Rediscovering History; Culture, Politics and the Psyche. Essays in Honor of Carl E. Schorske

Both the reward and the difficulty of the genre of Festschriften is their diversity: in this case, the diversity is well-motivated, since the range of interests matches the generous practice of Carl Schorske. And, here there is a second kind of diversity in the scale and point-of-view of the articles themselves; thus the contributions of T. J. Clark and Lionel Gossman are substantial monographs, while James Sheehan gives a brief,useful prospectus of a work-in-progress, a study of nineteenth-century German museum practice.

Schorske, of course, explored the interaction of culture and politics in a remarkable range of practices—artistic, philosophical, literary, psychoanalytic. P. Jelavich’s “Girls and Crisis,” which reads S. Kracauer’s reading of Weimar entertainment modes as diagnostic commentary on politics, is exemplary of a Schorskian tactic. The revue “replicated the fragmentation of sensation in the metropolis” (233); the kickline, the precision chorus performance, paralleled “the reduction of the worker’s body to economically useful attributes” (233); both “revealed—or perhaps disguised?—an underlying sense of economic and military order” (239); both continued even in the loathsome Hitlerian camps.

But the peculiar gift of Schorske was to read the interaction of culture and politics as interaction of individual tactics and societal strategies. Just so, in the remarkable diversity of this collection there subsists a pervasive thematic, an exploration of individual/social relations manifest in cultural practices. There is, in general, a refusal to deal with atomistic units at the expense of larger, shared interests and pressures. Michael Roth cites the account in Schorske’s article on Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams of “the counterpolitical ingredient in the origins of psychoanalysis,” of psychoanalysis as “a compensation for political impotence” (346). Roth’s title is “Freud’s Use and Abuse of the Past”; Freud’s breakthrough differentiates positive (useful for life and work) and negative (melancholic, morbid) remembrance of past traumas. The claim is that psychoanalysis can work through individual/ social tangles, “(p)sychoanalytic conflicts between personal history and the demands of groups to which we belong or which claim us.” To grasp the connections and conflicts is to assist personal achievement. But this is, still, counter-political.

The other articles furnish variations on this theme in focussing on cultural practices as the working out or countering of what are perceived to be large-unit pressures on the individual. In Section I, “Ideas, Institutions, Professions,” Anthony Vidler, in “Psychopathologies of Modern Space” describes the isolation, estrangement of the urban individual by the instrumentality of urban space. Harry Liebersohn’s “Selective Affinities: Three Generations of German Intellectuals” describes the continuity of the Protestant educated elite, the Bildungsbürgertum, in creating an essential—but problematic—Germanness, a moment which recalls Kocka’s critique of Bildungshumanismus as seductive displacement of civil interests. William McGrath’s “Freedom and Death: Goethe’s Faust and the Greek War of Independence,” suggests that Goethe’s fascination with Lord Byron enabled him to portray a new balance between individual and authority in Faust II. Martin Jay’s “Experience without a Subject; Walter Benjamin and the Novel,” describes Benjamin’s response to the opposition of individual Erlebnis and group Erfahrung as motivated by a nostalgia for traditional Erfahrung, experience without a subject; his notion that experience is a “multifaceted and internally contested concept” is obvious in his failure, Jay claims, to appreciate strategies of certain novels (133).

In Part II, “Aesthetic Politics and Aesthetic Religion,” Roth claims the articles raise the issue of the value of the aesthetic (“Introduction”, 5), while focussing on not displacement but response to politics (1). Debora Silverman’s “Weaving Paintings: Religious and Social Origins of Vincent van Gogh’s Pictorial Labor,” sees the textile motifs and surfaces as “stylistic response to multiple and historically-specific pressures to refer the self to the larger totalities of corporate community and redemptive labor” (168). Sheehan’s “From Princely Collections to Public Museums; Toward a History of...