A Surprising Portal on the German Sixties:

Jürgen Moltmann’s Theologie der Hoffnung (1964) in light of Thomas Bernhard’s Frost (1963)

Robert Weldon Whalen

Queens University of Charlotte

Charlotte, North Carolina

Presented to the Annual Meeting of the

German Studies Association in San Diego, California

2007

Like skeletons protruding from melting snow, or perhaps like resurrected bodies rising from their graves, early in the 1960s, Thomas Bernhard’s Frost and Jürgen Moltmann’s Theologie der Hoffnung, two utterly different texts, erupted into German-speaking Europe, testifying to something Ernst Bloch once described as “explosive hope”[1] and reviving Central Europe’s peculiar and ominous apocalyptic imagination.  To be sure, these two texts were certainly not the only socially-critical or apocalyptic texts in post-war Central Europe. Indeed, Moltmann’s text is inspired by Ernst Bloch’s 1959  Das Prinzip Hoffnung.[2] No doubt their remarkable reception had as much to do with the Sixties’ hungers as with the texts’ messages. Yet their power also arose from their explicit deployment of apocalyptic, messianic, and redemptive themes that, if not totally suppressed, had lain dormant for a generation. Harbingers of the future – each would be an iconic text in the German and Austrian Sixties – Frost and Theologie der Hoffnung were also ghosts from the past, returned to trouble, inspire, and haunt a new generation.   

          Frost came first. Published in 1963, Frost was Thomas Bernhard’s breakthrough novel. Thirty-two when Frost appeared, Bernhard had been publishing poetry and short-stories for nearly a decade. Frost, though, marked the beginning of a remarkable two decades of creativity, public honors, and ferocious public controversy. Frost, according to Bernhard critic Gitta Honegger, is Bernhard’s “first grand narrative,” which pioneered, among many other things, the sort of intense reflection on thought, popular culture, and the “performative impact of language,” that is, the ways in which language, behavior, identity, and action are related, that would quickly appear in works by others, such as Peter Handke’s famous play, Kaspar. Frost, Honegger argues, put Bernhard “on the map as a major talent who stood out for the force of his language and the darkness of his vision.  It earned the novice novelist two awards, the Julius Campe Award in 1963, and the Bremen Literaturpreis” in 1964.”[3]  In 1968, Bernhard would win the Austrian Förderungspreis für Literatur. Frost’s “dark vision” would also plunge Bernhard into the bitter public arguments which would dominate the rest of his life.

Jürgen Moltmann’s Theologie der Hoffnung appeared the next year, in 1964. A quarter century later, Moltmann was still amazed by his work’s reception.  Systematic theology doesn’t normally climb the pop charts, but Moltmann’s dense book became one of the most talked-about documents of its era. “I published it in 1964,” Moltmann recalled, “and in 1967, it appeared in English. But after that it slipped away from me and acquired a history of its own.” The book, he continued, had “met its kairos,” its cosmically “designed time.” Theologie der Hoffnung injected “iron in anemic Christian blood,” announced Der Spiegel, in 1967.  A New York Times headline helpfully explained that same year, that “God is Dead Doctrine Losing Ground to ‘Theology of Hope.’”[4]

          Each of these texts, of course, pointed to the future, specifically the tumultuous German and Austrian “Sixties.”  Bernhard’s fierce criticism of Central Europe’s status quo, and especially its alleged refusal to confront its horrendous past, would find a powerful echo in the social criticism of the Sixties’ radicals. Ironically, of course, this accusation – that Germans and Austrians refused to confront their past – would also be fueled by the Sixties’ two dramatic confrontations with the past: the Eichmann Trial of 1961 and the Auschwitz Trial of 1964.[5]  Moltmann’s revival of revolutionary hope would inspire many of the Sixties’ utopian projects, from Liberation Theology to the Green Movement to a reborn feminism. 

