A Great Crime at Crimea: Austrian Ballerina Prisca Zeisel Dances at Sebastopol Gala, Only to “Self-Eject” from the Bavarian Opera

With the exception of the celebrated Fanny Elssler, departed this world in 1884, Austria has produced virtually no classical dancer of international stature—rather surprisingly given’s the country’s pre-eminence in music and theatre.

All the more cause for rejoicing then, when in 2011 a teenaged Prisca Zeisel joined the Ballet attached to the Vienna State Opera on graduating from its School. Swiftly enough, the girl rose through the ranks, to a degree that she was poached away by the Bavarian State Opera, where she was appointed principal dancer in 2019.

At that time, the Ballet Director at Munich was Igor Zelensky, a Russian who happens to be Putin’s son-in-law. As one might have expected, shortly after the Special Military Operation (SMO) was launched, in April 2022 to be precise, Zelensky quit Munich “of his own accord”—amongst the most interesting and influential jobs in European theatre, and one that no-one would ever quit of his own accord.

At Munich, Mr. Zelensky’s position was straightaway filled by Laurent Hilaire, a French dancer who had just “self-ejected” from the Stanislavsky Theatre at Saint-Petersburg, where he had run the ballet since 2017. In February 2022, a few short days after the SMO began, Hilaire left Russia at speed, owing to “circumstances” which “prevent one from settling down to work with peace of mind.” Whether “circumstances” might have had to do with Micronian/World Economic Forum rule over the Quai d’Orsay (French Foreign Office) is likely a figment of Moufid’s fevered imagination.

Whatever the case, following Zelensky’s departure from Munich, Miss Zeisel kept up ties to her former Director and his dancers, amongst whom several then “self-ejected” from Munich as well.

Now, in 2019, Miss Zeisel had danced at the Sebastopol Ballet Gala, without this ruffling a Bavarian feather. Then, in August 2023, she returned to the Crimean city to dance with Dmitri Sobolevski. On returning to Munich, she was almost immediately self-ejected, or as the Theatre’s press release put it:

In early September 2023, principal dancer Prisca Zeisel asked to leave the Bayerisches Staatsballett. Over the summer, she had danced at a Crimean gala (editor’s note: the word “Russia” never appears, as NATO which rules Germany does not, of course, recognize the Crimea as Russian). Further to exchanges with our Ballet Director and our General Intendant, Prisca Zeisel asked that her employment contract be terminated, to which Management has agreed.

According to the Spanish newsletter Mundo Clasico, Miss Zeisel’s departure… only serves to shew the de facto complete subservience of Mr. Hilaire to General Intendant Serge Dorny, also responsible—a thing of which Dorny then boasted—for Igor Zelensky’s so-called resignation as Ballet Director.”

All-too-evidently, the hothouse-orchid clique of General Intendants who run almost every major Opera House in the West enjoy an (exceptionally lucrative) career dependent on two factors: unswavering Wokism, and obsequious—if coyly naughty—boot-lickism to Whomever may be in Power. As for Serge Dorny, he emerged from the Gérard Mortier/Bill Viola côterie, of which ‘Nuff Said.

For the French art newsletter Diapason, though, it ain’t ‘Nuff Said. In May 2022 Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus, playing at being Ukrainian Minister of Culture, got Intendant Serge Dorny on the phone, where he crowed about having got rid of conductor Valery Gergueev (“despite our having worked with him for 35 years”) and opera singer Anna Netrebko (“we don’t want artists like that (sic) about”), and as for Igor Zelensky “he didn’t really take the decision to quit of his own will.” The Vovan and Lexus prank is most definitely not “fake news”: their conversation with Serge Dorny was confirmed without comment by the Bavarian State Theatre.

Now, if those oafs parading as the Government of Germany—Finance Minister Robert Habeck, “Miss Piggy” Annalena Baerbock and Chancellor Oaf Scholz, can Sing along with Mitch while the USA blows up Nord Stream, what is to stop their having an an Opera House Intendant hammer the purportedly weak—a little ballerina—whilst boot-licking the purportedly strong?

A practising Catholic—her official portrait for the Munich Ballet, shews a small crucifix carefully placed over her lace garment—Mlle Zeisel’s principles would appear to be non-negotiable, and thus on the same plane as her ability.

Not on the breadline, perhaps. On September 27th 2023, she is scheduled to appear as Gamzatti in La Bayadère at the Mikahilovsky Theatre at Moscow.

As for NATO’s arm-twisting a slew of European artists, whether Russian, pro-Russian or just plain unwilling to toe any line, we have been advised by The Postil’s editors to eschew all vulgar langage. Point taken.

Moufid Azmaïesh writes from France.

What is Dictatorship?

In politics, whether we know it or not, we are always fighting against an enemy, whether stationed on our borders or camouflaged within the city. But there is also another form of enmity, much more subtle than the one that bubbles at ground level, incarnated by men who have an ideology or a culture, perhaps a religion or a barbaric anthropology, incompatible with our own. It is the enmity derived from political concepts, polemically handled and exploited against the “moral element,” the criterion by which the true capacity of resistance to the hostility and offenses of the enemy is measured.

What I want to say, now by way of example, is that certain assumed definitions, transformed into taboos, enervate the will, having previously worked the intelligence by “brainwashing,” an expression that, suspiciously, has ceased to be used at a time when political pedagogy is dedicated only to that. Some pontificate on the benefits of ethnic, religious and cultural pluralism—the pluralism of values, in short—and others suffer its consequences: loss of cultural identity, social conflict, babelization. Nor is it strange that the same people who praise “miscegenation”—vaguely in the legal system, but with more determination in public universities and in the Press and Propaganda Section of the mass media—then maintain that races (or cultures) do not exist. It has also become normal for the zealots of “defensive” pan-Melanism—Black Lives Matter is not new, it was previously invented in the 1920s—to promote as just and necessary an anti-white racism and to demand that we finance our own re-education.

War, even in its current “pacifist” variants, takes place in space, that is to say, on the earth, because to control it and to reasonably order life on it is the primary object of politics. The much more decisive and brutal quarrels over concepts are settled in time. The struggle for the meaning of words, for the “story” that obsesses all modern princely counselors—today called “political analysts” or “advisors,” young people with no experience of life, generally coming, as Jules Monnerot used to say, from an educational system dedicated to “the mass production of artificial cretins”: as opposed to those who are so by a natural disposition; those who flourish massively today are “cultivated cretins, like a certain type of pearl.” Once the political logos and dictionary have been colonized, that is, the national “political imaginary,” any capacity for resistance is radically diminished. Then, and only then, the defeat of the external or internal enemy can be presented as a victory or a political and cultural “homologation” with the executioners. Indeed, a few days ago we in Spain spoke, with a sense of opportunity, of the “afrancesados,” Spanish archetype of a colonized political imaginary.

It is therefore necessary, in a certain sense, to “decolonize the imaginary” and give back to political concepts their precise meaning, which is neither invented nor developed in a Think Tank, but is part, however modest its aliquot, of the truth of politics. It is necessary, in order to know where we stand. I do not know if “political realism” has a specific mission; perhaps, some would say, the elaboration of a “decalogue” or program that can be implemented by a political party, a faction or a movement, but I do know that its raison d’être lies in the demystification of political thought. One of the concepts that needs this mental cleansing is “dictatorship,” a frightening notion about which the greatest confusion reigns—a self-interested Confusionism, exploited by those aspiring to power, presenting their rivals as vulgar supporters of authoritarian regimes and themselves as “democrats”—as if that term had a precise meaning beyond the mental tropisms that adorn the demo-liberal right.

Everything conspires against the reputation of political demystifiers. However, writing about the war-phenomenon does not presuppose a bellicose personality; probably only a meek man can write a theory or a sociology of war. A theory of decision… an indecisive one. And a theory of dictatorship is perhaps only within the reach of someone incapable of exercising it.

It is not easy to look “dictatorship” in the face, a highly inflammable political concept that gravitates over particularly intense political situations and which is entangled with legislation of exception, states of necessity and coups d’état. People believe that a dictatorship is what the “anti-Franco vulgate” teaches, but they do not lose sleep over a government that can illegally shut down Parliament and deprive the whole nation of freedom of movement. Anti-parliamentarism has many forms and those of today are nothing like those of a century ago. It would be very interesting to write a palingenesis of dictatorship, for it is periodically reborn and its singularity should be recognized. To turn one’s back on its reality is to culpably ignore the momentary concentration of power, a reality that happens outside our moral or ideological prejudices, independently of our will. Not knowing what it consists of compromises our position vis-à-vis the enemy who does know what it is and how to use it.

Dictatorship is a fundamental institution of Roman public law. It consists of a lifting or suspension of the juridical barriers in order that the dictator, generally pro tempore, faces the exceptional political situation (sedition, civil war, foreign invasion) and restores the public tranquility to the city. Once restored the order or expired the foreseen period, the extraordinary powers of the dictator are cancelled, whose prototype is Cincinnatus. But there are also in Roman history examples of dictators of undefined undertaking (Sila) and those lifelong (Caesar), even omnímodo or, as we would say today, constituent (lex de imperio vespasiani).

Roman pragmatism had grasped the political essence of dictatorship: it is a concentration or intensification of power that opposes the pernicious effect of the impotence of the established power, besieged by the enemy, generally internal. From a conceptual point of view, it is not strictly speaking a “political regime,” but a “political situation,” transitory by definition. Any manifestation of power always generates criticism from rival parties or factions, but in a particularly intense way criticism is aroused by dictatorship, secularly associated with the personal usufruct of command.

Every dictatorship constitutes a political fact, imperfectly subjected to a legal status. Jean Bodin’s notion of sovereignty is, in this sense, the attempt to make normative a particularly intense moment of command. Such is the glory of Bodin and of the French legists of the 16th century.

During the 19th century, dictatorship gradually lost all its former respectability, as a consequence of the generalization of a new juridical ideology: constitutionalism. Liberal historiography, in its fight against the “enemy,” the absolute monarchies, reworked the classical political tradition and generalized the denigration of the dictatorial institution, arbitrarily associated with tyranny and despotism.

However, the constitutional movement has always recognized, implicitly, that political necessity knows no law when it modulates states of exception, siege and war, denominations which push dictatorship into the background. Dictatorship became a political taboo after the coup of Louis Napoléon (December 2, 1851), the most important coup of the 19th century. But the technical meaning of dictatorship remained and developed in the constitutional states of exception. For the first time, the raison d’être of the classic dictatorship was legally enunciated, but without mentioning it by name: the suspension of law to allow its subsistence. Otherwise, liberalism, which at the time was never, to a certain extent, a “neutral and agnostic” doctrinarism—a legend spread by conservative illiberalism—would never have built the prepotent European nation-states.

Dictatorship formally denies the rule it wants to ensure materially, a doctrine established by Carl Schmitt in his research on the evolution of the institution: Dictatorship (1921), a book of conceptual history, diaphanous and without equivocation, whose non-readers (a very interesting intellectual fauna) figure, against all odds, that it is an apology for Nazism. According to the German jurist, “the essence of dictatorship from the point of view of the philosophy of law consists in the general possibility of separating the norms of law and the norms of the realization of law.” At the same time, dictatorship also implies an effective suppression of the division or separation of powers. Schmitt, being in need of the necessary conceptual demarcation as a jurist, contrasts commissariat dictatorship with constituent dictatorship, categories currently received in the healthiest part of the theory of the State and constitutional theory. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will plays a crucial role in the transition from one to the other.

Hermann Heller, a brilliant jurist, like Carl Schmitt, politicized by his leftist militancy and also committed to national socialism—but the opposite side of the other national socialism—was equally concerned about legal taxonomies. Less perspicacious than his colleague, rival and friend when political or juridical realism (concepts) come into conflict with ideology (positions), for Heller, dictatorship, condemned en bloc, is nothing more than a personalistic and corrupt government (“individuality without law”) opposed to the rule of law (“law without individuality”); in short, “a political regime manifestation of anarchy.” Simplifying a lot, this is the idea of dictatorship generalized among constitutionalists since 1945, the heyday of the “Potsdam democracies.” Carlos Ollero Gómez explained very effectively the constitutional “archaism” that weighed down these regimes.

The commissariat type of dictatorship, an updated formula, at the beginning of the 20th century, of the Roman dictatorship, presupposes a prior mandate or commission, spontaneous (royal call or invitation of a parliament or national assembly to assume extraordinary powers), or forced (pronunciamiento, coup d’état). The commissioned dictator’s mission is to restore the violated constitutional order without going outside the constitution or questioning its essential decisions (form of government). A good example of this is the Spanish dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, the “iron surgeon” expected by all. Have political and legal historians ever stopped to think why dictatorship got such a good press after World War I? They should read more Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, for example, a left-liberal constitutionalist, and think less about the ANECA, cancer of the Spanish university.

Sovereign dictatorship, on the other hand, pursues the establishment of a new political order, using for this purpose a power without legal limitations and operating as a constituent power. Charles de Gaulle in 1958 (dictator ad tempus). This type of dictatorship is associated in the 20th century with totalitarian regimes (total states and popular democracies), while the commissariat dictatorship falls more into the field of authoritarian regimes (Boulangism, authoritarian states and, however bizarre the term may sound, “Catholic dictatorships”). The possible effects of revolution having been limited by the experience of the Paris Commune, the lessons of which led to a turning point in insurrectionary techniques, the alternative to violent subversion is from then on the surgical coup d’état or legal revolution.

In its modern (Baroque) meaning, coups d’état are “audacious and extraordinary actions that princes are forced to undertake, against common law, in difficult and desperate affairs, relativizing the established order and legal formulas and subordinating the interest of individuals to the public good.” Thus speaks, in a secret book, Gabriel Naudé, so mistreated by political ignorance. Naudé, a librarian by profession and a harmless spirit, considers coups legitimate and defensive. Their usefulness depends on the prudence of the prince and, above all, on his ability to anticipate, for “the execution always precedes the sentence”: thus “the coup is received by the one who weighs to give it.” The reputation of a coup d’état depends on those who exploit it: it will be beneficial if it is carried out by friends or allies (salus populi suprema lex esto) and disturbing if it is plotted by enemies (violation of the constitution, counter-coup). Judgment thus depends on the relative position of the observer and his commitments and objectives.

The contemporary sequel to Naudé’s Considerations politiques sur les coups d’Estat (Political Considerations on Coups d’Etat), (1639), is Curzio Malaparte’s Tecnica Del Golpe De Estado (Technique of the Coup d’Etat), (1931). Malaparte, on whom the opprobrium of the right and the left falls indiscriminately, discusses the nature of coups in order to teach how to defeat them with a paralyzing “counter-coup” (coup d’arrêt) and defend the State.

Triumphs like Mussolini’s March on Rome (1922), wrapped in an aura of political romanticism, may never happen again… in the same way. After World War II the general impression was that the coup d’état is an infertile technique. All the more reason why, because of its congenital romanticism, the pronunciamiento can no longer have any effect. From all this we can only expect, as the theoretician of the State Jesús F. Fueyo used to say, an “acceleration of disorder.”

The violence of the coup is logically unacceptable to public opinion in pluralist constitutional regimes. However, that same “public opinion,” by inadvertence or by seduction, can willingly accept what Malaparte calls a “parliamentary coup,” in the style of the one executed by Napoleon Bonaparte on the 18th Brumaire (1799). Carl Schmitt calls it “legal revolution” in a famous article of 1977, written against the non-violent and electoral strategy of the Western communist parties (the Eurocommunism of Santiago Carrillo, a senile disease of Marxism-Leninism, a political religion then beginning to decline, although they, the Western communists, do not yet know it). In reality, the same result can be reached without going through the “legal revolution.” For this, it is necessary to count on the artful political strategy of occupying the constitutional courts—much more than a “negative legislator”—to turn them into the architects of an unnamed constitutional mutation, the greatest danger for the constitutions they are supposed to defend.

But it was not these communists, neither the Soviets nor those of the West, but Adolf Hitler, who, almost half a century before the publication of Eurocommunism and the State, set up the leverage to build a constituent dictatorship with totalitarian roots. Unlike dictatorships of the other species, the authoritarian, the totalitarian dictatorship pretends to have a mission not only political, but also moral, even religious: to give birth to the new man—Bolshevik, Aryan or Khmer Rouge—by disenfranchising the old.

The futility of the Munich coup of 1923 instructed Hitler on the tactical convenience of the electoral struggle and the possibility of legally attaining power in order to activate from the government the de facto abrogation of the constitution. It is a matter of exploiting the “legality premium” to revoke legitimacy. It is precisely against this process of constitutional subversion that Carl Schmitt warned, once again the Cassandra, in the summer of 1932.

The history of the Weimar system is well known and its last gasps have a name: the Authorization Law or Ermächtigungsgesetz (1933), a bridging constitution that suspended and emptied the Weimar constitution of content, opening the door to a constituent (totalitarian) dictatorship that ended up becoming a political oxymoron: a permanent regime of exception.

One of these bridge-constitutions, the Law for Political Reform of 1977, also served as a fuse for the “controlled explosion”—as it was called during the Transition—of the regime of the Fundamental Laws. The truth is that in Spain no one was fooled at that time; or, to be more exact, only those who allowed themselves to be fooled were fooled: “From the law to the law, passing through the law.” It portrays a generation of constitutionalists that no one has dealt with that bridging constitution. In reality, these jurists have powerful reasons to avoid it, since in very few European constitutional processes its character of supreme political decision is so evident, beyond the Kelsenian supercheries and fictions about the Grundnorm or fundamental normal on which everything hypothetically depends. Another fantastic exception to constitutional normativism is found in De Gaulle, playing, for the love of France, the Solon of the Fifth Republic.

The same school as the German National Socialist law of 1933 has held the Hispanic American populism since the end of the 1990s. The case of Hugo Chavez is a paradigm that transcends Venezuelan politics: from the failure of his 1992 “coup d’état” to the success of the “legal revolution” that began with his victory in the 1998 presidential elections and his famous oath of investiture on “the dying constitution” by virtue of which he had been elected.

The politically neutralized constitutionalist has no answer to this political challenge exported to almost all Latin American republics. He is paralyzed by the paradox. It is the ankylosis of Karlsruhe.

Jerónimo Molina Cano is a jurist, historian of political and legal ideas, translator and author. He is a corresponding member of the Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas in Madrid. This article appears through the kind courtesy of La gaceta de la Iberosfera.

Featured: Cincinato abandona el arado para dictar leyes a Roma (Cincinnatus Leaves the Plough to Dictate Laws to Rome), by Juan Antonio Ribera; painted ca. 1806.

Why Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Matters

1. A Brief Intellectual Biography

I wrote the second part of this essay for the annual meeting of the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund, on the Commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of the German-American thinker, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888—1973). That part was originally written for those who already know of his work, which is a very small group indeed. The voice it is written in reflects not only the circumstances and interests of the audience for whom it was written, but it reflects the emphasis, which I think might be of value to those who know nothing of him. Hence for those who have never heard of Rosenstock-Huessy before, a few biographical details may be warranted.

He was born in 1888 into a family who were of Jewish blood but had no interest in their tradition. His mother was as little moved by her son’s conversion to Christianity as she was by the tradition of her ancestors. Of his conversion, Rosenstock-Huessy said that there was no road to Damascus; his baptism seemed a natural progression from his interest in philology and history, and he simply thought that every word of the Nicene Creed was true. He received a doctor of laws at the age of 21, with the inaugural dissertation, “Landfriedensgerichte und Provinzialversammlungen vom 9.-12. Jahrhundert, (Courts of Peace and Provincial Assemblies from the 9th to the 12th Centuries).” And few years later, he completed his Habillitation (the German degree that is usually a prerequisite for becoming a university lecturer), with the deesertation, “Ostfalens Rechtsliteratur unter Friedrich II (East Westphalian Legal Literature under Friedrich) .”

By the age of 24, he was a private lecturer, teaching German Private Law and German Legal History at the University of Leipzig, before joining the German war effort. He served as an officer, and while fighting in the Battle of Verdun he had, what he himself called, a vision of the providential nature of war and revolutions and their indispensable role in making us and the world we now inhabit. That idea would first take preliminary form in 1920, in the work, “Die Hochzeit des Kriegs und der Revolution (The Wedding of War and Revolution).” This was followed by more complete versions, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man (1938) and Die europäischen Revolutionen und der Charakter der Nationen (The European Revolutions and the Character of Nations) (1951).

These works focussed upon the unity of the European revolutions, which he derived from what he saw as the first total revolution in the West—the Papal revolution, an event involving a complete rejuvenation of the Church that led to Pope Gregory VII’s excommunication of Emperor Henry VI over the practice of lay investiture. The popular support for the Gregorian position was perhaps most evident in the Church ridding itself of married clerics. The central argument of the works was that the Western revolutions that followed—the Italian Revolution (the Renaissance), the German Revolution (the Reformation), the English Revolution, the American Revolution (which he depicts as a half-way house revolution), the French and Russian Revolutions—were not only decisive in the formation of the modern European nations and their character, but gave birth to the social materials and commitments/ the faith that would flow into the world wars, and thereby draw the entire world into an unstable unity.

