Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the Fall of Communism (review)

Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the Fall of Communism. Otto Karl Werckmeister. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 188. $45.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper).

Icons of the Left is an important book, intellectually rewarding well beyond its apparently limited scope. I want to stress that importance because its concerns are underrepresented in English-language cultural studies today. Read beyond the specific artworks that form its analytical starting point, the book develops into a broad reflection on the cultural challenges facing international Left identity after the cold war. Its intimate concern with Left culture as well as power make it a much darker and more tonally nuanced book than Richard Rorty's reflection on the contemporary U.S. Left, Achieving Our Country. In its scope and cultural focus Icons is similar to several recent collections of studies in aspects of contemporary German culture. But it is different from the Frankfurt School approaches that have informed some of the better volumes of the past decade, breaking with the vocabulary of the "dialectic of the enlightenment" and putting the historical relationship between European military and social policy in the foreground. This is an important shift because the Frankfurt-influenced discussion of international issues focuses attention optimistically on institutions of legality and discourses of conflict resolution. Such discussion generally ignores the moral and aesthetic ambiguity of Communist party histories, gravitating instead to the high ground of Holocaust memorializing and culture industry scolding. Werckmeister's contextualization of the Left cultural tradition, by contrast, emphasizes the overwhelming violence of the contemporary world order--one in which the distinction between soldier and civilian has become progressively weakened to the point that terrorism and civil warfare are the dominant means of radical political change and civilian air strikes are the dominant means of European and American power projection. Werckmeister's analysis presumes that world power throughout the century has been not so much a matter of rational consensus as a stalemate of realpolitik in which all major ideological tendencies have expressed themselves through military violence.

In five short chapters, each published separately as an article or occasional text, the book takes up four canonical figures of twentieth-century European Left culture. All relate their iconic figures to later artworks and discussions in diverse media and venues, establishing a bridge between the context in which a work emerges and that in which it is disseminated as an icon today. For example, Werckmeister examines Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History" as a response to Benjamin's inability to keep step with either the militant Communist avant-garde, represented by André Breton, or Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's politically accommodationist Institute for Social Research. He contrasts Benjamin's desperate search for political relevance to an academic canonization of him in which his melancholy is adopted in innocence of the failed attempts at a parti-pris that underlay that resigned affect. Eisenstein's film Potemkin is seen as ideologically reinforcing Soviet War Commissar Mikhail Frunze's doctrine that subsumed social revolution under military policy. As Werckmeister extends his analysis of Potemkin into contemporary artworks that refer to its iconic status, such as Chris Marker's Grin without a Cat and Federico Fellini's And the Ship Sails On, he demonstrates how changing perceptions of the relationship between military discipline and class solidarity have led to sharply decontextualized readings of Eisenstein's film. Contemporary cultural appropriations of Picasso's legendary Guernica have even more blatantly disregarded the complex negotiations by which Picasso sought to preserve artistic autonomy while serving Spanish Civil War era Popular Front strategies. As Guernica's propagandistic concern to distinguish civilian victims from military casualties has become obsolete, its iconic status as above the fray has been consolidated. Its leftist poignancy is preserved at the cost of political irrelevancy.

In these sometimes bitter, often wry, but never...