The Summer of Theory. Philipp Felsch
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his arrival at the university that he had no talent as a writer.
‘He didn’t write’, the New York theory publisher Sylvère Lotringer would recall about his friend many years later.24 The statement hits the central issue of Gente’s life on the head – perhaps even the issue of his generation. As a budding intellectual, he had not only penetrated into the nexus of leftist tradition during the sixties, but had also been looking for his own voice. For lack of a better label, Gente identified himself at the time of Merve’s founding as a ‘freelance writer’,25 but, except for an article on the ‘Bitterfeld Way’, a current in East German workers’ literature, he had written practically nothing.26 Publishing other people’s writing suited him better. At a time when the air was filled with editorial projects, there were many opportunities to do so. Gente scored his first modest coup as an editor in 1965 with a theme issue of Alternative on Parisian essayists. By that time, he had extended his mania for collecting to include French journals, and had unearthed texts by Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lucien Goldmann and others. Hardly anyone in Berlin knew these theoreticians, and the issue was a great success. Two years later, Gente would again demonstrate his advanced knowledge by providing the key evidence in the dispute over the Suhrkamp edition of Benjamin. Helmut Lethen, who also contributed to Alternative at that time, found Gente and his encyclopaedic knowledge a ‘tremendous source of inspiration’. Nevertheless, Gente did not become a regular member of the editorial team: the editor-in-chief, Hildegard Brenner, would not accept the fact that he could not be persuaded to write.27
School of Hard Books
In 1965, shortly after the Alternative special issue appeared, the newly appointed Professor of Hermeneutics and Jewish Studies Jacob Taubes invited Gente into his office. Up to then, he had taken no notice of the quiet student in his seminars, but he found Gente’s knowledge of the French thinkers remarkable. As a token of his appreciation, Taubes offered Gente one of his envied student assistant positions. Gente’s first assignment was to unpack Taubes’s library, which, he recalled, had ‘arrived from New York in heavy shipping crates’.28 At that time, it was taken for granted that a well-to-do scholar and professor would control his means of production by personal ownership.29 To the hungry eyes of his student assistant, the encounter with Taubes’s books must have been a formative experience. Taubes’s library encompassed more than the canon of German philosophy and modern classics that had come to be de rigueur for the followers of Critical Theory. It documented the reading career of a cosmopolitan intellectual who had a penchant for giving consideration to obscure and scandalous thinkers. Taubes exuded an atmosphere of scholarly intensity in which the fate of humanity seemed to depend on the interpretation of crucial texts.30 Rumour had it that he was able ‘to grasp the content of a book infallibly by merely laying his hands on it’.31 Among the mysteries of this colourful personality is the fact that, in spite of – or perhaps because of – this gift as a reader, he was not prominent as an author. Adorno, whose relationship with Taubes was strained, thought he was ‘simultaneously highly gifted and deeply disturbed in his productivity’.32 To the students who felt attracted to his intellectual excitement, Taubes conveyed the existential importance of theory. The Department of Hermeneutics that he established at Freie Universität ‘was the centre of often wildly interdisciplinary studies, highly controversial, and a sanctuary for many who did not want to tread any predefined path’, recalled Henning Ritter, who was a tutor under Taubes in the sixties.33 One of the nonconformists broadening their intellectual horizons in this circle was the student assistant Peter Gente. Those who came under Taubes’s influence were exposed to sufficient apocrypha to immunize them against the dogmatism of the student movement. They were also estranged from Adorno, whom Taubes in turn considered a ‘protesting left-wing Heideggerian’ with an affected style.34 ‘Who here can write as beautifully as Adorno?’ he is said to have shouted repeatedly during a lecture, ‘laughing eerily.’35
Taubes had neither Adorno’s talent as a writer nor his reluctance to intervene in politics. At Freie Universität, which he saw as something like the Berkeley of Germany, Taubes took the side of the rebelling students. And yet he responded with scepticism to their utopian expectations. The activity of the SDS interested him more for its subversive energy than for its socialist background. When the Kommune I members Fritz Teufel and Rainer Langhans were made to stand trial for distributing a handbill inciting people to burn down department stores, Taubes wrote, as an amicus curiae, an evaluation of the ‘surrealist provocation’, situating it in the tradition of literary avant-gardes. His submission helped the communards escape a jail sentence.36 In July of 1967, Taubes moderated a public discussion at FU with his friend Herbert Marcuse, who drew boisterous enthusiasm from the students. Taubes invited the Parisian Hegel interpreter Alexandre Kojève to Berlin the same year, who perplexed his revolutionary listeners by recommending that the best thing to do in the present situation was to learn Ancient Greek. Kojève’s snobbism was incomprehensible to the ’68 generation. Only initiates among Taubes’s students could decipher, perhaps, that Kojève was serving up a taste of his theory of ‘post-histoire’.37 Taubes himself also knew how to subvert leftists’ expectations, which sometimes made his political engagement difficult to gauge. The right-wing intellectual Armin Mohler, Taubes’s friend from undergraduate days, was of the opinion that he wanted to inoculate the protest movement ‘with surrealism’.38
Paperback Theory
Jacob Taubes also plays an important part in the history of theory in West Germany as one of the architects of the Suhrkamp culture. In 1965, when Gente arrived in his department, Taubes was in the middle of planning a new paperback series for the head of Suhrkamp, Siegfried Unseld. Three years before, Unseld had inaugurated the edition suhrkamp, a rainbow-coloured shelf of paperbacks that became the emblem of an intellectual era. The concept of supplying literary and philosophical titles in a pocket format had become feasible only after the death of Unseld’s predecessor Peter Suhrkamp, who had staunchly refused to deal in paperbacks.39 In 1962, Unseld’s innovation was still the object of controversy at the publishing house. Among the questions debated by his advisors, who included the paperback critic Enzensberger, was whether an ‘intellectual series’ could afford to have bright-coloured covers. The compromise initially adopted – printing Willy Fleckhaus’s cover design on a dust jacket which could be removed to reveal grey cardboard as a guarantee of intellectual solidity – says a great deal about the weight of the ideological confrontation. The edition suhrkamp sold well from the beginning; the philosophical titles in particular seemed to appeal to the ‘younger and student readers’, Unseld’s target audience for the new series.40 Authors such as Wittgenstein, Bloch and Adorno topping the sales statistics even in train-station bookshops was remarkable news.41 Husserl’s Logical Investigations, a fundamental text of modern philosophy, had sold just 7,500 copies by 1966. The long-term best-seller of the twentieth century, Heidegger’s Being and Time, had sold 40,000 copies.42 Figures like these were low compared with Suhrkamp’s philosophical paperbacks: Herbert Marcuse’s Culture and Society, which appeared in edition suhrkamp in 1965 as Kultur und Gesellschaft, sold 80,000 copies within a few years.43
At first, the critics of the paperback format saw its success as confirmation of their suspicions that people might buy paperbacks, but not read them.44 But the phenomenon also admitted the opposite interpretation: perhaps the affordable books were actually revolutionizing people’s reading habits; perhaps they were a medium for disseminating difficult ideas. Unseld, one of the optimists, commissioned the young luminaries of the West German social sciences to conceive another series that would serve this purpose. Jürgen Habermas, Hans Blumenberg, Dieter Henrich and Jacob Taubes were engaged as advisors and series editors to attune Suhrkamp’s academic catalogue to the zeitgeist. A few years later, Unseld added Niklas Luhmann to this circle. ‘The individual books should be formally appealing as well as inexpensive’, the editor Karl Markus Michel wrote to the professors in January of 1965, ‘and should be distinct