Im Bann der Utopie. Ernst Blochs Hoffnungsphilosophie in der DDR-Literatur

Unlike the man, Ernst Bloch's philosophy of hope continued to influence select East German cultural intellectuals significantly long after his departure in 1961. Bloch himself left for West Germany following the construction of the Berlin Wall. After the end of World War II, he had returned from his New York exile by invitation in 1948 to accept the chair of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. While in exile, this friend of Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno had written the multivolume work entitled The Principle of Hope (Das Prinzip Hoffnung). In support of his return, the newly founded German Democratic Republic subsequently published it between 1954 and 1959. But Bloch's open-ended, dynamic utopian visions based on the “not-yet-conscious” and the concept of “possibility” soon ran up against the inflexible doctrine of the Socialist Unity Party. Bloch's open criticism of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 led to accusations of “revisionism” by the party and to his eventual exit from East Germany.His work continued to inspire many of the postwar generation (Aufbaugeneration) in East Germany. Some of them were able to attend Bloch's lectures while he was still at the University of Leipzig. In 1980, Erhard Bahr wrote, “The literature of the German Democratic Republic can be subsumed under Bloch's principle of hope, or, in other words, the literature of the GDR is the Literature of Hope” (15 n. 10).1 While unable to engage directly with the philosopher, the texts of a number of authors alluded to his ideas “between the lines” or directly through allegory or form. These writers included none other than the major names of GDR literature, among them Volker Braun, Peter Hacks, Heiner Müller, and Irmtraud Morgner. Bloch's influence has been referred to in post-reunification scholarship on GDR culture, including Wolfgang Emmerich's Little Literary History of the GDR (Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR, 2000). In English, Siegrun Wildner referenced Bloch in her article on Irmtraud Morgner's feminist reworkings of Greek myth from 2004. In his work on East German identity, Peter Thompson pointed to Bloch's role in the formation of the GDR as “imagined community” in 2011. Yet this remains an understudied subject. Kirchner's publication from 2002 was and still is the only full-length work devoted to the topic.Kirchner's project is twofold: first, to demonstrate through close textual analysis the strong identification that a number of GDR authors did have with Bloch's philosophy; second, to find in this affinity an explanation as to how such authors failed to be more critical of the “socialist revolution” in East Germany (11). There had been the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the Solidarity movement in Poland of the 1970s. Yet no major uprising took place in East Germany between 1953 and the protests of 1989. Kirchner seeks an explanation when she writes that literary intellectuals increasingly turned to Bloch's work in the 1970s and 1980s as a “way to bridge the gap between a seemingly failed revolution and the hope for the future” (12–13). It led to a “fatal ambivalence” that “kept them from making a break with the system” (back cover). Instead, Bloch's reception enabled a process of simultaneous “critique and affirmation” of the existing system. Kirchner states, “Philosophically inspired literature ... proved to be a reservoir of hope, which provided the originally emancipatory agenda of the socialist revolution with a renewed and believable utopian horizon” (13). She comments that the writing by Braun and Fries relied on the Blochian concepts of “yes, but” or “this as well as that” in their reconciliation with the East German ideal and reality. In other stories, such as those written by Christa Wolf, the “not-yet” predominates as the idea that the utopia and the completely different (das “ganz Andere”) have not yet been reached in the first place, that is, Bloch's not-yet-success.As stated, the book itself highlights Bloch's influence on the writings, identities, and personal philosophies of Irmtraud Morgner, Uwe Johnson, Christa Wolf, and particularly Volker Braun and Fritz Rudolf Fries. After the introduction, the first chapter provides a brief introduction to Bloch's philosophy of hope as it pertains to the book's subject matter. The next three chapters very briefly touch upon the influence on Morgner, Johnson, and Wolf. The greatest contribution of the book is contained in the five chapters devoted to close readings of the following: Volker Braun's Guevara or The Sun State (Guevara oder Der Sonnenstaat, 1975), Hinze-Kunze-Novel (Hinze-Kunze-Roman, 1984), and The Not Lived (Das Nichtgelebte, 1995) and Fritz Rudolf Fries's The Airship (Das Luftschiff, 1974) and Alexander's New Worlds (Alexanders neue Welten, 1982).Chapter 1 provides a quick overview of Bloch's Principle of Hope, in which Kirchner highlights its specific privileging of literature and art as a site of expression of the “not-yet-become” via the daydream (“not-yet-conscious”) of a better world. One embodiment of this “not-yet-being” lies in the figures that represent “humans venturing beyond their limits” (Leitfiguren), specifically Don Giovanni, Don Quijote, and Faust. These characters strive toward an ideal, cross borders, and search for a “utopian identity” against all odds (43). It is particularly through an analysis of parallel Leitfiguren in the latter chapters that Kirchner demonstrates Bloch's philosophy to be central to the literary projects of these authors. Further, she postulates that the authors of the “first phase” (beginning with the mid-1960s) found legitimization for their writing in Bloch's identification of literature as a privileged location in the “struggle for the future” (46). The second period (from the mid-1980s) was characterized by a broader “universal historical synthesis of purpose with a critique of instrumental reason” as the philosophy of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944/1947) became significant. This second phase found literature to be a more “objective fantasy” in the Blochian sense, one that strove toward an ideal whose realization was yet to come, that is, the location of a more distant future utopian horizon. Kirchner equates both of these phases with their corresponding