The Skin of the System

On Germany's Socialist Modernity

Benjamin Robinson

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804772488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Deutsche Geschichte

The Skin of the System objects to the idea that there is only one modernity—that of liberal capitalism. Starting from the simple conviction that whatever else East German socialism was, it was real, this book focuses on what made historical socialism different from social systems in the West. In this way, the study elicits the general question: what must we think in order to think an other system at all?

To approach this question, Robinson turns to the remarkable writer Franz Fühmann, the East German who most single-mindedly dedicated himself to understanding what it means to transform from fascism to socialism. Fühmann's own serial loyalties to Hitler and Stalin inform his existential meditations on change and difference. By placing Fühmann's politically alert and intensely personal literary inventions in the context of an inquiry into radical social rupture, The Skin of the System wrests the brutal materiality of twentieth-century socialism from attempts to provincialize both its desires and its failures as antimodern ideological follies.

PART I

BETWEEN NOT YET AND NO LONGER

I confess that in America [East Germany] I saw
more than America [East Germany]; I sought there
the image of democracy [socialism] itself, with its
inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its
passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to
hope from its progress.

—Alexis de Tocqueville

CHAPTER ONE

Utopia and Actuality: What Is to Be Done with Really Existing Socialism?

I. “THE INTERNATIONALE”: ONE ICON—TWO STORIES OF FUTURES PAST

‘Tis the final conflict, let each stand in his place.

—Eugène Pottier, “The Internationale”¹

Come, join in the only battle wherein no man can fail,
Where whoso fadeth and dieth, yet his deed shall still prevail.

—William Morris, “The Day is Coming”²

In Ken Loach’s 1995 Cannes Prize-winning film, Land and Freedom, the protagonists—volunteers fighting Franco in the libertarian-left POUM (Partido Obrero Unificado Marxista) militias—sing the workers’ anthem, “The Internationale,” after a fractious debate over land reform in the Aragón village they have just liberated.³ The song rallies the multipartisan, multinational soldiers back together again in working-class unity. An anthem, particularly “The Internationale,” is a powerful symbol, and the complex emotions of the volunteers—bravado, fatalism, solidarity—are portrayed by way of the song’s effect on film audiences who have their own emotional and political associations with the fabled anthem. In the film’s screening time, the historically alert audience senses the tragic irony of the volunteers’ faith in the fragile unity wrought by the still stirring refrains. The main narrative, meanwhile, goes on to play out the irony as the characters discover through their own actions—“with my own eyes,” as the protagonist puts it—how much less charitable events are than ideals. The young comrades-in-arms are led either to tear up their party cards or go their separate organizational ways. Loach’s historical fiction makes it clear that the militia members singing the song are ultimately not fighting under the banner of either the Spanish Republic or the Communist Party of Spain. Rather, loosely based on George Orwell’s account of the war, Homage to Catalonia, the film tells the story of the Barcelona-based POUM militias’ efforts to force the pace of revolution by collectivizing the land under their regional control.⁴ They are defeated in this project not by Franco’s fascists, but by the Communist parties committed to the bourgeois democratic Popular Front of the Spanish Republic. It is a complicated story that leaves intact little of the celebratory unity of the “The Internationale.” By the film’s end, not a few of the debaters who closed their session on land reform with the song have died, along with the Spanish revolution, at the points of each other’s guns.

As material culture, “The Internationale” is a real and even banal thing: a military march existing in sheet music, impromptu performances, recordings, and films. What it symbolizes, however, is not so clear, although it still mobilizes great passion, as the film’s extended citation of it indicates. Moreover, if this vague thing it symbolizes might be called “socialism,” then it is even less clear whether this reference has any substantial existence in reality or belongs only to the infinitely displaced world of signs. In fact, the difficulty of specifying anything concrete about socialism is what allows the film to negotiate the slippery border between symbolic autonomy and historical reference. For while the main narrative concentrates on the Left’s internecine squabbles, taking advantage of the audience’s historical knowledge of the twentieth century’s failed socialist revolutions to highlight the story’s tragic power, the film gives back with the right hand what the left has taken. Thus, the film’s framing device accomplishes another aspect of its narrative agenda: to deliver its heroes and their struggles, sacrifices, and symbols from a less-than-heroic socialist history that appears finally to have been discredited by the world-shaking events of the late 1980s. The frame takes the film’s story up to the moment of the protagonist’s death in a derelict council flat in post-Thatcher England, where his grandniece recovers and identifies with the personal history whose mementos he has stashed away in a little chest. Now—both diegetically and in the theater—the symbols and sacrifices contained in the narrative box are passed on to the audience outside of it. The fire of international workers’ revolution escapes its dousing by functionaries and fellow travelers; the martyrs have not died in vain; the valiant culture the film has cited is no longer artifact, but living legacy. Over the hero’s open grave, his youthful grandniece recites a few words by William Morris and raises her fist with a group of his loyal comrades.

