Frankfurt School, 1938: The limits of humanism as a political philosophy

Max Horkheimer

Max Horkheimer’s “Die Philosophie der absoluten Konzentration” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 3/1938 is a review and response to Siegfried Marck’s book, Der Neuhumanismus als politische Philosophie [New Humanism as Political Philosophy] (1938). The urgency of the European political situation and the threat of a general war hangs over this relatively short essay. From a reference to Czechoslovakia he makes in the text, it’s obvious that it was written with knowledge of the outcome of the Munich Conference. The possibility of a general European war was painfully obvious and very public in the lead-up to that conference. And it doubtful if Horkheimer shared the optimism of Neville Chamberlain that his awful deal at Munich would bring an enduring peace.

A German biographical sketch of Siegfried Marck (1889-1957) is available from the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie & Neue deutsche Biographie (Digitale Register) (1990). In his youth a German patriotic chauvinist, like many others he was deeply affected by the experiences of the First World War. Marck became a pacifist and an adherent of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). In 1918, his book Imperialismus und Pazifismus als Weltanschauungen [Imperialism and Pacifism as Worldviews] was published. Horkheimer in his essay takes a swipe at this work: „Die pazifistische Haltung, die 1918 vor dem Frieden dem Philosophen als ein Ausweg aus dem Dunkel erschien, ist inzwischen ein dunkler Ausweg aus der Philosophie geworden.“ („The pacifistic position, which in 1918 before the Peace appeared to the philosopher as a way out of the darkness, has since then become a way out of philosophy.“)

As an active SPD politician, an outspoken Marxist and a Jew, Marck was fired from his university teaching job in Marburg September 1933 and immediately emigrated to France in September. The Nazi regime revoked his German citizenship in 1935. Marck in his French exile was active in attempts to create a “popular front” of the German opposition, to include conservatives, liberals, social democrats and Communists. He was attracted to the “new humanist” Esprit Group led by Emmanuel Mournier and became friends with fellow German exile Thomas Mann.

His ideas of this period found expression in Neuhumanismus als politische Philosophie, the book Horkheimer discusses in this essay. Horkheimer writes, “Marck ist ein ehrlicher Gegner des Faschismus.” (Marck is an honorable opponent of fascism.”) Fascism at this time was generally understood to include National Socialism in Germany, as it still is generally. Although it remains a matter of dispute to this day the extent to which Nazism should be considered a variant of fascism or a related but distinct phenomenon. An article by Rudolf Schlesinger in the preceding (1-2/1938) issue of ZfS addressed in part that very issue.

Horkheimer doesn’t treat Marck’s book as the work of a political opponent. But he criticizes it for being not much use in understanding the current situation of the real and potential opposition in Germany. In the course of his essay, Horkheimer explains some of his political understanding of recent Germany history that makes him skeptical of Marck’s proposal in Neuhumanismus als politische Philosophie.

Marck called for a “concentration” of forces against Nazism within Germany, and offered “new humanism” as a unifying ideology for such a grouping in his book. The alliance of the SPD in early 1919 with the far-right Freikorps militia to brutally suppress the protest wave that came to be known as the Spartacus uprising left deep and lasting resentments and suspicions among left-leaning Germans. So did the suppression of the self-described Soviet Republic that held power in Bavaria for a few weeks in 1919. Whether the Spartacus uprising was led by the Communists and whether the Bavarian Soviet Republic was like the Soviet regimes in Russia and Hungary are interesting questions which I won’t go into here.

But the lasting resentment and suspicion still shows in Horkheimer’s 1938 essay. He refers to that experience bitterly, “Noch das äusserste Entzetzen heute hat seinen Ursprung nicht 1933, sondern 1919 in der Erschiessung von Arbeitern and Intellektuellen durch die feudalen Helfershelfer der ersten Republik.” ("Even the worst [Nazi regime] terror of today had its origins not in 1933, but in 1919 in the shooting of workers and intellectuals by the feudal assistants’ assistants of the First [Weimar] Republic.")

