by Stefanos Geroulanos
This text was prepared for, and first published in, the Mosse Program Blog. It is reprinted here with their permission.
In May 2008, we had dinner somewhere on Sixth Avenue. I can’t remember what we ate, nor what we said, but clear as day in my mind is Andy’s excitement, which culminated in a massive bear hug he gave me before we parted. I am taller, and still it felt much the opposite, after a decade of conversations in which he, though not nominally my Doktorvater, had served as a sort of secret prince. How to balance philosophy and history, what not to obsess about, how to think of myself as belonging in several traditions at once, how boring one passage I’d written was, how another was saying more than I thought, on this page and that a note to “up” (meaning “unpack!”). He would tilt his head—this here is a fad and I shouldn’t overcommit to it, let’s talk why I am interested or not interested in something else. That May, I had now defended, some burden had lifted, and still Andy would continue in exactly the same way, because his hadn’t been a formalistic advising, but instead a sort of live curation, live editing, curiosity as design, and conversation as rerouting. His physical strength in that bear hug was so unusual a gesture with me, as though he was holding me before sending me out to the world, as though also to note he wasn’t going away and he’d now be keener with his comments. It stuck with me, especially as he later weakened physically over time while I continued to ask for his intellectual paternity and he offered it as friendship. He never changed the way he talked to me: what I had understood as advisory and paternal had been a bidding for conversations to become meaningful and continuous. Now it had simply become freer.
I’m convinced that Andy had little idea of how intensely influential he was, first off as a conversationalist. Partly because he respected his interlocutor, but really because what was to him a normal conversation full of small gestures and playful criticism demanded real effort from anyone else. Even if it were about some unimportant film, it made it come alive somewhere in between us. Same with his writing: his effect was not a matter of people quoting or citing him but of them having to think differently after encountering him. The Human Motor was one of those rare books that craft a world. (We all have three or four favorites—books that make us feel immediate kinship with anyone who struggles with them, whether they love them or are pained by them. When someone merely shrugs about The Human Motor, I can’t help it: I just doubt their intelligence, I expect less, I look away.) No one in intellectual history wrote something as complex: no one wrote something that bridged society and ideas and made you feel that transformation and those ideas in how your body was supposed to work. No one with an interest in Benjamin or in Adorno took essential elements of their thinking as paths to writing a blended history of aptitude testing, thermodynamics, chronophotography, applied psychology, social policy in response to industrial accidents, Fordism, melancholia, psychotechnics, Nazi ideals about labor. For Andy, the disenchantment of the world happened through the rules set up to manage energy. Instrumental rationality had triumphed through the rule of productivism—and yet it had also created the welfare state. Reification and the deception of the masses must not ignore the reduction of life to the measurements needed to sustain it as labor. The wholly enlightened earth radiated with the enforcement of energy and the handling of fatigue. Reading Adorno didn’t mean you wrote about Adorno: you should write with him, find better places to work with his insights. He told me once—second memory—that I would regret pages about history-writing, pages philosophizing about history; I should just think with the theory, and write.
Third memory, from several occasions: Andy spoke of George Mosse with unmitigated adoration, and you could hear in his voice and residual New York accent that Mosse had been a model of an advisor, a star around which one’s planet revolved. Forty-five years later, Andy remembered clearly how he’d had to negotiate some of Mosse’s eyerolls and suggestions. I wonder a lot about that because I have the same sense yet Andy did not advise (me) in that way. He was less direct, didn’t need to be the center of the solar system, and knew how to wait and concentrate his comments, often in picking little pinpoints with intense effects. He would ask about how a passage related to one thinker whom I did not consider in the paper, or how I would deal with that seemingly irrelevant thinker—I was stuck. His comments would spiral outward from precise points as much as parallels like this. The way he waited to say something, sometimes for weeks, had a stronger effect than a direct address; his way of praising other people’s work or just squinting to signal indifference worked just as well. Few people could roll their eyes or raise an eyebrow as consequentially—in a perfection of the minimum gesture. Andy would laugh this deep laugh, sometimes throw his head back. A lot of the time he talked about things that seemed outside of the chapter or paper, and I’d realize later that they weren’t, or else that my horizon should have included them.