The story he tells is one in which providence (and not the wills of men) forces us into a condition where we must confront each other in dialogue, draw upon our respective traditions as we seek to navigate a common future—or what he called a metanomic society—if we are to achieve any lasting peace. A metanomic society is not to be confused with the progressive, globalist order that asphyxiates living spirits in conflict so that they may all be presided over by an elite of the good, the true and the beautiful—and the extremely wealthy. Rather it is one of persistent tensionality, as nations and peoples meet at the crossroads of a universal history of faith and war and revolt (sin and disease). On that cross road we encounter the various pathways and epochs (“time-bodies”) opened by founders who often stand for inimical life-ways, and yet we have to find a way to stand or perish together.

The works on revolution were themselves but parts of a more complete attempt to outline his vision of a metanomical society, Die Vollzahl der Zeiten (“The Full Count of the Times”), which would almost take him fifty years to complete. There he formulates the problem confronting the species, as one of making contemporaries of distemporaries—for we all come out of different “times.” Die Vollzahl originally appeared as the second volume of the work published in 1956—1958 as Soziologie, and has more recently appeared under the title he intended as, Im Kreuz der Wirchlichkeit: Soziologie in 3 volumes (Vollzahl appears as volumes 2 and 3 in that edition.) The two parts of the work are divided into one dealing with spaces—it is called Die Übermacht der Räume, which Jurgen Lawrenz, Frances Huessy and myself have translated and edited as The Hegemony of Spaces. The second, as I have indicated, deals with “the times.” The plurality adopted in the titles is important—for much of what Rosenstock-Huessy sees as destroying the human spirit is the adoption of the metaphysical and mechanical ideas of time and space as blinding us to living processes and the role of spaces and times in our lives, especially the opening up new paths of the spirit, involving a new partitioning of time.

The first volume of Soziologie/ Im Kreuz der Wircklichkeit is devoted to laying down Rosenstock-Huessy’s methodological critique of what he sees as the philosophical disaster that has culminated in what he calls, in the culminating section, “The Tyranny of Spaces and their Collapse,” the triumph of the Cartesian dissolution of all life into mechanical space paired with Nietzsche’s aestheticization of life which leaves the more fundamental tyranny untouched. That tyranny comes from the failure of a world increasingly dependent upon professionals devoted to ideas and ideals to understand the living powers of social cultivation and us substituting abstractions for living processes. The key idea of that volume is that play had always been conceived as a preparation for life, by sequestering spaces for play which enable people to focus upon the requisite undertaking we are engaged in. Play enables us to develop a more controlled, a more distanced and hence abstract understanding of life. It also aids us in developing our focus and capacities that may assist us in the tribulations that befall us in “real” life. Play is the species’ greatest source of education. It is thus not a mere afterthought to survival but as intrinsic to our nature as to our social formation and history.

Those familiar with Johan Huzinga’s Homo Ludens will be familiar with how play forms the basis of reflective life, though I think Rosenstock-Huessy makes this the basis of sociology, and human social roles, and by doing so does far more with it, especially in how he identifies the way in which the reflective consciousness has generally downplayed the more primordial social emotions and priorities required for developing pathways of life, in which we find our place and commitments in the world. Lifeless essences—“the individual,” “man,” “free will,” and such like—which can be moved about by the mind of the intellectual on a blank canvas of mental space are treated as real, while real forces of shame, admiration, gratitude, behests, affirmation, negation (I am taking a random selection from powers Rosenstock-Huessy denotes within a larger sociological breakdown) whilst still socially operative are not even noticed by most scholars and researchers.

It would be remiss of me not to mention another preliminary aspect of his intellectual biography. Prior to the First World War, Rosenstock-Huessy was the teacher of the most important Jewish philosopher of the twentieth century, Franz Rosenzweig. Their friendship and his lectures led to Rosenzweig considering to follow his cousins (the philosopher, Hans and author, Rudi Ehrenberg) and Rosenstock-Huessy into the Christian faith. At the last minute, after attending a Yom Kippur service, as a farewell gesture to the faith of his ancestors, Rosenzweig decided that he would “remain a Jew.” Rosenzweig’s “conversion” experience led him to seek out Rosenstock-Huessy again and enter into a dialogue about Christianity and Judaism.

In 1916, the two friends engaged in a heated but brilliant exchange, in which each defended his own faith and criticized that of the other. The correspondence has been translated into English and edited by Rosenstock-Huessy in Judaism Despite Christianity. It is the most important Christian-Jewish dialogue ever written. Rosenstock-Huessy left Germany as soon as Hitler came to power, but he did return in 1935 to help launch Rosenzweig’s Collected Letters. Rosenzweig, by then was deceased, and the correspondence between him and Rosenzweig played a special part in that collection. In my book, Religion, Redemption, and Revolution: The New Speech Thinking of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, I have written the only extensive account of the intellectual relationship between Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy, that draws attention to how they believed that they were, in spite of irreconcilable differences of faith, fighting on a common front against the kind of abstract and philosophical thinking that has dominated the West and is now destroying it. Both, in different ways, undertook to explicate the power of their respective traditions and what those traditions uniquely brought to our understanding of experience. Whereas Rosenzweig has a small audience in the academy (and I make no excuse for the fact that I find the academic reception of Rosenzweig in the US and Germany to be a bowdlerisation of his thinking so he can fit the “ethical” and “political” prejudices that now dominate the academy), Rosenstock-Huessy is almost completely unread today.

Before coming to the United States Rosenstock-Huessy had played an important role in seeking to build bridges between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. He wrote, Das Alter der Kirche (The Age of the Church) with Joseph Wittig and collected a mountain of material arguing against Wittig’s excommunication—the excommunication would subsequently be overturned. He also played a leading role in the formation of the Patmos publishing house and the setting up of the journal Die Kreatur, both ventures in religious cooperation directed against the forces of resentment that were fuelling the Marxist and Nazi ideologies. In addition to his academic work and writing, after the First World War, he worked for a while with Daimler Benz, editing a magazine for the firm and its workers. He would also play a leading role in fostering cooperation between students, farmers and workers. In the United States he would continue that aspect of his work by helping set up Camp William James, which has been said to have inspired the Peace Corps. He was also the first director of the adult education initiative of the Academy of Labour in Frankfurt, and then between 1929 and 1933, vice-chairman of the World Association for Adult Education. I mention this just to emphasize that just as Rosenstock-Huessy did not belong to one discipline, (he was not a legal scholar, philosopher, sociologist, historian, nor philologist, classicist, nor theologian) yet every work he wrote storms through these and other disciplines, he was also not simply an academic. Like Goethe, whom he quotes incessantly, his focus was life itself, not just ideas.

Admired by Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich with whom he corresponded, and W.H. Auden, who wrote a preface to his I am an Impure Thinker, but unlike so many other German emigres to the US, settling in Dartmouth, he had no doctoral students, and was essentially living and writing as an exile.

2. Commemorative Essay

Unlike every other essay I have ever written on Rosenstock-Huessy, this commemorative one is written for an audience who already knows who he is. Each member of this audience has encountered Rosenstock-Huessy in his or her own way: some are family members, some were his students, others, like myself, simply stumbled onto him. Each member of the audience also has his or her own reasons for how Rosenstock-Huessy’s teachings have mattered in their own lives. Further, there is also a common desire to see his work gain a wider readership and larger influence.

In spite of the indefatigable efforts of Freya von Moltke, Clinton Gardner, Harold Stahmer, Frances and Mark and Ray Huessy, Lise van der Molen, Michael Gormann-Thelen, Eckhart Wilkens, Norman Fiering, Russ Keep, and many, many others (I apologize to the many I have not included here) to gain the audience his great corpus deserves, he remains almost unknown to university professors and teachers and their students, as well as the rest of the population. The efforts of his family, former students and friends have also contributed to preserving his work digitally, which means that scholars in the future have a vast treasure trove of materials to explore, if ever his name does catch fire. Those who contributed to this effort, and those who invented and made available the technology, belong to a common time. Rosenstock-Huessy was a man of his time, who reached back into times usually only of interest to historians and anthropologists, whilst thinking forward both to warn us of the dangers of our time, and to galvanize our faith in a time of greater concordance, one in which love, faith and hope converge so that we may better be able to achieve tensional bodies of solidarity—what he called a “metanomic society”—rather than persist in the cycles which lead us periodically back into hell.

Some of the people I have mentioned have now passed, others are still doing what they can to see his work take on a larger body of those who hear the urgency and respond to the perspicacity and grand sweep of his analysis of what being alive means, how it matters, and how lives over multiple generations have been formed.

Those of us who are party to this commemoration, irrespective of personality differences and styles of what we think may be the best tactic to gain a larger audience, irrespective of what we even think of each other, we are together because the trails and encounters of our individual lives have awoken in us a common appreciation of the “genius” of a man who has brought us together so that what we say, to each other and about each other, in his name, matters. Rosenstock-Huessy fought his entire life against the one-sided polarities which have divided philosophers into idealists and materialists, and thereby led them into metaphysical entrapments where pride in purporting to know the All subsists alongside a litany of errors which prevent us from knowing what really is important, what really matters, what really bears fruit.

It was Rosenstock-Huessy who most schooled me in the importance of our responses to the contingent circumstances that befall us, to the loves that move us, to the faith that focusses our observational powers about what matters in our lives, to the power of speech to bind or divide us, and to the times which flow around and through us, and how times are socially formed.

Each person here will know the major moments in the trails of their lives, even if not the countless trails of their ancestors whose offshoots they are, which led them to Rosenstock-Huessy. In my case, it was coming across Harold Berman’s Law and Revolution, while simply running my fingers across a library shelf in the library at the University of Adelaide, just as I had completed my PhD, which would become my first book, The Metaphysics of Science and Freedom: From Descartes to Kant to Hegel. Had I not been attending that university, had I not been at that section in the library, randomly walking by shelves, had the university not existed, Australia not been discovered, the printing press not invented, had that title not caught my attention (I had just taken up a job involving teaching a subject I had designed, called “Justice, Law, and the State”), had its position on the shelf rendered the book invisible, I may have never heard of Rosenstock-Huessy. And Harold Berman would never have written that book had he not been Rosenstock-Huessy’s student in Dartmouth. And my life would never have taken the trajectory it has had I not picked up that book, and you would not be reading this essay.

I may have remained caught up in the metaphysical grip of a way of thinking that has been as pernicious as it has been influential. I was certainly in the grip of that thinking when I encountered him. But I had already reached a stage where I was finding philosophy far closer to spiritual death than most ever realize. In my case, I can truthfully say philosophy was killing me when I encountered Rosenstock-Huessy. On that point, along with his friends Rudi Ehrenberg, Viktor von Weiszäcker, and Richard Koch, Rosenstock-Huessy always saw that the severance between nature and spirit was a life-threatening disease—and, for those who do not know it, and who have some German, I cannot recommend strongly enough his Introduction to the edition, with Richard Koch, of writings by Paracelsus—Theophrast von Hohenheim. Fünf Bücher über die unsichtbaren Krankheiten, whose subtitle in English reads, Five Books on Invisible Diseases, or Chapter 8, “Das Zeitenspektrum” (“The Time Spectrum”), from Heilkraft und Wahrheit (Healing Power and Truth).

When, thanks to Berman’s book, I picked up Out of Revolution, the opening sentences of Chapter One, “Our passions give life to the world. Our collective passions constitute the history of mankind,” struck me with such power that I was stunned. I suspect others in this audience may have experienced a similar feeling when they first read something by Rosenstock-Huessy, that feeling of being overwhelmed by an insight and how it is expressed, and feeling that this is someone who sees and knows important things. I know that not everybody responds this way to Rosenstock-Huessy. That is especially so with university people. I have had almost no success in sharing my enthusiasm and love of Rosenstock-Huessy.

Apart from my own failures to interest people in his work, the question of why he has not received a larger academic audience has to do with many things. First there is his style. His writing is sprawling and associative, connecting things specialists do not connect. His voice teeters on the conversational and it is laced with anecdotes drawn from every-day experience that do not resonate with an academic audience. His writing rarely, if ever, fits into a discipline—and hence, as he recounts in Out of Revolution, the university did not know where to put him, or what to do with him. His Sociology is many things, but it is most definitely not a traditional Sociology. He dismisses Weber and Pareto with barely a sentence each, but he connects himself with Henri de Saint-Simon, and proceeds to hail him as the founder of Sociology. He writes constantly about language, but he does not do Linguistics, and he almost only ever mentions linguists to rebuke them. Likewise, his writings on Christianity barely engage with theologians, and he finds theology as a discipline to be barren. That he disparages the importance of the mainstream (quasi-Platonist) understanding of the soul’s survival after death makes even his Christian faith look suspect to theologians.

The academic mind is inducted into an area of specialization, and that comes with being confronted with, and being required to participate in, various disciplinary debates and consensuses. He never agrees with any of them, whether it be the Q hypothesis in biblical studies, or the dual Homer of classicists. And he bypasses almost completely what Egyptologists have to say about ancient Egypt, with the odd expression of disapproval, relying for his interpretation of ancient Egypt on the basis of his own readings of Egyptian hieroglyphics. He frequently draws attention to the shortcomings of Philosophy. Where he does engage with philosophers, as in, say, his concluding chapter on Descartes and Nietzsche, in The Hegemony of Spaces, Volume One of In the Cross of Reality: Sociology, or with Descartes in Out of Revolution, he has such an original take that it also falls on deaf academic ears.

Then there is the overall vision. He has a providential reading of history, and the role played by wars and revolutions as the great powers of providence, at a time when providential history has almost no academic representatives. Even the Marxists have largely dropped the teleologism in Marx. But teleological history is not the same as providential history. The key point about his providentialism and how that differs from the progressivist academic orthodoxy of today is perhaps most easily understood if we distinguish between a cast of mind which looks to ideas and ideals, and attempts to rebuild society around the normative claims it makes. This is the standard way in which the philosophically influenced mind works—to be sure Marx transferred the site of development to the material plane, but, for all that supposed break with idealism, his position was still one of postulating what he already knew to be the best (ideal!) society (communism) and looking for how it would be realized. He missed two things that are intrinsic to Christian doctrine and to Rosenstock-Huessy.

First, reality is revealed, and not the result of thinking it through to its end. Secondly, our reality is inseparable from our sins. It is how we build with that that matters. The philosophers teach ethics. They do so because they believe that if we can act without error we will make ourselves and our world much better. This is idealism pure and simple. The difference between Christianity and philosophy and its predilection to instruct us in ethics and designing laws to make a better world stands in sharp relief to what Christianity is doing when we think about Peter and Paul, the two pillars of Christ’s Church. One was a weakling and a liar; the other a zealot and witness to murder. The Church is a creation of sinful flawed creatures. That is why Rosenstock-Huessy saw it as a miracle, and its very existence a confirmation that Jesus was the Son of God. It is the recognition of the salvation of the fallen, the forgiveness of sin, redemption through grace not the potency of our virtue and intelligence that is constantly at work in Rosenstock-Huessy’s writings. Thus too, Rosenstock-Huessy sees war and revolution as the greatest creative occasions not because they are good things, not because he is calling for a revolution in which we implement what we think will be the better future, but because they are symptoms and signs forcing us to recognize the dead ends we have reached: they are spiritual diseases. They reveal us at the end of our tether, and are the preconditions of our ways of dying into a new form of life. One of the inner secrets Rosenstock-Huessy sees in Christianity is that it teaches how we must die into new life.

Rosenstock-Huessy also makes Christianity the root of the tree of universal history, in a century where the academic mind has largely been devoting itself to a neo-pagan revival, as most evident in the importance of what Rosenstock-Huessy calls the four dysangelists of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud, each of whom is involved in destroying the traditional components of every civilization, including Christian civilization. While Rosenstock-Huessy goes deep into why the various pillars of civilization exist and why their modern destroyers are so destructive, he is as little interested in defending tradition for the sake of tradition, as in congratulating those who think that we have simply outgrown traditions because we are smarter and better. But he is interested in the collected learning of the species, of the creative, revelatory and redemptive aspects of life which accompany how we organize our lives, how we orientate ourselves as we command and call, declare, and refuse, and then occupy the different fronts of reality that our lips and hearts and hands have opened up.

We all occupy different positions in the various fronts we encounter through our various social allocations, from the family to the division of labour, to our culture, and so forth. A tradition is only a tradition in so far as it is a living pathway of spirits; pathways can run out of spirit; they can be merely dead ends. The tension between anchorage and dwelling, and the spirit’s movement and growth is one of the most important of the species. Societies can be equally doomed by a refusal to grow spiritually, by idolizing their traditions, and by becoming unhinged as the enticements of our desires and imaginings sever us from sacrificial requirements intrinsic to love’s existence and movement.

Rosenstock-Huessy takes cognizance of the fact that all life is about mutation and transformation (which is why he identifies with the Christian fathers who saw Heraclitus as a Christian before Christ’s birth). The power of the language of religion, he would say in Practical Knowledge of the Soul, lies in it, addressing the secrets of transformation. We can never be alert to mutation and transformation if we neglect the importance of contingent encounters, or the creative opportunity that a moment may call for. The meaning of our actions are only revealed through our responses to the circumstance of the moment—not by our plans and intentions. Thus Rosenstock-Huessy emphasises that responsiveness is a condition we ever find ourselves in—not “cogito ergo sum,” as he famously said, but “respondeo etsi mutabor.”

Knowing when to preserve and when to jettison, how to respond to the requirements of the time and circumstance, how to know whether the powers of the tradition are alive or dead, having a sense for which of the hidden powers of the future are to be fought for and given over to, that is part of the cross of our suffering, the trial of our lives, the test of our faith. This is something that is simultaneously something that we are never sufficiently prepared for but what we most need to be educated for. This is also why Rosenstock-Huessy, in the first volume of his In the Cross of Reality, places such importance on how games or play prefigure in our lives—they are means for preparing us for the serious and the unpredictable contingencies which require on our part an astuteness of observation and a strength of character. Neither of these qualities are particularly highly valued by a modern education system which prioritises principles ostensibly encompassing the sources of all our greatest social problems and their application which will ostensibly solve them. The sporting field, though, is a preparation for the battlefield, and the “battlefield” or “theatre of war” is the most serious space in which life is tested.

Rosenstock-Huessy’s view of life owed much to his experience on the battlefield. His conceived War and Revolution amidst the horror of Verdun. The sense of urgency, of trauma, of the horrors we are capable of unleashing, and of what is required for our survival, as well as what contributed to the nations of Europe killing each other on such a scale are woven everywhere into his writing. They give his voice a sense of reality that comes from being covered in mud and splashed with blood, from watching his comrades killed in combat. It is a voice that does not simply come from the study, which I suspect is why those who live in and from the study and the classroom rarely respond to it. That is also why how he approaches the great task of building a lasting peace has nothing in common with the far more popular figures such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Jacob Taubes (who for a year corresponded with Rosenstock-Huessy), Giorgo Agamben, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, all of whom sought to implicate the modern radical project of emancipation within the theo-political one of the messianic. And they, like their less theologically sensitive contemporaries, such as Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, who have had such an important influence on the ideas circulating in the Arts and Humanities, all view traditions and social roles as if they were explicable through the dyad of oppressor and oppressed, and hence as if what mattered most in a life was that it could be lived according to one’s desires.

But they also want to expose the shaping of desires by the dominant social powers and the ideologies that sustain their privilege, as that very shaping of desires also is a symptom of oppression. Emancipation thus always comes back to appetites, and sociality magically forming some chemical compound to be released in utopia or the “to come.”

However philosophically clever and satisfying the above thinkers are to students and professors who think that ideas exposing who has more, and how much more “power” we will have when emancipated, Rosenstock-Huessy had no time for such vapid analyses that betray the idealistic vapours of their conjuration. Thus he rarely mentions any of the major figures of twentieth century Marxism in his major writings. In some letters, we discover that he thought the revival of 1848 in the age of world wars was a disgraceful failure to read the times. He also lets off steam about Habermas, Adorno and Bloch, while he seems oblivious to the French structuralists and post-structuralists who had started to make a name for themselves in the 1960s and who would go onto play such a large part in the kinds of political narratives coming out of universities in the last forty or so years.

In sum, what the generation who came of age as they were being educated in the 1960s came to see as the great voices of orientation, the very voices which came to play an ever bigger part not only in university curricula, but in policy, were either unnoticed or dismissed by Rosenstock-Huessy. The idea that the greatest problem confronting the species was to overthrow the forces of oppression to emancipate the self we—and those who think just like us—identity with was completely alien to Rosenstock-Huessy. And it is the lack of such a core principle in his work that also continues to alienate him from readers who are of, or trained by the academy.

Whereas the academy has come to play a major role in the narratives which have now come to define the West, neatly now summed up as policy formulations of Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity, Rosenstock-Huessy saw freedom as both a decisive feature of what we are and of the better, more Christ-like, world. It is inseparable from the Holy Spirit, and his take on freedom is yet again an indication of how he diverges from the commonplace distinctions of philosophy which are now so engrained in the mind of the educated public, and the way his faith informs his eyes and ears and throat and heart.

Please indulge me the following excursus into the history of modern philosophy. For if we understand the underlying connections between the modern elevation of the value of freedom, the specific meaning that freedom takes on in the modern context (one very different even from classical philosophy), and the underlying metaphysical parameters within which it emerged, we are in a far better position to appreciate how we are still very much entrapped in the mental prison that Rosenstock-Huessy was trying to break open. We will also better appreciate why Rosenstock-Huessy’s Christian solution is a genuine solution to what commenced as a dream (Descartes’ dream) and has become a living nightmare.

The modern philosophical view of freedom emerges in the broader metaphysical dualism of determinism and voluntarism. They are the polarities which Descartes appealed to in his claim that there were two fundamental substances which provide the basis for all of our understanding of reality—one is immaterial (the mind), the other is defined by virtue of it being extended (the body). Mind, though, in Descartes solely consists of cognitive operations, so the voluntarism in Descartes is strictly limited to acceptance or negation, while the body is construed entirely deterministically. While the particular means identified by Descartes as required to explain causation was abandoned thanks to Newton’s demonstration of the fact (not hypothesis as he proudly declared) of action at a distance, the far more important philosophical contribution made by Descartes was the metaphysical redefining of the world as a totality of laws operating through causal mechanisms, i.e. determinism.

The German idealists (though not Hegel), but especially Kant, the young Schelling, and J.G. Fichte developed the voluntarist metaphysics that is so widely embraced today. In Kant that voluntarism was purely limited to our moral claims, but it finds it most complete form in J.G. Fichte, the major philosophical figure in the Romantic and nationalist movements in Germany, who is barely read today. Fichte had taken the Kantian and Rousseauian idea of freedom being submission to a law which we give to ourselves and extends it to any and every activity where there is human involvement. Thus life itself as we fathom it and participate in it through our consciousness of it and ourselves, for Fichte, is but the self-conscious postulation of the ego. Hence the world is but a fact-act, and our relations are all potentially contractually formed, albeit on the basis of some intrusions by the non-I, which are, inter-alia, racially determined (hence his nonsense on the German character.)

The highpoint of Fichte’s fame was in 1806, when he delivered his Addresses to the German Nation, which was a call for the unification of the German people into one nation to counter the Napoleonic conquests. By the 1830s his fame had dropped away, but his influence had impacted indirectly upon the romantic radicalism of the young or neo-Hegelians. In spite of their name, the young/neo-Hegelians were generally radically anti-tradition and anti-institutionalist and in this respect deeply opposed to Hegel’s philosophy of the reconciliation of the Enlightenment spirit of diremption. They are mainly remembered today because its “members” included Karl Marx. The most philosophical amongst them was probably Ludwig Feuerbach whose critique of Hegel was to be repeated by the young Marx. The two figures in that group that are most conspicuously Fichtean in their philosophical formulations were August Cieszkowski, and, Max Stirner. Cieszkowski is all but completely forgotten, but while Stirner’s work of anarcho-individualism, The Ego and Its Own was philosophically light-weight compared to Fichte, his name has survived, in part due to the merciless polemic against him by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, but also because he would be an important influence on Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche, though, was also deeply influenced by Schopenhauer, whose polemics against Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel contain some of the best comic lines in the history of philosophy.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy also proceeds by way of metaphysically uniting determinism and voluntarism. He does this by making the will the underlying creative material power of the universe, which is also inseparable from the representations that accompany its incessant drive. He had, so he claimed, bridged materialism and idealism by uncovering the nature of Kant’s notoriously elusive thing-in-itself—Kant had claimed “the-thing-in-itself” was a necessary postulate of reason, that we could never understand, because it lay beyond the mental strictures of our “experience”—it lay outside the parameters—the a priori elements of what he called the faculty of understanding. Nietzsche would simply appropriate this hybrid of material determinism and the will as the fundamental power of the universe.

But whereas Schopenhauer’s response to this was to seek retreat by withdrawing his mind from the world and the restless tumultuous will that was the source of all our suffering, Nietzsche merged a physiological/ biological (determinist) view of human beings with the more Fichtean and Stirner one of heroic potency. Nietzsche ridiculed “the heroic,” a term being bandied about by Carlyle (also an admirer of Fichte), but his superman is a call for the breeding of just the type Fichte had made the high point of his philosophy.

The same deterministic-voluntarist hybrid, albeit without the philosophical self-consciousness and deliberation of Fichte or Schopenhauer, is also in Marx. He claimed to have demonstrated the necessity of socialism arising from the break-down of the bourgeois mode of production, whose laws he had claimed to identify in Capital. But the movement between bourgeois and socialist society was also predicated upon the revolutionary act by the industrial working class, i.e. that act and class were the sine qua non of socialism. In spite of his constant refrain that consciousness was determined by society and not the other way, Marx himself laid out a theory of ideology which would be essential to the radical thinking of the next century. For without clearing away the ideological distortions which protected the ruling class that action might not occur. The proletariat, in other words, needed to be educated, needed to have their consciousness raised. His theory contained two irreconcilable “absolutes”—one (the reality of the capitalist mode of production) studied by the scientist , the other (a non-existent future socialist and then communist society) appealed to by the revolutionary. Eventually the revolutionary Marx quietly adopted the kind of voluntarism that would define Leninism: that moment came when Russian Marxists asked Marx if they could bypass capitalism taking hold in Russia and leap straight to a socialist society. He replied, Yes—and with that he tactility renounced the deterministic basis of his own theory: consciousness could in fact determine social being.

The one philosopher who grasped the importance of the metaphysical bifurcation that had been playing itself out since Descartes was Hegel. He had argued that the modern metaphysical bifurcation of determinism and voluntarism was but one more unfortunate legacy of the Enlightenment’s division of the world into the finite, and infinite, which, he argued, rests upon a dogmatic (and philosophically false) belief that the finite is not a moment within the infinite, but a separate part of it. That is, it cuts us off from the world that it purports to exhaustively define so that we can understand all its laws. Hegel was correct to see the dialectical relationship between determinism and voluntarism. His mistake was his faith in philosophy itself—and even how he pits faith against philosophy involves the error that explodes his entire edifice. That error is most visible in the key to his entire corpus, his lesser known book, Faith and Knowledge. While it provides a brilliant analysis of the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte, it is based upon a completely false understanding of faith.

Although Hegel admired Hamann, and wrote a very positive and lengthy appraisal of him, had he read him more closely he would have realized that faith is not something arrived at when knowledge reaches its end. The idea that faith was required when knowledge reached its end was what the Romantics had in common with Kant, and it was this that Hegel kept finding and criticising not only in Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi, but young Schelling, Schleiermacher, Fries and other contemporaries. His point was like Kant, who had denied any knowledge of the thing-in-itself, only to tell us a lot about it, they all speak of the limits of knowledge only to tell us what they know lies beyond knowledge, and how we too might know it! While Hegel’s argument against the philosophers and theologians is compelling, it, nevertheless, misses the point—that faith is what leads to knowledge and indeed to the life you have, not what takes place outside or beyond it. It is utterly existential, and world-making.

When one sees the ruin of Hegel’s life-time work, a system with nothing but rubble to be picked up by subsequent generations we cannot help see (I at least) the deep failure that incubates within philosophy. For none has done a better job than Hegel in demonstrating that any subject we consider is only what it is because of its predications. The more knowledge we bring to/have about the subject, the more we see what it is. That is a very clever defence of science and the importance of knowledge as a systemic enterprise—but it overstates the importance of reason and ideas and underestimates the things that Rosenstock-Huessy emphasises which are required in knowledge and which I talk about at the end of this paper. Thus it is, for Hegel, that to know the part requires knowing the All that informs the part. That is a brilliant metaphysical insight, and it sends Hegel on the path of writing The Science of Logic and The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Science, and the most magisterial account of the history of philosophy ever given, as it demonstrates how his philosophy is the culmination that recognizes the conceptual development and labour that led to him.

If philosophy from its origin aspired to the God’s eye view, it is Hegel who has the eye of God. Or so it would be the case if he were correct, though we can see how silly it is when we start to look at some of the errors of judgment he displays in his Philosophy of Nature, especially. But our life is not formed in the study, nor by denoting the dynamic of our contradictions. It is formed by the faith that has carried us to where we are as it also moves us to our next action. This by the way was why the deeply religious Hamann liked Hume so much and forgave him for his more enlightened nonsense. Hume understood that faith is a motivation where all our knowing can be sceptically broken down if we pose the right questions to it.

Hegel, aside, the disjuncture between determinism and voluntarism remains very much with us in our confused world. Here Hegel’s genius retains its relevance. For we can see that because the greatest faith in the Western world today is faith in their ideas about the world and they themselves are caught up in the constant oscillation transpiring between the polarities of the metaphysical spectrum upon which their ideas “pop up.” More often than not the oscillation (Hegel’s dialectic of contradiction) transpires within the one narrative. An extremely common one involves being drawn into identifying the determinations of identity (gender, race, ethnicity etc.), whilst at the same time rallying behind the (wilful, i.e. idealist driven actions) overcoming of those determinations by changing our ideology.

The contemporary soul, in sum, in so far as the modern project is to a very large part a philosophical—an ideational—creation is torn between two absolutes, the absolute of the universe and the social forces that are treated as naturalistic variations of ideological social power, and the absolute of emancipation in which the rights of the oppressed subject triumph over the unjust imposition of the privileged. But the concept of emancipation is also implicated in the other metaphysical oscillation concerning freedom which accompanies the determinism/ voluntarism dyad, which was at the centre of Kant’s (unsuccessful) attempt to provide an unassailable metaphysics. That was the division between freedom as the formulation of a categorical imperative (i.e. the capacity to make unconditional universal moral commands) and simply giving into the appetites (our appetites, in this schema, are simply bodily determinations). From the Kantian perspective surrendering to our appetites is the antithesis of freedom—so much so that he holds that no act is free if is affected even by the tiniest degree by an appetite.

Kant aside, the idea of freedom has become extremely commonplace today, although the idea of our freedom requiring removing the strictures upon the appetites is the view of freedom to be found at its most brutally honest form in Sade, and in a more humorous version in Rabelais’ less semen and blood-stained depiction of the kind of giants we could be were we free of religious superstition, priests, bad rulers, lawyers, scholastics, etc.

The liberal view of freedom, which goes back to Locke and takes persons and their property as the bastions of liberty, mediates between the appetites unbound, and the binding required of other appetitive beings. That human nature is nothing but appetites in motion is also an offshoot of the deterministic metaphysics of the modern and is laid out by Spinoza and Hobbes, and it will be this view of the self without freedom or faith in its own dignity that will be a major impetus for Kant’s critical philosophy.

The politics of emancipation in the West (and they have no real resonance outside of the West today), though drawing upon “moral” posits which give it normative leverage (the leverage of shame), is the dialectical resolution of the modern components of the idea of freedom. It incorporates the satiation of one’s appetites, the right of respect (dignity) for having one’s appetites and determinations (being/ identity), control of education to enable the breaking up of oppressive/ traditional forms of social reproduction to enable this dignified/ appetitive self, as well as the political demand that this emancipated self receives the resources, whether through reparations, or career and office holding opportunities distributed on the basis of one’s being/identity, that enable its perpetuity. Indeed as we are witnessing, the emancipated self requires for its realization a complete overhaul of the entire political, economic, pedagogical and social spheres. That it has generated an all-encompassing alliance between the state, corporations and those who determine which ideas are to be taught and publicly tolerated in order to sustain this new world of new selves also requires an unprecedented technocratic, bureaucratic and ideocratic alliance.

All of this is as remote from Rosenstock-Huessy as pretty well any other kind of campus-initiated politics that have grown out of the student revolution and its aftermath. In sum, then, for Rosenstock-Huessy the secret of freedom is not disclosed by Descartes, Spinoza, Roussea, Kant, nor Fichte nor Sade, a decisive influence in the French pot-pourri of Bataille, Blanchot, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, who have played such a huge role in the Arts and Humanities in the Western world, nor Marx nor Nietzsche. even if Rosenstock-Huessy finds things in Marx and Nietzsche which he sees as valuable. It is to be found in the partitioning of time, and the foundation of a new time. For Rosenstock-Huessy the great partitioning occurred with Jesus, for it would both bring an end to all of what he called “the listening-posts” of antiquity, that is the distinct life-ways of tribes, empires, city-states, and the diasporic Jews bound by their God, their belief in His promise, their prophesies and expectation of a Messiah, as well as breathing new life into them by raising them to another socio-historical plane and purpose.

Rosenstock-Huessy’s argument about where Christianity fits into the larger scheme of a universal history can be seen as a variant of the kind of accounts we find in the writing of people like Frédéric Ozanam, Christopher Dawson, and G.K. Chesterton, though I think once the second (and third, depending upon the edition) volume(s) of his Sociology are factored in with the two studies (the German and English versions being organized differently and having somewhat different emphases) of the European revolutions then his account is sui generis. Like any historical account, and especially when it covers such a massive array of events, some of its findings as well as the stations on its way are disputable.

However, that he provides an account of history in which he draws attention to so many variables being of consequence for the world we now live in, and that he does so balancing structural (especially in the Sociology—though, it would also be the structural features of his study of the European revolutions that would lead to a preface to the Die europäischen Revolutionen being written by the doyen of structuralist/systems theory Political Science, Karl Deutsch) and contingent features lays out a great research project that remains largely neglected. Although Berman’s two volumes of Law and Revolution is an important contribution to the development of that project.

But just as the Christian centre of his universal history has left his work being neglected, the method is also something that leaves the work being neglected. That he has a method is something he makes clear in the first volume of his most methodical writing, the first volume of In the Cross of Reality/Sociology. But just as his understanding of freedom has nothing in common with the philosophical way in which freedom has developed, his method is what he calls the cruciform one in which there are no such things as objects per se or subjects per se, even if we are to retain that philosophical language, which Rosenstock-Huessy only very occasionally does, nor are future and past unmediated by each other.

We all find ourselves torn by what we each bring to a situation, as well as what has gone into creating the situation which takes us far beyond what can be encapsulated in the words of subjectivity of objectivity. Words like subject and object have such philosophical importance because of the philosophical willingness to eliminate the complexities which overly complicate the process of having clear and distinct ideas. The terms are the result of a decision to simplify reality so it is better controllable. The terms subject and object conceal an array of actions, circumstances, occasions, historic and semiotic backdrop and inherited lexicon and knowledge-pool, as well as the associations and memories that we have and do not even know we have until we speak. “Speech,” and Rosenstock-Huessy folds writing into Sprache/speech—discloses us to ourselves as much as it communes with others—and these in turn are enmeshed in what he calls our prejects, what calls us and pulls us from the future, and trajects, which push us.

At the most critical moments we are literally torn apart between competing directions, in and at the cross and the cross roads. This is also why Rosenstock-Huessy also deviates so decisively from the general tenor of the modern mind which thinks that through its intentions and designs it will get the world it wills, as if the self and world are not inexhaustible mysteries which are revealed by the word and over time through our participation in life, but substances to be analysed into clear and distinct ideas and synthesised so that we can be masters of ourselves and the world. In sum, the modern philosophical position which has seeped so deeply into the world is one which exists in defiance of the Holy Spirit through its elevation of the self as subject, or, which is in essence no different, the elevation of our understanding of “the All” whose most important determinations have been identified by our great luminaries.

Rosenstock-Huessy is a counter-Enlightenment thinker, in the vein of Hamann, in so far as he prefers to throw himself on the ground and pray in the midst of that cross-road because he knows how fragile we and our minds are. He would rather trust the Holy Spirit than the technocratic spirits which have emerged out of the modern philosophical imagination and its limited but insufferably proud understanding. His writings are testimony to that Spirit. What I recounted earlier about the way I came to Rosenstock-Huessy, and what have suggested about the way everybody has come to him is exactly the kind of meaningful event in a life that Rosenstock-Huessy has taught me to appreciate the living presence of Holy Spirit. But thinking thus, and seeing the world thus necessarily puts him at odd with the entire academic mind-set of today which, at its worst, see the world and our participation in it through a technocratic/and or ideological template, and, at best, through the systemicity we may gather through positioning ourselves within the sciences, including the human sciences.

The Holy Spirit though is not a thing, and certainly not anything that can be adequately incorporated into a social or human science, at least so long as the sciences proceed according to the strictures that were designed to study nature in its mute “object” manner. But that approach to nature also involves us blinding ourselves to ourselves. On that front it is most interesting to compare Rosenstock-Huessy’s comparison, in Der Atem des Geistes, of the respective insights and ways and means of Michael Faraday with those of Eddington. Rosenstock-Huessy rightly indicates, no science of anything would be possible were it not for the breath of inspiration of a founder of a hitherto unknown pathway of the spirit, and the inspiration (the shared breath) that the founder is able to instil in others who follow down that path as they take us further into unexplored aspects of life. Nietzsche had claimed that the ascetic ideal in Christianity prioritised truth in such a way that it opened up a pathway for science, but Rosenstock-Huessy takes seriously what most philosophers simply ignore and that is the personal dimension and interaction of those involved in research, and the spirit that binds them in their inquiry. Thus he addresses not only what knowledge is for, but for whom it is for.

I will return to this toward the conclusion of this essay but here I wish to emphasize Rosenstock-Huessy’s recognition of the primacy of the elemental component of a living process is what is invariably left behind in abstraction. As I have hinted already what Rosenstock-Huessy teaches about Christianity, and what he finds in Christianity is what has mainly been lost, especially by theologians, about why it is important: what it reveals about life.

We live in an age where doctrine and abstraction proceed as Siamese twins, where it assumes that a doctrine such as is embodied in the Christian teaching came out of someone’s head, rather than out of lives lived, and it is what was picked up and then taught by the lives lived in devotion to a particular person, a person acknowledged and revered by those who witnessed him as a person who was both man and God, someone from whom their lives took on such a meaning that they saw themselves as being reborn through their faith in him. Rosenstock-Huessy had said that his faith was something he grew into because could never understand “why everybody did not believe the Nicean Creed.” Those are not the words of someone who thinks abstractly, but rather someone who has an uncanny perspicacity, the ability to see the relationship between the spirit and flesh of Christendom and the words that those believers at Nicaea formed with such precision and purposefulness. What Rosenstock-Huessy sees as exemplified in Christianity is the illustration of the word becoming flesh: life, teaching and actions belong together, as he writes in his masterful essay, “ICHTHYS”: they are a trinity, and as such they are the cure against what Rosenstock-Huessy identifies as “the three infernal princes—of the senses, of thought, and of compelling authority.”

But it is precisely because in forming a world where ideas matter so much we have not become better attenuated to life and its commands and demands but we have deafened and dumbed and blinded ourselves as we deal in words that lack life. We misuse and abuse names that once had power, and now they reflect back our own emptiness and powerlessness, our preference for the dead and the mechanical over the real that is love’s creation. We simply cannot fathom the experiences that gave rise to the names that created the Christian world—the experiences have become completely invisible to us because the words are but husks.

Rosenstock-Huessy’s most systematic work was his Sociology: In the Cross of Reality, which was divided into a critique of the hegemony that spatial thinking had come to play in the world, culminating in the suffocating tyranny of its imposition that had been ensconced philosophically, and an account of the times that have made us into planetary neighbours. While he often had praise for Nietzsche, he saw that the arc of modern philosophy from Descartes to Nietzsche was a fateful one for modern people. For we have become swept up in a technocratic view of life (going back to Descartes) in which the world and we ourselves are but components or resources to be dissolved into an infinitude of space, measured and reincorporated and reconfigured to conform to the plans and machinations that are supposed to emancipate us. Much of The Hegemony of Spaces is devoted to the importance of roles and the way in which they socially position us for our cooperation in making our way in the spaces we operate within. The philosophical prioritising of spaces in an age where philosophism has undermined and in many way supplanted the ways and the role of the Church also comes with the target of eliminating roles so that people better pursue their individual happiness. The rationale of roles within the family, the workplace, the school, which provides our named placement in the social order, which induct us, and steers us through the processes where we must learn the difference between shameful acts and the responsibilities which come with our role, is bound up with the fruits that we all must socially harvest if we are to have concordance and growth. Once again Rosenstock-Huessy sees the reductive and destructive force of the materialism/ idealism truncations and their naturalistic/ scientistic counterpart cutting away at how we are able to access and creatively participate in the spiritual development of the species. The grave threat facing “modern man,” requiring that he “outrun” it, is sterility, a sterility of spirit that also shows itself in its suicidal self-destruction, in its concentration camps, in its danger of turning the life-world into a gigantic factory.

If the motherless Descartes was the mother of this world, the fatherless Nietzsche aspired to be the true father who would give birth to the superman who would rule the earth. For Nietzsche the modern world is the barren offspring of the “marriage” of scientism (Descartes) and aestheticism (Nietzsche). Both swallow up the complexity of real life with their abstract fantasies. Nietzsche holds out the promise of meaning that has been shorn off our lives as but mechanical parts of the universe by Descartes. It is a deluded promise made by a man who saw much but missed much, most notably the sterility which becomes satiated by imagined children being a substitute for real children.

The second volume of Rosenstock-Huessy’s great masterpiece was devoted to one overarching theme, an account of the great times that have contributed to a universal history. The infinitization of space has as its corollary the infinitization of time, which is another way of saying the reduction of all the social creativity that has formed different times, different epochs, different generations, different ages of the spirit. Rosenstock-Huessy’s contribution to countering the spiritual and existential mass murder of reducing us and our lives, our traditions and achievements, our future hopes, and our faith and loves to spatial confinements and mechanisms is to draw us into what he calls the Full-Count of the Times.

