“On the Notion of Decadence in Germany and France after 1945—with Examples by Rainer Werner...

Copyrighted material – 9781137431011

Contents

Preface Diemo Landgraf vii

Acknowledgments xiii

Part 1 Historical and Philosophical Perspectives

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

Diemo Landgraf 3

2 “In the very quick of the nightmare”: Decadence and Mystics of Wilderness in Henry Miller’s Cultural Criticism of Modernity

Mario Bosincu 25

3 The Function of Decadence and Ascendance in Analytic Philosophy

Jens Lemanski and Konstantin Alogas 49

4 Progress and Decadence—Poststructuralism as Progressivism

Gerald Hoffleit 67

Part 2 Decadence and the Politics of Culture and Language

5 The Concept of Decadence as Ideological and Law Enforcement Category in the GDR

Torben Ibs 85



Contentsvi

6 Joual en stock : The Controversial Issue of Language Quality and Autochthonous Standardization in Quebec

Claus D. Pusch 111

Part 3 Literary and Film Studies

7 Michelangelo Antonioni’s Early “Trilogy of Decadence”: L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961), L’eclisse (1962)

Jakob Willis 133

8 Houellebecq’s Fin de Si è cle: Crisis of Society, Crisis of the Novel—Thematic and Poetological Intertextuality between Michel Houellebecq and Joris-Karl Huysmans

Betül Dilmac 153

9 The Shadow of Decadence: The Latin American Boom and the Taboo of the Spanish Novel of the Democratic Period

Pablo Sánchez Translated from the Spanish language by Jon Regan 171

10 Exile and Writing: Alfredo Bryce Echenique and the Decadence of the Myth of Paris

Blanca Navarro Pardiñas Translated from the Spanish language by Jon Regan 187

11 Tradition, (Post)Modernity, and Decadence in Vargas Llosa’s Lituma en los Andes and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto

Diemo Landgraf 205

About the Authors 225

Index of Persons 229

Index of Terms 231



DECADENCE IN LITERATURE AND INTELLECTUAL DEBATE SINCE 1945Copyright © Diemo Landgraf, 2014.

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ISBN: 978–1–137–43101–1

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Decadence in literature and intellectual debate since 1945 / edited by Diemo Landgraf.

pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–1–137–43101–1 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Decadence in literature. I. Landgraf, Diemo, editor.

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Chapter 1

On the Notion of Decadence in the FRG and France after 1945—with

Examples by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Botho Strau ß , 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 Strau ß ’s “Anschwellender Bocksgesang” (“Goat Song Rising,” 1993) and Richard Millet’s Langue fant ô me, suivi d’ É loge litt é- raire d’Anders Breivik ( Phantom Language, Followed by Literary Praise of Anders Breivik , 2012), will provide concrete examples for the intellectual



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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 revolu-tion 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 per-fectibility implied also looking at the reasons for all forms of regression and decline. 1 Since Charles Montesquieu’s study Consid é rations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur d é cadence ( 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 â ge classique , of the preceding seventeenth century could not be outbid, inspired the idea that decline was inevitable for con-temporary 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 catastro-phe. 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



On the Notion of Decadence 5

philosophers (such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Friedrich Nietzsche), is the refusal of materialism, capitalism, egalitarianism, socialism, and liberal-ism. 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 random-ness, 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 É mile 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 common-places, 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 civiliza-tion 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



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cause society and politics to become indifferent or even hostile toward religion 6 and culture. 7

According to Freund, the second ideological component, the eschato-logical 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 consid-ering 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 (char-acterized 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 peo-ple 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 lan-guage 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, indoctrina-tion, and forced uniformity are developed under the cloak of political edu-cation, 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 d é mocratie en Am é rique ( Democracy in America , 1835/40). His opin-ion has later been shared by numerous authors of decadence theories such




as Gaetano Mosca (cf. Freund 180), Jakob Burckhardt (cf. Freund 213), and Ren é e Gu é non (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 Th é ophile Gautier and Baudelaire toward the middle of the nineteenth century, has its peak around the fin de si è cle, 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 writ-ers 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 par-adigm 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 capital-ism and socialism (united in the form of social democracy) started its tri-umph 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 prob-lems 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 sp ä tr ö mische 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



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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 receiv-ers 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 atroci-ties 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 Union) felt impelled to pay tribute to public opinion by stating, “Multikulti ist absolut gescheitert” — “Multicultural society has failed completely.” 16

Increasingly, the European Union (EU) is also perceived as a negative factor. While the FRG lacks money for maintaining streets, highways, and the education system, the German taxpayers have to shoulder astonishing amounts for the “rescue” of banks and bankrupt states such as Greece and Portugal. Previous promises by the political elite that this would not happen are broken cynically. In other countries, the apparently dominant FRG and the Germans are blamed for austerity measures such as cuts in social services and the privatization of state-owned infrastructure. Apart from the continuously inflating Brussels bureaucracy, the joint debt ven-ture, and the transfer of national decision-making powers to European institutions (especially the European Commission), it cannot be said that the European nations are coming closer to each other. Critics of the “Euro rescue,” such as the liberal Frank Sch ä ffler (Free Democratic Party) and the economist Wilhelm Hankel (Social Democratic Party), stress the fact that the respective decisions have been made without democratic legitima-tion and against law (the “no bailout” clause of the Treaty of Maastricht).

