Marxism: Thomas Metscher: A joy-drunk dialectician

When I began researching the topic of “pop music and politics” a few years ago, I suggested to Thomas Metscher and his wife Priscilla that they spend a few days with a tape recorder, play some of the highlights of the genre for them and record what they said it occurred to them. Of the Beach Boys, who are rather unsuspected of Marxism, I chose “Surf’s Up” from 1967, whose lyrics, written by Van Dyke Parks, are among the most difficult and enigmatic in the history of pop music. When our pop evening came around one evening, I was amazed at how confidently and naturally the two of them moved through the different levels of text right from the start, and within twenty minutes the song and the text had been accurately integrated into an aesthetic and political level of meaning. The Metschers enjoyed the song and had fun exposing the philosophical and political level.

The pair were more impressed by “A Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke, “Hurry Sundown” by Little Richard and “Town Called Malice” (The Jam). Once again I was able to discover that the dividing line between E and U art was a huge bourgeois fraud and that the shining moments (i.e. not the mass-produced average) of popular art were definitely capable of being absorbed into the realm of higher art. Not much has changed since Shakespeare, who is now considered the pinnacle of serious art, but was at the time a phenomenon comparable to the Beatles. An idea that can be found in quite a few of Thomas Metscher’s books.

Metscher was born in Berlin on July 30, 1934, the child of a (socialist) Social Democrat who welcomed the first Soviet soldiers with a bottle of wine in 1945. He received his first formative influences in the sense of “new criticism” (i.e. from it’s in the text itself, stupid) from the English scholar Rudolf Sühnel. Margeritha von Brentano, Dieter Henrich and Karl Löwith introduced him to the paths of philosophy in Berlin and Heidelberg; He had to bring himself to the heights of Marxism (with the help of the writings of Georg Lukács). From 1961 to 1971 he taught in Belfast, at the same time he completed his doctorate on the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey. From 1971 he held the position of professor of literary studies and aesthetics at the University of Bremen. Since his retirement, the passionate mountaineer has been making the forests and heights of Lower Bavaria unsafe.

In his numerous book publications he devotes himself politically and philosophically to the central idea of ​​“integrative Marxism”.

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In his numerous book publications, he devotes himself politically and philosophically to the guiding idea of ​​”integrative Marxism” (as is well known, Karl Marx processed, criticized and integrated into his work, for example, the philosophical ideas from Aristotle to Hegel and economic ideas from Adam Smith to David Ricardo, Marx was therefore an integrative Marxist). In “Logos and Reality”, a work that I predict will have an interesting future – provided the world does not die spiritually in Baerbockism – he collected partial insights from the various philosophical disciplines and embedded them in a more fundamental philosophical context in such a way that it becomes one material reconfiguration of the idealistic rational thought arises. And just these days he is throwing a six-hundred-page work on “Faust and the Dialectics” at our ears, which could also set the entire German guild in disarray. His thesis, which has never been formulated in this way with such clarity: The diametrical contrast of Faust in the early history of reception as a positive protagonist and the current classification as a negative protagonist misses the fundamental, contradictory level of meaning of the text, where the positive is present at every turn and negatives are constitutively intertwined.

I hope the readers’ brain cells have fun discovering the previously undiscovered connections. And to you, dear Thomas, a nice day with your loved ones, cheerful conversations, good food and red wine! Your company means a pleasure that is heightened to the highest degree, drunk with joy. Just keep it up and stay with us for a long time!