The work as anyone knows who has read it brims with brilliance: it betrays the kind of erudition that is the preserve of the most learned of his especially learned generation; it teems with brilliant aperçus, and it makes the most marvellous connections across periods that convey an entire sense of meaning and spiritual purpose to great periods of time. Of course, it is a specialist’s nightmare. But, apart from the dire need it has of an editor who may have salvaged some of the syntactical leaps which drag entire paragraphs into thin air without leaving any trace of meaning behind, it is a work which consciously seeks to connect the lost and forgetful man of the mid-twentieth century with the multiform conditions of which he is the sociological, historical and spiritual heir.

Although he is, as I have repeated throughout a Christian, he explains in numerous works why being a Christian is not simply defining one-self against other religions and gods, but is to enter into a tradition which is founded upon the incorporation and reinvigoration of the living beyond death that precedes it. For Rosenstock-Huessy being a Christian means being open to God’s creation, voice and promise, and one cannot do that if one comes with a theologian’s or philosopher’s truncated and distorted understanding of God. A god is a living name on the lips of people—a people’s existence is bound up with the spirits they serve, the voices they respond to, what they hold sacred, the commands of their god. Rosenstock-Huessy often made the point that people first needed to understand the gods before they could begin to understand what they were talking about if God’s name arose.

And talking about God was already a sign that one was missing the point. The living God is meaningful only in relationship, in communion, in prayer and obeisance and supplication. But in so far as one is trying to explain the spiritually living to the spiritually dead, one has to imaginatively enter into life worlds remote from our own, life worlds we might never have thought about, but without which we simply would not be what we are. Few, apart from Herder, have laboured as much as Rosenstock-Huessy to explore the historical, sociological and broader cultural conditions which are part of the human story. It is the fact that, for all our differences, we are part of one family. This is why the Aborigine is the kin of the modern office worker, though on the surface they may as well live on different planets. How have we come to inhabit such different worlds, with our different traditions, our different ways of world-making, our different orientations and priorities, our different “gods” and values, hopes and expectations?

But no less important is the question, how is it that in spite of these differences we not only live on one planet, but we find ourselves conscious of the fact that there are so many different worlds, different calendars, different cultures etc. and that we also can speak to and of each other? These questions are burning ones still and Rosenstock-Huessy’s project (here he is very much following the pathway of Herder) is one which requires we drop the philosophical nonsense and norms of Western imposition and listen to each Other. Yet one more irony is that it is precisely those who do the philosophical imposition, who see the world through its norms, who are most hostile to the universal message of Christianity, and its response to the universal condition of human suffering.

Rosenstock-Huessy had an uncanny knack for tapping into that suffering and for entering into the different life worlds, as he looked to the powers and spirits that animated them, the circumstances which exhilarated and terrified them, and the creations and prayers that distinguish them. In antiquity he identified four distinct life-worlds: the tribe, the empire, the Jewish diaspora and the Greek city state. For Rosenstock-Huessy if we fail to understand the spirits of these groups and their legacies we can never appreciate Christianity. If we fail to see the power behind animism, and the powers that connected human beings with their ancestral animal teachers and tribal ancestors, if we fail to appreciate how polytheistic societies arose and what they generated, and what crises befell them, if we cannot appreciate what the Jews learnt from their enslavement and exile, why they awaited a messiah, how will we be able to appreciate the miracles that may spare us from the hellish darknesses that have always befallen civilizations, and peoples?

Rosenstock-Huessy lived through the world war(s) (he believed, rightly in my view, they were but the one event) and fought in one of its phases. But what he saw was that in spite of the horror and darkness, there was survival, and he very much saw that capacity for survival as coming out of the spiritual reserves provided by the Christian faith. The importance of Christianity lies in large part in the spiritual reserves that it has absorbed from peoples and practices who knew nothing of it. We are, for Rosenstock-Huessy, bonded by the realities that different faiths and orientations have discovered and generated and which are part of us and our world, in spite of what we might want to think or believe. Thus he writes in The Secret of the University (Ray Huessy provides this quote in his marvellous introduction to his new edition of The Fruit of Our Lips): “We must all create originally (like the pagans), hope in expectation (like the Jews), and love decisively (like Christians)— that is to say, we must take part in the beginning, end, and middle of life.”

What Rosenstock-Huessy expresses here as an existential truth, an observation about ends and beginnings and the middle of history, is preceded by the life of Jesus, whom he accepts and follows as the Son of God, the genuine middle, “the hinge-point” of history, the moment where the ages are cleft into BC and AD by a life that shakes up the worlds that preceded it and sets them on a new path. In The Fruit of Our Lips, Rosenstock-Huessy talks about the spiritual dead ends that had been reached that provide the opening, the need for Jesus to be the answer to the human prayers:

Jesus was in fact the end of our first world. He took the sins of this first world upon himself. This sentence simply recognizes the fact that in separation, tribal ritual, the temple of the sky-world, poetry in praise of nature, and the messianic psalms, were all dead ends, {in the immutability of their one-sided tendency}. In this sense Jesus’ death sentence was the price of his being the heir of these fatal dead-ends. They slew him because he held all their wealth and riches in his hand, heart, mind, and soul. He was too rich not to share in the catastrophe of the all-too-rich ancient world. {So it was his duty to be the one condemned by the king, the one sacrificed by the priest, the poem of the poet, and the one foretold by the prophet} (41),

It is interesting to note in passing how the more philosophical minded trying to fathom our historical condition can, as Agamben, Badiou, Taubes and Žižek have done, take Paul seriously, but not Jesus (Žižek, the most clownish of these characters at least provides a clownish account of Jesus as a monster who fits into his Marxian-Hegelian-Lacanian schematic overriding of history and spirit). That they take the teacher more importantly than the one whose life gives meaning and purpose to the teaching conforms to the type that Rosenstock-Huessy saw as so unfit to teach because their priorities do not conform to how life and the spirt of life works. What we teach is only actual when it is lived first.

The gospels are not a compilation of doctrines but the record of a life that bears fruits that must be taught and carried into actions. And the life that was lived was what it was in large part because of when it was lived. The who and the circumstance and the encounter are all part of the spirit of the truth and its power. The realization of the power of the life of Jesus required respondents who would take his life and take his teachings into the world so that new pathways of life, new lives could be formed. Jesus’s life was the seed to be spread while, says Rosenstock-Huessy, “The four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the lips of the risen Christ. These lips bore fruit because Jesus was also an answer to their prayers. The four Evangelists lay down their human limitations at the foot of the cross and transform their individual experience into a contribution to the community.” What the modern secular minded person can easily dismiss as merely the stories told by believers and fanatics, in Rosenstock-Huessy’s eyes reveals something astonishing—and the problem with the smug dismissal lies in the complete disjuncture between cause and effect. The irony is all too conspicuous in so far as the great principle of continuity in Greek thinking is the dogma of the equivalence in power between cause and effect. And yet we see the refusal to acknowledge this very principle by those who otherwise invoke it all the time.

For the Christian something great can indeed come from something tiny, the character of a thousand years can be born from the flame of faith in hearts awed by the words and deeds done by the right person in the right time. Faith and miracles go together, and they are intrinsic to Christianity, beginning with the miracle of the world’s creation, and the story of the fall that comes from a lack of faith/trust/ obedience in God’s promise.

How faith is formed owes much to who has the faith and what it is in. Jesus lived but it mattered who responded to him, and who responded to them. That he had the respondents who had their faith is also, from this point of view, this faith-held view, and that they reported their accounts of the life of Jesus and what he taught in the order they did is yet another miracle, or what Rosenstock-Huessy more prosaically refers to as “remarkable.”

“There is” observes Rosenstock-Huessy” a remarkable sequence in the authors of the four gospels”:

Jesus’ name in the old church had four parts: Jesus, Christ, Son of God, Savior. The four Greek initials of these four names were read as Ichthys (fish). The four gospels proclaim this name. Matthew the sinner knew that the Lord was his personal savior (= Soter); Mark knew him from the beginning as the Son of God (Hyious Theou); Luke saw Christ who had converted Saul, to whom Jesus had never spoken (for Paul, Jesus could be nothing else but exclusively Christ); John, the kindred spirit, knew him as an elder brother, that is, he thought of him as “Jesus,” personally.

In spite of Rosestock-Huessy drawing upon biblical scholars and traditions to make his case, one thing that I have not seen anyone else address with such startling insight is his claim about the way in which the gospels form a unity through their positioning on different fronts to different communities. And it is this approach that I see as providing an invaluable example of how our history should be told. It takes the most important, the most world-shaping, book in the world and demonstrates how it is a living example of the circulation of spirit, how truth is polyphonic, how it is nothing without the bond between speaker and listener, how the specific speaker and the specific person/community being addressed matter—and concomitantly how any idealistic reduction, i.e., dissolution of the living encounter and the teaching expressed in that account dies if it is diced up and regurgitated as mere ideas. Allow me to quote two passages from The Fruit of Our Lips, the one tells us something important about the speaker/ writer, the other about the listening community:

1. John writes as an eye-witness who knows the minutest details when he cares to mention them. The apostle is the author of the gospel, and that is why it carries authority.
2. All four gospels are apostolic. Matthew was the converted publican {among the apostles}, and he wrote under the eyes of {Peter and the sons of Zebedee and} Jesus’ brother in Jerusalem before the year 42. Mark obeyed Peter. Luke lived with Paul. John dictated to a Greek secretary.
3. Matthew wrote in Hebrew, not in Aramaic, and he was the first to write.
4. Mark states bluntly that he is quoting Matthew (47).

and:

John spoke to people who knew the arts and sciences; Luke spoke to the greatest high churchmen and Puritans of antiquity; Mark spoke to the civilized inhabitants of the temple states. But thanks to his “bad taste,” Matthew penetrated to the most archaic layer of all society, to the tribal layer of ritual, and so Matthew gave us a version of the gospel that was to become the most universal and fundamental characteristic of the new way of life. The Mass and the Eucharist, the inner core of all worship, is identified in Matthew [26:26–29]. Since he made clear that by His sacrifice Christ had purchased the salvation of the sacrificers, the scripture now says: At every meal, the sacrifice that is the bread and wine speaks to the dining community and invites us to join our Master on the other side, so to speak—on the side of the victim (92-93).

Finally on the importance of Christianity as “the hinge point of history”—and I should emphasise that it these few citations do not remotely compare to the detailed case Rosenstock-Huessy makes in the Full Count of the Times—what matters as much as what preceded Christianity by way of the creations, loves and practices that flow into it and that it redeems, is what it puts an end to by becoming a stumbling block:

I may not relapse into tribal ritual or Pharaoh’s sky-world; Hitler, who tried to do just that, stands revealed as a madman. The other streams are similarly blocked: the modern Greeks, the physicists, and the modern Jews, the Zionists, are certainly not the Greeks or Jews of antiquity. The Greeks glorified the beauty of the universe; our physicists empty it of meaning. The Jews praised God; the Zionists raised a university as the first public building in Jerusalem. So the roadblock of the Word is simply a fact; not one of the streams of the speech of ancient men surges through us directly any more (45).

Rosenstock-Huessy’s reading of history and the role of Christianity as a universalising, planetary forming force stands in complete contradiction to the modern liberal mind which believes it and it alone has found a way to reconcile all the traditions and faiths of the world, thereby illustrating that it is no less a universal dogma than the Christian faith—but it is a dogma that proceeds by deception, the deception of purporting to respect the very traditions it destroys by squeezing their essence into the pre-formations it finds tolerable. Lived faiths are born through and from bloody sacrifices—the blood and sacrifice are as intrinsic to the existence of the faith as to its truth.

Thus, the Jewish Bible and Old Testament and Koran are as bloody books as ever have been written. They are an affront to the vapid comfortableness of the liberal mind which does not want to acknowledge the blood and horror behind its own birth—believing it escapes its reality by virtue of the sanctimony of its moral accusations against its ancestors. In place of harrowing and astonishing testimonies of despair and salvation, of battles and renunciations, of dogmas that require an all or nothing commitment, liberalism distils a religious—moral essence which it drops into an abstract mush. It presents a morally vacuous and existential picture of life’s meaning devoid of real conflictual devotional differences, a safe-space free from micro-aggressions and hate. It presides over the waste land of spirits deprived as much of authority as of their memory.

The liberal spirit is pure tyranny in which all the gods are interchangeable because they have been defanged and folded into the air of ideas and ideals. They are as loveless as they are vacant. They promise the freedom that comes from the right of sensual and racial and ethnic identity in which real differences of the sort thrashed out by Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig in the midst of war in 1916 are only of importance to the extent they may indicate degrees of demanding, having, and blaming the oppressive privileged Other. This cast of mind is the antithesis of the dialogical spirit as exhibited in the amicably acrimonious exchange between Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, an exchange that changed both their minds and opened up new paths for both of them: they both discovered more about their commitments, and priorities, their faiths, what they each held as unnegotiable in so far as they could not lie to themselves about what had made them who they were: and then they joined beyond themselves and beyond their trajects.

One of the most shocking things that we face in the Western world, particularly Western Europe with Muslim immigration is not simply a demographic transformation which the host population has not been prepared for, but the entire process is transpiring without a modicum of understanding being demonstrated in the media or education system about why an encounter must change all parties to it, why that is an opportunity for grace, for new creations of the spirit. Instead, we are witness to a people whose sense of tradition is more than a millennium and a half old encountering a people who have almost entirely lost all sense of communal historical continuity, a people now so spiritually bereft they have little but their stuff and distractions, their escape pathways in booze and drugs and hyper-sexualized culture (that only makes them despicable to Muslim migrants) to show for themselves. Is it any wonder that the Muslim youth are so embittered and willing to embrace causes where they can take direction from a God that lives in their hearts and gives them meaning and purpose that is an alternative to the wasteland that they see all around them?

The liberal narration that predominated among the political and pedagogical classes can only bring to the discussion the same failed abstractions that are tearing itself apart. The Rosenstock-Huessy-Rosenzweig dialogue, as I once said in a lecture in a university in Istanbul, provides the “model” of what a dialogue between inimical faiths must involve. Without such dialogues there can be no friendship, and no birth. But an understanding of the importance of friendship and conflict being in what it gives birth to, again something of such importance to Rosenstock-Huessy, has no meaning in a world in which ideas have supplanted living connections.

Not surprisingly the liberal mind cannot bear to read the Christian Rosenstock-Huessy, preferring to dismiss him as an anti-Semite so that he need not be heard, while the Jewish Rosenzweig is simply reduced to an aesthete and ethicist, a forefather of the pure ethicist Emmanuel Levinas, whose Jewishness never gets in the way of his Greekness, which makes him academically sellable to Jews and Gentiles, who can only look back at past animosities as Christian prejudice and Jewish victimhood. The tyranny of spatial thinking is how it cuts away at the times that provide defining and differentiating characteristics of peoples, and their respective spirits and pathways.

The critical methodological innovation that Rosenstock-Huessy proposed for a new human science unencumbered by the tyranny of spatial thinking was attentiveness to the cleavages in time, or more precisely, attentiveness to the various partitions of time which divide and surround us. When I was growing up it was not uncommon to see nuns and priests in the street. Their clothing was a reminder of another age. And yet they also inhabited this age. We rarely consider how different professions are also the result of a time partition. The further we are willing to follow the way of the spirit and not remain captive to the spatialization of our being the more conscious we can become of why our differences are time-founded and time-bound.

Thus, for Rosenstock-Huessy, the great challenge we face as a species is dialogical and time-ridden. To be able to speak and listen to what has come out of the different times we as a species have inhabited, to be able to, in his phrase, make the times “conversable” is our great challenge. It is also an opportunity in so far as the times have been literally pressed up against each other as the European revolutions and the world wars have made us conscious of our planetary condition. We may be more conscious of our world being one, we can only respond to the challenge that has been posed to us if we bid farewell to the kind of essentialist thinking that has been part of the tyranny of the philosophical legacy.

This is also closely related to other of Rosenstock-Huessy’s aspirations: the desire to make grammar the basis of a new social science, something that is sketched out in Speech and Reality. In various places RosenstockHuessy rues the triumph of Alexandrian grammar. And I recall a former classics teacher of mine saying how crazy this was: Alexandrian grammar was simply a way of teaching a language. For Rosenstock-Huessy, though, why it mattered was because it attenuated the mind to prioritize the philosophical imagination’s way of taming reality rather than properly inducting us into the living priorities such as are provided by the vocative mood and the imperative mood. Social induction commences with the imperative, just as our most serious engagements are ones in which respond to a calling, to the vocative.

The movement from God being a person whom we address and who addresses us to a figure encapsulated in, and talked about through the imposition of the indicative mood is indicative of a massive cultural shift. In our post-Enlightenment age we see that has the result of simply knowing more. But we simply do not know what we are doing if we do not render visible what powers we are giving ourselves over to in our deeds. The moderns have mostly lost all sense of themselves by being blinded by abstractions which hide their deepest sense of what matters to them from themselves. They make conversableness impossible because speech is merely a tool, the modern soul, as he observed in the fourth section of Der Atem des Geistes devoted to the need to resuscitate liturgical thinking, merely a fragmented bundle of nerves (ascribed some mythic identity—in Rosenstock-Huessy’s time race and class predominated), our expectations and motivations bound up with philosophical ideals, while formerly venerable and meaningful names such as person, nature, time, modesty, experiment, and the individual are dissolved in the intellectual acidity of the Renaissance and the further spiritual bifurcation that occurs with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

Against this Rosenstock-Huessy proposed a return to “liturgical thinking,” a kind of thinking that moves us back into the primordial condition of being called, something we know happens in life from our infancy on as we are integrated into the bodies of sociality which provide us with place and purpose. But it is also in the sacred relationship between priest and God, and in the sacrifice of the mass that Rosenstock-Huessy sees the revealed truth that “The soul must be called “Thou: before she can ever reply “I,” before she can ever speak of “us” and, analyze “it” finally.” The deployment of lessons taken from liturgy, as well as prioritising how our capacity to partition and recognize the partitions of time and the different fronts of reality that grammar accentuates and drives us further into all are to be incorporated into what Rosenstock-Huessy proposes as a new science, that is a break with the ways of knowing which have failed—and which can be seen to have failed if we can see through the noise and moral self-righteousness, and observe the conflicts both regionally and globally that now beset the West.

The spiritual bifurcation mentioned above has continued on its way with its appeal to rights on the one hand—the abstract spirit of idealism, whose best metaphysical cases are to be found in the contestation between the a priorism of “practical reason” [Kant] and logic [Hegel])—and materialism which plays out in the twin perversions of scientism and economism. Scientism is science deprived of an understanding of its “why?” and “for whom?” Which is also to say that it is science unhinged from a culture in which the bonds of real solidarity have been fragmented into the same nervous bundles and isolated atoms monstrously compounded by economic gain irrespective of the spiritual worth of a project (funding and tenured employment), ambition, pride, honour and the other diabolical temptations of the spirit—it splits, dehumanises and terrifies, and annihilates (from the alienated lonely soul to the concentration camp); its rewards are as ephemeral as they are grace-less.

For Rosenstock-Huessy, this is the Greek legacy, shorn of the constraints that accompanied its initial resuscitation and direction under the auspices of the trinity. The metaphysical drive to know and control the world, without a break, is the great juggernaut of technē and calculation. Like the Greeks we moderns in entering into this pact with these diabolical powers that can be unlocked by the “metaphysicilization” of the material world into its scientifically reductive and economically productive components are driven onto find slaves to do our bidding and pleasures to slake our empty time. There are deep affinities between Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and Rosenstock-Huessy’s, but they drastically depart on the issue of what saves us from it. The pairing of Descartes (science) and Nietzsche (aesthetics) mentioned above is the sterile pairing of a world losing its faith, hope and love in what is worth having faith in, hoping for, and loving. It is the blocking out of grace that comes from being indifferent to the living person and delivering the self to its own emptiness and abstractness.

It is against this horror we are blindly running into as we can no longer distinguish between the living and the dead, between human loving lives animated by a common spirit and promise of future in spite of tensional differences and zombies whose utility is to be calculated on a vast spread sheet and whose moral worth is the purely sterile one of self-worth that Rosenstock-Huessy raises the spectre of Saint Paul and his meaning for science in Der Atem des Geistes. There he pits the legacy of Paul’s devotional development of his understanding in its wholeness, with the Platonic desiccation of life into ideals and world, and the subsequent cultural and social truncations and deformations that come from tearing the world into mental strips and bits to be inserted into an idealistic/ technocratic design. One may recall the picture Plato presents of the philosophers having to switch babies around when the eugenics program designed to improve the natural likelihood of philosopher kings being born goes awry. The horror of it is so much that there are Platonic scholars who see it all as a warning against utopia—completely downplaying why Plato admired the Spartans so much and how he was trying to improve upon what he saw as the best of Sparta and Athens by eliminating the family and private property for philosophers.

In a section that strikes me as amongst the most profound of Rosenstock-Huessy’s insights into the gift of the Christian way of creation, revealing and redeeming life, we see how it matters whom Paul serves and what follows from that faith and devotion.