Hence, the notion of decadence has become relevant again after decades of absence from public discourse. Although the origins of the tendencies that have led to the present crises are to be found at the very beginning of the new postwar order (the German defeat being followed by occupation and the European Recovery Plan, which institutionalized the hegemony of the United States over Europe and laid the basic structures for the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Economic Community, and,




finally, the EU), these very circumstances had suppressed a broad open debate until the previously mentioned eruptions. With the rebuilding of the destroyed country and the economic miracle in the 1950s, there seemed to be but one direction: upward. Also, this has been the message of the media and the education system in the FRG, which at first had been monitored directly by the military government of the Western occupation forces and then guided by a system of political and cultural foundations and the party system. If critical perspectives were adopted, they aimed par-ticularly at coping with the National Socialist past (this is the main topic of the literary Gruppe 47 , among them authors such as the Nobel prize winners Heinrich B ö ll and G ü nter Grass), whereas the majority of the cul-tural productions eluded the problematic aspects of the postwar order, if they did not stage a perfect world such as in the case of the Heimatfilme that were particularly popular in the 1950s. However, spiritual discomfort found expression from time to time in exceptional works of art and intel-lectual debates.

The Marriage of Maria Braun and the Question of Sovereignty

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982) was known as the enfant terrible of FRG cinema. In his relatively short bohemian life that was overshad-owed by drug abuse, he participated as an actor, director, scriptwriter, and producer in forty films, twenty-four stage plays, four radio plays, and fur-ther productions. As a determined representative of the extreme Left, he dedicated himself preferably to topics such as the discrimination against guest workers and the critique of bourgeois society. In addition, he made experimental films, documentaries, and cinematic adaptations of liter-ary works (among others Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest , 1971, and Alfred D ö blin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz , 1980). The Marriage of Maria Braun , with Hanna Schygulla in the title role, has been Fassbinder’s biggest commer-cial success. The film tells the story of a woman who pays for social and economic success with increasing alienation from her own feelings and the people who are close to her. It takes place in the time between the end of the Second World War and 1954, when the FRG won the soccer world championship, which was interpreted as the return to “normality” by many Germans.

After the end of the war, when Maria Braun assumes that her husband, Hermann, has fallen, she decides to take her life into her own hands. In



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view of the circumstances—she has no professional training, the coun-try lies in ruins, and the victors administrate the resources—this means she has to prostitute herself. 17 Thanks to her relationship with a black GI, Bill, she and her family benefit from numerous conveniences. When Hermann surprisingly returns and catches the couple in bed, it leads to a fight between the two men. Maria, who is pregnant by Bill, kills her lover in the heat of the moment. Her declaration in court that she only was fond of Bill, while she loved her husband, motivates Hermann to assume spon-taneously the responsibility for the murder and go to prison in her place. On a train journey Maria takes directly after the abortion of her child with Bill, she gets acquainted with the French-German industrial Karl Oswald, whom she calculatingly seduces. Instead of permitting the wealthy stock-ings producer to support her, she starts working for him. Her demand that he distinguish between “Maria Braun who wanted to sleep with you” and “Maria Braun who wants to work for you” not only confuses her lover and at the same time employer but it also uncovers her psychological dilemma: Maria’s emotional control of the amorous Oswald does not change the fact that she is prostituting herself for the sake of economic and social success. Although she asserts that she is doing everything only for her husband, Hermann is unable to cope with her behavior. His emigration to Canada immediately after leaving prison is part of a deal with the terminally ill Oswald that can be seen as a compensation for the humiliations she has been inflicting on him. For being declared Oswald’s sole heir together with Maria, he has promised to leave his wife to the other man until the latter’s death. Thus, not only did Maria sell herself, but her husband, to whom she had always been loyal according to her own perception, also sold her. The couple’s reunion after Oswald’s death does not last long. Maria causes an explosion by lighting a cigarette because she had forgotten to turn off the gas cooker; it remains unclear whether this was deliberate or by accident.

Commonly, The Marriage of Maria Braun is read as an allegory of West German postwar society. 18 Although not all the details are in agreement with the historical context, the film does show the basic problems of the time. Just like Maria, the FRG sought the proximity of the Western vic-tors in order to make the best out of the given situation and to suggest to herself that her opportunist behavior in a predicament was a free deci-sion. But whereas Bill and Karl Oswald fall in love with the attractive Maria to their own undoing, such a turn cannot be established with regard to the FRG and the Western victors. The case of the soldier returning from war, Hermann, who encounters his wife in bed with another man, is less ambiguous. As Matthias Uecker (57) notes, he represents “one of the central images of the post-war period, articulating not only a private




fear or experience of many German men, but more significantly a male perspective on the defeat of the German army.”

However, the real complexity and contradictions of the subject only become manifest on a meta-level, namely the dedication to typical patterns of interpretation. Whereas most critics agree that the film is a “bleak and damning portrait of West German history” (Uecker 46) and that Maria Braun’s development, as Jean de Baroncelly puts it, converts her into “a creature dressed in obviously expensive clothes that has lost its soul; a win-ner whose head has been turned by fortune and who has courted disaster” (in Uecker 46), the assessment of the historical context is a contentious issue. Fassbinder himself expressed his view of the FRG shortly before the premiere of the film in the following way: “I would say that in 1945, when the war was over, when the Third Reich had ended, the opportunities that existed at that time were not used. I would say that instead the structures and values that are the base of the current democratic state are basically the same as before” (in Jansen 100–101; my translation). As Uecker (46) sum-marizes, many critics also confirm “the perceived continuity of authoritar-ian, patriarchal or even fascist attitudes.”

At least with regard to the FRG’s political and social framework, this assertion cannot be maintained, because it was designed primarily accord-ing to the ideas of the Western occupation forces, which have been sta-tioned in the FRG until the present day. As Minister of Finance Wolfgang Sch ä uble (Christian Democratic Party) admitted publicly in face of the “non-negotiable” “bank rescue” in 2011, “sind wir in Deutschland . . . seit dem 8. Mai 1945 zu keinem Zeitpunkt mehr voll souver ä n gewesen”—“here in Germany . . . we have never been entirely sovereign since May 8th 1945.” 19 But already the case of Maria Braun shows that others have estab-lished the options in and for the FRG since 1945. Her conversion to a cold-hearted and calculating materialist can be explained as the attempt to preserve control and dignity in spite of her prostitution. As Baroncelly mentions, she fails and damages her soul.

