The Moment of Rupture: Historical Consciousness in Interwar German Thought

By Humberto Beck

An instant is the shortest span in which time can be divided and experienced. In an instant, there is no duration: it is an interruption that happens in the blink of an eye. For the ancient Greeks, kairos, the time in which exceptional, unrepeatable events occurred, was opposed to chronos, measurable, quantitative, and uniform time. In The Moment of Rupture, Humberto Beck argues that during the years of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of fascism in Germany, the notion of the instant migrated from philosophy and aesthetics into politics and became a conceptual framework for the interpretation of collective historical experience that, in turn, transformed the subjective perception of time.

According to Beck, a significant juncture occurred in Germany between 1914 and 1940, when a modern tradition of reflection on the instant—spanning the poetry of Goethe, the historical self-understanding of the French Revolution, the aesthetics of early Romanticism, the philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, and the artistic and literary practices of Charles Baudelaire and the avant gardes—interacted with a new experience of historical time based on rupture and abrupt discontinuity. Beck locates in this juncture three German thinkers—Ernst Jünger, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin—who fused the consciousness of war, crisis, catastrophe, and revolution with the literary and philosophical formulations of the instantaneous and the sudden in order to intellectually represent an era marked by the dissolution between the extraordinary and the everyday. The Moment of Rupture demonstrates how Jünger, Bloch, and Benjamin produced a constellation of figures of sudden temporality that contributed to the formation of what Beck calls a distinct "regime of historicity," a mode of experiencing time based on the notion of a discontinuous present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jul 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9780812296440

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The Moment of Rupture

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE MODERN AGE

Series Editors

Angus Burgin

Peter E. Gordon

Joel Isaac

Karuna Mantena

Samuel Moyn

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Camille Robcis

Sophia Rosenfeld

The Moment of Rupture

Historical Consciousness in Interwar German Thought

Humberto Beck

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Beck, Humberto, author.

Title: The moment of rupture: historical consciousness in interwar German thought / Humberto Beck.

Other titles: Intellectual history of the modern age.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019] | Series: Intellectual history of the modern age | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019007399| ISBN 9780812251593 (hardcover: alk. paper) | ISBN 0812251598 (hardcover: alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Germany—History—20th century—Philosophy. | Time perception—Germany—Philosophy—History—20th century. | Time perception in literature. | Jünger, Ernst, 1895–1998—Criticism and interpretation. | Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940—Criticism and interpretation. | Bloch, Ernst, 1885-1977.

Classification: LCC DD97.B43 2019 | DDC 901—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007399

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Instant from Goethe to Nietzsche: The Modern Beginnings of a Concept

Chapter 2. The Instant of the Avant-Garde

Chapter 3. Ernst Jünger and the Instant of Crisis

Chapter 4. Ernst Bloch and the Temporality of the Not-Yet

Chapter 5. Walter Benjamin and the Now-Time of History

Conclusion. Instantaneism as a Regime of Historicity

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

This book explores the rise in significance of instantaneous time—the sudden temporality of the instant (Augenblick)—in several currents of German thought during the first decades of the twentieth century. Between 1914 and 1940, in response to the experiences of abrupt discontinuity and social and political rupture, a new form of historical time consciousness was born in Germany, which articulated itself around the notion of instantaneity. Three German writers in particular—Ernst Jünger, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin—fused the consciousness of war, crisis, catastrophe, and revolution with the literary and philosophical formulation of the instantaneous as a category of thought. Their work employed instantaneity as a conceptual framework for the description and interpretation of the experiences of rupture and discontinuity, both personal and collective. Together, they produced a constellation of concepts and figures of sudden temporality that contributed to the formation of a distinct instantaneist regime of historicity¹—a mode of experiencing time based on the notion of a discontinuous present.

The creation of this new formula for the perception of temporality drew considerably from a modern tradition of reflection on the concept of the instant as a philosophical and aesthetic category, a tradition that spanned the poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the historical self-understanding of the French Revolution, the aesthetics of early Romanticism, the philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Baudelaire’s theory of modernité, and the artistic and literary practices of the historical avant-gardes. Given the existence of this previous tradition of reflection on instantaneity, what was created in Germany during this period was not a qualitatively new idea of the instant—a philosophical concept that goes back as far as Plato—but, rather, the transformation of suddenness and abrupt discontinuity into the foundations of a new organization of the experience of time. Jünger, Bloch, and Benjamin turned to the figure of instantaneity in order to intellectually represent an era marked by shocks in individual perception and other historical and political crises. Through their works, the instant became a defining figure of the era’s historical consciousness.

