Theodor W. Adorno’s Wall Clock

TheodorW.Ador no’ sWal lCl ock Ami tMukhopadhyay

Theodor W. Adorno’s Wall Clock

Amit Mukhopadhyay 2021

About the author

Amit Mukhopadhyay Studied Art Criticism and Art History from Faculty of Fine Arts, M. S. University, Vadodara. Junior Research Fellow of the ICHR

from

1978-1981.

Fellow,

Indian

Institute of Advanced Studies, Simla from 1987 - 1989. Senior Fellow, Department of Culture,

Government

2013-2015.

Published

‘Fragmented

Text’

in

of

India

a 1993.

book

from on

Founder

Member of the REALIST Group established in 1987. Curated several exhibitions of Contemporary Art including Edge of the Century in 1999-2000. Worked as Editor of Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi looking after the Contemporary publications in English Language, especially the Journal “Lalit Kala Contemporary.” Recent interests are in Critical Theory with specific interests in the

works

of

Theodor Adorno, Max

Horkheimer and Jurgen Habermas of the Frankfurt School.

Published in 2021

by Amit Mukhopadhyay Kolkata, West Bengal India

Email: amitpublicsphere@gmail.com

© Amit Mukhopadhyay 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced of transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or manual including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover Image: Bedrich Fritta, "Before the transport" (an old woman sits on luggage), Trezin, 1943-44, Hand drawing, Thomas Bedrich Fritta Haas, Permanent loan to Jewish Museum, Berlin

Book Design: Shruti Mukherjee

Printed in New Delhi, India Not for sale

" There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."

Ellie Wissel

Preface Hundreds of books and essays have been written on Holocaust and are still being written. Research on the Holocaust takes various perspectives, from philosophical, sociological, psychological, economic to anthropological and historical. Each of them is as important as they ought to be for the study of man, culture, civilization, progress of society etc. Why did I think of writing this essay and what values will it carry in understanding the Holocaust? I admit I may not be a Holocaust researcher in the true sense of the term; neither I am a philosopher, economist or a sociologist who may be better qualified to undertake such a study. I am simply an art historian, editor and curator who took interest in the photographs of Auschwitz and Birkenau taken by lens-based artist Shruti Mukherjee during her visit to Poland in 2018. I thought of curating an exhibition of those photographs and proposed it to my artists friends in Guwahati, Assam, a North- Eastern State of India. They readily agreed and it was held there with the support of the Guwahati Artists Guild. Two contemporary artists Sheersha Mukherjee, Nikhileswar Baruah from Guwahati responded to the photographic images and the Auschwitz tragedy by putting up their own works in the show. The show was very well received. I started corresponding with the Auschwitz Memorial Museum and other Holocaust Museums like United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Amsterdam Museum of Holocaust, Jewish Museum, Berlin etc for an exhibition of art works done by the prisoners at Auschwitz and in other concentration camps. Their response was overwhelming. A second exhibition along with a seminar titled Aesthetics after Auschwitz was planned in collaboration with the Centre for Modern European languages and literatures, Bhasha Bhavan (CMELLCS), Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan in March 1999. The invitations were about to be sent out for the event but Pandemic started and the University was closed indefinitely.

Lockdown prompted me to inquire further into the question: why did Theodor Adorno said ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ Was there no artistic activities during the Holocaust? The drawings and paintings I received from the Holocaust Museums says otherwise Despite being in the extermination camp, knowing for certain their imminent death in the gas chambers, thousands of amateur and trained artists did drawings and paintings depicting the horrors, tortures, killings, murders, that went on in the camp. Besides, those artists who resisted / evaded arrest and deportation to the camps protested against Fascism through their art works. This truth led me to a larger question, why did Fascism happen and what was the role of the contemporary thinkers and philosophers, especially the highly respected individual philosophers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School?

I am completely ignorant about philosophy. It is difficult to understand the complexities of the philosophical arguments and debates. However, relying on my limited knowledge I wrote the first draft and sent it across to Professor Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, Retired S. N. Banerjee Chair Professor, Department of Political Science, Calcutta University, West Bengal ,India for his comments and suggestions. Professor Datta Gupta was extremely helpful and suggested several leads I could probably follow to build up my arguments about the rise of Fascism in Germany. It was his suggestion that I may focus on the issue of IRRATIONALISM in the German philosophical tradition which helped the rise of Nazi ideology and further suggested me to develop on the visual art segment of the essay.

Arnold Hauser said a long time ago: “A work of art is a challenge; we do not explain it and we adjust ourselves to it. In interpreting it, we draw upon our own aims and endeavours..... Great works of art gives us an interpretation of life which enables us to cope more successfully with the chaotic state of things and to bring from life a better that is a more convincing and more reliable meaning.”

- Arnold Hauser, Philosophy of Art History, 1963.

What challenges does the anti- fascist art pose before us, how does it help us understand the complexities, chaotic, disastrous life- system that evolved in Germany from 1933- 1945? There are two ways of treating the entire genre of anti-fascist art, one, the works of art are an ‘opaque’, formal structure as we are taught in Art Schools by the tradition of the bourgeois art history/historians, a clear iconographic study may glorify the formal qualities and second, a complete rejection of such a study which prohibits in protecting the society, its culture and its institutions. Classicism in art has scarcely any link with the common man and slightest connection with Democracy. Anti fascist art does not represent a particular social/ religious group, it represents wider historical realities conditioned by definite material conditions of life. It is this material condition of existence which becomes a true link to the survival of man. It is free from any ideology of “false consciousness”, the artist is absolutely free from rationalising his motives and aims. The only rationale of his work lies in his struggle for survival and a message to us that life and art defies the irrational and hence, saves mankind from total collapse. Philosophy which has no connection with life becomes irrelevant.

Amit Mukhopadhyay

Introduction Time in every epoch assumes very different contents, characterised by space and movements. Can time be described simply as a succession of events in space, leading towards infinity? Is time oriented differently in philosophy, arts, aesthetics and politics?

Take philosophy, for instance, what would Greek philosophy mean today or Hegelian time for that matter. Would it make any difference to life in the present context? The Greeks thought of natural phenomenon as a whole and not in particulars. It was pure contemplation and the origin of open-air philosophy lies in their innocent investigations of nature. Even though there was an absence of fully formed materialism, the brilliant intuitions of the Greeks and the commonsensical investigations came to an end during the middle Ages. The end of the middle Ages ushered a new age, which we term as Renaissance. It began with in-depth research into the antiquities of its literature, art and philosophy. In brief, the history of the Greeks was the ‘first return’ to our first major civilizational departure, the Renaissance. Why did the Renaissance believe in going back to antiquity? How did Renaissance humanists define the Dark or middle Ages as a separate transitional period? What kind of research led them to believe the different value system etched in history? How did antiquity alter the basic tenets of Renaissance - the idea ‘of man finding the highest place in human thought’, instead of the Church and monarchy?

Humanism was the essence of Renaissance so was the question of values.

Did time move on from the ‘natural philosophy’ of the Greeks to ‘classical German philosophy’, primarily as an abuse of an idea or value? From the idea of the world ‘as a copy of nature’ to the idea of ‘a corruption of the value system transcribed in social relations’? Slavoj Zizek opens the argument of reform in the structure of ‘apolitical social relations of production’. But why take such an unnecessary task of reform in the apolitical social relation of production?

It is certainly in stark contrast to the idea of Jürgen Habermas, articulated in his thesis on the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in a given historical period, that analyses the rise of a bourgeois class in England and France after the Industrial Revolution. He argues for definite political reform in the changing production system, which is close to Karl Marx’s idea of the political reform that exists in every society dominated by value production; values that transform every product into a social marker. The product of labour or the substance of value should look as natural and have the striking capacity to look like the ‘ne plus ultra’ of human history, a surplus quality of man which transforms one form of society into another - the finest example being, the transition of the Middle Ages into a period of modernity.

Frederic Jameson cites two different notions of modernity, which he claims to be the interplay between two different categories of modernity - the material base, and the other, the cultural superstructure, where we usually deal with issues such as values, norms and ideals linked with issues of democracy, equality, social justice, emancipation and so on; all that is related to Enlightenment. But Jameson also argues that the two categories complement each other and the birth of modernism is a complex combination of both.

In case of an over spill ,either of the two could lead to the erasure of values which may in turn lead to total disjuncture in the political system as well.

Rational/Anti-Rational/Post Rational: The withering away of reason.

The Middle Ages subordinated reason to faith and philosophy to religion. It was Thomas Aquinas who proclaimed faith to be rooted in reason. Yet he meant this with reference to the divine and not with reference to secular logic.

Whereas, the philosophy of the new age, shaped in the era of bourgeois revolution, rejected the views generated by a stagnant feudal society. And it was Rene Descartes’ radical departure that provided a new rationalist idea: “The ability to reason and to distinguish truth from error- which is usually called commonsense or Reason- is natural, equal to all men.”

- George Lukacs- (The Young Hegel, 1954), 1975, Translated by Rodney Livingstone.

This was more or less the rationalist declaration against medieval mysticism.

Rationalists arrived at the concept of ‘pure reason’ independent of our thought, which by its character was able to overcome the impact of subjective feelings and experiences of the world. Locke wrote: “Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything.”

- John Locke- An essay concerning Human Understanding, Vol 2, 1974.

Emmanuel Kant accepted the concept of pure reason but rejected its rationalist interpretation. Kant was more for inclusion of human experience in the formulation of reason, without which he thought man was bound to commit theoretical error.

1

Hegel, on the other hand, was responsible for moving the dialectical cart from an apparent pre-Socratic stasis to a movement of form and in the process, he gave a definite content to the already existing idea of the formlessness dominated by the mythological state of mind.

Despite all the facts available to us of the Hegelian time, we are probably faced with the possibility of his reconciled /compromised world view leading to universalization of reason: all that exists is the same, the differences done away with. Theoretically speaking, his thesis about a gradual transition of a State system yielded to the Irrationalist’s interpretation of dialectics. Hegel’s attitude to the French Revolution exposes his subjective thinking and at the same time, his metaphysical opposition to the revolution. He termed it as a ‘glorious sunrise’ and for him the revolution was as if the ‘divine was really reconciled with the world’. Was Hegel’s journey a story of a philosophical nomad - a tale of ideological migration and reverse migration; from metaphysical to the real, actual to the ideal, reason to unreason and logic to illogic, rational to the irrational?

In Germany, Schelling instigated the attack against rationalism founded by Descartes. This attack subsequently assumed its supreme form during the time of Hitler, with the rejection of all progressive bourgeois as well as leftist philosophies.1 Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries is the classic land caught in the contradiction between rationalism and irrationalism. Industry and commerce grew profusely at the end of the middle Ages and at the start of the modern period, yet Germany lacked the unity of ‘the anti-feudal people’ that had boosted the French Revolution.

1 After the election in 1932, Hitler’s fate dwindled. Capitalist system almost collapsed. People close to him were seen begging in the metro and underground rail. On the other hand, the industrialists, bankers, were worried over the rise of the socialist ideology in Germany. Former Chancellor, Fan Papen took the initiative to call a meeting of the Capitalists in Cologne. Everyone present in the meeting including Hindenberg chose to select Hitler as Chancellor on 31st January, 1933.During Hitler’s reign, there was increase in Germany’s weapons industry, women were ordered to go back kitchen... The main purpose of Hitler was to promote active propaganda against the communists. Hitler took it upon to sow the seeds of unknown happy days.

Rahul Sankrittayan- Manab Samaj, 1st and 2nd volume, 1973. Edited by Subodh Chowdhury, Translated from the original Bengali by this author.

2

Caught between the declining feudal era and the just emerging industrial capitalism, and a little later, the Great Depression, Germany produced a class of vagabonds, a broad stratum of which, declined into the lowest social and political class. As a result, social space fell into a dualism of ‘subject-object’ Cartesian logic and Kantian transcendental space. It was a battle of the real and the sublime, an EGO and a non-EGO - the Cartesian subject taking up a position to speak of the object or becoming a participant in the activities of producing an appropriate representational space for man. What happened was that between the protracted battles of these two binaries, the collective subject was eliminated. The loss of cogito was the result of the loss of the rationality of the social space and subsequently in all spheres in human thought and action.

