Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art

FORM AS REVOLT

Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art

SEBASTIAN ZEIDLER

A Signale Book

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS AND CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

ITHACA, NY

To my parents

The tale has often been told, with an inevitability of events and culmination, either melancholy or exultant. The conviction that it all had to happen is indeed difficult to discard. Yet that conviction ruins the living interest of history and precludes a fair judgement upon the agents. They did not know the future.

—Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Carl Einstein: A Life

Carl Einstein: An Introduction

1. The Lost Wanderer

2. Sculpture Ungrounded

3. Cubism’s Passion

4. The Double Style

5. Private Mythologies

Acknowledgments

Notes

Copyright and Photographic Credits

Index

ABBREVIATIONS

CARL EINSTEIN

A Life

The subject of this book is Carl Einstein, a writer, art critic, political activist, and art historian of the early twentieth century. Einstein’s life was one of the most eventful of the period, and his writings were among the most complex. Since neither his life nor his writings are familiar to most English-speaking readers, I will offer a précis of Einstein’s life here, and the introduction that follows will outline this book’s approach to his writings.

On April 26, 1885, Carl Einstein was born, as Karl Einstein, in the provincial town of Neuwied in southwest Germany, halfway between Cologne and Frankfurt.¹ He received a humanistic education at two gymnasiums, where he was introduced to ancient mythology, which left a powerful impression on him. For a time Einstein’s family prospered, but then tragedy struck. His father, Daniel, had had a successful career as a Jewish cantor and instructor in religion, which culminated in his appointment as director of a Jewish teacher’s college in Karlsruhe, near Stuttgart. But Daniel had to retire for health reasons around the age of fifty, and in 1899 he died in a mental asylum, probably by his own hand. Decades later, the combined impact of the death of his father and of the cosmology of the Greeks would continue to reverberate through the writings of the son.

In 1904 Einstein moved to Berlin to enroll at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, which he left four years later without a degree. Still, Einstein had not been idle in his studies. The classes he took with Alois Riehl, Georg Simmel, and Heinrich Wölfflin opened the world of philosophy and art history to him. Over the years Einstein would read up voraciously on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, and Wölfflin’s Basic Principles of Art History would always remain both a touchstone and a negative foil for his own formalist art criticism. For the time being, however, Einstein was pursuing a career as a writer. The first version of his novella, Bebuquin, or The Dilettantes of the Marvelous, was published in 1907 in Opale magazine by the writer and editor Franz Blei; it made him an instant celebrity in the literary world of Berlin. It must have been Blei, a connoisseur of French Symbolism, who introduced Einstein to the work of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and above all Mallarmé, whose Divagations would have a significant impact on the dozens of experimental prose pieces he went on to publish before World War I. Among the literary circles in which Einstein was now moving were the Neuer Club and the Neopathetisches Cabaret; it was likely here that, thanks to his acquaintance with the Club’s co-founder Erwin Loewenson and the writer Salomo Friedlaender (Mynona), Einstein became enthralled, or still more enthralled, with the Romantic philosophy of Novalis and Schelling. Other interests at the time included the plays of Paul Claudel, the novels of André Gide, and, less obviously, Meister Eckhart’s sermons and the Outlines of Skepticism by Sextus Empiricus.

In 1912, Einstein’s writing became politicized, suddenly and radically. The personal may have led to the political. Einstein’s girlfriend Maria Ramm, whom he married that year, was the sister-in-law of Franz Pfemfert, anarchist, pacifist, and editor of Die Aktion magazine. Pfemfert had founded it as an organ of forthright radicalism that stood for the idea of a Great German Left, and in the years before the war Die Aktion did become a base for writers and thinkers across the full range of the left-wing spectrum. Peter Kropotkin, Erich Mühsam, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Hugo Ball, and the young Walter Benjamin all published in it. Einstein’s contributions to Die Aktion read like aggressively political texts, documents of his deep immersion in a body of radical thought that ranged from the freewheeling anarchism of Gustav Landauer through the syndicalism of Georges Sorel to the left-wing socialism of Wilhelm Liebknecht, whom by 1915 he knew personally.