historical events in the GDR. Finally, the Blochian statement “Hope must be disappointed” is to Kirchner a key phrase that led GDR authors to rationalize the failures of the GDR and to displace its revolutionary promise into a not-yet-future (46–47).After the first chapter, the next three briefly touch upon Morgner, Johnson, and Wolf. Chapter 2's main purpose is to demonstrate Bloch's importance to Morgner via a long citation from her last publication, The Heroic Testament (Das heroische Testament, 1998). In it, she exclaimed: “I experienced Bloch like a natural wonder [Naturerlebnis]” (52). Chapter 3 situates Johnson, one who left the GDR for the West, in the context of the utopian in his texts. Chapter 4 touches briefly upon Christa Wolf's recognized use of the utopian throughout her writing and admission that she only read Bloch late in life. While I understand that these three chapters perhaps seemed to be important to situate the following five, this idea could have been accomplished in the introduction with well-placed quotes. Ultimately the chapters are so short as to be disappointing in their all-too-brief treatment of seminal works of GDR literature. For instance, Morgner's almost seven hundred-page feminist masterpiece Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice (Das Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz, 1974) receives no more than two pages. In addition, the “first phase” is not really established in the same way as the second due to the lack of close textual analysis of texts from the 1960s.The latter chapters, 5 through 9, provide concrete readings of the books by Fries and Braun focusing on questions of the GDR's cultural heritage (Kulturerbe), the portrayal of history in Marxism-Leninism, and some gender and generational analysis. This analysis is done through the lens of Bloch's Principle of Hope and later the influence of Horkheimer and Adorno. Each chosen text has its corresponding revolutionary “idealist hero” (Leitfigur) who, in the face of adversity and even certain death, remains true to a “utopian identity” that points toward a better world. For Bloch, classical examples were Prometheus, Odysseus, and also Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Faust. Kirchner identifies Don Quixote figures in Guevara or the Sun State and Don Giovanni figures in Hinze-Kunze-Novel, Alexander's New Worlds, and The Airship. The analysis compares the function of these characters in their respective texts with the function of such heroes in Bloch's philosophy, as lessons in how to avoid the historical and political mistakes of past utopian hopes (247). Kirchner then notes what Wolfgang Emmerich had already observed to be the transition from Bloch's optimism of progress (Fortschrittsoptimismus) to the more pessimistic and closed philosophy of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic.While an interesting approach that certainly yields a productive discussion and a better understanding of these novels, ultimately Kirchner's thesis suffers from the assumption that utopia is inherently escapist. The book fails to engage in discussions of the subversive potential of Bloch's utopian philosophy, specifically the significance of the utopian impulse, and conflates it with the closed system of Horkheimer and Adorno. Where the latter found no emancipatory potential in art produced in late capitalism, Bloch's “not-yet-conscious” found agency there, even if not-yet-conscious, particularly in the popular cultural forms that were rejected in the Dialectic. In fact, where Kirchner states that it was Bloch's philosophy of hope that led to this “fatal ambivalence,” it seems, if one wants to continue in her line of thought, that the influence of Horkheimer and Adorno played that much more of a decisive role.Kirchner is correct to observe that readers would be in error should they reduce Bloch's influence to merely a way in which these authors were able to reconcile themselves with socialist realism (13). Indeed, there were also other potential explanations for such a reconciliation. For instance, many East Germans of the postwar generation believed that communism was the only viable alternative after two wars and fascism. This belief held fast even after the disillusionment of the Prague Spring of 1968 and the new openness of the early Honecker era and then ended in renewed disappointment and a real break with the party for many after the Wolf Biermann affair of 1976.However, at times the book does read in this reductive way because it tends to close off the potential for and complexities of subversions within the narrative ambiguities common to GDR literature of the 1970s and 1980s. Kirchner is well versed in the East German literature she approaches in her book. While the author certainly provides an important reading of these texts, it strikes me as odd that a scholar whose topic deals primarily with Ernst Bloch's philosophy does not include a discussion of the utopian impulse or moment that is indeed central to an understanding of his Principle of Hope. In a footnote in the introduction, Kirchner explains that she simply does not believe those who argue that there is no future without utopia. This is called prognosis, she argues. Yet, by making this assumption, she rules out an entire line of utopian studies theory that would have helped to complicate her own thesis. Rather, her foundational understanding of utopian thought is something that has its “focal point of a generally satisfied state of being; this ideal is the central distinguishing feature of a utopian concept—also of the Blochian Principle of Hope” (16). What Kirchner is confusing here is the definition of the classic literary utopia as all-encompassing perfect world with the more contemporary and dynamic understandings of the utopian impulse or moment that is self-reflexive and inherently subversive (see the work of Lyman Tower Sargent or Tom Moylan for just two examples). She rejects this understanding in the abovementioned footnote. Consequently, the book ultimately replicates an approach still rooted in Cold War politics: subversion versus propaganda, capitalist versus communist, Western bourgeois realism versus Eastern utopian escapism (the specter of fascism or communism). Its assumptions limit the complexity of its analysis. But the book was written in 2002, and much has happened since then

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