Galin Tihanov
Abstract: In philosophy, literature, and the arts, the cosmopolitan tends to be defined chiefly with reference to a particular ethos (often individual rather than collective) of openness to what is non-familiar and alien, and on a particular range of values, such as tolerance, hospitality, cultural and intellectual curiosity. I insist,however, that cosmopolitanism is not a homogeneous concept. In this article, I draw a distinction between political cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and cultural cosmopolitanism, on the other. Arguably, these two types of cosmopolitanism, far from being identical, have disparate values that do not always coincide. I seek to demonstrate that exile and cosmopolitanism abide in a relationship that is far less straightforward than habitually assumed: the best way to describe this relationship is perhaps to refer to exile and cosmopolitanism as bound by a rather uncertain affinity. In the introductory part of this article I explore various meanings of the word “cosmopolitanism” and attempt to attain finer granularity by identifying two different strands within what has long been taken to be a unitary discourse.1The first part of the present text is based on a guest lecture at the Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin held in November 2022. I am grateful to Professor Eva Geulen and Dr Matthias Schwartz for hosting the lecture, and to my colleagues there for the good discussion. I am also grateful to Professor Susanne Frank for her comments on an earlier draft of this essay. In the second part, I discuss the complex relationship(often also divergence) between the two types of cosmopolitanism—political and cultural—that I identify in the Introduction. I do so by analysing a set of examples drawn from the work of left-leaning European Jewish exiles and their experience of cosmopolitans without a polis. What is at stake throughout my analysis is a deeper understanding of cosmopolitanism, both as a desideratum but also as a discourse that harbours inner contradictions, and also an attempt to revisit the way we think about how the experience of exile relates to cosmopolitan attitudes and practices.
Keywords: cosmopolitanism; exile; discourse; uncertain affinity
Ever since Diogenes, banished from his home town of Sinope in today’s Turkey, referred to himself as “a citizen of the World” (acosmopolitan), cosmopolitanism, while evading a precise definition, has been understood as a belief in the need to recognise the dignity and rights of peopleacrossborders,culturesandcommunities. This means that to be a cosmopolitan it does not suffice to merely declare a belonging to the world, but to belong to it in a particular way:through acknowledging, appreciating, and indeed embracing, difference. Cosmopolitanism begins with a recognition of universal human nature, but only comes into its own when recognizing cultural difference: we can truly respect our fellow human beings when we learn to see them both as equal to us (in their humanness) and different from us (because of their culture, background, customs and traditions). But the reverse is also true: recognising cultural difference would not suffice without the foundational act of extending respect to othersquahumans.
In our increasingly interconnected world of global risks and opportunities cosmopolitanism has become a catchword, a slogan seen and heard from the covers of popular magazines(Cosmopolitan) to the offices of politicians. But cosmopolitanism is not a homogenous concept,and in this article I hope to offer a more differentiated approach to it.
Cosmopolitanism can be understood differently. It can be thought of as a) an ethos and a set of values that includes openness to other cultures, tolerance, respect for others despite—or because of—their background and traditions; b) a foundation for a specific world order built on peace and mutual recognition amongst states, communities, and(non)citizens; c) a particular methodology in the social sciences since the fall of the Berlin Wall that looks at social phenomena not through the prism of the nation state (what is known as “methodological nationalism”), but from a more global (“cosmopolitan”) perspective. The first of these three uses pertains to a number of interconnected areas: philosophy, politics, culture, and the arts. Historically, this is the earliest manifestation of cosmopolitanism; it points to the need for humans to go beyond the comfort zone of their own cultures and accept other cultures, thus learning to inhabit the entire world as its citizens. Philosophically, cosmopolitanism rests on two premises: the assumption that it should embody order (cf. the Greek “cosmos” as opposed to “chaos”; the Greek word also implies some measure of beauty, a meaning we still hear today in the word “cosmetics”),and the assumption that being human is not an abstract feature but a quality that needs to be validated and recognized again and again as we move across different cultures and different communities (ideally to the point where this validation can occur everywhere in the world). It is clear from this that cosmopolitanism is not value-free or value-neutral: it already comes loaded with ideas of order, and with notions of human dignity, human rights, etc. The second use(cosmopolitanism as a foundation for a specific world order) is a more recent manifestation of cosmopolitanism that begins in what we still tend to refer to as the age of Enlightenment, more specifically with Kant.2The foundational text here is Kant’s essay Towards Perpetual Peace (1795; 2nd, slightly expanded ed. 1796). The literature on Kant’s text is substantial; for a comprehensive treatment, see e.g. Pauline Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 2011).Today Kant’s project of eternal peace and universal hospitality is put under pressure: isolationism is gathering momentum, and resurfacing nationalisms and antimigrant sentiments, not least in Europe, are questioning the notions of a cosmopolitan law and the importance of the global institutions that are meant to uphold human rights, fairness,dignity, and assist in cases where humanitarian intervention is necessary. Finally, there is, as I have suggested, a third incarnation of cosmopolitanism, understood as a recently developed methodology in the social sciences, believing that in order to understand the various forms of social life we need to look at them not through the prism of the nation and the nation state but rather through a “cosmopolitan” prism, one that thinks the world in its entirety and interconnectedness.
The question of who is a cosmopolitan has been answered—in philosophy, literature, and the arts—chiefly with reference to the first of the three meanings of cosmopolitanism discussed above, insisting on a particular ethos (often individual rather than collective) of openness to what is non-familiar and alien, and on a particular range of values, such as tolerance,hospitality, cultural and intellectual curiosity.