The year 1912 was important in another sense; it marked the first securely documented visit by Einstein to Paris. It was likely during the several weeks in the city with his friend, the left-wing writer Ludwig Rubiner, that he became seriously interested in French cubism in general and Pablo Picasso in particular. He probably met the artist’s dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and so laid the groundwork for a friendship that would last a lifetime. Einstein already knew Max Raphael, a fellow renegade Wölfflinian, author of From Monet to Picasso (1913), and his most important interlocutor on modern art before the war. Einstein’s own efforts at art criticism throughout the 1910s were scattered and limited, however. Perhaps daunted by the topic, he had virtually nothing to say on cubism. As for the texts on the artists he did write about, a diverse group that included figures like Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Arnold Waldschmidt, it is unclear whether they should count as art criticism or prose.

The same cannot be said for the extraordinary book Einstein went on to publish in 1915. Negro Sculpture was at once an intervention into the contemporary theory and practice of European sculpture and a manifesto for the sophistication of African art. It put Einstein on the map as a major critic in the formalist tradition and as an unusual kind of modernist primitivist. The topic would continue to fascinate him. A follow-up study, African Sculpture, was published in 1921, and in 1925 Einstein visited London to discuss plans for a much more comprehensive publication with the British Museum’s deputy keeper of ethnographic collections.²

When World War I broke out, Einstein volunteered for service in the army. By 1916 he was stationed in German-occupied Brussels, which was then the unlikely home of a wartime artists’ colony: poets like Gottfried Benn, another close friend, and art world figures like Wilhelm Hausenstein and Alfred Flechtheim were based there, too.³ Einstein may have been officially employed at the German-occupied Colonial Office; he was certainly using its library and regularly visited the Museum of Belgian Congo in Tervuren to study its collection of African art. But again politics interrupted Einstein’s cultural pursuits. As Germany was losing the war, her soldiers mutinied on many fronts. On November 10, 1918, a soldiers’ council was seizing power at Brussels, and Einstein took a leading role in its command. Einstein and his comrades imagined creating a republic of ex-soldiers and Belgian socialists in postwar Brussels. The dream lasted for all of one week.

After the failure of the Belgian revolution Einstein returned to Berlin.⁴ He participated in the street fighting during the Spartacus Revolt in January 1919; by June he had joined the newly founded German Communist Party (KPD). On January 15, the day Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered, Einstein and his wife were temporarily arrested. On June 13, he was one of a handful of speakers at Luxemburg’s belated funeral. Throughout 1919 and 1920 Einstein would deliver speeches and publish pamphlets in support of a German councils’ republic, as well as invectives against the Social Democrat government. He cofounded or took over two journals of the radical Left: Die Pleite, which he ran together with George Grosz, Wieland Herzfelde, and John Heartfield; and Der blutige Ernst, on which he again collaborated with Grosz.⁵ This is not to say that Einstein had now joined the Berlin Dada movement. The two journals never so much as mention the word Dada, and he only ever wrote briefly on the art. In an amusing photomontage, Grosz and Heartfield would spoof Einstein for his infatuation with cubism in the age of the avant-garde; conversely, he seems to have considered Berlin Dada’s antiaesthetic the negligible part of a project of political militancy. Finally, in 1922, in a much-publicized court case ripe with anti-Semitic undertones, Einstein and his publisher Ernst Rowohlt were put on trial for blasphemy for Einstein’s farcical play Bad Tidings. Both were sentenced to significant fines.

By the time of the trial Einstein’s political activism had already faded, and his art-world career had begun to take off. He was now visiting and temporarily living in Paris on a regular basis. He began to publish in Paul Westheim’s Kunstblatt and in Florent Fels’s Action. He got to know André and Clara Malraux, took cognizance of André Breton’s Littérature, was in touch with Amédée Ozenfant of the Esprit Nouveau, and maintained a regular correspondence with Kahnweiler. He wrote a short book on the painter Moïse Kisling, another personal friend. Plans for other books, on Georges Braque and Juan Gris, didn’t take off; but Einstein did write on Fernand Léger’s stage designs (partly inspired by Negro Sculpture) for the Swedish Ballet. In 1923 he paid a visit to the Bauhaus, where he met with Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. He may have received an offer of a teaching position; but if so, he never took it up. While he admired the art of Klee, Einstein had serious misgivings about the metaphysical bombast of Kandinsky and other Bauhaus figures.

