Some wisdom from my childhood: apart from the really obvious, the worst thing you can call somebody is “Stalinist”. (I grew up in Pankow, the wall had just come down.) To this day my mother insists on this, not just because Stalinism was a dictatorship, it was also – and this, too, is a serious charge – a travesty of Marxism.
So Sahra Wagenknecht, even then hailed as the rising star of the Orthodox Left, was mostly an object of scorn. There were jokes about her affecting a limp to be even more like Rosa. But there were also serious rumors about her alleged “Neo-Stalinism”. I don’t know if that is true. What I do know is that she wrote a review of Rüdiger Safranski’s new biography of Goethe. Wagenknecht attempts to turn the poet into a prophet of the human perils of Capitalism, a pre-Marx Marxist, and doesn’t even have the decency to mention György Lukács.
I only read the article anyway because I’d hoped to see Marshall Berman’s name in a German newspaper. Berman died last month. His study “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air”, a most wonderful book, includes a chapter on Goethe and “Faust” that builds on Lukács but adds a warmth that is all Berman’s:
“This is the meaning of Faust’s relationship with the devil: human powers can be developed only through what Marx called “the powers of the underworld,” dark and fearful energies that may erupt with a horrible force beyond all human control. Goethe’s Faust is the first, and still the best, tragedy of development.”
Hot stuff, as they say. In his review in 1982 Bob Christgau wrote that he hoped the book would turn out to be as important for the 80s as “Life Against Death” was for the 60s. (Bob Christgau, who was called “an asshole from the Village Voice” by Lou Reed on his live album “Take No Prisoners”. Christgau was grateful for the correct pronunciation of his name and remained a fan.)
Marshall Berman was a Marxist Humanist, which is either the most natural thing or the rarest breed in the world, depending on who you talk to and what their position on Althusser is. I personally don’t know if anything of this still means anything today – I somehow would like to think it does, but it might not.