Born in 1885 in Ludwigshafen, 1 Ernst Blochâs personal reminiscences of his early years reveal how he grew to resent rigid authoritarianism and to sympathize with the lower and working classes who lived in impoverished conditions at that time. His parents were assimilated, well-to-do Jews, who had clear, but narrow expectations for Bloch and his future. His father was a senior official of the Imperial Railways and treated his son with a firm, governing hand. For the most part, he was concerned more about respectability than about helping Bloch develop his talents. As a young boy, Bloch felt the parental imposition of stultifying regulations as a direct impingement on his personal freedom. In the rare public remarks he made about his youth in his adulthood, Bloch always stressed how much he wanted to break away from his home and hardly mentioned his parents in his later years. Ludwigshafen, too, was not conducive to his childhood dreams and desires. At the end of the nineteenth century, the city was a dreary industrial center in which the living conditions of the workers were decrepit, and the lifestyle of the bourgeoisie boring and predictable. Compared with the neighboring elegant city of Mannheim, which was more affluent (marked by a residential palace) and had a more interesting cultural life, Ludwigshafen, the âproletarianâ city, reminded Bloch as a boy and young man of the social and political inequities that disturbed him throughout his life. To a certain extent, it was the contradiction between Ludwigshafen and Mannheim that gave rise to Blochâs early political consciousness, a contradiction that Bloch later sought to grasp as a major cause for the rise of fascism in Germany. Here was the first sign of non-synchronism (Ungleichzeitigkeit) or the inequality of temporal change: Mannheim was a modern society (Gesellschaft) moving with the modern times toward secularization and cosmopolitanism while Ludwigshafen was still underdeveloped and harboring strong nineteenth-century notions of community (Gemeinschaft). The unequal temporal breach between the two cities led Bloch to grasp why fascism, which paid heed to the basic yearnings and customs of the lower classes and did not dismiss them, as did communism, was to have such a great appeal to the German people.
At that time, however, during his youth he was more bothered by the void in his own life, which, he came to realize, was connected to the contradiction between Ludwigshafen and Mannheim. That is, his home was characterized by what he called âmustyââdreariness, lack of love, understanding, and stimulation. The Jewish religion played a minor role in his life and was meaningless in his family. He could only compensate for the gaps between him, his family, and their beliefs by filling the void with daydreams, voracious reading of fairy tales, popular literature, classics, philosophy, music and visits to the opera house and theater as well as letter-writing to eminent philosophers, rebellion against traditional schooling, and concern for social democratic politics.
To make up for the lack in his home and in Ludwigshafen, Bloch left in 1905 to study philosophy and German literature at the University of Munich and then at the University of WĂŒrzburg, where he focused on experimental psychology, physics, and music and took an interest in the Kabbala and Jewish mysticism. After receiving his doctorate in philosophy in 1908 with a dissertation on Heinrich Rickert under the direction of Hermann Cohen, he moved to Berlin to study under the renowned sociologist Georg Simmel, and it was in Simmelâs seminar that he made the acquaintance of Georg LukĂĄcs, the great Hungarian political theorist, who became one of his best friends and later one of his foremost philosophical antagonists. Bloch studied with Simmel until 1911 and was strongly influenced by his Lebensphilosophie, that is, by Simmelâs notions about the âlived momentâ and the impossibility to know the immediate. More important, Simmel was one of those remarkable intellectuals who believed that a philosopher must be concerned in everyday occurrences and minutiae. He had a broad range of interests and expounded on everything he encountered. In fact, Simmel was a man after Blochâs own heart, and he left a lasting impression on him even after Bloch broke with him due to Simmelâs defense of German patriotism during World War I.
Aside from Simmelâs influence, the period between 1909 and 1914 led to major changes in Blochâs life. Like other young Jewish intellectuals of this period such as Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Landauer, Kurt Hiller, Salmo FriedlĂ€nder, and Theodor Lessing, Bloch took a strong interest in the question of Jewish identity and Zionism and reflected on these issues in an essay entitled âSymbol: Die Judenâ (1912/1913). 2
Finally there is a certain pride to be Jewish that has awakened in us Jews and beats restlessly. These people remain mixed and ambiguous. There are flexible and hard, chatty and practical individuals among them, like everywhere and not like everywhere. But the unproductive and unsterile ones will rapidly disappear. At least there no longer appears to be a basis among the young Jews for the distinctive and formal inclination toward commerce. One sees here a waiting before them that had already once borne fruit among these people. 3
In addition to his interest in messianic ideas, Bloch began studying Christian mysticism due to the religious convictions of Else von Stritzky, a gifted sculptress from Riga, whom he had married in 1913. By this time, Bloch had moved to Heidelberg to participate in Max Weberâs seminar with LukĂĄcs. Here, it was not so much Weber, who drew Bloch to Heidelberg, but LukĂĄcs with whom he shared a great deal, especially a concern with developing a philosophy that would transcend the rationalism of the enlightenment and provide more intuitive means for understanding experience and dealing with such problems as alienation, commodification, and instrumentalization. There was also a group of pacifist intellectuals including Karl Jaspers and Gustav Radbruch, who stimulated Blochâs political thinking. Most important for Bloch at this time was his work on the important category of the noch-nicht-bewuĂt (the not-yet-conscious) that was to be related to the noch-nicht-geworden (the not-yet-become). Here, he began to connect messianic aspects of his thought with a study of everyday phenomena and art and literature to critique existing sociopolitical conditions.