In the early 1920s Einstein met a number of Russian intellectuals and artists who were visiting or living in Berlin, among them Roman Jakobson, Victor Shklovsky, Natan Altman, and possibly Vladimir Mayakovsky. Two avant-garde journals listed Einstein as a correspondent or prospective contributor: Lef, the organ of the Russian formalists and constructivists; and Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand, the trilingual magazine that El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg were running in Berlin. A posthumously published text, which at first sight looks like an aggressive manifesto for political abstraction, was probably written with Altman in mind and intended for Veshch’.⁶

But Einstein’s openness to the Soviet avant-garde soon degraded into hostility and contempt. The reasons for his change of mind are partly elusive, but it is certain that the political and the artistic were converging here. For one thing, Einstein always shared with Kahnweiler a cubism stalwart’s prejudice against abstraction; he was lukewarm on the work he saw at the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung at the Van Diemen Gallery in Berlin in 1922. For another, Einstein had been as enthusiastic about the October Revolution in 1917 as he was now becoming weary of its aftermath, about which he was harboring no illusions.⁷ In a letter of March 1923 he deplored the way in which in the Soviet Union Bolshevik censorship and the free-trade tendencies of the New Economic Policy were complementing each other. He also hinted at a conflict between himself and unnamed partisans of the conservative cultural policy decreed by Anatoly Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar for Enlightenment. The occasion of the exchange is unknown (a KPD cadre briefing in Berlin?); but for Einstein it became symbolic of the failure of an entire project. Sometime in the early 1920s he was either expelled from the KPD or left it voluntarily. Years later, he would spend pages ridiculing Lunacharsky’s preference for bourgeois writers like Goethe, and he gleefully reported on Mayakovsky’s suicide.

In 1922 Einstein managed to obtain a contract with the respectable Propyläen Verlag for a survey of contemporary art from fauvism to the present moment. Over the next several years he worked feverishly on the manuscript, and his labors paid off.⁸ Published in 1926, The Art of the 20th Century established Einstein as a major figure in the European art world. It was a commercial success and went through two further editions (1928, 1931), many sections of which were substantially rewritten or newly added to cover the recent most art, including French surrealism and Picasso’s work from the later 1920s. In terms of its range and value The Art of the 20th Century is a book of extremes. Given its prospective audience, German art is well represented in it, notably the expressionists and the Blauer Reiter and Bauhaus painters. But Einstein’s writing on many of them is uneven, a mix of misplaced theoretical complexity, undisciplined digressions, and routine delivery, spiced up with scorn or hyperbole. His hostility to abstraction in general and Soviet art in particular ensured the sections on Mondrian, Malevich, and related artists were the low point of the book. That does leave the significant share, and it is a major one. Einstein’s chapter on the cubism of Braque and Picasso ranks with the best criticism the two artists have ever received.

The years between 1926 and 1928 saw a drop in the quantity and quality of Einstein’s work. The dry spell ceased dramatically once he made good on plans he had been harboring for a while, and in 1928 moved permanently to Paris. He was awaited by a number of people he had got to know in the preceding years. Besides Kahnweiler, there was the young writer and critic Michel Leiris, who had recently married the dealer’s stepdaughter. There was also Braque, with whom Einstein became personally close, and who would serve as best man at his second wedding in 1932; and there was Jean Arp, who like Einstein was moving in the circle of Transition, the magazine run by Eugene Jolas. Soon, however, Einstein would have his own journal. Backed financially by the art dealer Georges Wildenstein, and possibly by the wealthy magnate Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, another friend and one of the most important collectors in the history of modern art, Einstein served as the cofounder, with Leiris and Georges Bataille, of Documents (1929–30).⁹ Short as the magazine’s lifetime was, it proved an immensely productive moment for him.

The several dozen essays that Einstein published in Documents, Die Weltkunst, Die Kunstauktion, and in various exhibition catalogues, and the revised chapters of his survey, show him immersed in new or newly revisited theoretical resources: Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Will to Power; Freud on sadism, masochism, and the death drive; the surrealists on automatic drawing; Hegel’s Science of Logic on the dialectic; and Mauss and Lévy-Bruhl on primitive theories of magic, among others. Einstein brought this material to bear on topics as diverse as the art of the nomads of central Asia and early Mediterranean bronze sculpture. Among contemporary artists, Picasso became the abiding focus; Einstein was clearly the driving force behind a Documents special issue on him. Between them, the flurry of essays he published in the magazine and in the much-expanded 1931 survey chapter on the artist add up to an account of Picasso’s surrealism whose complexity has never been fully recognized and never surpassed. The same is true, in a different key, for The Art of the 20th Century’s rewritten section on Paul Klee. Read together with a Documents essay on Jean Arp, it describes an art of cosmology in which the origin of a world springs into being upon the death of its creator-god. For Einstein, that doubleness resonated deeply with his own childhood, and beyond that with modernity at large.