I insist, however, that cosmopolitanism is not a homogeneous concept. In fact, there are two different types of cosmopolitanism: cultural and political.3For a different understanding and use of “cultural cosmopolitanism”, see Motti Regev, “The Condition of Cultural Cosmopolitanism,” in Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism and Global Culture, ed. Vincenzo Cicchelli, Sylvie Octobre and Viviane Riegel (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 27-45, and Jeremy Adler, Goethe: Die Erfindung der Moderne. Eine Biographie (Goethe: The Invention of Modernity: A Biography) (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2022), 189 (Adler seems to believe that cultural cosmopolitanism places the emphasis on what is similar between various cultures; in that regard, his interpretation is the opposite to what I argue below). For an earlier articulation of my distinction between cultural and political cosmopolitanism, see Galin Tihanov, “Two Types of Cosmopolitanism: Instead of a Preface,” in Viagem e Cosmopolitismo: da Ilha ao Mundo (Travel and Cosmopolitanism: from the Island to the World), ed. Ana Isabel Moniz et al. (Ribeirão: Húmus, 2021), 13-17.They do not coincide, and there is an underlying distance between them. Cultural cosmopolitanism has at its core the appreciation of difference, and language is central to this understanding of the world as the site of interaction between distinctive cultures which can be translated into one another but can never be entirely reduced to a denominator of commonality (whether language actually does serve as an indispensable foundation for cultural cosmopolitanism is a larger philosophical question, which one should discuss separately). This type of cosmopolitanism could be called, for convenience sake, Herderian, even though—or perhaps precisely because—Herder’s work displays the complex tendency of appreciating cultural difference and conceiving of it through a mixed lens:one that delivers a cosmopolitan perspective on it, while often also sponsoring a notion of organically rooted (sub)national collectivities; cultural cosmopolitanism, historically speaking,has recurrently been embedded in, and has functioned in amalgamation with, discourses evoking nationalism and a sense of collective cultural uniqueness. The second type of cosmopolitanism I single out could be called‘political cosmopolitanism’ (or, for convenience sake, Kantian cosmopolitanism), even though it could, with the same justification, perhaps also be referred to as ‘moral cosmopolitanism’, for it insists on upholding moral values such as respect for human dignity and the closely related practice of hospitality. The reason why I do believe it would be better to use the appellation ‘political cosmopolitanism’ is because Kant’s project of a cosmopolitan order was essentially a political one, asking and answering the question of how political power should be used by governments to attain and safeguard these morally laudable values of cosmopolitanism. Compared to cultural cosmopolitanism, political cosmopolitanism rests on a different assumption: the latter is usually language-neutral and sees the world as a place that evolves towards some measure of homogeneity; while not neglecting difference, this version of cosmopolitanism believes that commonality, attained through various procedures of equivalence and reciprocity(think of Kant’s imperative of hospitality towards the foreigner by any state whose citizen s/he is not), ought to be the ultimate goal of history, the horizon that should navigate all nations’ journeys through it. Let me repeat: dissimilar as they are, both of these two types of cosmopolitanism retain the notion of difference as their foundation: Kant’scosmopolitanlaw (unlikeinternationallaw) presupposes two different agents (an individual human being and a state) and, even more important, a radically different status for each of these two agents: the foreigner, unlike the locals (the cultural aspect makes an unavoidable, if only implied, appearance here, much as Kant seems to be neglecting it), does not possess the rights citizens do. But these two types of cosmopolitanism, while both grounded in the recognition of difference, handle this difference dissimilarly: cultural cosmopolitanism embraces, cultivates,and proactively encourages difference; political cosmopolitanism rather works towards its negotiation and eventual accommodation under a regime of commonality. The trouble with our thinking about cosmopolitanism is that we have so far failed to recognise with due clarity the existence of these two different types of cosmopolitanism, and have therefore operated with an undifferentiated blanket notion of cosmopolitanism. Today, we must think of how these two types of cosmopolitanism intersect historically(and in the current situation), but also how they diverge. The demands and values of cultural cosmopolitanism are different from those of political cosmopolitanism, and so attaining the objectives of the former does not ensure the objectives of the latter would necessarily be met: we could readily refer to a plethora of cases where accomplished cultural cosmopolitans embrace and uphold the principles of totalitarian societies that despise, hamper, and reject the values of political cosmopolitanism; and vice versa, one can be a political cosmopolitan (in the Kantian sense of extending universal respect, hospitality,and tolerance—charged as this latter concept might be—towards any human being, including those who are not citizens of the country they found themselves in) without necessarily being a cultural cosmopolitan. Multiculturalism as a doctrine that seeks to encourage the peaceful and mutually respectful coexistence of different communities—but at the price of maintaining largely parallel lives, without proper involvement in the culture of the other—might be a good example of political cosmopolitanismwithoutcultural cosmopolitanism. All of this has various important consequences for how we think about cosmopolitanism. There is, unfortunately, no reliable symmetry between cultural and political cosmopolitanism, and the political condition of exile—fleeing a totalitarian regime or various forms of state-sponsored hatred and discrimination,foremost anti-Semitism—does not always beget (contrary to what we are accustomed to think) a disposition in favour of cultural cosmopolitanism. It is indeed frequently assumed that exile facilitates cultural cosmopolitanism, but we need to revisit this sweeping claim. I shall return to this point later.
Furthermore, we can also distinguish between what I call cosmopolitanism “from above” and cosmopolitanism “from below.” This differentiation can be mapped onto the one I have just made:political cosmopolitanism is mostly a classic manifestation of cosmopolitanism “from above,” while cultural cosmopolitanism is more often than not a manifestation of cosmopolitanism “from below”(as an ethos, a set of values, and a phenomenon of material culture). We are facing here the central question (amongst some others) of whether cosmopolitanism is the exclusive domain of high culture,or whether it is embodied in acts of everyday life, such as fashion, shopping, and tourism. This is not a trivial question: it goes right to the very heart of the larger questions: how do we conceive of cosmopolitanism: as a norm-setting ideal (“cosmopolitanism from above”) or as a particular life-style(“cosmopolitanism from below”), and—flowing from this—who is a cosmopolitan?