          Yet, what I want to explore in what follows is not so much the texts’ futures as their pasts. Specifically, I want to consider these two archetypal Sixties texts as continuations, and reconfigurations of, Central Europe’s apocalyptic tradition.  Bernhard and Moltmann are both heirs to this apocalyptic tradition; they would also be that tradition’s re-inventers.   

          First, let me make some brief remarks about this apocalyptic tradition.  Then, let me consider Bernhard’s Frost and Moltmann’s Theologie der Hoffnung as texts in critical dialogue with this tradition. Finally and very briefly, let me consider the two together, and suggest their relationship to their time, and to ours.

I

Maybe it’s all Martin Luther’s fault.[6] Maybe the peculiar German obsession with apocalypse is not just a strange survival from the ancient Teutons, but is a product of Luther’s fervent imagination.  To be sure, the Lutherforscher of the early 20^th century downplayed Luther’s apocalypticism, or translated it into more respectable forms,[7] but the fact remains that Luther was fascinated by end-times and the whole panoply they entail: fire in the sky, demons and angels in battle, the trumpet blasts of doom.  Luther’s times, of course, were apocalyptic times, and the apocalyptic mood would remain powerful until driven underground by the Enlightenment and Absolutism.[8]

But what then, is, apocalypse?

The term is notoriously slippery. Its root Greek meaning is “unveiling,” or “revelation,” a gradual, or more often, a sudden, “making present.”  A making present of what?  Of the “eschaton,” the end of time, the end of all things, but also the beginning of new and different things, the end of the old and the beginning of the new creation, the unveiling of a cosmic turning point, a cosmic crisis. This unveiling of the eschatological crisis is a time of metamorphoses and transfigurations, a time of kobolds and poltergeists. This unveiling may be triggered by a person or a group of persons – the Messiah – whose mission it is to explode the quotidian and inaugurate the apocalypse.  All this, though, is not sheer catastrophe, for what emerges, in the apocalyptic imagination, is a new creation, a restored harmony of all things, a godly kingdom, redemption.

Ernst Bloch would argue that all thought is potentially apocalyptic, because the very act of thinking involves recognizing a distinction between “is” and “ought,” and struggling to transcend the merely “is” and search for the “ought.” Every act of imagination is transcendent, Bloch argued, every imaginative act is an effort “to see around the corner, where different, unfamiliar life may be going on.”[9]

The apocalyptic imagination and all its elements – eschatology, messianism, a yearning for redemption – are rooted in, as Engelhard Weigl writes, a sense that the everyday world is “radically contingent.”[10] The weird stalks, intrudes into, and shivers the normal. Such a sensibility, whether the product of a fevered psychology or a shattered society, is dangerously flammable but enormously fruitful.  Buried by the Enlightenment and Absolutism, the apocalyptic was excavated by the early 19^th century Romantics. Waning in Bismarck’s Kaiserreich, the apocalyptic flooded the Central European imagination around the end of the 19^th century – Marianne Weber was struck by the eschatological enthusiasm of Heidelberg’s young, fin de siècle philosophers[11] – and especially in the catastrophic years during and after the Great War. Virtually every post-World War I German intellectual was deeply shaped by the apocalyptic imagination: Adorno and Benjamin; Scholem and Bloch; Barth, Heidegger, and Bonhoeffer. Classic Weimar texts like Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia (1919) and Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption (1921) reflect this intense yearning for what Eric Jacobson calls a “metaphysics of the profane.”[12]  Expressionism, of course, is the aesthetic dimension of this apocalypticism, but Weimar apocalypticism was much more than merely an echo of Dr. Caligari. In the arts, Caligari-style expressionism was out of steam by the mid-1920s,[13] but in thought, the apocalyptic continued to resonate.  

          Fascism and Communism were not the only fruits of apocalypticism, but both systematically mobilized apocalyptic sensibilities.  Little wonder, then, that even in the 1930s, and certainly by the 1940s, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Eric Vogelin, and many others would express grave reservations about the mingling of politics and apocalypse. In the post-war era in Central Europe, the apocalyptic faded, though it never disappeared.  Ernst Bloch would continue to defend it. In the 1960s, a new generation of Central Europeans would encounter it again, but changed, in the work of Thomas Bernhard and Jürgen Moltmann.