Even if the word is not used within the film, it is completely justified to speak about decadence, which philosophers such as Albert Schweizer ( Verfall und Wiederaufbau der Kultur – The Decay and the Restoration of Civilization , 1923) and Ren é Gu é non ( La crise du monde moderne – The Crisis of the Modern World , 1927) define as a spiritual crisis or sickness. It is not without reason that Maria Braun’s unscrupulous assertiveness, employed for the benefit of Karl Oswald’s company, is demonstrated through her expressive English, which, as she declares herself, she “learned in bed”: her soulless and materialistic professional ethics point at the Americanization of the occupied FRG. 20



Diemo Landgraf12

Two scenes toward the end of the film can be read as mise-en-abyme of the allegory of the decadence brought by the economic miracle. Shortly before his passing away, Oswald meets with Maria in a luxurious restau-rant. Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons constitutes the background music, Maria is expensively clad, and the couple is surrounded by a swarm of waiters. When the industrialist shows his despair in view of her unap-proachable and indifferent behavior, she answers extremely cynically. After his death, she is dining alone at the same place. Hidden behind a folding screen, a waiter is caressing the breasts of a colleague. The ambience and the respectful distance of the waiters toward Maria underline her self-inflicted loneliness. Instead of classical music, a radio speech by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer can be heard in the background.

This scene is connected to several other elements within the film. Maria’s fading out of her emotions can be seen as an analogy of the com-plete absence of the historical and political context within the plot itself. This is highlighted by two radio speeches by Adenauer. In the first one, shortly after the foundation of the FRG, he categorically excludes rearma-ment with the argument that enough people have died. Toward the end of the film, he demands rearmament with equal conviction and presents it as the FRG’s right. While the present characters stoically ignore the first piece of news, which is played so loudly that the audience cannot miss noticing it, we see Maria alone in the restaurant in the second scene, where she sud-denly feels nauseous.

In his interpretation of the scene, Anton Kaes points at Hannah Arendt’s conjecture in her article “Besuch in Deutschland 1950” that the absence of an open debate about “what has happened” is due either to “intentional refusal to mourn” or the “genuine emotional incapacity” of the Germans. He sees Maria’s vomiting as Fassbinder’s attempt to “cor-relate public and private sickness, to show an extreme private reaction to what he considers a fatal development in German political history” (83). Such an interpretation is plausible with regard to Fassbinder’s quoted view on German history. However, it has to be noticed that the film takes place exclusively before the official annulment of the Occupation Statute. 21 Thus, independently from the director’s intention, the passive attitude of the characters in the film symbolizes the factual political impotence of the Germans in this situation. Further, the rearmament of the FRG was in no way decided in order to establish real sovereignty, but it was due to the new threat of the Cold War: the Bundeswehr was necessary to stand against the troops of the Soviet army and the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—mind you, without its own atomic missiles and under the command of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), that is, the United States. Thus, rearmament above all meant the risk of a




fratricidal war between the German people who were divided into hostile political blocs.

Kaes refers to further scenes that in his eyes prove Fassbinder’s antina-tional attitude. In this sense, he reads the one that shows an accordionist playing the first strophe of the national anthem in the midst of ruins as a metaphor for the resurgence of a sense of national identity and comments: “The ragged singing of the anthem in the midst of ruins must be read as Fassbinder’s sarcastic comment on the willed ignorance of those who do not want to admit that ‘Deutschland’ has perished” (83–84). Such a view demands of the Germans that they accept their self-abandonment as a nation and people as a moral imperative. 22 The film itself, or at least interpretations such as the one by Kaes, thus show that the Germans since 1945 have found themselves in a unique historic situation in which they are expected to welcome their decline, abolition (cf. Sarrazin), and there-fore their decadence. 23

“Goat Song Rising”

In the 1990s, Botho Strau ß was considered to be the leading German play-wright. The central topics of his work are the figure of the outsider and the question of identity in the context of tradition and history. According to Leslie A. Adelson (as referred to in Wolf) and Gregory Wolf, his plays, since the ’70s, have expressed a feeling of “diachronic longing,” “a desire for soci-ety to re-establish the vibrant, living relationship with its past, history, and tradition which has been denied by the forces of liberalism” (Wolf 321). In 1993, the publication of his essay “Goat Song Rising” (“Anschwellender Bocksgesang”) in the German weekly Der Spiegel caused one of the biggest intellectual controversies in the history of the FRG. “Goat song” is the literal translation of the Greek word “tragedy.” The tragedy Strau ß warns of is the defeat of a decadent society against more vital competitors, which implicitly recalls the historical example of decadent Rome in the times of the Barbarian invasions.

Similar to the allegory in Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun , Strau ß characterizes FRG society as soulless and materialistic, opposing peoples who are “determined to preserve their moral principles against others to the point of shedding their own blood in this struggle” (328) to the lack of transcendent values (cf. Freund and Durkheim) of the West.

Besides a “hundred-year-old ‘counterdevotional concept of culture’ (Hugo Ball) . . . that . . . in Nietzsche’s wake, has overpopulated our intellectual liv-ing space with innumerable cynics, atheists, and frivolous insurgents, and that has created its very own bigoted piety of the political, of the critical and



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all disputable” (332), he identifies particularly the negative self-image of the Germans as responsible for decadence: “From its origin (in Hitler), the German post-war intelligentsia has invariably clung to the belief that one can be con-scious only of the [wickedness] 24 of the prevailing conditions” (329). Strau ß calls the respective strategy of the dominant leftist elite perfidious because it stirs up conflicts by permanently vilifying German culture and society and confronting it with the elated other “in hopes of finally exposing the covert ‘fascistoid’ strain in the hated fatherland’s own state of affairs” (330). Part of this is the “media mainstream seeking constantly to enlarge the right-wing trickle, denouncing again and again the already denounced, in order for all that expense of moral excitement to justify itself and pay off” (339).

