IS THE NEW LEFT NEW?
Bopp, James Jr.
IS THE NEW LEFT NEW? BY JAMES BOPP JR. Some time ago a group of young people headed by a man with the singular name of Muck Lamberty went from town to town calling the people to contemplation,...
...The old youth movement was, on the whole, antiintellectual and never had a foothold in the universities...
...the school was not to be ruled by its head but by an executive of teachers and pupils...
...But they did have in common a strong element of violence in their utterances, a great urge for destruction...
...The pre-war German youth movement had clearly identifiable, obvious targets: the authoritarian structure of family, school and life in general...
...Their elders tended to belitde these manifestations of protest, but they deserved more serious consideration...
...It has all happened before, and it is not only in Germany that the danger looms today...
...Little groups of "Bezmotivniki" sprouted, advocating "motiveless terror," partisan warfare, open street fighting of every possible type...
...But since young people do 4 not, as a rule, persist in nihilism for very long except as a pose, everyone was desperately groping for revolutionary new ideas and solutions to problems...
...Young people, he said, never had the right to, or the opportunity for, self-expression...
...They carried guitars, sometimes practiced free love and always adored flowers...
...the general situation in America now is so very different from the conditions prevailing in Central Europe during the years just before and after World War I. Berlin is far from Greenwich Village and Weimar from Haight-Ashbury...
...I mentioned earlier the communal settlement of Christian socialists and radical pacifists originally established in Germany, now in upstate New York...
...The public participated actively, shouting, joking and showering rotten eggs...
...But their confused thinking, their inability to accept industrial society, their profoundly antidemocratic and intolerant outlook, and their irrationalism made them an easy prey of philosophical charlatans and political demagogues preaching all kinds of eccentric doctrines...
...Max Norday, a literary critic living in Paris (now mainly remembered as one of the founding fathers of modern Zionism), launched a savage attack against it in a huge tome which he called "Degeneration...
...Those who chose commitment did not necessarily all go in the same direction...
...The futurist paintings and sculptures and the "noise music" soon became respectable...
...Their subsequent careers are known...
...After many tribulations they, or their children, are now settled in upstate New York...
...They visited many campuses spreading their message and, as is to be expected in this age of dissatisfaction, found tremendous interest...
...The idea that patriotism was unreasonable was widely accepted in these circles...
...they came from a middle-class background...
...The attacks on established norms in school and university and the demand for sweeping reforms and sharing control on the part of the students are virtually the same...
...How indeed to explain the antics of the established authorities: patriotism, morality, the family, the school...
...Youth was regarded as a transitional stage between childhood and maturity without specific, positive character or a style of its own...
...These long-haired boys and girls walked barefooted or sandaled...
...Again, there was a common denominator...
...The French anarchists with their indiscriminate assassinations and bombings, found many admirers, even among the right-wing Futurists...
...A group of religious socialists, deeply convinced that the love of money is the root of all evil, banded together and settled on the land to practice communism and to realize social justice in their own lives...
...It was the heyday of new fashions, political and philosophical, sexual and sartorial alike...
...His central idea was "youth culture...
...they were opposed to artificial conventions, snobbery, and affectation...
...The restlessness of youth, its innate revolutionary spirit, its unwillingness to accept established norms is a natural part of the human condition, but it can manifest itself in the particular way we are now experiencing only in times of relative peace -Continued on Page 11 10 IS THE NEW LEFT NEW...
...The ills and the injustices of society are compared not with society as it was, or with other societies...
...They did not share Marxist belief in the revolutionary character of the working class...
...the scene, central Germany, and the chief actors, members of the German youth movement, the so-called Wandervogel...
...usually they had not washed for a long time...
...On the contrary, it occurs only at a time of prosperity after a prolonged period of uninterrupted economic growth...
...It was an age of uncertainty, of dissolving beliefs and of an approach to nihilism...