Cosmopolitanism has always been a contested territory. For a decade or so, the proponents of cosmopolitanism have still been searching for a political and legal framework that could ensure it thrives across the globe. A good example might be Habermas’ work on world governance, as well as other proposals from the social-democratic Left in Europe, including those seeking to deploy cosmopolitanism in mitigating the unpalatable effects of globalisation and mobilising solidarity to deal with global risks (the work of the late Ulrich Beck4See, above all, Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2006); the German version was published in 2004 by Suhrkamp as Der kosmopolitische Blick (The Cosmopolitan Vision). See also Beck’s earlier work on risk society and modernity.). At the same time, such efforts are constrained by the scepticism of those who see in cosmopolitanism little more than a theory of emphatically Western provenance, and thus just another conceptual tool of establishing domination and subjugating others by smuggling in and imposing notions of universal culture and morality. This argument has a long tradition and has been changing hands between those espousing political conservatism (invoking the erosion of communities and of cultural specificity, etc.) and those (usually) on the Left who would consider cosmopolitanism a doctrine of cultural re-colonisation by the West. At its most extreme, anti-cosmopolitanism finds itself in an unholy alliance with anti-Semitism: we only need to recall the anti-cosmopolitan campaign in Soviet Russia in the last years of Stalinism; the standard allegation (and incrimination) there was that cosmopolitans, by being citizens of the world (“rootless cosmopolitans”, in the parlance of the late 1940s), were bound to undermine the nation, its(unique) culture, and its state. (Thus a book, hailed at its publication as a significant scholarly achievement, would be stigmatised during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, together with its author who would die in incarceration in 1950, as an assault on the originality of Pushkin—arguably the incontestable centre of the Russian literary canon—for drawing parallels between his work and that of a number of Western Romantics.)5See Isaak Nusinov, Pushkin i mirovaia literatura (Pushkin and World Literature) (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1941).Sadly, the key-note speech by Theresa May delivered at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham on 5 October 2016, her first major speech on becoming Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, would present a variation on this rather controversial slogan: “if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”6The full text of the speech is available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-speech-toryconference-2016-in-full-transcript-a7346171.html, [March 17, 2023]; for a response that promotes the notion of transnational citizenship, see Lorenzo Marsili and Niccolo Milanese, Citizens of Nowhere: How Europe can be Saved from Itself (London:Zed Books, 2018).But the enemies of cosmopolitanism also inhabit another camp: those who believe that mainstream cosmopolitanism is too prescriptive, a rigid set of values dictated from above(through global political and juridical bodies or by global cultural elites), which denigrates and neglects grassroots activities and everyday experiences. It is the intersection of these two vantage points that bears out the most important struggle over cosmopolitanism today.
Covid-19 has bequeathed to us a situation of heightened vulnerability of the Anthropocene belief in a human-centred, rational, and progressive West. One of the concerns that fill the air at present is that underlying Western ideas could as a result find themselves in a state of precarity,from which only a very conditional recovery might be possible. Cosmopolitanism is not immune to this precarity, and it will be up to us to make sure it remains a constructive and viable proposition for a world that faces a momentous redefinition of culture and the human.
It seems to me imperative to probe deeper into the resilient notion that exile produces,somehow automatically and unfailingly, cosmopolitan attitudes. Exile, in this reading, is a dependable machine for churning out cosmopolitans who emerge from the exilic experience as reliably enriched, unfailingly energized, and dependably cultivated and tolerant citizens. By adding to the arguments that interrogate this consensus, I seek to address the multiple, and often contradictory, inscriptions of exile in current debates on cosmopolitanism. Crucially, I also want to think about the inherent complexity and multi-layered nature of the very idea of cosmopolitanism, in which there exist recognisable overlaps and tensions between cultural and political cosmopolitanism, and examine the restrictions and precarity these different types of cosmopolitanism face in exile.
In a book published a few years ago, I set forth a working hypothesis essaying to explain the birth of modern literary theory in the twentieth century.7See Galin Tihanov, The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford, CA:Stanford UP, 2019).Exile, rather than acting as an impeding factor, was right at the heart of salutary developments that promoted the growth of literary theory in the interwar period. On this reading, exile was part and parcel of a renewed cultural cosmopolitanism that transcended local encapsulation and monoglossia. For a number of years,the activities of the Russian Formalists, for example, were taking place in a climate of enhanced mobility and exchange of ideas between the metropolitan and émigré streams of Russian culture.The most gifted ambassadors of the Formalists abroad were, at various points, Viktor Shklovsky, during the time he spent as an émigré in Berlin, and Roman Jakobson, while in Czechoslovakia (where he arrived as a Soviet citizen, deciding eventually not to return to Moscow). Jakobson is a particularly important example. His subsequent cooperation with Pyotr Bogatyrev (another Soviet scholar who resided in Prague for nearly two decades—and for about two years also in Münster—but remained a Soviet citizen, maintaining close cooperation with his colleagues in the Soviet Union and returning in the end to Moscow in December 1938), with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, a Vienna-based Russian émigré scholar, and with Yuri Tynianov (who stayed in Russia but was involved in the work of his Prague colleagues), were all crucial in attempts to revive the Society for the Study of Poetic Language(Opoyaz) in the Soviet Union.These attempts, while unsuccessful, yielded an important document in the history of literary theory, a brief set of theses titled “Problemy izucheniia literatury i iazyka” (“Problems in the Study of Literature and Language”), written in Prague jointly by Jakobson and Tynianov. The Theses signalled the urgent need to revise the supremacy of “pure synchronism” and promoted attention to the “correlation between the literary series and other historical series.”8Quoted here from the English translation [Yu. Tynyanov and R. Jakobson, “Problems of Research in Literature and Language,” trans. L. M. O’Toole, in Formalist Theory, ed. L. M. O’Toole and Ann Shukman (Colchester, England: University of Essex, 1977, pp. 49)]; written in December 1928 and first published in Russian in Novyi Lef 12 (1928)—actually in early 1929.The work of Russian Formalism in its concluding stages, and later the formation and flourishing of the Prague Linguistic Circle, became possible through intellectual exchanges that benefited from the crossing of national boundaries, often under the duress of exile. The activities of the Prague Linguistic Circle, in particular, proceeded in the situation of a veritable polyglossia, which rendered narrow nationalistic concerns anachronistic.
