Decadence in Literature and Intellectual Debate since 1945

D. Landgraf

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137431028
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bridging the gap between decadence as it is traditionally understood in literary and cultural studies and its relevance to current phenomena, this interdisciplinary collection examines literary texts and movies from Europe and the United States since 1945.

Part 1

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Historical and Philosophical Perspectives

Chapter 1

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On the Notion of Decadence in the FRG and France after 1945—with Examples by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Botho Strauß, and Richard Millet

Diemo Landgraf

Introduction

Since 1945, only a few intellectuals have used the concept of decadence for criticizing social, cultural, and political pathologies, but the term has gained importance and acquired new meanings in the last several years due to numerous crises. Especially the Euro crisis, globalization, the challenge of the project of a multicultural society, and the citizens’ loss of confidence in the political elite have to be mentioned here. The present chapter starts with an overview of the concept of decadence since the eighteenth century and then examines its relevance after 1945 in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and France, which, according to a popular saying, can be regarded as the “motors of Europe.” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979) and two essays that created a big stir in the FRG and France, Botho Strauß’s “Anschwellender Bocksgesang” (“Goat Song Rising,” 1993) and Richard Millet’s Langue fantôme, suivi d’Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik (Phantom Language, Followed by Literary Praise of Anders Breivik, 2012), will provide concrete examples for the intellectual debate about decadence, all of which allude to the dwindling importance of Europe within the new postwar order.

Essential Features of the Notion of Decadence since the Eighteenth Century

The general meaning of the term “decadence,” stemming from the Latin word cadere, is fall, decline, and decay. Because of its history—a specific usage can be observed since the eighteenth century—it is charged with connotations that are linked to certain epochs and aesthetic phenomena. Three factors explain the moment of its appearance: the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment fostered a more profound historical conscience and thereby the condition for understanding centuries-long historical developments. Furthermore, the new idea of progress and the ideal of perfectibility implied also looking at the reasons for all forms of regression and decline.¹ Since Charles Montesquieu’s study Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, 1734), the fall of Rome has been the preferred example and point of reference for political and cultural decadence.² In France, where the term first became popular, the perception that the Golden Age, or âge classique, of the preceding seventeenth century could not be outbid, inspired the idea that decline was inevitable for contemporary society. In this sense, Voltaire wrote, “Geniality is restricted to one century, after which it has to degenerate,” concluding that “in every sense, we are living in times of the most horrid decadence” (in Freund 111, my translation).

Since then, numerous decadence theories have been formulated, each expressing the spirit of its time and the different ideological premises of the author. Basically, one can distinguish between cyclic concepts (nations and cultures are subject to an evolution similar to the seasons; different ages alternate), organicist concepts (nations and cultures follow an evolution similar to the ages of biological organisms and that inevitably ends with death), and the concept of decadence as anomaly, sickness, and catastrophe.³ Whereas the first two categories are characteristic of mythical and metaphysical worldviews,⁴ a sober stocktaking is the foundation for the third grouping, to which, as we will see, all the representative examples from after 1945 belong.

A key feature that all the important nineteenth-century authors share, be they writers (such as Charles Baudelaire and Joris-Karl Huysmans) or philosophers (such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Friedrich Nietzsche), is the refusal of materialism, capitalism, egalitarianism, socialism, and liberalism. Thus, their attitude can be described as fundamentally antimodern, which is also true for most of the more recent decadence theories.

According to Julien Freund, egalitarianism and the eschatological concept of progress, which postulates that there is “a march of humanity towards the perfection of justice, equality, liberty, and peace” (371, my translation), constitute the core of the criticized ideologies. In his view, egalitarianism (that is, equality as an absolute value, which demands that what is unequal by nature be made equal “for the sake of justice”) fails to recognize that “hierarchies are inseparable from the idea of value itself. . . . A thing necessarily has a value in comparison to another thing, which is worth more or less. . . . If all things have the same value, no thing has any value at all” (364). Denying this leads to universal confusion with destructive consequences for society: “By its intrinsic logic, egalitarianism inevitably does not only establish equality between parents and children or masters and pupils, as Plato had already indicated, but also between the sound minded and the lunatic or even between artist and charlatan” (362). The ensuing loss of values causes contempt for tradition, general randomness, decline of morals, and loss of orientation: “Decadence is prone to close itself in the present, as if it could create out of nothing” (363).⁵ This evolution inevitably has negative consequences for social cohesion and coordination. Referring to Émile Durkheim, Freund speaks about a loss of transcendence:

How can we define the spirit of a society or a civilization? It consists of a common intelligence, a lifestyle and connivances, including commonplaces, which allow the members to understand each other without many words. But it also consists of the feeling of obligation and service in the interest of the collective destiny, which exceeds the individuals. Durkheim rightly highlights that the implicit agreement that unifies the members of a society transcends the individual conscience. This means that a civilization only exists by the faith it has in itself. Thus, it is not without reason that religion—its denomination does not matter much here—has been the cement of societies because it is the exemplary depositary of transcendence. (367)

The loss of transcendence is accompanied by a dominant orientation toward merely material values. For the individual, this becomes manifest in the form of pursuit of profit, egoism, and hedonism; in the field of politics it is the primacy of the economy. It is significant that this is just as valid for socialism as it is for liberalism and capitalism. All these ideologies cause society and politics to become indifferent or even hostile toward religion⁶ and culture.⁷

According to Freund, the second ideological component, the eschatological concept of progress, appeared with the increasing mechanization and the scientific ideal of the nineteenth century: “The application of material technology to human organization has had the effect of considering society as an artificial creation that can be built, dismantled, and rebuilt arbitrarily in case it is not regarded to be suitable anymore” (377).

