Modernism in the Streets. Marshall Berman

      Contents

      Introduction by David Marcus

      I. Origin Stories

      1.Caught Up in the Mix

      II. Radical Times

      2.The Politics of Authenticity

3.Alienation, Community, Freedom

4.Notes Toward a New Society

5.Unchained Melody

III. Living for the City

6.Take It to the Streets

7.Buildings Are Judgment, or “What Man Can Build”

       8.Views from the Burning Bridge

       9.New York Calling

       IV. Jay Talking

       10.The Dancer and the Dance (Karl Marx)

       11.Still Waiting at the Station (Edmund Wilson)

       12.Angel in the City (Walter Benjamin)

       13.Cosmic Chutzpah (Georg Lukács)

       V. The Bright Book of Life

       14.The Jewish Patient (Franz Kafka)

       15.Waiting for the Barbarians (Isaac Babel)

       16.In the Night Kitchen (Alfred Kazin)

       17.The Bright Book of Life (Orhan Pamuk)

       VI. Signs in the Street

       18.Signs in the Street

       19.Underground Man

       20.Broadway, Love, and Theft

       21.“Justice / Just Us”

       VII. The Romance of Public Space

       Introduction by Shellie Sclan

       22.The Romance of Public Space

       23.The Bible and Public Space

       VIII. From the Ruins

       24.Emerging from the Ruins

       Notes

       Index

       Introduction

       Marxism with Soul: On the Life and Times of Marshall Berman

      Marshall Berman was born in the South Bronx in 1940. Over the next three decades, he watched his lower-middle-class neighborhood turn to ruin. Between 1948 and 1972, Robert Moses—who years later became the Faustian villain of Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air—built the Cross Bronx Expressway. It ravaged the South Bronx, cutting it up into bits and pieces and bombing out other areas completely, including much of Berman’s own neighborhood, Tremont. In the 1970s, the less systematic destruction began. New York City was broke and its outer boroughs were in a state of neglect and disrepair. “The Bronx finally made it into the media,” as Marshall recalled in an essay about the ’70s. The headline: “The Bronx Is Burning!”

      The self-destructive tendencies of New York City—and, more generally, of modern urban life—were to become the central preoccupation in Berman’s work. His first book, The Politics of Authenticity (1970), took eighteenth-century Paris and its two most brilliant thinkers, Montesquieu and Rousseau as a case study for what culminated in the revolutionary violence at the end of the century. All That Is Solid, which came twelve years later, was something less and something more. It marked the end of a promising, though contained, academic career in the vein of his college and early graduate school mentors—Peter Gay, Lionel Trilling, Isaiah Berlin—and the blossoming of a startling and radical new voice in social criticism. Tracing an arc of violence and destruction from Goethe’s Faust to New York City’s Moses, Berman argued that modernism, when coupled with the toxic tendencies of industrial capitalism, wreaked havoc on man’s psychic and spiritual life as well as his social and economic conditions.

      Both works and the many essays that came before and after also insisted there was another side of modern life. A figure like Robert Moses, eschewing the humanist impulses of city life and modernist aesthetics, sought to rid New York of its creative chaos. But the modern city could also be a place for human creativity and rebirth and Berman was drawn to those figures who embodied this vision. From Marx to

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