With his warning of the incipient tragedy that amounts to the extinc-tion of the Germans and their culture, the author provoked the wrath of the Central Committee of the Jews in Germany. Although it cannot be said that Strau ß would approve or minimize the “Nazi crimes” and the Germans’ “guilt that exceeds human measures” (Strau ß 339), his pointing at an understanding of guilt that keeps individuals who were born decades after the war from developing a positive self-concept was denounced as rel-ativizing the Holocaust. The then-committee chairman Ignatz Bubis went as far as blaming the essayist for the rise of anti-Semitism and infringements on Jews and synagogues (cf. Wolf 317). The hails of hateful reactions from the Left in the following months that portrayed Strau ß as a “dangerous scatterbrain” (Peter Glotz, in B ü scher) show that at least within the media system agreement existed that the penance of the Germans excludes their self-assertion as people and culture. Thus, the intention of Fassbinder’s film as conceived of by Kaes is confirmed in a wider frame: in view of 12 years of National Socialism, the following generations of Germans shall not be allowed to return to normality and get back their sovereignty. As the British historian Peter Watson proves, referring to the image of Germany inside and outside the FRG, the fixation on National Socialism continu-ously increases with temporal distance to the war; a kind of hereditary guilt is stage-managed. 25 It is no surprise that a society loses balance under such an imposition, but what might be surprising for outsiders is the fact that a similar situation can be observed in contemporary France.

Richard Millet and the Freedom of Art in Times of the “New Moral Order”

In contrast to Germany, France regained her sovereignty after the lib é ration from National Socialist occupation. But although officially




belonging to the Western victors, she had lost her role as a world power with her defeat by the German Reich in 1940. Under President Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970; president of the Fifth Republic from 1959–1969), who wanted to reestablish the nation’s former grandeur, this fact was discussed as little as the consequences of Germany’s lost sovereignty in the FRG. In this context, the defeat in the Algerian War in 1962 and, thus, the loss of the last colony (which, since 1848, had officially been part of France) caused a national depression. Yet, just as in the FRG, the events of May 1968 brought a paradigm change, after which the question of decadence did not seem to be relevant anymore, at least from the perspective of the new intellectual elite. Today, France is suffering from a disastrously high unemployment rate, economic depression, and an unprecedented loss of confidence in the political elite (currently, in February 2014, the population’s approval of President Fran ç ois Hollande is lower than 20%). Also, the project of a multicultural society, promoted by the elites, is increasingly causing violent tensions. 26

Many of the critics of the current order hold the opinion that France’s decadence has been caused decisively by the ongoing influence of the activ-ists who took part in the demonstrations and student revolts in 1968 and who can be counted among those classified as “utopianists” by Freund. The most notorious representative of this view is currently the novelist Michel Houellebecq (born 1956), whose literary fame has made his opin-ions known to a wider public. 27

Even more sharp-tongued and radical than Houellebecq is Richard Millet (born 1953), another one of today’s leading French writers. In 1994, he was appointed to the publishing house Gallimard’s editorial board after being awarded with the Acad é mie fran ç aise’s Grand Prix de l’Essai for his three-volume work Le sentiment de la langue . In this position, he played a decisive role in the publication of two novels that obtained the presti-gious Prix Goncourt: Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes ( The Kindly Ones , 2006) and Alexis Jennis’s L’Art fran ç ais de la guerre ( The French Art of War , 2011). Millet himself is the author of more than 40 novels and essays, and has made a name for himself especially as a brilliant stylist. The decay of language in the context of decadence is the central topic in his nonfiction works.

In 2012, his essay Langue fant ô me ( Phantom Language ) created unrest in a way that exceeds the reactions to Botho Strau ß ’s “Goat Song Rising.” In view of his sweeping blow against almost the whole of contemporary lit-erature and his haughty elitism (which is reminiscent of the late Nietzsche and Huysmans’s literary creation, duke des Esseintes), it is not surprising that Millet made many enemies.



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Alluding to the concept of postmodernity and Francis Fukuyama’s the-sis of the End of History , Millet characterizes the present as the time of “post-literature,” defining the latter by its “mimetic degradation within the international novelistic pr ê t- à -porter” (8, my translation). He refers to Umberto Eco’s new edition of The Name of the Rose , cleansed of difficult vocabulary and other obstacles for common readers by the author himself, as the perfect example for the decadence of our contemporary literature system. Millet satirically comments that the consequent next step in the process toward “under-literature” (11), that is, literature reduced to the mere plot, will be a version of Eco’s novel as a video game. For the French writer, Eco’s case exemplifies

the big specter of worldwide linguistic standardization by the Market, which shows that post-literature is one of the ideological-ludic accomplish-ments of globalization: it updates the decomposition of a Europe whose decadence has pervaded the spirits to such a degree that it can only take place in English . . . Europe, economically and geographically, is nothing more than the Anglophone waste of our culture . . . (37–38) 28

Due to the new habits of reception in times of the Internet, reading sinks into a “literary zapping” and a “ludic usage of virtual literature” (15); texts are assembled by the technique of copy and paste. Further, egalitarianism fosters “absolute permissiveness” and the idea that “everybody can or even has to be a writer” (25). Millet sees a process of detachment and a shielding from real literature, that is, literature according to how it has been “understood for thousands of years” (14) and the “idea of the literary work as the will to be the representation of a totality that encompasses books and life” (16).

From Millet’s point of view, the new concept of literature is part of a society that does not fall short of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World . Although books have not yet been forbidden in the postmodern world, the same effect is attained through “the insignificance of the countless and the consensual . . . and by the absence of transmission, which seems to have become an obligation for National Education” (17). While the politically correct newspeak, just as depicted in Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 , destroys language as an instrument of understanding, “the consensual totalitarianism of the Internet and the logorrhoeic and narcissistic hell of the social networks” go far beyond what the authors of the two famous dystopias could imagine. Millet concludes that “all signs of decadence” are given in the present: “illiteracy, de-cultivation, hate of knowledge, purity, grandeur, unity, and authority” (20). France, “once the primary example for a literary nation,” has become a “literary banana republic.” 29




With regard to the reasons for this decadence, he joins his colleague Houellebecq and the sociologist Freund (who, more abstractly, speaks about “utopianists”): “This phenomenon is relatively recent and can be traced back to the year 1968” (27–28). 30 In the eyes of the essayist, cultural relativism and political correctness have impoverished French literature and culture in general, because they demand to cover up the social, cultural, and religious tensions that have been caused by multiculturalism. Millet sees the contemporary French writer in an “unprecedented neo-colonial situation” (69), in which political correctness is asking for “renouncing at oneself for the benefit of the political and media divinization of the Other—the stranger, the immigrant, or the illegal alien, the mode of exis-tence for the French being defined completely with regard to the stranger, of whom the Muslim has become the proverbial representative in the frame of post-identity beatitude praised by Propaganda” (84). One of the conse-quences is “positive discrimination” and the literary industry’s obsession with ethnicity that favors the “so-called writers of the francophonie ” (41), which means writers who are not French or whose native language is not French. In the eyes of Millet, this tendency is most developed in the case of English literature, of which “Propaganda affirms that it does only exist thanks to the ‘new blood’ that the immigrants bring in, Salman Rushdie ahead . . . ” (70). Against this backdrop, Millet deems that literature has degenerated to a propaganda tool of the New Moral Order, just as the other domains of the modern entertainment industry: “The international novel has become the rock, the pop, the rap of literature, or, in other words, the very form of its noisy and populist insignificance: its fascisticizing [ fas-cisante ] pulsation” (80). Thus, Millet considers the ubiquitous praise of “democratic dialogue” as a lie, because today, freedom of opinion is limited to political correct consensus (52).

Millet’s essay can be considered to be an important document for study-ing the history of ideas especially because the debate it triggered promptly confirmed some of his theses. Due to public pressure, he had to resign from Gallimard’s editorial committee. The concerted accusations by intel-lectuals such as Bernard Henry L é vy, Jean-Marie Le Cl é zio, and Tahar Ben Jelloun were all connected to a subchapter of Phantom Language with the title “Literary Praise of Anders Breivik.” Although others, such Alain Finkielkraut and Elisabeth L é vy, argued against what they perceived as an attack against freedom of opinion and art, the number of the accusers was overwhelming. On September 10, 2012, the daily Le Monde published an article titled “Richard Millet’s Fascist Pamphlet Dishonors Literature” (my translation), penned by Annie Ernaux and signed by 118 known and less-known authors who demanded a boycott of the heretic. Ernaux reproaches her colleague that he justifies “violence, under the pretext of examining



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from the point of view of their literary beauty the ‘acts’ of whom, in 2011, coolly killed 77 persons in Norway.” 31 She thus keeps quiet about Millet’s explicit declaration to “keep in mind that I do not approve the acts com-mitted by Breivik the 22nd July, 2011, in Norway” (103), and she also denies that Millet’s alleged admiration for the “literary beauty” of the assassination is irony. This becomes evident when he characterizes Breivik and his “manifesto, whose naiveties, composite character, and ‘Wikipedia-culture’ are not difficult to underline” (106) as an “exemplary product of that kind of Occidental decadence that has acquired the appearance of the Americanized petit-bourgeois” (107). Here, the author refers to his critique in the main part of the essay, where he writes that the idea that “everybody can or even has to be a writer” (25) is one aspect of contemporary decadence of language and literature. Thus, the attentive reader sees that Millet has chosen Breivik as an example for the most extreme aberrations within the context of his main topic, the decay of language, literature, and culture.

Apart from this accusation, Ernaux’s principal argument is that Millet’s critique is “a political act aiming at the destruction of the values at the base of French democracy.” Although the essayist does not hide his rejection of multiculturalism (which has been imposed on the people by the elite), no political demands or ideals can be found in his text. Actually, his critique focuses on the fight of the New Moral Order against the freedom of art and, in consequence, of thought and literature. Since he deems that this new totalitarianism affects the core of European culture, he judges the issue to be of existential relevance.

This is also the context in which he places Breivik’s terrorism and its representation by the media, which is given priority over the bloody deed itself. On July 22, 2011, the then-32-year-old Norwegian first killed eight persons with a bomb that exploded in Oslo’s government district and then shot sixty-nine participants of a summer camp of the Socialist Party, most of them Norwegian adolescents. His motives are explained in an over 1,500-page manifesto published on the Internet. There, he writes that he wanted to light a beacon against the destruction of Norwegian culture through massive immigration, Islamization, and cultural Marxism, all pushed ahead by the Left.

According to Millet, the authorities’ attempt to portray the terrorist, “who affirms to be sound of mind and responsible,” as an “irresponsible paranoid schizophrenic” is part of the “illusion of a ‘specialized’ knowledge that is one aspect of the big media lie” (105), created to suppress a discus-sion about the real background of the condemnable deed. He also declares the portrayal of Breivik as a racist as improper because the assassination itself and its supposed justification were aimed at the socialists, whom




Breivik sees as the only ones responsible for the destruction of Norwegian culture, and not at the immigrants themselves.

At this point, a connection to Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun becomes apparent: Millet considers the anti-identity and anti-traditional attitude of the current political elite in Europe as a consequence of the political hegemony of the United States since the end of the Second World War: “The American under- and mass-culture” is “the last consequence of the Marshall plan [which has made] the globalized Market almighty” (108). 32 The essayist judges that the New Moral Order with its aggressive implementation of political correctness, egalitarianism, and multicultural-ism pursues the abolition of traditional society and national sovereignty, which are obstacles for the New World Order of global capitalism. Thus, the “utopianists” and capitalism are pulling together in the same direction. In Millet’s eyes, the equation of traditional values or conservatism with fascism and the extreme Right is used as a weapon for the enforcement of the New World Order. This goes as far as questioning European identity as such, which, in the end, also means the end of literature. The valid-ity of these arguments is underlined by the case of Millet itself, as Pierre Assouline asserted in his blog at Le Monde on September 9, 2012:

In aid of Millet, it has to be stated that the mere accusation of fascism, which had been believed to be obsolete since long ago, but which is as use-ful as void, is sufficient to ostracize somebody. When will the Committee of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals be reflated? And after that: Millet’s expulsion from Gallimard? And then: his erasure from the French book market for lifetime? And then? 33 (my translation)

Conclusion

As Freund (388) correctly remarks, politics, society, and culture cannot be dissociated when debating the question of decadence: “Nothing is more na ï ve and sociologically unreasonable than studying a civilization without taking into account its military power.” If a society is not able to decide about its organization and way of life, it cannot be called healthy anymore, health being defined primarily by sovereignty, as Karl Heinz Bohrer argues. This is also the allegorical message of Fassbinder’s film The Marriage of Maria Braun , in which the protagonist prostitutes herself due to a predicament and increasingly indurates spiritually when she continues with her behavior, also to the undoing of the people close to her. Whereas Germany and Austria lost their sovereignty after the Second World War,



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the hegemony of the United States over Western and Central Europe as the outcome of the war in the end had similar consequences for other countries such as France. This is especially true with regard to liberal capitalism and the creation of an Americanized entertainment industry. Since 1968, this kind of egalitarian and commercialized mass culture has dominantly conveyed the values of those intellectuals called “utopianists” by Freund. While the ruling order describes itself as democratic, tolerant, and liberal, taboos have been established that are primarily directed against conserva-tive positions, that is, opinions that prefer the preservation of traditional European culture to the New World Order. As the cases of Strau ß and Millet exemplify, the principal strategy of censorship is relating opposition to the New World Order to fascism and the extreme Right. Freund’s clas-sification of the protagonists of the New Moral Order as utopianists seems to be justified because they have not been able to show the feasibility of their projects until now; instead, numerous problems have been crystalliz-ing. Since no end to the resulting economic, social, and cultural crises is in sight, it can be expected that the concept of decadence will gain even more relevance in the future.

Notes

1 . Cf. Chaunu (69): “Pour qu’il y ait place pour la d é cadence, il faut qu’il y ait progr è s.”

2 . Concerning Rome as a model for decadence theories, cf. Freund (105–131) and Hank.

3 . It would not be possible to give an exhaustive account here. Probably the most complete summary and classification of decadence theories is Freund’s study La d é cadence. Histoire sociologique et politique d’une cat é gorie de l’exp é rience humaine (1984).

4 . With regard to decadence within myth and antiquity, cf. Demandt. 5 . Cf. Mario Vargas Llosa’s description of contemporary decadence in the West

in his essay La civilizaci ó n del espect á culo. Its symptoms reach from the sexu-alization of all areas of life over an increasingly shameless and primitive enter-tainment industry to the most primitive forms of political populism.

6 . Referring to Benedetto Croce and Josef Pieper, Freund highlights that the symptoms of European decadence are congruent with the Christian concept of the Antichrist: “The Antichrist is the temptation of liberating us com-pletely from morality, that is, from any communion with the others. . . . He corresponds to the fall into the seclusion of pure individuality. Decadence would mean in this case the individual’s retreat into itself, into the prison of his loneliness and his hostility toward the rest of the world” (Freund 21). “The Antichrist has to be conceived of as the representation of a political




power that dominates mankind entirely; it is the universal sovereign” (Pieper, in Freund 21)

7 . Nietzsche’s decadence theory in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) has to be mentioned here. Durkheim’s and Freund’s assertion about the loss of transcendence is an analogy to his diagnosis that the randomness and lack of vitality of contemporary European culture are due to the destruction of myth. Nietzsche’s allegory of the theoretical man (who appeared in world his-tory with Socrates) illustrates the nineteenth century’s blind belief in science. Also Nietzsche’s later theory of decadence that focuses on the allegedly negative impact of Christianity and the distinction between master and slave morality has been very important for the history of the concept. However, it is not relevant for the concrete examples that will be analyzed further on in my contribution.

8 . In this field, Klein’s article in Ä sthetische Grundbegriffe is equally worthy as Freund’s study with regard to philosophical and sociological questions.

9 . One of the few exceptions is number 8/9 (August/September 2007) of the German journal Merkur , titled Kein Wille zur Macht. Dekadenz . I will refer in footnotes to connections to several articles.

10 . Cf. M. Davray (in Livi 56–57, my translation): “The pretention to be dec-adent is as difficult and ridiculous as obliging oneself to be virtuous or depraved. . . . during a short interlude, some secondary individuals and some young people called themselves ‘les d é cadents’ in order to shock the bour-geois.” Albert Samain referred to the “decadent spirit” as “an artistic intoxica-tion, just like an opium intoxication” (in Livi 57).

11 . The loneliness of the traditionalist in times of the Kali Yuga , the “dark age,” is the topic of Julius Evola’s Cavalcare la tigre (published 1961), one of the most influential theories of decadence and critique of the new postwar order in Western Europe.

12 . For the history of the concept of decadence in the socialist German Democratic Republic, cf. Torben Ibs’s contribution to the present book.

13 . “CSU: ‘absoluter Murks’—FDP: ‘sp ä tr ö mische Dekadenz.’” faz.net , November 2, 2010, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/hartz-iv-csu-absoluter-murks-fdp-spaetroemische-dekadenz-1936756.html [February 1, 2014].

14 . Concerning decadence and the social system, cf. M ü ller. 15 . Freund (387) comments: “A falling birth rate is one of the signs that indicate

renouncement to life, be it for the sake of egoistically enjoying the present, be it because of fear of the future.” The topic had been discussed more broadly in the nineteen-eighties (cf. Chaunu), but the debate petered out in the nineties without any real reactions in the field of politics.

16 . Cf. “Merkel: Multikulti ist absolut gescheitert.” s ü ddeutsche.de , October 16, 2010, <sz.de/1.1012736> [February 1, 2014].

17 . Whereas talking about prostitution for food and other goods has not been a real taboo, the mass raping of more than 2 million German women and girls by soldiers of the occupation forces has only started to be openly discussed very recently (cf. M ü nch).

18 . For a comparison with the filmic representation of Italian postwar society, cf. Jakob Willis’s contribution to the present book.



Diemo Landgraf22

19 . Cf. G ü nther Lachmann. “Die ö ffentliche und die verborgene Seite der Krise.” welt.de , December 8, 2011, http://www.welt.de/politik/article13757549/Die-oeffentliche-und-die-verborgene-Seite-der-Krise.html [February 1, 2014].

20 . With regard to the decadence of the United States and soulless capitalism, cf. Mario Bosincu’s contribution to this book.

21 . According to the speech delivered by Member of Bundestag Gregor Gysi (the Left Party, former Socialist Unity Party in the GDR) on November 18, 2013, the annulment of the Occupation Statute in 1955 was practically cancelled by secret treaties; the FRG, thus, would have to be considered as a satellite state with no real autonomy. The public learned about the existence of these trea-ties only thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency.

22 . It is revealing that The Marriage of Maria Braun is the only film by Fassbinder that was shown in GDR cinemas (T ö teberg 168). According to the official GDR doctrine, the FRG was the heir of the fascistic Third Reich.

23 . Bohrer deems that “the FRG, in case of emergency, would probably neither be able nor willing to defend itself,” referring to Jean-Paul Sartre’s characteriza-tion of the German postwar mentality as self-denial (661, my translation). According to Bohrer, politics in the FRG is reduced to welfare payments due to the fear of the Will to Power (666).

24 . The translator Ringmayr omits the word Schlechtigkeit in the German original (203).

25 . About the “past that does not want to pass” (“Vergangenheit, die nicht verge-hen will” was the title of an article by the historian Ernst Nolte in the daily FAZ on June 6, 1986, that triggered the so-called historians’s quarrel), Watson writes: “Hitler and the Holocaust are preoccupying the world to such an extent, I suggest, that we are denying ourselves important aspects elsewhere in German history” (28). As he demonstrates based on examples, this tendency is neither accidental nor the mere result of the given facts, but the effect of seeing “every episode of the past 250 years as leading up to the Holocaust, as if it were the culmination (as Goldhagen implied) of all events and ideas that occurred in modern Germany” (25). The example of Daniel Goldhagen and others show that this perspective is often stage-managed dishonestly, e.g., through wrong translations and deliberate omissions of documents and citations.

26 . Many areas in French cities inhabited by immigrants have become no-go areas, even for the police. Besides other forms of violence, an increasing num-ber of cars are burned every year in these areas. Repeatedly, spectacular acts of violence have occurred. In March 2012, for example, Islamic terrorists first assassinated three French soldiers in different locations in the D é partment Midi-Pyr é n é es and then killed one adult and four adolescents in front of a Jewish school.

27 . Cf. Bet ü l Dilmac’s contribution to the present book. 28 . The Americanization of Europe has been a topic of decadence theories since

the nineteenth century: cf. Livi (94–95). 29 . For a comparison with the Spanish literature system after Francisco Franco,

cf. Pablo S á nchez’s contribution to this book.




30 . Concerning the significance of May 1968, cf. also Bet ü l Dilmac’s and Blanca Navarro Pardi ñ as’s contributions to the present book.

31 . Millet’s case recalls the reactions to the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s comments on the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. In both cases, the comparison of the terroristic deeds with art were considered to be morally unacceptable by the broader public, in spite of the artists’ explicit condemnation of the terrorists’ acts. Concerning art and morality, cf. Klinkert.

32 . The real name of the “Marshall-Plan” is “European Recovery Plan.” Through loans bound to conditions and obligations, the United States started to exert influence on Western and Central Europe’s economic policy, creating trans-national structures and reducing national autonomy. Thereby, it paved the way for the European Economic Community and the EU.

33 . http://passouline.blog.lemonde.fr/2012/09/15/affaire-richard-millet-le-gout-amer-de-lepilogue/ [February 21, 2014].

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Abusch, Alexander, 95Adenauer, Konrad, 12Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, 79,

85, 87, 97Arendt, Hannah, 12Assouline, Pierre, 19Ayer, Alfred Jules, 53–5

Barthes, Roland, 137, 148Baudelaire, Charles, 148, 212–13, 215Bergman, Ingmar, 133–4Bergson, Henri, 41Bertolucci, Bernardo, 134Borges, Jorge Luis, 171, 178Brandom, Robert, 56Brecht, Bertold, 90–1, 94Bricmont, Jean, 73

Carlyle, Thomas, 27–31Carnap, Rudolf, 57–8Chalmers, David, 57–8Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 29

Dalí, Salvador, 89Deleuze, Gilles, 70, 76–81Derrida, Jacques, 71, 73, 74, 76–8Durkheim, Émile, 5, 213Dymschitz, Alexander Lwowitsch,

88–90

Echevarría, Ignacio, 173Eco, Umberto, 16Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 31, 33

Ernaux, Annie, 17–19Erpenbeck, Fritz, 90–1, 94

Fellini, Federico, 133–4, 138, 150Ferreri, Marco, 134Fitzgerald, Scott F., 140Foucault, Michel, 41, 44, 69–70, 79Franco, Francisco, 176–81Freud, Sigmund, 26–7, 79, 80Freund, Julien, 5–7, 72, 213

Glock, Hans-Johann, 58Godard, Jean Luc, 133–4Goodman, Nelson, 61Grotewohl, Otto, 94Guattari, Félix, 70, 76–81Guelbenzu, José María, 178

Harman, Gilbert, 51–3Hergé (Remi, Georges), 111–26Herzen, Alexander, 40–1Hölderlin, Friedrich, 44Honecker, Erich, 99Houellebecq, Michel, 153–67,

218–19Huxley, Aldous, 16Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 153–67,

211–20

Jünger, Ernst, 43

Kafka, Franz, 91–3Kuhn, Thomas, 79

Index of Persons



Index of Persons230

Landa, Josu, 189, 198–9Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 87Lewis, Richard, 26Loest, Erich, 100López Albújar, Enrique, 210, 221López Cuenca, Alberto, 175Luhmann, Niklas, 213Lukács, Georg, 85–8, 91–3Luther, Martin, 39

MacIntyre, Alasdair, 54–5Malle, Louis, 149Mann, Thomas, 93, 209–10Marco, Joaquín, 171Mariátegui, José Carlos, 206–7Meister Eckhart, 45Merkel, Angela, 8Mielke, Erich, 103Mill, John Steward, 30Montesquieu, 4, 135Muñoz Molina, Antonio, 171, 174,

180, 183

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 21, 25–7, 34–6, 42, 43, 45, 135–7, 148, 206–11, 212, 213, 215, 218

Orwell, George, 6, 16

Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 134, 138Picasso, Pablo, 89Popper, Karl, 78

Quine, W. V. O., 56–8

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 27Rimbaud, Arthur, 34–6Rorty, Richard, 55–60, 79Rosselini, Roberto, 150Rushdie, Salman, 17

Sarrazin, Thilo, 8, 13Sartre, Jean-Paul, 22, 93,

194–5, 200Schäuble, Wolfgang, 11Schiele, Egon, 212, 217Sellars, Wilfrid, 60Shelly, Percy Bysshe, 35Smith, Barry, 73Sorrentino, Paolo, 149Spengler, Oswald, 42, 43, 187

Taylor, Charles, 30Thoreau, Henry David, 41Tocqueville, Alexis de, 6, 32–3Tremblay, Michel, 119Truffaut, Michel, 133–4

Vargas Llosa, Mario, 20, 68–71, 79, 172, 177, 202, 205–24

Visconti, Luchino, 134, 138Voegelin, Eric, 41Voltaire, 4, 135

Wagner, Richard, 71–2, 136, 215Westerwelle, Guido, 7Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 51–3, 55–8

Zhdanov, Andrei, 86–9, 90



1968, Mai, 15–20, 155–63, 197–201

American Dream, 25–48, 188Americanization, 11, 16–20, 100, 140,

156–8, 216Anti-Christ, 20

beat music, 98–100

capitalism, 6, 19–20, 32–3, 87–104, 162, 172, 181–2, 184, 206, 216

Cold War, 12–13, 88–9, 95, 98communism. See Marxism

deconstruction, 67–81democracy, 6, 7, 18, 26–9, 37, 79, 94,

171–84déprimisme, 153–4Dionysius, 38, 135–6, 206–11

economic miracle, 9–13, 133–52egalitarianism, 5, 16emotivism, 54–5Enlightenment, 4, 26, 54–5, 69–71, 172ethics (current in modern philosophy),

53–5European Union, 8, 173

formalism, 86, 88–91, 95–6, 103francophonie, 17, 111–26

Greece, 36–40

historiophobia, 51–3

indigenous culture, 33–4, 206–11

jazz, 97–8

language quality, 111–26Left (political), 9, 14, 18, 22, 67–80,

173, 182, 194–200, 211linguistic insecurity, 116–18

Marxism, 6, 18, 62, 79, 80, 85, 88, 92, 181, 196, 199

materialism, 5–6, 11–13, 29–30, 137, 142–3, 147–8, 159, 216–17

modernismo, 176–7multiculturalism, 8, 15–19

National Socialism, 14, 86, 89, 92neopragmatism, 55–7New World Order, 19–20, 88Nouvelle Vague, 133–4

ontology, 57–8

progress, 4–7, 29–31, 41, 42, 67–80, 86–96, 138, 144, 159, 162, 172–6, 183–4, 189, 195, 200, 211, 215

punk, 100–3

Quiet Revolution, 111–26

religion, 5–6, 26–9, 36–8, 43, 69, 74, 162–3, 188, 213, 215–16, 219

rhizome, 73–6

Index of Terms



Index of Terms232

Right (political), 19–20, 73Rome, fall of, 4, 13, 20, 41, 134

Sendero Luminoso, 207–11sexuality, 67–8, 153–8, 208–11, 216–20socialist realism, 85–90, 91, 93–4,

96, 103

Soviet Union, 6, 86, 88–93

transcendence, 5, 41, 213–14, 218–19

utopia, 35, 148–9, 157–8, 162–3, 174, 180, 188, 201, 206–7, 211

utopianism, 6–7, 15–20, 72


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