By salvaging “The Internationale” at the expense of the Comintern, Loach’s film frees the workers’ anthem from the betrayals of Stalin and the tainted cultural legacy of “really existing” socialism. A less burdened socialism than that which “really existed”—namely, one whose revolution never happened—can thus become the heroic reference point of the living legacy. From the Loyalists’ defensive cry ¡No pasaran! the slogan now becomes the utopians’ untested “Not yet!” Noch nicht is the phrase Ernst Bloch used to characterize the glimmering “principle of hope”: the workers’ future is yet to come.⁵ So what has happened in Land and Freedom’s switch of the primary reference of “The Internationale”? That socialism which claimed to be really in existence—the socialism of the commissars—is denied as false. That socialism that never existed—the socialism of those who haven’t had or have been denied their chance, the socialism of song—is adopted as the true reference of the anthem’s refrains. This transformation of socialism is indeed a gain of many degrees of freedom. It has become a “floating signifier,” the surplus signification that like the mana of primitive reverence “is the disability of all finite thought (but also the surety of all art, all poetry, every mythic and aesthetic invention),” according to Claude Lévi-Strauss.⁶

At the same time, other stories of fact and fiction besides Loach’s can be told about the embattled workers’ anthem, ones that, however much latitude we grant them, leave us with less perfect freedom. Admiral N. G. Kuznetsov, commissar of the Soviet Navy, had been a top military adviser to the Loyalist armies in Spain during the crucial years of the Civil War. Alone among the non-Axis powers, the Soviet Union had committed matériel and manpower to the defense of Spain against fascism. Five years after the bloody events in Spain described by Loach’s film, the Red Navy under Kuznetsov’s command found itself under massive attack in its own waters.⁷ On June 22, 1941, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, and within two months Hitler’s Eighteenth Army had trapped the Baltic Fleet in the harbor of Tallinn. The Red Navy, desperate to evacuate more than twenty-five thousand Soviet troops and civilians from the Baltic republics, was forced to sail east toward Kronstadt through the thickly mined Gulf of Finland under heavy air attack by the German First Air Fleet. In the exodus twenty-eight out of twenty-nine transport ships were sunk, with the loss of over ten thousand lives. A sailor witnessed the transport Virona as it went down. At the very last, with the remaining passengers and the crew assembled on the quarterdeck, the sailor heard the sound of singing. They were singing “The Internationale” out over the dark, wreckage- and mine-strewn water. Defiant to the end, the civilian and military personnel on the ship foreshadowed the determination that those who survived the evacuation were to demonstrate in the ensuing nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad, one of the few modern sieges more costly than Franco’s siege of Madrid. Just before the Virona slid under water, the officers on deck drew their guns. A brief series of cracks and flashes signaled their final act of loyalty. Whatever other meanings one ascribes to the story—Russian patriotism, respect of naval tradition, fear of Stalin—one can also accord to the same Red soldiers whose treachery Loach decried the rich meaning of the workers’ anthem.⁸ But whose legacy is the flawed one?

2. INSTITUTIONS VERSUS IDEALS

These two tales of military courage displayed in the name of “The Internationale” bring into focus a problem in cultural studies posed by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of “really existing” socialism in Eastern Europe. The problem, simply stated, is whether critical scholarship should “emancipate” the kernel of real socialism—as a set of utopian ideals carried by an independent popular culture—from the context of a discredited institutional history; or should that institutional history and the culture that emerged with it form a primary basis for our understanding of what was distinctively socialist about “socialist” culture? In the one case, the arts and ethos of Eastern Europe are best served by an approach like Loach’s that recuperates their critical negativity from the instrumentalization of state sponsorship, just as Loach salvaged the anarchist spontaneity of the workers’ anthem from its duty to maintain discipline along a chain of command. As Adorno put it, “[C]ulture is only true when implicitly critical.”⁹ In the other case, the question of whether or not Eastern European regimes produced a socialist culture can only be answered by taking seriously their claim to be socialist in the first place, recognizing that their intellectual and expressive symbols, their class and property relations, and even many of their party traditions were those shared or envisioned by the workers’ movement. Whereas Adorno demands for true art “separation from the prevailing realm of purposes,”¹⁰ the singing of Kuznetsov’s sailors took on its “truth” in their embracing the Red Navy’s redness as their own in an affirmative act of “cultural reconciliation.” The story of Kuznetsov’s sailors might describe only a familiar kind of patriotic gesture—it is hard to read behind the lines of a single episode.¹¹ But the very fact that it was “The Internationale” accompanying their auto-da-fé hints at how important it is to understand the powerful commitments that made it possible for societies to subsist under socialist government—however they came, and we come, to understand that label.¹²