He argues that the SPD government should have mobilized its working-class basis for far-reaching democratic changes, but instead it settled for managing short-term realities. The SPD governments, he argues, wound up being essentially powerless. They regarded the official theory of their Party as an internal “scruple”. “Die Regierung machte die Freiheit zur politischen Philosophie anstatt zur politischen Praxis.” ("The government made freedom into political philosophy instead of political practice.") Retrying such an approach, of settling for a minimum of formal democracy without the kind of far-reaching economic and social changes needed to secure it “would play out the same way as the original.”

The benefit of hindsight makes it a particular challenge to understand the contemporary viewpoint in a case like this. We know in retrospect that only by complete defeat in the Second World War was the Hitler regime destroyed. Horkheimer and other oppositionists in 1938 still hoped for an internal change of regime. He thought that some form of social revolution leading to a socialist regime and economy would be necessary to accomplish that.

If that view seems far-fetched from today’s perspective, Horkheimer was looking at recent history in making his argument. Specifically, Marck was arguing for what Horkheimer saw as a middle way, which Horkheimer characterized more specifically as a “longing for the majority ready to govern, which under the Weimar Republic eventually was no longer there.” The reference there was to the instability of the governing coalitions of 1918-1933. The last couple of years of the Weimar Republic were dominated by Executive government by decree, although Parliament was still functioning.

Marck argued that the ideology of classical liberalism provides “immortal motives for humanistic concentration”, i.e., an alliance of diverse political forces. Horkheimer believes that Marck’s faith in the faith of liberalism in the German context was sadly misplaced. “Marck misunderstands National Socialism because he misunderstands the Republic in which he grew up.” (This was a bit of a belittling comment, since Marck turned 29 in 1918.) In Horkheimer’s understanding, the capitalists and the non-socialist parties in Germany had given up on democracy and had accepted the authoritarian Nazi state as their preferred form of rule.

He wasn’t conjuring concept out of the air in asserting this. In the final act of what was left of the Weimar Republic, the Parliament (Reichstag) voted to give Hitler dictatorial powers in the Emergency Law (Ermächtigungsgesetz) of March 23, 1933. The Communist Party (KPD) had been suppressed and all 81 Communist Reichstag delegates arrested, as had eight of the SPD’s 120 ministers. The SPD was the only party to vote against the Emergency Law. It was scarcely a normal vote, with armed SS and SA goons present when the vote was taken. But when it came down to the final moment of the Republic, the Social Democrats and Communists were the only political parties left to oppose the Nazis – though the KPD hadn’t supported the Weimar Republic, either. The other major Party that along with the SPD had been considered a core “Weimar” party, the Catholic Center Party, supported the Emergency Law and the establishment of Hitler’s dictatorship. If one was thinking in 1938 about building an internal movement that could challenge the Nazi regime, the idea that liberals and conservatives and moderates from the old “bourgeois” (non-socialist) parties would come together with Social Democrats and Communists in an effective movement really was pretty far-fetched.

In fact, one serious attempt at building a People’s Front which Siegfried Marck had supported flopped pretty quickly. Franz Osterroth and Dieter Schuster in their Chronik der deutschen Sozialdemokratie. 2. Vom Beginn der Weimarer Republik bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges (1980) Stichtag: 21. Dez. 1936, describes a call from the Committee for the Preparation of the German Popular Front on December 21, 1936 that was signed by Marck. Their appeal was signed not only by Marck but by others whose names were already well known or would later figure prominently in the politics of postwar Germany, West and East: Willy Brandt, Wilhelm Pieck, Walter Ulbricht, Herbert Wehner, Willi Münzenberg, Leon Feuchtwanger, Arnold Zweig, Heinrich Mann, and Ernest Bloch.

Not only were Communists like Ulbricht and Münzenberg supporting this idea. But it’s general outline of a political program sounded pretty much like an aggressive social-democratic program that envisioned a transitional period of rule without benefit of general elections. Only after some pretty large tasks, like the nationalization of the large banks and the armaments industry, appropriation of the large landholdings to break the power of the Prussian Junkers, and a transition to a peacetime economy (Germany’s economy in 1938 was very much focused on preparation for war), only then would elections be held in which the German people “auf Grund eines unverfälschten demokratischen Wahlrechts seine Vertreter wählen, die ihm allein verantwortlich” ("would elect their representatives, who would be responsible to them along, on the basis of a genuinely democratic election law”.

