SUNY series, Philosophy and Race

Jazz and Racial Blackness in German Thought between the Wars

Mark Christian Thompson

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438469881
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Anti-Music examines the critical, literary, and political responses to African American jazz music in interwar Germany. During this time, jazz was the subject of overt political debate between left-wing and right-wing interests: for the left, jazz marked the death knell of authoritarian Prussian society; for the right, jazz was complicit as an American import threatening the chaos of modernization and mass politics. This conflict was resolved in the early 1930s as the left abandoned jazz in the face of Nazi victory, having come to see the music in collusion with the totalitarian culture industry. Mark Christian Thompson recounts the story of this intellectual trajectory and describes how jazz came to be associated with repressive, virulently racist fascism in Germany. By examining writings by Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, T.W. Adorno, and Klaus Mann, and archival photographs and images, Thompson brings together debates in German, African American, and jazz studies, and charts a new path for addressing antiblack racism in cultural criticism and theory.

ONE

The Jazz Paradox

Race and Totalitarian Politics in the German Jazz Reception

Figure 1.1. Caricature of black jazz saxophonist in Jonny costume, from the 17 January 1928 Wiener Zeitschrift, entitled “Der Götz von Berlichen.”

The Negro

Someone already saw himself better, precisely in his error. Late one night this gentleman arrived at a hotel with friends; all the rooms were taken. All but one; but someone else was already asleep in the room, a black man; we’re in America. The gentleman took the room anyway; it was only for the night; early the next day he would have to catch a train. He enjoined the bellhop to knock at the door as well as the bed, and the right bed, not the black man’s. He and his friends then drank into the night, all sorts of strong stuff, so much that his friends, before they put him in the room, painted him in blackface without his even noticing. When the bellhop later woke him, he raced to the station, onto the train, and into the restroom to wash his face. Seeing himself in the mirror, he bellowed, “Now, that idiot woke the nigger after all!”

The story is told in different ways, but always with the same outcome. Was the man still half-asleep? Certainly, and at the same time he was never more awake than at that moment. So indifferently near himself, yet his habitual whiteness fell from him like taking off a suit, however comfortable, in which he’d been stuck. Even whites look mostly like a distortion of themselves—nothing fits there; life is a sorry tailor. The black man would lose his suit even faster if he blinked hard just once. (21–22)

—Ernst Bloch, Traces (1930)

Der Schwarze

Einer blickte sich schon mehr an, grade indem er irrte. Spät abends kam ein Herr ins Hotel, mit Freunden, alle Betten waren besetzt. Außer einem, doch im Zimmer schlief bereits ein Neger, wir sind in Amerika. Der Herr nahm das Zimmer trotzdem, es war nur für eine Nacht, in aller Frühe mußte er auf den Zug. Schärfte daher dem Hausknecht ein, sowohl an der Tür zu wecken als am Bett, und zwar am richtigen, nicht an dem des Schwarzen. Auf die Nacht nahm man allerhand Scharfes, mit so viel Erfolg, daß die Freunde den Gentleman, bevor sie ihn ins Negerzimmer schafften, mit Ruß anstrichen und er es nicht einmal merkte. Wie nun der Hausknecht den Fremden geweckt hatte, er rast an den Bahnhof, in den Zug, in die Kabine, sich zu waschen: so sieht er sich im Spiegel und brüllt: “Jetzt hat der Dummkopf doch den Nigger geweckt.”—Die Geschichte wird auch noch anders erzählt, läuft aber immer aufs Gleiche hinaus. War der Mann nicht verschlafen? gewiß, und er war zugleich nie wacher als in diesem Augenblick. So unbestimmt nah an sich selbst und die gewohnte Weiße fiel vom Lieb wie ein Kleid, in das man ihn sonst, wenn auch ganz angenehm, gesteckt hatte. Auch die Weißen sehen meist nur dem Zerrbild von sich ähnlich; da sitzt nichts, das Leben ist ein schlechter Schneider. Dem Neger freilich fiele sein Kleid noch mehr herunter, blinzelte er einmal scharf hin. (35–36)