Germany, 1914–1940: Experiences of Historical Discontinuity and Crisis

Between the years 1914 and 1940—that is, between the outbreaks of the First World War and the Second—Germany experienced an almost uninterrupted series of violent ruptures. The feeling of euphoric expectation that preceded the First World War was followed by the traumatic experiences of the troops on the battlefield and the devastation of a calamitous military defeat. At the conclusion of the war in 1918, the proclamation of the new Weimar Republic marked the beginning of a period of extreme social and political turmoil after which would come, in turn, the rapid establishment, in 1933, of a brutal dictatorship and the eruption of a new world war a few years later. Before these political upheavals, German society had already undergone shock-like experiences and perceptions brought about by new technologies and urbanization. Berlin, capital of both the Reich and the Republic, typified the new mass industrial metropolis. The entire European continent shared the experience of historical rupture brought about by war, revolution, accelerated modernization, and crisis, but in Germany the rupture was the most extreme. From 1914 to 1940, the nation endured a turbulent progression of events. War, military defeat, imperial collapse and change of regime, failed revolution, economic breakdown, general strikes, unsuccessful putsches, rule by emergency powers, the increase of political radicalism and violence, and the rise of a totalitarian dictatorship—these were just some of the events that crowded these tumultuous years. Their accumulation generated an intense sensation of discontinuity, both historical and perceptual. The recurrence of the feeling of discontinuity throughout the interwar years contributed to the formation of a sense of perplexity that became the characteristic feature of the experience of time during this unstable era.

Taking into consideration this historical context, The Moment of Rupture asks a question about the relationship between ideas and events in modern European intellectual history: What role did the concept of instantaneous temporality play in German thought between 1914 and 1940?² My proposition is that instantaneity represents a crucial concept for the development of the historical and time consciousness of the period. The notion of the instant was understood as the isolated now of abrupt discontinuity. Its importance arises from a certain correspondence between the instant’s conceptual features—above all, its connection with suddenness and rupture—and the nature of the interwar years as unstable and marked by recurrent radical change. Given the defining qualities of this period in German history, it is possible to speak of an elective affinity³ between the experiences of crisis and rupture and the instant as a conceptual device. The grounds for this affinity reside in the instant’s ability, as a notion, to posit certain questions that would remain obscure under a conventional understanding of temporality as continuous duration. With its close connection to suddenness, the instant cultivates a sensibility attuned to the exceptional and the unexpected. This sensibility became fundamental to historical and time consciousness in Germany during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Oswald Spengler, one of the most representative authors of the era, seems to have made an argument similar to mine in The Decline of the West when he wrote: In the Classical world years played no role, in the Indian world decades scarcely mattered; but here [in Germany in 1918] the hour, the minute, even the second is of importance. Neither a Greek nor an Indian could have had any idea of the tragic tension of a historic crisis like that of August 1914, when even moments seemed of overwhelming significance.⁴ Following this line of interpretation, I analyze historically and conceptually the variations on the theme of instantaneous temporality that were articulated during this period of German history. The history of these variations is significant for understanding fundamental aspects of twentieth-century intellectual history, such as the role of historicism and antihistoricism in modern visions of temporality, and transformations in the notion of individual and collective experience.

Previous approaches to this topic include Karl Heinz Bohrer’s conceptualization of suddenness as a motif in European modernist literature; Anson Rabinbach’s examination of the critical reactions of German intellectuals to the experience of catastrophe after the end of the two world wars; and Michael Löwy’s study of the relations between Jewish messianism and libertarian socialism in Central European thought.⁵ Stephen Kern’s panoramic analysis of the culture of time and space in Europe at the turn of the century and Modris Eksteins’ characterization of Germany’s perspective on the First World War as a central moment in the emergence of modern consciousness have also addressed the interaction between representations of time and historical events.⁶ The Moment of Rupture intends to contribute to this area of inquiry by constituting an intellectual history of the operation of the motif of instantaneous time in the work of three authors in whose writings instantaneity functions as a crucial notion for the conceptual mediation of the experiences of war, revolution, and crisis.