Einstein did not become idle after Documents folded. In 1933 he cowrote the script for Toni, a film directed by Jean Renoir. He also helped organize a major Braque retrospective at the Kunsthalle Basel, and the French translation of his book manuscript on the artist was published a year later. But toward the mid-1930s dark clouds were beginning to gather. The first years in Paris had been affluent for Einstein, complete with office and secretary in the rue la Boétie. But after the Nazi seizure of power his German bank accounts were blocked, and his employment prospects in the Paris art world were drying up. Einstein sold his library to the artist Kees van Dongen, and at one point his new wife, Lyda Guevrekian, had to support them by working as a seamstress. Moreover, Einstein was becoming isolated politically and intellectually. With one exception, he did not participate in the events that were hosted by the Paris-based German exile organizations; nor was he active in the Popular Front, perhaps because of an anarchist’s contempt for communism and social democracy both. His circle of friends was reduced to Kahnweiler, Leiris, and a few others.

By 1935 Einstein had stopped writing on contemporary art. He retreated into the recesses of his mind, which expanded out into a vast and fractured landscape of art history and autobiography. He kept compiling notes for a project that at one point was going to be called a Handbuch der Kunst: a world art history of all ages and regions whose annotated table of contents takes up twenty-one pages of Einstein’s Werke edition. None of the notes got even close to a publishable state; all of them betray a restlessly roaming intellect unsupported by training in historical research. The other vast project Einstein was working on, and had been since at least the early 1920s, is in similarly fragmented condition. Known as BEB II, it is a massive collection of notes for an autobiography that to the present day have remained unedited.¹⁰ Some of these notes can make for an enthralling read, but their editorial status is problematic. Because of their preliminary state it is often impossible to tell whether one is reading the draft for a paragraph or page or the actual text itself, and to what degree it is fictionalized or autobiographical. Moreover, because of a number of disastrous archival decisions, Einstein’s original organization of his notes is now virtually irretrievable, and so is the overall plan for the book, should he have had one. This study will refer only sparingly to BEB II.

In the late summer of 1936 Einstein abruptly left Paris for Barcelona to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He met the syndicalist leader Helmut Rüdiger, and, enchanted by the magnitude and enthusiasm of the mass movement he witnessed in the city, he went on to join the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo-Federación Anarquista Ibérica (CNT-FAI). Thanks to the military expertise he had acquired in World War I, and to his interest in strategy (Einstein was an avid reader of Sun Tzu), he soon became an officer with the Durruti Column, a legendary anarchist militia. At the Aragon Front, the Column was not only battling the nationalists but also organizing the collectivization of land. The experience of working and fighting together with Spanish farmers and with soldiers from many countries moved Einstein deeply. Strange as it may sound, this may well have been the happiest time of his life. Einstein had found what had eluded him in Brussels, and what he had seen drown in blood in Berlin: a collective of people forming up in a historical situation that was threateningly instable, but which for that very reason was also profoundly open. But the moment was not destined to last, and another event duplicated itself. In 1919 Einstein had spoken at Luxemburg’s funeral; in November 1936 he delivered a radio address that commemorated the death of Buenaventura Durruti.

Between 1937 and 1939 Einstein fought in a number of major battles and was repeatedly wounded; all this time his wife was working as a military nurse. When the Spanish Republic fell, he fled back to France. His situation now changed from precarious to lethal. Einstein was temporarily interned as a Civil War veteran, then continued on to Paris. In 1940, he was interned again in a camp near Bordeaux, this time for being a German in France. In one of the camps he was briefly reunited with Max Raphael; they talked about art to pass the time. After the Franco-German ceasefire in June, Einstein either was released or managed to escape, whereupon he was now being hounded as a Jew. On the run in southern France, with his friends out of reach and no resources left, Einstein briefly found a haven with the Roman Catholic priests of the Sacred Heart at Lestelle-Bétharram. On or around July 3, 1940, having given up all hope to escape across the Pyrenees, he drowned himself in a river. After the war, Kahnweiler and Leiris arranged for a small memorial to be set up in a nearby village. It is dedicated to their friend, Carl Einstein, writer and art historian, fighter for freedom.

CARL EINSTEIN

An Introduction

Groundlessness as Ground

It will be evident even from the compact CV I have just rehearsed that as the topic of a book Carl Einstein is both an embarrassment of riches and a daunting challenge. Few intellectuals in the early twentieth century had a life this compelling; few were as intensely committed to literature, art criticism, art history, political militancy, and philosophy as Einstein was at various points in his career. How to make sense of it all?