II

          A young medical student receives an odd assignment.  His advisor, Dr. Strauch, has a brother.  The brother is a painter.  Painter Strauch is crazy.  Painter Strauch lives high in the Austrian mountains, in an utterly obscure and cranky little village. Doctor Strauch asks his student to go to the village, observe Painter Strauch, and send back a report. Frost is the medical student’s diary of the twenty-seven days he spends on assignment; mixed in with the diary are reports to Dr. Strauch, transcripts of Painter Strauch’s interminable soliloquies, and miscellaneous notes.

          Frost begins:

Erster Tag

Eine Famulatur besteht ja nicht nur aus dem Zuschauen bei komplizierten Darmoperationen, aus Bauchfellaufschneiden, Lungenflügelzuklammern und Fußabsägen, sie besteht wirklich nicht nur aus Totenaugenzudrücken und aus Kinderherausziehen in die Welt.  Eine Famulatur ist nicht nur das: abgesägte ganze und halbe Beine und Arme über die Schulter in den Emailkübel werfen.[14]

[First Day

A medical internship consists of more than spectating at complicated bowel operations, cutting open stomach linings, bracketing off lungs, and sawing off feet; and it doesn’t just consist of thumbing closed the eyes of the dead, and hauling babies into the world either.  An internship is not just tossing limbs and parts of limbs over your shoulder into an enamel bucket.] [15]

The grotesquerie continues relentlessly.  On a train, a bird is crushed by the sudden closing of a window; outside, “Die Arbeiter zogen Messer heraus und schnitten Brot, Große, dicke Brotbocken würgten sie hinunter, dazu aßen sie Fleischstücke und Wurst;”[16] [“workers “choke” down lumps of bread, meat, and sausage”]; the inn the medical student finds is frightening, the landlady is disgusting, she and her inn remind the student of a time in childhood when he “had to vomit outside the open doors of the slaughterhouse.”[17] The landscape around the village is scary; the village “is populated by small, fully grown people whom one can certainly call cretins.”[18] The village and its inhabitants are so bizarre they’re almost comic, but the comedy quickly returns to the ominous. This is no ordinary universe; this is the world of Bosch and Grünewald, a universe of gaping, toothless mouths, greenish flesh, and disjointed limbs.

          This is a world where time has exploded; what is left is the debris of fractured days and ruptured nights. “The sour colors are drab. Everything is drab. No transition, no twilight. The Föhn wind sees to it that the temperature doesn’t drop. An atmosphere that causes the heart to tighten, if not to stop altogether … A climate that engenders embolisms.  Bizarre cloud formations … Rivers stinking of corruption all along their length.  Mountains like ridged brains.”[19] Perhaps this is hell (the student notes, mid-way in his report, “In fact, I’m in hell”[20]) but it seems far more chaotic, far more exhausted, than Dante’s magnificently structured inferno.  Perhaps this is the ruin of hell.

          Frost is all but plotless.  The medical student arrives at the beginning. He spends his twenty-some days listening to Painter Strauch’s mad monologues. The last pages report that Strauch disappears; the student leaves.

          “The frost,” in this frozen world, Strauch says, “is all-powerful.” The frost is implacable, pitiless.[21] Yet things do rustle and shift beneath the ice and snow. After checking-into his appalling inn, the student goes outside, looking for Strauch. He stumbles in the snow, and notices “a tree stump some twenty yards away … now I could see lots of similar stumps sticking out of the snow, as if shredded by shelling, dozens and dozens of them.”[22] What rustles and shifts in this nightmare world are corpses and ghosts.  Everything is stained and choked by death, corpses, and war. “Everything people eat is pieces of dead bodies,” Strauch says.[23] He tells the student: “Every room has seen its own atrocity. The war has soaked into these walls.”[24] And later, Strauch notes that “the war is an inexpungible inheritance.  The war is properly the third sex.”[25] The student reports: “The war had left its grisly traces up and down the valley. ‘Even today you keep encountering skulls or entire skeletons, covered over by a thin layer of pine needles,’ says the painter.”[26] The painter adds, “this war will never be forgotten. People will continue to encounter it wherever they go.”[27]