The Intellectual Representation of Suddenness

The affinity between the concept of the instant and the experiences of historical discontinuity found its most consummate expression in the works of Ernst Jünger, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin, each of whom addressed the question of historical and perceptual discontinuity from the point of view of instantaneous temporality. In the writings of this constellation of authors, the instant presented itself as a formidable instrument for the intellectual representation of a time of crisis. In spite of their cultural and political differences, these authors shared a fundamental dilemma: how to name the novel experiences of rupture in historical consciousness and individual perception as well as the particular social consequences of these forms of rupture. They resorted to the language of instantaneity to capture the unprecedented and sometimes contradictory quality of these new forms of experience, which seemed to break with the conventional expectation of time as a linear progression and to present crisis, catastrophe, and danger as new bases of perception.

The differences in these authors’ political persuasions are considerable. Jünger was involved with nationalist and militaristic circles, whereas Bloch and Benjamin distinctively combined revolutionary Marxism and Jewish messianism. But their belonging to opposite political fields does not obviate their commonalities. Rather, it is a telling symptom of the existence of a deeper frame of mind in this period of German history and a general outline for the perception of temporality that cut across the ideological spectrum. Central to this outline was a vision of instantaneity as a unifying category for collective and individual experience under the cultural and political conditions of the early twentieth century.

A series of significant characteristics connected these authors’ understanding of the instant. Most fundamentally, they shared an interpretation of instantaneous time as a temporal modality based on suddenness. They also adopted the instant as a notion that was simultaneously political and aesthetic, and they articulated this notion as a category that was, at the same time, a vehicle of historical consciousness and a mode of subjective perception. As a result of these convergences, Jünger, Bloch, and Benjamin created an influential collection of images of instantaneity, in which the main features of their era’s conception of temporality came together. With instantaneity as the basis of discontinuous interpretations of temporality, these images especially negated—or transfigured—the perception of historical time as progress, and thus expressed a powerful antiteleological tendency. The notion of the instant posits disruptive and singular events as a sort of historical ex nihilo creation—either through violence, decision, or revolution—in opposition to the notion of a historical reason gradually accomplishing itself along the lines of a predetermined goal or telos. This was true even when these authors looked into the past to develop their respective notions of instantaneity, as the return of past elements can itself be a form of sudden interruption. As a consequence, each of these authors disavowed linearity and continuity and postulated a caesura in time as the premise for a new conception of history.

These images of instantaneity also contributed to the fashioning of a new conception of experience.⁷ In such formulations as Jünger’s danger, Bloch’s darkness of the lived moment or Benjamin’s shock, the conventional contrast between ordinary and extraordinary experience dissolves and sudden perception becomes identified with actual sensations that the the individual subject faces. Each of these conceptions points to a form of exceptional experience that, as a consequence of the cultural and political conditions of twentieth-century modernity, became part of the common structure of temporal consciousness and of a new standard of perception. Furthermore, novel forms of mediation between the subjective and historical dimensions of the experience of time furthered the dissolution of these boundaries. In these authors’ writings, notions derived from individual perception helped to articulate the sense of a collective historical experience, and, at the same time, their concepts of historical and political crisis conditioned the subjective experience of temporality. This process is made clear in Jünger’s, Bloch’s, and Benjamin’s engagement with the avant-garde aesthetics of sudden juxtaposition and their distinct temporalities—Jünger’s terror, Bloch’s noncontemporaneity, and Benjamin’s now-time. In each, the formal principle of montage becomes a paradigm of historical consciousness and sensory perception.

The constellation formed by Jünger, Bloch, and Benjamin takes central stage in this book because of these convergences in their treatment of instantaneity. But in this period of German intellectual history, there were other important authors who also developed reflections on diverse facets of instantaneous temporality: Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt, among others. I did not include them centrally in my inquiry because fundamental aspects of the instantaneity chronotope (a term I discuss below) were not present in their works—such as the correlation between the historical and subjective dimensions of time, or the integration of the principles of avant-garde aesthetics into a vision of temporality. But, even though these writers are not my main object of study, I do analyze their ideas when they touch upon the development of my central argument.

