Das Patchwork der Minderheiten [The patchwork of minorities], Berlin: Merve, 1977 (see Appendix for translation). © Merve Verlag. Photos by Christian Werner, Berlin.
9 Pages 6 and 7 of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Bernd Schwibs, Winterthur: Suhrbier, 1974 (see Appendix for translation). Peter Gente and Heidi Paris struggled through this pirate edition for five years. © ZKM Karlsruhe, Merve-Archiv / Man Ray Trust, Paris / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2015. Photo by Franz Wamhof, Karlsruhe.
10 Peter Gente (second from left) reading Mille plateaux by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Poland, 1994. © Benjamin Gente.
11 Michel Foucault in West Berlin, Güntzelstrasse, Pension Finck, 1978 (see Appendix for translation). © ZKM Karlsruhe, Merve-Archiv. Photo by Franz Wamhof, Karlsruhe.
12 Michel Foucault and Heidi Paris at the Tunix Conference, Berlin, 1978. © Ulrich Raulff, Marbach.
13 Michel Foucault and Peter Gente at the Tunix Conference, Berlin, 1978. © Ulrich Raulff, Marbach.
14 Traverses: Revue trimestrielle, 32 (1984) (see Appendix for translation). Photo by Christian Werner, Berlin.
15 Architectural misunderstandings would like to become a book: Martin Kippenberger sends greetings from Tenerife, 1987 (see Appendix for translation). © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
16 The site of Berlin’s former central railway station, Anhalter Bahnhof, 1980s. © DACS, 2021.
17 Endpapers of Ernst Jünger, Auf den Marmorklippen, Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1939. Photo by Christian Werner, Berlin.
18 The Wild Academy at the buffet, Kassel, 1984. © Dieter Schwerdtle, Kassel, Germany.
19 Dirk Baecker proposes Luhmann’s interviews to Merve (see Appendix for translation). © Dirk Baecker / ZKM Karlsruhe, Merve-Archiv. Photo by Franz Wamhof, Karlsruhe.
20 In the original Dschungel at Winterfeldplatz, 1976. © bpk / Esther Colton.
21 The Gropius Building next to the Berlin Wall, Berlin, early 1980s. © DACS, 2021.
Acknowledgements
Although this book is mainly based on a composite of written records, it would not have been possible without numerous conversations. I thank the following people for their willingness to answer my questions: Hannes Böhringer, Peter Geble, Peter Gente†, Wolfgang Hagen, Marianne Karbe, Helmut Lethen, Michaela Ott, Wolfert von Rahden, Ulrich Raulff, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Cord Riechelmann, Henning Schmidgen, Edith Seifert, Walter Seitter, Georg Stanitzek, Jochen Stankowski, Ronald Voullié, Nikolaus Wegmann and all the others who have talked to me in the past few years about their experiences with theory. I especially thank Tom Lamberty and Elisa Barth of Merve Verlag for their generous help and support. My heartfelt thanks go to Stephan Schlak for the initial impulse that led to this book. I thank the staff of the Centre for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, the Walter Benjamin Archives (where there are photocopies of Adorno’s correspondence), the German Literature Archives in Marbach and the University Archives of Freie Universität, Berlin. I would not have been able to finish the book without a sabbatical semester funded by the Excellence Initiative of Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. For their critical reading and crucial suggestions, I thank Philipp Albers, Jan von Brevern, Martin Engelmeier, Martin Mittelmeier, Jan Mollenhauer, Moritz Neuffer, Kathrin Passig, Cornelius Reiber, Johanna Seifert and, most of all, Hanna Engelmeier. I thank Christian Werner for his dedicated photography. I thank Stefanie Hölscher for her great interest in this project. And I thank Yael Reuveny and Anne Henk for everything else.
Introduction: What Was Theory?
Sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for arson in 1968, Andreas Baader discovered letter-writing. He described the torment of solitude, ranted about the guards, and asked his friends to supply him with essentials. Besides cured meats and tobacco, that meant, most of all, books. He had people send him the student movement’s favourite authors, Marx, Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, which he had only known from hearsay up to then. ‘Mountains of theory, the last thing I wanted’, he wrote to the mother of his daughter. ‘I work and I suffer, without complaining of course.’ Later, in the maximum-security prison at Stammheim, it was up to his lawyers to feed his hunger for reading material. At the time of his death, there were some 400 books in his cell: a respectable library for a terrorist who was notorious among his comrades for his recklessness. Without a doubt, Baader played the part of a jailhouse intellectual, just as he had previously played the revolutionary. Yet, at the same time, there was a great deal of seriousness in his studies. His letters indicate that he felt a need to catch up1 – after all, the struggle to which he had dedicated himself was founded on theoretical principles.2 In a different time, Baader would have taken up painting perhaps, or begun writing an autobiographical novel. Instead, he plunged – almost in spite of himself – into theory.
Now that the intellectual energies of ’68 have long since decayed to a feeble smouldering, it is hard to imagine the fascination of a genre that captivated generations of readers. Theory was more than just a succession of intellectual ideas: it was a claim of truth, an article of faith and a lifestyle accessory. It spread among its adherents in cheap paperbacks; it launched new language games in seminars and reading groups. The Frankfurt School, post-structuralism and systems theory were best-selling brands. West German students discovered in Adorno’s books the poetry of concepts. As the sixties dawned, the New Left rallied under the banner of its ‘theory work’ against the pragmatism of the Social Democrats: those who would change the world, they proclaimed, must start by thinking it through. But the thinking they had in mind had nothing to do with the philosophy of professors who stuck to interpreting the classic texts or the meaning of Being. It was concerned less with eternal truth and more with critiques of the dominant conditions, and under its scrutiny even the most mundane acts took on social relevance. Jacob Taubes, professor of the philosophy of religion in Berlin, saw his students reading the works of Herbert Marcuse with an intensity reminiscent of the zeal ‘with which young Talmud scholars once interpreted the text of the Torah’.3 On campus, theory conferred upon its readers not only academic capital, but also sex appeal. Marcuse led to Marx, and Marx to Hegel: those who wanted to have a say in the discussion got themselves the twenty-volume Suhrkamp edition of Hegel’s complete works.4 Only after the shock of the terrorists’ debacle in Stammheim and Mogadishu did any doubts about the canon of the ’68 generation mature into open resistance. New thinking came to Germany from Paris and did away with the tonality of dialectics. The books of Deleuze and Baudrillard called for a different kind of reading from those of Marx and Hegel. They seemed to have a more important purpose than the search for truth, and in the course of the 1980s theory metamorphosed into an aesthetic experience. And when ecology laid constraints of quantities and limits on the speculative imagination of the seventies, thorny philosophy set out to infiltrate the art world.
The first impetus to write this book dates from several years ago. In the spring of 2008, the editor of a journal of intellectual history called me to ask for an article on the German publishing house Merve. The editor was planning an issue about West Berlin, the walled-in city on the front lines of the Cold War, which Merve had supplied with theory for twenty long years. Peter Gente, the founder of Merve, had retired from publishing and sold his papers to an archive to finance his sunset years in Thailand, and so the time seemed ripe for historical retrospection.5 Although I wasn’t a Berliner, Merve was a byword to me too. There was no way I could refuse.
Merve has been called the ‘Reclam of postmodernism’ – Reclam, of course, are the publishers of the ‘Universal Library’, the yellow, pocket-sized standard texts