—Ernst Bloch, Spuren (1930)

I. BLOCH’S BLACKS

It is difficult to believe that this extraordinary parody of a fable by Ernst Bloch was written in the late 1920s.1 It uses multiple names and substitutions for racial blackness, including Neger, Nigger, the genitive des Schwarzen, and the nominative title, Der Schwarze. Using many differently inflected ways of racially designating a “black man,” Bloch has recourse to the unusual. “Der Schwarze” was not in use as a common racial designation (as Schwarzer now is) at the time Bloch composed the vignettes that form Spuren. If all that he wished to designate with his title was a man of discernible African descent, he would have used the terms he signals with in the body of the text, Neger or Nigger.2 Is Bloch guilty, then, of what would have been at this time an opaque usage, or of something else entirely? The answer lies in Bloch’s presentation of the racial substitution and parody on which the text depends for its content, signification, and significance. This will not be to say that Bloch advances a notion of race based on contingency. On the surface it will appear that Bloch makes a claim for race as a social construct as opposed to a biological essence. While this impression will prove to be false, he does insist that race can act as a type of secondary appropriation, that race is open to being parodied, that it cultivates staged imposture, and that it thrives on theatrical, costumed substitution.

Whereas Bloch’s text ends with the isolated subject’s confrontation with himself in the mirror, it begins with the social individual in a crowd. It is not yet clear that this male figure is abroad, only that he is among the masses. He is merely in a hotel that is booked to capacity, with the exception of one bed in a shared room. The room’s other occupant is a black man (Neger). This fact alone confirms to the man that he is in America. It is, of course, not the case that the European did not know which country he was in until seeing a black man in, or rather, included in, a hotel. Instead Bloch relies on the by-then-conventional cultural association in the late jazz age in Germany of the United States with African Americans. In doing so, Bloch situates the intelligibility of his discourse firmly in the realm of mass culture, and in particular in relation to jazz. The black man, coupled with the automatic assumption on the part not just of the man but the text, provides the interpretive schemata for the interlude. For to the German racial-cultural imagination of this time, African Americans stood in for all American cultural products, with jazz functioning as the determinative representative, or master signifier, in the mass cultural field. And if we understand the hotel as Bloch’s contemporary European American mass cultural field, then the man, or Germany, sleeps with African American jazz culture, slightly belatedly yet decisively.

The man “enjoins” (einschärfen; “Schärfte daher dem Hausknecht ein”) the bellhop to wake him early, expressly commanding that the wrong man not be awakened. The scene is a play on Hegel’s critique of Schelling’s absolute as a night in which “all cows are black.” Bloch was a trained philosopher deeply influenced by German Idealism, and in particular by Hegel and Schelling. It should therefore come as no surprise to find Bloch alluding to the two philosophers’ most famous point of reference. In this common point of reference, Hegel objects that the absolute as Schelling conceives it lacks a modal construction, making it impossible to differentiate characteristics between the objects it mediates. Here Bloch slyly foreshadows the story’s ending by suggesting that the darkness of early morning might make it difficult for the bellhop to distinguish between the men, black and white, as if racial modality had been suspended or destroyed. A quick read, then, might be satisfied with Bloch’s partially shrouded suggestion that racial blackness is a matter of surfaces determined by the visible spectrum. A closer look illuminates the fact that for Bloch it is not a matter of physical appearance and juxtaposition. Race, or a certain understanding of blackness, is an intellectual-cultural complex that can be imposed on the subject from the outside, even on a “lowly” bellhop. There are differentiating racial modes, such as biology and culture. However, something has obscured them.

