The Summer of Theory. Philipp Felsch
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clubs with Martin Kippenberger.16 As well-entrenched members of the theory crowd, they coexisted with a like-minded milieu whose centre of gravity was the university, but whose orbit passed through Berlin’s smart night spots. Or vice versa. In the 1980s, the Merve paperbacks were required reading in this milieu.
‘We are almost never in Paris and are happy living in Berlin’, Heidi Paris and Peter Gente wrote in 1981 to the New York professor Sylvère Lotringer.17 West Berlin was an ideal location for the publishers. Speculative thinking flourished in the city’s exceptional political conditions. The Merve culture grew lavishly between the bars and discos of Schöneberg and the lecture halls of Dahlem. Berlin in the sixties had been a bastion of the New Left; in the seventies, it became a biotope of the counter-culture. And in the eighties, as the Cold War ideologues faded to spectres, postmodernism dawned. Hegel himself had held the Prussian capital to be the home of the World Spirit; his critical heirs thought it nothing less – although the existence of the ‘enclave on the front lines’, as Heidi Paris once called her city, actually seemed to contradict Hegel’s theory.18
The history of the publishing couple of Gente and Paris is inseparably connected with West Berlin, yet it is more than an intellectual milieu study of the city. People in Germany tend to equate the heyday of theory with what was known as ‘Suhrkamp culture’: the phrase was coined in 1973 by the English critic George Steiner, referring to the catalogue of the Frankfurt publishing house Suhrkamp as the canon of West Germany.19 And, in fact, Suhrkamp played a crucial part in shaping and propagating the genre, as we shall see. Their policy of producing theory in paperback was one thing that made a project such as Merve possible in the first place. But because the Berlin publishers never blossomed out into a company with employees, proper bookkeeping and the imperative of profitability, the files I discovered in Karlsruhe afford a different perspective: they recount the long summer of theory from a user’s point of view. All their lives, the Merve publishers and their friends identified themselves as avid readers. Accordingly, Merve was not just a publisher, but a reading group, a fan club – a reception context.
That fact is an invaluable advantage for my project of writing the history of a genre: to understand the success of theory since the sixties, examining how it was read and used is at least as important as its content20 – which has long since been studied in any case – as the recently published memoirs of some former theory readers have pointed out.21 Perhaps certain texts had a power of suggestion that was even greater than their systematic argument. This preliminary intuition, and the methodological choice which follows from it, are not aimed at adding yet another interpretation to the history of twentieth-century philosophy.22 This book recounts the formative experiences of Peter Gente, the odyssey of the Merve collective, and the discoveries of Gente and Paris. It follows the course of their readings, their discussions and their favourite books – but it does not seek to penetrate the grey contents of those texts. The history of science has long had its eye on ‘theoretical practice’, to use the Merve author Louis Althusser’s term for the business of thinking. Following him and others, that history has learned to pay attention to the media, institutions and practices of knowledge.23 Why should this approach not prove fruitful for the theory landscape of the sixties and seventies, the environment in which it was originally formulated?24 In 1978, Michel Foucault developed the concept of philosophical reporting – ‘le reportage d’idées’, a form devoted to the real history of thought. ‘The world of today is crawling with ideas’, he wrote, ‘that are born, move around, disappear or reappear, shaking up people and things.’ Hence, there is always a need ‘to connect the analysis of what we think with the analysis of what happens’.25 This book’s purpose is precisely that.
Notes
1 1 Andreas Baader to Ello Michel, 21 August 1968, quoted in Klaus Stern and Jörg Herrmann, Andreas Baader: Das Leben eines Staatsfeindes, Munich: dtv, 2007, fig. 40; cf. 110–16, 177.
2 2 On the ‘highly theoretical’ motivation of the first-generation Red Army Faction, see Karl Heinz Bohrer, ‘The Three Cultures’, in Observations on the ‘Spiritual Situation of the Age’, ed. Jürgen Habermas, trans. Andrew Buchwalter, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984, 147.
3 3 Quoted in ‘Marcuse: Hilfe von Arbeitslosen’, in Der Spiegel, 21:25 (1967), 103.