In trying to answer that question, the literature has typically settled for one of two options. Either it has produced biographical studies in which Einstein’s commitments are comprehensively documented but not thought together, or it has cherry-picked them according to its own convictions. Einstein has been an anarchist to the anarchists, a Bataillean to the Batailleans, a Marxist to the Adornians, a bourgeois intellectual to the Brechtians, a writer to the Germanists, a critic to the art historians. This interpretive cacophony has gone hand in hand with chronological atomization. Treatments of Einstein the writer typically end by the time of World War I, after which he all but ceased to publish prose. Reading the literature on surrealism, one wouldn’t guess he had a life before Documents. Studies of his militancy have been as episodic as his own engagement in it, and the art criticism he was writing in the long spells in between is usually read without his politics in mind.

Still, the atomization is instructive, for it faithfully mimics the historical reality. Einstein was an enigma not just to postwar academics but to his own contemporaries. The reviews of Negro Sculpture and The Art of the 20th Century were equally numerous and uncomprehending. Even a close friend like Kahnweiler chose to remember their author not as an art critic but as a poet. In 1919, a journalist for the ultra-left Rätezeitung found a speech by Einstein baffling in spite of its straightforward topic (The Political Responsibility of the Intellectual). And in 1937, the veteran anarcho-syndicalist Helmut Rüdiger was dismayed to learn his new comrade was ignorant of the basic tenets of the CNT-FAI.¹

These examples could be multiplied, but we can already discern a pattern. Some of Einstein’s acquaintances provided him with a source of income; others gave him new ideas, a political home, or access to artists and collections. But Einstein was always a man apart, and his project cannot be deduced from the company he was keeping at any one moment: his cubism wasn’t Kahnweiler’s any more than his anarchism was Rüdiger’s. The apartness, I shall argue, was by design. The contexts through which Einstein kept moving never grounded his texts. To the contrary, his perennial shifts from the one to the other worked to sustain their author’s groundlessness. In his wandering among the territories of literature, art criticism, and politics, Einstein was enacting as his life a modern ontological condition to which he was giving form in his work: that is the argument of this book.

Like Einstein himself, it will use the notions of ground, origin, and causality synonymously. A ground is the firm fundament upon which you erect your project, say the economic base of your superstructural efforts as a Marxist critic. Alternatively, an origin roots your project in a specific era and location, as Africa did for the early twentieth-century primitivists. Causality in turn unrolls a chain of causes and effects over time, and so creates a stable temporal sequence, say of modernism or the legacy of the avant-garde, into which your project may then be inserted: as the latest link in the chain that responds to the penultimate one. What the three notions have in common, then, is that they enable, shape, and even prescribe a project by grounding it in an a priori condition, whether political, art historical, or temporal. And that is why Einstein rejected all three out of hand.

So much so that in the notes on childhood in his autobiographical work BEB II he refused to recall his own origins: Nobody knows his childhood; hence we lack the very elements of our own life, which thereby remains wholly unknown to us; whence such substitutes as the origin myth of the arch-ground, etc., the cosmogonies, etc.² Einstein’s childhood amnesia was postulate in part, but that only makes his point more programmatic. Whether it was Hesiod’s Theogony, his own autobiography, or the work of a contemporary painter (he had Paul Klee, childhood cosmogonist, in mind): according to Einstein, the staggering task of the work of art is to unfold an entire world—but a world whose origin must be the originlessness of its creator. For the creator mustn’t rely on a ground to support that world ready-made. He is rather compelled to produce a new one from scratch, all while knowing it to be a substitute, since the real ground, assuming it exists, will forever be inaccessible to him.³

In Einstein, autobiography was only one of many examples of such ground-lessness as ground, just as in the early twentieth century groundlessness was more than one person’s predicament. It describes a pervasive sense of ontological drift that set in when the era cut itself loose from tradition broadly conceived: from the traditio, the handing down, of genres of literature, conventions of building and art making, and templates of collectivity. In stating as much, this book argues implicitly that the artistic continuity that is still routinely perceived to extend from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth and beyond is false. Few art-historical illusions have been more harmful, or more influential, than the causal chains that descend down the branches of Alfred Barr’s tree diagram.⁴ This book puts the axe to that tree. It argues that to understand Einstein’s project is to discover the specificity of his era, and with it the contours of a different history of modern art: a history of groundless experimentalism, not of developmental problem-solving.