So maybe Horkheimer wasn’t being entirely fair in charging Marck of something like a lazy centrism!

But that attempt at building a Popular Front fell apart around the turn of the year 1937-38. So Horkheimer was also writing in light of that experience, as well.

Horkheimer was anti-religion. But he thought that Marck was being unfair to the striving toward justice which was part of the religious impulse. And in criticizing Marck on that score, he makes a memorable polemic against lazy centrism based on the experience of 1918-33 in Germany:

Gott ist [writes Marck] „die eigentliche Mitte, zu der die Gegensatze, die Totalitat, zu der die Teile konvergieren. Er ist die absolute Konzentration, dem alles Begrenzte und Dämonische als Exzentrizität gegenübersteht." Wer gegen solche Bestimmungen Gottes nicht durch die Erinnerung an eine bessere theologische Tradition gefeit ist, konnte allein schon durch die geschichtliche Erfahrung gewarnt werden, dass Konzentrationen, welche die „Exzentrizitäten" rechts und links als dämonisch austreiben, sich in der Praxis schliesslich entscheiden müssen, mit welchem Teufel der Anfang zu machen sei. Nachdem in Deutschland im Jahr 1919 diese Entscheidung gefallen war, ist die Entwicklung bis 1933 konsequent gewesen. Die Vorstellung, welche die angebliche Mitte von sich selbst besass, blieb als politische Ideologie erhalten, während ihre längst erschütterte gesellschaftliche Grundlage vollends zerfiel.

[God is {writes Marck} "the true Middle, to which the opposites, the totality, to which the parts converge. He is the absolute concentration, against which all the marginal and demonic stand as eccentricities." Those who are not willing to oppose such claims through the memory of a better theological tradition can be warned only through historical experience that concentrations which drive out the "eccentricities" of the left and right as demonic, must eventually decide with which devil to start. After this decision had been taken in Germany in the year 1919 [with the suppression of the workers' revolt by the Social Democratic government], the development up until 1933 was a consequence. The notion with which the alleged middle had of themselves, remained held as a political ideology while its long wrecked social basis collapsed completely.]

He writes, "Eben weil der Kampf um Kultur zugleich ein Kampf gegen eine bestimmte Kultur ist, ja als solcher unmittelbar in Erscheining tritt, ist er kein 'Gasamtbewegung' im Sinne Marcks." (Precisely because the battle for culture is at the same time a fight against a particular culture, and makes its appearance directly as such, there is no “general movement” in Marck’s sense.) Marck, in other words, isn’t recognizing the real social and political implications of his ideas.

Die Wahrscheinlichkiet, in eine hoffnungslose Minorität zu geraten, ist zu einer Zeit, wo die Hoffnung der Menschheit nicht so sehr bei Konzentrationen als im Konzentrationslager aufgehoben ist, kein ganz so vernichtendes Kirerium, wie es manchem politischen Philosophen scheint. Eine Vereinigung philosophischer Anthropologen und anderer Autonomisten, mit dem massenfeindlichen Ortega y Gasset an der Spitze, kann von der Theorie und Praxis der Geschichte hermetischer abgeschlossen sein als der isolierteste Literat, der an jenen Konzentrationen bloss zu nörgeln weiss.

[The probability of being lost in a hopeless minority is not so much a decivisive criterium as many political philosophers think it is, at a time when the hope of humanity is not being ablated {transformed} so much by concentrations as in concentration camps. A club of philosophical anthropologists and other autonomists with the hostile-to-the-masses Ortega y Gasset at their head can be more hermetically sealed off from the theory and practice of history than the most isolated literati who only knows how to whine about these concentrations.]

Marck emigrated to the United States before the German invasion of France. Despite his negative judgment of the Soviet Union’s internal political structure and his strong disapproval of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939, he welcomed the USSR’s participation on the US-British side of the Second World War. And he supported Paul Tillich’s efforts after the war to avoid a hostile split between the US and the USSR. But he came to embrace the basic tenet of the Cold War, declaring, "Kommunismus ist unser Hauptfeind geworden." ("Communism has become our main enemy.")

Marck himself did a review of a book by Georges Gurvitch on moral experience in the 3/1938 number of the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung.

Tags: frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, max horkheimer, siegfried marck