This interpretation of exile as an enabling factor that unlocks creativity can be reinforced and extended by examining the birth of a related discipline in the interwar decade. In equal measure,one could argue, modern comparative literature begins with life in exile, with the Istanbul works of Auerbach and Spitzer and their post-war continuation in the United States.9The literature on Auerbach and Spitzer has grown substantially over the last twenty years; for a very good overview,especially with reference to the role of exile in their work and with helpful pointers to earlier relevant research, see Emily Apter,The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006, esp. ch. 3), and Kader Konuk, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010).The qualifier “modern” is not trivial here: I mean by this a comparative literature that had moved beyond the nineteenth-century model of examining cultural bilateralisms and exchanges between nations10On this nineteenth-century model, see Galin Tihanov, “Cosmopolitanism in the Discursive Landscape of Modernity: Two Enlightenment Articulations,” in Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism, ed. D. Adams and G. Tihanov (London: Legenda, 2011), 133-52, esp. 143-44.and had instead embraced a wider perspective that focuses on larger supranational patterns: mode of representation, style, genre, etc.
Auerbach and Spitzer behaved, however, in a markedly different way in Istanbul. Spitzer was eager to learn Turkish; he even wrote a brief essay, in which he praised the “phonetic sensibility” of Turkish, its melodic variations, and its “harmony of front and back vowels.”11Spitzer’s essay “Learning Turkish” was first published in French in 1934 and soon after that translated, with some modifications, into Turkish (perhaps with Spitzer’s own interventions, especially in the first part of the text) and published in 1934/35; for an English translation, see Leo Spitzer, “Learning Turkish”, translated, and with a foreword, by Tülay Atak, PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011): 763-79, here 774 (there is also an abridged German translation of the French version in Trajekte (Passages),no. 19 (2009): 18-21.Auerbach did not look further than German and French in his communication with colleagues and in his teaching. Was Erich Auerbach a cultural cosmopolitan during his exile in Istanbul, given that he showed no interest in the Turkish language as such and continued to write in German and teach in French? Probably not, all the more so if Auerbach’s work were to be measured by our own yardstick today; we need to remember that his wonderful book,Mimesis, was, after all, a book focused almost exclusively—willingly and deliberately so, and for good historical reasons—on the Western cultural tradition. That Auerbach’s work in Istanbul would be difficult to interpret as evidence of cultural cosmopolitanism—much as he was himself insisting on the right of intellectuals in exile to preserve their dignity, and was thus no doubt attuned to the moral values of a political cosmopolitanism in the Kantian sense—becomes increasingly clear when one considers his perspective on Turkish history and culture. While Kader Konuk has rightly emphasised Atatürk’s indigenous—and proactive—revival of humanist values that marked the scene at the time of Auerbach’s work in Istanbul,12See Kader Konuk, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010).the fact remains that Auerbach perceived these pro-Western cultural reforms as too fast and inadequate, pushing Turkish culture into “triviality” and ushering in, just as in the rest of the world, a lamentable “Esperanto culture”(Esperantokultur) that would wreck the uniquely non-Western habitus he clearly hoped to see preserved in Turkey (Auerbach’s essentialising approach to Turkish culture can be discerned here). What is more, Auerbach displayed a tendency towards orientalising Turks and Turkish culture in a manner that should have provoked a sense of discomfort in Edward Said, one of his most insightful admirers. Thus in a letter to Walter Benjamin of 3 January 1937, Auerbach refers to the Turks of Anatolia as “used to slavery and hard but slow labour” (gewohntanSklavereiund harte,aberlangsameArbeit); on the same page, the Turks of Anatolia are compared to the South Europeans through a string of negative attributes, but are in the end declared to be “easy to tolerate and full of vitality” (aberdochwohlgutzuleidenundmitvielLebenskräften).13See the text of the letter in Erich Auerbach, Die Narbe des Odysseus. Horizonte der Weltliteratur (The Scar of Odysseus:Horizons of World Literature), ed. Matthias Bormuth (Berlin: Berenberg, 2017), 130-34, here 132.
This propensity was not entirely alien to Spitzer either; his own cultural cosmopolitanism presents an uneasy compromise between a repeated insistence on acknowledging and appreciating cultural and linguistic difference, on the one hand, and seeking to establish an implied scale of comparison in which languages can be measured according to their proximity to the Indo-European family. He compares Turkish with French, only to conclude that Turkish is the language of “emotion” vs. the “logic” that French exemplifies;14Spitzer, “Learning Turkish,” 771.to him, Turkish has lesser capacity (and interest) in conveying abstract concepts—it moves more sovereignly in the sphere of the concrete, fragmentary, and that which works through imitating rather than conceptualising real life (Spitzer adds Hungarian, alongside Turkish, as another insufficiently “abstract” language). Spitzer’s comparison is bound to remind us of Hegel’s rejection—as powerfully couched as it was misguided—of the capacity of the Chinese language to serve the procedures of abstract (Western) thinking.
