One man who hated Berlin – he called it Babylon – who hated all cities, who in fact elevated his hatred of city life to an entire philosophy, was Martin Heidegger. Born in southern Germany in 1889, he studied under Edmund Husserl before becoming himself a professional teacher of philosophy.76 His deliberate provincialism, his traditional mode of dress – knickerbockers – and his hatred of city life all confirmed his philosophy for his impressionable students. In 1927, at the age of thirty-eight, he published his most important book, Being and Time. Despite the fame of Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Heidegger was – besides being earlier – a more profound existentialist.
Being and Time is an impenetrable book, ‘barely decipherable,’ in the words of one critic. Yet it became immensely popular.77 For Heidegger the central fact of life is man’s existence in the world, and we can only confront this central fact by describing it as exactly as possible. Western science and philosophy have all developed in the last three or four centuries so that ‘the primary business of Western man has been the conquest of nature.’ As a result, man regards nature as though he is the subject and nature the object. Philosophically, the nature of knowledge is the central dilemma: ‘What do we know? How can we know that we know?’ Ever since Descartes these questions have been paramount. For Heidegger, however, reason and intellect are ‘hopelessly inadequate guides to the secret of being.’ Indeed, at one point he went so far as to say that ‘thinking is the mortal enemy of understanding.’78 Heidegger believed that we are thrust into the world willy-nilly, and by the time we have got used to being here, we are facing death. Death, for Heidegger, is the second central fact of life, after being.79 We can never experience our own death, he said, but we can fear it, and that fear is ad-important: it gives meaning to our being. We must spend our time on earth creating ourselves, ‘moving into an open, uncertain, as yet uncreated future.’ One other element of Heidegger’s thought is essential to understanding him. Heidegger saw science and technology as an expression of the will, a reflection of our determination to control nature. He thought, however, that there was a different side to man’s nature, which is revealed above all in poetry. The central aspect of a poem, said Heidegger, was that ‘it eludes the demands of our will’. ‘The poet cannot will to write a poem, it just comes.’80 This links him directly with Rilke. Furthermore, the same argument applies to readers: they must allow the poem to work its magic on them. This is a central factor in Heidegger’s ideas – the split between the will and those aspects of life, the interior life, that are beyond, outside, the will, where the appropriate way to understanding is not so much thinking as submission. At one level this sounds a little bit like Eastern philosophies. And Heidegger certainly believed that the Western approach needed sceptical scrutiny, that science was becoming intent on mastery rather than understanding.81 He argued, as the philosopher William Barrett has said, summing up Heidegger, that there may come a time ‘when we should stop asserting ourselves and just submit, let be.’ Heidegger quoted Friedrich Hölderlin: We are in the period of darkness between the gods that have vanished and the god that has not yet come, between Matthew Arnold’s two worlds, ‘one dead, the other powerless to be born.’82
This is, inevitably perhaps, a rather bloodless summary of Heidegger’s thinking. What made it so immediately popular was that it gave respectability to the German obsession with death and unreason, with the rejection of urban rationahst civilisation, with, in effect, a hatred of Weimar itself. Moreover, it gave tacit approval to those völkisch movements then being spawned that appealed not to reason but to heroes, that called for submission in the service of an alternative will to science, to those who, in Peter Gay’s striking phrase, ‘thought with their blood.’ Heidegger did not create the Nazis, or even the mood that led to the Nazis. But as the German theologian Paul Tillich, who was himself dismissed from his chair, was to write later, ‘It is not without some justification that the names of Nietzsche and Heidegger are connected with the anti-moral movements of fascism and national socialism.’ Being and Time was dedicated to Edmund Husserl, Heidegger’s mentor, who was Jewish. When the book was reprinted during the Nazi era, the dedication was omitted.83
We last left George Lukács in chapter 10, in Vienna, in exile from Budapest, ‘active in hopeless conspiratorial [Communist] Party work, tracking down people who have absconded with party funds.’84 Throughout the 1920s Lukács’s life remained difficult. In the early years he vied with Béla Kun for leadership of the Hungarian Party in exile – Kun had fled to Moscow. Lukács met Lenin in Moscow and Mann in Vienna, making enough of an impact on the latter for him to model the Communist Jesuit Naphta in The Magic Mountain partly on Lukács.85 Most of the time, however, he lived in poverty, and in 1929 he stayed illegally in Hungary before going to Berlin and on to Moscow. He worked there at the Marx-Engels Institute, where Nikolai Ryazanov was editing the newly discovered manuscripts of the young Marx.86
Despite these difficulties, Lukács published in 1923 History and Class Consciousness, for which he was to become famous.87 These nine essays were about both literature and politics. So far as literature was concerned, Lukács’s theory was that, beginning with Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, novelists have fallen predominantly into two groups, those who portray ‘the incommensurability between self (or hero) and environment (or society),’ as Cervantes, Friedrich von Schiller, and Honoré de Balzac did, as ‘world fleeing,’ or as in Gustave Flaubert, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, or Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, in ‘the romanticism of disillusionment,’ involved in life but aware that man cannot be improved, as Joseph Conrad had said.88 In other words, both approaches were essentially antipositive, antiprogressive. Lukács moved from literature to politics to argue that the different classes have different forms of consciousness. The bourgeoisie, while glorifying individualism and competition, respond in literature, and in life, to a stance that assumes that society is ‘bound by immutable laws, as dehumanised as the natural laws of physics.’89 In contrast, the proletariat seeks a new order of society, which acknowledges that human nature can change, that there can be a new synthesis between self and society. Lukács saw it as his role to explain this dichotomy to the bourgeoisie so they would understand the revolution, when it came. He thought the popularity of film lay in the fact that in movies things lost presence, and that people liked the illusion, to live ‘without fate, without causes, without motives.’90 He also argued that while Marxism explained these different class consciousnesses, after the revolution, with the new synthesis of self and society that he posited, Marxism would be superseded. He came to the conclusion, therefore, that ‘communism should not be reified by its own builders.’91