Paul is the non-idealized teacher of the Gentiles, believing the “incarnated Word” instead of his ideals. Pagans have ideals, academics have values, but men have ancestors of their soul journey. Thus Paul simply says: Scio cui credidi. I know who I have faith in…. Paul is the first normal, modern scientist. He knows whom he is serving, whom he has believed. If we do not recognize the mysticism of the apostle Paul as the sound sociological truth of research, then the freedom of science is lost. Because only on the Pauline basis of “Cui cogitatur?” where the one knowing thus serves the loving ones, can vice be banished from the schools… the Christian peoples believed Paul was right. Paul has been at work in every school and college for the last nineteen hundred years… Thanks to Paul we knew what still concerned us in Plato and what didn’t. Thanks to Paul we knew what still bound us in the Old Testament and what had passed. Today’s scholarship, however, deals with Paul instead of being based on him. It is to him we owe the freedom of science.

And a page or so later, he continues:

Paul is the normal thinker, and the liberal theologians are the originators of all tyranny. For in tyranny, whether that of Hegel or Marx or Hitler, the deadly thirst for knowledge reigns supreme over life-hungry individuals.

However, in the normal order, love reigns over death and knowledge. Both desires are unleashed today – those which consume the antediluvian individual, the thirst for knowledge and the thirst for life, the will to power of the knowledge-hungry, the thirst for life of herd animals. The Lord had overcome the thirst for life; Paul had overcome the thirst for knowledge. The two desires condition and produce each other. Hackel and Hitler belong together like Jesus and Paul. Hitler’s mysticism and Häckel’s rationalism together have perverted the relationship between thinking and speaking: animals have become our models since we have forgotten that we only understand animals thanks to the language of our own love. But whoever recognizes Jesus and Paul as two generations of one and the same man formed together out of both of their loving—and that’s what they have required of us—sees that they came into the world against mysticism and reason, against Haeckel and Hitler.

Apart from the point that I have emphasised above, what is also worth noting in this passage is the way Rosenstock-Huessy makes his point by way of invoking the names of Haeckel and Hitler. While in the early part of the nineteenth century, the zoologist, biologist and eugenicist Ernst Haeckel was a household name in Germany, especially through popular science books like The Riddle of the Universe, he is now largely forgotten; Hitler’s name though has become synonymous with political evil.

Rosenstock-Huessy constantly emphasizes the living name over the primacy of the concept. And it is noteworthy how in Plato’s attempt to provide an answer for everything important from the structure of the cosmos to the way in which to live one’s life, he insisted on the primacy of the idea over the name (see his Cratylus), only to disprove everything he was saying by making the man with the name Socrates the model of the best man who had ever lived. Plato had ridiculed Protagoras’ claim that “man is the measure of all things,” only to make the powers exhibited by one man to be the measure of all that mattered. Our names do indeed matter, and the fact that the name of Haeckel will send someone of a certain age back to google while everyone knows who Hitler is indicative of how a name and its mattering is also bound up with time—how it may become a cipher of significance over a certain period of time.

In conclusion and on a personal aside I will also say, that every time I reread Rosenstock-Huessy I discover something not only inspirational, but something I have never previously seen. Much of my life over fifty years as a university student, academic, and writer was spent reading philosophers. None have had the same effect on me. I do make exceptions of Hamann and Herder, when I say no matter how brilliant all the other great minds I have read, Rosenstock-Huessy, has remained an open-ended source of inspiration. The spirit always awakens something in me when I read him. I picture him beckoning me to show me something else I have never considered. I have written much on Rosenstock-Huessy. I do not consider myself to be an expert on him. I know as little about what it would mean to be an expert on Rosenstock-Huessy as to be an expert about a day I was inspired by the wind and a walk in the forest or a thrilling conversation. He is too vital for that. I have written this because he not only changed my life, his presence has remained constant throughout it.

I hope that through our common love of this man we might keep his spirit alive for a future generation, who living beyond the hells that are now upon us, will hear the wisdom of his way, and participate in delivering future generation from the mental entrapments we have adopted over multiple generations and the particular horrors those entrapments have unleased.

For us, we have prayer. And I thank Rosenstock-Huessy for showing how necessary prayer is when we are at the end of our tether.

Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen books. He also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.

“Mr. Baab, You Won’t Get any Beer Here!”

Journalist Patrik Baab was fired from Christian Albrechts University (CAU) in Kiel for pursuing freedom of the press. Because of his investigations in the Donbas—the Russian controlled part of Ukraine—he was denounced as Putin’s poll watcher in a press campaign and kicked out as a lecturer of practical journalism at Kiel university. This example of cancel culture and censorship has caused a worldwide sensation. Patrik Baab took legal action against this. Meanwhile, heHe won the court case against the termination. The judges ruled that the university may not prohibit a journalist from doing his job. In the meantime, the judgment has been legally binding. What happens now?

Roberto De Lapuente is in conversation with Patrik Baab.

Roberto De Lapuente (RDL): Mr. Baab, Kiel University has not objected to the ruling of April 25, which was in your favor. This means that the ruling is legally binding, and you have been proven right. So, we’ll see you back in Kiel soon?

Patrik Baab (PB): Well, that’s not up to me. The CAU awards teaching assignments from semester to semester. In my case, it was a subject supplement on “Practical Journalism.” The students learned tools to research topics methodically and correctly and to implement them for television. In 20 years, there has not been a single complaint. As my website shows, I have a little experience in this field. Now we have to see if CAU will swallow its pride and offer me a teaching position again. As far as I am concerned, I will continue to be available. After all, it’s not about vanity, but about education—especially in times of war, when the truth is clouded by all parties involved, and when methods of research and ideology criticism should be taught.

“Sad state of the German higher education system”

RDL: The ruling also strengthened the freedom of the press, you could say. Do you personally have the impression that such is the case? Or will universities funded by the public continue to try whatever they can to get rid of troublesome colleagues?

PB: In fact, in my view, the Schleswig-Holstein Administrative Court has strengthened freedom of the press. But more than that—in a difficult climate, in which state propaganda narratives permeate the entire public and politics is done by way of resentment, the chamber, chaired by Dr. Malte Sievers, has demonstrated judicial independence. This is a good sign for the separation of powers in German democracy. This signal is particularly significant at a time when other courts sometimes give the impression that the lies of the warmongers enjoy legal protection. With this ruling, the Chamber has also strengthened the Freedom Democratic Basic Order (Freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung, FdGO, which means the core elements of the democratic order in Germany)) as a whole. This is because, according to supreme court rulings, the legality of administration is also an integral part of the FdGO. This means that administrative action must be carried out in accordance with the rule of law, and that no one can be arbitrarily thrown out the door without due process. In its 1956 ruling on the KPD (German Communist Party), the Federal Constitutional Court distinguished the FDBO from any form of National Socialist or Stalinist arbitrary rule, particularly in its remarks on the lawfulness of administration. Against this background, too, the Schleswig-Holstein Administrative Court made legal history with its ruling.

RDL: And what impact do you think that has?

PB: Other journalists and university lecturers who do not always want to follow the prevailing opinion can refer to this ruling. According to a study by professors Dr. Heike Egner and Dr. Anke Uhlenwinkel, 47 full professors alone were dismissed at German, Austrian and Swiss universities from 2020 to April 2023 without reasons codified in criminal or service law, i.e., by circumventing constitutional procedures. Prof. Dr. Ulrike Guérot was not even warned by the University of Bonn. In not a single case was the presumption of innocence applied. The study only refers to full professors; lecturers and research assistants were not counted. We can therefore assume an even much larger number of unreported cases. This demonstrates the sad state of the German university system. Now the Administrative Court of Schleswig-Holstein has made it clear: universities must not act as truth-tellers or opinion monitors.

“Mr. Baab, leave the premises immediately!”

RDL: Are we looking at a re-feudalization of higher education?

PB: The universities have returned to the year 1837, the time of the so-called “Göttingen Seven.” At that time, seven professors were dismissed at the University of Göttingen because they demonstrated against the abolition of the liberal constitution introduced in the Kingdom of Hanover in 1833. Today, the universities have partially reverted to the educational ideal before the Enlightenment. “The critical method suspends judgment in the hope of arriving at it,” the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote. Today, universities have returned to judgment—to the affirmation of existing power relations. This is a serious regression, back into the mindset of the Counter-Enlightenment.

RDL: In the mainstream media, we have read about your trip to eastern Ukraine. The fact that you won the trial, that it is now even legally binding—not a peep. What will the public remember about Patrik Baab as a person?

PB: The German public is divided. The following incidents show this: On Good Friday 2023, I wanted to visit the restaurant Palenke in Kiel with a friend and his daughter. I was greeted by the words of a server, a young man who also studies at the University of Kiel: “Mr. Baab, you are a conspiracy theorist. You won’t get any beer here. Leave the pub immediately!” On the street, we recalled: “That must have been how it was in 1933.” This young man is also active at the campus radio of the CAU, where he spreads identitarian thinking and ideas of contact guilt. He thus contributes to a new anti-democratic dictatorship of the “kindly ones,” as Jonathan Littell characterized it in his novel of the same name. This is indeed the state of the bourgeois public sphere today—it is no longer democratic, no longer inclusive, but degenerating into a public sphere of censorship and denunciation. The majority of the press has not only completely compromised itself by parroting state war propaganda, but has also demonstrated its semi-literacy. This will come back to haunt these organizations: Many users are already turning away in horror.

“Those who need money, do not play the hero”

RDL: Maybe just a stupid pub experience?

PB: No, the incident also demonstrates that anti-democratic thinking does not originate in circles of the intellectually disadvantaged. It is cultivated in academic circles. This was already the case in the Weimar Republic. Antidemocratic, authoritarian and racist thinking was propagated in the circles around Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Hans Zehrer, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Ernst Jünger, Arnold Bronnen and others. The studies of Kurt Sontheimer and Karl Dietrich Bracher have shown this impressively. In journalism, anti-democratic and racist ideas were brought among the people, not only by the National Socialist newspapers, Völkischer Beobachter or Der Stürmer, but also by the editors of the right-wing conservative press empire of Alfred Hugenberg. The destruction of democracy is preceded by the destruction of the democratic public. The intellectuals—or what is left of them, the academics—are the driving forces. Mostly, these people themselves do not realize how deeply they are entangled in the propaganda system: “It is hard to convince a man of anything when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” Upton Sinclair wrote in 1934.

RDL: How can this development be explained, Mr. Baab?

PB: Through the liberalization of universities, the reduction of mid-level faculty, the temporary contracts, the cutbacks in funding and the compulsion to acquire third-party funding from government agencies or companies. All of this, together with the monetarization of science, simultaneously ensures covert censorship—those who need money do not play the hero. One bows to power. Characteristic of these academics is blind submission to state authorities, a self-synchronization in which, according to Karl Dietrich Bracher, Byzantinism, manipulation and coercion are inextricably intertwined.

RDL: What else sticks with you after this dismal experience with your university?

PB: On the plus side, my research earned me a lot of respect from the defenders of the Republic. At a protest event in Kiel, organized by the CAU students’ working group for the protection of fundamental rights, more than 100 people were in the hall, and there was a standing ovation. My name is now known throughout the English-speaking world, from Australia and Canada to the legendary reporter John Pilger in the USA. My reportage about the war and the pre-war in Ukraine, On Both Sides of the Front, will be published in early autumn. The calendar for September and October is already full with readings and discussions. I have requests for translations into English and Swedish. This means that a counter-public is forming against the warmongers and the destroyers of reason. From Ukraine, from Russia, from the USA, from Canada and Australia, from Switzerland and Austria, critical spirits are coming forward who do not want to watch how an incompetent and mendacious generation of politicians is leading this world into an inferno. They ask the question posed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: “Why do people fight for their servitude as if it were about their salvation?”

“Media does not describe reality; but the relationship of journalists to reality”

RDL: That sounds hopeful. However, you are now talking about the journalist Patrik Baab—but what about the human being Patrik Baab?

PB: What remains of me: a pile of dust. Many old colleagues say: He took a wrong turn at some point. They don’t realize that anticipatory obedience has long since become part of their personality, like a brain implant. Yet they are the ones who have long since arrived in the post-factual age. They gawk at the computer and don’t realize—media is a filter that looks like a window. They live in the illusory world of propaganda. Media does not describe reality; but the relationship of journalists to reality. This is Kant: “The objects must be according to our cognition”—so nothing new. But this does not mean renouncing the reality test on the spot. Kant also says: Perception must be “afflicted” by the observation of the world.

RDL: How would you like to be remembered after this episode?

PB: I wish I were posthumously counted among the resistant, among those who said, No, in front of the power elites. Because there are enough conformists. But we can’t know that. Jean-Paul Sartre once said: The author writes a score. But the reader performs it. In any case, I have staked my life on research in three wars (the Balkans, Afghanistan and Ukraine). That’s what distinguishes me from the “desk-jockey” editors. In the end, however, I will perish—like a face in the sand on the seashore.

This interview comes through the kind courtesy of Overton Magazin.

Kiel University Sacrificed Freedom of the Press

Patrik Baab has won outright. The ruling of the Schleswig-Holstein Administrative Court in his favor is now legally binding.

So now it’s official: Patrik Baab did nothing, with his trip to eastern Ukraine, that would justify ending his teaching position at Kiel University. The ruling of the Schleswig-Holstein Administrative Court of April 25 of this year is now legally binding. This is because Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (CAU) has allowed the deadline for appealing to the Higher Administrative Court to expire.

After a lot of chest-beating, in the end, CAU did not dare come out of hiding. Its decision to kick journalist Baab out may have been a kowtow to the political situation and especially to the foreign policy course of the German government—but this decision was never legally tenable.

Freedom of the Press Before Political Pandering

The reasoning of the Schleswig-Holstein Administrative Court explicitly emphasized “the freedom of science according to Article 5 (3) sentence 1, GG (Grundgesetz—German Basic Law) and the freedom of the press according to Article 5 (1) sentence 2, var. 1 GG, which the plaintiff [i.e., Baab] is entitled to invoke. The scope of protection of the freedom of the press guarantees,” the court explained in detail, “in its subjective-legal dimension, the rights of freedom against the state for persons and organizations active in the field of the press; in addition, in its objective-legal meaning, it guarantees the institution of the independence of the press.”

Freedom of the press, it goes on to say, “includes, with respect to printed matter, all conduct that serves to obtain, prepare and disseminate opinions and facts for the public… Holders of freedom of the press are also entitled to a subjective right of defense against indirect infringements.” The court expressly emphasized that Baab’s trip to eastern Ukraine at the time of the referenda also falls under this protection, as he was researching for a book and acting as a journalist.

This argumentation is nothing less than a strengthening of the freedom of the press in Germany. It has an impact on other journalists and publicists in the country who see themselves exposed to the reach of politics and academia. The ruling also says that freedom of the press is more important than the anticipatory obedience of various educational institutions that think they have to throw themselves at the mercy of ideologizing politics. Therefore, we are also dealing here with a rejection of ingratiation.

Kiel University as a War Party

Patrik Baab was a journalism lecturer in Kiel. There he taught research, critical questioning—in short: He showed what freedom of the press can achieve—and this at a university that has now received more or less official confirmation that it has not only failed to appreciate that very freedom of the press, but has torpedoed it. A fatal report card for the teaching institution. Can we hope that journalists trained there will have grasped, in the course of their studies, what the qualities of freedom of the press actually mean?

The administrative file on this incident, which is now available, is peppered with one-dimensional classifications of the Baab trip. The university protagonists quoted in it made themselves a war party in the matter. In effect, there is no mention of investigative openness as a value in itself—nor is there a brief interjection that journalists (should) go where it hurts.

But that’s exactly what Baab has done. Basically, he has shown his students—in exemplary fashion—what journalistic work means: not being satisfied with what other professional colleagues have already written, remaining suspicious, displaying skepticism and getting a picture of the scene for yourself. His employers, Kiel University, however, have now emphatically demonstrated that these values are not necessarily required at all—journalists who apply them tend to appear to be a nuisance, and they’d rather be shown the door.

Now What?

The aforementioned administrative file mentions several names of professors who were in lively exchange when Baab’s trip became known via t-online—a news portal, known for its campaigns against intellectuals critical of the German government, and belonging to an advertising group that receives a large part of its orders from exactly this government. Again and again, the accusation was made that Baab had the wrong attitude—and therefore he must be unsuitable as a lecturer. The fact that he did not get on with the job, i.e., with a completely strict condemnation of Russia, thus led to the charge that he also refrained from factual analysis. This is a reproach throughout. Yet Baab has condemned the Russian invasion several times—his condemnation, however, also does not paralyze his journalistic ethos.

After the court decision, which the CAU did not even object to, apparently knowing that it had overreached considerably, the question now arises: Who will take responsibility for this democratic and constitutional failure? Who will justify the fact that funds allocated by the public were wasted for such an act of political pandering?

For example, Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at Kiel University, Christian Martin, who was heavily involved in Baab’s dismissal and who teaches comparative governance and politics? Shouldn’t one expect more sensitivity to publicity from a teacher in this subject, i.e., a sense of how journalism is done and where not to get in its way? After all, this case is no trifle; here, a university has proven that it is willing to sacrifice freedom of the press just to puff itself up as being politically correct. The danger of teaching attitude rather than expertise does not seem so small—especially when people like Baab are thrown out the door.

Roberto J. De Lapuente is a journalist who writes from Germany. He is the author of Rechts gewinnt, weil Links versagt [The Right Wins because the Left Fails]. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Overton Magazin.

Featured: The Seal of Kiel University, with the motto: “Pax optima rerum” (“Peace is the best thing”).

Richard Wagner: A Life

I.

It is curious to note how often art-controversy has become edged with a bitterness rivaling even the gall and venom of religious dispute. Scholars have not yet forgotten the fiery war of words which raged between Richard Bentley and his opponents concerning the authenticity of the “Epistles of Phalaris,” nor how literary Germany was divided into two hostile camps by Wolf’s attack on the personality of Homer. It is no less fresh in the minds of critics how that modern Jupiter, Lessing, waged a long and bitter battle with the Titans of the French classical drama, and finally crushed them with the thunderbolt of the “Dramaturgie;” nor what acrimony sharpened the discussion between the rival theorists in music, Gluck and Piccini, at Paris. All of the intensity of these art-campaigns, and many of the conditions of the last, enter into the contest between Richard Wagner and the Italianissimi of the present day.

The exact points at issue were for a long time so befogged by the smoke of the battle that many of the large class who are musically interested, but never had an opportunity to study the question, will find an advantage in a clear and comprehensive sketch of the facts and principles involved. Until recently, there were still many people who thought of Wagner as a youthful and eccentric enthusiast, all afire with misdirected genius, a mere carpet-knight on the sublime battle-field of art, a beginner just sowing his wild-oats in works like “Lohengrin,” “Tristan and Iseult,” or the “Rheingold.” It is a revelation full of suggestive value for these to realize that he is a musical thinker, ripe with sixty years of labor and experience; that he represents the rarest and choicest fruits of modern culture, not only as musician, but as poet and philosopher; that he is one of the few examples in the history of the art where massive scholarship and the power of subtile analysis have been united, in a preeminent degree, with great creative genius. Preliminary to a study of what Wagner and his disciples entitle the “Artwork of the Future,” let us take a swift survey of music as a medium of expression for the beautiful, and some of the forms which it has assumed.

This Ariel of the fine arts sends its messages to the human soul by virtue of a fourfold capacity: Firstly, the imitation of the voices of Nature, such as the winds, the waves, and the cries of animals; secondly, its potential delight as melody, modulation, rhythm, harmony—in other words, its simple worth as a “thing of beauty,” without regard to cause or consequence; thirdly, its force of boundless suggestion; fourthly, that affinity for union with the more definite and exact forms of the imagination (poetry), by which the intellectual context of the latter is raised to a far higher power of grace, beauty, passion, sweetness, without losing individuality of outline—like, indeed, the hazy aureole which painters set on the brow of the man Jesus, to fix the seal of the ultimate Divinity. Though several or all of these may be united in the same composition, each musical work may be characterized in the main as descriptive, sensuous, suggestive, or dramatic, according as either element contributes most largely to its purpose. Simple melody or harmony appeals mostly to the sensuous love of sweet sounds. The symphony does this in an enlarged and complicated sense, but is still more marked by the marvelous suggestive energy with which it unlocks all the secret raptures of fancy, floods the border-lands of thought with a glory not to be found on sea or land, and paints ravishing pictures, that come and go like dreams, with colors drawn from the “twelve-tinted tone-spectrum.”

Shelley describes this peculiar influence of music in his “Prometheus Unbound,” with exquisite beauty and truth:

 "My soul is an enchanted boat,
 Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
 Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
 And thine doth like an angel sit
 Beside the helm conducting it,
 While all the waves with melody are ringing.
 It seems to float ever, forever,
 Upon that many-winding river,
 Between mountains, woods, abysses,
 A paradise of wildernesses."

As the symphony best expresses the suggestive potency in music, the operatic form incarnates its capacity of definite thought, and the expression of that thought. The term “lyric,” as applied to the genuine operatic conception, is a misnomer. Under the accepted operatic form, however, it has relative truth, as the main musical purpose of opera seems, hitherto, to have been less to furnish expression for exalted emotions and thoughts, or exquisite sentiments, than to grant the vocal virtuoso opportunity to display phenomenal qualities of voice and execution. But all opera, however it may stray from the fundamental idea, suggests this dramatic element in music, just as mere lyricism in the poetic art is the blossom from which is unfolded the full-blown perfection of the word-drama, the highest form of all poetry.