After this stern, apparently necessary warning to avoid mistaking one black cow for another, a drinking party between friends ensues, a sort of symposium, during which the man no doubt imbibes to great excess in addition to, perhaps, using narcotics (we are told only that they took in, “allerhand Scharfes”). Bloch is of course well aware that jazz was strongly associated with drug use and drug culture in Weimar, as well as being itself considered like a drug. Spuren, then, as a work of expressionist philosophy, uses an adapted form of symposia and hints at drug use, immediately calling to mind both Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus. It will come as no surprise to mention that Bloch was critically engaged with Platonic philosophy, particularly in The Principle of Hope (published in three volumes in 1954, 1955, and 1959), in which he is deeply critical of Plato’s concept of anamnesis, but very supportive of his notion of Eros. Indeed, in the massive work Bloch explicitly and importantly joins the figure of Plato’s Eros in the Symposium and the Phaedrus. He writes: “Not least the image of the Agon is also of such an emotional nature, the image of the contest in which the nevertheless still amiable, indeed playful Eros, as Plato portrays it in the Symposium, becomes in the Phaedrus the all-beginner, all-creator” (The Principle of Hope, vol. II, 845). While it is not my intention here to give a detailed analysis of Bloch’s extensive investment in Platonic philosophy, it suffices to say that Bloch places great importance of the imminent connection between the Symposium and the Phaedrus. For Bloch, the two dialogues are intimately bound through Eros. Thus, despite its literary form, Bloch’s text is a philosophical discourse that makes reference to a drinking party and narcotic use. Embedded within, among other things, the Western philosophical tradition, the text alludes to the Platonic corpus and in particular to the Symposium and Phaedrus. Through Phaedrus the interlocutor, both texts are linked to discussions of ecstatic states and the Pharmakon.

While Bloch relies on the multiple philosophical meanings of the Greek term, his intent here is not Platonic in any strict sense of an analysis and appropriation of either the Symposium or the Phaedrus. Rather he wishes to consider the jazz scene through the various, general philosophical associations linked to the Platonic concept of Pharmakon, all of which are ultimately secondary to their contemporary social referent. The results of this effort read remarkably like at least two now imminently familiar theories of the Greek Pharmakon, both conditioned here by blackness. The first is blackness as scapegoating and sacrifice (Girard, which will be treated later in the book), and the second is blackness as difference, indeterminacy, and substitution (Derrida). Bloch is, however, neither Girardian nor Derridean before the fact. In Bloch, philosophy becomes a metaphor for naming the indeterminacy of value and hierarchy in material culture while still maintaining normative racial and sexual values. For Platonic eroticism (the two men both “sleep” together in the literal sense and join or couple in the night at the level of subjectivity) here names the perceived homosexuality as racial sexual perversion linked to jazz culture, not a transhistorical ritual signification or an irreducibly deferential operation. The degeneration of the race is accelerated in jazz’s invasive racial indeterminacy at a historically constitutive moment in a rigidly defined national-racial culture. Narcotics use and narcosis are seemingly unavoidable supplementary activities to the jazz scene alone. Ultimately, Bloch sees jazz blackness as the cultural-historical medium functionally akin to the iterative philosophical plenitude found in the concept of the Pharmakon, strictly and exclusively within his contemporary milieu.

In so doing, Bloch, despite having the man fall into a deep, coma-like sleep during which his friends transform his race, is not positing the palliative, differential, or toxic properties of an ultimately indeterminate, ambiguous understanding of race. Painting him in blackface in his intoxicated, probably narcotized, dream-like state adds to the story a parodic element in which Bloch burlesques the fable of transformation while relying on the idea of Pharmakon to create the phantasmagorical, fairytale-like atmosphere of this otherwise deeply materialist story. Indeed, the metamorphosis has occurred through jazz culture as Pharmakon, bearing in mind that jazz was overtly and insistently linked at the time with narcotic use and drug culture, and the music itself was seen as a narcotic. Jazz variations as much as anything else could be “allerhand Scharfes.” But this does not mean, for Bloch, that race is inherently illusory, or “pharmakological.” Phantasmagorical is the racial effect of jazz and the image of race imposed on the precariously constructed subject of mass entertainment, but not on race itself.