          Frost is, of course, the grandchild of expressionist apocalypticism. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the two.  Expressionist apocalypticism, the work of, for example, Ernst Toller, expresses a “redemption myth” that yearns for an end to time, a conclusion to history. Lisa Marie Anderson notes that “it is astounding how commonly the Expressionists appropriated … Jesus’ proclamation that he and his kingdom are ‘not of this world.’”[28]The Expressionist Messiah would redeem us all by ending the terrible pain of history.

          The pain of history, though, is precisely what Bernhard hopes to trigger in Frost. The novel is an indictment of a profoundly distorted and perverse society which refuses to recognize its own perversity. Bernhard’s conceit is that the cause of this perversion is frozenness, immobility, a refusal to face the realities of time, a refusal, in particular, to realize that the past flows inexorably into the present as the present into future. The village in Frost has anaesthetized itself against the pain of memory. Time and memory, in the novel are frozen solid. Therefore, Bernhard’s mission is apocalyptic – he must explode this frozen time, not to eliminate time but to permit time to flow again. Frost explodes the utterly unreflective, frozen, present through a score of shocking, expressionist, gestures – by displacing the normal with the marginal (and building the story around a madman); by ruthlessly spotlighting the bizarre and grotesque – but unlike  Expressionist apocalypticism, Bernhard’s aim is not to flee history but to revive it.  

     In Frost, Thomas Bernhard revives the apocalyptic tradition, but changes it as

well, in order to jolt 1960s Central Europe’s memory alive.  Here, the apocalyptic is not an escape from time, but a revivication of history. Bernhard, like the mad painter, “has turned a vast system of beginnings and significations into an edifice of thought where he tries to order the extraordinary chaos of history.”[29]

II

          Looking back a quarter century after the publication of Theologie der Hoffnung, Jürgen Moltmann wrote: “I am its author, that is true … but the history of the impact made by the Theology of Hope is a different matter.  There I am really one person among others … I am perhaps the book’s first reader rather than its author.”[30]

          Moltmann’s claim that “Christianity is eschatology” is not at all new.  Karl Barth, the great Weimar theologian, as Moltmann points out, made the same claim in the 1920s: “If Christianity be not altogether thoroughgoing eschatology,” Barth wrote, “there remains in it no relationship whatever with Christ.”[31]

          More important than Moltmann’s affirmation of eschatology is his rejection of existentialism.  Indeed, for Moltmann, eschatology is the vital alternative to an exhausted existentialism. Theodor Adorno rejected existentialism in part because its historical pessimism too easily becomes a justification for a passive acceptance of the status quo; existentialism, in this sense, is “the final ideology,” which, by closing off the future, abolishes any alternatives to the present.[32]

Moltmann has other reasons for rejecting existentialism. Heideggerian existentialism had made its mark on German religious thought especially through the work of Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann, like Heidegger, thought that “Being,” or “Eternity” suddenly intruded on, and unveiled itself to, human beings. Humans experience then a moment of timeless wonder, of awe, of transcendence before the Eternal. But, says Moltmann, this Bultmann-Heideggerian-existentialist understanding of eschatology is deeply misleading: “it was precisely the transcendentalist view of eschatology that prevented the break-through of [the] eschatological.”[33] The problem is, Moltmann thinks, that the existentialists, despite their obsession with time, are, oddly enough, ahistorical. They see Being – unchanging, eternal, unmoving Being – interrupting and suspending history. This sort of thing is Platonic; the motionless Being unveiled is not the passionate God of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. The same problem, Moltmann argues, occurs when the existentialists, like Bultmann, try to describe revelation.  Bultmann writes that “we understand by revelation the disclosure of what is veiled, the opening up of what is hidden.”[34]Again, Moltmann argues, time is suspended by the timeless. Indeed, Moltmann insists, in Bultmann’s existentialism one hears echoes of Kant and the Idealists’ abolition of eschatology. “It is therefore,” says Moltmann, “just as impossible for Bultmann as for Kant that eschatology should provide a doctrine of the ‘last things’ in the world process,” because according to them, “the logos of the eschaton becomes the power of liberation from history.”[35] Kant and Bultmann want to suspend history, escape history, liberate us from history – but that, Moltmann insists, is a serious misreading of eschatology.

