Letter from Berlin

On Kurfürstendamm, corner of Schlüterstraße, about a three quarters of an hour’s walk from the Wiko, there is a little square, a triangular swath of pavement cut out of the normal perpendicular row of houses and storefronts. A bit of open space on the most luxurious stretch of Berlin’s luxury boulevard, where pedestrians can rest their legs or have a smoke on one of the surrounding splintering green-painted wood benches, or patrons of the Italian restaurant facing the square can sun themselves over Aperol spritzes and gaze out at the Cumberland House’s historic façade or the Tiffany and Balenciaga display windows on the opposite side of the street. The square is called George-Grosz-Platz, after the expressionist painter, who lived from 1928 to 1933 at Trautenaustraße 12 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, about a twenty-minute walk from his future eponymous plaza. In the middle of the square, a small column presents a timeline, in German and English, of significant events in Grosz’s life, including such facts as Grosz’s family’s 1902 move to Stolp in what was then German Pomerania (now the Polish town of Słupsk), “where young Georg enjoys a carefree childhood,” and the philologically dubious assertion that in 1916 the twenty-three year-old Georg, né Groß, “anglicizes his name to George Grosz.” On the website for the municipality of Berlin, one learns that the groundbreaking ceremony for the square, in 1986, was presided over jointly by the CDU politician Klaus-Dieter Gröhler, then a city councilman for Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, and Gregor Hampel, an executive for the multinational energy company Vattenfall, which donated the equivalent of 150,000 euros for the construction of the site.

Grosz himself, meanwhile, is buried in the Heerstraße Cemetery, in the West Berlin borough of Westend – and is no doubt turning there in his grave. One of Grosz’s most famous works is the 1926 painting bearing the heavily ironic title, borrowed from Ibsen’s play of the same name, “Stützen der Gesellschaft” (Pillars of Society). The painting is a satirical composite portrait made up of five allegorical grotesques. In the foreground stands a monocled and dueling-scarred aristocrat with a beer mug in one hand and a sword in the other, his tie pinned down elegantly by a swastika tie-pin, his sawed-off head revealing a ghostly §-sign and the outline of a cavalryman, the spectral image of laws present and wars past. Behind him stands a cross-eyed and bespectacled journalist, an upturned chamber pot on his head and in his arms a stack of newspapers, blood dripping down their front pages. Then comes a portly Social Democrat with a walrus moustache, a placard with the anti-strike motto “Sozialismus ist Arbeit” (Socialism is Work), and a head filled with steaming excrement. Finally, behind him, a rubicund and jowly priest, making a fatuous gesture of benediction, and, facing the opposite direction, a clenched-jawed soldier, with a bloodied sword in the right hand and a pistol in the left, while an apartment block behind them goes up in flames. 

As with all artworks, no one interpretation will exhaust its meaning. But the main message of Grosz’s painting is clear enough: the people and institutions that society honors with privileges and respect are in fact only brutes or idiots, with blood on their hands, war on their minds, and shit for brains, spinning out their fantasies in imbecilic earnestness as the world around them burns. 

I have been thinking a lot about these days what it means to be a scholar, in particular, a scholar of literature. As I write these words, I am sitting on a bench by the Halensee on an unseasonably warm day in early May, listening to the singing of the birds and the humming of insects as a swan drifts by lazily on the water – so different from the Neukölln neighborhood where I usually live when I’m in Berlin, with its hipster bars and Lebanese grill joints and graffitied storefronts. I am lucky, people tell me, to be spending a year in Germany, away from the current outrages of the United States, not to mention the eager slide of my own university into a nauseatingly bland compliance with them. But that only makes the discordance between this idyll and the current state of things all the more palpable. Even when it does not directly engage with the contemporary moment, scholarship is always of the present – though, as my colleague in German Studies and former Wiko Fellow John Hamilton reminds us, being of the present is not the same thing as the infamous search for “relevance,” which often just slots new knowledge into old answers. In my own work, I try to think about how style and language shapes that knowledge itself, often in ways we are not always fully aware of, to ask, in the words of another former Wiko Fellow, Sianne Ngai, “what type of aesthetic subject, with what capacities for feeling, knowing, and acting,” particular forms both create and address.

