In the Garden of the Feuilleton
Translated from the German by Julia Bosson
Editor’s note: The following text was originally presented at “Der grosse Kanton: Rise & Fall of the BRD,” which was held in Zurich on 5-6 December. It was prepared for a panel on the topic of the German media, the feuilleton, and the disintegration of the public sphere.
I HAVE BEEN ASKED TO SPEAK about the German feuilleton. This assignment seems logical to me. If one is interested in the decline of the Federal Republic of Germany, the feuilleton itself could be suspected of having played a special role in this decline, for the simple reason that it only exists — or existed — in the Federal Republic of Germany. It is a significant case of publishing high-minded works for a relatively large audience; a garden, greenhouse, even museum, in which debates are cultivated and nurtured, as well as clipped, cut short, and made off-limits, thus structuring the public sphere.
The idea that the forms of thinking and discussion that underlie the political realities of life — treated seriously, but also tendentiously, or at least strategically in the political pages of the newspaper — can be examined openly, playfully, or, if you will, freely in the feuilleton sounds, at first, very nice, downright charitable, like a breathing exercise in a deadlocked workday, like yoga during a lunch break, indeed, like a diluted version of the basic aesthetic principles of Western-bourgeois autonomy of art: the world a second time, but different.
But the price of this beauty was the conspicuously territorial and ideologically-determined political line of the rest of the paper.
Defined in this way, the balance between gravity and ease, between consequence and play naturally has its problems. Of course, it seems nearly paradisiacal that there was a time — let’s call it the 1970s — when a major German daily newspaper opened its feuilleton pages with a one-and-a-half-page review of a Bresson film, or a profile of Josef von Sternberg, although he hadn’t even made a new film. But the price of this beauty was the conspicuously territorial and ideologically-determined political line of the rest of the paper. The price was the fact that something daring could not be read in its own right but only as a supplement in the context of a publication that was otherwise oriented in one direction or another, and that it always had to be grateful for the generosity of the actual reporting on economics and government on which it depended.
Since, roughly, the end of the old Federal Republic of Germany, when it became fashionable to believe that there was no longer a right or a left, that the old frameworks no longer matched the structure of the public sphere after the supposed “end of history,” these broad orientations that shaped newspapers and their feuilleton temporarily disappeared and new ones emerged. The moderately-organized unworldliness of the feuilleton’s literary sensibility has been replaced by the general journalistic demand for relevance to the present. Meanwhile, sarcasm and irony have followed in the footsteps of literary spirit, bourgeois idealism, and more or less left-leaning ideological criticism. On the one hand, the feuilleton is now supposed to determine and/or become part of the future of cultural, technological, and public structures; on the other, it is supposed to assimilate or replace hipster and pop journalism — forms that, for various reasons, have emerged directly in opposition to the feuilleton. (Two new books, Erika Thomalla’s Making the Present: Oral History of Pop Journalism and Philipp Goll’s Western Dissidence, about Petra and Uwe Nettelbeck, address various forms of writing against the feuilleton.)
At that time, the traditionally conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and social-democratic- to liberal-leaning Süddeutsche Zeitung exchanged the employees of their respective feuilleton sections on a large scale, to make it clear to readers that the security of old political alignments should no longer exist. This period was shaped by many new projects and, at the same time, a growing awareness that the end of print was imminent; it was characterized by hectic innovations and authoritarian-charismatic editorial leadership.
At the conclusion of this phase, which perhaps lasted until the mid-2000s, three new influences were gradually mixed in with the old ones: First, the realization, only an inkling at first, that digital culture has created a new type of public sphere, which is no longer concerned with content as such but instead only with the organization and the degree of participation of the audience that provides its data. “Participation is the new Spectacle”: that was my slogan at the time. Anyone who wanted to appear clever talked about algorithms and their indifference. This indifference was not limited to beauty, morality, and criticism, but also extended to the sphere of traditional politics. Meanwhile, print media finally died out.