...to display a permissive attitude toward all its manifestations is impossible...
...Sincerity was the key word then as now...
...Seen in historical perspective, the German youth movement was part of a much wider revolt of the young generation all over Europe...
...Hardly anyone in the new movement knew about its predecessors—certainly not in America, where the new movement came as a terrible and wholly inexplicable shock...
...The artists had begun by demanding the destruction of all picture galleries...
...There was nothing comparable to the Vietnam war in 1910...
...There was an overwhelming need for new radical ideas...
...Nordau and other conservatives failed to appreciate that the spirit of revolt, the search for new content and form in life and art alike, was a psychological necessity...
...We thought everything possible...
...In 1910, there were several movements propagating very different aims-militarists and pacifists, left-wingers and rightists, symbolists, poets and athletes, drug addicts, and teetotalers~so much so that any attempt to find a common denominator will do, at least to some of them, a grave injustice...
...the chief critic of the decadents, Remy de Gourmont, said it in so many words: "We are not patriots...
...Spengler's "Decline of the West" was published in 1918 and widely discussed...
...the German youth movement took extreme positions only after World War I. But underlying the political attitudes of these groups was the belief that the bourgeois world was corrupt to the roots, beyond redemption by parliamentary reforms...
...Numerically, it was smallit had never more than 100,000 members~and it was solidly middle class in origin...
...Some accepted pessimism and degeneracy with delight (at least as a literary pose...
...the millennium was about to dawn and the New Jerusalem was at hand...
...This was the esthetic approach...
...Published in 1967 Laqueur called it a "historical study" and said in conclusion that today the movement had "receded into the distant past with its guitar playing, folk songs and folk dancing, with its interminable controversies and its lunatic fringe of groups dedicated to eccentric, if sometimes engaging, futilities...
...They declared open war on society, endorsing every deed of violence however rash and senseless...
...This, with few exceptions, was the credo of the political avant-garde of 1910...
...In a real crisis, few people have the time and inclination to ponder the discontents of civilization and cultural pessimism becomes a luxury few can afford...
...The basic beliefs and even the outward fashions of the various groups constituting the present-day revolutionary youth movement in the United States, Germany, Holland, Sweden and elsewhere go back almost without exception to the period before World War I. The sincerity and the long hair, the guitars and the folk songs, the flowers and the hitchhiking, the demand for school and university reform were part and parcel of the German youth movement...
...The year the first Wandervogel group met in Berlin (1896), Art Nouveau came into fashion, in Germany, it was appropriately called Jugendstil—youth style...
...What, one wonders, will future historians say one day about the "movement" of the 'sixties...
...Some new prophets preached Chinese philosophy or Indian mysticism...
...Muck's group broke up...
...The young people of 1910 faced an age very satisfied with itself but saw little reason for such satisfaction...
...In 1968, there are more politics and greater uniformity...
...What matter the victims, provided the gesture is beautiful," a poet wrote, though he happened to be one of the victims...
...But the teachers refused to cooperate and most of the students were indifferent or actively hostile...
...The earlier movement was a protest against outworn traditions but it also created new ideas and new forms of expression...
...The details of his case are ridiculous but his basic idea, the effects of the ever more hectic urban way of life on the peace of mind, cannot easily be dismissed...
...It is different in a country such as Germany, where the plant of freedom, of tolerance, and of the recognition of the inalienable rights of human beings has as yet but tender roots...
...Nothing like it had been seen since the days of the Anabaptists...
...After the 1890's, the conviction that only by destroying the old order could a new world be born had rapidly gained ground among left and right...
...In Italy, Corradini, the chief ideologist of the avant-garde, produced pre-Maoist doctrines: that the revolution would be the work of proletarian nations destroying the stranglehold of plutocratic Europe...
...Continuedfrom Page 10 and prosperity and only in a bourgeois milieu...
...Anyway many overestimate the genuine depth of their attachment to their declared revolutionary ideals...