The man races to the train in blackface, the tempo of modern, technologized life moving too quickly for him to have taken stock of himself before leaving in the early hours of the morning. In the train men’s room, finally finding a moment to look at himself, the man mistakes his own face for that of the black man. It is here that we get the use of the word “nigger” for the first and only time in the story. Angered by having the black man awoken instead of the white, the strongest racist epithet used in the story serves as a means for the man, first, to distance himself from his own racial blackness, and second and more importantly, to foreclose on the knowledge that blackness as he imagines it exists but is incomplete without cultural, pharmacological supplement. Bloch suggests here that blackness is a performance layered atop a biological fact, a painted black face that can be applied to black as well as white skin to equal effect. It is a reflection in the mirror, whose insubstantiality, whose emptiness, is filled by the needs, emotional and material, of the blackened subject. Indeed, for Bloch the subject’s formation is incomplete without racial imagining vis-à-vis blackness, without the construction and constitution of the blackness in the racial imaginary through which to see and interpret one’s reflection. The suggestion here is not, as in the type of fairy tale Bloch presents and undermines throughout Spuren, that the bellhop could not tell a white man and a black man apart, but that the blackface worn by the white man is racially just as convincing as the skin of the black man from a certain perspective, and that in any event, in the culture industry black men wear blackface as well.3

Ultimately, the man’s encounter with a stranger on a train reveals the parodic structure of blackness as essential to subject formation within the German racial imaginary and determined in the last instance by the culture industry. My use of the term “parody,” following the OED, stems etymologically from the “post-classical Latin parodia (4th cent.; in classical Latin as a Greek word),” which follows the “ancient Greek παρῳδία a burlesque poem or song.” The prefix παρα (para) means “counter” or “contra,” but also “besides.” “Ode” (ᾠδή), understood here notionally as a poetic mode of production as much as a formal attribute, mediates the combined two senses of the prefix. This mediation insists on both the nearness or “intimacy” that Hutcheon suggests “besides” implies, as well as the combative, adversarial aspect of “para” (Hutcheon 32). The “ode” in parody outlines the “formal address” by which two racialized subject positions, whose relationship is that of the irreconcilable yet intimate aspects in the prefix “para,” adapt to each other and coexist in the same space. Parody is a form of nearness, or promiscuity in the spatial sense of the word, that embraces—figuratively, formally, and poetically—the hostility between intimates and inmates. Thus, I also wish to retain at least the sense if not the rigor of the term’s origin in poetics as an “ode” or formal address while making a cultural and political argument. In this respect, I am deeply invested in the OED’s primary definitional trait of parody as “A literary composition modeled on and imitating another work, esp. a composition in which the characteristic style and themes of a particular author or genre are satirized by being applied to inappropriate or unlikely subjects, or are otherwise exaggerated for comic effect. In later use extended to similar imitations in other artistic fields, as music, painting, film, etc.” Bearing this in mind, the operational definition of parody I follow is, however, the OED’s extended-use listings: “a poor or feeble imitation of something; a travesty”; and “to imitate in a way that is a parody; esp. to copy or mimic for comic or derisive effect; to make fun of, satirize.” Parody comprehends, as Hutcheon writes, an “imitation with critical difference” and “the inscription of continuity and change” (Hutcheon 36). But this “critical difference” is not neutral, as Hutcheon is aware. It contains a value, in that it entails a derisive judgment as travesty. Parody does not simply mimic the structure of difference and repetition, it describes a subversive poetic practice. As Dentith has written, “while all language use certainly involves imitation, the particular inflection that we give to that imitation (and parody is one possible inflection) indicates the extent to which we have adapted language to occasion, transformed the value given to he utterance, and thus redirected the evaluative direction in that chain of utterances. Parody is one of the means available to us to achieve all those ends” (4).

The travesty of parodic transformation is subversive in that it attempts to “redirect” the meaning of statement from within. This subversive process is operative in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction German Jazz and the Metronome of Race
• Chapter one The Jazz Paradox: Race and Totalitarian Politics in German Jazz Reception
• Chapter two The Jazz Machine: Brecht and the Politics of Jazz
• Chapter three The Monkey’s Trick: Herman Hesse and the Music of Decline
• Chapter four The Music of Fascism: Adorno on Jazz
• Chapter five Jazz-Heinis: Klaus Mann and Jazz Ontology
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover