Jens-Fietje Dwars | Utopian in the rear service

Hardly anything is more difficult to discern than the direction of those processes of which one is a part and witness. This fact points to fascinating phenomena of incompatibility – of life and knowledge: We are fools in our perceptions, catching a golden ornament here and there, almost always missing it, and yet we act as if we were – knowledgeable. But it cannot be mended, this contradiction between the unpredictability of our existence and the effort to write history and chronology as logically as possible.

Where does this effort come from? Quite simply: every life needs protection. We want to be justified. The indulgent romantic demands as much recognition as the leathery cynic. And when this work receives public recognition, a sobering truth emerges: "Success is a mistake."

That's the title of Jens-Fietje Dwars's book—speeches, essays, and commentaries from over three decades. The publisher and author, curator and editor, writes from Jena to the rest of the country (and beyond?), always with both passion and suffering, because: Anyone who wants to make an impact without a lobby is always stifled by the managerial ignorance of the literary establishment.

Dwars's persistent work over the years: carefully edited books and series. A beautiful compulsiveness also exists in his own texts: he wants to be a stumbling block, hence the unbridled output of paper, and hence also the constant intellectual thrust. Which naturally bumps heads. For this author strives to remain sharp in his analysis of the flow and the sludge of time; and even when he finds himself in a state of buoyancy, he never loses himself in the rhapsodizing vagueness.

In this volume, he presents essays that will both prick the heart and the ear. Over 30 texts unfold, revealing a novel of philosophical thought that defies the chatter of loose tongues—this sign of the times of epidemic entertainment. Is there a "tether of reason through the labyrinths of omnipresent madness"? That is the Dwars question, kept alive in essays for people who would feel addressed if someone were to come to them with, say, Nietzsche. He wrote: "Moreover, I detest everything that merely instructs me without directly enlivening my activity."

This author wants to remain sharp in the analysis of time flow and time mud

Nietzsche: Dwars persistently and stimulatingly explores it, for example, the birth of modern art from the mind of this philosopher. And others. How does one attain self-creation without resorting to higher powers? "Perhaps we must pass through Feuerbach once more." And then the place of Jena—which Dwars tells about a special "baton of thought": the largely unknown Kantians Schütz and Schmid, leaders in the "alchemists' kitchen" of Thuringia, where the most inspiring minds of their time once sought wisdom. Schiller and Novalis also appear—teachers in the "primary school of a freedom that would later be called revolution." This—German experience—was not an error, and therefore not a success either.

Reflections on Christoph Hein, Erik Neutsch, and Christa Wolf, short portraits of visual artists such as Horst Hussel, Strawalde, and Moritz Götze, and sometimes just the gem of a sentence: "Does God exist if order creates chaos?" Dwars describes what binds him to an intellectual heritage, and in doing so, he also leads the reader onward. To where one may live in contact with a haunting sound, that is, the sirens' whistling. You read this as if under a rain that washes you clean of the false sense of importance, of the newspaper spirit, of the glue of daily order. You hear the tones of a utopian in the rear service. This is not a restorative historical incantation, but a summoning of what we carry within us as a demanding, rich household of mood and the dignity of memory. A worthwhile task: better to be cautiously greedy for the past than always just briskly curious.

He looks back at the Basel Congress of 1912, and thus at the failure of social democracy against the dark horizon of the coming world war. He portrays Peter Weiss, whose "Aesthetics of Resistance" is to him the "cruelest, coldest, and at the same time most compassionate text in German literary history." He reflects on "instrumental-rational mechanisms of power reproduction" that did not end with Stalin. Always focused on structures. History always also as pre-history (that's what happens when something like that happens) and as a shimmering process. This is a concern, set against the common demonization of global political dictators. "Why would we need a science of history if it merely confirms the irrationality of historical processes, a judgment that common sense has more readily at hand?"

The author works, as it were, in constant alternation, with telescope and microscope. Fierce effort with a cold gaze, also directed at himself. Among the most exciting essays is "The Lives of Other Others": a letter about Dwars's own fate between the GDR and the West; a truly traced labyrinth of courage and caution, of dreams and tactics, of scientific passion and political consequences. A text woven from conviction ("I was a Trotskyist without having read Trotsky") and entanglement, the curse word being "Stasi," and sentences that stick together: "The vain curiosity of someone without connections drew me into the spell of evil." What remains, after 1990? "Unspeakable grief for the futility of all efforts to make oneself understood."

In these reflections, the person who remembers is a tempter—one who refuses to find a pliable standpoint between becoming and passing away. Yet, one who still wants to glimpse that binding element that gives existence a reliable, fundamental determination in changing times. Despite continued ruptures. The author is clear-sighted without triumphant; he stands upright in stubborn obstinacy: In summoning contemporary intellectual giants from a completely different era, the present becomes for him a "paradise of devils who cultivate their self-interest behind the facade of the common good."

The tone is sometimes deliberately sharp and harsh. For example, against "stutterers of historiography" who think in terms of anniversaries, not problems, i.e., recurrences and transitions. "Black books settle accounts with communism as if it had ever existed, and the heirs of history engage in constant apologies." Dwars is thus preoccupied with the contradiction between Goethe and Buchenwald—"Classicism and concentration camps," the notorious counterpart to Weimar, "long since degenerated into an advertising slogan, a secretly uncanny locational advantage in the tourism business."

He walks through the Buchenwald memorial. Monumental, mythical. What may rouse – also crushes. He reads the lines by Johannes R. Becher, dedicated to Ernst Thälmann, carved into the steles. Religion and transfiguration: an individual, driven by an ideological urge to exploit, becomes "a miraculous giver of meaning to nameless suffering." And the terrifying thought arises: the thousands of victims of fascist violence would thus be humiliated once more, "degenerating into the gray mass of a petrified memory."

What helps someone who lives in the fading word? The written word? No. The only thing that helps is writing. "If books aren't read, one wants to fall silent with pain, yet one should continue speaking, ever more precisely, with greater concentration, to the point of silence." Because: success may be a mistake, but striving to continue writing is not.

Jens-Fietje Dwars: Success is a Mistake. Speeches, Essays, and Other Notes. Quartus-Verlag, hardcover, 272 pp., €22