...only the left was in favor of school reform, against repression, sexual and otherwise, and for the "class struggle of the young generation...
...Reactions varied from group to group and from country to country...
...Parents were nonplused: Why did these boys and girls protest...
...In practice, there was much enlightened dictatorship...
...He explained it on the background of impressive statistics about the growing consumption of alcohol and tobacco, the suicide rate, and the general decline in health...
...In their meetings, they displayed wreaths with thousands of flowers, a veritable sea of asters and chrysanthemums...
...The rebellion can be psychologically explained, not in pseudo- Marxist terms with reference to economic grievances...
...In conditions like these, undermining all authority might have disastrous consequences...
...As for the specifically political outlook of the young generation, the avant-garde of 1910 lacked a unified political philosophy...
...Thereis a limited choice of ways to demonstrate protest, but many of these manifestations are new to America...
...One of the strongest influences on the youth movement was the educator Gustav Wyneken...
...Their practice, admittedly, lagged behind their theory, but the urge to destroy was intense...
...The ideas of natural law, of the inalienable rights of man, were strange to us...
...Wild men in Holland and Sweden will probably not do much harm and may do some good...
...Today's revolt has surprisingly much in common with the youth movement of 1910, but it is, of course, not a mere repetition...
...In France, "direct action" became the slogan of both left-wing syndicalists and the extreme right...
...The police intervened, and the modern Happening was born...
...We were in midair without a real basis for our artificial construction...
...Now it is largely a student protest movement (certainly in America and Germany but less so in other countires...
...American schools and middle-class families could hardly be accused of a surfeit of authoritarianism...
...Muck Lamberty's favorite word was "swinging...
...Hermann Hesse and others have written about them...
...The Futurists arranged soirees in the spring of 1910 in Trieste, Parma, Milan and other Italian cities...
...Occasionally erstwhile prophets of decadence ended up as superpatriots, such as Barres in France and the flamboyant D'Anunzio...
...the feeling that society was rotten...
...Teaching was in groups rather than in classes...
...Anarchist attacks inevitably provoke a strong authoritarian countermovement which will eventually get far more political support than the attackers for its claim to be saving the country from destructive elements...
...things were swinging if a community was united in peace and joy...
...It contained a multiplicity of groups, some of them strongly favoring political commitment, especially after World War I. Others—the eternal Wandervogel—amiable beatniks, aimless drifters, decided to opt out of society...
...No one came...
...Even before the fin de siecle mood had reached its height...
...Many of the ideas may be half-baked and the politics little better than an acting out in real life of the Theater of the Absurd...
...If they are absurd and antisocial, they exert a disturbing and corrupting influence on the views of a whole generation...
...That a youth movement of protest did not develop in 1930 or in 1946 is no accident...
...Continued from Page 4 of 1910 tried spontaneously, if awkwardly, to alter the human condition at a time when philosophers and sociologists were already writing about the "alienation of man," the "atomization of society," the lessening of contacts between human beings...
...He called on the young people to hold elections and establish students' councils (soviets of sorts) to establish new schools on the ruins of the old, free of the traditional submissiveness, mutual distrust and mendacity...
...Germans usually still tend to believe that what happened in their country, during the decade before World War I was absolutely unique, but this is not so...
...There are more urgent tasks to be faced such as the question of physical survival...
...Some opposed industrial society and the urban (suburban it would be now) way of life in principle, others, like the Italian Futurists, raved about the beauties of airplanes, racing cars, fast trains and modem architecture...
...It all sounded very profound and various gurus had great acclaim, even though their parables were hardly applicable at a time of political and social crisis to a people with an entirely different cultural tradition in the heart of Europe...
...How was all this to be accomplished...
...It is from these productions that an age derives its ideals of morality and beauty...
...Money meant little to them...
...Corradini lived to become one of the founding fathers of facism...
...In Europe, at least, a few remembered that once before in living memory...