Nevertheless, it might be objected that this second approach, which critically embraces Eastern European socialism as a systemic effort to realize a socialist society, is an unwarranted narrowing of the culture that may be considered socialist. Surely the socialist tradition is broader than Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. It includes religious and communal communisms as well as workers’ and reform movements in the industrial West and Third World; it includes the solidaristic capacity emerging within and against the rule of competitive individualism.¹³ As broad and diverse as the tradition is, however, cultural studies would surely not want to mistake breadth with indeterminacy and refuse any specification of socialist institutional forms that have a referential concreteness beyond the play of differences in a culture of modernity. Kuznetsov’s sailors understood themselves and their social belonging in a complex and effective network of relationships, and to this network they ascribed the symbolic value of “The Internationale.” The “validity” of equating that polyglot anthem with that thick network of logics, intentions, and cross-purposes consists not in its exclusive determination of socialist identity but in its historically real determination of socialism as a governing power.¹⁴ However much this determination weighs down the free-floating signifier with the red sailors’ sunken ship, it is one that any future socialism, as a practical designation for an alternative organization of the good life, cannot overlook.

Two otherwise very different traditions of cultural studies—the more positive “culturalist” tradition associated with the name of Raymond Williams and the critical “culture industry” tradition associated with the Frankfurt School—both emphasize that it is the strict specification of some ensemble of practices, meanings, and values that distinguishes the field of cultural studies from more methodologically individualistic approaches focusing on autonomous works of high art.¹⁵ While these traditions have wrestled with the necessity of a concept of “totality” for anchoring their analyses, it is nonetheless characteristic of cultural studies that it proceeds holistically either by defining culture itself as a total field where forces from disparate realms of life come together, or by bringing cultural artifacts into relationship with influences outside of culture as a merely imagined self-sufficient whole (in fact, the imagined self-sufficiency of science is also an important focus of attack by critical theory¹⁶). In either case, it is some large inter-relation of logics, rather than one strand in isolation, that grounds cultural studies analyses. Thus, even as Walter Benjamin and Adorno, for example, build their inquiries upon the basis of juxtaposed fragments, rather than assuming the perspective of the whole, their juxtapositions suggest a shattered culture’s indexical reference to an unrevealable totality. If Adorno, as we indicated above, ultimately emphasizes the critically negative autonomy of true art, then it is his interest in “false” art that makes him a pioneer in cultural studies, for false culture finds its meaning in what Frederic Jameson has called “the common historical situation” to which Adorno’s language always makes “monitory allusion: the administered world, the institutionalized society, the culture industry, the damaged subject”¹⁷—and it is some form of this tendentially unified historical situation that interests cultural studies. Together with Horkheimer in their 1944 study of the “culture industry,” Adorno even goes so far as to claim that the culture of modern capitalism functions as “a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part,” a uniformity that derives from the “absolute power of capitalism.”¹⁸ While the work of Williams more positively emphasizes even everyday culture’s moment of “relative autonomy” from other social determinations, he is most interested in what he calls the “‘social’ definition of culture,” rather than the “‘ideal’ definition” that characterizes culture as a progressive realization of universal values.¹⁹ For Williams, culture indicates a “whole way of life” of a people and its inter-related structures, not simply individual or spontaneous expressions, nor simply its most impersonally universalistic side. It is “the signifying system through which necessarily (though among other means) social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored.”²⁰

It is to such definitions of culture as part of a broadly understood social order that this study harks—but in our case we presume that the social order finds itself in a radically different “historical situation” than the one to which Adorno alludes. If the impetus behind a cultural studies approach to socialist culture is the attempt to ident...