Consider the clarion call that opened the cubism chapter of Einstein’s Art of the 20th Century: Doesn’t history, conceived as a continuum of repetition, put creation into question—isn’t the preciousness of tradition the lifebelt of the un-creative? Repetition or invention—a decision was going to be made (K1 56).⁵ Either artists, writers, and political activists choose merely to repeat the past by adding a minor update to an unbroken tradition, whether of modernist painting, the nineteenth-century novel, or social-democratic reform. Or they resolve to uproot themselves from that past, and go on to erect, as if from nothing, a new world upon the abyss of deracination: a world of painting ungrounded from nature and the nineteenth century, a world of experimental prose ungrounded from novel and narrative, a world of collective politics ungrounded from incremental reformism.

That was the decision Einstein demanded, and countless contemporaries joined him in following it through. To be sure, the outcomes were not exactly uniform; they ranged from radiant utopianism to ruthless optimism, delicious paradox, and dark affliction. To give just a few examples, the most exhilarating and most literal expressions of groundlessness can be found in early twentieth-century architecture, whether at the level of the city or of the individual dwelling. Enabled by the daring use of reinforced concrete, the endlessly stacked and ramifying infrastructures of Antonio Sant’Elia’s designs for the futurist Città Nuova swept away the earthbound tectonics of Beaux-Arts architecture, so that the earth as first principle and ground seems no longer to exist at all.⁶ Meanwhile, the slender pilotis that lift the Villa Savoye up and away from its plot are key elements of Le Corbusier’s design strategy: "to transform the land from ground into an equipotential datum, one among others. That effect critiques the discipline’s history of complicity in the metaphysics of land’s groundedness with all that that entails, from holy land to fatherland to my land."⁷

But if groundlessness can be limitless sprawl or graceful suspension, a ride on modernization’s bullet or a harvest of its emancipatory boon, it may also be experienced as threat or purposely unresolved dilemma. Then, it will lead to attempts to retrieve, rather than to create, a ground or origin for modern philosophy and art; attempts that will be undertaken either in earnest or ironically. The first mood is represented by Heidegger’s exploration of the essence of the ground and the origin of the artwork in his eponymous texts.⁸ Max Ernst, by contrast, can stand for the ironist faction. In his Dada overpaintings the sedimentation of geologic strata echoes the pattern of the artwork’s wallpaper support. Here, in a visual double entendre, a retrieval (Wiederholung) of a prehistoric origin is thwarted by the origin’s repetition (Wiederholung) by the work’s material ground.⁹

Given this range, which will be extended further shortly, on which side of early twentieth-century groundlessness did Einstein come down? Which of its moods did his texts express, and how? The passage I just cited from his survey makes him sound like a boilerplate avant-garde optimist, but we shouldn’t forget the bafflement of his interlocutors. The manifestos of the futurists weren’t known for their incomprehensibility. Matters are more complicated, then; and that complication points to the uniqueness of Einstein’s project. It is caused by an oscillation in his texts between theory and literature, or, in my parlance, between discourse and writing. In Einstein, discourse states modern groundlessness in the mood of exhilaration, which writing then threatens to undermine.

It will be practical to begin with a concrete example for this claim, using a topic that’s timely, urgent, and instructive. Einstein’s politics will be simmering away in the background of every page of this book. They have never been examined satisfactorily, and the following section is intended to sketch them in outline. But that sketch will be only half the task. Once I am done describing Einstein’s politics as discourse, I will be compelled to question their foundation in writing. At that point, when paradox has reached maximum pitch, we are ready for a summary of the scope and argument of the chapters to come.

Original Politics

To understand Einstein’s politics properly, a few introductory remarks are required. Today, at least among historians of modern art, the ex-post-facto label Western Marxism is too often confused with historical reality. It can seem as though there was no Left before Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923); and that when that Left finally emerged, it was committed to a defensive action fought from the margins by the Frankfurt School: to a critique of reification rather than its abolition, isolated from the communist mainstream that might have brought it about. But Einstein’s political convictions, and not just his, were formed a full ten years and one World War before Lukács’s book, in an era when revolution, not resistance, had still been on the agenda of the Left—except, that is, when it hadn’t.

