Kerstin Stakemeier: Intellectual Dangers

Modern monisms, the vast varieties of holistic desires, omnipresent in the first decades of the twentieth century—of which Marxist materialisms were just one—with the rise of fascism in Europe had to face their practical failure. They were confronted with the vile nationalisms that replaced them–brutalized displacements of the alienating nature of modern capitalist life. This shift left Marxist intellectuals devastated, their revolutionary role collapsed: From assets of the working class they turned into culturalized liabilities. Bertolt Brecht’s TUI-Roman-Fragment and Carl Einstein’s Fabrikation der Fiktionen, both from the 1930s, map this political and aesthetic situation of rupture and disdain. Kerstin Stakemeier will discuss this breakdown of modern Monisms as a momentous shift, both historically and contemporarily.

Kerstin Stakemeier
To the biography...

Part of the conference Deep Time and Crisis, c. 1930