Secondly, the decline of an ideology-critical or educated middle-class habitus by way of an intermediary stage of shrunken structuralism that only wanted to criticize false rhetoric instead of false content, partly because it fit the technocratic jargon of theories of the digital public sphere so well. People were then opposed to relativization, comparisons, perpetrator-victim reversal, whataboutism, or even canceling, without feeling compelled to discuss what was actually being canceled or relativized. After all, there may be good reasons to reverse a perpetrator-victim narrative, when, for example, it is incorrect. A line of reasoning reviled as whataboutism can convey an entirely respectable complaint about double standards.
Increasingly, laws and agreements relating to rhetoric, word usage, etc., are once again being used to determine the meaning of words in a way that is oriented toward the architecture of the digital public sphere.
Finally, thirdly, a new form of statehood and proximity to the state has begun to fill the gap between self-confidence and self-understanding that was created by the technological and economic challenges to long-established forms of meaning-making and criticism in the garden of the feuilleton. Increasingly, laws and agreements relating to rhetoric, word usage, etc., are once again being used to determine the meaning of words in a way that is oriented toward the architecture of the digital public sphere. The problem is not so much preventative acts of censorship, exclusion, and the suppression of free speech in the classical sense (which are also on the rise), but rather a combination of labeling, rhetorical checklists, outdated and often reversed ideological criticism, and a fixity of meaning seemingly inspired by legal texts. This not only regulates content in general, but also shapes the feuilleton’s debates in particular, those debates which are so beloved and celebrated as they are deployed to legitimize discourses: not only on the Gaza war, on the politics of memory, on the interpretation of works of art at the last documenta, or the legitimacy of inviting bands whose bassists have supported BDS to a partially state-funded festival.
I say this as someone who, first of all, has mostly defended so-called political correctness against the knee-jerk appeal to speak off the cuff as an appreciation of negotiating the state of affairs inside of and in opposition to institutions, e.g., in matters of anti-racism and feminism. And I say it again as someone who has had and continues to have a large investment in unregulated, new-journalistic writing. So I am not simply lamenting regulation, but rather a certain historically-driven, ideological regulation that serves to narrow the discourse. And I am not simply countering this with the reconstruction of the idyll of the feuilleton, but rather with the experiences and lessons of many decades of different forms of rebellion against the feuilleton, from both inside and outside.
However, it is important to be clear about what the “guardrails” of the feuilleton are and were in each case. What were the political positions (rarely explicitly stated) of the old Federal Republic of Germany before 1989, and how have they developed to the present day? What is the backdrop against which the feuilleton — once afforded a long leash, but now kept on a short one by these positions — operates? (Although it is obvious that some of these positions could better afford the feuilleton and to do so for longer than others).
The classic political matrix of the Federal Republic of Germany (before 1989):
CENTER
1. There is a hegemonic West/colonialism/US imperialism.
2. We are involved in it as perpetrators/complicit parties.
3. And that’s a good thing. It brings liberalism. Freedom of expression. Prosperity
LEFT
1. There is a hegemonic West/colonialism/US imperialism.
2. We are involved in it as perpetrators/accomplices.
3. That is not a good thing. It exacerbates exploitation and inequality.
RIGHT
1. There is a hegemonic West/colonialism/US imperialism.
2. We are its victims.
Germany’s new political matrix (developing since 1990):
ANTI-DEUTSCH/CENTER/LIBERAL
1. There is a hegemonic anti-liberal anti-West, with China/Putin/Iran as its base and Hamas, Greta Thunberg, Judith Butler, BDS, enemies of Israel, and postcolonialism as its superstructure, forming a Sonnenallee of the humanities.
2. We white, liberal, pro-Israel Germans are its — imminent — victims (because we have come to terms with our perpetrator status)
3. Consequence: More defense, militarization, disciplining (and reduction of bureaucracy)
LEFT/DECOLONIAL
1. There is a hegemonic West with fascist tendencies
2. As leftists and/or people with a colonial/migration history/origin, we are its victims
3. Consequence: activism (a perspective no longer compatible with the state, perhaps a counterculture)
RIGHT
1. There is a hegemonic, degenerate, non-white, Muslim-feminist-identitarian-political, queer West/South that cannot behave itself in the swimming pool.
2. We, as well as the Russians, the Christians, Israel, and the Boers, are its victims.
3. Consequence: takeover of the state, seizure of power.