For this was the era of the Second International, or, which to many contemporaries was the same thing, the era of a crisis of socialism.¹⁰ As I will argue in detail in chapter 1, for Einstein and his associates at Die Aktion that crisis consisted in the paradox that by 1912 European socialism seemed to be winning at last, only thereby to fail all the more thoroughly. The most vivid sign of the crisis was the fate of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), by far the most powerful force in the Second International. The SPD had achieved a sweeping victory in the elections and had become the largest faction in the Berlin Reichstag. But since all other parties refused to engage in durable coalitions with it, the moment of the SPD’s political triumph looked like the moment of its institutional defeat.

To the mind of the left-wing opposition within the SPD and of the anarchists beyond its fringes, what was in the balance was more than a parliamentarian deadlock that might be resolved in future elections. The entire Second-International project seemed discredited. Variously referred to as gradualism, revisionism, or attentism (wait and see), that project was powered by the assumption that ultimate political victory was as inexorable as the steps toward it needed to be incremental. It was through the perennial pursuit of gradual reform, and only through it, that socialism would one day emerge from within capitalism. That sounds like a policy any 1960s Social Democrat could have underwritten; but the difference lies in the theory of history that was undergirding it: a severely determinist version of Historical Materialism which the Second International had inherited, not exactly from the young Marx, but from late nineteenth-century efforts at making Engels look still more scientistic than he had been.

Taking their cue from Engels’s Anti-Dühring (1878), a number of Second-International thinkers had attempted to merge the HistoMat with a reductive version of Darwin’s Origin of Species in order to think political teleology together with biological evolution.¹¹ The argument was rigid, simple, and efficient. As with the development of the species, so with the amelioration of workers’ conditions over the centuries: perfection was a gradual process—an e volution, not a re volution— and that was precisely what made it inevitable. The upshot, as Die Aktion never tired of pointing out, was that according to many Second-International leaders, political revolt was not even an option. Historical evolution needed to run its determinist course, and any willful intervention into it, say by extraparliamentarian mass strikes, had to be curbed. Workers could not be allowed to delude themselves into thinking they were free-willed agents capable of making their own history, as opposed to merely enacting the law of its development.¹²

Left-wing opposition to this scheme of things had begun to gain traction in 1899 with Rosa Luxemburg’s attack on Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism.¹³ Most important for our purposes is the root-and-branch critique launched in 1911 by the anarchist Gustav Landauer in his influential Call to Socialism: Where the Marxists are believers in development à la Hegel, there the revisionists are believers in evolution à la Darwin. They no longer believe in catastrophe and suddenness. Capitalism, they think, won’t flip over into socialism in revolutionary fashion; it will rather differentiate itself gradually and so become increasingly tolerable.¹⁴ Landauer’s dismissal, not just of pseudo-Darwinian evolutionism, but also of Hegelian development, shows him willing to discard the HistoMat altogether, and with it all shades of Marxism: That is why we hate [Marxism] from the bottom of our hearts: because it is not the description and science it claims to be, but a negatory, disintegrating, and paralyzing appeal to powerlessness, lack of will, acquiescence, to just letting things happen.¹⁵

That was also Einstein’s stance. Traces of Landauer’s argument can be found in Einstein’s writings from 1912 on. There are, for example, his polemical dicta, à propos of the Reichstag elections, that Darwinism is a thoroughly parliamentarian theory of science, and that socialism weakened its idea by allowing parliamentarians … to dissolve revolt into the primal slime of evolution.¹⁶ There is his rejection of the HistoMat’s teleology, whether Bernsteinian or Leninist: People were overwhelmed by the idea of ‘maturation’ and development. They trusted in the mechanical flow of economics to carry them swiftly to socialist paradise. Even the ‘revolutionary’ Marxists posit a fixated utopia that is supposedly the ‘goal’ of historical development.¹⁷ There is Einstein’s claim that, on the contrary, a real revolution will smash right through history and tradition.¹⁸ And then there is this broadside attack on the SPD: Social Democracy declared itself a conservative party from the very beginning, for it defined itself as a class party.¹⁹

The last statement wasn’t motivated by a Dandyist’s disdain for ordinary workers; again, Einstein was a combatant in the Spartacus Revolt. Nor was he merely setting his sights on the inertia of the SPD’s right-wing labor aristocracy. Instead, rather than with a rejection of the working class we are dealing with a rejection of class as such. That rejection in turn is in sync with Einstein’s polemic against evolutionist and developmental models of socialism.