Progress, which is supposed to lead to the salvation of humanity and the illusion that anything is feasible are the core ideas of Marxism (characterized as scientific by its adherents), which postulates that the material conditions of production set the tone for all the other areas of human life. This theory is supposed to justify violently changing these conditions (that is, abolishing the feudal and the bourgeois society) for the betterment of mankind. Since Marxism is based on mere postulations and, until now, has always failed when attempted to be put into practice, Freund speaks about utopianism. According to him, the latter consists of

the tendency to consider all things essentially with regard to the future, generally in the most vague terms and with the intention of pushing people towards an undetermined course of action. Utopianism . . . is a way of thinking that denigrates human experience in the name of a chaotic imaginary that is presented as feasible because it is qualified as ideally generous. (376)

The incompatibility of ideology and reality, Freund writes, implies a forced redefinition of linguistic terms and forms of expression, for which George Orwell coined the word “newspeak” in his novel 1984. But not only language is violated. A similarly technocratic view of society that pretends to create a “new man” by government interventions on all levels, including the citizens’ private life, cannot create anything but a tyranny that surveys and controls its subjects.

While the Soviet Union and its satellites were obviously police states, Freund sees the same strategies applied in a more subtle manner in the liberal-capitalist West: “techniques of spiritual conditioning, indoctrination, and forced uniformity are developed under the cloak of political education, administered with flatteries that have the objective of directing the ideas of the citizens by the promise of material wealth” (375). This kind of social engineering and populism converts democracy into a farce, which had been predicted in the nineteenth century by Tocqueville in his book De la démocratie en Amérique (Democracy in America, 1835/40). His opinion has later been shared by numerous authors of decadence theories such as Gaetano Mosca (cf. Freund 180), Jakob Burckhardt (cf. Freund 213), and Renée Guénon (cf. Freund 237).

In spite of the current relevance of the concept of decadence, its usage has been bound primarily to specific personalities and epochs until recently. The most prominent association is the aesthetic phenomenon of “decadent literature,” a tendency that starts with Théophile Gautier and Baudelaire toward the middle of the nineteenth century, has its peak around the fin de siècle, and ends with the First World War. For the same reason, research has almost exclusively conceived of decadence as an historical phenomenon in the field of aesthetics.⁸ Only seldom has it been discussed whether it might describe concrete phenomena of the present in an accurate manner.⁹

Two reasons can be given: although all of the nineteenth-century writers in whose work the concept of decadence is important use it to seriously criticize contemporary society and culture, this critique is often overlaid with mannerist and eccentric aesthetics that plays with its own decadence and is prone, not infrequently, to sensationalistic exaggerations.¹⁰

Further, the First and especially the Second World War caused paradigm shifts that made the concept of decadence appear outmoded. Traditional society, which had been menaced by modernization in the nineteenth century and to which practically all of the critics of decadence felt they belonged, lay in ruins, and the Janus-headed couple of capitalism and socialism (united in the form of social democracy) started its triumph in Western Europe.¹¹ After egalitarianism and liberalism had finally become the leading values of a new ideal of progress, intellectuals who saw themselves in continuity to the nineteenth-century critics of decadence were marginalized. Only in recent years, new tendencies can be noticed, especially because the big projects of progress or the utopias of the present time have failed or are menaced by failure.

With this observation, which shall be illustrated by several examples, we have arrived in the present. Let us first look at the FRG, where in 2010 a series of eruptions occurred that were the expression of tensions and problems that had been growing since long ago.¹²

“Late Roman Decadence” in the FRG

When Guido Westerwelle (Free Democratic Party), who was minister of foreign relations at that time, criticized that promising effortless wealth to the people lead to spätrömische Dekadenz—“late Roman decadence,”¹³ he triggered a fervid, several-months-long media debate. The context of his statement was the fact that the number of taxpayers in the FRG is shrinking, while the number of households receiving welfare money is on the rise. The welfare system that has been protecting millions of citizens from social descent has reached its limits.¹⁴

As the former senator of finance in Berlin, Thilo Sarrazin’s (Social Democratic Party) best-selling book Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Is Abolishing Itself, 2010) shows, based on statistics, the number of receivers of welfare money is particularly high among immigrants from Islamic countries. Simultaneously, they constitute the fastest-growing minority in the FRG. Thus, the debate about the welfare system is closely linked to that concerning the feasibility of a successful multicultural society. Another thesis in Sarrazin’s book is that in a few decades, Germans will become a minority in their own country if the current trends continue.¹⁵ Intensified by the impression of a series of religiously motivated atrocities that had started with the murder of the Dutch film director Theo van Gogh by an Islamic extremist and by repeated immigrant riots in London and Paris, an intense debate flourished in the FRG and other countries. Chancellor Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic U...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part 1   Historical and Philosophical Perspectives
• Part 2   Decadence and the Politics of Culture and Language
• Part 3   Literary and Film Studies
• About the Authors
• Index of Persons
• Index of Terms