The Origins of the Instant: A Brief History

The concept of the instant, and its ramifications in the intellectual history of Germany during the years of the Great War, the Weimar Republic, and the rise of National Socialism, are central to The Moment of Rupture, but what, exactly, is an instant? An instant is the shortest span in which time can be divided and experienced. The instant is, then, a moment without time, that infinitely short moment in which there is no interval or duration, no before or after, but only an atemporal present. Because of its timelessness, the instant is associated with eternity, and therefore alludes to the paradoxical experience of the eternal in the ephemeral. The instant is that interruption that happens in the blink of an eye: it evokes fractures in permanence and negates the idea of time as an empty continuum in which the now is merely an abstract boundary between the past and the future.⁸ The vision of the now that derives from the instant is, rather, reminiscent of kairos (καιρός), the ancient Greek word that denotes the timely occurrence of an event,⁹ as opposed to the uniform, quantitative time of chronos (Χρόνος). Kairos designates the happening of the unrepeatable and exceptional, as well as the unique time for auspicious action, especially in a moment of crisis.

The concept of the instant is, in this sense, analogous to the notion of the event: that unexpected disruption of the flow of time that seems to emerge out of nowhere—an episode of singularity that opens up the horizon of thinking and action by introducing a previously inconceivable possibility.¹⁰ Because it distills experience into a fleeting, transitory moment, the instant has been prominently associated with suddenness, a concept that poses two fundamental themes: the discontinuity of time and the occurrence of the radically new.¹¹ In the realm of human subjectivity, the instant has been considered the privileged space for the expression of the spirit’s inner life, the form and limits of sensory perception, and the mental and moral ground of freedom and resolution.¹² As Rüdiger Safranski has pointed out, the instant means a different experience of time and the experience of a different time. It promises sudden turns and transformations, perhaps even arrival and redemption, but at any rate it enforces decision.¹³

In the Western tradition, the concept of the instant originated in Plato’s speculations about change as a sudden, unexplainable alteration in the qualities of being, and, later, in Saint Paul’s doctrine of parousia—the second coming of Christ at the end of time—as an abrupt and radical transformation of the cosmos. In the Parmenides, Plato defines the instant as the moment when the change from one quality to another—for example, from stillness to movement—takes place. Since an object cannot exist simultaneously in two different states, Plato conjectures that there must be a moment outside of time during which the transformed object is in neither state and when the transition actually occurs. This moment, which Plato calls an atopos—a non-place but also a non-time—is the instant.¹⁴ In his Physics, Aristotle departs from Plato’s discontinuous vision of temporality and posits instead an account of time as an uninterrupted flow.¹⁵ His alternative to Plato’s instant is the now, whose function is analogous to that of a point on a line: to connect and, likewise, to signal the end of a duration or length in temporality.¹⁶ By virtue of being, just like the point, simultaneously a link and a limit, the now establishes both the continuity of time and its division into past and future. Nevertheless, insofar as it was indivisible, as the point in space, Aristotle’s now is a purely conceptual reality that did not correspond directly with anything perceptible. In the end, Aristotle’s continuous account of time, and not Plato’s emphasis on interruption, became the more influential in the history of philosophy, and, as a consequence, it became the foundation for most of the later treatments of temporality. This situation remained unaltered until the arrival of the modern thinkers of the instant, such as Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Saint Paul’s vision of final redemption is the other significant source of the concept of the instant. In the Epistles, Paul outlines his eschatological thinking, a central tenet of which is the belief that the end of the world will happen suddenly, in the propitious moment, or favorable time, of an instant.¹⁷ In the First Epistle to the Corinthians, he famously describes the moment of the parousia as an instantaneous event: in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.¹⁸ In the early Christian worldview shaped by Paul’s eschatology, Christ’s return was expected to happen in the twinkling of an eye. As a result of this expectation, any instant could in effect become the ultimate one, the potential scenario for the consummation of time. This ever-present latency of the end did nothing but intensify the awareness of the present moment. Paul’s identification of the instant with the twinkling of an eye would become a fundamental concept in modern philosophical thought. Following Luther’s translation of Paul, Kierkegaard and Heidegger referred to the instant with terms that recalled the original Pauline image—the Danish øjeblik and the German Augenblick (both of which mean in the blink of an eye).