It is not by chance that the conception of some of Blochâs most radical philosophical categories coincided with the outbreak of World War I, which compelled him to link questions of individual awareness and cognition with the need to transform if not revolutionize sociopolitical conditions. Though an anarchist, Bloch sided with the left social democrats and opposed the Wilhelminian governmentâs militaristic policies. His efforts now went toward bringing an end to the war, but it was extremely difficult to act against the German nationalism because the state took emergency and police measures to prohibit the publication of protest articles and books and because the German people became caught up in the chauvinistic furor of the time.
Due to his opposition to the war, there were few opportunities for Bloch to earn a living and make his ideas known, once he left the university. So, in 1917, Bloch decided to emigrate to Switzerland with his wife, who was suffering from an ailment that would eventually take her life in 1921. There, in Bern, Bloch undertook a study of utopian currents and political strategies for the journal Archiv fĂŒr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. In addition, Bloch hoped to earn money as a political journalist because most of his articles could not be published in Germany due to censorship. However, he overestimated his chances in Switzerland, and, despite a small monetary subvention from a wealthy businessman, he and his wife endured many hardships due to lack of money and political squabbles and intrigues. His contact with Hugo Ball, founder of the Dada Movement in European art at this time, reinforced his own position of religious anarchism and led him to explore the ideas of Franz von Baader and Thomas MĂŒnzer, early radical theologians of the Reformation. In addition, he wrote numerous articles against the war and Germany (often under pseudonyms) while also conceiving his first major philosophical publication Geist der Utopie (Spirit of Utopia, 1918), but the poor living conditions caused Bloch often to act in desperate ways so that his first major work on utopia was his concrete means of countering harsh social and personal realities.
Blochâs Geist der Utopie, which he revised and expanded in 1923, indicated the path that he was to pursue during the 1920s. This book was an expressionist and utopian effusion that rejoiced in the apocalyptic ending of Wilhelminian rule and the breakdown of the alienating conditions that had existed in Germany. According to Bloch, the apocalypse would allow for a âwarmâ messianic redemption, but one that depended on communal action:
Life is going on all around us and does not know where it is going. We ourselves are still the lever and motor. The external and especially the revealed sense of life is faltering. But the new ideas have finally broken out, into the full adventures, into the open, unfinished, dreaming world, into Satanâs rubbles and darknesses, providing the cutting off itself. Life also goes around girded with despair, with our spiteful presentiment, with the tremendous power of our human voice, to name God and not to rest until the innermost shadows are expelled, until the world is doused with that fire that is behind the world or shall be ignited by it. 4
This passage is typical of the elliptical, metaphorical, and prophetic style that Bloch was to use for the rest of his life. It was his way of cultivating the âform of the inconstruable questionâ that would need art and literature to illuminate the way forward toward utopia. To be sure, as the last chapter of the book entitled âKarl Marx , Death and the Apocalypse,â indicates, Bloch was turning more and more toward the basics of Marxism to provide the framework in which he would pose questions about ontology, aesthetics, and utopia for the rest of his life.
In fact, despite or because of his mystical and expressionist leanings, Bloch became more and more an iconoclast Marxist in his political opinions during the 1920s. The blend of religious mysticism and communism can be seen most clearly in his study Thomas MĂŒnzer als Theologe der Revolution (Thomas MĂŒnzer as Theologian of Revolution, 1921), in which he depicted MĂŒnzer as a forerunner of Marxism by interpreting the chiliastic aspects of MĂŒnzerâs thinking in relation to the Marxist notion of the classless society. Such an unorthodox interpretation of MĂŒnzer opened new approaches to both religion and Marxism. All Blochâs writings, even the numerous articles he wrote for newspapers and journals from 1919 to 1933, were now related to the elaboration of Marxist principles in a manner disturbing to most orthodox Marxists, particularly Blochâs friend LukĂĄcs, who had completed History and Class Consciousness (1923), a superb study of reification, and was more inclined toward following the Communist Party line than exploring the messianic-religious ties between Marxism and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Yet, these were the very ties that Bloch endeavored to grasp because their elaboration, he believed, would determine the political future of Germany if not Western civilization as a whole.
The period from 1921 to 1933 was a trying one for Bloch, both on a personal and professional level. After the death of his first wife Else, he went through a long period of depression. A second, somewhat desperate and unhappy marriage to Linda Oppenheimer in 1922 lasted less than a year and ended in divorce. In addition, his books were known only to a small group of intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Gerschom Scholem, Siegfried Kracauer, and others like them who acknowledged the power of his remarkable ideas and were stimulated by them. However, Bloch sought a greater audience for his works since he was confident that his philosophical revision of Freud and Marx could have a great impact through a broader group of intellectuals. He never lacked confidence in his own ideas and mission as a philosopher, and many of his acquaintances even thought Bloch to be pugnacious, arrogant, and pretentious, though they were always impressed by his âgenius.â Not only did Bloch have a stunning photographic memory, but he was an accomplished musician and storyteller. Moreover, like Benjamin, one of his closest friends, he was curious about the seemingly most incidental things and cultural artifacts and studied them with an uncanny understanding and appreciation of their significance.
Blochâs reverence for the small as well as the great drew him to the irreverent and experimental dramatist, Bertolt Brecht, whom he met in Berlin, and he became one of the Brechtâs avid champions and interpreters. Indeed, during the 1920s in Berlin, Bloch sought to grasp and learn from political expressionist writers and painters and used the montage technique and elliptical symbolism in his own writings to induce estrangement from the familiar. Here, he wanted to provoke his readers to break out and away from forms that prevented them from becoming conscious of what they were missing, things they had to define for themselves. Blochâs emphasis on estrangement was similar to Brechtâs estrangement effect and the open endings of many of Brechtâs plays. In this sense, Brechtâs dramas were models of anticipatory illumination as can be seen in Blochâs comments on his works in Spuren (Traces, 1930) and Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Heritage of Our Times, 1934) and in such later essays as âThe St...