The Heritage of Our Times

Ernst Bloch

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745694696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Heritage of Our Times is a brilliant examination of modern culture and its legacy by one of the most important and deeply influential thinkers of the 20th century. Bloch argues that the key elements of a genuine cultural tradition are not just to be found in the conveniently closed and neatly labeled ages of the past, but also in the open and experimental cultural process of our time.

One of the most compelling aspects of this work is a contemporary analysis of the rise of Nazism. It probes its bogus roots in German history and mythology at the very moment when the ideologies of Blood and Soil and the Blond Beast were actually taking hold of the German people.

The breadth and depth of Bloch's vision, together with the rich diversity of his interest, ensure this work a place as one of the key books of the 20th century.

PART I

EMPLOYEES AND DIVERSION

THE JADED MAN

He has had enough. But he can never see how and where. So the dependent man allows himself to go on being used. Thinks he is a different person than the one he is.

THE COLLARS

No one would come of his own accord. But later he adjusts himself. Those who sell themselves do not always give themselves completely of course. The workers are hostile to what is done with them. But the employee corresponds completely to the image that his masters fashion from him, which he allows to be fashioned from him. The way the girls lead their dreary lives (and the evening only numbs them for the next day). The way the men remain subordinate, disgruntled to themselves, cheerful in company; the way no one ventures beyond the unindependent limit. In the collar of the day, in the cheap pleasure of the evening that is specially set for them, they feel themselves to be citizens. With a sense of duty, from which there are no pickings to be had, they still polish their chains patriotically. In small towns they are still only living from the viewpoint of yesterday, but in large towns they have processions, falsely glittering pleasures too. Thus they are no longer the limited little people of dust-spreading mustiness, but new people, existing beside themselves, distracted. Who allow themselves to be diverted, by cinema or race, so that they do not collect themselves. Disperse, policemen shout in difficult times in the street, circulez, messieurs. The white-collar workers¹ sort this out quite happily by themselves, allow themselves to be sorted out.

SMALL TOWN (1924)

Everything is quiet here, scarcely still breathing. The blooming country-side, with peasants, stretches into the place in vain. Few like living in smaller towns, these themselves are hardly living any more. And become totally dreary when the autumn comes.

The empty streets, not even the wind feels at home in them. An old tram clatters from the station to the market-place; the light inside illuminates tired faces which do not become more cheerful, because they all know each other. Paltry shops are bursting with pots, cheap clothes, rubbish from the big city; far too many tinned preserves are ageing between them. The stationer’s – soon there will be cotton-wool snow on display in the shop-window, three candles, writing paper with sprigs of pine, some silver foil. Fewer and fewer characters permeate the small town, less and less language still stewing in its own juice, less and less country loaves, good old days in the newspaper. Instead, yesterday’s cliché rules, and just as the shops have their tinned preserves, public opinion comes ready set, freshly churned, as dross from Berlin. An unspeakable sadness permeates the small town with the autumn, the poorly illuminated evenings; it makes the people who are interned there fruitlessly embittered. The summer sustained the image thus far, a scent of mountains and meadows wafted in, the sky was high. But the autumn has just as constricting an effect as evening in the train, when you no longer see any landscape, only the few faces under the lamp in the compartment. There are of course exceptions, small towns with people who have set themselves up, who find truth in wine and the big wide world in the cinema. But most backwaters are so spiteful today, dead and conventional like an unhappy marriage. There is early ageing here and so little room that there is not even real emptiness, except the inward kind which the manual worker, the employee, the boss while away in separate clubs, united sentiments. Many bowls roll, everyone throws their own, but they all aim for the king-pin. Only the one down the road of course, to whom one must give a false smile.

ARTIFICIAL CENTRE (1929):

on Kracauer’s The Employees²

Elsewhere the day has simply got louder, not fuller. Life in the big city foams more, swindles all the better in return. Dupes the poorly paid man, who has to pay for everything pretended to him. The workers are outside in the factories, the employees inhabit the shops, offices, streets of the big city itself. By day grey life, in the evening diverted life determines their image, fills them.

Kracauer travelled to the centre of this way of not being there. With a solitary glance which penetrates where others only report, or simply chat. In a language which can say what it sees, which sticks, with a certain sober colourfulness, closely to the recognized matter. The beginning is placed several paces ahead of the usual scientific one, and thus manages, over the whole race, to get just as far beyond the theoretical end, namely by tendentious means. Here the real situation of the employees is hit on the head or rather on the false consciousness which it has of itself. The masks which the employees put on or allow to be put on them are shown and recognized as such.