What defined the logic of irrationalism, how can we understand this phenomenon, by which criteria or human action/emotion? Anger and fear are the two major contexts where the irrational part of the character structure comes into play. In such circumstances it could be true of all human beings in any given situation. But in the context of Germany and of the Great Depression period, we can see an alliance formed between the ‘LITTLE MAN’ and the Great Leader or Dictator.2 What do we see in early 20th century Germany after the collapse of reason? We certainly live in a social and political space, outmanoeuvred by illogical time; it was the period of a tragic time and space inscribed in the social body. So what did irrationalism do to the people of Germany? Firstly, there was complete loss of security among people, which threatened their lives. On the other hand, it provided a false sense of security, an illusion of social autonomy and intellectual superiority over others.3

2 Aditya Nigam borrows the term from Wilhelm Reich and goes on to argue that the revolt of the ‘little man’ itself could not have led to the rise of the Right, without the support of the Capital to channelize the revolt against the Left and Left- of- centre politics.

3 It must be said that Lukacs has consistently criticised all philosophical developments after Marx as looming over to the trait of irrationalism, towards mysticism and racism, thereby layinga platform not only for retrograde political movements in general but also which ultimately lead to Fascism. He says in a lecture in 1948:“It must be shown that from Nietzsche via Simmel , Spengler , Heidegger, etc, a direct line leads to Hitler....”

Speech at Wroclaw Conference , 1948, cited in Modern Quarterly, Vol 4, No 3, ( Summer 1949)

3

Caricature of Hermann Göring detail with text of Gestapo reports 2,000,000 Jews executed, Heil Hitler by Arthur Szyk (1894-1951), We're Running Short of Jews (1943), New York, (Cropped) Credit: Commons, Wikimedia.org

4

The Question Of Superiority And Domination

Ever since the Renaissance, when human powers of reason stamped its authority over nature, the ‘cosmocentric’ themes in philosophy and science often clashed with the ‘anthropocentric’ themes in social and political thought.

It was Walter Benjamin who voiced the idea that 19th century industrial capitalism could be constructed through the suppression, domination of mythical forms which led to new forms of heteronomy and domination, thus leading to alienation from nature.4 Adorno understood this transformation and said: “The more relentlessly socialization commands all moments of human, inhuman immediacy, the smaller the capacity of man to recall that the web has evolved, and the more irrestible its natural its natural appearance. The appearance is reinforced as the distance between human history and Nature keeps growing, nature turns into an irresistible Parable of imprisonment.”

- Theodor Adorno- Negative Dialectics, 1966, Translated by E. B. Ashton, 1973.

For Adorno, the problem of the relationship between man and his world, between man and nature is agonisingly close to both the cosmocentric and anthropocentric ideas.

4 Introduction to Adorno’s ‘Idea of Natural History’ BY Bob Hulot Kentor: “ ..... Philosophy has no other measure than the collapse of illusion...it is a process of opening up concepts whose contents is memory of suffering.”

5

The contradiction was resolved in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in the philosophy of Enlightenment thinkers: Voltaire, Lessing, Goethe, Diderot and others. Karl Marx regarded man in the context of the process of historical development and in his relation with nature and social environment.

For him, ‘nature exists as a bond with man’ and as the foundation of his own human existence. Alienation from nature can happen only when there is rupture

in

the

relationship.

Technological

domination

does

have

a

dehumanizing effect, as it is often said that the relationship between man, nature and technology is barbaric to the extent that any overspill may lead to barbarism of humans over humans. Nature, in such a situation stands as a silent witness to such horrific violence. Otherwise, in extraordinary circumstances, nature may introduce and remind man of its powers of hostility and destruction. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno put forth an argument of domination: the domination of nature by man, and domination of humans by humans. This idea of domination opens up the fundamental principle out of which the whole of modern thought and human society developed: the recognition of the primitive content of all reality.

Domination of any kind does provoke a sense of fear about the finality of fate and a tragic sense of history hovers over the social time. This perception is well received.

But the question remains,despite the authors’ fear of the domination over nature

by

man,

were

they

driven

more

strongly

by

the

fear

of

de-mythologization of nature as God? In a larger context can we say: Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalised?5

5 The idea of Natural History- A lecture by Theodor w. Adorno, 1932, Praxis International, Vol 4, no 2, Translated by Bob Hulot –Kentor, 1984. .” “ ....the concept of nature that is dissolved is one that, if translated into standard philosophical terminology , would come closest to the concept of myth. The concept is always vague....it is meant what has always been. What is fatefully arranged predetermined being underlies history and appears in history? What is delimited by those expressions is what i mean by ‘nature’. The question that arises is that of the relationship of the nature to what we understand by history, where history means that the mode of conduct established by tradition that is characterised primarily by the occurrence of the qualitatively new; it is movement that does not play itself out in mere identity, mere reproductionof what has always been , but rather one which the new occurs; it is movement that gains its true character through what appears in it as new.”

6

But Horkheimer and Adorno leave a trace of eclecticism, a curious mix of idealism and materialism when they said: “Myth

is

already

enlightenment

and

enlightenment

reverts

to

mythology.”

- Max Horkeheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Translated by Edmund Jephcott, 2002.6 This position creates a spectacular dialectical double perspective. On the one hand, they talk of secularising the outdated rituals and religious practices which contributed to the process of Enlightenment and surprisingly makes a reverse travel to mythology. What exactly were they suggesting? That any qualitative fundamental change is not possible at all and that we all are trapped in the mythic fate and the tradition of irrationalism? Horkheimer and Adorno’s intriguing statement that Enlightenment reverts to mythology, leaves us with the thought that the concept of fascist totalitarianism is synonymous with the totalitarianism of the Enlightenment. Robert Hullot-Kentor makes a provocative statement: “Adorno’s philosophy took shape in recognition of the reversion of society to the primitive...”

- Robert Hullot-Kentor, ‘Back to Adorno’, In’Things beyond Resemblance’, Collected Essays on Theodor Adorno, 2006, an Interview with Falio Akcelurd, in the ‘New Social Environment’, 2008.

6 ‘Postmodern an Introduction’- in Postmodernism – A Reader, by Thomas Docherty, 1993.

“A major source of contemporary debates around the post modern is to be found in the work of the Frankfurt School, most specifically in the text proposed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in 1944, Dialectic of Enlightenment, a work ‘written when the Nazi terror was in sight’. This work prefigures some of Francois Lyotard’s later questioning of Enlightenment..... It is worth indicating in passing that it is Adorno and Horkheimer, not Lyotard , who propose that ENLIGHTENMENT IS TOTALITARIAN.

7

Hullot-Kentor uses the concept of regression and Adorno’s view of the world and his formulation of the philosophy of Negative Dialectics. Jürgen Habermas appreciated the analysis of Enlightenment but at the same time viewed the treatment of reason as a Nietzschean gesture, a dialectical reversal rather than progress.

Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in exile, opens with a ruthless assessment/comment of the modern West: “The Enlightenment understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant.”

- Max Horkeheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944, Translated by Edmund Jephcott, 2002.

Did this exiled text anticipate what was coming? If they knew that such a thing was coming, philosophically speaking, where was the preparation to oppose what was coming? Or were they concerned only in representing a phenomenal form of a real world? Philosophy must proceed from actual struggles of the contradictions of the ideal and the real conditions of existing life. Within this act of explaining the actual struggle to the world, lies the possibility of visualising the transcending quality of rationalised society. The philosopher while making observations of the real world or a society he lives in, takes the role of a critic, which in turn, is actually the product of the same world/society. Suppose Adorno and Horkheimer failed to find a realistic alternative to the existing system or state, wouldn’t their capacity to negate it justify the same? The critic or the philosopher can proceed from any theoretical premise and then develop the actuality inherent in existing consciousness.

8

What was their real problem - absence of a dynamic party or a political organisation or movement or not knowing the “next step forward”?

Adorno complaining that Marx and Hegel did not live in a world like “ours” was not enough for their “stillness” in theoretical formulation leave aside the “praxis” part! Adorno and Horkheimer insisted on situating themselves historically in terms of their own position, locating their lives in a particular situation and wishing a return of Hegel and Marx in their physical presence to rescue them from the chaos and mess which Hitler created.

What

is

perplexing

about

Adorno

and

Horkheimer’s

philosophical positioning is perhaps they think history is dead for ever, it is not in a position to ‘supply’ further ontological schema and there is no scope for a new move forward. The problem is history cannot autonomously supply; it depends on the other material reflections. In other words, theory must be tied to practice to reconstruct the ideal to the real as the next historical step. Horkheimer does propose that: “The idea of practice must shine through in everything we write...in whose interest do we write? People might say that our views are just all talk, our own perceptions. To whom shall we say these things?

- The Platypus Review 37, The Third Annual Platypus International Convention, Opening Plenary: The Politics of Critical Theory, April- May, 2011.

Horkheimer is caught in a dilemma while he proposes that their theory does not have content which can relate to the proletariat and thus remains a bad theory. Adorno asks what the meaning of practice is if there is no party, in that case practice can either relapse into solitude or reform. This sounds really strange.

9

Which party he was referring to - the Soviet or the German Communist party and what does he mean by REFORM in Marxist philosophy or in the existing political system?

At the time of writing the exiled text, there was still no breakdown of the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical, historical premise. Even if so, one could take the clue from other philosophical categories, mainly, the category of ethics or morality, evil and good to critique the existing state of consciousness. What was it that they were concerned about? Was it that despite the progress of modern science and society through a rigorous rationalist discourse which promised to liberate people from ignorance, from mythological modes of thought, obscurantism, poverty etc, how could the modern German Society go back to irrationalism of the medieval world and usher in fascist ideology practicing genocide by destructing Reason?

10

Adorno The ‘Gentle Socrates’ Was Adorno a philosopher of the fragment, the particular and the nomad?

Does his dialectical thinking imply a Hegelian sublation rather than a conclusive dialectics based on praxis? It is true that much of Adorno’s analysis of the commodity form was informed by Lukacian analysis of reification (a form of rationalisation), which is reflected in his 1938 essay: ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’ and in Negative Dialectics (1966).

However, he was non-committal in representing the ordinary or proletariat as the subject-object of history; the ordinary or the proletariat did not have a place in his theory. Susan Buck- Morris writes: “Adorno thus considered it possible to accept Lukacs’s dialectical materialism as a cognitive method only, without embracing the ontological theory of the historical process.”

- Susan Buck-Morris - The Origin of Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute, 1977.

Frederic Jameson also expressed an opinion that Adorno’s materialism did not include a class analysis or an attempt to be a ‘philosophy of praxis’. Marx believed that theory or philosophy must ‘seize the masses’ by which he probably indicated that the value of theory must be worth its reception among the people or the working class. Thus, theory, by its very essence, should have an intrinsic quality to be rooted to the needs, emotions, intentions, aspirations and dreams of people, who can relate to it and accept it. Theory standing as an external force or as an alien substance becomes an ‘imposition’, rather than an inclusion, else it looks like a “bottled up message”.

11

Adorno‘s own statement before his death is worth mentioning here: “I am a theoretical human being who views theoretical thinking as lying extraordinarily close to his artistic intentions. It is not as if I have turned away from praxis only recently; my thinking always stood in a rather indirect relationship to practice.”

- Theodor W. Adorno and Gerhard RichterWho is Afraid of the Ivory Tower?

A Conversation with Theodor Adorno, Monatshefte 94.1 (spring), 2002.

How could Adorno resolve the closure of the subject- object in relation to his theses? He was completely aware of the Marxist position and the essential role of philosophy that it cannot be done away without completing its historic task of transforming the particular form of consciousness into a different and higher form. Adorno responded to this Marxist formulation much later while reflecting on the damaged life/’slaughter bench of screaming bodies’: “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.”

- Theodor Adorno- Negative Dialectics, 1966, Translated by E B Ashton, (1973.)

It sounds like a mirror reflection of Marx’s comment that ‘philosophy cannot be abolished without realising it’, with the exception that it is not clear what he was referring to as obsolete. The challenges of the Frankfurt School from 1930’s onwards or to be very specific, during the period of Nazism, was to confront the raging issues of industrial capitalism and its consequences: Racism, irrationalism, open declaration against anything modern and communist in character. The Jewish question, the return to the rural/idyllic nature working as ‘safety net’, secured in an imaginary world without the knowledge of the prevailing high consumerism and popular culture instead, they distanced themselves from the empirical facts, the impending catastrophe.

12

They lost the battle of narratives to the battle of ideas. Franz Newmann, in his critical assessment of the situation remarked that Nazism is not something which happened accidentally and was arrived at in a day.

It was a long drawn out process of ideological conflict relying too much on the hierarchy of history and society instead of giving chance to a society or state system to grow on its own specificity and difference, thus obscuring the complex causes that leads to such a crisis.