For what is subtending all of Einstein’s political remarks is a full-blown ontology of time, one that includes political time but is not limited to it. For reasons that will become clear over the course of this book, Einstein resented all theories of human practice that conceived of temporal flow as a linear chain of causality according to which events that happen at one moment in time are merely the effects of earlier events. Whether revisionism’s evolutionary class struggle, Hegel’s development of Spirit in history,²⁰ the gradual formation of character in Goethe’s Bildungsroman,²¹ or art history’s tradition of ever-increasing naturalism: all of these models were equally tedious to Einstein for the way in which they defined time as a sequence of incremental causes and effects that extended from a punctual origin in the past through the present into a plottable future—from the dawn of class struggles to the ideal society, from the naïve adolescent to the mature protagonist of the novel, from the primitive efforts of African art to the perfect copy of nature in the Renaissance.

That is why terms like evolution, heritage, tradition, and repetition were always used interchangeably by Einstein: because, ontologically speaking, they were all conservative terms in the literal sense. All of them described the conservation of an identity through history—the identity of a person over the course of their biography, the identity of Spirit through the march of the eons, the identity of art through the succession of styles—by anchoring it in an origin, and then plotting its development from seed into blossom. For Einstein, the offense here was not just the belief in historical progress but more fundamentally the belief in historical determinism: a belief that, motivated by a contemptible fear of novelty, emptied the present moment of its significance by relaying it back to some past. Hence Einstein’s rejection of the very idea of class. For the SPD to define itself as a class party was for it to be conservative from the beginning. It was for it to shrink from the challenge of groundlessness that was posed by any beginning worth the name: the challenge to define political identities anew from first principles. In that sense, even though few traces of Bakunin or Kropotkin can be found in his work, Einstein was indeed an anarchist. He was resolved to create a new world without an arché, without an origin to anchor it or a ground to prop it up.

As he put it in his survey of modern art, Braque and Picasso had come up with an image type that’s characteristic of the beginning twentieth century (K3 117).²² Note the double entendre here: the beginning century was the century of beginnings. Contrary to postwar clichés about its alleged millenarianism, for Einstein, as for so many others, this was not the era in which history was finally ending; it was rather the era in which it could finally start: the era in which, so far from reaching its ultimate link, the chain of causality was breaking up for good.²³

That conviction explains why Einstein became so deeply estranged from the Soviet Union in the early 1920s: because bolshevism had turned out to be just another archism, so to speak. Poets in Russia are an impossibility, since the Marxist doctrine prevents and paralyzes the aptitudes and powers needed for poetry; where poetry should be understood in the expansive sense of poiesis, or general creative production.²⁴ Conversely, it explains Einstein’s proximity to the left-wing opposition within the Second International. To name just two examples here, what he had in common with Rosa Luxemburg, whose writings he clearly knew well, and the young Antonio Gramsci, whose early texts he may or may not have known, was a model of history according to which re volution and e volution, originality and development, were fundamentally at odds.

For all the obvious differences between them, in Gramsci, Luxemburg, and Einstein alike we find a theory of what might be called original events. Original events happen in historical intervals that open within consecutive time, interrupting its flow;²⁵ intervals during which a map of relations—political, social, visual, biographical—is redrawn across the board of a bottomless ground. So long as the interval remains open, the delirium of experiment will displace the lockstep of gradualism, the novelty of invention the straitjacket of teleology. It is only after the fact that original events will be causalized again, when groundlessness is sealed over, the chain is relinked, and originality is reduced to precursorship … or to an infantile disorder.²⁶

Novelty does not emerge in logical development, which tends to be confined to the domain of the similar; it rather comes into being in a visionary interval in which existence is initially disavowed; the work is proceeding by leaps, it is alogical and in opposition to historical heritage. The perspective of later observers will level out this conflict, the disconnected event will be approximated to historical precedent. (K3 114)²⁷

In this passage from The Art of the 20th Century, the novelty Einstein has in mind is the emergence of a new visual world on the canvases of Braque and Picasso. But switch the focus from Paris to Petersburg, and what you have is the argument of "The Revolution against Capital," Gramsci’s breathtaking essay of 1917. Gramsci was trying to fathom the significance of October as it was happening, and that significance seemed dramatic indeed. It disproved, not proved, the historical logic of Marxism as he knew it. After all, according to the prescriptions of political economy, the revolution should never have taken place in Russia at this time. For Gramsci, the fact it did anyway made it not just a revolution against Capital but against Marx’s eponymous book.²⁸

At stake for Gramsci, as for Einstein, was the question of temporality, of how historical events