Be that as it may, in both cases—the birth of modern literary theory and of modern comparative literature—one can legitimately construct a narrative of exile that foregrounds, and for good reasons, creativity, seminality, and the desirability of cosmopolitan attitudes fostered by denaturalising one’s own cultural inheritance and standpoint. But these attitudes are put to the test when cultural cosmopolitanism is at stake; the foundational dispositives of European(Western) culture and its inherent binaries often restrict the space in which cultural cosmopolitanism can be sustained and survive its encounters with that which is different beyond essentialisation or exoticisation.
Let me now dwell in more detail on the other mainstream modern narrative of exile: that of suffering, anguish, and distress—a narrative that captures exile as affliction and an incapacitating reality. To lend added persuasiveness to my argument I will once again look at the interwar decade from which my previous narrative of exile as promoter of creativity was drawn;cosmopolitanism will once again loom large in my exposition, this time not merely as a restricted or at times enfeebled, but rather as a painfully receding, and ultimately failing, desideratum.
My protagonists in this section are a host of Hungarian-Jewish and Polish-Jewish Left intellectuals and literati (Georg Lukács, Béla Balázs, Aleksander Wat, and Bruno Jasieński),all of whom found themselves in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s or in the 1930s. The “East-East exilic experience”, as I have termed this complex texture of actions, beliefs, and dispositions exhibited during the long enforced stays of Left intellectuals from Eastern and Central Europe in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, carried the deeper meaning of a tirelessly pursued, yet culturally and politically frustrated cosmopolitanism.15See Galin Tihanov, “Exilic Marxisms: Lukács and Balázs in Stalin’s Moscow,” Thesis Eleven 171 (2022): 30-46.In theCommunistManifesto, Marx and Engels had famously asserted the spirit of a proletarian cosmopolitanism that should envelop the awakening working class and lend its emancipatory ambitions a truly global scale. Proletarian solidarity was envisaged as a world-wide network that defeats the supremacy of a bourgeoisie profiting from an equally globalised mode of production. But by the mid-1930s cosmopolitanism was becoming a word of denunciation in Moscow; it was employed to stigmatise the enemy—without and within the Party, Soviet and foreign alike—as a rootless agent who evades Party control and gives the lie to the ever more vociferous propaganda of Russianness. “Cosmopolitan” was often a concealed anti-Semitic qualification, the origins of which should be sought in the revival of the mythology of Russian uniqueness, reinforced by the ongoing fight against Trotskyism. During World War Two this line gathered momentum (in 1943, Fadeev warned inPodznamenemmarksizmaagainst the “hypocritical sermons of groundless cosmopolitanism”16Quoted in Omri Ronen, Iz goroda Enn (From the City of Ann [Arbor]) (St. Petersburg: Zvezda, 2005), 336; the Russian reads:“ khanzheskikh propovedei bespochvennogo kosmopolitizma.”), culminating after the end of the War in the wide-ranging 1948-49 campaign against cosmopolitanism.
Instead, the official Party line promoted proletarian internationalism as a discourse reflecting the more desirable world-wide co-operation between various Communist parties and movements under the indisputable leadership of the Soviet Union. Internationalism, unlike cosmopolitanism,did not erase the boundaries between nations; it preserved a core idea of belonging and left intact the assumption of alienness that informed attitudes towards foreign Communists and sympathisers of the Left in the Soviet Union. In Stalin’s hands, internationalism was little more than a smokescreen slogan concealing the tactics of maximising the benefits of nation-building at a time when the Soviets were still the only country where the revolution had triumphed. The resulting ambiguity—openness towards supporters from without, checked at the same time by a fundamental distrust and concerted policies of control and Russification—shot through and affected profoundly the life worlds of numerous East- and Central-European Left émigrés and exiles in Moscow during the 1930s.
The Polish-Jewish writer Aleksander Wat, in his youth amongst the founders of the Polish Futurist movement, fled Warsaw in 1939. Later imprisoned in Saratov, Russia in 1941 he converted to Christianity, referring to himself as “a Jew with a cross around his neck”.17Aleksander Wat, My Century. The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, ed. and trans. Richard Lourie (Berkeley, CA:University of California Press, 1988), 360.Another Polish-Jewish writer whose early work shaped Polish Futurism, Bruno Jasieński, was twice expelled from Paris for Left propaganda and found safe haven in Leningrad in 1929, becoming closely involved in Soviet literary and political life and enjoying huge literary success until his arrest in Moscow in 1937.18For an introduction to Jasieński’s life and work, from which these biographical details are sources, see Nina Kolesnikoff(Bruno Jasieński: His Evolution from Futurism to Socialist Realism, Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1982).Georg Lukács’s Moscow exile, from March 1933 to the end of August 1945 (with a brief spell in Tashkent), was the result of persecution and insecurity; a Communist and a Jew writing in both German and Hungarian, in September 1919, following the defeat of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he had found refuge in Vienna, returning illegally to Hungary in 1929 and then going to Moscow in 1930(his first visit there was in 1921 when he attended the Third Congress of the Comintern); in 1931 he was already in Berlin, doing Party work until the political climate forced him to return to Moscow.