Nazism, is in fact, a challenge to modernity whose foundation was structured on rationality; it is anti-science, and a direct expression born out of monopoly capitalism. Increasing irrationalism on the whole, over reliance on the idealistic philosophy, the failure of the good dialectic - this is how one can understand the causes for the rise of fascism. Perry Anderson opines that the dictatorship of ‘Fascism was the only historical solution of Capital to the dangers of Labour’, Fascist counter–revolution is the one aspect of the domination of not just man over man, but the domination of one social-political system over the

other.

German

Three

things

society,

a

were

happening simultaneously

meticulously

procedural

in

methodology

adopted towards an unprecedented violence and erasure of human lives

called

AUSCHWITZ

which

pales

medieval

barbarism .Simultaneously Artists’ protest against the ideology of National Socialism reflected in their works a cultural and political manifesto/document, and the individual brilliance of the theoretical articulation of Frankfurt School scholars. The artists’ works mark a different

world-

view

and

a representational value of

our life-

system which rose as an alternative ideology. But generally speaking the Frankfurt School failed as an Institution. Perry Anderson is ruthless in his estimation, he writes: “The hidden hallmark of Western Marxism as a whole is that it is a product of defeat.”

- Perry Anderson-Considerations of Western Marxism, 1976.

13

Images from the exhibition: Memories of Auschwitz: Site as History, Eye as witness, Curated by Amit Mukhopadhyay, in 2019, organised with the support of and held at Guwahati Artists’ Guild, Guwahati, Assam.

Photographs of Auschwitz and Birkenau by Shruti Mukherjee

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

Creative responses by Sheersha Mukherjee - Digital Flex

22

23

24

Installation: Humanity Goodbye by Nikhileswar Baruah

25

Photograph of the Gas Chamber by Pawel Sawicki, Auschwitz Memorial

26

Jan Komski: Seek and you will find, US, 1972-80.

Memories Of Auschwitz: Site As History - Eye As Witness Credit: Auschwitz- Birkenau Memorial Museum Jerzy Potrzebowski: Awaiting for transportation to a gas chamber, Poland, 1950.

Memories Of Auschwitz: Site As History - Eye As Witness Credit: Auschwitz- Birkenau Memorial Museum 27

Wincenty Gawron: March to Abbruch, Kl Auschwitz, 1942.

Memories Of Auschwitz: Site As History - Eye As Witness Credit: Auschwitz- Birkenau Memorial Museum Francis Reisz: Transportation to a Gas Chamber Memories Of Auschwitz: Site As History - Eye As Witness Credit: Auschwitz- Birkenau Memorial Museum 28

Anderson’s remark seems like a sweeping generalisation because the problem with Adorno’s work is that it is so varied which is difficult to bring them under one roof and then employ the analytical tool to uncover all the subtle nuances of its implications.

Yet, it can be safely said that certain propositions of Adorno defy logic despite his brilliant analysis and opposition to fascist totalitarianism. The problem lies in his refusal to accept a particular political theory which has the potential to counter and break open the prevailing consciousness or to say it more lucidly, in his lack of understanding or refusal to accept the importance of practice as an integral part of theory or philosophy, he becomes a prisoner of a ‘suffocating memory’ of destruction or destabilisation of society, leading to helplessness and despair.

This is all the more evident in the discussion between Adorno and Horkheimer in 1956, titled: Towards a New Manifesto. It was an audacious and funny attempt to replicate Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto written in 1848. Andrew Feenberg rightly points out that we should try to understand it against the background of Marx and Lukacs’s interpretation of the theorypractice relation. Feenberg goes on to say:

29

“Their dialogue is a strange document. The pretension to update the Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels in 1848 is astonishing, particularly given the stillness of much of their talk....The dialogue returns constantly to the question of what to say in a time when nothing can be done.

The Communist movement is dead, killed off by its own grotesque success in Russia and China. Western societies are better than the Marxist alternative that nevertheless symbolically represents an emancipated future.”

- Andrew Feenberg - Waiting for History: Theatre of the absurd’, Published in the Platypus Review 37. The Third Annual Platypus International Convention, Opening Plenary: The Politics of Critical Theory, April-May, 2011 Supplement to issue 37, July 2011.

And also refer to: - Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeheimer-‘Towards a New Manifesto’, March 1956, Translated by New Left Review.65, Sept- Oct, 2010, no 33.

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Irrataionalism’s Double Disorder “Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final state of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

- TheodorAdorno - Prisms Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, 1967, Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson and Samuel Weber (1983).

In the brokenness of time, the move from the rational Cartesian man ushered in a world of suffering and pain, a savage irrationality of the Nazi conscience.

Did Adorno hear the groans of the wounded and dying... the hysterical weeping of the survivors? Was he making only a statement, a memory stock- taking of facts, a statement void of emotion? Let us recall what the poet of lamentation wrote about Jerusalem 2,500 years ago after the conquest and rape at the hands of Babylonians, which at that time felt like the Holocaust by the survivors: “How lonely sits the city That was full of people How like a widow she has become....

She weeps bitterly in the night, Tears on her cheeks, Among all her lovers She has none to comfort her.”

Lament is not just a form of mourning, it is an existential wail.

It is a wailing of the human soul, it articulates the inarticulate, Tears become ideas. It is refusal to settle for the ways things are and is an action of “restless hope”. Lamentation violates Theodor Adorno’s warning: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’.

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Alex Teplish: Aron’s Story- Graphic Novel on the memory of the second world war, exhibited in the LAND show Curated by Amit Mulkhopadhyay in 2014, Credit: Alex Teplish

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Alex Teplish: Aron’s Story- Graphic Novel on the memory of the second world war, exhibited in the LAND show Curated by Amit Mulkhopadhyay in 2014, Credit: Alex Teplish

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The First Disorder The idea of barbarism was voiced by Hitler in his interview to Hermann Rauschning, his one time confidant. As recorded by Rauschning, Hitler says: “We must be brutal. We must regain a clear conscience about brutality.

Only then we can drive out the tenderness from our people...Do I propose to exterminate entire nationalities? Yes, it will add up to that...I naturally have the right to destroy millions of men of inferior races who increase like vermin...Yes, we are barbarians. It is an honourable title.”

- Max Weber – Rauschning’s phoney conversation with Hitler, An update- Journal of Historical Review, Volume 6, no 4,Winter, 1985-1986.7 The first task of Hitler after assuming power in 1934 was to change the cultural narrative as it existed in Germany then. He felt that Germany was too open a nation with an amalgamation of multiple ideas leading to democratic artistic practices. At the end of the First World War, a humiliated Germany was quietly preparing for retribution. Hitler came into power in 1933 and with him the narrative of barbarism and cultural hegemony .He realised that he must capture what matters most to human lives, culture or visual arts in particular. A political system that lasted only twelve years could inflict an enduring damage to the collective consciousness of a nation. From 1933 to 1945, culture became the key word for the regimen to operate and create havoc in the minds of men.

7 Hermann Rauschning’s conversations with Hitler was first published in USA IN 1940 as the ‘Voice of Destruction’. This version was contested by Otto Wagener in his book: ‘Hitler- Memoir of a confidant’, in 1965.

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Sheersha Mukherjee: Speech: an Act?, Digital Print, 2014. First exhibited in the LAND Show in 2014, Curated by Amit Mukhopadhyay

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Art was considered one of the most important elements in building the Reich and the New Nazi Man. Artistic expression and political aims became synonymous.

Hitler assertively said: “Art is a noble mission. Those who have been chosen by destiny to reveal the soul of a people. To let it speak in stone or ring in sounds, live under a powerful, almighty and all pervading force...art has all times been the expression of an ideological and religious experience and at the same time the expression of a political will.”

- Peter Adam- The Arts of the Third Reich, 1992 The main aim and task of the third Reich was to impose a National Socialist ideology of life, a philosophy which embraced the narrative of the blue blood Aryans which was exactly the opposite of the dark Jew whom he considered as cultural parasites and incapable of any higher idealism, then he went on to link the Jewishness with Marxism: “The bourgeois world is Marxist... Marxism itself plans to transmit the world systematically into the hands of Jewry.’

- Adolf Hitler- Mein Kampf (My Struggle), 1925, Translated by Ralph Manheim, (1998).

As we look back on a century in which more people have suffered and died in war than ever before in human history, we now live in a world no longer innocent about the suffering human beings can inflict on each other. Hitler made explicit through his policies which rested basically on ‘sameness’, the underlying meaning is: “you should be like me. But if you are not like me, remember that I am the centre, the fixed point by which you and rest will be defined.”

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”This is the language of dominant power. In reality, there is no one centre. There never was- except in the delusions of certain dominant philosophies and political systems. The second premise that Hitler held on to is that he considered the ‘other’, the Jews, the Communists, the Romas, the Gays and Lesbians as a threat to National Socialism leading to the foundation of the Death Factory. The ‘other’ defines space, boundaries, time, difference, bodies, cultures, traditions, ideologies and a different ‘History’. To speak of the other is to speak of poverty, of sexuality, of justice, of gender, race and class. It is in the spirit of acknowledgement and acceptance of otherness that human relationships can be built. There is an African saying: “A person is a person through other persons.” It is in the sense of belonging that we live and survive meaningfully in this world.

Hitler erased all the differences, sameness was ordered through exclusion and extermination.

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Hitler’s Strategy Of Artistic Domination The National Socialists brought art to the masses in a unique way to every house, in every work place, ‘orchestra played in factories with the work of Beethoven, theatres were built in small towns and it was no longer meant for a select audience’, the public squares, factories , the tiniest of villages ,Schools, culture reached everywhere. There was celebration of healthy bodies much like Plato’s healthy community in the so-called ideal state in his Republic. After Alfred Rosenberg, Robert Ley took over the leadership of ideological and cultural propaganda among the German people. In 1889 , Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlaine wrote a book called ‘The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century’ in which he argued for a building of a ‘newly shaped...and...Especially deserving Aryan races’. It was used to justify the promotion of ideas about German racial superiority and for any oppressive action taken against the members of “inferior population”. The German society was bitterly divided between the Dürer League on the left and pan German League on the right, a call finally came from the pan German league ‘we belong to the master race.

Germany awake’. Paul de Lagarde wrote way back in 1866 “The Germans have a mission for all nations on earth.” The mission was to demolish all differences of thought, theory or practice that indulged in introspection and a search for truth rather than ordered/mechanistic beauty. Rosenberg published his book Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century) in 1933 defending the concept of blood and soil which made him the party’s spokesman. Before that, in 1930, Erwin Piscator’s famous Berlin Theatre Group was not allowed to perform and films by Sergei Eisenstein as well as George Willhelm Pabast’s ‘THREE PENNY OPERA’ (1931) were banned. Rosenberg asserted that the destruction of the art was begun by the Expressionists. Works of Gauguin and Matisse, buildings by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, La Courbusier were attacked, so was the Bauhaus Group led by Walter Gropius.

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Oskar Martin Amorbach: Daily Life, 1941 ( Bought by Hitler) Credit: www.germanartgallery.eu

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Oskar Martin Amorbach: The Sower, 1937.

Credit: www.germanartgallery.eu

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Oskar Martin Amorbach: Evening Peace, 1941. (Bought by Hitler) Credit: www.germanartgallery.eu

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Oskar Martin Amorbach: They Carry Death, 1942. (Bought by Hitler) Credit: www.germanartgallery.eu

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The majority of the German people were suffering from alienation, feeling of not being able to comprehend the ethos of modern anxiety and suffering, the big city syndrome of no sense of belonging in the central scheme of things, even a sense of being uprooted from the provincial cosiness. They appealed for a ‘return to the pastoral life and to the stillness of nature’. The main purpose of Nazi artists were to use the pictorial balance , calm and order, while building up a rational construct of classical clarity. These were considered as NATIONAL TRUTHS of Nazi Art. This is what Hitler said while opening the degenerate exhibition in Haus der Kunst: “....The Germany of the 20th century is.......newly awakened to a reaffirmation of all that is beautiful, strong, and vital. Strength and beauty are the Bugle calls of this new age: clarity and logic command its inspirations.”

- Harry Grosshans Art under a Dictatorship, 1993 Only recently, Russian artist, Smart Mary refuted such claims of classical ideals, she said: “...the cult of the strength and purity leads up to Fascism and segregation.”