Grosz might have found a grim humor in having the square that bears his name stand in the midst of such tawdry luxury, inaugurated by two men who could surely count themselves among the pillars of society of their time. In Berlin, the cunning of reason lurks around every corner. Of course, Germany in 2026 is not Germany in 1986, nor is it Germany in 1926. But it is hard not to feel, even amidst the relative scholarly tranquility of the Wiko, that not all that much has been learned in the past hundred years. Around the same time as Grosz was composing his painting, Walter Benjamin (whose own eponymous square is a sterile colonnade just a few blocks northwest of Grosz’s) wrote, famously but maybe not famously enough, that “every document of culture is a document of barbarism.” What does this mean for those of us who, like Benjamin for that matter, have dedicated our careers to the study – and production – of culture’s documents? A recent opinion piece in the Chronicle for Higher Education, an American trade journal for university faculty and administrators, suggested that the reason why the humanities are struggling is because they have done away with the idea of the “great man” (or anyway great works) theory of cultural history. The humanities have become too critical, it said, so focused on exposing our “documents of culture” as “documents of barbarism” that students begin to ask why they should even bother to engage with them. The anxieties that motivate the author of the piece are maybe real enough, but his conclusion is wrong. For one, the idea of the “greatness” of the cultural artifacts studied by the humanities forgets all the political and cultural labor that have gone into investing those works with an idea of greatness in the first place, and the fantasies and desires that this labor expresses. A fellow Fellow at the Wiko asked me how I ended up working on nineteenth-century German literature, when other literatures of the time are so much more enjoyable to read. But the enjoyability of works is not necessarily a criterion for finding them revealing or interesting or useful as objects of scholarship, or for thinking through their complexities, strangenesses, and productive resistances. Meanwhile, society is already doing a perfectly good job of keeping up a bildungsbürgerliche respect for the cultural patrimony, sanitized and kept at a safe distance. Students are no fools. They know a scam when they see it, and one of those scams is the imagination of a neutral and apolitical humanist culture, populated by geniuses (just like us, only a little smarter, or madder). But maybe another scam, not so entirely different from the first, is the idea that there are counter-geniuses that we can instrumentalize as the heroes of the society we think we desire. Grosz’s furious image was hardly a match for the rise of the Nazis, from which he fled Berlin as a “degenerate artist” in 1933, though now it hangs in the permanent collection of the Neue Nationalgalerie, a document of culture itself. As Benjamin’s frenemy Theodor Adorno (who gets a square in Frankfurt, but not Berlin) writes, “in the face of the abnormity into which reality is developing, art’s inescapable affirmative essence has become insufferable.” Though, as he takes care to add – and contrary to what those of us who like to read Adorno might expect – the success of the avant-garde gesture is also not to be counted upon: “Art can no more be reduced to the general formula of consolation than to its opposite.” 

What is the space for critique – even, for anger, for disgust – in contemporary scholarship? In one of the texts I’ve been writing about during my time at the Wiko, Nietzsche’s first Untimely Meditation, Nietzsche speaks of the “tutti unisono” that, for him, dominated the discourse of his day: “Indeed, all of us are convinced that for the moment almost everything is ordered as neatly as possible and that, at any rate, everything of any consequence has long been discovered and accomplished – in short, that the finest seeds of culture have been sown, and that in some areas they are already pushing up their green shoots or even standing in full flower.” This was his diagnosis of Germany in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war, where Prussia’s surprise victory helped to bring about the consolidation of German states into one nation, with Berlin as its capital. The first time I came to Berlin, in 1996, on a break from a semester exchange in Paris, I was struck by the heaviness and clumsiness of Berlin’s imperial architecture, especially compared to the conspicuous elegance of the Parisian allées, struck by how in Berlin not just the grimy, once futuristic post-war architecture or the neglected old housing blocks around the former Wall, but even the late nineteenth-century Prachtbauten of the touristic city center somehow managed to be coarse, dull, and ugly. I loved it. I hardly suspected, at the time, that this city would come to be my second home, or that I would spend the greater part of my career analyzing the texts, ideas, and attitudes behind all that graceless pomp. Should we go back to propping up the pillars of society of that time, the “full flower” of the culture of the Kaiserreich? In my project at the Wiko, I am analyzing what one might call the sound of those pillars as they strained under their own weight, the bluster and sputters of righteous indignation with which the men in power then (and maybe now) tried to reassure themselves that the doubtful privileges and respect that they enjoyed were actually sacrosanct. 

I suppose no one these days imagines that “everything is ordered as neatly as possible.” But beneath all the handwringing, it seems like a certain late nineteenth-century complacency still reigns (maybe even symptomatized by such handwringing). It often feels like the possibilities for thought are becoming ever more limited, that the terms of the debates we carry on are fixed, that the very words we use to conduct these debates have been decided upon in advance. The Wiko is hardly exempt from that, though it is also a space in which one is perpetually forced to examine one’s own favored concepts, practices, and professional self-understanding in the encounter with those of others. Adorno leaves us no comfort in the work of art or literature – but that doesn’t make art or literature for him any less necessary. As I try to teach my students, it also matters how you read, how a text – even a bad one! – discloses its own ways of thinking to be analyzed and checked against both its and one’s own wishes for consolations and easy answers of all kinds. Sometimes the discomfort is the point.

On the other side of the city from the Wiko, near my Neukölln neighborhood, is one of my favorite places in Berlin, the urban park of Tempelhofer Feld. Expropriated from farmers in the eighteenth century, the land was used as a military parade ground for the Prussian army until it was turned in the 1920s into an airfield and weapons manufactory (in the Second World War largely dependent on forced labor), and during the Cold War it served as a commercial and military airport under American control. In the 1990s it became a purely commercial airport. In 2008 – not long after my first arrival in Berlin for a longer stay, on a three-year graduate student fellowship –, the last planes landed; since 2010, it has been a municipal park, where children fly kites on the former runway and families sit around portable barbecues gone wavy with charcoal smoke, grilling sausages under a suddenly giant sky. Sometimes, when I’m there, I imagine that the end of the world has happened, and everyone just decided to go out and have a picnic. The end of the world hasn’t happened. There are pillars of society today who want to chip away at even that little piece of public utopia. But Berlin, my second home, still feels to me like a place where critique and creativity is still alive, where the ironies of the past are still palpable, where, at least for now, a combination of scrappy improvisation and intellectual seriousness is still on offer, where there is no consolation but something like a project of disquiet for those who go looking for it.