because of its most immediately attainable economic goals. The
songs of mourning delivered by Klopstock and Schiller were directed at the
wrong corpse--at the broken palm branch rather than the perished citoyen.
As already mentioned, only Holderlin perceived and lamented the victory of
the bourgeoisie, seeking the vanished citoyen and the continued impulse of
this ideal (throughout the Reign of Terror) in a utopian Greece. In the next
twenty years, when the negativities of today have finally dimmed, let us
hope that traces, features, groups of citoyens may be discovered even in
today's world, even throughout the other five-sixths of the earth.

Translated by David Bathrick and Nancy Vedder Shults