- On and off Poster - 2013 ‘The traditional realist painters also felt left out against the modernists who were considered as foreign origin and not German art’. Hitler saw Greek and Roman Art as uncontaminated by Jewish influences. Modern art was seen as act of violence by the Jews against the German spirit. Racial prejudices, philistinism, jealousy among the German artists were rampant. They complained about lack of sale and promotion by the galleries and museums of the German artists. The eminent historian Werner Sombart published his book The Jews and The Economy in 1910 linking Capitalism and Jewishness which became hugely popular.

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Continuing with the idea of deprivation Artur Dinter published his book on The Sin Against Blood in 1918. Hitler just fuelled these feelings, the Jews and the Marxists were thought of as instruments in violating the German race. The first sign of barbarism came in the form of ‘destruction of Oskar Schlemmer’s frescoes in the stairwell of the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1930’.

“At the same time seventy works of modern art by Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokaschka, Lyonel Fieninger and others were taken from the Schlossmuseum in Weimer. But many interpreted these actions as provincial philistinism; few saw the writing on the wall.”

- Peter Adam The Arts of the Third Reich, 1992.

Quarrel between philosophy, poetry, art and politics is actually quite ancient. It all began with Plato, especially with Plato’s proposal to ban poetry from the ideal State. What was the IDEAL STATE for Plato? Why did Plato propose the ban on poetry/art, what was his motivation for this act of apparent barbarism? He formulated this idea in his REPUBLIC, was it simply because the poets and painters enjoyed more prestige in the society and was considered as repositories of ultimate wisdom or because poets were considered as educators of ancient Greece? Or was it because of the power of the tragic poetry and dramas which portrayed ‘distressing’ and ‘negative emotion’?

Thousands of tragedies were written for the tragic festivals, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides wrote between them three thousand tragedies which used to be performed in public squares. Was Plato’s proposal to ban poetry an expression of fear, fear of the power of the PUBLIC attending the festivals who could revolt against the IDEAL STATE? Plato’s proposed ban was just not a war against on art and poetry, it was a political act. Plato was writing at the end of the Peloponnesian war which decided the fate of the ancient world. It was a war between democracy and oligarchy, ‘between an empire and allied nations’.

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Erich Lichtblau: Leskly- A cardigan for half- a- loaf of Bread, Water colour, year unknown.

Credit: Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Holocaust Studies, especially visual Arts.

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Artist Unknown- Death March Credit: Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Holocaust Studies, especially visual Arts.

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Henri Pieck: His Excellency the Minister (Cover page and Preface) Credit: Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Holocaust Studies, especially visual Arts.

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Henri Pieck: Four images from the book ‘BUCHENWALD’, 1945.

Credit: Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Holocaust Studies, especially visual Arts.

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Plato’s city of Athens developed a war phobia that would instil fear and hatred among

the

citizens

regarding

an

imagined

enemy;

a

fear

of

destabilization/subversion of the Ideal State. However, Plato’s city lost the war, and surrendered the cultural values, the Greek tragedies which still enthral us and have come to be termed as CLASSIC. The fact is that Plato’s ideas have been identified with the war-mindedness of Adolf Hitler because both of them proposed a TOTALITARIAN STATE, which ultimately turned into a TRAGIC STATE. But neither Plato nor Hitler could banish poetry/art from the State, culture triumphed finally.

Hitler considered all modernist art as Degenerate and it was a term adopted by the Nazi Regime to describe all of modern art, music, literature and such was banned because it was thought to be Jewish and Communist in nature. The artists who were identified with such art were subjected to sanctions, not allowed to exhibit and in some cases forbidden for creative activities. Dozens of artists faced persecution from Hitler when he pushed DEGENERATE ART out of the Museums.8 In 1937, Goebbels put Adolf Ziegler, in-charge of a six member commission authorised to confiscate from Museums and art collectors throughout the Reich , any remaining art deemed modern, degenerate or subversive... over 5000 works were seized which included works of Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Picasso, Miro, Van Gogh, Matisse among other modern masters.

Avant-Garde artists were both enemies of the State and the German people.

John Kofas argues that during the Great Depression of the 1930’s there was a sharp turn to a discussion of VALUES, that the ultra-nationalists lead by Hitler and formulated by the Nazi theoretician Alfred Rosenberg advocated ethnic cleansing as a means of resting the purity of Aryan race.

8 The first writer to use the term ‘Degenerate’ in connection with art was used by Max Nordau in a novel called “ Entartung’ (Degeneration) published in 1893.

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Most of the Nazi commissioned art works celebrated myths of the cult of the BODY with themes like wars and boxers. The Third Reich manufactured the value system to steer clear the crisis from what went wrong with the POLITICAL ECONOMY. In 1942, a large number of modernist art which included Picasso, Dali, Max Ernst, Klee, Leger, Miro were destroyed in a BONFIRE in the Garden de Paume in Paris. Very few tried to warn or plunge into resistance against his policies and actions.

In 1911, the painter Carl Vinnen published a manifesto protesting against the ‘Modernists’, it was signed by 134 artists. The terms like ‘Degenerate’, ‘Jewish, ‘‘Bolshevik’ was used frequently before 1933 to describe the modernists and leftists, from Kaathe Kollwitz to Ernst Barlach and George Grosz.

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The Alarm Bell Rings: Protests And Revolts Of The Artists.

The November Group The modernists started fighting back. Herwarth Walden’s magazine Der Sturm (The Storm: 1910-1932) became the platform for the modernists to express their concerns. In 1919, the National Gallery, Berlin opened an exhibition of the modernist’s painters of the Bucke (Bridge) and the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) groups along with the works of Braque and Picasso. Most of the leading artists who were practicing during the 1920’s have identified themselves with the Communist Party whom the National Socialists regarded as their main opponent. However, the radically inclined artists in Berlin formed a group during the revolutionary turmoil of 1918, called the Novembergroupe. Its aim was to mix people and art as closely as possible. They believed that their art had a role to play in finding a democratic society and cultivating a new type of human being: “.....Open to every style from cubism to New Objectivity, they challenged the viewing habits of the people. This liberal attitude to different artistic techniques reflected the democratic principles of the young republic whose demise also triggered the end of the group.”

- Alte Jakobstbe, Berlin- Freedom: The Art of the November Group and Isabel Wunsche, Die Novembergruppe, 1918-1935, (2006).

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The group was led by Max Pechstein and Cesar Klein. After the group closed down, it was succeeded by Rote Gruppe, founded in 1924 and it was an organ of the KPD (The German Communist Party).

George Grosz was the Chairman of the group, Rudolf Schilichterü and John Heartfield were it’s Secretaries, it had distinguished members like Otto Dix, Otto Nagel, Edward Lucie- Smith says: “The political and social involvements of the avant-garde artists gave it a great deal of visibility as far as ordinary public was concerned. But as Hitler was shrewd enough to sense, reactions were not always positive... The avant-garde might identify itself with the ‘workers’, but it was still suspected of being elitist. It was equated with the garish new urban culture that sprung up in Germany since 1918.”

- Edward Lucie-Smith- Art of the 1930’s (The Age of Anxiety), 1985.

Dresden Group Philosophy flourished during the inter-war years as people reached to open their minds and ways of thinking. The Expressionist movement flourished in Germany at this time but had its roots with the Die Brücke movement in 1909.

The Dresden Group included artists like Erich Heckel, Lyonel Feininger and Ernst Ludwig.

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Creator(s): Heartfield, John (1891-1968) Title/Date: Adolf, der Ubermensch : Schluckt Gold und redet Blech, 1932 Journal Title: A-I-Z : die Arbeiter-illustrierte Zeitung aller Länder Credit Line: Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S194) Copyright Notice: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Rights Holder: Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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Creator(s): Heartfield, John (1891-1968) Title/Date: Krieg und Leichen : die letzte Hoffnung der Reichen, 1932 Journal Title: A-I-Z : die Arbeiter-illustrierte Zeitung aller Länder Credit Line: Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S194) Copyright Notice: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Rights Holder: Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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Creator(s): Heartfield, John (1891-1968) Title/Date: Prinz und Arbeiter in einer Partei?, 1932 Journal Title: A-I-Z : die Arbeiter-illustrierte Zeitung aller Länder Credit Line: Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S194) Copyright Notice: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Rights Holder: Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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Diego Rivera: Hitler, Lithograph, 1933. ( It is a print of the 'HITLER' panel from a mural made by Diego Rivera in 1933 for the New Yorker's School in New York.This mural "Portraits of America', was destroyed not long ago after its creation.)

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Albeiter – Illustrierte- Zeitung or AIZ (The Workers Pictorial Newspaper) John Heartfield’s Photomontages It was pictorial news paper published between 1924 to 1933 in Berlin. After Hitler assumed power in 1933it went into exile in Prague and later in Paris till 1938. It first appeared in 1921 with images and report of the newly formed Soviet Russia. The first report of the German proletariat was published in 1922.The paper received valuable contributions from Kaathe Kollwitz, George Grosz, Maxim Gorky and Bernard Shaw. But the important contribution came from John Heartfield’s photomontages savagely criticising the Nationalist Socialism. Heartfield’s ant-fascist collages and anti-Nazi art appeared on all corner newsstands all over Berlin.

“Emerging from the extremism of Dada, Heartfield produced one of the most sustained and richest bodies of visual montages to offer increasingly satirical critiques of Nazi Germany...his perspectives turn the photographs into a blend of political essay and the political cartoon or caricature.”

- G. Clarke- The Photograph: A visual and cultural History, 1997.

The exceptional stories of resistance – Art of the Holocaust by Felix Nussbaum ,Bedrich Fritta, David Friedmann. Gyule Zilzer, Lea Grundig, Zeev Porath (Wilhelm Ochs) The pictures of Felix Nussbaum from OSNABRÜCK stand out among the New Schalichkeit works of the period after 1930. Of Jewish descent, this German painter emigrated for good in 1933.Between 1940-1944, living under terrible threat while he was living in Brussels; he did a series of moving pictures based on this situation. One of these shows the artist with the compulsory yellow star David and Jewish identity card (1943).Nussbaum’s Brussel’s self portrait with Felicia Platek is a moving allegory of the power of erotic instinct of self-preservation. Besides an allegory of constant threat, the daily sensory attacks, frightening bad news is symbolised by the anti- Semitic political smear –sheet of the German occupying powers, Le Soir, lying on the floor.

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During the stay in Brussels, Nussbaum was trying to depict the nightmares, the terror of isolation, and a sense of being at the mercy of others. The motif of a bare tree with pruned branches became a frequent cipher in Nussbaum’s works. The artist leaves a shocking testimony of loneliness and a desperate situation of helplessness in his self portrait with his niece Marianne. Torn between a sense of fear and at the same time a will to live, Nussbaum awaited his fate in his hiding place. His dark premonitions, expressed in The Damned, only proved him right: in 1944, Nussbaum and Platek were tracked down and arrested. The last deportation train took them to death chambers of AUSCHWITZ.

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Felix Nussbaum: The Damned, oil on canvas, 1943/44, 101x 153 cms, Credit: Felix Nussbaum- Haus Osanabruck. Loan from the Niedersachsische Sparkassentifung. Photographer: Christian Grovermann

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Felix Nussbaum: ‘ Evening( unfinished)”, Self portrait with Felka Platek, 1942,oil on canvas, 87x72 cms.Photographer- Christian Grovermann, Credit: Felix Nussbaum- Haus Osnabruck, Loan from the Nieddersachsische- Sparkassenstifung. Photographer: Christian Grovermann.

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Felix Nussbaum: Fear -1941, oil on canvas, 51x39.5 cms. Credit: Museum quartier Osanabruck, Felix- Nussbaum- Haus, Photographer: Christian Grovermann.

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Bedrich Fritta Bedrich Fritta worked as an illustrator and graphic designer before the war in Prague. He devoted himself to political caricature for the satirical magazine Simplicus.

Drawings of Fritta were produced between 1942 and 1944 in the THERESIENSTADT GHETTO. The fortress of Theresienstadt in Prague was made into a ghetto in late 1941. Around 140,000 Jews from central and Western Europe were interned before being deported to Auschwitz and other death camps.

Among the other tasks, artists detained were to produce propaganda material for the Nazi regime. However, in secret drawings he captured the hardships of actual life in the Ghetto. Fritta’s large ink drawings and sketches numbering more than 200 were discovered in the Ghetto. Fritta’s works has been for a long time regarded as a historical document. But examining his works, it reveals his aesthetic sensibilities through which he interpreted and commented on the Ghetto life. The works are a testimony of his extraordinary artistic quality and technical skill. Fritta was finally deported to Auschwitz where he died of exhaustion. Johana, his wife died of typhus in the ghetto and his son survived and was later adopted by his friend Leo Haas.9

9 During the second world war, a group of left wing German exiles in Mexico established the anti- Nazi publishing house El Libero Libre ( The Free Book) in 1942. They published El Libro negro del terror nazi en Europa, (The black book of Nazi Terror in Europe), a collection of documentary photographs and accounts of Nazi atrocities written by the refugees. El Libro negro also included small sized reproductions of original drawings and prints.

