Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)

265 Pages·2001·1.61 MB·English

by  Helmut Lethen

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