II.

That music, by and of itself, cannot express the intellectual element in the beautiful dream-images of art with precision, is a palpable truth. Yet, by its imperial dominion over the sphere of emotion and sentiment, the connection of the latter with complicated mental phenomena is made to bring into the domain of tone vague and shifting fancies and pictures. How much further music can be made to assimilate to the other arts in directness of mental suggestion, by wedding to it the noblest forms of poetry, and making each the complement of the other, is the knotty problem which underlies the great art-controversy about which this article concerns itself. On the one side we have the claim that music is the all-sufficient law unto itself; that its appeal to sympathy is through the intrinsic sweetness of harmony and tune, and the intellect must be satisfied with what it may accidentally glean in this harvest-field; that, in the rapture experienced in the sensuous apperception of its beauty, lies the highest phase of art-sensibility. Therefore, concludes the syllogism, it matters nothing as to the character of the libretto or poem to whose words the music is arranged, so long as the dramatic framework suffices as a support for the flowery festoons of song, which drape its ugliness and beguile attention by the fascinations of bloom and grace. On the other hand, the apostles of the new musical philosophy insist that art is something more than a vehicle for the mere sense of the beautiful, an exquisite provocation wherewith to startle the sense of a selfish, epicurean pleasure; that its highest function—to follow the idea of the Greek Plato, and the greatest of his modern disciples, Schopenhauer—is to serve as the incarnation of the true and the good; and, even as Goethe makes the Earth-Spirit sing in “Faust”—

 "'Tis thus over at the loom of Time I ply,
 And weave for God the garment thou seest him by"—

so the highest art is that which best embodies the immortal thought of the universe as reflected in the mirror of man’s consciousness; that music, as speaking the most spiritual language of any of the art-family, is burdened with the most pressing responsibility as the interpreter between the finite and the infinite; that all its forms must be measured by the earnestness and success with which they teach and suggest what is best in aspiration and truest in thought; that music, when wedded to the highest form of poetry (the drama), produces the consummate art-result, and sacrifices to some extent its power of suggestion, only to acquire a greater glory and influence, that of investing definite intellectual images with spiritual raiment, through which they shine on the supreme altitudes of ideal thought; that to make this marriage perfect as an art-form and fruitful in result, the two partners must come as equals, neither one the drudge of the other; that in this organic fusion music and poetry contribute, each its best, to emancipate art from its thralldom to that which is merely trivial, commonplace, and accidental, and make it a revelation of all that is most exalted in thought, sentiment, and purpose. Such is the aesthetic theory of Richard Wagner’s art-work.

III.

It is suggestive to note that the earliest recognized function of music, before it had learned to enslave itself to mere sensuous enjoyment, was similar in spirit to that which its latest reformer demands for it in the art of the future. The glory of its birth then shone on its brow. It was the handmaid and minister of the religious instinct. The imagination became afire with the mystery of life and Nature, and burst into the flames and frenzies of rhythm. Poetry was born, but instantly sought the wings of music for a higher flight than the mere word would permit. Even the great epics of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” were originally sung or chanted by the Ilomerido, and the same essential union seems to have been in some measure demanded afterward in the Greek drama, which, at its best, was always inspired with the religious sentiment. There is every reason to believe that the chorus of the drama ofÆschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides uttered their comments on the action of the play with such a prolongation and variety of pitch in the rhythmic intervals as to constitute a sustained and melodic recitative. Music at this time was an essential part of the drama. When the creative genius of Greece had set toward its ebb, they were divorced, and music was only set to lyric forms. Such remained the status of the art till, in the Italian Renaissance, modern opera was born in the reunion of music and the drama. Like the other arts, it assumed at the outset to be a mere revival of antique traditions. The great poets of Italy had then passed way, and it was left for music to fill the void.

The muse, Polyhymnia, soon emerged from the stage of childish stammering. Guittone di Arezzo taught her to fix her thoughts in indelible signs, and two centuries of training culminated in the inspired composers, Orlando di Lasso and Pales-trina. Of the gradual degradation of the operatic art as its forms became more elaborate and fixed; of the arbitrary transfer of absolute musical forms like the aria, duet, finale, etc., into the action of the opera without regard to poetic propriety; of the growing tendency to treat the human voice like any other instrument, merely to show its resources as an organ; of the final utter bondage of the poet to the musician, till opera became little more than a congeries of musico-gymnastic forms, wherein the vocal soloists could display their art, it needs not to speak at length, for some of these vices have not yet disappeared. In the language of Dante’s guide through the Inferno, at one stage of their wanderings, when the sights were peculiarly mournful and desolate—

 "Non raggioniam da lor, ma guarda e passa."

The loss of all poetic verity and earnestness in opera furnished the great composer Gluck with the motive of the bitter and protracted contest which he waged with varying success throughout Europe, though principally in Paris. Gluck boldly affirmed, and carried out the principle in his compositions, that the task of dramatic music was to accompany the different phases of emotion in the text, and give them their highest effect of spiritual intensity. The singer must be the mouthpiece of the poet, and must take extreme care in giving the full poetical burden of the song. Thus, the declamatory music became of great importance, and Gluck’s recitative reached an unequaled degree of perfection.

The critics of Gluck’s time hurled at him the same charges which are familiar to us now as coming from the mouths and pens of the enemies of Wagner’s music. Yet Gluck, however conscious of the ideal unity between music and poetry, never thought of bringing this about by a sacrifice of any of the forms of his own peculiar art. His influence, however, was very great, and the traditions of the great maestro’s art have been kept alive in the works of his no less great disciples, Méhul, Cherubini, Spontini, and Meyerbeer.

Two other attempts to ingraft new and vital power on the rigid and trivial sentimentality of the Italian forms of opera were those of Rossini and Weber. The former was gifted with the greatest affluence of pure melodiousness ever given to a composer. But even his sparkling originality and freshness did little more than reproduce the old forms under a more attractive guise. Weber, on the other hand, stood in the van of a movement which had its fountain-head in the strong romantic and national feeling, pervading the whole of society and literature. There was a general revival of mediaeval and popular poetry, with its balmy odor of the woods, and fields, and streams. Weber’s melody was the direct offspring of the tunefulness of the German Volkslied, and so it expressed, with wonderful freshness and beauty, all the range of passion and sentiment within the limits of this pure and simple language. But the boundaries were far too narrow to build upon them the ultimate union of music and poetry, which should express the perfect harmony of the two arts. While it is true that all of the great German composers protested, by their works, against the spirit and character of the Italian school of music, Wagner claims that the first abrupt and strongly-defined departure toward a radical reform in art is found in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with chorus. Speaking of this remarkable leap from instrumental to vocal music in a professedly symphonic composition, Wagner, in his “Essay on Beethoven,” says: “We declare that the work of art, which was formed and quickened entirely by that deed, must present the most perfect artistic form, i.e., that form in which, as for the drama, so also and especially for music, every conventionality would be abolished.” Beethoven is asserted to have founded the new musical school, when he admitted, by his recourse to the vocal cantata in the greatest of his symphonic works, that he no longer recognized absolute music as sufficient unto itself.

In Bach and Handel, the great masters of fugue and counterpoint; in Rossini, Mozart, and Weber, the consummate creators of melody—then, according to this view, we only recognize thinkers in the realm of pure music. In Beethoven, the greatest of them all, was laid the basis of the new epoch of tone-poetry. In the immortal songs of Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Franz, and the symphonies of the first four, the vitality of the reformatory idea is richly illustrated. In the music-drama of Wagner, it is claimed by his disciples, is found the full flower and development of the art-work.

William Richard Wagner, the formal projector of the great changes whose details are yet to be sketched, was born at Leipsic in 1813. As a child he displayed no very marked artistic tastes, though his ear and memory for music were quite remarkable. When admitted to the Kreuzschule of Dresden, the young student, however, distinguished himself by his very great talent for literary composition and the classical languages. To this early culture, perhaps, we are indebted for the great poetic power which has enabled him to compose the remarkable libretti which have furnished the basis of his music. His first creative attempt was a blood-thirsty drama, where forty-two characters are killed, and the few survivors are haunted by the ghosts. Young Wagner soon devoted himself to the study of music, and, in 1833, became a pupil of Theodor Weinlig, a distinguished teacher of harmony and counterpoint. His four years of study at this time were also years of activity in creative experiment, as he composed four operas.

His first opera of note was “Rienzi,” with which he went to Paris in 1837. In spite of Meyerbeer’s efforts in its favor, this work was rejected, and laid aside for some years. Wagner supported himself by musical criticism and other literary work, and soon was in a position to offer another opera, “Der fliegende Hollander,” to the authorities of the Grand Opera-House. Again the directors refused the work, but were so charmed with the beauty of the libretto that they bought it to be reset to music. Until the year 1842, life was a trying struggle for the indomitable young musician. “Rienzi” was then produced at Dresden, so much to the delight of the King of Saxony that the composer was made royal Kapellmeister and leader of the orchestra. The production of “Der fliegende Hollander” quickly followed; next came “Tanhäuser” and “Lohengrin,” to be swiftly succeeded by the “Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” This period of our maestro’s musical activity also commenced to witness the development of his theories on the philosophy of his art, and some of his most remarkable critical writings were then given to the world.

Political troubles obliged Wagner to spend seven years of exile in Zurich; thence he went to London, where he remained till 1861 as conductor of the London Philharmonic Society. In 1861 the exile returned to his native country, and spent several years in Germany and Russia—there having arisen quite a furore for his music in the latter country. The enthusiasm awakened in the breast of King Louis of Bavaria by “Der fliegende Holländer” resulted in a summons to Wagner to settle at Munich, and with the glories of the Royal Opera-House in that city his name has since been principally connected. The culminating art-splendor of his life, however, was the production of his stupendous tetralogy, the “Ring der Nibelungen,” at the great opera-house at Baireuth, in the summer of the year 1876.

IV.

The first element to be noted in Wagner’s operatic forms is the energetic protest against the artificial and conventional in music. The utter want of dramatic symmetry and fitness in the operas we have been accustomed to hear could only be overlooked by the force of habit, and the tendency to submerge all else in the mere enjoyment of the music. The utter variance of music and poetry was to Wagner the stumbling-block which, first of all, must be removed. So he crushed at one stroke all the hard, arid forms which existed in the lyrical drama as it had been known. His opera, then, is no longer a congeries of separate musical numbers, like duets, arias, chorals, and finales, set in a flimsy web of formless recitative, without reference to dramatic economy. His great purpose is lofty dramatic truth, and to this end he sacrifices the whole framework of accepted musical forms, with the exception of the chorus, and this he remodels. The musical energy is concentrated in the dialogue as the main factor of the dramatic problem, and fashioned entirely according to the requirements of the action. The continuous flow of beautiful melody takes the place alike of the dry recitative and the set musical forms which characterize the accepted school of opera. As the dramatic motif demands, this “continuous melody” rises into the highest ecstasies of the lyrical fervor, or ebbs into a chant-like swell of subdued feeling, like the ocean after the rush of the storm. If Wagner has destroyed musical forms, he has also added a positive element. In place of the aria we have the logos. This is the musical expression of the principal passion underlying the action of the drama. Whenever, in the course of the development of the story, this passion comes into ascendency, the rich strains of the logos are heard anew, stilling all other sounds. Gounod has, in part, applied this principle in “Faust.” All opera-goers will remember the intense dramatic effect arising from the recurrence of the same exquisite lyric outburst from the lips of Marguerite.

The peculiar character of Wagner’s word-drama next arouses critical interest and attention. The composer is his own poet, and his creative genius shines no less here than in the world of tone. The musical energy flows entirely from the dramatic conditions, like the electrical current from the cups of the battery; and the rhythmical structure of the melos (tune) is simply the transfiguration of the poetical basis. The poetry, then, is all-important in the music-drama. Wagner has rejected the forms of blank verse and rhyme as utterly unsuited to the lofty purposes of music, and has gone to the metrical principle of all the Teutonic and Slavonic poetry. This rhythmic element of alliteration, or staffrhyme, we find magnificently illustrated in the Scandinavian Eddas, and even in our own Anglo-Saxon fragments of the days of Cædmon and Alcuin. By the use of this new form, verse and melody glide together in one exquisite rhythm, in which it seems impossible to separate the one from the other. The strong accents of the alliterating syllables supply the music with firmness, while the low-toned syllables give opportunity for the most varied nuances of declamation.

The first radical development of Wagner’s theories we see in “The Flying Dutchman.” In “Tanhhäser” and “Lohengrin” they find full sway. The utter revolt of his mind from the trivial and commonplace sentimentalities of Italian opera led him to believe that the most heroic and lofty motives alone should furnish the dramatic foundation of opera. For a while he oscillated between history and legend, as best adapted to furnish his material. In his selection of the dream-land of myth and legend, we may detect another example of the profound and exigeant art-instincts which have ruled the whole of Wagner’s life. There could be no question as to the utter incongruity of any dramatic picture of ordinary events, or ordinary personages, finding expression in musical utterance. Genuine and profound art must always be consistent with itself, and what we recognize as general truth. Even characters set in the comparatively near hack-ground of history are too closely related to our own familiar surroundings of thought and mood to be regarded as artistically natural in the use of music as the organ of the every-day life of emotion and sentiment. But with the dim and heroic shapes that haunt the border-land of the supernatural, which we call legend, the case is far different. This is the drama of the demigods, living in a different atmosphere from our own, however akin to ours may be their passions and purposes. For these we are no longer compelled to regard the medium of music as a forced and untruthful expression, for do they not dwell in the magic lands of the imagination? All sense of dramatic inconsistency instantly vanishes, and the conditions of artistic illusion are perfect.

 "'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
 And clothes the mountains with their azure hue."

Thus all of Wagner’s works, from “Der fliegende Hollander” to the “Ring der Nibelungen,” have been located in the world of myth, in obedience to a profound art-principle. The opera of “Tristan and Iseult,” first performed in 1865, announced Wagner’s absolute emancipation, both in the construction of music and poetry, from the time-honored and time-corrupted canons, and, aside from the last great work, it may be received as the most perfect representation of his school.

The third main feature in the Wagner music is the wonderful use of the orchestra as a factor in the solution of the art-problem. This is no longer a mere accompaniment to the singer, but translates the passion of the play into a grand symphony, running parallel and commingling with the vocal music. Wagner, as a great master of orchestration, has had few equals since Beethoven; and he uses his power with marked effect to heighten the dramatic intensity of the action, and at the same time to convey certain meanings which can only find vent in the vague and indistinct forms of pure music. The romantic conception of the mediæval love, the shudderings and raptures of Christian revelation, have certain phases that absolute music alone can express. The orchestra, then, becomes as much an integral part of the music-drama, in its actual current movement, as the chorus or the leading performers. Placed on the stage, yet out of sight, its strains might almost be fancied the sound of the sympathetic communion of good and evil spirits, with whose presence mystics formerly claimed man was constantly surrounded. Wagner’s use of the orchestra may be illustrated from the opera of “Lohengrin.”

The ideal background, from which the emotions of the human actors in the drama are reflected with supernatural light, is the conception of the “Holy Graal,” the mystic symbol of the Christian faith, and its descent from the skies, guarded by hosts of seraphim. This is the subject of the orchestral prelude, and never have the sweetnesses and terrors of the Christian ecstasy been more potently expressed. The prelude opens with long-drawn chords of the violins, in the highest octaves, in the most exquisite pianissimo. The inner eye of the spirit discerns in this the suggestion of shapeless white clouds, hardly discernible from the aerial blue of the sky. Suddenly the strings seem to sound from the farthest distance, in continued pianissimo, and the melody, the Graal-motive, takes shape. Gradually, to the fancy, a group of angels seem to reveal themselves, slowly descending from the heavenly heights, and bearing in their midst the Sangréal. The modulations throb through the air, augmenting in richness and sweetness, till the fortissimo of the full orchestra reveals the sacred mystery. With this climax of spiritual ecstasy the harmonious waves gradually recede and ebb away in dying sweetness, as the angels return to their heavenly abode. This orchestral movement recurs in the opera, according to the laws of dramatic fitness, and its melody is heard also in the logos of Lohengrin, the knight of the Graal, to express certain phases of his action. The immense power which music is thus made to have in dramatic effect can easily be fancied.

A fourth prominent characteristic of the Wagner music-drama is that, to develop its full splendor, there must be a cooperation of all the arts, painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as poetry and music. Therefore, in realizing its effects, much importance rests in the visible beauties of action, as they may be expressed by the painting of scenery and the grouping of human figures. Well may such a grand conception be called the “Art-work of the Future.”

Wagner for a long time despaired of the visible execution of his ideas. At last the celebrated pianist Tausig suggested an appeal to the admirers of the new music throughout the world for means to carry out the composer’s great idea, viz., to perform the “Nibelungen” at a theatre to be erected for the purpose, and by a select company, in the manner of a national festival, and before an audience entirely removed from the atmosphere of vulgar theatrical shows. After many delays Wagner’s hopes were attained, and in the summer of 1876 a gathering of the principal celebrities of Europe was present to criticise the fully perfected fruit of the composer’s theories and genius. This festival was so recent, and its events have been the subject of such elaborate comment, that further description will be out of place here.

As a great musical poet, rather epic than dramatic in his powers, there can be no question as to Wagner’s rank. The performance of the “Nibelungenring,” covering “Rheingold,” “Die Walküren,” “Siegfried,” and “Götterdämmerung,” was one of the epochs of musical Germany. However deficient Wagner’s skill in writing for the human voice, the power and symmetry of his conceptions, and his genius in embodying them in massive operatic forms, are such as to storm even the prejudices of his opponents. The poet-musician rightfully claims that in his music-drama is found that wedding of two of the noblest of the arts, pregnantly suggested by Shakespeare:

 "If Music and sweet Poetry both agree,
 As they must needs, the sister and the brother;
 One God is God of both, as poets feign."

From Great German Composers, by George T. Ferris (1840-1932), published in 1891.

Featured: Portrait of Richard Wagner, by Franz von Lenbach; painted ca. 1882-1883.

In the Propaganda War

On September 25, 2022, I was standing at the window in my room on the 5th floor of the Park Inn hotel in Donetsk. I watched as an artillery shell hit an apartment building. 800 meters away from me, part of the facade came crashing down. At about the same time, I got a text message from T-Online. The editor, Lars Wienand, wanted to know if I was an election observer at the referenda in the Russian-occupied territories. I was on one of several research trips to Ukraine and Russia. I clarified that I belonged to a journalist group. Apparently, he only asked pro forma. Because my denial did not interest him at all.

What came next is a moral picture of self-proclaimed quality journalism and foremost academic culture. I therefore must tell you about myself. But, in fact, this is really all about you. About your freedom of opinion and information, about your freedom of research and teaching. It’s about Article 5 of the German Basic Law. It is about how, in the service of propaganda, desk jockeys try to censor public opinion, to politically cleanse academic life and to destroy livelihoods; and in this way make an example, to force anticipatory obedience by creating fear—in you.

While my associate and I were trying to escape militias, snipers, artillery shells and mines in the Donbass, desk-jockey editors in Germany were launching a journalistic attack. I was made into an election observer at Putin’s sham referendums, an apologist for the Kremlin, a journalist on a political errand. As a result, the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel and the Hochschule für Medien, Kommunikation und Wirtschaft (HMKW) in Berlin cancelled my lectureships. They fell for a hoax that has been fabricated in such a way that someone has to fall for it. Such denunciation campaigns, for which T-Online is well-known, only work when others join in. No one checked. This points to the kowtowing of academic elites to propaganda.

Here are the facts:

In Luhansk and Donetsk, I attended two press conferences at the request of the local authorities. I also did this during research in the Kosovo War in 1999 and in Afghanistan in 2002—both wars of aggression, by the way, that were also illegal under international law. There were no mandates from the UN Security Council.

Nevertheless, I accompanied German soldiers on their missions, took part in military briefings and press conferences, spoke there myself, explained my research assignment and reported on my experiences. This is nothing unusual, if only because all those involved need to exchange information, for example, about where mines had not yet been cleared or where dispersed free fighters were on the move. Anyone who, like me, has been in a minefield (near Orahovac) or under fire (near Prizren) knows the importance of such coordination. Thus, I was “embedded” in the KFOR. No one would have thought of accusing me of this or even of claiming that I could not report independently, that I would even spread KFOR propaganda or justify a war of aggression in violation of international law.

My stay in Donetsk demonstrated yet again how dangerous such research is: our hotel was shelled with heavy artillery from Marinka, while a 155-millimeter shell just missed the Park Inn and my room on the 5th floor. Our local associate and driver Yevgeny was killed six weeks later by HIMARS rocket fire.

Exchanging information, including that concerning the mood of the population, is virtually a matter of survival in a war zone. That’s why I also talked to Russians. As a journalist, I am constantly talking to people who have different origins or different opinions. That is the core of my work. It’s not about having something in common with them, but that’s how information is researched. Moreover, no one would have thought of accusing Peter Scholl-Latour, for example, who was the first to film from the Viet Cong side, in the 1973 Vietnam War, of spreading communist propaganda. Reporter Martha Gellhorn survived eight wars (Spain 1937; Finland 1939; China 1941; Italian front 1943; Normandy invasion 1944; Vietnam War 1966; Six Day War 1967; civil war in El Salvador from 1980). She was also “embedded” in the U.S. Armed Forces (at the rank of captain) during World War II. No one ever thought of accusing her of one-sided reporting.