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Bedrich Fritta: Courtyard in the Sudetan Barracks, Terezin,1943, Hand Drawing, Thomas Fritta- Haas, permanent loan to the Jewish Museum, Berlin.

Credit: The Jewish Museum, Berlin.

Bedrich Fritta: A Transport leaves the Ghetto, Terezin, 1942-43, Hand Drawing, Thomas Fritta – Haas, permanent loan to the Jewish Museum, Berlin.

Credit: The Jewish Museum, Berlin.

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Bedrich Fritta: Sitting figures under a tree, Terezin, 1943- 44, Hand Drawing, Thomas Fritta- Haas, permanent loan to the Jewish Museum, Berlin.

Credit: The Jewish Museum, Berlin.

Bedrich Fritta: Rest of the old, Terezin, 1943-44, Hand Drawing, Thomas Fritta – Haas, permanent loan to the Jewish Museum, Berlin.

Credit: The Jewish Museum, Berlin.

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David Friedmann David Friedmann was born in 1893 in Mashrisch, Ostrau, Austria-Hungary (today Ostrava, Zechia). He studied etching with Hermann Struck and painting with Louis Corinth. He painted some of the important histories of modern world surviving the two world wars. His flourishing career came to an end in 1933. The Nazis targeted his art and him; finally in 1938 he fled with his family to Prague. He depicted fate as a refugee in Prague, as a prisoner in Lodz Ghetto and in the Auschwitz sub-camp, Gleiwitz1.His little daughter Mirjam and his wife Mathilde were murdered in Auschwitz. Despite his personal loss, Friedmann showed to the world the ruthless persecution, torture, inhumanity as practiced by the Nazis. He could never erase the memories of forced labour, torture, killings and the Death March through his artistic creations which he called: ‘Because they were Jews!’

Miriam Friedmann Morris- ‘The Nazis failed to destroy the artist David Friedmann’, Diaspora, Newsletter, July, 2020.

Gyule Zilzer Gyule Zilzer was a Hungarian-American artist who studied at the Royal Academy of Arts, Budapest and at the Hans Hoffman School of Art in Munich. In 1932, he published a portfolio of Lithograph called: “Gas Attack”. From 1938 to 1948, he worked as a production designer. In Paris, he worked for the French magazine Clarte and daily newspaper L’ humanite which belonged to the Communist Party. His portfolio Gaz, is a collection of works protesting against the use of Gas as a form of warfare against civilian population. His aim was to criticise the cruelty of the Nationalist Socialist Party. Zilzer belonged to the expressionist genre of art, protested as strongly as possible against the Fascist ideology.

Shaul Greenstein - “The artist who forewarned the Dangers of the Nazis,” Take a look at the incredible treasures from the archive of the Hungarian Jewish artist, Gyula Zilzer, in Diaspora Newsletter, April, 2018.

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Gyle Zilzer: Gaz Portfolio of 24 Lithographs (Cover Page) Credit: Janos F. Keseru, Feoli Fine Art, Great Barrington, Mass ,USA

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Gyle Zilzer: 1and 2 Lithographs from Gaz Portfolio Credit: Janos F. Keseru, Feoli Fine Art, Great Barrington, Mass ,USA

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Gyle Zilzer: 3 and 4 Lithographs from Gaz Portfolio Credit: Janos F. Keseru, Feoli Fine Art, Great Barrington, Mass ,USA

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Gyle Zilzer: 5 and 6 Lithographs from Gaz Portfolio Credit: Janos F. Keseru, Feoli Fine Art, Great Barrington, Mass ,USA

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David Friedmann: Lying Prisoner, Liegender Haftling, Charcoal- 1945.

Credit: Miriam Friedmann Morris

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David Friedmann: To an Unknown Concentration Camp, Charcoal, 1945.

Credit: Miriam Friedmann Morris

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David Friedmann: Death March from camp Glawitz to camp Blechhammer, oil, 1947.

Credit: Miriam Friedmann Morris

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David Friedmann: A Few Seconds before Execution, 1964, 24”x18”, Charcoal.

Credit: Miriam Friedmann Morris

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Zilzer’s Gaz Portfolio of 1932, contained 24 Lithographs and an introduction by the famous writer and intellectual Romain Rolland.

Romain Rolland while referring to the chemical warfare maintained that: “.........will carry greater destruction than did the Black Plague of the14th century....It will consume certain forms of European Civilization ....mostly urban culture.... No way exists of escaping war. I believe human insanity irremediable.

But this is no way except the handful of rational men from standing from it not for safety at least for self-respect...I can reassure those who fear the end of human race. The life of the beast is bound to its body. It has already been wasted a hundred times. It will survive the pestilence as it has survived others, but it will be subdued and once more driven back many centuries. This is its manner of progress. Its tenacity to live again counterbalances its frenzy to die.”

- Romain Rollaind—Introduction to the Gaz Portfolio, 1932.

Lea Grundig Lea Grundig was born in Dresden, Germany in 1906. She was a painter and printmaker. Lea was a dedicated communist who created anti- fascists works documenting and protesting conditions under Nazi rule in Dresden. She was first arrested in 1936 but soon released, however she was arrested again in1938 and sentenced for two years in the Dresden Gestapo prison. Lea joined the German Association of Revolutionary Artists, a group that regarded art as weapon of class struggle. She addressed the grave situation of the working class, documented the terrors of the Holocaust. She relentlessly denounced Fascism as ‘insanity and blindness’ through her Etchings. Her husband, Hans also an artist and a communist somehow acquired an Etching press which they used to create series of prints against Fascist Germany and circulate them.

Produced between 1933 to 1937, Lea’s etchings became more and more polemical in its opposition to Hitler.

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Lea Grundig: The Tank, 1936, Etching on heavy white wove paper,Signed and dated,titled lower center, numbered 23/30, and inscribed “Kreig droht”, lower left, 91/2x 10 inches, from the series ‘War Threatens’, WV 85.

Credit: Galerie St. Eteinne, New York

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Lea Grundig: The Exodus Begins, from the series ‘Under the Swastika’, 1934, Etching on paper.

Credit: Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections,Purchased with funds from the Edmundson Art Foundation.

Photo credit: Rich Sanders

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Lea Grundig: Children play war, Plate 4 from the series, ‘Under the Swastika’, Drypoint on paper, 1934. Credit: Des Moines Art Center permanent collections, purchased with funds from the Edmundson Art Foundation.

Photo credit: Rich Sanders

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Lea Grundig: War Threatens, Plate 1 from the series ‘Under the Swastika’, 1934, Drypoint onpaper, Credit: Des Moines Art Center permanent collections,purchased with the funds from the Edmundson Art Foundation.

Photo credit: Rich Sanders

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Zeev Porath (Wilhelm Ochs) Zeev Porath is an Ukranian artist and Holocaust Survivor. He secretly drew women being tortured, sexually abused and killed by the Nazis while he was imprisoned in the Janowska concentration camp as a slave labourer. Sexual violence against women largely has gone undocumented. Zeev’s series of drawings titled TORTURES, documents such horrific violence against women by the Nazis.

Holocaust Art: between an open window and fragile totality It is said, a work of art is like opening a window upon the world to see the fragile totality of human experiences. What art does to us, especially in times of unnatural situations? We have now in our historical record thousands of works of art created at the various concentration camps in Europe and especially in Auschwitz. Archival records are available to us to see and try to understand under what circumstances such works were created, in art historical terms how does one define and categorise them?

Can we say artistic and cultural phenomena must always be seen as mirroring of an objective reality? Works produced at the various concentration camps and outside it, breaks with the immediacy of our everyday practical engagements that normally dominate the more common forms of reflection. In such cases aesthetic reflections of reality are expressed as an inner experience.

Here in this context aesthetic representation though remains connected to an evocation of reactions of a human subject, it breaks with the immediacy of our experiences of our normal ‘daily lives’, representation is not possible of daily lives since it is absent in extraordinary circumstances created by another set of human beings. The purpose and function of art in such a situation was to present the fragility of lives as the objective, historical reality in the form of pure visibility of ‘closed world in itself’ or as an intensive totality. Even under the conditions of life’s precariousness, torture, illness, inhuman conditions, it was possible for the artists to present a barbaric world from a specific standpoint to comprehend the the universal aspects of our existence and to consciously 81

Zev Porath (Wilhelm Ochs): Drawing from the Tortures series, a testimony from the Janowska camp.

Credit: Ghetto Fighters’House Museum, Israel/Art Collection

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Zev Porath (Wilhelm Ochs): Drawing from the Tortures series, a testimony from the Janowska camp.

Credit: Ghetto Fighters’House Museum, Israel/Art Collection

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participate in rescuing the collective damaged lives. Technically and aesthetically speaking the works created in the concentration camps and outside of it can be qualified as UNCEREMONIAL and NOTABLE. The artists loyalties owes to the wider diffusion of the realities around them without falling into the clutches of boredom of the eye or the conventionalities of form and content. The artists gives us a SIGN that they represent a common EVIL through a language which they invented by countering lies of the State. The art works show a range of reactions to the Holocaust- from the deeply personal to the documentary approach recording the everyday happening in the Camps and Ghettos. These art works carry the legacy of loss, desperation and exclusion. It is one thing if art serves the purpose of transforming the ‘whole person’ of everyday life into a ‘person as a whole’, but does it help the people outside the ‘window’ to acquire a sense of self consciousness regarding the richness of human reactions that constitute the historical development of humankind? By virtue of its (arts) capacity or the capacity of the subject who is the addresser and the addressee, can it evoke an understanding of how brutal and barbaric the world is, and how through his experience can negate the humiliation and alienation of people who suffered during the Nazi period?

It must be said that there is no totality of the universal character of the works of art, it is neither a homogeneous medium nor it appeals to such a criteria.

Realism in art looks for particulars/particularities, the details of specific objective world. In the context of the classical fascism, the art of the Holocaust can be defined as NEW REALISM completely different from the 19th century Realism. It is unique in human history. The entire body of work created during the Holocaust by hundreds of prisoners in various concentration camps , by both professional and amateur artists, cutting across nationalities , comes to us as KNOWLEDGE of not just one individual artist, but it is a collective memory of the darkest phase of human civilization.

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Leo Kok: Free hand drawing, 1941 Credit: The Holocaust Museum, Amsterdam

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Irrationalism’s second disorder Auschwitz was planned mass murder site; the construction was totally controlled by the local SS from the’ doorknob to the entire compound like Birkenau with its four crematoria’. The site was always in motion, changing every now and then; flux and fluidity shaped the architecture of Auschwitz.

Historian Paul Jaskot writing about the architecture of the Holocaust termed it as “lack of rationally planned and controlled space”. The site’s look changed many times due to various reasons, yet its viciousness, its cruelty; its methodological madness was completely rational. One can safely say, there was interplay between the rational and the irrational in the site called Auschwitz- Birkenau and the life that existed in the camp. It was an idea of life, talking to death.

Here is the testimony of a prisoner at Auschwitz: “...Loneliness, alienation and hostility were all around me. There was even not enough air to breathe.....Trains ceaselessly bringing loads of people to their death at Birkenau and uploading them...flames and smoke from the crematorium chimney, stink of burning human flesh, mud everywhere , diseases, festering wounds all over my body that never healed, scalies, lice, typhoid and above all , selections became my daily realm.”

- (Auschwitz survivor, prisoner no- 48693) Helena Berenbaum—Hope is the last to Die.

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Sheersha Mukherjee: In Memory of the Missing Children, A series of portraits done in linocuts of the missing children of the Holocaust, 2020.

Sourced from the ‘Remember Me’ section of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Website.

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Or one has only to read the text of Zalmen Gladowski composed in Auschwitz in 1944 and discovered after liberation in a tin near the destroyed crematoria Nikolas Wachsmann quotes him: “Dear Reader, I Write this words in the moments of greatest despair ... it is for you to imagine reality.”

- Nikolas Wachsmann- KL: a History of the Nazi Concentration camps, 2015.

