former favourite author in supplying the editors of the literary journal Alternative with original publications by Benjamin from the 1930s to demonstrate that the Frankfurt editors of Benjamin’s collected works – Adorno and his student Rolf Tiedemann – were carrying out a questionable policy. The allegation that the Suhrkamp edition, principally edited by Adorno, downplayed Benjamin’s conversion to Marxism by retouching key sentences caused a stir in philological politics. To his growing numbers of followers in the student movement, Benjamin was being martyred once more by the injustice of his executors.20
While the leftist press drew on his expertise, Gente’s studies made only modest progress. The seminar papers he wrote on materialist aesthetics did not arouse his professors’ enthusiasm. Peter Szondi found a 1965 paper on Lukács to contain ‘approaches and suggestions that sometimes overstep the boundary between research and journalism’, and marked it ‘satisfactory’.21 In spite of modest marks, Gente thought about going on to do a doctorate. The dissertation he had in mind, inspired by his reading of Benjamin, would be devoted to the failure of the bourgeois arts. But Szondi was not receptive to the topic. ‘He didn’t really understand what I actually wanted, and I couldn’t really explain it to him, you see’, Gente recalled. The idea of the end of art must have sounded as strange to Szondi as it did to Adorno.22 Yet it was what everyone had been talking about since May ’68, under the label of ‘cultural revolution’. ‘L’art est mort’, the Parisian students had written on the walls of the Sorbonne, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger had continued their eulogy in his monthly cultural journal Kursbuch: ‘In our day, it is not possible to identify a significant social function of literary works of art’, he pronounced, causing an uproar among publishers and authors. As examples for a revolutionary literature to come, Enzensberger named the politically engaged writers Günter Wallraff and Ulrike Meinhof.23 In view of their public reception, however, his theses were no longer suitable as a topic for a dissertation. It looks as though Peter Gente had come too late to his academic career. Or perhaps he had merely realized since his arrival at the university that he had no talent as a writer.
‘He didn’t write’, the New York theory publisher Sylvère Lotringer would recall about his friend many years later.24 The statement hits the central issue of Gente’s life on the head – perhaps even the issue of his generation. As a budding intellectual, he had not only penetrated into the nexus of leftist tradition during the sixties, but had also been looking for his own voice. For lack of a better label, Gente identified himself at the time of Merve’s founding as a ‘freelance writer’,25 but, except for an article on the ‘Bitterfeld Way’, a current in East German workers’ literature, he had written practically nothing.26 Publishing other people’s writing suited him better. At a time when the air was filled with editorial projects, there were many opportunities to do so. Gente scored his first modest coup as an editor in 1965 with a theme issue of Alternative on Parisian essayists. By that time, he had extended his mania for collecting to include French journals, and had unearthed texts by Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lucien Goldmann and others. Hardly anyone in Berlin knew these theoreticians, and the issue was a great success. Two years later, Gente would again demonstrate his advanced knowledge by providing the key evidence in the dispute over the Suhrkamp edition of Benjamin. Helmut Lethen, who also contributed to Alternative at that time, found Gente and his encyclopaedic knowledge a ‘tremendous source of inspiration’. Nevertheless, Gente did not become a regular member of the editorial team: the editor-in-chief, Hildegard Brenner, would not accept the fact that he could not be persuaded to write.27
School of Hard Books
In 1965, shortly after the Alternative special issue appeared, the newly appointed Professor of Hermeneutics and Jewish Studies Jacob Taubes invited Gente into his office. Up to then, he had taken no notice of the quiet student in his seminars, but he found Gente’s knowledge of the French thinkers remarkable. As a token of his appreciation, Taubes offered Gente one of his envied student assistant positions. Gente’s first assignment was to unpack Taubes’s library, which, he recalled, had ‘arrived from New York in heavy shipping crates’.28 At that time, it was taken for granted that a well-to-do scholar and professor would control his means of production by personal ownership.29 To the hungry eyes of his student assistant, the encounter with Taubes’s books must have been a formative experience. Taubes’s library encompassed more than the canon of German philosophy and modern classics that had come to be de rigueur for the followers of Critical Theory. It documented the reading career of a cosmopolitan intellectual who had a penchant for giving consideration to obscure and scandalous thinkers. Taubes exuded an atmosphere of scholarly intensity in which the fate of humanity seemed to depend on the interpretation of crucial texts.30 Rumour had it that he was able ‘to grasp the content of a book infallibly by merely laying his hands on it’.31 Among the mysteries of this colourful personality is the fact that, in spite of – or perhaps because of – this gift as a reader, he was not prominent as an author. Adorno, whose relationship with Taubes was strained, thought he was ‘simultaneously highly gifted and deeply disturbed in his productivity’.32 To the students who felt attracted to his intellectual excitement, Taubes conveyed the existential importance of theory. The Department of Hermeneutics that he established at Freie Universität ‘was the centre of often wildly interdisciplinary studies, highly controversial, and a sanctuary for many who did not want to tread any predefined path’, recalled Henning Ritter, who was a tutor under Taubes in the sixties.33 One of the nonconformists broadening their intellectual horizons in this circle was the student assistant Peter Gente. Those who came under Taubes’s influence were exposed to sufficient apocrypha to immunize them against the dogmatism of the student movement. They were also estranged from Adorno, whom Taubes in turn considered a ‘protesting left-wing Heideggerian’ with an affected style.34 ‘Who here can write as beautifully as Adorno?’ he is said to have shouted repeatedly during a lecture, ‘laughing eerily.’35
Taubes had neither Adorno’s talent as a writer nor his reluctance to intervene in politics. At Freie Universität, which he saw as something like the Berkeley of Germany, Taubes took the side of the rebelling students. And yet he responded with scepticism to their utopian expectations. The activity of the SDS interested him more for its subversive energy than for its socialist background. When the Kommune I members Fritz Teufel and Rainer Langhans were made to stand trial for distributing a handbill inciting people to burn down department stores, Taubes wrote, as an amicus curiae, an evaluation of the ‘surrealist provocation’, situating it in the tradition of literary avant-gardes. His submission helped the communards escape a jail sentence.36 In July of 1967, Taubes moderated a public discussion at FU with his friend Herbert Marcuse, who drew boisterous enthusiasm from the students. Taubes invited the Parisian Hegel interpreter Alexandre Kojève to Berlin the same year, who perplexed his revolutionary listeners by recommending that the best thing to do in the present situation was to learn Ancient Greek. Kojève’s snobbism was incomprehensible to the ’68 generation. Only initiates among Taubes’s students could decipher, perhaps, that Kojève was serving up a taste of his theory of ‘post-histoire’.37 Taubes himself also knew how to subvert leftists’ expectations, which sometimes made his political engagement difficult to gauge. The right-wing intellectual Armin Mohler, Taubes’s friend from undergraduate days, was of the opinion that he wanted to inoculate the protest movement ‘with surrealism’.38
Paperback Theory
Jacob Taubes also plays an important part in the history of theory in West Germany as one of the architects of the Suhrkamp culture. In 1965, when Gente arrived in his department, Taubes was in the middle of planning a new paperback series for the head of Suhrkamp, Siegfried Unseld. Three years before, Unseld had inaugurated the edition suhrkamp, a rainbow-coloured shelf of paperbacks that became the emblem of an intellectual era. The concept of supplying literary and philosophical titles in a pocket format had become feasible only after the death of Unseld’s predecessor Peter Suhrkamp, who had staunchly refused