Having found himself in Moscow, Lukács, like so many of the other East-Central European exiles, was confronted with a pressing identity problem: was he Hungarian, Soviet,Russian, German, Jewish?Or did all these cultural codes interplay, shaping a multi-layered,flexible, yet vulnerable perspective on the surrounding world?With reference to language,Balázs’s answer to these vexing questions was recorded in his Moscow diary in January 1940:“a poet without a people and a homeland who must write in two languages and employ both without the perfection that befits a master.”19Quoted in H. Loewy, Béla Balázs—Märchen, Ritual und Film (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2003), 380.Often deprived of the opportunity to write in theirMuttersprache(mother tongue), these literati felt the loss of a more general sense of language comfort: they were bereft, to quote Jean Paul, of aSprachmutter(language mother).20On current debates on multilingualism and the precariousness of the idea of ‘mother tongue’, see, amongst others,Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham UP, 2012).Politically, things were not any easier. Attempts to normalise one’s precarious situation were not always successful. Balázs arrived on an Austrian passport, applied in 1937 for a Soviet citizenship but was rejected, and became eventually adisplaced person.21Cf. J. Zsuffa, Béla Balázs. The Man and the Artist (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 281.Lukács confronted the Soviet officials with even greater difficulties: a Hungarian by nationality, a Soviet citizen, and for eight out of his twelve years in the Soviet Union a member of the German Communist Party,he was a Hungarian-Jewish intellectual writing mostly in German, a person impossible to pigeonhole. Arousing suspicion all along, he could not escape being taken into custody for two months in 1941.22Lukács became a member of the German Communist Party on 1 July 1931; in April 1941 he was registered in the Hungarian Communist Party [cf. L. Sziklai, “‘41 bin ich doch aufgeflogen.’ Das Verhör Georg Lukács’s in der Lubjanka” (“In 1941, I was busted after all.” Georg Lukács’s Interrogation at the Lubyanka), in Lukács 2001. Jahrbuch der Internationalen Georg-Lukács-Gesellschaft (Lukács 2001 Yearbook of the International Georg Lukács Society), ed. F. Benseler and W. Jung, 5(2001): 229-30)]. He was arrested in Moscow on 29 June 1941 and released on 26 August.
These East-European exiles thus cut insecure and imperilled figures on the Moscow cultural and political scene. None of them ever reached the inner circles of power; often they were not trusted even within the narrow confines of their professional environments, where their work was monitored, censured, and publicly attacked, not least by their Soviet peers. Eisenstein kept Balázs at a distance;23Cf. Loewy, Béla Balázs—Märchen, Ritual und Film, 381.Shklovsky, at the time himself a hostage of the regime, stopped the publication of Lukács’s bookTheHistoricalNovelwith a negative internal review.24See Galin Tihanov, “Viktor Shklovskii and Georg Lukács in the 1930s,” The Slavonic and East European Review 78, no.1 (2000): 44-65. Shklovsky was a good friend of Gyula Háy’s; he helped Háy, Balázs, Fridrich Wolf and others to continue their evacuation journey to Alma-Ata by securing a locomotive from Tashkent [cf. J. Hay, Born in 1900. Memoirs, trans. J. A.Underwood (London: Hutchinson 1974), 248-53)]. Lukács travelled with the same group from Moscow but went to Tashkent;Shklovsky and Lukács no doubt met on this journey. Aleksander Wat was also helped on several occasions by Shklovsky in Alma-Ata (Wat, My Century, 319-21).There was a growing sense amongst these exiled Jewish intellectuals that they didn’t own the project they had subscribed to. They were cosmopolitan in their beliefs and aspirations, yet they had no polis to apply their civic ethos to, excluded as they were from the real political process.
Yet most crippling of all was the political and moral disorientation and loss of identity that followed the signing of the Soviet-German treaty of 23 August 1939 which entailed a full relinquishing of the ideas and values of antifascism. Lukács, along with many others, was severely hit by this radical change in Stalin’s foreign policy. The new line taken by the Soviet government was bewildering, offensive, and bitterly disappointing to him and to all those who had fled the Nazi persecution and had found safe haven in Moscow.
Thus neither language, nor cultural inheritance or acquisition, nor indeed their political creed and commitment could lend the exiles an unassailable and self-assured identity. One was haunted by an atmosphere, as Lukács put it in hindsight,“of lasting mutual mistrust, an alertness directed towards everybody…and a sensation of being permanently under siege.”25Georg Lukács, Marxismus und Stalinismus (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1970), 184.All this meant that the imperatives of political cosmopolitanism could no longer be attended to by these exiles left without a polis and submerged in a context of enduring suspicion, anomy,conformism, and betrayal, often extending to their closest comrades, friends, and even family members. It is in this tormenting setting that we have to place, and judge to the extent to which one might be entitled to, the involvement of Lukács, Balázs and many others in the “purging” sessions of the mid-1930s, where a repugnant witch hunt was unleashed on fellow-exiles.
Far from being able to extend mutual respect and solidarity, former friends turned foes,brothers denounced their siblings. Balázs’s friendship with Lukács and Andor Gábor collapsed in 1940, following what Balázs believed to be a silent attack on him (he was not mentioned by name) in Lukács’s 1939 article “Writer and Critic”. Failing friendships were part and parcel of the arid landscape of exile in Stalin’s Moscow; even more destructive was the humiliation entailed in self-preservation at the cost of betraying a family member. A scar for life, this enforced act of survival was a repeated occurrence in the 1930s, amongst Soviet and exiled communists alike. Since 1934, Balázs’s brother, Ervin Bauer, had been a successful professor of biology at various Soviet research institutes. When Ervin was suddenly arrested in Leningrad in August 1937, Balázs (born Herbert Bauer), at the time an Austrian citizen and insecure amidst the waves of growing xenophobia, felt compelled to send a letter to the German Section of the Comintern, stating that he always had a bad relationship with Ervin and had not been in touch with him since coming to the Soviet Union. Thus political cosmopolitanism with its moral imperatives of respecting the dignity of others was foundering in Moscow. “At the heart of the world”, as another Left exile put it at the time,26Ervin Sinkó, Roman eines Romans. Moskauer Tagebuch (The Novel of a Novel: A Moscow Diary) (Cologne: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1962), 131.political cosmopolitanism and the moral values it would uphold had ceased to be an aspiration that could mobilise and steer everyday action and had instead become a distant horizon, an ideal beyond reach.