Gladowski secretly chronicled the never ending procession of the doomed to the gas chambers. He only hoped that one day his writings will be found and help future generations “Form an Image” of the hell of Auschwitz-Birkenau. His text reveals the moments of everyday life, time without colour, taste without smell, only Auschwitz stands as a silent monument of suffering, standing outside time, to the historical reality of living and dying. If all these documents and truths came out about the Nazi terror in Auschwitz and still artists and writers had the courage to document them which meant that the power of human resistance to adverse conditions even in the face of inevitable death and to record them for the future of mankind to learn those truths, does prove that creative potentialities cannot be just be suppressed. Nazi terror could not stop man from writing poetry, even performing music and plays in various Ghettos, and in the post fascism period, with the new realities of authoritarian right wing tendencies arising out of Capitalist liberalism and new democracies, forms

of

protest

and

voices

of

discontent

can

be

noticed

in

artists’/photographers/researchers’ works. The question still haunts is why did Adorno say ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric?’

It is true that the term ’barbaric’ appears in many of his major texts and it concerns not only arts and culture but also involves science and politics, the society as a whole. In essence it concerns our own engagement with socio-political realities.

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The second premise may be his reference to culture and philosophy, the failure of the Enlightenment adhering to the exclusionary form of instrumental reason incapable of preventing the Holocaust. Anne –Verena Nosthoff talks about the idea of ‘miscellaneousness’ of the meaning of ‘barbarism’ in his overall philosophical presentation which is not only too far fetched but she has missed the fact that Adorno specifically mentions Auschwitz in his remark. It cannot go outside the context of Auschwitz.

Anne - Verena Nosthoff - Barbarism: Notes on the Thought of Theodor W Adorno, 2014.

Adorno also blamed the failure to prevent Auschwitz on the tradition of art and philosophy to which he was also an important part .He was ruthlessly critical of Heideggerianism all though his life, but Heidegger was not the only philosopher responsible for the rise of fascism, there is a whole history of irrationalist thought in the entire German/Western philosophical discourse beginning from the 18th century onwards which was responsible for systematically destroying Reason/Rationality. It was the obscure and lesser known philosophers/writers who formulated the theory of National Socialist Philosophy (of course Nietzsche was the leader of this ideological orientation). The other major philosophers of the time were busy in focussing on art and culture rather than engaging in political theory, leave alone participating in active politics. There is no point arguing for a ‘miscellaneous’ interpretation of Adorno’s famous dictum, ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. If he had no power within his theoretical rationality to prevent the Holocaust, he have no reason to plunge in melancholic negation of the dialectic.

We have seen that irrationalism and hostility go hand in hand in the act of progress.

As

long

as

there

is

global

capitalism

transformed

into

Communicative Capitalism, which spreads like a virus in this world and affects millions of people, the possibility of a renewal of neo fascism is a near possibility.

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Post Classical fascism, we are probably heading to an unpredictable destination, Communicative Capitalism may find another location/s where irrationalism reigns supreme through religious and ritualistic practices, and obscurantism dominates the life-system. The Little Man may already be ready to listen to the Great Leader, all that can happen given the indication of the terror of the irrationalist discourse which prevails as a major theoretical and behavioural pattern devastating human emotions. But it can be said quite unambiguously that there can be no return to Adorno, in Dialectics there is no going back, or justifying. The only possibility is to find the ‘next step forward.’

Sappho, the wise poetess of antiquity and a leader of the ‘female collective’, said a long time ago that the fate of human destiny is as variable as the weather at sea, ‘where fair winds swiftly follow harsh gales’. Should we then leave ourselves at destiny’s mercy to follow the winds direction and sail our boats or should we direct our boats to a Second return to Enlightenment?

Rediscovering the self and the other “The motive invoked to justify the death of the Gypsies Were the same as those numbering the Jews And the method employed for the one were identical with those employed with the other.”

- Myrium Novotich, Ghetto Fighters’ House, Israel The death of any Democracy is always violent in which the fatal agents are the organic disorder of the values, both cultural and civilizational. The possibility of a reversal to barbarism will largely depend on the breakdown of the world of values, values are a fact of culture as it is social in its essence. Culture in fact precedes civilization and civilization to a large extend depends on culture for its development. It is interesting to note that the origin of the word culture as peoples’ understanding of it is ‘worshipful cultivation of something, particularly the ‘LAND.’ 91

Would it imply a new matriarchal form where women will play a significant role in the production system, engaging themselves with the emerging personal, social and political priorities? What seems to be emerging in today’s world are the phenomena of the ORDINARINESS, an idea based on the notion of care and love. Jacques Rancière argues for a distribution of sensibilities, a trajectory which he believes will challenge the existing social order by the ‘excluded’.

Rancièr’s main premise for such a distribution comes from modernism which he thought to be essentially an egalitarian movement which radically alters the distribution of the sensible/sensibilities. On an aesthetic level, Rancièr’s distribution of sensibility theory is quite innovative but can this be extended to the premise of ‘liberation of senses’ to an alienated community or could it mean adapting to nature without creating a divide, a flatter, horizontal, a communal consciousness, a world of feminine sensitivity that will have the potential to prevent a possible WORLD CIVIL WAR? Civilizatioinal melancholy ‘Man is by nature a political animal’ - Aristotle ‘Man is a thinking being’ - Michael Foucault Michael Foucault set up a contestation between the humans driven by self-interest and who sees the world as shaped by economics and another set of men who is a political man and always seeks to exert power and control. The term ‘economic man’ was first used by John Stuart Mill in the 19th century:

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“.... Political man is concerned solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging the comparative efficiency of means to obtaining the end.”

- John Stuart Mill- Political Economy, 1999 Aristotle discussed the nature of self-interest in ‘Politics’, Book ii, part v: “...... the love of self is a feeling implanted by nature, selfishness is not the mere love of self, but that love of self is in excess, like all man’s love of Money....”

- Aristotle-Politics, Book II, Part V Amartya Sen has argued that it would be absolutely wrong for the economists to conclude that all human thoughts and actions inevitably lead to greed of acquiring wealth, man could give credible commitments to a reasonable conduct of behavioral decency. This argument stands in contrast to that of the homoeconomicus, so it can be defined as homoreciprocans, which means that human beings are basically cooperative and would try to improve their relationship with other human beings and nature.

If we accept this argument, then what is preventing a common good of man in future? What is the vertical stress that is being anticipated as a threat to democracy? Wendy Brown identifies global capital/neoliberalism as the main enemy without giving much attention to the economic factor; she justifies her formulation by saying: “Neo- liberalism is a distinctive mode of reason, of the production of subjects, a ‘conduct of conduct’, and a ‘scheme of valuation’. It is mode of thinking and the manner in which it emerges can be infinitely varied.... it is a slippery beast, in other words, hard to define and even harder to see when it is happening” - Wendy Brown- Undoing the Demos: Neo-Liberalism’s Stealth Resolution, 2014

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Leopold Mendez: Fascism1, Wood Engaving,Philadelphia Museum of Art with the Thomas Shelton Harrison Fund, 1944, 1944-30-20 Copyright: Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YORK/SOMAPP, Mexico City.

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Leopold Mendez: Fascism ii, Wood Engraving,Philadelphia Museum of Art with the Thomas Skelton Harrison Fund, 1944, 1944-30-21 Copyright: Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YORK/ SOMAPP, MexicoCity

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Leopold Mendez: Deportation to Death, Linocut, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1942, 1943-35-13, ,Piladelphia Museum of Art, with the Gift of Peter Schneider and Susan De Jarrat, 2005-37-6 Copyright: Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAPP, Mexico City

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Jesus Escobedo: Fascism, 8th Lecture: How to combat Fascism, 1939, 2005-37-6, Philadelphia Museum of Art, with the Gift of R. Sturgid and Marion B F Ingersoll, 1943, 1943- 35- 13 Copyright: Artists Rights Society, New York/SOMAPP, Mexico City.

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These works were also published in EL libro del terror nazi en Europa (An International Artistic and political collaboration in Mexico)

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99

Gunduz Aghayev: Two Illustrations for war and peace.

Courtesy: Gunduz Aghayev

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101

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Even though Brown hardly focuses on the economic part, it cannot be denied that finance is the key factor as the determiner of the life of man and nature, but what is more intriguing when Brown questions the similarities between the neoliberal rationalism and fascism, she says: “This is not to say that we live in fascist times, but what if it is an emerging form of fascism?”

- Interview of Wendy Brown by Robin Celikates and Yalande Jansen in 2000 and Timothy Shenk’s interview of Wendy Brown in DISSENT, April, 2015.

Brown thinks neoliberalism has the potential to break the neck of the ‘thinking man’. While we are past modernism, postmodernism and entering into new paradigm of anti-globalism, a conservative kind of self isolationism, what hope do we have to create a better world through the wisdom of feminine culture, a culture of compassion, understanding and rationality?

The fall of the barbarian Land “As soon as animals crept forth on the first lands, a speechless and degraded crowd, they battled for the acom, and for their lairs with claws and fists, then with clubs and at length with arms......until they learn to use words by which to indicate vocal sounds and thoughts and to use names. After that they began to refrain from war to fortify.”

- Horace, Sat, 1, III, 99 The conquest of Rome brought world peace but not prosperity; there was a crisis in the economy and in the world of ideas. Rome was rich but it needed social restructuring by an inclusive principle of stimulating the middle class, the small factory owners, craftsmen and workers who were inclined to proletarianism. By 250 AD all semblance of prosperity vanished, the Roman economy collapsed.

Gordon Childe said emphatically: 103

“Economically, as well as scientifically, classical civilization was dead a hundred and fifty years before barbarian invaders from Germany disrupted the political unity of the Empire and formally initiated the Dark Age in Europe .....In these hundred and fifty years the later rulers made a vain attempt to rescue the mechanics of civilization by reviving a regime of Oriental Centralization, often miscalled State Socialism. A more appropriate term is now available since National Sozialismus employed almost identical methods of maintaining an antiquated social system.”

- Gordon Childe What Happened in History, 1942.

What happens today?

What colour is the sky or the sea? There could be one or more answers to that question. What colour is of our time, time ‘which is out of joint’? Have we reached the end of aesthetic modernity? Then we cannot cite Rome or Paris, where do we look for new artistic tendencies. We are yet to find a new form of consciousness among the young artists and cultural workers who can illuminate their own milieu in a reassembled dialectical aesthetics. We are past the modern, post modern, post industrial, post historical phase of our history, broadly speaking , we are playing into the hands of ‘young conservatives’ of the pre-modern, and the ‘old conservatives’ of the postmodern. Or is there an alliance developing between the pre and post modernists in the guise of ‘Populist Nationalism’?

We can divide the time, multiply, conjure up, but how can we see its colour? If ‘Time is out of joint’, so must be the ‘body’, how then do we proceed to deliberate the status of the body, whether it is ‘disjunctive’ or ‘dematerialised’? Then the next set of deliberations should be where is the body gone, is it buried, gone forever or/and reappears in the form of a ghost? Just like Hitler died, so did Enlightenment? Hitler returns to earth, his ghost roams around, threatens us with the possibility of a repeat live show in Radio, TV, Theatres, Shopping malls, in Digital Space and sure looking to find a ‘public’( The Little Man’).

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Where has Enlightenment gone? Does Hitler and Enlightenment negate each other or may one ask if a complete negation, negation of negation possible in our time? It will depend on the dialectical overrule, throwing from the bath tub the ghost of the Kantian sublime. Adorno is already buried in the dust of negation.

We acknowledge that the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ was written in complete awareness of the realities of fascism and Nazi terror, it only represents the ‘evil’ of the time but it fails to inaugurate in opening a debate into reason/rationality and HOPE. Did they see any Hope in the Enlightenment History and its political ethics? The question one may pose, did Enlightenment evade the prevailing political question of the time? If Adorno and Horkeheimer believed that it addressed the political, then where is the question that it evaded the political?

Pure/abstract thinking does not make anything political, neither the body nor the time. Despite all the disjunctive bodies and time, there is a chain in nature as well as in history which links together all that is seemingly ‘good’ (as against evil), all that is alive as a category of HOPE and will be revealed ‘in the fullness of time’. Let us remind ourselves of Voltaire’s words of wisdom in CANDIDE: “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

Voltaire goes through the grind, sees and experiences human suffering, unjust acts of violence and natural disasters. He starts to question whether all is for the best, critiquing Enlightenment he realises the ‘dangers of optimism’. But in the end he finds a way out of the dark chambers of gloom and suffocation and starts cultivating his garden, garden of hope and new beginning, fights for rights of the individuals, champion’s religious tolerance and becomes involved in politics.

Immediately one would feel this as false hope Voltaire was sounding out from History knowing fully well where Enlightenment fell short of realising the ideals?