...But some of the forces which drive these young people are noble, and if they display an excess of romantic fever and utopianism, the world would be a poorer place without these impulses...
...Youth in revolt is exclusively concerned with what society ideally should be...
...It was not a conscious revival...
...It is, in fact, what the leaders of the generation of 1910 were shouting from the rooftops...
...that the Americanization of European life (as everyone called it) ought to be stopped...
...Its adherents tended to shake petty egoism and careerism...
...Most of them went to war with great enthusiasm and became fervent nationalists or national socialists...
...admittedly, it has become much more difficult to be original in our age...
...It might seem far-fetched that what confronts us today is a new version...
...After the war they drifted away from politics—or into political extremism...
...Not a few among them thought that the sooner the old world was destroyed, the better...
...The settlers subsequently sent limousines to campuses to bring to the settlement for a visit those who had expressed their enthusiasm...
...Unlike other contemporaries, he took the new apostles seriously: "Books and works of art exercise a powerful suggestion on the masses...
...He had his own school, one of the first in Germany in which coeducation was practiced...
...Nordau condemned all modern art (including Nietzche, Zola, and Ibsen), interpreting the pessimism, the ennui, the vehement emotionalism in terms of mental disease...
...When the youth movement reached its apex in 1910, the Italian Futurists publishing their revolutionary manifestoes and two young Frenchmen, writing under the pseudonym "Agathon," created a furor (and established a trend) with a litde book called "Young People of Today...
...when the anonymity, the impersonality and the vulgarity of life in modern societies, the loss of vitality in individuals and the growing social torpor, were already themes of contemporary social criticism...
...A prominent member of the German youth movement said much later: "We had no real principles...
...Then came an interlude of four decades until, in the '60s, a new movement of protest sprouted among a new generation...
...Awareness of the problems and difficulties involved, and ultimately, disillusionment, will come all too soon...
...One need only compare the posters of Mucha or the School of Nancy with present-day psychedelic art...
...Sometimes there is a specific textual identity in the attacks made by the old and the new youth movement on society and its conventions, its artificiality and materialism, its lack of human warmth and sincerity...
...The old youth movement developed in its rnembersqualities of sincerity, decency, openmindedness, and idealism...
...But a closer look shows that more is in question than some striking if superficial similarities...
...His group was called the New Band and its attire was a little strange...
...Politically, they were rather naive: when World War I broke out, they breathed a tremendous sigh of relief...
...Greater comfort does not necessarily create greater happiness, and prolonged periods of a quiet, orderly, and uneventful existence invariable generate boredom, a feeling of suffocation and the fervent wish for a radical change...
...Admittedly historical parallels and analogies can be notoriously misleading...
...His followers, like the early Christians, shared their worldly possessions and were vegetarians and abstainers...
...The Futurists proposed to exclude from the supreme political body in their ideal state everyone over 30 and Giovinezza (youth) became the anthem of Italian fascism...
...Not long ago I met some of the leaders of the second generation of settlers—impressive men, as eager as ever to make converts tojoin them in their way of life...
...Others showed more staying power and were absorbed into the general culture of their countries, such as rambling and hitchhiking, folk songs and dances in Germany...
...Didn't they have everything they could possibly want...
...The German youth movement came into being around the turn of the century, its heyday was in the years immediately before and after World War I and it petered out during the early 1930's...
...Tolerance was thought to be the source of all evil and morality to start at the barrel of a gun...
...A common, antibourgeois denominator underlied these beliefs, pessimism about the future of culture, the assumption that liberalism, humanism, tolerance and all the traditional ideals of the Enlightenment were out-of-date...
...Tagore's gospel, "Love-not power," found many enthusiastic disciples...
...In his speeches he castigated urban civilization and its evils, the loss of all communion with life and with the spirit of nature, the new one-dimensional man...
...Not all went to such lengths...
