Literature – Obituary for Hildegard Brenner: Theory, as far as she has followed

In the spring of 1973, the Bremen local press reported on a turmoil on a schoolyard of the Hanseatic city: “Elementary school students tempt you to agree: Bremen students started leaflet campaign against Gewosie,” said the “Norddeutsche Rundschau”. Stone of the kick -off was a project seminar at the University of Bremen, in which teacher students and their students had written essays about their living conditions and put them in circulation. The fact that the aforementioned housing cooperative came away poorly in the campaign was angrily to their board as well as the school’s parents’ advisory board, which appealed to the university management. A criminal complaint was in the room, and the “Red” university was also reported nationally about the “chaoting” action. The professor Hildegard Brenner, who has been in Bremen since 1971, is likely to have looked at the outrage caused by the seminar. “Theory only seemed important to us as far as it has followed, and they should be referred,” was one of the guiding principles of the magazine “Alternative”, which Brenner published at the time.

Center of debate culture

Since 1964, Brenner had transformed the small magazine into one of the most read debate forums of the West German new left and increased its number of requirements from a few hundred to around 10,000 copies. Practice -related interventions in (knowledge) political struggles owed the popularity of the booklets kept in red and black as well as the theoretical debates led in them: The political generation of 1968 was not only able to discover the critical marxism of the interwar period – Benjamin, Brecht, Korsch, Lu Märten, Carl Einstein and others, but also French structuralism and later the feminist Psychoanalysis.

The Brenner, born in 1927 in 1927, became an instructor, if not a teacher, for her students or a doctorate. “At a time when it was not easy to keep leftists at work, she managed to let her in her circle extreme discipline to be given and publish booklets that you have to post in his library,” wrote the religious sociologist Jacob Taubes in an expert opinion when she applied for a professorship.

The fact that the name Hildegard Brenner rarely falls despite its services to the literary and theoretical culture of debate in the FRG’s intellectual history is rarely surprised in view of the fact that “large” men with “large” books are particularly in their canon. Hildegard Brenner’s work can be shown in particular, which the embodiment of public work could and can not only have debates for the distribution, but also for the course of the content of mentally historical debates.

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The most famous example of this is the sensational dispute over the levy of Walter Benjamin, which the »Alternative« led publicly with Theodor W. Adorno and Suhrkamp-Verlag in which Benjamin’s work was published from 1967. The dispute was about rehabilitation Benjamin as the Marxist, social revolutionary thinker, to which he had developed in the course of his life, which was swept under the carpet by the Frankfurt edition policy. The positions on the place of Benjamin in the critical theory that were taken in this dispute have not yet been discussed.

Work, not hard work

Hildegard Brenner once wrote that she did not want to be called “hardworking” because this was often the only attribute with which women were “decorated” in knowledge professions. Accordingly, her theory policy was always a commitment to female visibility in male -dominated debates. In controversy with the Frankfurt Benjamin editor, for example, she moved into the spotlight, for example, the Latvian theater director Asja Lācis, who had previously led an existence in the shadow of her more prominent youth friend. Brenner also saw Lācis’ invisibility in the edition policy of Frankfurter at the time: When the important “Naples” attachment was published in the writings of Benjamin in 1955, the name of the co-author had been canceled as well as the dedication of Benjamin’s “one-way street”. With the volume “Revolutionary at work”, Brenner not only published the first and only German-language book publication by Lācis in 1971, but also of the then 80-year-olds her place in intellectual history.

The fact that Brenner was primarily a committed publisher was not meant that she had no “big” book: in 1963 in the popular paperback series “Rowohlt’s German Enzyclopedia” her study “The Art Policy of National Socialism”, which was still discussed as a fundamental investigation into instrumentalization, annihilation and robbery in Nazi Germany in research. At the work documents in Brenner’s estate, which is located in the German Literature Archive Marbach, it can be seen against which resistance fought, who was researching the NS around 1960: the palette ranges from refused archive additives to legal hostility. Without an academic institution in the back, Brenner nevertheless managed to present a material -rich reconstruction of art policy in the NS, which at the same time offered a theoretically informed analysis of National Socialist mechanisms of rule. With Benjamin, she ordered the National Socialist extreme case of “aestheticization of politics” into larger socio -theoretical relationships and thus also contributed to the fascism -theoretical debates of the 1960s.

The area of ​​tension, which was once opened by Benjamin, between the (fascist) “aestheticization of politics” and the (communist) “politicization of art” is also a bracket for further work. Already in her first professional activity as a cultural journalist, she had fundamentally dealt with the relationship between art and politics when she reported on Hölderlin’s poetry theory at FU Berlin from 1953 for several years for West German radio feature stones from the GDR. On the one hand, critical of the authoritarian access of the state, on the other hand, it expressed sympathy for the main social role that was attributed to the arts in socialist society. From then on, her interest and public commitment was not least GDR intellectuals such as Müller or Biermann, who were socialists, but were conflict with the guidelines of the SED and, as Brenner once wrote, as communists could measure reality in the promises of communism. In addition to several “alternative” issues, Brenner’s GDR anthology “News from Germany”, which appeared at Rowohlt in 1967, promoted the German-German literary exchange.

Chronicle of the self -understanding

Critical border tours – and not least: Innerlink controversy and arguments about doctrine hardening and bad ways of Marxism – were always part of the self -understanding process about theory and practice in the Federal Republican and international new left. Nowadays, the “alternative” can be read as a continuous chronicle of this self -understanding process. An important chapter in it is not least the argument about how to deal with disappointed expectations and lack of “consequences” after a long political-intellectual work: When the spirit of optimism from 1968 towards the end of the 1970s was handled in many places in Left Melancholy, Brenner voted for a consistent end of their magazine-not without breaking the political generation of 1968 To make theoriere discussion.

“It is not the Marxist theory that has ended, but the terrain, on which we worked as a left in the 1960s and 1970s with and on this theory, is no longer the place of its effect,” she wrote before she left to private terrain – and the discussion that has not been completed to date left to others. At the beginning of March, Hildegard Brenner died in Berlin at the age of 97.

Moritz Neuffer is a historian and cultural scientist. In 2021, his book »The journalistic form of theory was published in the Wallstein-Verlag. The magazine Alternative, 1958-1982 «.