But Voltaire also nurtures his garden of Desire and Hope, reaffirms his faith in the goodness of man, and goes back to the fundamental principle of life. But Adorno reminds us, there is nothing like ‘good’ or ‘hope’ that exists either as a philosophical category or in real life-situation that he is living. In an interview with Spiegel, in 1969, he said: 105

“........I may not fault someone living in our world today for feeling despairing, pessimistic, and negative. Those who compulsorily shut down their objective despair with the noisy optimism of immediate action in order to lighten their psychological burden are much more deluded.”

- A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno (Spiegel, 1969), Translated and Edited with an Introduction by Gerhard Richter.

Jürgen Habermas, his friend and colleague put it succinctly that Adorno’s dialectic is at its ‘Blackest Spots’ of resignation, surrendered to ‘the Destructive pull of the Death Drive’, a Freudian pull if one may say so, which partly dominated the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.

Critiquing Enlightenment is perfectly valid, theoretically speaking, but Habermas worries that the “Dialectic of Enlightenment” gets trapped in the deepest despair and surrenders itself to the “Counter-Enlightenment”, even though Habermas does not specify if he means the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkeheimer and Adorno or the dialectic of the Enlightenment in history, yet , we will be ever intrigued and searching for the truth whether Adorno’s theoretical /philosophical premises/paradigms are based on constant and rigorous interpretations and reinterpretations of the ideologies that is in flux all the time while the world changes from one social, economic and political system to another. How does the philosopher act in the ephemeral phenomena which we witness in every epoch of history? What is the role of the ideal philosopher in conditions where ordinary men are bewildered and find it difficult to understand things as they are, or as they are seen, yet, incomprehensible? It is his responsibility to develop new principles of the world from the already existing principles, drawing from its sources to show to the world , why people struggle to live a decent, a safe and secured life and explain to the world and the people about their own acts as well as acts of others, the State in particular, analysing and understanding why/ where the violence/hostility lies, why ‘Death Camps’ are erected/installed with the imagined brutality which puts the original barbarians into shame!

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The larger question one may ask, in the face of REAL FASCISM, which Adorno, and Horkeheimer deals extensively in their writings, do they actually confront with the question of History or did they investigate the actual historical development of the working class, their movements or even the history of the movements of the bourgeoisie as an advance class in feudal society, especially in the Enlightenment era? Reconstruction of ‘historical materialism’ is a necessity in formulating theory without which theory will look unhistorical/ahistorical , hence it will be confined to only ‘conceptual’ analysis. It is said by scholar/writers that the Frankfurt School thinkers either neglected or excluded both History and economics from their theoretical premise drawing away from the broad definition of ‘Classical Marxism’, class analysis being its foundational principles, the proletariat constituting the revolutionary subject, the ideal agent of emancipation. This subject is absent from Frankfurt School doctrine, especially from AdornoHorkeheimer writings, hence it has been termed as Marxism without the proletariat leading exclusively to a ‘philosophical meditation’ only based on the defeats sustained by the working class in the twentieth century Germany...and subsequently in the struggle against Fascism.10 What kind of information, analysis of social and political reality Adorno and Horkeheimer was feeding their minds and spirit, did they consume information/theory that promoted despair and surrender to the predicament of the age/time? When one is in such a state of mind, one is destined to fail to create his/her own reality and reality like nature takes revenge on Man, in a variety of forms unleashing unprecedented violence unthinkable for any thinking man.

10 Helmut Dubiel- Theory and Practice: Studies in development of Critical Theory, Translated by Benjamin Gregg, 1985.Dubiel says: “......Was Horkheimer and Adorno close to the Hegelian dialectic than the Marxist one? In 1940’s the theoretical orientation of several Frankfurt School thinkers clearly broke away from the Marxist tradition. Dubiel argues that Horkheimer , Adorno, Pollock, Lowenthal left the Marxist tradition altogether, for their works were ‘no longer concerned with Capitalism as the contemporary form of social production.”

Martin Jay makes a similar claim. He argues that although Horkheimer and Adorno retained some Marxist rhetoric, “..... They no longer sought answers to cultural questions in the material substructure of the society.”

Jay goes on to say that Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of instrumental reason, most notably in the Dialectic of Enlightenment replaces the model of class conflict between human beings and nature. In his study of the Frankfurt School’s development, Jay claims that in their theory social and political struggles are only occasionally mentioned, but the dialectical constitution of the group engaged in struggle and their relation to production is almost never discussed.

Martin Jay- The Dialectical Imagination: A History of Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social research, 1923-1950, (1973)

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Every predicament demands dialectics to attend to it, nullify the vertical –horizontal dualism. Was fascism a predicament to Adorno and Horkeheimer as they lost all ideas to deal with it except the meditative part, which they might have thought as a substantial alternative of an idea, a correct one in such a situation?

The fact is where the correct ideas come from; it certainly does not fall from the sky as a heavenly bliss. It depends on the philosophy of praxis, how well and deeply connected one is to the realities of the time. Here is what Mao Zedong has to say in this context: “.........They come from social practice and from it alone, they come from three kinds of social practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle, and scientific experiment. It is man’s social being that determines his thinking. In social struggle , the forces representing the advance class sometimes suffer defeat not because their ideas are incorrect, but because in the balance of forces engaged in the struggle , they are not in not as powerful for the time being as the forces of reaction, they are therefore temporarily defeated , but are bound to triumph sooner or later....”

- Mao Zedong- ‘Where do correct ideas come from’? May, 1063. (Referred by Ranabir Samaddar in his essay: ‘What is Postcolonial Predicament’) in EPW, Vol XLVII, No 8, 2012.

As individuals , both Adorno and Horkeheimer’s concept of ideology is derived from the concept of ‘rationalisation’ justifying their attitudes, thoughts, feelings and actions in order to make them acceptable interpretations from the standpoint of social/philosophical conventions. Even otherwise, if we consider them as representatives of a particular social group interpreting natural and historical events, its opinions and valuations, in accordance with material conditions/interests, they reflect an unconscious ‘rationale’ of the material conditions of life.

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The interconnectedness between the ideas and their material conditions of existence is complex and complicated because philosophy is much richer and its structure is far more opaque than other streams of human thought and its end products, and here Adorno and Horkeheimer or for that matter, the ideology of the Frankfurt School just falls short of collapsing. One cannot perhaps call it true or false, correct or incorrect like we treat a scientific theory, the life of a philosopher or philosophical work may cross the boundary of theoretical truth, even historical validity should be applied with certain reservation and all the talk of ‘correct consciousness’ is probably out of place. Philosophy, like a work of art, is a challenge. We try to understand it, the authors try to explain it, and in the process energies of both sides are driven towards certain aims and endeavours, we draw some interpretations of life which enables us to cope successfully with the chaotic state of things and discover a more reliable and convincing meaning of life. The problem arises when we treat a work of philosophy as autonomous/independent formal theses, complete in itself and in isolation, as it were, from anything external to it. Philosophy like arts and culture serves to protect society, its tradition, conventions, and the democratic attributes, finally the social organisations that represent those values. The philosophy of National Socialism destroyed the very fabric of a democratic society. There were no alternate/correct dialectics to counter that, the force of ‘irrationalism’ won the war of values, at least for a certain time. What values do we live for now? How do we ‘read’ the philosophical formulations of Adorno- Horkeheimer/the Frankfurt School? It was more like the Greek classical art or philosophy (an ideal form) which had hardly any connection with common people, hence, a philosophy of unconnectedness, an abstraction of thought. The tragedy of philosophy lies in its failure to connect to people, to reality of the material conditions of life.

Nazism is a system, a system of thought, a practice of ideas, a system of the ‘irrational’, a system of the world of politics and something beyond the political, it was a system deconstructing all the existing bourgeois values and ideas, it was post structural in method, Nazi Germany was an ‘Absolute State’, a Nation for which the large number of population was ready to die for.

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Karl Ove Knausgår in his six volume autobiographical novel My Struggle (2011) digresses from Adolf Hitler’s autobiography and adds a new dimension to the rise of National Socialism in Germany. The main reason, he cites, is of course the joining of forces by Heidegger , Nietzsche and other intellectuals, artists, writers, film makers, musicians etc who made outstanding contribution to form the ‘IRRATIONAL NATIONAL’. Knausgaard refers to Leni Riefenstahl’s film ‘ Triumph of the Will’( 1934) and how she appeals to the emotion by portraying the popular demonstrations, the ‘torchlight parades’ which is otherwise stronger than the facts, analysis, reason, democracy, economic policies, she appeals to human emotions, a community bonding of sorts, this was another aspect of the Third Reich. Knausgaarde says: “...it is impossible to understand the emergence of Nazism....without understanding what moved the people of Germany...to embrace it – it was not the promise of Nazi’s to distribute income, or Hitler’s analysis of world affairs or even initially their hatred for the Jews. What moved them was rather the joyful feeling of togetherness...... of being able to transcend not only the fragmented democracy of the Weimar period... In National Socialism philosophy and politics come together at a point outside the language, and beyond the rational, where all complexity ceases...”

- Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle (2011) Indeed what triumphed in Nazi Germany is the spectacle of the will for the irrational, the destructive pull to Death. Tragedy triumphs finally, perhaps a re-run and a return to the original? Or was there a paradigm shift? What has changed since then, the wound of Auschwitz is only recent, the problem of Capital and labour has not yet been resolved, a new subject-object relationship has been formed, and there is no qualitative change in such a relationship, the unregulated global Capital has given rise to the populist subject, populist imagination and populist politics.

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The traditional Capital is changing over to the populist Capital, and populist culture is ultimately sustained by the ordinary peoples’ desperate cry for immediate gains notwithstanding the dangers of submission to irrationalism of the ruling class. The populist political class is open to incite racism, religious fanaticism and patronising lies, deceit, hypocrisy and violence towards the underprivileged. The new structural changes define the West/World of today, it fuels the emotions and sentiments of superiority over those who are waiting to be represented for centuries, and yet goes unrepresented. Can the circulation of

the

‘ordinariness’

make

a

counterpoint

to

the

rigidity

of

the

representational politics? The representational values must take into consideration the ethics of reality, the radicalism of the unknown/unspoken, may overturn the structural paralysis of thought and action.

What kind of life-system do we live in? We are still witnessing globalisation of the economy, of political accumulation of ‘rage against democracy’, and a ‘double lack’ of the political consciousness and will. The fate of the last liberal man is now uncertain, liberal democracy bound up with the global economy and market is unsure of its political life. There is no scope to weave a liberal democratic dream within the West/World; ‘the alliance of the liberal democracy and free market’ is no longer the determining factor of the new economic and political structure. Capitalism itself has sabotaged its unruly reason. The danger of our life-system lies precisely in this crisis, Capital is in the process of a new formation of a structural system, a system that may invade the collective consciousness of the public, push them into a private Gulag. The age of globalisation may be coming to an end, but not the adventures of ‘suspicion of reason’. There is a rage against humanism; there is an attempt to escalate the onslaught against Enlightenment values, a counter narrative is in the process of erasing the public sphere or the potential of the rational public.

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Leni Riefenstahl: Stills from Triumph of the Will,1935 (The infamous propaganda film of the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, Germany.)

Director: Leni Riefenstahl Writers: Leni Riefenstahl, Walter Ruttman and Eberhard Taubert. Credit- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Leni Riefenstahl: Stills from Triumph of the Will,1935 (The infamous propaganda film of the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, Germany.)

Director: Leni Riefenstahl Writers: Leni Riefenstahl, Walter Ruttman and Eberhard Taubert. Credit- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Is it time for us to move into a much wider and cosmopolitan public sphere into the ‘life-world’? If this shift is granted/accepted, it can only imply that the reference to ‘life-world’ will free the public domain from the model of the public sphere as invoked in the 18th century European background which had a clear divide between the public and the private domain. The point is we cannot reverse the wheel of history and go back to the established norms of traditional values of ethics, morality, religion, law, culture and economy which would then dangerously

invite

three

most

powerful

cultural

and

religious

institutions/traditions, Hinduism, Christianity and Islamic civilization to clash and challenge the 21st century. Even more dangerous is the ‘rational dialogism’ being halted by all kinds of fundamentalist irrationalism forcing the withering away of long standing institutional values. The crisis of every form of Government today and its Institutions of democracy, law, and justice appears to have been triggered by the unholy combination of Fascism and its monopoly capital. What reverberates from this history of unqualified alliance is reflected in the increasing disarray in the very foundation of our social and political life. Walter Benjamin in a letter to Gretel Adorno dated April 1, 1940 wrote: “.... Even today I am handing them over to you more as a bunch of whispering grass gathered on pensive walks than as a collection of theses.... the reflections have such an experimental character...”