4 4 Cf. Nikolaus Wegmann, ‘Wie kommt die Theorie zum Leser? Der Suhrkamp-Verlag und der Ruhm der Systemtheorie’, in Soziale Systeme, 16:2 (2010), 463.
5 5 Cf. Sabine Vogel, ‘Die Kunst des Verschwindens: Es begann im Geist der 68er Bewegung; Jetzt hat der Berliner Buchverleger Peter Gente sein Lebenswerk, den Merve Verlag, weitergegeben’, in Berliner Zeitung, 2 January 2008.
6 6 Ulrich Raulff, ‘Tod einer Buchmacherin: Der Merve Verlag und seine Leser haben Heidi Paris verloren’, in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 19 September 2002; cf. Dietmar Dath, ‘Schwester Merve: Zum Tod der Verlegerin Heidi Paris’, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 September 2002.
7 7 After years of archival research, Marchetti published his findings in a scholarly and voluminous work that should have been translated long ago: Valerio Marchetti, L’invenzione della bisessualità: Discussioni fra teologi, medici, e giuristi del XVII secolo sull’ambiguità delle corpi e delle anime, Milan: Mondadori, 2001.
8 8 I mean the Merve books Michel Foucault, Mikrophysik der Macht, trans. Hans-Joachim Metzger, Berlin: Merve, 1976, and Paul Veyne, Der Eisberg der Geschichte: Foucault revolutioniert die Historie [The iceberg of history: Foucault revolutionizes history], trans. Karin Tholen-Struthoff, Berlin: Merve, 1981.
9 9 Quoted in Merve Lowien, Weibliche Produktivkraft: Gibt es eine andere Ökonomie? Erfahrungen aus einem linken Projekt [Female productive power: is there a different economics? Experience of a leftist project], Berlin: Merve, 1977, 153. On Gente’s circle of acquaintance, see Jürg Altwegg, ‘Die Merve-Kulturen: Ein Verlags- und Verlegerporträt’, in Die Zeit, 22 July 1983; and Heinz Bude, ‘Die Suche nach dem Unmöglichen: Paul Arnheim und die Bücher’ [The search for the impossible: Paul Arnheim and books], in Bude, Das Altern einer Generation: Die Jahrgänge 1938 bis 1948, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995, 225. The pseudonymous Paul Arnheim of Bude’s study is Peter Gente.
10 10 Email to the author, 9 December 2011.
11 11 Altwegg, ‘Die Merve-Kulturen’, mentions that there were Merve books among the effects of the Stammheim prisoners. According to Stern and Herrmann, Andreas Baader, 177, many leftist publishers provided their books to the terrorists at no cost.
12 12 Jacob Taubes, ‘Secondary Recommendation on the Working Plan and Application for a Graduate Stipend of Hans-Peter Gente’, 15 July 1974: Merve archives, Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media Technology (ZKM).
13 13 Henning Ritter, Notizhefte, Berlin Verlag, 2010, 24.
14 14 A more nuanced view is in order here. As Lorenz Jäger has remarked, the cohort born around 1935 produced the best observers of the ’68 activists – who were a few years younger than themselves. Peter Gente, born in 1936, could be counted among those observers. See Lorenz Jäger, ‘Die Jahre, die ihr nicht mehr kennt: Mission Zeitbruch; Fotos von Abisag Tüllmann im Historischen Museum Frankfurt’, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 November 2010.
15 15 On the problem of gender roles in the Merve collective, see Lowien, Weibliche Produktivkraft. See also Wolfert von Rahden and Ulrich Raulff, ‘Distanzgesten: Ein Gespräch über das Zeitschriftenmachen’, interview with Moritz Neuffer and Morten Paul, in Grundlagerforschung für eine linke Praxis in den Geisteswissenschaften, 1 (2014), 67–9.
16 16 The video adaptation of Heiner Müller’s text ‘Bildbeschreibung’ was never made, to my knowledge. See the extensive documentation of the project in the Merve Archives.
17 17 Merve Verlag to Sylvère Lotringer, 25 March 1981: Merve Archives. The outgoing correspondence of the Merve publishers is quoted here and subsequently from archived drafts, some of which were posted in translation.
18 18 Heidi Paris, Drei Reden zum Design: Der Spaghettistuhl [Three talks on design: