Abstract
In 1922 Marcuse summarized his early life in the ‘Lebenslauf’ (biography) required as part of a German doctoral dissertation:
I was born on July 19, 1898 in Berlin, the son of the businessman Carl Marcuse and his wife Gertrud, born Kreslawsky. I attended the Mommsen Gymnasium and from 1911 the Kaiserin-Augusta Gymnasium in Charlottenburg until my summons to military service in 1916. After completing my final examination (Reifeprüfung), I entered Reserve Division 18 (Train-Ers.-Abtg. 18) but remained in the homeland on account of my poor eye-sight and was transferred to the Zeppelen Reserves (Luftschiffer-Ers. Abtg. 1) where I received permission and the opportunity to visit lectures. After my release in the Winter of 1918, I studied regularly for four semesters in Berlin and four semesters in Freiburg, first Germanistik, and then modern German literary history as my main subject (Hauptfach) and philosophy and political economy as subsidiaries (Nebenfach).1
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Notes and References
Herbert Marcuse, ‘Lebenslauf’, appended to his doctoral dissertation, Der deutsche Kunstlerroman (Freiburg i. Br., 1922); reprinted in Schriften 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978) p. 344 (hereafter S1).
Conversation with Herbert Marcuse, 28 December 1978, La Jolla, California; see also Sidney Lipshires, Herbert Marcuse: From Marx to Freud and Beyond (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1974) p. 1. We shall see that Marcuse’s interviews on his early experiences often contain contradictions and that he simply was not concerned to be overly precise because he did not think that the experiences of his youth were particularly important. Accordingly, my discussions with him concerning his early life focused on his ‘road to Marx’, which he agreed was of utmost importance in appraising his life and thought.
Conversation with Marcuse, 28 December 1978. Marcuse also told Helmut Dubiel that he had rarely actively experienced anti-semitism in Germany. See Helmut Dubiel and Leo Lowenthal, Mitmachen wollte ich nie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980) pp. 27ff. Consequently, like Marx, Marcuse was never especially interested in the ‘Jewish question’, as were other Jewish Marxists like Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. Nonetheless, Marcuse’s Jewish origins may have helped produce alienation from bourgeois society, which may help explain his sharp critiques of bourgeois society and search for an alternative model of society and culture.
For a suggestive analysis of Jewish opposition to bourgeois society, see John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension (Boston: Beacon Press, 1977) p. 19.
Conversation with Herbert Marcuse, 26 March 1978, San Francisco, California. See also Marcuse’s statements in Revolution or Reform, ed. and trans. A. T. Ferguson (Chicago: New University Press, 1976) pp. 57–8.
Conversation with Marcuse, 26 March 1978.
Conversation with Marcuse, 28 December 1978. On the workers’ councils movement and the political situation at the time, see A. J. Ryder, The German Revolution of 1918: A Study of German Socialism in War and Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967)
Peter von Oertzen, Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution (Düsselfdorf: Droste, 1963).
Documents describing the council’s ideas and actions are found in Charles Burdick and Ralph Lutz, The Political Institutions of the German Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1966); Die Rätebewegung, ed. Günter Hillman (Reinbeck bei Hamberg: Rowohlt, 1971)
Dieter Schneider and Rudolph Kuda, Arbeiterräte in der Novemberrevolution (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973). I discuss Karl Korsch and the German Revolution in my book Karl Korsch: Revolutionary Theory.
Conversation with Marcuse, 28 December 1978.
Although some commentators have claimed that Marcuse was a member of the Spartacus group, he explicitly denied it in a conversation with me (28 December 1978) affirming that he had indeed joined the SPD. He also denies the claim that he had joined the Independent Social Democrats (the USPD) advanced by Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976) p. 27,
Göran Therborn, ‘The Frankfurt School’, in Western Marxism: A Critical Reader (London: New Left Books, 1977) p. 84.
On the differences between the Social Democrats (SPD), the Independent Social Democrats (USPD) and the Spartacus League, see the history of the USPD by Hartfield Krause, USPD, Zur Geschichte der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, On the Spartacus programme, see Rosa Luxemburg, Selected Writings, ed. Dick Howard (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972)
See the sources in note 7.
Ibid., and Arthur Rosenberg, The Birth of the German Republic (London: Russell & Russell, 1931). On the Baverian Soviets, see Rosenberg and the documents in Hillman (ed.), Die Rätebewegung, pp. 54ff. and 134ff.
See Ryder, The German Revolution of 1918, and Rosenberg, The Birth of the German Republic.
Marcuse, in Revolution or Reform?, p. 57, and a conversation with Habermas and others, ‘Theory and Politics’, Telos, 38 (Winter 1978–9) p. 126.
Conversation with Henry Pachter, 11 July 1978, New York City.
Conversation with Marcuse, 28 December 1978. See also ‘Die Salecina Gespräche’, in Gespräche mit Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, Silvia Bovenschen and others (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 1978) pp. 98f.
Although the statement of Marcuse cited in note 18 indicates that he quit the SPD after the deaths of Luxemburg and Leibknecht in the abortive Spartacus uprising, he told me in an interview at La Jolla, California, in December 1978, that he quit the SPD before the suppression of the Spartacus uprising as a protest against the SPD policies described in the above paragraph.
Arthur Rosenberg, A History of the German Republic (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965).
Ryder, The German Revolution of 1918; and Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and His Times (New York: Norton, 1972).
Marcuse, Five Lectures (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970) pp. 102–3. See note 16.
Conversation with Marcuse, March 1978.
Ibid.
Conversation with Marcuse, December 1978, Marcuse told me that he and his radical friends were extremely excited by the Russian Revolution and avidly followed its developments. Compare Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971) pp. xi.
Marcuse, Revolution or Reform?, pp. 57–8. It should be noted that Marcuse went to Freiburg in 1921, not in 1919 as he states in this interview; compare ‘Lebenslauf’ in note 1.
Before the recent Suhrkamp publication of his dissertation in Schriften 1, the only original copy was in the library at the University of Freiburg. Leo Lowenthal told me that as far as he knew, Marcuse’s associates in the Institute for Social Research had never seen it and that Marcuse never really discussed it with them (conversation with Lowenthal, 22 March 1978, Berkeley, California). None of Marcuse’s friends in San Diego whom I interviewed in March 1978 knew anything about it. Hence, Marcuse’s dissertation, Der deutsche Künstlerroman, is a relatively unknown source of many of his later positions. The following discussion of the importance of Marcuse’s doctoral dissertation to his later philosophy is indebted to conversations with Marcuse and Stanley Aronowitz, and to correspondence with Barry Katz and Josef Chytry.
Conversation with Marcuse, December 1978.
Marcuse cites Witkop’s works throughout his dissertation. Henry Pachter remembers Witkop as a somewhat bohemian type, but rather academic, who loved neo-romantic literature (conversation in New York, 30 December 1979). Pachter also remembers that Witkop advised Jewish students not to seek academic careers because of anti-semitism. This might explain, in part, why Marcuse did not seek an academic career immediately after receiving his PhD.
Marcuse’s dissertation was part of the revival of Hegel in Germany, whose philosophy was used to criticize and provide an alternative to the neo-Kantian and other academic philosophies dominant in Germany at the time. The ‘cultural sciences’ (Geisteswissenschaften) approach was developed by Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, the early Lukács, and others (see note 46). On the Hegel revival of the 1920s, see Heinrich Levy, Die Hegel-Renaissance in der deutschen Philosophie (Charlottenburg: Heise, 1927).
Georg Lukács, Soul and Form (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974) and Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971). Lukács’s importance for Marcuse and other radicalized intellectuals of his generation can hardly be exaggerated. Leo Lowenthal told me in a conversation during March 1978 how he had memorized passages of The Theory of the Novel, stressing its importance for himself and the ‘inner circle’ of the Frankfurt School.
I shall analyse Lukács’s influence on Marcuse throughout this study. On Lukács’s importance for critical Marxism, see the articles in Telos, 10 (Winter 1971) and Telos, 11 (Spring 1972) as well as the studies by Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism (New York: Seabury, 1979)
Andrew Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981).
Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, pp. 41, passim. This experience of alienation and the need for its overcoming was a shared theme of existentialism and Western Marxism that was central to the work of Lukács, Heidegger, Marcuse, Sartre and others.
Compare Marcuse S1, pp. 9ff, and Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, pp. 29–69. Both are indebted to Part III of Hegel’s aesthetics (see source in note 30 and in Marcuse, S1, pp. 9ff).
Lukács, The Theory of the Novel and G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (New York: Oxford, 1975).
The theme of an authentic existence would be one of the features of Heidegger’s philosophy that would attract Marcuse. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), discussed in the next section of this chapter and in Chapter 2.
Compare Hegel, Aesthetics; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967); and Lukács, The Theory of the Novel.
Curiously, whereas Lukács, following Hegel, posits medieval Christendom as an integrated culture (The Theory of the Novel, pp. 37ff), Marcuse chooses instead the Norse Viking culture, whose heroic deeds and ballads he praises in almost Nietzschean terms, S1, pp. 10ff.
Compare Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, pp. 40ff.
The word ‘Befreiung’ (liberation) appears throughout The German Artist-Novel and is one of its main themes. Marcuse expresses great sympathy for ‘liberation movements’ such as Sturm und Drang, literary Bohemia, romanticism and other literary subcultures, previewing his later sympathy for the ‘new sensibility’.
For those interested in German literature, I might note that Marcuse’s study contains chapters covering: ‘The Beginnings of the Artist-Novel’ in Moritz and Heinse; Goethe; the early romantic artist-novel (Bretano, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Eichendorff); the offspring of the romantic artist-novel; the transformation of the artist-novel into the ‘social tendency’ novel; Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich; the recent turning away from historical time in the artist-novel; contemporary artist-novels analysed from the standpoint of the problem of art and life; and, in conclusion, a study of the artist-novels of Thomas Mann.
On the Sturm und Drang movement and the cultural-historical background to the period, see Hans Kohn, The Mind of Germany (New York: Harper & Row, 1960)
Jost Hermand, Von Mainz nach Weimar (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969).
Marcuse, S1, pp. 85ff. On Romanticism, compare Lukács, ‘The Romantic Philosophy of Life’, Soul and Form, pp.42ff; Kohn, The Mind of Germany; and Hermand, Von Mainz nach Weimar.
Marcuse, S1, pp. 174ff. On the ‘Young Germany’ movement, see Kohn, The Mind of Germany, and Hermand, Von Mainz nach Weimar.
Michael Lowy, for instance, suggests that Marcuse and Benjamin root their respective doctoral dissertations in German Romanticism; see ‘Marcuse and Benjamin: The Romantic Dimension’, Telos, 44 (Sum-mer 1980) pp. 25–34. Lowy claims that what Benjamin and Marcuse have in common ‘is not so much Jewish messianism as German Romanticism, with its nostalgia for pre-capitalist communities and its counterposing of artistic Kultur to prosaic bourgeois society’ (p. 25). Not only is there little nostalgia for pre-capitalist communities in Marcuse’s dissertation but he does not counterpose ‘artistic Kultur’ to ‘prosaic bourgeois society’; rather, as will be shown, he calls for the integration of art and society. Moreover, Marcuse tends to be quite critical of Romanticism and is more affirmative toward German ‘classicist’ realist literature in his dissertation, singling out for praise Goethe, Keller and Mann. Later, a synthesis between ‘Romanticism’ and ‘critical Marxism’ will constitute a distinctive feature of Marcuse’s post-1955 work and he includes both ‘realist’ and ‘romantic’ works of art in his aesthetic pantheon of ‘authentic art’ in his discussions of the aesthetic dimension from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Barry Katz is mistaken to claim that for Marcuse the artist-novel is a ‘sub-type of the German Bildungsroman, the novel of “education” or “inner development”, wherein a central character passes from innocence to mature self-consciousness as the story unfolds’. See ‘New Sources of Marcuse’s Aesthetics’ in New German Critique, 17 (Spring 1979) p. 177. In fact Marcuse contrasts the Künstlerroman and Bildungsroman throughout his dissertation, arguing that the Bildungsroman represents an overcoming of the problematic of the Künstlerroman and is thus a distinct artistic type. See S1, pp. 12, 50, 75–8, 83–4, 217 and 230–1. On the Bildungsroman, see Lukács, Theory of the Novel. Katz’s review is full of errors, mistranslations and illicit readings of Marcuse’s dissertation in the language of his later work. For instance, Katz writes:
Even in a time of universal suffering and oppression, the lost values of a world at one with itself, of the immediate unity of the artistic life and the fully human life, are preserved — if in an attenuated form — in the shape of artistic subjectivity. With its evocation of the fully developed artistic personality and self-consciousness, the Künstlerroman thus represents both a symptom of the devaluation of the world, of a reality estranged from its own potentialities, and a concrete anticipation of the negation and transcendence of this estrangement. The alienation of the artist from an artless world, which is embodied in the ‘Zwischen-zwei-Welten-stehen’ (standing between two worlds) of literary characters from Werther to Tonio Kröger, guarantees a refuge of transcendent ideals against the bad facticity of the present … The true artist — far from the unwitting affirmations of the bourgeois artisan or the scholar-poet, both of whom are remote from the conflicts and chaos of lived experience — emerges for the first time as a specific human type, an embodiment of negation, straining against the oppressive restraints of a one-dimensional society (pp. 178 and 180). In fact, Marcuse nowhere makes these claims in his dissertation, and rather than advocating a theory of the ‘aesthetic dimension’ which preserves ‘lost values’ and ‘transcendental ideals’ that contain a ‘concrete anticipation of negation and transcendence of estrangement’, Marcuse most favourably presents art which expresses joy in reality, which is integrated with life and is ‘affirmative’. Consequently, Marcuse’s ‘true artist’ is not the voice of negation but of affirmation in his dissertation. There is also no attempt by Marcuse to ‘map out a refuge of ontological stability, resistant to the variegations of everyday existence’ (Katz, pp. 187–8). If anything, Marcuse is celebrating ‘variegations’ and finding joy in everyday reality. Katz’s errors and misreadings are too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that although there are often uncanny anticipations of the later Marcuse in his dissertation, there are also discontinuities and tensions between the concept of art in his dissertation and his later aesthetic theory which should not be overlooked. See my review of Katz’s book Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation (London: New Left Books, 1982), in Telos, 56 (Summer 1983).
Marcuse told me in an interview in March 1978 that Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich was his favourite artist-novel.
Marcuse will later see intellectuals as harbingers and catalyists of social change; see the discussion in Chapter 9.
Marcuse cites Feuerbach’s influence on Gottfried Keller, claiming that Feuerbach’s materialism liberated Keller from his previous religious views and that, thanks in part to Feuerbach, henceforth Keller possessed a ‘glowing and powerful earthiness (Diesseitigkeit) which saw in the living reality the singular, the highest and the most beautiful, recognizing irreplaceable value in every single being … seizing everything past and present in its wonder-full (wundervollen) necessity’ (S1, p. 214). Later Marcuse would stress Feuerbach’s importance for Marx, a theme discussed in Chapter 3.
Compare S1, pp. 87ff with Reason and Revolution, pp. 6ff. In both texts Marcuse describes attempts to restructure reality according to higher ideals and to transform into reality the ideals of the Enlightenment and progressive philosophy. In his dissertation Marcuse notes elements in the philosophies of Kant and Fichte that emphasize the ability to constitute the world and praises the French Revolution as an attempt to realize the ideals of progressive philosophies. In Reason and Revolution, Marcuse discusses the philosophy of Hegel and German idealism as philosophical expression of the ideals of the French Revolution (discussed in Chapter 5 below).
See Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung; the enlarged second edition (Leipzig, 1907) is cited by Marcuse.
On Dilthey and his method, see Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey, Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). See also Lukács’s discussion of the ‘cultural sciences’ methodology in his 1962 preface to Theory of the Novel, pp. 11ff.
Marcuse draws on Lukács’s discussion of ‘The Bourgeois Way of Life and Art for Art’s Sake’, in Soul and Form, pp. 58ff, as well as on Thomas Mann’s Reflections of an Unpolitical Person and other sociopolitical writings.
This is evident in Marcuse’s first published essay, ‘Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism’, discussed in Chapter 2.
See Lukács, ‘Preface’, The Theory of the Novel, pp. 12ff.
Lukács, Soul and Form. See the studies in the anthology Die Seele und das Leben (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977) and Dennis Crow, ‘Form and the Unification of Aesthetics and Ethics in Lukács’ Soul and Form’, New German Critique, 15 (Fall 1978) pp. 159ff.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness. I shall discuss the decisive impact of this work on Marcuse’s first published essays in Chapter 2.
Lukács, 1967 Preface, History and Class Consciousness, p. xxxi.
Interview with Marcuse, 28 December 1978.
Herbert Marcuse, Schiller-Bibliographie unter Benutzung der Trämlschen Schiller Bibliothek (Berlin: S. Martin Fraenkel, 1925). Marcuse expressed his evaluation of the Schiller bibliography to me in an interview on 26 March 1978.
‘Heidegger’s Politics: An Interview with Herbert Marcuse by Frederich Olafson’, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 6, no. 1 (Winter 1977) p. 28.
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953);
English translation, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
Conversation with Marcuse, 28 December 1978.
See Edmund Husserl, Ideas (New York: Collier, 1962). Husserl’s and Heidegger’s philosophy and its appropriation and criticism by the young Marcuse will be discussed in Chapter 2.
Husserl, Ideas.
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit.
The reception of Heidegger’s philosophy is discussed in my doctoral dissertation Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity (Columbia University, 1973). Debates over Heidegger’s philosophy will be discussed in Chapter 2.
Herbert Marcuse, letter to Maximillian Beck and his wife, 9 May 1929. Beck was the editor of Philosophische Hefte, the journal that published Marcuse’s first essay, which we shall examine in the next chapter. The Becks were personal friends of Marcuse and also of his wife Sophie. I would like to thank Professors Herbert Spiegelberg and William McBride for making a copy of this letter available to me.
Marcuse interview, ‘Heidegger’s Politics’, pp. 28–9.
Walter Benjamin, letter to Scholem, 25 April 1930. Cited in Brecht Chronicle, compiled by Klaus Volker (New York: Seabury, 1975) p. 56. Henry Pachter told me that P. Dubislaw, a friend of Karl Korsch, referred to Heidegger’s philosophy at the time as ‘Quatschosophie’ and that the term was frequently used to label Heidegger’s philosophy in Korsch’s circle (conversation in New York, 11 July 1978).
For some contemporary interpretations and controversies see Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).
See Marcuse’s conversation with Habermas and others, ‘Theory and Politics’, pp. 125ff for discussion of this issue, which will be a major theme in the next two chapters.
Marcuse, ‘Heidegger’s Politics’, p. 28.
Ibid.
On the elevated concepts of art in Benjamin, Bloch and the early Lukács, see Richard Wolin, ‘Notes on the Early Aesthetics of Lukács, Bloch and Benjamin’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. XXVI (1981) pp. 89–110. Wolin shows that these thinkers responded to the ‘crisis of modernity’ with programmes of cultural renewal which ascribed important roles to art. The three thinkers all developed epistemologies, Wolin argues, which would privilege art as a source of critical truth. Later, in Eros and Civilization, Marcuse would himself take up this position in his own way, but for several decades he tended to present philosophy and social theory as fundamental sources of critical knowledge. Thus Marcuse has a more affirmative relation to philosophy and social theory than other neo-Marxists at the time.
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© 1984 Douglas Kellner
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Kellner, D. (1984). Origins: Politics, Art and Philosophy in the Young Marcuse. In: Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17583-3_2
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