...For the young generation — Continued on Page 9 IS THE NEW LEFT NEW...
...There was the underlying readiness to believe that not only Germany had failed, but that society and the West as a whole was in a state of deep, irremediable decay...
...The manifestations were different one from another, but the original inspiration of both left andrightwas identical, the general feeling being that diseases are relieved—or not at all...
...The Utopian mood is not open to argument...
...Down with Democracy...
...This description of Muck and his movement is found in Walter Laquer's "Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement, 1896-1933...
...After another few years, surrealism and other even more revolutionary trends had taken over...
...All this may sound like some present-day spiritual leader—minus, of course, current psychosociologicaljargon...
...others preached love of action and moral earnestness...
...that democracy was part of the rotten system, and that all politicians were crooks...
...The ideas that spread around the turn of the century encountered stiff resistance...
...The moral effect of the war would be like that of a great purifying fire, destroying everything rotten and decaying...
...Continuedfrom Page 9 Their British contemporaries advocated greater sexual freedom...
...The "Happening" was born in Italy...
...They had indeed everything-except the possibility of giving vent to the revolutionary spirit of youth...
...The year of course, was 1919...
...The rebels were firmly convinced the generation of their parents had landed the world in a mess and that a radical new beginning was needed...
...Not all were equally interested in politics, and those who committed themselves eventually went in opposing directions...
...The scene was repeated week after week in major Italian cities...
...Recent occurrences in the United States, Sweden, Germany and elsewhere have shown this obituary premature...
...the Russian anarchists around 1905 took the passion for destruction more seriously...
...the great bloody revolutionwould be made not by any specific class but by the vagabonds and robbers, the outcasts of society...
...After a few years they were exhibiting their pictures in the very places they had wanted to abolish...
...Experimenting with drugs to extend the frontiers of sensibility was the common thing to do among French fin de siecle revolutionaries from Mallarme to Huysmans through Baudelaire had already voiced doubts: "Le fou qui prend du hashish contracte unefoliquichasse Vautre...
...This general surge and revolt of youth was at one and the same time part of the fin de siecle general mood and an attempt to overcome it...
...Some time ago a group of young people headed by a man with the singular name of Muck Lamberty went from town to town calling the people to contemplation, urging them to wake up to life, to combat the decay of society, to be gay...
...In 1919, Wyneken was summoned by the government to reorganize the German school system...
...Manifestoes were read, ultramodern paintings exhibited...
...The revolt of 1900 was inevitable, as its successor today is...
...Wherever the group made its appearance, thousands joined in its meetings and dances, there were triumphal processions and the clergy had to open the churches for the lectures on the need for all-embracing love and for community singing...
...The impact of Art Nouveau in the 1960's hardly calls for documentation...
...The new movement has been less strong on the creative side so far...
...Some of the intellectual fashions they had created were soon discarded and forgotten...
...Some became fascists, others communists...
...The sexual revolution of the '20's dealt more with Freud and the social effects of World War I than with the proclamation of a few revolutionary ideologists...
...Continued on Page 10 9 IS THE NEW LEFT NEW...
...By singing, dancing and lectures on the "Revolution of the Soul...
...avant-garde art in France and Austria...
...that the decay of modern industrial civilization had made life intolerable...
...was the anarchist slogan...
...To oppose a priori such a movement is futile...
...The scheme was dropped after a few weeks...
...The cult of youth, the idea that youth is a virtue in itself, originated in Italy, France, Germany more or less simultaneously...
...There were public recitals of poems the like of which had never been heard before...
...They threatened to burn down whole cities and their news sheets featured diagrams for the preparation of homemade bombs...
...He was worried in particular about the effect of the constant vibrations undergone in railway travel on the nervous system...
...The members of the old youth movement were romantics but romantics with social conscience...
...But then the sense of proportion (and of history) is not at its most developed at the age of 19...
Vol. 1 • April 1968 • No. 5