Strange though, how easily the average man allows himself to be duped about where he lives. The employees have increased fivefold in the same time in which the workers have only doubled their numbers. And their situation has also become a completely different one since the war; but their consciousness has not increased fivefold, the consciousness of their situation is in fact totally obsolete. Despite miserable pay, conveyor belt, extreme insecurity of existence, fear of old age, debarment from the ‘higher’ strata, in short, proletarianization de facto, they still feel they are the bourgeois centre. Their tedious work makes them more dull than rebellious, authorization papers nurture a caste consciousness which has no real class consciousness behind it at all; only the external formalities, scarcely the contents of a vanished bourgeoisie haunt any longer. In contrast to the worker they are integrated into production much more remotely; that is why economic changes are perceived only later or easily misunderstood. Only a third of employees have organized themselves into trade unions, and of these a third are social-democratic (only the most progressive are communist). The second third are democratic, the final third have been nationalistic for ages, have caste ideology (the way things are cast at the moment), are a kind of core-group for the so-called National Socialist of today. This false consciousness (false even in revolt) also extends among peasants in fact, and students add the fancy garb;³ but it is employees who chiefly succumb to it. The unspeakable rabble of older bourgeois conformists stirs in its instincts, not folkish⁴ ones at all, but malicious, fossilized, downright unfounded ones whose only notion of anti-capitalism is to beat the Jew to death as a ‘usurer’. But distraction plays the greater role here, acquiescent distraction from real life. It dams life back to nothing but youth, to inflated beginnings, so that the question concerning the Where To never arises. It promotes sport and the evening sheen of the street, the exotic film or the differently glittering kind, indeed even the ‘new objective’⁵ facade of nickel and glass. Nothing lies behind this except dirty linen: but it is precisely this which is supposed to be concealed by the glassy openness (just as the abundance of light only serves to increase the darkness). Cafes, films, Lunaparks⁶ show the employee the direction in which he has to go: signs, much too illuminated for them not to be suspicious, indicating how to evade the true direction, namely that towards the proletariat. With which the employee now shares everything: deprivation, worry and insecurity, only not the clear consciousness of what his condition actually is. Of course distraction, precisely as a colourful street-fair, has another side to it, one which does not favour closed mustiness. Of course this side throws up dust too and this time already interrupting, sparkling dust to the power of two as it were. But that does not prevent the fact that, directly, the whole evasion simply amounts to deception which is supposed to conceal the place and ground on which it occurs. The culture of the employees, says Kracauer in a telling sentence, is escape from revolution and from death. And the masters, the master supervisors at the top (as one employee called them before the criminal court), are subject to the very appearance they pretend. They borrow it from the employees, present bathing glamour in films and the ever more amusing press, incapable of having and printing any other content here. Everywhere the same joke (even if enjoyed much more fully at the top), life as ‘business’: as tedium by day, as escape at night. The new centre does not save, does not think about tomorrow, diverts itself and soon everything.

THE DAZZLING FILM STAR

Clearly, this new breed has become lighter. Otherwise it could not endure its life, its fleeting life. Sport already loosens up, the film supplied a feeling for gesture. The type has veered with the wind, not to say like a sailor; in fact, he does not want to be a type at all, but a character, and he captains his own ship every evening. The living person rebels against the dependency and degradation of the conveyor belt; here however not as an oppressed class, but as a caste which has seen better times, as a character cast for the part. Through this lived-out appearance people hope to keep themselves at the top, and copy precisely those who caused them to plunge to the bottom, namely the genuine masters, the genuine characters of today. These are the individual managers themselves, the actual mechanizers of life; but the victims join forces with them, not with the proletarian comrades. The shop-girl can easily carry off the rose-tinted or suntanned lady, but the male employee fails to carry off the master. Because the lady also blooms in the erotic field, not just in the social one, and a well-groomed exterior can make up for a great deal here; but the so-called master-man⁷ is far from one today when posing as the master of profit. Indeed, the employee cannot even assume the ‘aura’ of the boss (because the latter mostly does not have one); so the new type develops through the film, allows his feeling for gesture to crystallize into the mere film character. So that the maliciousness of the earlier petit bourgeois towards dancers, people who enjoy life, and the like, ceases; on the streets what Ernst Blass⁸ once sang becomes a reality: the gentlemen come as if from operettas. The appreciation of the Fuhrer also first began in front of the film; supremely the hero up there stands out from the crowd, supremely he is illuminated by rotten dazzling highlights. Extraordinary too the erotic effect which precisely these false characters had on those who are equally false. Fraudulent bundles of nerves were admired as baby-dolls; amorphous heaps of fat had popular appeal as gentle giants. The really beautiful or victorious film star in particular cast the spell that befits him. The more life deteriorated and the more fraudulent the plot which replaced it, the more easily the petit bourgeois became the gushing girl in the presence of champions. Through boxers he drew himself up physically to his personal height, through film heroes mentally. The boss had wanted him to leave the prole behind him, and respect for himself commanded him to obey. After all, so many heroes likewise come from humble beginnings in order to rise out of them all the more beautifully: make way, if no longer for efficiency, then for happiness.⁹ Only Chaplin remains as poor as before and trips the masters up, modestly. But he too is seen as funny, and the masters from whom the poor devil escapes in a really fairy tale way dazzle in the film right alongside him and are by no means refuted, let alone exploded. Even the colportage-like paths which lead from the hut to the drawing room remain a game. Beautiful gestures, naked shoulders, swiftly mushrooming and lucky beggars, but they still entice in vain.

BELOW THE BORDERLINE¹⁰

Here too, how idle things are. There was not much energy left to read anyway. Only people who have done nothing all day are mentally alert in the evening. In fact, if the glance strays below the borderline, then immediately this is no longer that relevant.