Far away from Stalin’s Moscow, the American East Coast would confront European Jewish intellectuals in exile with other frustrations. There were undoubtedly opportunities, but there were also limitations and compromises. The outcome often was a characteristic vacillation between a renewed political cosmopolitanism that would insist on upholding the dignity of the non-citizen (Arendt), on the one hand, and a pragmatic internationalism, on the other, with its own institutional framework that would seek to discourage war and guarantee peace (Broch).
In “We Refugees”, dated January 1943, Hannah Arendt fathoms the abyss between being human and being a citizen. She speaks in the plural, on behalf of the many Jewish refugees and exiles who had to leave Germany under Nazism. But the stories she populates her essay with are very personal. They are about the forced optimism of the newcomer who eventually, after multiple displays of cheerfulness, turns on the gas or jumps to his death off the top of a skyscraper; or about the deeply misleading agility with which refugees acquire new identities. At the core of her narrative, however, is the philosophical problem of how one can validate one’s own belonging to humanity. To their horror, refugees and exiles discover that introducing oneself as a human being does not suffice. This overarching, reassuringly universal attribute fails to convince. One needs to take a step down the natural hierarchy of attributes and refer not to being human but to having the right citizenship. Without that much narrower and accidental attribute,one can no longer claim to be a part of humanity. Thus, what is unfolding in the pages of Arendt’s essay is the critical project of a political cosmopolitanism with its—sometimes rather painful—acceptance and negotiation of particularity and difference.
Kant had anticipated these problems in his 1795/96 “Towards Eternal Peace,” a much admired and critiqued manifesto for what he calls “universal hospitality.” But Kant never experienced exile, he was never a refugee. In fact, he would spend most of his life as a philosopher in the port town of Königsberg, never venturing out. Hannah Arendt’s essay speaks to the problem of exclusion of humanity with the power stemming from one’s personal experience of exclusion and marginalisation as a German and European Jew. What is at stake in her essay is human dignity that is always inextricably bound up with identity. The conclusion she reaches is as lucid as it is diagnostically potent: “The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.”27Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in Altogether Elsewhere. Writers on Exile, ed. Marc Robinson (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 110-19, here 119.A very different diagnosis from the one the early Marx had set out in his “On the Jewish question,” where he clearly suggests that the discrimination against Jews would only disappear when society as a whole is liberated from the oppressive regime of exploitation and inequality.
Arendt’s essay would later prove enormously influential for a young Italian philosopher,Giorgio Agamben, who, aged 27 at the time, had already written to her to express his admiration of her work. This type-written letter from Rome, with an idiosyncratic (mis)spelling of the verb “write” in the penultimate line, is an early document of engagement, by Agamben,with Arendt’s philosophy. In his eponymous essay of 1995, “We refugees,” which deliberately replicates the title of Arendt’s essay,28Giorgio Agamben, “We Refugees,” Symposium 49, no. 2 (1995): 114-19.Agamben sees the experience of being a refugee as a universalizable condition that shakes up the trinity of state, nation, and territory. What was to unfold in Europe some 20 years after he had written his essay only came to confirm his foresight.Alas, the European Union and the UK are still behaving in a way that does not allow them to address the migrant crisis in accord with their core values; they tend to outsource the responsibility to others, be it Turkey or Rwanda, as if money can be a substitute for justice.
But I would now like to dwell briefly on a writer and intellectual who was deeply committed to the causes of refugees and exiles, and who spent a lot of his time thinking and writing about human dignity, seeking to enshrine its protection in law from a perspective that was not cosmopolitan as such but rather internationalist-institutionalist. Hermann Broch and Hannah Arendt became friends almost by accident in May 1946, both exiles in the US East Coast. Broch was almost 60 at the time, Arendt 20 years younger. She very much welcomed Broch’s novelThe DeathofVirgil, which was published almost simultaneously in German and in an English translation in 1945 (the last great work of Western Modernism, fittingly coinciding with the end of World War II). In her brief review (September 1946, published inTheNation), and especially in her later article, “The Achievement of Hermann Broch,” Arendt placed Broch and his novel next to Proust, Joyce, and Kafka.29See Hannah Arendt, “The Achievement of Hermann Broch,” Kenyon Review 11, no. 3 (1949): 476-83.The alignment with Joyce must have been particularly pleasing for Broch; his extensive correspondence with Daniel Brody, the publisher, reveals,even before his first major novel,TheSleepwalkers, was to appear in print, Broch’s ambition to emulate and outstrip Joyce. (Brody, who publishedDieSchlafwandlerin 1931/32, was himself an émigré after 1936.)
Yet Arendt also wrote a third important piece on Broch, titled “Der Dichter wider Willen”(“Writer Against His Will,” 1955).30The English translation is titled “Hermann Broch: 1886-1951,” in Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1968), 111-151. On Arendt’s three texts discussing Broch’s work, see Austin Harrington, “1945: A New Order of Centuries?Hannah Arendt and Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil,” Sociologisk Forskning (Sociological Research) 45, no. 3 (2008): 78-88.This was perhaps an appropriate title for an article on Broch, who, beginning in 1936, would spend an inordinate amount of time, even as he was writingTheDeathofVirgil, on compiling various legislative and administrative drafts for improving the plight of refugees and now allowing human dignity to be dented or lost. It would appear that he considered this work more important and consequential than his work as a novelist.Arendt, however, didn’t think much of the former, and with some irony she was suggesting that Broch should have stuck to his creative writing. She certainly believed, and on occasion made this clear, that Broch’s vision for a just world in which human rights and dignity are protected internationally, was too naïve, both before and in the first decades after, World War II.