- Walter Benjamin- Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, (Translated by Edmund Jephcott), 1978.

Benjamin was writing this just before Auschwitz, bringing in the fragmentary nature of the images in the concept of History and its character of the text which rushes ahead towards the concept of the rupture in human progress. It is unlikely that Benjamin was ‘fleeing from catastrophe into religion’, he was probably arguing for a renewed human contact with History- both in reference to the past and political action in the present.

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Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet, artist and philosopher wrote just a couple of months before his death, a small book of just eighteen pages which carries the tension of the mayhem of the external world. Tagore was still living under colonial rule and was stirred up with the outbreak of the Second World War. This crisis forced him to take up the issue of mankind’s’ destiny: “As I look around I see the crumbling ruins of a proud civilization strewn like a vast heap of futility. And yet I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in man.”

- Rabindranath Tagore- The Crisis in Civilisation, 1941.

Maybe it is time to discover a new set of values, new laws of public life, because simply shifting attention from the public Sphere to the ‘life –system’ will not be enough to stop violence which has become ‘interior’- ‘exterior.’ The idea of the public sphere must be explored, extended and revitalised in all spheres of life, the Habermasian bourgeois public sphere may not be enough to capture the imagination of the new rising techno elite, the youth and women of today, neither the ideal communicative action is strong enough to sustain its relevance. The ordinary and the commonplace will perhaps give a new language, new expression of intent/will to challenge the wisdom of the ancient or the post modern.

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117

Conclusion

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(i) “Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.”

- Socrates (469- 399 B. C.) Quoted in Plato, Phaedo, Sect 62.

What were the dying words of Socrates? Plato’s recording of Socrates’ last words reveal his wish expressed to his followers who were witness to his dying: the inexhaustible spirit of his word/dialogue. Calling out to his disciple Crito, he says: “Don’t forget to sacrifice a rooster to Asklepios...I owe a sacrifice of rooster to Askplepios: will you pay that debt and not neglect to do so?” 11 The words of Socrates are referring to the ‘rituals of incubation’ in the hero cult of Asklepois. who had the power of healing and also power of bringing back the dead to life .Absolutely certain of his imminent death, why did Socrates refer to the ritual of a dead man walking alive? Does it justify the saying that there is no fixed human nature: rational or irrational? Invoking the ritual of the dead is contrary to the science of logic? A radical contemporary thinker like Cornelius Castoriadis is unsure of the trajectory of irrationalism might take and says: “History is essentially creation- creation and destruction”12

11 Gregory Nagy- ‘The Last Words of Socrates at the Place where he died’ in Classical Inquiries, March27, 2015. Askplepios was a hero whose father was god Apollo himself and he had several healing powers and also the power of bringing back the dead to life.He is also the model for keeping the voice of the rooster alive.

12 Cornelius Castoriadis- Philosophy, Politics and Autonomy, 1991.

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That is as far as history is concerned, what about philosophy, art and music? Do philosophy and art have a life of their own not subjected to decaying and withering away as time lapses into another time? What remains after the death of the philosopher/artist/musician remains forever etched in history? For Socrates, Askplepios is just a model for renewal/reviving the word, the dialogue, the argument. He was not at all worried about dying, he saw it coming, he wanted his word to be kept alive after his death, the spirit of the dialogue/ the philosophical argument must go on and not let it die, for in it lives the HOPE of the citizens to continue arguing and debating about matters of life, State, Society, matters of justice, truth, morals, democracy, ethics, law and the ideals of rationality. The soul of philosophy is the word/ argument which carries the meaning of life and it is the meaning of life which makes the HOME of the philosopher. Socrates here hints at an ultimate order of justice and truth, without which philosophy only becomes only a mode of inquiry and contemplation. He is keen to restore true music, the PHILOSOPHICAL MUSIC, so to say, by rejecting any myth making activities of the political class.

Plato portrays Socrates as someone who is clearly motivated by the powers of reason. Gregory Vlastos says the following about Socrates: “...not for the first time

but always , I am the sort of man who is

persuaded by nothing in me except the proposition which appears to me to be the best when I see reason about it.”13

13 Gregory Nagy- ‘The Last Words of Socrates at the Place where he died’ in Classical Inquiries, March27, 2015. Askplepios was a hero whose father was god Apollo himself and he had several healing powers and also the power of bringing back the dead to life.He is also the model for keeping the voice of the rooster alive.

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(ii) “... Death Dark dark dark damp damp damp Wet Like an under tunnel full of sewage Sticky smelly Has never seen the sun, ever Life lived in the shadows of death....”

- Excerpts from Sonal Jains poem, Facebook Post, 11th September, 2020.

The prisoners of Auschwitz never thought they would ever live in the city of Death. Did they look at the stars and the night sky? All they could see from the barbed wire walls was the ‘shadow side of the moon’. In death they are more real than in life. Auschwitz is the graveyard of philosophical music .Philosophy in the crudest sense became a musical, a symbol of the uneducated barbarians.

Socrates tells of a recurring dream he dreamt with the same message appearing repeatedly: ‘O Socrates, make music and let that be be your work’ For Socrates the message in the dream meant he should pursue philosophy which is the ‘greatest music’. The legacy of the ‘Socratic word’ and his music died at the Gas Chambers of Auschwitz. Did the dead rejoice in the spectacle of Death? Their death is far more real than all of their Damaged Lives put together, is our Reflections enough to the comfort of the dead, their speech is lost forever, and we can only bemoan the loss and memory of the bodies that are lost forever. We the living dead can only carry the damaged ‘soul’, the soul of the Socratic WORD/DIALOGUE. 121

(iii) Socrates makes a distinction between a story –teller and a myth –teller.

Socrates himself did not obey the orders of the Myth, because he is not one who ‘makes of what never was’, but he believed in the power of the artist/poet who ‘makes magic of what is’. Socrates appeals to the artists/poets not to be imitative instead they should submit their works to the ‘image of the good’.

What does he mean by the image of the good? He asserts that the image of the good is the ‘likeness’ which dominates and radiates the centre of the Dialogue and followed by his rejection of the ‘myth-making’ attempts but acknowledges that the myth which ‘corrects’ is the most important factor of the story. In comes the tragedy in the form of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Prometheus gave men ‘fire’ and opened their eyes to see the truth and the brought them out of the ‘caves’, the darkness of the world, but Prometheus forgot one thing, to introduce the POLITICAL ART.14 The wisdom of Socrates is evident in the art works created in Auschwitz, other concentration camps and in various other institutional and non institutional centres in Europe. These works reveal the truth of life and death, it tells a story devoid of any myth making. It is bare and stark reality and demonstrates the power of the Socratic word, that in death it still reverberates the spirit of the SUN, the Socratic word/dialogue, the focus shifts from the death of the philosophical music to the possibility of the revival of the Gracchi Reforms.15

14 Eva Brann- Socrates on Music and Poetry, in The Imaginative Conservative, April, 2016. This essay was first published in St. John’s Review, vol 39, no 1and 2, 189-90.

15 The Gracchi- Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were Roman brothers who tried to reform Rome’s social and Political structure to help the lower classes in the 2nd century B. C. E The brothers were politicians who represented the PLEBS or Commons in the Roman Government. They are considered the ‘Founding Fathers’ of Socialism and Populism.

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The advent of ‘new/renewed irrationalism’ has to be countered by ‘democratic realism’, through the formation of the multiple democratic POPULARES on a broad spectrum of public matters of interest or the interest of the COMMONERS. 16, 17 (iv) Will philosophy regain its musical truth and can the artists in the post bourgeois world break-free from the myth making paranoia? How does philosophy and art construct history of the day, more important is the question whose history, what philosophy of history? Voltaire in formulating the idea of the philosophy of history observed two basic categories, (a) history as a survey, collections of dry facts and data and, (b) how these facts are critically valued and devalued by the preceding

generations

well

as

the

current

generation

of

thinkers/philosophers.18 Rousseau takes a different route and asks what is it that causes the unfolding of history the way it does and how do we asses that unfolding? He then goes on to invoke a moral and ethical question: Is human civilization responsible for a ruination of humanity? If we accept this premise then we ought to ask: is that inevitable and unavoidable in the construction of history? Adorno almost echoes Rousseau and says history has been basically a series of catastrophes and it can be noticed in our attempt to master nature, hence contributing to the discontinuous, chaotic and splintered moments of history.

16 Takis Fotopoulas- The Rise of New Irrationalism and its incompatibility with inclusive Democracy. www. Inclusive democracy.org and also see: Takis Fotopoulos- Towards an inclusive Democracy, 1997.

17 The world has seen many artists groups and collectives over the centuries. But the one that got my attention is the Atelier Populaire formed during the May 1968 Student movement in Paris. Please see my essay: Reading May 1968, Paris, Posters of Atelier Populaire, Published in Art and Deal, New Delhi, Issue no 118, vol 14, no 85, July 2018.

18 Martin Shuster- The Philosophy of History, 2018.

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We must acknowledge that there is fundamental incompleteness, inadequacies in every historical moment beginning from the early savage period to the late savage period, i.e, the Nazi period; history in the process becomes splintered, as if a megaton bomb has exploded. In the chain of history, Rousseau claims that the late savage state of human development reflects an extreme state of brute animals and animalaseque men appearing in the decadent civilizational moment in history. The transformation which happens from the State of Nature to the Civil State effects a remarkable change in man, substituting instinct with reason and justice, giving a sense of ethics and morality of his actions which has escaped their behaviour before. The Nazi State devastated all sense of the civility, the values of whatever was thought to be a progress in history, SAVAGES BECAME BARBARIANS. Hitler became the first barbarian and proclaimed by landing in Poland: This is mine. He forgot that the ‘fruits of the earth belong to us all and the earth itself to nobody.’

Benjamin then turns towards the concept of history and challenges the notion of universal history to the idea of progress leading to the idea of civilization which gets a variety of names/categories thus defining the phases/ periods in history. Voltaire in his magnum opus: Essai sur les moeurs et l’espirit des nations (Essays in the customs and spirit of nations and key facts of history from Charlemagne to Louis xiii, 1756) traces common themes across human cultures and languages by a shared reality but at the same time stressed on the common human failings .Voltaire long ago rejected the idea of universal history but on a completely different premise. Reacting to the speech of Jacques – Beningne Bossuet’s on universal history which had presented Judeo- Christian nations as the most advanced, Voltaire took note of the ancient Indian and Chinese cultures and also argued against the prejudiced views that individual freedom only existed in the West. In fact, he brought the topic of European Feudalism and how it became a force of colonisation across continents, turning the ‘local subjects into slaves’. We often forget the dark phase of European history, especially the Middle Ages.

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He also argued if Christianity is the only essential civilization of a just society? How do we think of constructing a philosophy of history now? In a multi polar, multilingual, multi civilizational world, what are the essentials we can share on

a differential economics, culture and truth

of freedom and democracy? But first

of all, we need a Socratic

revolution in philosophical perceptions of all things that are equal and unequal, irrespective of values of the Land where they belong.

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References

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Most of them were gassed in Auschwitz”. In an Interview with RT, May 18, 2015.

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The essay is extremely relevant/pertinent to the current economic and political situations across the globe. It is bringing back to our consciousness Auschwitz, the perils of authoritarianism and to what we seem to have forgotten or have wilfully chosen to forget. For those whose understanding of Fascism and Nazism is through some textbooks as part of some academic curricula or for those for whom it was a freakish chapter in history that can't be repeated- it brings the horror and the brutality and the possibility of its repetition so much closer.

What I find so commendable is the ease with which Amit Mukhopadhyay, a well-known curator and an authority in his field, straddles theory and praxis simultaneously underscoring the importance of activism, debate, reason and rationality in imagining equality. He engages in an ongoing conversation with Theodore Adorno and the Frankfurt school which is incisive and fascinating.

Theodore Adorno's Wall Clock foregrounds the role of the artist. The artist can stir the public imagination, can critique as well as imagine an equal world in adverse times and regimes. The creative spirit lives on in the middle of holocaust and catastrophe. It lives on as a testament of hope. Various artworks, poetry, photographs and reproductions form an integral part of the essay. An ongoing dialogue between art, poetry, photography and philosophy is accomplished with great finesse and alacrity.

Jyoti A Kathpalia Art Critic, Associate Professor, Department of Engl ish, PGDAV Col l ege, University of Delhi