The 50th anniversary of the death of a writer is a difficult date. Somehow you still know him, so that a sensational rediscovery is impossible. Older people have some of his books on their shelves, but they seem quite dusty to younger people. So the publishing house that administers its rights will see no reason to get very involved. If you then have a more prominent namesake, there is a high risk that the anniversary will be canceled. But that would be a shame in the case of Ludwig – not: Herbert – Marcuse. Because Germany, this conformist nation, has not produced so many really free spirits that it could afford to forget this wonderful individualist. Nor does this country of complicated poets and cumbersome thinkers have too many authors who could write both thoughtful and approachable, serious and cheerful. So it is worth remembering Ludwig Marcuse, who died fifty years ago in Bad Wiessee today.
He never belonged. Looking back, he wrote: “All my life I was a ‘free’ (that is, also: badly paid) writer, ‘free’ (that is: non-party) citizen, ‘free’ thinker (that is also: never a free thinker): a person who was always free to contradict himself without remorse, not protected by any worldview and therefore exposed to a thousand vulnerabilities. ” The Jewish religion of his ancestors offered him no home. Even for his father, a wealthy factory owner, she had only a nostalgic temperament. But Ludwig could not become an assimilated property citizen either. He was far too little interested in professional advancement and economic success. That had its good side: he accepted the loss of the inheritance in the great inflation with a shrug.
Marcuse consistently saw himself as an individual. His most important author helped him with this: a philanthropically read Friedrich Nietzsche. He wrote his doctoral thesis on him, with the Protestant theologian and religious philosopher Ernst Troeltsch. He, in turn, was so liberal as to gather non-conforming students around himself. When he died far too early in 1923, the gateway to the academic world was closed for Marcuse.
He wasn’t part of any clique, so he saw what was coming more clearly and acted quickly
From then on he lived as a freelance writer. His book and theater reviews have retained a rare freshness. They are gems of literary judgment, taste and knowledge of human nature. Just read the commemorative articles for his friend Joseph Roth, astute and touching at the same time. Marcuse had his favorites and remained loyal to them: Besides Nietzsche and Roth, these were above all Heinrich Heine, Georg Simmel and Heinrich Mann. But he didn’t belong to any clique, and he kept his distance from his own profession. That was probably why he saw more clearly what was to come and acted quickly.
Right at the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship, he emigrated and settled in France. In Sanary-sur-Mer, this charming little town on the Mediterranean, which had suddenly become the secret capital of German literature, he lived in direct neighborhood with Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Annette Kolb, the Manns and many others. It was “six happy-unhappy years”, a mixture of endless summer vacation, writing exam and a coffee house under the open sky. He left this fatal idyll in time and emigrated to the USA. The disaster he had escaped became clear to him in the most terrible immediacy when the diaries of his sister Esther were handed over to him in 1959. She stayed with her old mother in Germany. Through her notes, he was able to understand her excruciatingly long journey into inevitable death.
In 1962 he moved back to Germany and settled in Bad Wiessee am Tegernsee. He did not expect any kindness and did not receive any. Dealing with the remigrants is known to be a second historical disgrace in Germany. But Marcuse did not make an identity out of his diverse history of suffering, but held on to being an individual – free, unmistakable and ambiguous. Because: “Contradictions are not an objection to a person. The word individual only means: indivisibility, not: harmony of parts.”
Often times he will have been lonely. He did not transfigure this, as some poets do, but understood and accepted it as his fundamental purpose: “Anyone who feels lonely and thus cast out should also recognize that the experience of being isolated belongs to the definition of being human – albeit rarely to consciousness. Everyone, according to their disposition, is mostly lonely, even if they haven’t noticed it for eighty years. ” But if you are to yourself all your life, you are less tempted to make yourself mean and thereby become mean.
“Tolerance means: not making shackles out of the holy feelings one possesses for the neighbor who has other holy feelings.”
Marcuse’s contribution to the blasphemy debate of 1930 is still worth considering. At that time, representatives of the Protestant Church sued the famous painting “Christ with a steel helmet and gas mask” by George Grosz. Marcuse took this as an occasion for a fundamental meditation: “To tolerate means to be patient. To tolerate does not mean: to bump into anyone; does not mean to respect sacred symbols as a cover for unholy facts – tolerance means: not to sit on the green sofa and take offense. Tolerance means not: renounce the fight, because the blessed opposing flags can be torn apart in the process – tolerance means: not making fetters out of the holy feelings one possesses for the neighbor who has other holy feelings. “
Obviously a lot has changed since then. Other things are now considered sacred or taboo. However, tolerance is no less necessary. Therefore, one should remember Marcuse’s demand: “The privileges in taking offense must finally stop!” And this sentence is still very heeded, for religious as well as for secular people who exaggerate it one way or another with resentment and being hurt: “One doubts very much the sanctity of feelings that are less in a security express a blissful faith than in hatred of the manifestations of the unbelievers – in smelling of wicked people. “
By the way, one should also think of Ludwig Marcuse as a happy person. The best way to do this is to read his Philosophy of Happiness, which he published in 1948. This is still the best book about the not very carefully treated human word “happiness” in the German tradition of thought. His memories “My Twentieth Century” from 1960 are also highly recommended. But actually you should read everything about him that you can get your hands on. You can’t go wrong with an author who had this motto above his desk: “It’s always more complicated.”