Andy developed and moved past Mosse’s approach most clearly in three essays. First, “The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich” (1976), which worked with Mosse’s sense of the cultural unity of National Socialism but blended the social policy of the Beauty of Labor organization with the aesthetic commitment the organization was supposed to generate through design and interior decoration. Then, “Nazi Culture” (2005) was all about fragmentation, about Nazism as a polyocracy and a cultural mess. As opposed to a Wagnerian worldview, he foregrounded the uneasy coexistence of several attitudes with the (antisemitic) “ethos” tying them together. In between these two came the intro that he and Jessica Benjamin wrote for Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, which took on “the attraction of fascism itself,” the schemas through which it blended cruelty and desire and through which it created libidinal attachments. By The Third Reich Sourcebook, Andy could emphasize the contradictions in the midst of the horror—“that Nazism’s racial utopia was a plausible and compelling idea for a great many contemporaries. The embrace of Nazi ideology and practice for countless ordinary Germans did not result merely from political propaganda but also from the more subtle mixture of commercial entertainment and ‘soft’ ideology,” an unpalatable potpourri as he and Sander Gilman called it, full of the “inner tensions of this shifting ideological morass.” Thanks to it, “the assault on culture merely anticipated the eventual criminal policies of a racial state” [TRS, xxiv–xxv]. Force, mélange, and contradictions—from the first catastrophe relayed by Benjamin and Bloch to the second registered by Heidegger, Adorno and Horkheimer, and Jaspers in In the Shadow of Catastrophe.
Fourth memory: the singular way he had of looking at you somehow through the top rim of his glasses, something that at first terrified me in office hours, even though it was meant at once as the start of a caring critique and warmth: not over the rim, simply through it. It’s too cute to call this a dialectical or even dual perception, but he did offer the feeling that he thought at once in your terms and in his: the imperative was that you should think in his too. For undergraduates like me who met him before reading him, Andy was neither the editor of New German Critique nor the author of The Human Motor; we didn’t know any of that. He was the person who filled a twentieth century of movements and catastrophes with specific intellectuals, their ideas, their worlds, their reactions to cultural shifts—in my case, regarding the interwar period first of all. And then, my senior thesis, about which he’d tell me to stop looking at the figures in the landscape of the painting, take the landscape in as much as you take them, it deserves as careful a reading, as deep a thinking. All of us as his undergraduates had a sense that he too was an intellectual, even though he did not speak much of his own engagements. I only learned about his interpretations of Benjamin, Heidegger, Adorno, the Historikerstreit, and so on when reading him subsequently, and I learned elements of his family history—like his father going to Birobidjan—a few semesters in. New German Critique and his books were extensions of his force in class—and this dual vision, above and below the rim of his glasses, was an easy way to recognize he’d be thinking at multiple levels at once.
This too is clear in retrospect in his writing. In the Shadow of Catastrophe had one of the most brilliant introductions of any book—full of possibility and openings, resolutely eschewing the historian’s introduction, just as resolutely refusing to downplay history, conversing with other writers, foregrounding catastrophe as the signal word of the time—without either ignoring its history or overcommitting to it. There, he thought as a philosopher as much as a historian but did not give either group of interlocutors the reins, sustaining for them a whole conceptual web that moved between enlightenment and apocalyptic thinking. For me, it was the first thing of his that I read, and even when I read it now it is something of a revelation: he could move in and out of texts with an agility few others showed. Andy considered intellectuals as complicated symptoms, not necessarily of some pathology, but at least of their own time, and he let them be endlessly creative without ignoring their unpleasant politics; he debated how intense, at times singular, intellectual personae get to be regardless of that plurality of meanings. He relayed to us the sense that texts have multiple meanings and simply look differently depending on the angle of approach, that concepts are tricky and deceitful, and that when ideas go public, what follows can be completely unexpected. I remember too a talk that he gave in 2000 on Hannah Arendt and Eichmann in Jerusalem. The published version retains the verve of the original presentation—perhaps the text is simply unchanged. There, the text was an event, twisted by other events, by people and alliances, by shifts in broader mentalities to which it couldn’t yet nevertheless did respond, its theories getting folded into and staged against them.
