Cool Conduct weimar and now: german cultural criticism Edward Dimendberg, Martin Jay, and Anton Kaes, General Editors 1. Heritage of Our Times,by Ernst Bloch 2. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990,by Steven E. Aschheim 3. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook,edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg 4. Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Mo- dernity,by Christoph Asendorf 5. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolu- tion, by Margaret Cohen 6. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany,by ThomasJ. Saunders 7. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption,by Richard Wolin 8. The New Typography,by Jan Tschichold, translated by Ruari McLean 9. The Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer,edited by William E. Scheuerman 10.The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950,by Martin Jay 11.Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, edited by Katharina von Ankum 12.Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900–1949, edited by Hans Wysling, translated by Don Reneau 13.Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935,by Karl Toepfer 14.In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment,by Anson Rabinbach 15.Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels, by Beatrice Hanssen 16.Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present,by Anthony Heilbut 17.Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, by Helmut Lethen, translated by Don Reneau 18.In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945–1948,by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, translated by Kelly Barry 19.A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism, by Elliot Y. Neaman 20.Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holo- caust,by Dan Diner 21.Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle, by Scott Spector 22.MunichandMemory:Architecture,Monuments,andtheLegacyofthe ThirdReich, by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld 23.The UFA Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918– 1945, by Klaus Kreimeier, translated by Robert and Rita Kimber 24.From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990, by Rudy Koshar 25.WeWeren’tModernEnough:WomenArtistsandtheLimitsofGerman Modernism, by Marsha Maskimmon 26.Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany,by Bernd Widdig 27.Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany,by Janet Ward Cool Conduct The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany Helmut Lethen Translated by Don Reneau UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · LosAngeles · London The translations of Bertolt Brecht’s “Report on a Tick” (chapter 1) and “On the Infanticide Marie Farrar” (chapter 6) are from Bertolt Brecht Poems, 1913–1956,ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (New York: Methuen, 1976). They are reproduced by permission of Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2002 by The Regents of the University of California Lethen, Helmut. [Verhaltenslehren der Kälte. English] Cool conduct : the culture of distance in Weimar Germany / Helmut Lethen ; translated by Don Reneau. p. cm. — (Weimar and now ; 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn0-520-20109-4 (alk. paper) 1. Conduct of life. I. Title. II. Series. bj1583.l5713 2002 943.085—dc21 2001027679 Manufactured in the United States of America 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39. 48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). (cid:2)(cid:2) Contents Preface to the American edition ix Acknowledgments xiii 1. Fending Off Shame: The Habitus of Objectivity 1 2. The Rapture of Circulation and Schematicism 21 3. The Conduct Code of the Cool Persona 33 4. The Cool Persona in New Objectivity Literature 101 5. The Radar Type 187 6. The Creature 195 Afterword 215 Notes 217 Index 239 Preface to the American Edition Distance and closeness between people in their social space is a cen- tral concern of cultural sciences. Arthur Schopenhauer formulated the necessity of solving this problem in his famous parable of the freezing porcupines. On a cold winter’s day an assortment of porcupines needs to set an adequate distance among its members. Being too close, they risk mutual injury from their quills; being too far apart, they are bound to die of exposure. The porcupines, as Schopenhauer writes, are torn be- tween closeness and distance until they settle on a moderate temperature at which they can tolerate their situation. This book is about “adequate distance,” which is a construct of cul- tural history. The historical setting is Germany from 1914 to 1945, the time of a thirty years’ war. The book depicts the traumatic situation af- ter the capitulation of 1918. The familiar horizons of the Wilhelmian empire are gone. After the loss of the authoritative system, people expe- rience the immediate confrontation with modernity as a freezing shock. In counterreaction, the ideal of a glowing community displaces the cold- ness of industrialized civil society. In this situation of a cult of community with its fatal political conse- quences, the philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner intervenes with a manifesto on cool conduct, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft: Eine Kri- tik des sozialen Radikalismus(The boundaries of community: a critique of social radicalism). It is a document of a culture of distance, rare and precious because German cultural history never appreciated it. ix