Reporting from a war and crisis zone is absolutely impossible without contact with the people involved—even if they have blood on their hands.

One more thing: This war in Ukraine will end at the negotiating table—or we’ll all be blown up. One can get used to the idea of negotiating with Russians. I have been talking to people from Russia for 25 years. Among them are government employees as well as opposition members. I have friends on both sides of the front, in Russia and in Ukraine. For more than 20 years, I have been bringing back films from Russia that critically examine grievances in Putin’s state. The Swiss Infosperber and the Canadian The Postil Magazine have taken the trouble to link these contributions so that everyone can see them. My research in Russia has brought me two unpleasant encounters with the FSB domestic intelligence service. Once we narrowly escaped arrest. There are witnesses to these events.

It is quite brazen when desk jockeys in universities or editors of online media, who have no idea about the conditions in war and crisis zones and have hardly attracted attention with their own independent research results, accuse me, who has stuck my neck out for independent reporting, of propaganda. They should first of all listen carefully so that their own heads are not crammed with propaganda.

At the beginning of the press conference, I made it clear that I was not speaking as an election observer, but as a journalist doing research for a book project. This was correctly translated into Russian by Sergey Filbert. We were both properly accredited. The planning of the trip had begun in the spring of 2022, when there was no talk of referenda. The date was communicated to us only three days before, in Moscow. The research trip was paid for by ourselves; we did not receive any offers of bribes. We were able to move completely independently in the war zone. The local military authorities did not impose any conditions.

During the press conference, I explained that this referendum did not meet the requirements for a free and secret-ballot election. However, I also explained that the results reflect the mood of the population. After all, the Donbass has been shelled by the Ukrainian army since 2014, and there have been more than 14,000 deaths, according to UN figures. For this reason, the population came into opposition to the government in Kiev. All this was too much for the journalistic satraps of the power elites: the truth about the Donbass must not reach German living rooms—that would undermine the propaganda narratives.

T-Online portrayed me as an election observer, although I clearly stated that I was not an election observer. The portal insinuated that I was indifferent to Putin’s war of aggression. I took legal action against this. Russian media may have called me an election observer, but it would have been T-Online’s job to check the factuality of this. Media is a filter pretending to be a clear window. In journalism, it’s not enough to sit at a desk and stare at a computer. Because on the Internet, you can only find what someone else has uploaded—according to their own selection and their own interests. Anyone who knows that is looking for a reference source in the real world.

It would have been easy to find out. A call to the Civil Chamber of the Russian Federation, which is competent according to the Constitution, would have sufficed; the contact details can be found on their website. Something like, “Could you send me a list of your election observers?” Don’t worry. German is a very popular foreign language in Russia; English can also help in a pinch. Presumably, the Civil Chamber media center would have referred to its website. There you will find a press release dated September 29, 2022, about a hearing before the Civil Chamber in Moscow with all election observers. I was not a participant in the hearing, nor am I named in the press release. Time needed for such? Maybe 15 minutes. Those who are afraid to talk to Russians could have entered my name into a search engine. They would have come across my website, or the portal Vimeo. My reports from Russia can be viewed on these sites. The effort involved? Perhaps 10 minutes. But T-Online forged ahead without any such source in the real world and thus violated its duty of care. The principle of craftsmanship: Audiatur et altera pars—which is why I researched on both sides of the front—was also put aside. The number of clicks is more important than clean craftsmanship. All this shows that it was obviously not about research, but about denunciation. Because such denunciation campaigns generate clicks and increase advertising revenues.

This made it all the more urgent for T-Online to call the universities mentioned. Helge Buttgereit’s account probably hits the nail on the head: “The T-Online journalist learned of Mr. Baab’s presence on site, researched his background and made a press inquiry to the Berlin University of Media, Communication and Business (HMKW). “Do you know what your lecturer is doing there? At the mock referendums? He’s legitimizing them! Do you think that’s good?” That’s how it might have been. It doesn’t matter how exactly, because according to its own statement, the university was on the phone with the delinquent, who was made one by his mere presence in the wrong place at the wrong time. And then a statement was hastily published on the homepage. The gist: We condemn and distance ourselves (HMKW, 26.9.22). Meanwhile, the article appeared on the net. Author Wienand could now add the accomplishment of his mission right away; online many things can be changed and enhanced quickly.”

The call from HMKW was indeed not long in coming. We were on the edge of the gray zone and had just escaped direct fire. The line was full of static. All I heard was, “We will sharply separate ourselves from you… What you are seeing on the ground is bogus objectivity!” That the shells that just flew around our heads were only fired for appearances—I would not have thought of that. Someone who at best has newspaper knowledge wants to know the truth in the war zone by remote diagnosis from a distance of 2,100 kilometers. That would be a challenge even for experts on Eastern Europe. But the chancellor of HMKW, Roland Freytag, is not an expert on Eastern Europe; his area is psychology. In his field, such a thing is called “projection.”

In the HMKW press release, I was accused of having legitimized the “sham referenda” and of having made myself the fig leaf of the aggressors. It was incompatible with the basic principles of HMKW to employ me further. But if research on the ground legitimizes the local rulers, then the press is no longer allowed to check the propaganda of the warring parties against reality and is limited to spreading their propaganda lies. For only on the spot is something possible that cannot be done at the desk—and nor in editorial offices or academies—a reality check. [Walter Lippmann observes: “The newspaper covers a lot of events that are beyond our world of experience… Apart from the interested party, seldom is anyone able to verify the accuracy of a report.”]

So, what Freytag says and does, how the CAU behaves, is an attack on press freedom and an attempt at indirect censorship. Quite apart from the fact that journalists would then also no longer be allowed to report on abuses or violations of the law in Russia, as I have done. This means that these universities support the disinformation of a war party and thus become a war party themselves. They are thus violating Article 5 of the German Basic Law and the freedom of opinion, research and teaching enshrined in the Basic Law.

HMKW Chancellor Roland Freytag was an obedient GDR citizen, a fellow traveler of the SED system. Then came the time of change, and he changed roles. Now he strongly advocated democracy and invoked the new freedoms. That’s how he got to the top as a turncoat. He was one of the speakers at the big demonstration on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz on November 4, 1989, which heralded the beginning of the end of the SED state.

A turncoat from the GDR like Roland Freytag wanted to explain to me (who has demonstrably been resistant in different systems), and from a distance—the reality that I was currently researching on the ground. This behavior belongs in the textbook of anticipatory obedience. For here we are dealing not only with an uninformed know-it-all, but with the primacy of propaganda, albeit Western propaganda. Professor Freytag obviously learned a lot in the SED state—above all, to swim with the tide. The attitude is: If the prevailing opinion does not fit reality—all the worse for reality.

Kiel University also immediately terminated my teaching contract. In contrast to HMKW, however, the teaching contract had already been written out. This made it possible to take legal action. The notice was given in an expedited procedure, because there was imminent danger. Therefore, the hearing required by administrative law was waived. Christian Albrechts University saw its reputation at risk because I assumed the role of an election observer in the Donbass, or at least gave that impression. Again, no proper examination of the false allegation. The dean of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, Professor Christian Martin, wrote, according to the administrative file before the court, “I also don’t know what there is great to look at in Donbass.” That is the rejection of any form of science. Because its findings are measured against reality. Again, it was obviously not about proper examination, but about protecting oneself in panic from supposedly bad press, and hastily submitting to the prevailing climate of opinion. This shows that it was not about knowledge, but about commitment—commitment to a war party, Ukraine and NATO. This has nothing to do with science.

When it comes to the reputation of Kiel University, it is worth taking a look at the past. For the heroism of the faculty in defending democracy and peace was kept within narrow limits from the beginning of the 20th century. Before and during the First World War, hurrah-patriotism and anti-democratic-monarchist sentiments prevailed. The “meaning of sacrificial death for the fatherland” was explained to the youth. During the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch in 1920, armed Freikorps were formed at Kiel University, who wanted to crush the Weimar Republic and engaged in firefights with the defenders of democracy in Muhliusstrasse and Bergstrasse. When the National Socialist era dawned in 1933, professors and students at Kiel University did not want to stand on the sidelines. They went into battle against the intrusion of “Western liberalist and democratic ideas,” in order to create a “new unity out of blood;” and on May 3, 1933, they confessed to the Kiel student body: “The study of history takes its innermost justification only from its service to the present”—the National Socialist one, of course. From 1933 on, liberal, social democratic or Jewish scholars were expelled—at least 38 out of 222, according to other accounts even half. (See the work of Ralph Uhlig and Hans Christian Petersen, “Expertisen für die Praxis. Das Kieler Institut für Weltwirtschaft 1933 bis 1945,” in Christoph Cornelissen].

Joachim Krause, a political scientist from Kiel, who has since retired, justified the war of aggression waged by a U.S.-led coalition against Iraq in 2003, which violated international law, saying that it was a matter of “protecting the system of collective security against a state that… quite deliberately sets out to undermine this system… in order to gain leeway from it for the renewed production of weapons of mass destruction…” Except that these weapons of mass destruction have never been found and corresponding claims have turned out to be lies. I am not aware that he was deprived of his professorship for this. Here one sees how CAU measures with a double standard. Kiel University may have many reasons to worry about its reputation; I am probably the least of them. Roberto de LaPuente writes: “If journalist Patrik Baab had spoken of Germans’ ‘escalation phobia,’ he might still be doing his teaching job at Kiel University today. However, he was doing journalism: That is the worst reproach one can face today.” This is how journalism becomes an offense. The freedom of research and teaching is replaced by political correctness. In this way, CAU itself takes sides in the propaganda war.

It becomes completely dubious when the university involves uninvolved parties. It refused to rent a room in the guest house to my American friend Professor Robert E. Harkavy, unlike in previous years, and justified this by saying that my lawsuit against CAU was not helpful in the matter. [“You might have heard that the institute/the university is in a legal dispute with Patrik. That does not make things easier.” Email from Wilhelm Knelangen to Robert E. Harkavy on January 18, 2023, 7:18.]

What does Robert Harkavy, a scientist who has been associated with this university since 1982, have to do with my lawsuit? The foreign press spoke of a return of National Socialist “Sippenhaft.” Such things endanger the reputation of CAU, not my research in the Donbass.

Harald Welzer and Richard David Precht speak of the “ethics of mind surplus”: “And the morality presented with power and vehemence springs by no means from the firm stance one supposedly takes, but one moralizes opportunism.” It is a matter of swimming along in the current of prevailing opinion. Pierre Bourdieu has described the habitus behind this as “respectful conformism.” Respect, of course, for the supposedly powerful. When it comes to appropriate campaign journalism, T-Online has the knack for provoking hasty reactions by way of fear of bad press. That is one side. The other side is the complete absence of clean craftsmanship and moral courage on the part of those called upon. The alacrity with which they make themselves accomplices in the campaign is actually laughable. One believes oneself safe in the protection of the power elites. This is the opportunism of intellectuals.

This cancel culture has nothing to do with a democratic public sphere. After all, democracy means allowing even those positions to have their say in the arena of the public sphere that one does not like. But in the meantime, many academics and journalists are carriers and promoters of identity-politics thinking. It aims at putting specific social groups in the center and enforcing a higher recognition of such groups. Cultural, ethnic, social, or sexual characteristics are used. This politicization of identity is directed against the universalism of the Enlightenment. It is thus a central discourse characteristic of the Counter-Enlightenment. The assumption that different cultures can arrive at knowledge through different paths and claim special rights for themselves is historically seen as a precursor to racial thinking and national superiority. In this perspective, freedom no longer means being argumentatively convincing in the arena of debate, but rather professing one’s allegiance to a group, demonstrating a certain attitude. All those who do not submit to the collective process thus lose their claim to validity. Thus, identity politics approaches are directly connectable to fascist figures of thought. The historian Götz Aly: “National Socialism was also an identitarian movement!”

When press organs present denunciation campaigns instead of facts; when leading university members launch an attack on the freedom of the press and thus on the freedom of opinion and information; when professors smash the freedom of research and teaching without necessity—rights with constitutional rank, mind you—then one can confidently speak of anti-democratic thinking. It does not spread in circles of the intellectually disadvantaged. Rather, intellectuals—or what is left of them, academics—make themselves the drivers of anti-democratic thinking. T-Online is stepping out of the role of reporter, just as those responsible at CAU have stepped out of the role of academic discourse participant. They have become political-ideological actors in the process of opinion control and mind control, and thus self-appointed censors with the goal of narrowing the public debate space to the state-desired area, indeed to the soup plate horizon of their own huckster’s soul.

“Major press outlets also bear responsibility. Rather than seeking to contextualize events properly for their readers, the media have trumpeted the government’s preferred narrative. Whatever its motivations, the mainstream media have implemented, and continue to implement, a regime of propaganda that misinforms the public and can only be perceived by Russia as an affront to the national character of its people. Online providers of information are doing much the same. In fact, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and First Amendment lawyer Glenn Greenwald has shown, massive censorship of dissenting views is now occurring at many levels of society in both the United States and Europa. Although it is difficult to look at the horrific images coming out of Ukraine without revulsion and anger, succumbing to blind emotion and embracing the dominant Western narrative is a dangerous error. It empowers the worst forces in Washington, including the nexus of bureaucratic power and commercial interest… This narrative also enables the most Russophobic and militaristic of European leaders, as well as those with the least guts to stand up to misguided American policies. The narrative clouds the minds of American and European citizens, leading to jingoism and war-mongering” (Benjamin Abelow).

From Anne Morelli one can read how this war hysteria is promoted by propaganda—also, and especially, by the propaganda used by NATO:

  1. The Kremlin is to blame for everything. After all, it has invaded a weaker neighboring country. We don’t really want war.
  2. It is an “unprovoked” war of aggression. The enemy is solely responsible for this war.
  3. Putin is a fascist, a butcher. The enemy has the face of the devil—or at least of a villain.
  4. In Ukraine, what is being fought for is “western values” or “freedom.” The real interests are disguised with honorable, higher goals.
  5. The enemy intentionally commits heinous war crimes—as in Bucha. When our people make mistakes, it’s stupid.
  6. We have hardly any losses, but the enemy has enormous losses. We hear this on both sides now, the actual numbers are secret.
  7. We fight for a good cause—the enemy must learn to lose; we are morally in the right after all.
  8. Even poets and thinkers support our cause.
  9. The enemy uses internationally outlawed weapons, uranium munitions, poison gas, biological weapons, cluster bombs.
  10. Whoever questions our propaganda is a Putin-stooge, a lumpen-pacifist, a submission-pacifist, a right-wing cross-front agitator, the Fifth Column of Moscow.

I got dragged into this propaganda narrative. Because one thing must not happen under any circumstances—that the truth about this war become known. Therefore, the reporter on the ground must be made out to be a fig leaf of the aggressors and supporter of a war of aggression. The goal then becomes to undermine his credibility through denunciation and political purges. For under no circumstances should one’s own outrages, one’s own shared responsibility, one’s own interests and the suffering of others be allowed to reach German living rooms. This would enable people to do what propaganda undermines—the reality check. Instead of war fever, there would then be disillusionment. Propaganda works particularly well when people themselves have no knowledge.

Part of the propaganda narrative is to omit essential historical facts in connection with this war, or at least to push them into the background. Here, without claiming to be exhaustive, are the most important:

  1. NATO’s eastward expansion to Russia’s borders despite promises to the contrary;
  2. The Maidan Coup and the masterminds around Victoria Nuland responsible for it;
  3. Then-Vice President Joe Biden’s bragging about how he used financial blackmail to force the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor who was investigating a corruption scandal involving an energy company with the then Vice-President’s son, Hunter Biden on its board;
  4. Ukraine’s biological weapons production facilities;
  5. The neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and similar organizations;
  6. President Zelensky’s self-enrichment and secret foreign assets;
  7. Human rights abuses in Ukraine;
  8. Zelensky’s laws restricting freedom of expression and banning political parties;
  9. Reprisals against the Russian Orthodox Church;
  10. Endemic corruption in Ukraine.
  11. The blocking of a peace agreement all ready for signature, negotiated between the warring parties in Istanbul in March—for which there are at least six sources, two of which were involved in the negotiation process.

[“According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries”—Fiona Reed and Angela Stent. “I have one claim. I claim there was a good chance of reaching a ceasefire”—Naftali Bennett. “The Grinding War in Ukraine Could Have Ended a Long Time Ago”—Branko Marcetic. More broadly on the Ukrainian conflict—Harald Kujat].

In light of this, Noam Chomsky laments the collapse of the democratic debating space: “Perhaps parts of the intellectual class are so deeply immersed in the propaganda system that they cannot even perceive the absurdity of what they are saying. Either way, it’s a drastic reminder that the arena of rational discourse is collapsing precisely where there should be hope that it will be defended.” In academic circles, that is.

Denunciation cascades, triggered by academic and media networks, in league with influencers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., have one goal in the end: to shatter the economic livelihood of the targeted individuals. So, this is not about democratic discussion, but the opposite: preventing democratic discourse about structural violence. The critics of NATO propaganda are to be deprived of their livelihood. This is not about individual cases. Rather, an example is to be made. The goal is to force anticipatory obedience by generating fear. This is essentially initiated by states or supranational organizations such as the EU, but also by state-sponsored institutions. But the drivers are the eco-libertarian and militaristic-conservative academic milieus.

The overarching characteristic of all these cases is that university decision-makers believe themselves to be under the protection of the executive branch and therefore act with the arrogance of borrowed power. The result is a conglomeration of academic soul-sellers who are either beholden to transatlantic organizations or U.S. foundations, or who spread their narratives in anticipatory obedience. The actors themselves, according to Upton Sinclair, do not notice: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

It is no coincidence that at least at one university, it was precisely those who consider themselves committed to transatlantic networks, such as the German Marshall Fund, who actively pursued my expulsion. This shows where the real masterminds of censorship and denunciation sit. By this, it is by no means meant that the operators receive instructions from Langley. Rather, the alacrity of their actions proves that they see themselves in a kind of debt to be discharged. After all, it’s all about invitations to conferences, scholarships, research trips and the approval of research projects. David Michaels, former director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, calls such scientists “science-for-sale specialists”—scientists who can be bought for money. This does not necessarily mean direct payments. They believe that it is better for one’s career to act as a legitimacy canvasser for American interests.

The entanglements of Kiel professor Werner Kaltefleiter in intelligence machinations of the BND and CIA during the Cold War have been elaborated by Katja Backhaus. According to press reports, CAU received 2.7 million euros from the German Ministry of Defense and NATO between 2005 and 2012, most of which went to Professor Joachim Krause’s Kiel Institute for Security Policy (ISPK). These funds went primarily to a counterinsurgency project in Afghanistan. The project partner at the time was Victoria Nuland’s Center for a New American Security, which has set itself the task of protecting American interests and is partly paid for by the arms company Northrop Grumman. Krause also belongs to the Integrity Initiative, a program of the British Institute for Statecraft, which is close to NATO and British intelligence services. Officially, it is supposed to expose Russian disinformation, but it is actually about NATO propaganda. The Integrity Initiative’s German Cluster in 2019 included political scientist Hannes Adomeit, now deceased, his friend Joachim Krause, former MI6 agent Harold Elletson, and Marie-Luise Beck of the Center for Liberal Modernity. Critics call Krause a “NATO janitor.” No wonder he accuses the German people of an “escalation phobia” in the Ukraine war. Of course, my research does not fit into such war propaganda, so it must be sanctioned.

T-Online yet again. The portal also acted as a denunciation portal against Professor Ulrike Guérot and Professor Gabriele Krone-Schmalz and put together press campaigns aimed at triggering a political purge and destroying the economic livelihood of these two targeted professors. Then I found out that the State Protection Department in the Federal Ministry of the Interior also keeps a file on me—as an alleged election observer. This kind of thing usually happens on orders from above. So, one may ask whether the office of the Minister of the Interior itself orchestrates such denunciation campaigns. And secret services do what they are there for: Chinese whispers. Here, one has to ask whether journalists also cooperate with intelligence services and do the dirty work for the BND, for example, as the federal government openly stated in its answer to a parliamentary question in the German Bundestag. The same applies to university employees.

In this way, a censorship and denunciation cartel is being created as if by magic, which is supported by US foundations and NATO apron organizations. The Pentagon alone employs 27,000 PR specialists with an annual budget of five billion dollars, whose goal is to influence the media with targeted messages, with experts for interviews or footage for television. During NATO’s war against Serbia in 1999—it’s not only the Russians who wage wars of aggression in violation of international law—31 PR agencies ensured that public opinion was brought into line: the Serbs were portrayed as the bad guys, the Muslim Bosnians as their victims. As a result of such manipulation, virtually no one understands what was actually going on in Yugoslavia.