Broch’s first document as a thinker concerned with human rights and dignity, especially those of refugees, was his draft “Resolution on the League of Nations” (1936-37) which insisted that human dignity be protected by law, and violations of dignity be prosecuted internationally.This draft Resolution didn’t advance very far in its implementation, even as Broch tried to enlist the support of notable dignitaries. The core principle formulated in it was: “that which is good for the human being should take priority over that which is good for the state.”31My translation; the German reads: “daß das Menschenwohl dem Staatswohl vorangestellt werde” [(Hermann Broch,Völkerbund-Resolution (League of Nations’ Resolution), ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1973), 40]. For a recent discussion of Broch’s work on human rights and dignity, see Paul Michael Lützeler, Hermann Broch und die Menschenrechte: Anti-Versklavung als Ethos der Welt (Hermann Broch and Human Rights: Anti-Enslavement as Ethos of the World) (Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021); for an interesting critique of Broch’s work on human rights as grounded in an essentially Euro/Occidentocentric blueprint for a post-war settlement, see Werner Wintersteiner, “Ethik und Politik in Hermann Brochs Völkerbund-Resolution: Eine postkoloniale Lektüre” (Ethics and Politics in Hermann Broch’s League of Nations’Resolution: A Postcolonial Reading), in Hermann Broch und “Der Brenner” (Hermann Broch and “The Burner”), ed. Paul Michael Lützeler and Markus Ender (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2020), 161-75.This was not an example of classic liberalism; rather, it was an expression of a pacifist humanism that also pervades his later blueprints for a new international order designed to uphold human dignity.
Unlike Arendt, Broch was thinking about human dignity not so much philosophically(although he also has an earlier piece that expands on dignity and rights from a philosophical perspective) and not as often from a cosmopolitan perspective, but—much more frequently and more energetically—through the prism of internationalism and its institutions. He would tirelessly propose various new bodies, including an International Criminal Court, and an International University, both of which materialised only decades later. His project for an International University (drafted in 1944) is particularly interesting;32See Hermann Broch,“Bemerkungen zum Projekt einer ‘International University,’ ihrer Notwendigkeit und ihren Möglichkeiten” (Remarks on the Project of an “International University,” Its Necessity and Its Feasibility), in Hermann Broch,Kommentierte Werkausgabe (Annotated Edition of the Works), vol. 11, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp, 1978), 414-27 (first published in 1969).the basis of this new university, which should be educating the future elites of humanity in a pacifist spirit that rises above nationalism and aggression, was supposed to be three already existing American academic institutions,largely sustained by exiled intellectuals from Europe: The New School for Social Research,already in place in New York since 1919, but with a newly founded Graduate Faculty (1934)made up of exiled European academics. All through the end of World War II, the Graduate Faculty would be formally known as “Graduate Faculty University in Exile.” The other such institution was the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, founded in 1930 and offering safe haven for so many refugee intellectuals in the 1930s-1940s. Broch had personal impressions of the IAS as the guest of Albert Einstein and on other visits to the place. And the third such institution at the core of the new International University was supposed to be the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York (1942-1946), in which prominent French and other European exiles taught, amongst them philosophers Jean Wahl and Jacque Maritain. It was at the École Libre that the collaboration between Roman Jakobson and Claude Levi-Strauss began, which would later issue in an article known to many comparatists, their 1961 analysis of Baudelaire’s “Les Chats”(published the following year, first in the journalL’Homme).
Thus, one can see that exile, human dignity, and what Arendt calls “the life of the mind” present an organic cluster in Broch’s work during his years in the United States. Yes, his vision was premature, and it took a long time for his projects to begin to take shape in the life of properly built institutions. His was the vision of an internationalist and humanist who, as Karol Sauerland put it, belonged to the generation whose formative experience were the horrors of World War I, whereas Arendt’s generation’s formative experience were the Nazi concentration camps. In a sense, she believed that Broch was responding to the fear of death that war instils,whereas she was responding to the fear of pain, incalculably more pervasive and difficult to ward off.33See the argument in Karol Sauerland, “Hermann Broch und Hannah Arendt: Massenwahn und Menschenrecht”(Hermann Broch and Hannah Arendt: Mass Hysteria and Human Right), in Hermann Brochs literarische Freundschaften(Hermann Broch's Literary Friendships), eds. Endre Kiss, Paul Michael Lützeler and Gabriella Rácz (Tübingen: Stauffenburg,2008), 319-31, esp. 328-29.This no doubt coloured the way they thought about human dignity and the resources that needed to be mobilised in order to protect it. Beyond this underlying difference, they were both convinced that literature has the power to bestow dignity on its readers and creators, even in “dark times,” as Arendt would call their shared century.
In this article, I have essayed to draw a distinction between political cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and cultural cosmopolitanism, on the other. As my analysis progressed, it became clear that these two types of cosmopolitanism, far from being identical, have their own distinctive values that do not always coincide. I was also at pains to demonstrate that exile and cosmopolitanism abide in a relationship that is far less straightforward than habitually assumed:the best way to describe this relationship is perhaps to refer to exile and cosmopolitanism as bound by a rather uncertain affinity. Exile doesn’t always generate cosmopolitan attitudes, either in the sense of a political cosmopolitanism (with its defence of unambiguous moral values) or in the sense of a cultural cosmopolitanism. At times, exile triggers identity struggles that occasion the shrinking of one’s horizons and a relapse into communitarian-diasporic, sometimes markedly nationalist modes of thinking; what is more, it frequently forces writers and intellectuals to settle for an agenda that is pragmatically internationalist in nature rather than cosmopolitan. These appear to be lessons one could do worse than ignore as one seeks to uphold cosmopolitanism as a desideratum that is currently under renewed attack.
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