Like Thomas Bernhard, Moltmann’s aim is not to escape time but to re-enter time. Eschatology redeems time by setting it again in motion.   

Eschatology, Moltmann insists, is not just about the future.  Eschatology is about, from a Jewish and Christian perspective, promises made in the past which will come to fruition in the future. Far from freeing believers from time, eschatology causes believers to re-experience time. “Those who hope in Christ,” Moltmann writes, “can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it.”[36] Eschatology reminds believers that “was,” “is,” and “yet to be” are all intimately related but not identical. Eschatology reminds believers that the way things are is not necessarily the way things ought to be or will be. Eschatology sets history in motion, “a history that is open towards the future.”[37]

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Moltmann insists that the eschaton is not a utopia.

The most compelling criticism of apocalypticism is that it is utopian, abstract, unrealistic, unconnected with reality.  In fact, some versions of apocalypticism have indeed promised kingdoms beyond time.  Such utopias are at best trivial escapism; worse, they are irrelevant to the crises of the day; and worst of all, they become “redemption myths,” dogmatic delusions that enflame the minds of Hitlers and Stalins.[38]

          It is essential, Moltmann argues, to “distinguish the spirit of eschatology from that of utopia.”[39] Utopia, Moltmann thinks, means not only “no place” but “no time.” Utopias are escapes from history. Utopian hope yearns to flee to timeless Eternity. Eschatological hope, does not yearn to flee time. Eschatological hope hopes in historical change, it looks in the present to the fulfillment in the future of promises made in the past. Eschatology does not direct our minds away from history to the timeless, but from the timeless, the static, and the frozen, to the dynamics of history. The timeless god of the utopians “describes the God of Parmenides rather than the God of the exodus and the resurrection.”[40]

Conclusion

The impact of Frost and Theologie der Hoffnung on the German and Austrian Sixties was immense. These texts were powerful at least in part because they mobilized Central Europe’s apocalyptic imagination, an imagination eclipsed but, as Ernst Bloch demonstrated in the late 1950s, still vibrant and fruitful.  Bernhard and Moltmann did not, though, simply repeat Weimar apocalypticism. Though clearly influenced by the apocalypticism of the 1920s, each re-imagined the apocalypse in distinctive ways.  Bernhard, for example, insisted that apocalypse is not a flight from history but a return to history (a claim echoed by Moltmann). Moltmann, for example, denied that eschatology is a form of utopia. He insisted that the real “utopians” are those defenders of the timeless, changeless, way-things-are; they are what Robert Musil described as defenders of the “utopia of the status quo.”[41] Those who hope in the eschaton are, to the contrary,  the true “realists.” The power of Bernhard’s and Moltmann’s texts is also, then, a product of their re-invention of the apocalyptic tradition.

The apocalypse is frightening.  No doubt, part of us agrees with Thoreau’s aphorism, “one world at a time.” Yet, even during a time of the “eclipse of the messianic,” we might well begin to feel that the way things are is not the way things ought to be, we might begin to feel that the world around us is, in Bloch’s terms, a strange “hollow space,[42]” and we might well find in texts like Frost and Theologie der Hoffnung congenial, disturbing, and even redeeming spirits. We might even begin to understand characters like Bernhard’s crazy painter, Strauch.  In a burst of madness, the painter points to “his theater,” the frozen world all around him, in which, to his ears at least, the trees, and winds, all have roles to play and lines to speak. He ends: “the air is learning its lines … Nothing more. Come on, let’s go, and let’s not be scared any more.”[43]

Notes