One more little remembrance to share is a duet of memories: an evening walk, in Berlin in 2015, and a drink, again in Berlin, this time in 2018, the latter after the Mosse Program’s big conference there. I asked him about all the essays he had accumulated without republishing, and whether we could work on them to become books. I thought at the time that the massiveness of the Third Reich Sourcebook had perhaps drained Andy of the desire for another book process, and I wanted to simplify the logistics. What I didn’t realize is that something had changed, and how committed he was to thinking about concepts and their histories, something he had begun in Begriffe aus dem Kalten Krieg but would not get to complete as a full book. I proposed to scan and OCR old texts, some of them written on a typewriter, so he could have them in one document, as a first draft of the book. That’s how he started on The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor, before reworking parts and writing the introduction. By the time that Dagmar Herzog and I worked with him on Staging the Third Reich (2020), Andy was ready for retouching texts, if a bit peeved perhaps that we were bringing back some he hardly cared for anymore. (He certainly didn’t keep an updated CV, and at times he would shrug off old publications I’d found with “oh yes, that.”) With both books he became energized, as though these were entirely new projects, which in a sense they were.
Memories serve on occasions like this to frame a relationship, a shared parcours. But I should like to use mine to frame something of a sense of Andy as thinker of modernity. I think anyone who met him had a sliver of this, and those of us who spent real time with him got more slivers, many more, though never a single full picture. He was a thinker for whom Austrian social democracy was the tragic intellectual antidote to the Soviet disaster, a Left with ideas worth believing in all the while one watched it collapse; a thinker who bridged Madison with West (and even East) Germany to turn the often-amorphous, mercurial intellectual left during the 1970s into a set of engagements whose precision belies the scope of his vision: on Rodolsky’s career, then a critique of West-German Marxist theories about Nazism, back to Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times, with a little Benjamin mixed in, then turn again, to Poulantzas, back again at Austromarxism. This feels now like an awakening for anyone who has held close one historian-philosopher or two, who made their pronouncements always explicit, who always finish a sentence and complete a book. Andy’s involved more of a dance. In each of his studies, New German Critique essays as much as occasional pieces for Dissent, we watch theory dance with tragedy—and therein lies one grandeur—and then glimpse present concerns loop around the ones from long ago. Characteristic of Andy’s intervention was his sympathy and the excitement for ideas and theory—doubled with a persistent sentiment of the catastrophe that would befall utopia.
This was one axis, his thinking about the Left. But then there was his thinking on fascism. Dagmar and I wrote about Andy’s thinking about ideology, belief, and commitments to fascism—particularly about how specific ideas seemed to take a back seat to an overall ethos—and how for him its history was intertwined with its memory and historicization. Which is also to say how what we remember and historicize alters a world that we can’t simply treat as history yet can’t carry forward to the present. And a third axis was formed by the questions about modernity: The Human Motor and the Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor, the latter of which included his formalization of the relationship between bodies and machines into three eras, mimetic, transcendental, and digital. Those two books don’t always get along. But whatever their tensions, they, along with his arguments about technology and modernity in fascism and his explicit thinking about catastrophe, build a richer and more playful account of our century—one that is up there with the best of them, wears its learning lightly, and carries a suspiciousness and care that theorists downplay for the sake of “rigor.”
I remember Andy telling me, soon after I met him, to read and think with “Mourning and Melancholia” because I needed it. I think he meant personally as well as philosophically. I also remember our last conversation: Andy unwilling to bend on an argument I thought would tempt him: no, too facile, he replied, you don’t need to like this author or his politics and commitments, but he was a misfit, don’t downplay that, he shouldn’t be made to belong to this politics either. Andy seemed at peace in his thinking, yet not at peace in general: there was more to do and discuss, even when it was difficult, and his presence and discussion were as alive as any word he might write. This is one reason why the grand theory was less important than every conversation. The last few times we spoke he thought so sharply. He thought the high and low of ideas and human behavior, he offered a full theory of the twentieth century without ever saying that’s what he was doing, he kept both graciousness and skepticism on hand. I listen to recordings of him, hear his irony and laughter, and I miss him with a gratitude that I cannot articulate to you.
Stefanos Geroulanos is the director of the Remarque Institute, a professor of history at New York University, and the author of The Invention of Prehistory (2024) and co-author of The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe (2018). He co-edits the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Featured image: Anson Rabinbach speaking at conference “Mosse’s Europe,” June 2019. Courtesy of the University of Wisconsin’s Mosse Program Blog.