Not merely the reader is to blame for this, but also those who supply him. Of their own accord, of course, most businessmen do not go beyond the day in which they flourish. And they unwind in the evening: thus we see the tired man who comes home from work and only reads the yawning newspaper. The life he has is printed large, another life which diverts him and is nothing to do with him is gossiped about. But of course the men who reflect life below the borderline in the newspaper by cutting and scribbling certainly do their bit to turn it into fun, veeringly and versatilely. Partly they seem good for nothing other than copying out or checking through all kinds of things they do not know. Partly they overrate themselves, shack up grumpily in their job, ready to leave at any opportunity of becoming authors. For the centre, which has chosen its profession and fills it, few seem cut out here.

Thus there is a gradual descent into fun, the latter becomes increasingly arbitrary. The business section of a good bourgeois newspaper is still half true, occasionally it roughens up laundered reports. The political section has character, so to speak, namely that of the publisher’s capital and of the large advertisements. But even the reports in this section grow all the more fantastic the further away the scene of events gets, the thinner therefore actual knowledge of their subjects becomes. Thus the feature section begins precisely in Mexican, Indian and Chinese regions, i.e. wherever there is an unclear market and no familiar capitalist plane. To become out-and-out entertainment below the borderline: entertainment from events that do not really disturb the businessman, which are above all portrayed as harmlessly or as ‘colourfully’ as possible. Here the captioned cartoons stand unconnected side by side, indeed even the instructive has to be entertaining. There are exceptions in two or three old papers; otherwise there is the art of evasion everywhere, aversion to the real matter.

Such pens can and must dance around everything. Overblown bourgeois consciousness overblows itself once more. For the average reader the emptiness in which he has to live is boarded up with nothing but inexact little pieces. The man of means however, who actually conducts business out of the emptiness, makes himself immune even to poison, the modest poison of a Toller¹¹ for example, by taking it from his paper in stimulating doses. And for the time being the scribe may say everything, because he has nothing to say.

A VICTORYOFTHEMAGAZINE(1929)

Further and further afield now effort is omitted. The newspaper is cheerfully laid out, in order to be skimmed over all the more pleasantly. On the way to the office, during the breaks in a life that hardly comes to its senses in bed. Even the periodical is either no longer one or it perishes where it wants to remain one.

Not five lines are printed about poems, never mind people being given these to read themselves. A novel must be reviewed in no more than thirty lines unless it puts the bourgeois himself, the way he would like to see himself, into the bookcase. Essays, which in France for example, as an undiverted bourgeois country, immediately magnetized negatively or positively, are printed here just as if they never existed. Stresemann¹² once complained in vain that the periodical as supplement of the daily paper was dying out and gave him no opportunity to inform himself about the intellectual life of the country. In France the bourgeois are even less advanced in the consciousness of their ideological decay; so people like Briand¹³ are informed over there. But the advert controls German printing space: the cigarette is illustrated sometimes ethereally, sometimes voluptuously, a stir is created about considerably less than an omelette, and only the writers lack space. If we put the printing space of cosmetic and tobacco advertising together, then Germany could have a periodical in comparison with which the ‘Neue Rundschau’¹⁴ would be a mere publisher’s brochure. In France the sharp commentary still exists, the space-creating essay; in our country even formerly great reviews seem like ‘cream which takes the bite out of the wind’ or ‘like the miracle of the perfect mixture which makes our Arabian blend so palatable’. Thus they can be replaced by Mouson and Reetsma.¹⁵ but who can help Stresemann? Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.¹⁶ Only the President of the Reich has the right not to have read any books since his cadet training.¹⁷

At the same time papers still exist, some really fresh, some not quite faded. A typical example of the former would be the ‘Weltbühne’,¹⁸ of the latter the ‘Neue Rundschau’; there are also more distinguished ones, they still preserve the times when people spoke about poverty as the great radiance from within and thought nothing of it. Left-wing periodicals are read by shadowy people, oily ones who need some vinegar, Jewish and other malcontents who use wit or the caustic tone as a release. The writers of these things often understand the art of always being in the wrong place on time, some are turncoats by nature who do not really want to arrive at all. Activists are on the market whom no one hires, journalists are themselves sometimes the type they are fighting, whom they equally entertain with possible and impossible jokes. T...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION
• PREFACE TO THE 1935 EDITION
• POSTSCRIPT, 1962
• DUST
• PART I: EMPLOYEES AND DIVERSION
• PART II: NON-CONTEMPORANEITY AND INTOXICATION
• SUMMARY TRANSITION: NON-CONTEMPORANEITY AND OBLIGATION TO ITS DIALECTIC (MAY 1932)
• FINAL FORM: ROMANTIC HOOK-FORMATION
• PART III: UPPER MIDDLE CLASSES, OBJECTIVITY AND MONTAGE
• RELATIVISMS AND EMPTY MONTAGE
• PHILOSOPHIES OF UNREST, PROCESS, DIONYSUS
• THINKING SURREALISMS
• INDEX