Bloch, Heritage of Our Times

← Ernst Bloch, Heritage of our Times, trans. N. and S. Plaice, Oxford 1991 (first edition of Erbschaft dieser Zeit published Zurich 1935) ← ← Inventory of Revolutionary Appearance (1933) ← “When two do the same thing, they do not do the same thing. Especially when one copies what the other is doing, in order to deceive. So it is today, when the Nazi cannot yet reveal the way he really looks, and thus disguises himself. He pretends to be rebellious, as we know; the most dreadful white terror against populace and socialism which history has ever seen camouflages itself as socialist. To this end its propaganda must develop sheer revolutionary appearance, garnished with thefts from the commune… Thus hell mocked right from the beginning with a grotesque mask of salvation, again and again.” (64) ← ← “And finally they pretend to think of nothing except what will change things. This sounds almost formally Marxist, recognizes no intellect in itself, but places it instead in the service of politics. Goebbels expressly declares the film ‘Battleship Potemkin’ to be a model for the German film, so far does the formal consent go, as the crook and thieving perverter imagines it. What is important, according to the latest dramatic guidelines of these shabbily cunning plagiarists, is not how good or bad the performed play was but the mood in which the spectator leaves the theatre… he [Goebbels] wants tendency in the theatre instead of l’art pour l’art. All this seems, undoubtedly, as deceptively anti-contemplative as a forgery can only be which confuses the Marxist application of theory to practice with the patter of a con-man… It is important here to observe the paths by means of which precisely the copy of the Marxist relationship between theory and practice seemed attainable to National Socialism in a particularly easy, particularly ‘modern’ way. To tolerate not only no intellect in itself, but no intellect at all, except on the commanding heights of profit, this constitutes the chloroform practice of Hitlerism. ‘Justice is, truth is, what benefits the German people’, that is, what benefits German monopoly capitalism: this scandalous pragmatism of the Nazis is ultimately not just the ape of the Marxist relationship between theory and practice, but its total perversion. For in Marxist terms the primacy of theory is definitely found in this relationship, i.e. something is not true because it is beneficial, but because it is true it is also beneficial.” (67-8) ← ← “Thus the enemy is not content with torturing and killing workers. He not only wants to smash the red front but also strips the jewellery off the supposed corpse.” (68) ← ← Jugglers’ Fair Beneath the Gallows (1937)

← On the opening of the Haus der deutschen Kunst in Munich, and the Entartete Kunst Austellung: ← “Let us speak quietly, there is someone dying in the room. Dying German culture, it does not even have catacombs at its disposal inside Germany any more. Merely chambers of horror in which it is to be exposed to the derision of the mob; a concentration camp with visits from the public.” (75) ← ← On Hitler’s speech on art, as reported in the Frankfurter Zeitung: ← “the philosophizing Führer has the floor: ‘A radiantly beautiful human type, gentlemen, you prehistoric art-stutterers, is the type of the new age, and what do you produce? Misshapen cripples and cretins, men who are closer to animals than human beings – and this is what these most dreadful amateurs dare to present as the expression of that which shapes the modern age and stamps its hallmark on it.’ Naturally the philosophical discussion turns away from such allusions to the present and from its hallmark and finds the following about itself and its kind, who would not have been regarded as human among the Greeks: ‘Never was humanity closer to antiquity in appearance and in its feelings than it is today.’” (76) ← ← Bloch is relieved that Hitler, unlike Mussolini, will not tolerate the avant-gardes: at least it puts the intellectuals off. ← “A homogeneous system has entered into things, even art is sent to the torture chamber, the burning of books preceded the burning of people anyway, in name and kind alike. And the false messiah satiates the ‘nation’ with a well-paid mixture of dance on the alpine pasture over the sofa and blood and soil in the abyss.” (80) ← ← Summary Transition: Non-Contemporaneity and Obligation to it Dialectic (May 1932) ← “A. Early Condition. ← Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, through the fact that they can be seen today. But they are thereby not yet living at the same time with the others.

← They rather carry an earlier element with them; this interferes. Depending on where someone stands physically, and above all in terms of class, he has his times. Older times than the modern ones continue to have an effect in older strata; it is easy to make or dream one’s way back into older ones here. Of course, a merely awkward man who for this very reason falls short of the demands of his position or little position is simply backward in himself. But what if in addition, through the continuing effect of ancient peasant origin for instance, as a type from earlier time he does not fit into a very modern concern? Various years in general beat in the one which is just being counted and prevails. Nor do they flourish in obscurity as in the past, but contradict the Now; very strangely, crookedly, from behind. The power of this untimely course has appeared, it promised precisely new life, however much it merely hauls up what is old. The masses also streamed towards it, because at least the intolerable Now seems different with Hitler, because he paints good old things for everyone. There is little more unexpected and nothing more dangerous than this power of being at once fiery and meagre, contradictory and non-contemporaneous. The workers are no longer alone with themselves and the employers. Much earlier powers, from a very different bottom, begin between them.” (97) ← ← Hidden Quality ← “It is good to go into the troubled waters of others and to fish in them yourself. For darkness is not only useful to criminals, lovers also know what to do with it. That is why a glance is important which, while it wants and knows progress, also knows it in concealed form or in loops. Many Marxists perhaps turn their backs all too a limine on occult or archaic phenomena, just as if with the enlightenment of 1880 the world were at an end… Above all, is it not concretely presumable that, just as the social relationship at least in the gentes was more concrete than in later periods, even though undeveloped and in ‘childish form’ (Marx) – that equally the relationship to nature of the primitive world, and hence the prelogical mode of thought and experience, hit upon a different reality in nature, perhaps more reality, than becomes apparent from the viewpoint of the climax magic-metaphysics-positivism?” (176-7) [sounds like justification of Balazs…] ← ← The Jolt ← “We are beside ourselves. The glance wavers, with it, what it held. External things are no longer usual, displace themselves. Something has become too light here, goes to and fro.” (189) ← ← Transition: Berlin, Functions in Hollow Space “This place first drew in fresh air again. Worked with borrowed money, filled its patched pocket. Berlin won the war in Germany, the city is right in front in late-bourgeois terms… Berlin seems in fact

extraordinarily ‘contemporaneous’, a constantly new city, built hollow, on which not even the lime becomes or is really set. But no matter how far in front a capitalist city is, of course, it is for the present only ‘contemporaneous’ in the limited, indeed inauthentic sense, namely that of being merely up to date.” (195)