After Plato and Saint Paul, the next defining chapter in the history of the instant would arrive in the fourth century with the writings of Saint Augustine, who introduced—most notably in his Confessions—an enduring association between instantaneity and subjectivity. Like Aristotle, Augustine regards the moment of the immediate present as indivisible, but, in contrast to the abstractions of Aristotelian thought, the theologian rejects the perception of the now as an impersonal limit and instead centers his understanding on the concrete, subjective experience of temporality. Augustine thus became the first thinker to focus his analysis on the personal aspect of time. He defined time as a distension of the soul, which measures the effects that fleeting things have on it. Because of its immediate nature, Augustine considers the instant the only genuine reality of time, in opposition to the past (that has already been) and the future (that has not yet been), as well as to other measures of temporality, such as the year, the month, the day or even the hour, all of which, if studied carefully, are revealed to be illusory.¹⁹ Nevertheless, he also realizes that the instant, since it has no duration, does not, strictly speaking, exist either. Augustine draws out the paradox of instantaneous temporality: the only point of contact with time is the present but the present moment is not in time. His proposed resolution to the paradox is to relocate it in the realm of subjective experience. It does not matter, he argues, if time’s only reality, the instant, lacks a true outward expanse, because the measuring of time is not an external reality but an activity that takes place in an altogether different dimension—that is, in the soul.

The reflections on the instant in Plato, Paul, and Augustine established the foundations of the notion of instantaneity in the Western tradition. Some of the basic tenets of this conception would reappear in medieval philosophy and theology—as in the scholastic idea of nunc stans (or eternal present) as an attribute of God, or in the ecstatic visions of Meister Eckhart and other Christian mystics. Other isolated aspects of the doctrines can be found in early modern thinkers, such as the implied decisionism of Blaise Pascal’s famous wager or René Descartes’ principle of the re-creation of the world at every instant. But what ultimately predominated in Western thought, at least until Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, was rather a continuous and Aristotelian idea of time as uninterrupted flow. As Chapters 1 and 2 will show, toward the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, a series of influential discourses on the instant broke with the dominance of temporal Aristotelianism and reintroduced instantaneity as a key concept in philosophy, aesthetics, and politics. The aesthetic ideas of Goethe and the early German Romantics, the French revolutionary spirit, and the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche brought instantaneity to the center of European intellectual history. In the early twentieth century, European thinkers took up this tradition of reflection on the instant in order to explore the essential discontinuity of Time²⁰ in the cultural and political context of their era. The triad of Jünger, Bloch, and Benjamin embodied a powerful incarnation of this tradition’s revival by transforming some of the features of the concept into the premises of a general vision of time consciousness.

The Rhetoric of Instantaneity

Given the philosophical history of the concept, and following Karl Heinz Bohrer’s analysis of suddenness as an aesthetic category,²¹ I here use instantaneity to refer to an abrupt discontinuity that resists integration into a regular and coherent flow. Instantaneity is a form of temporality dissociated from stability, permanence, or accumulation. I treat instantaneity as a trope, which means that the term implies a certain fixed identity denoted in its conceptual structure. A trope is a rhetorical expression that introduces a change in ordinary meaning—from the Greek for a movement or turn—by establishing a new relationship between two words or terms.²² The relationship that the trope of instantaneity has typically established is the unforeseen juxtaposition between two contrasting or unconnected elements, which triggers the aesthetic effect of suddenness. As the foundational examples of Plato, Paul, and Augustine, or the more modern incarnations in Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, attest, instantaneity has traditionally alluded to the abrupt association of two apparently contradictory components: the ideas of time and eternity.

Although treating instantaneity as a trope permits its identification through time, it does not exclude its examination as a properly historical object of study. The figure of instantaneity can also be comprehended, in this sense, as a motif,²³ that is, as a pattern of thought that continually recurs and is reappropriated in diverse historical contexts. The history of the instant resides, above all, in the tracing of these uses and strategic deployments²⁴ in specific intellectual traditions, historical conjunctures, conceptual universes, and political moments. This history also entails, then, the tracking of the concept’s ramifications and historical inscriptions²⁵ in concrete social and political settings, which mediate between the events and their intellectual representation. Since the first formulations of the instant in antiquity up to the years of the Weimar Republic, for example, there have been essential changes in the intellectual, cultural, and political implications of its use. The diverse intersections between the idea and concrete historical processes have resulted in the coinage of novel connotations in response to new circumstances. As a consequence, in each iteration of the instantaneity motif, both the conceptual pattern of sudden juxtaposition and the images of the temporal and the eternal have been variously interpreted, reinvented, adapted, or extrapolated.

The treatment of instantaneity as a motif can account for the seeming paradox of using a notion belonging to such an old tradition to describe a modern historical era. The paradox dissipates if one takes into account the distinction between the different dimensions in the usages of instantaneity. Although there is certainly a continuity in the