None of this works with coercion; it works only with consent. This active participation shows the susceptibility of the academic elites to anti-democratic thinking. When anti-democratic thinking is then combined with racial thinking, we are on the threshold of fascist figures of thought. Political scientist Florence Gaub on April 12, 2022, on the talk show, Markus Lanz: “We must not forget, even if Russians look European, that they are not Europeans—right now in the cultural sense—who have a different approach to violence, who have a different approach to death.” Such phrases open the door to racism. Ukrainian author Serhij Zhadan calls Russians a “horde,” “animals,” “filth”: “Burn in hell, you pigs.” This is the language of fascism. For this, Zhadan received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

Conformism becomes a weapon: As in the case of Ulrike Guérot, who was dismissed from the University of Bonn, and Gabriele Krone-Schmalz, who is subject to massive attacks, the aim is censorship and acts of political cleansing that are unworthy of a democracy. In the process, the campaigns also aim to destroy the livelihoods of the targeted individuals. This alone documents their anti-democratic character. The smashing of democracy is preceded by the smashing of the democratic public sphere. The media and universities play a decisive role in this transformation, because they make themselves the bearers of counter-enlightenment and influence the transformation of democratic consciousness. T-Online and many other media, as well as the University of Kiel and HMKW in Berlin, have made themselves the warring party in the propaganda battle without need. This has consequences that extend beyond their direct sphere of influence. They are contributing to the poisoning of the social climate and are thus sawing away at the foundations of democracy.

Scolding colleagues is not usually my style, but it is appropriate here. I summarize: 1. Very bad craftsmanship: no verification by second source in the real world. 2. Political denunciation because of economic calculation. 3.Obliviousness to history and ignorance, both of one’s own and of Ukraine’s history. 4. Opportunism: succumbing to propaganda unchecked. 5. Anticipatory obedience: making oneself a tool of propaganda. 6. Anti-democratic thinking and acting. The result is a sum of dangerous stupidity that is capable of dragging this country into the abyss once again.

Some people speak here of the intellectuals’ refusal to work. But that is not the case. It is a matter of business. Those who work with their heads, sell their heads to the highest bidder. They are paid for their ideas, with which they organize the cultural hegemony of the power elites and their rule.

We are sitting in the bus from the Chonhar border crossing to Simferopol, the capital of Crimea. Only now does the tension fall away. I lean my head against the window and nodded off. In dream images, the fear that I had locked away at the bottom of my soul in the war zone catch up to me. Shelling, mines, arrests swirl in tangled scraps and perform a witches’ sabbath in my half-sleep. Only gradually do I realize that another St. Vitus dance awaits me on my return: that of journalistic contract writers, “a well-organized gang of literary rustlers,” as Heinrich Heine put it, “who go about their business in the Bohemian forests of our daily press.” A sentence by Zygmunt Bauman comes to my mind: “Not wanting to see, not wanting to look, and thus suppressing the possibilities of another coexistence with less suffering, is part of suffering and contributes to its perpetuation.” Another hour to Simferopol. As the bus rocks, I ponder the misery of intellectuals.

Patrik Baab

Featured: Join the Navy. Poster by Richard Fayerweather Babcock (1887-1954), published in 1917.

Nord Stream! And Lutherania Descends into the Maelstrom

“Thank you, USA!”
Radek Sikorski, MEP

“Thank you, Olaf Scholz!”
Society for German Garden Gnomes

In a few minutes more, there came over the scene another radical alteration. The general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and the whirlpools, one by one, disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam became apparent where none had been seen before. These streaks, at length, spreading out to a great distance, and entering into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly—very suddenly—this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more than a mile in diameter. The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray ; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven [Edgar Allan Poe, Descent into the Maelström (1856)].

Most observers—even those extremely hostile to Scholz—tend to see him as a blithering idiot, stooge or punching-bag for the Annalena “Miss Piggy” Baerbock faction. However, on February 21, 2023, Professor Michel Chossudovsky published a piece on the Nord Stream blast referring to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ own statements, and suggesting that the latter had, from the outset, been in on the plan to physically demolish Nord Stream.

As the Professor’s article did not, however, report the passages below from Scholz’ intervention in German at the notorious Washington press conference on February 7, 2022 allow us to do so now. There, President Biden publicly announced that the Deed would be Done. Picking up where Biden had left off (“I promise you we will be able to do it…”) Scholz stated the following:

Olaf Scholz ((from 5 mins. 9 seconds):

“Let’s be clear. In order to concretely implement whatever sanctions be needed, should it come to an attack on the Ukraine, our preparations have been intense. We must do whatever may be called for, to make Russia understand that the measures will be tough and far-reaching. Obviously, we will not toss all our cards onto the table: the Russians must be made to realize that a great deal more may occur, than they would even imagine. Meanwhile making it perfectly plain that we’re well prepared. The measures will be far-reaching.”

[More here].

To get a handle on the purported “blithering idiot,” “stooge,” or, rather more likely, Quisling, backtrack to the 1980s.

Where There’s a Steklov, There Must be a Schmolz

According to the French version of Wikipedia, two short lines of which brush off Scholz’ role in the CumEx affair—it just happens to be the biggest tax fraud in German history—in 1982 at 24 years of age Olaf Scholz was appointed Federal Vice-President of the JUSOS (Young Socialists), quite the power-brokering agency in the social-democracy at the time. The French weekly L’Express then described him as “far closer to the DDR’s Communists than to West-German leaders”, as Scholz made a name for himself calling for Germany to leave NATO, and for all US medium-range nuclear weapons to be withdrawn from her territory.

In his role as JUSO VP (1982-1988) and VP of the International Union of Socialist Youth (1987-1989), Scholz crossed over to the DDR several times. One of his meetings with Egon Krenz and the DDR Nomenklatura made prime-time television in the DDR:

As the nail-hard East German delegation stares impudently across the table at the baby-faced West German youths, giddy with their own sense of importance, one can only wonder… at what went on behind the scenes. Trained in the USSR, with the Stasi and the apparatchiki weeviling into the woodwork, the Nomenklatura rarely wasted the main chance. In any event, the above video conveniently popped up on YT on August 19, 2022, just as Olaf Scholz appeared before the Parliamentary Commission of Enquiry (PUA) on the CumEx affair.

One should perhaps add that until 1989, given the red-tape, surveillance and harassment on both sides of the Wall, few Westerners ever attempted to travel to the East bloc. But Olaf Scholz, plainly, had slippery skin.

Olaf Scholz, A Babe in the DDR Wood

“Europe, not Euroshima!”
Freie Deutsche Jugend slogan

As one might imagine, Olaf Scholz’ profile as one more braying ass in NATO’s stable of useful idiots, resembles that of his contemporary Jens Stoltenberg, known as Steklov to the KGB whilst still a “socialist” teenager.

Thus, on February 5, 2022 Markus Decker, ex-member of the Freie Deutsche Jugend or FDJ (Free German Youth, outlawed as anti-constitutional in West Germany from 1951), penned a short note confirming that , in 1983 he attended an FDJ camp at Werder an der Havel in the DDR, with Olaf Scholz essentially at its helm.

“Scholz was six years older than I … he headed the delegation (West German—editor’s note) to Werder, and was more a player, than a mere onlooker. Scholz travelled to the DDR several times. According to reports, he was waved through the checkpoints, and inter alia met with someone who would be much talked of in 1989: Egon Krenz, Secretary of the SED (Socialist Unity Party) Central Committee. Scholz belonged to the Stamokap wing, State Monopoly Capitalism… the dimension of the problem concerns the actual surveillance of Olaf Scholz in West Germany. Seven or more West German citizens under the aliases ‘Kugel,’ ‘Gustav,’ ‘Giesbert,’ ‘Konrad,’ ‘Holm,’ ‘Heine’ and ‘Udo’… forwarded no less than 19 reports (to the West German authorities—editor’s note) between 1978 and 1987 on Scholz and his activity on behalf of JUSO-Hamburg…”

Ah, “Peace ! First amongst the Rights of Man! Europe, not Euroshima! (Frieden ist unser erstes Menschenrecht! Europa darf kein Euroshima werden!), such were the slogans produced for the Werder an der Havel camp, nicht wahr, Herr Kanzler?

Speaking frankly, had Olaf Scholz stuck to his anti-NATO, peacenik, communistic views his enitre life – like the unrepentant Rainer Rupp, ex-spy, now a militant essayist—whether one agreed or not, one would have simply shrugged one’s shoulders and said “at least he’s coherent.”

And Scholz would never have become mayor of Hamburg, then finance minister, and now soon to be ex-chancellor, but a Potsdam Town Councillor. Hence the joke doing the rounds when Scholz turned his coat: Es ist Schmolz—der Scholz is geschmolzen—Scholz has liquified.

But for Scholz to have liquified, geschmolzen, to the point of applauding an act of war by the US against his own country, of agitating for injecting experimental gene therapy into his own population, of appointing as Foreign Minister an individual, Miss Baerbock, whose vulgarity, ignorance and recklessness beggars belief, of actively pressing for Operation Barbarossa II… there had to be either a carrot or a big stick at the other end. Given the implications of the CumEx affair, it looks rather like the big stick.

Whatever is this “CumEx” business, the maelstrom down which Scholz and Co. will eventually no doubt vanish? According to the specialized site FinanzWende, which has been tracking Olaf Scholz’ role from the word go, CumEx refers to a series of share-deals effected with the sole purpose of tricking the tax authorities into refunding (unpaid) taxes several times over to a chain of players, linked by an underground network.

Share-bundles are bought and sold in swift succession close to the dividend due-date, with (cum) or without (ex) dividend-entitlement. As the deal-wheel spins swiftly, the real share-holder at any one time is unclear to the tax authorities; they end up refunding capital gains tax to all the players who then divvy up the loot.

CumCum deals are similar: these enable foreign shareholders to draw tax refunds in Germany, a thing normally forbidden. Which is why one finds the Hamburg lawyer Hanno Berger, plying that trade from Switzerland, or Freshfields Germany partners, or the Canadian Maple Bank, all with their fingers in the pie.

Via a judgment handed down on December 15, 1999, the Federal Finance Court (Bundesfinanzhof) had carelessly opened a breach for such deals, by holding that for tax purposes, a single share might have two owners, with property passing to the buyer at the time of the sale despite the share still being “in the hands” of the vendor. In late December 2002, the German Bank Association (Bundesverband deutscher Banken) wrote to the Finance Ministry about CumEx, to suggest that legislation be designed to mitigate liability for the banks involved. The argument then bandied about was that CumEx/CumCum was a tax loophole rather than a criminal scheme to defraud the tax authorities.

From that point on the CumEx/CumCum merry-go-round took off: over a period of roughly fiften years Germany was cheated of about 10 billion Euro tax revenue through CumEx deals and roughly 28 billion through CumCum. On the European level, the losses in tax revenue for the various countries have been estimated at roughly environ 150 billion Euro.

As it happens, the German authorities were tipped off to the scam early on. According to Finanzwende, between 2005 and 2007 a whistleblower contacted BaFin (Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht, the banking oversight agency), in vain. In 2007, “alarm bells rang in the Finance Ministry: a whistleblower reported that CumEx deals were taking on monstrous proportions … nevertheless, the Ministry neither sent the oversight agencies into the banks, nor ordered a freeze on all federal tax refunds from the Bundeszentralamt für Steuern, nor alerted the Prosecution Service.

There would be much, much more to say. Plainly, by no later than 2007 not a single political or financial figure in Germany could have been unaware of the fact that THE far more profitable CumEx and CumCum deals had come to replace “plain vanilla” banking, that the gamers were making at least 20 % on such deals, and that the tax base was being looted. By 2012, official investigations and legal proceedings both civil and criminal were underway in several Länder, especially in Cologne where officials were notably diligent; by 2014 Landesbank Baden-Württemberg for example, agreed with to the tax agents to return 150 million Euro in undue refunds.

In January 2016, the Cologne Prosecutor launched an enquiry into Warburg Bank at Hamburg (150 million Euro at stake), and February 2016, a Parliamentary Commission of Enquiry into CumEx was set up.

Under such circumstances—and the publicly-available documentation on CumEx/CumCum runs into the thousands of pages of which we have been able to read only a fraction—there can be no doubt whatsoever that Olaf Scholz, whether as Mayor of Hamburg (2011-2017), or Federal Finance Minister (2018-2019), was well aware that a major scam was afoot.

By some quirk of fate, Die Akte Scholz (The Scholz File), a study by investigative reporters Oliver Schröm and Oliver Hollenstein, appeared only a few days after the Nord Stream blast (September 26, 2022); the book picked up from leads in the impounded private journal of Warburg’s Hamburg boss Christian Olearius. For a pitiless and quite thorough summary of events as related in Die Akte Scholz, see this three part video by young German financer Kolja Barghoorn:

Founded in the late 18th Century, the Warburg Bank, although with tentacles extending worldwide (Paul Warburg was amongst the Federal Reserve’s founders in 1913), holds the splendid city of Hamburg, all very prim, proper and Lutheran, in its grip. As for Christian Olearius, who in 40 years multiplied the bank’s turnover by five, nothing stirred in Hamburg without him, lastly but not leastly CumEx deals for its notables.

“Warburg’s Using the Threat of Bankruptcy”

In 2016 and 2017 Scholz, then Mayor of Hamburg, thrice received Christian Olearius and Max Warburg at Town Hall, although investigators were already engaged in a CumEx tax-fraud enquiry against Olearius.

Whilst elsewhere in Germany, the tax authorities and prosecutors were tearing hither and thither, striving to shut down the CumEx scam, nothing of the sort occured at Hamburg. There, the tax people, led by the mysterious Svenja Pannhusen (all trace of her seems to have vanished from the Internet) not only declined to chase up the Warburg Bank for refunds, but made so free as to disclose civil servants’ OTR musings to the bank. Scholz himself apparently suggested the following, terribly original argument to the tax office: “Warburg is Too Big to Fail. And is threatening to go bankrupt (Existenzgefaehrdung)”. According to Die Akte Scholz, then-Mayor Scholz told Olearius of his exchanges with Svenja Pannhusen and the Hamburg Finance Senator, the interesting Peter Tschentscher who was to take over from Scholz as Mayor in 2018.

And thus we have the Hamburg tax authorities letting Warburg’s CumEx shenanigans slide right up to – you guessed it – the Statute of Limitations (December 2016, 47 million Euro time-barred, just in time for a Warburg Christmas). But, Perfection being Not of this World, not even in the Warburg World, the Federal Ministry of Finance, deaf to screams of protest from the Hamburg tax office, managed to file a demand for 42 million Euro in tax refunds from Warburg, just before the cut-off date in late 2017.

Amongst the truly strange Machers, as we say in Yiddisch, tugging strings in the environment, one stumbles upon the man who may be Olaf Scholz’ actual controller, a certain Colonel Alfons Pawelczyk; in 2021, he was raided by the Cologne authorities, again in relation to CumEx, Warburg and Scholz.

Defense Industry Boring into the Woodwork?

Whilst Scholz was still Mayor, his party, the Hamburg SPD, is known to have taken 45,000 Euro in donations from the Warburg Bank, thanks to Pawelczyk’s good offices – tip of the iceberg? Given how much politicians cost these days? Another peculiar Macher in Scholz’ entourage is fellow SPD’er Johannes Kahrs, in tight with Warburg and with defense industry figures. In 2022, CumEx investigators from Cologne (them-thar pests again!) cracked open one of Kahrs’ strong-boxes, only to find banknotes in the amount of 218,000 Euro, the origin of which Kahrs has not yet cared to explain.

In the USA, lying to the US Congress or Senate is an offence (perjury), for which in theory punishment is severe. Funny. Perjury seems to worry no-one in Beautifool Germanie.

Indeed, since 2020, Olaf Scholz has had to appear before the Hamburg Town Council, known as the Bürgerschaft (2021, 2022), and before the Federal Parliamentary Commission of Enquiry (2020, 2023). As some of these hearings took place behind closed doors, there is doubtless much of which we are unaware.

Be that as it may, and going by a report that appeared on 16th January 2023, Scholz was economical with the truth before the Parliamentary Commission. Minutes of a Commission session held in July 2020, initially kept secret (Why?), have just appeared. Amongst the many inconsistencies, one learns that in July 2020 Scholz was able to bring to mind a conversation with Christian Olearius of Warburg, of which he had, however, lost “all concrete recollection” by September 2020. Cat got his tongue? N’other joke doing the rounds of Lutherania: CumEx Lingus.

At the time of writing, despite the dismal delays and lack of expert investigators, 1500 individuals and 130 banks are being prosecuted at various levels in the CumEx/CumCum affair. Bearing in mind that this is by far the most serious looting operation against the German taxpayer, and one that carried on merrily for over 15years, one can only be bewildered by the German authorities’ forbearance, compared to the unprecedented armed raids conducted by German police, prosecutors and secret service against a gaggle of grey-bearded garden gnomes going by the name of “Reichsbuerger” in December 2022. That said—Rejoice! Retro-engineering the truth, Andromeda Yacht style should pose no problem to Chancellor Scholz.

Mendelssohn Moses is a Paris-based writer.

Journalism as an Offense: The Baab Case

If journalist Patrik Baab had spoken of Germans’ “escalation phobia,” he might still be doing his teaching job at Kiel University today. However, he was doing journalism: That is the worst reproach one can face today.

Journalists who have more than just attitude, namely professional ethics, are having a hard time these days. A current example: Seymour Hersh. Using an anonymous source, the American journalist has worked out who is to be held responsible for the attacks on Nord Stream I and II—namely, the US Navy and Norway. The German press pounced on this eminence of American investigative journalism, making the man look like a novice. The criticism came from “colleagues,” journalists who spend most of their working lives sitting at desks or copying from each other.

They are rather unfamiliar with field studies. For them, journalistic work simply means accepting prefabricated opinions, only questioning them when instructed to do so. When the U.S. government denied Hersh’s report, these critics of Hersh accepted the denial as a credible opinion—here their journalistic intuition once again ended abruptly.

Much like Hersh, German journalist Patrik Baab has fared similarly in the recent past. He left his desk to do something that contemporary journalism in Germany hardly ever does anymore—get an impression on the ground. In the end, that is exactly what he is accused of. As a journalist, it is apparently advisable in these times and lands, to remain dutifully seated in front of one’s laptop and do research on Wikipedia and in the vastness of Twitter. But never in eastern Ukraine.

Baab in Eastern Ukraine

NDR journalist Patrik Baab was on the road in eastern Ukraine last September. The reason for his trip there—research for a book project. For him, taking a close look at conditions on the ground is part of the journalistic standard, as he also points out in his book Recherchieren. Ein Werkzeugkasten zur Kritik der herrschenden Meinung [Research: A Toolbox for the Critique of Prevailing Opinion]. At that time, those controversial referendums were taking place in Luhansk, Donetsk and Kherson, which were supposed to allow the regions to join the Russian Federation. Baab was present. He observed the events on the ground as a journalist—but not, as he was subsequently accused, as an election observer.

Usually, election observers are appointed or invited. Patrik Baab never received such an invitation; to a certain extent, he was there on his own behalf. As a researcher and curious journalist. Nevertheless, the reaction followed promptly: A report by Lars Wienand for the news portal of t-online drew attention to the fact that an NDR reporter—Baab—was acting as an election observer at those referendums and thus legitimizing Russia’s controversial approach.

In other words, a journalist was reproached for doing his job. If the mere presence of a journalist at critical events led to the legitimization of these events, then—viewed dialectically—reporting in the true sense would no longer be conceivable. Because the journalist would already be an influencing factor qua existence, who could no longer act as a chronicler of events, but would only change events through his presence. Perhaps this is the reason why on-site research is becoming increasingly rare today—because they want to stay out of it—which would be tantamount to an oath of revelation for the profession.

Decision, After a Few Minutes

Baab was promptly accused of having aligned himself with Putin’s cause. His visit to eastern Ukraine was proof of that. Patrik Baab himself distances himself from Russia’s war against Ukraine. His CV as an NDR reporter includes countless films and features that report critically about and from Russia—and thus do not make the Russian leadership look good. Infosperber has linked to some of Baab’s productions under an article on the case: They prove that the journalist always kept a sober distance in regards to Russia—professionally speaking.

Although the accusation that Patrik Baab was present as an election observer cannot be verified (here, election observers have their say, Baab was not present and also not invited), the Hochschule für Medien, Kommunikation und Wirtschaft (HMKW) in Berlin distanced itself from Baab. In the past, the journalist had often worked there as a lecturer. Among other things, the HMKW’s justification stated that Baab was “providing a welcome fig leaf for the aggressors.” In addition, he was engaging in “journalistic sham objectivity”—the HMKW statement can be read here. Interesting is the introduction of the justification report, in which they speaks of having learned of the matter only “a few minutes ago, through the article, Scheinreferendum, hurra, by Lars Wienand (t-online.de)”—after minutes they had already decided? That doesn’t sound like a prudent approach, more like a favorable moment for people who want to make a political example.

Since Patrik Baab did not have a valid contract with HMKW, he could not take action against this decision of a few minutes. In the case of the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel (CAU), the situation is somewhat different. It withdrew his teaching contract one week after HMKW. The reason—factually the same. Apparently, they didn’t even bother to contact Baab in advance. The reason given by CAU was that there was “imminent danger.” One puzzles over what this is supposed to mean: Baab was standing with tanks in front of Kiel—that’s not possible, because the tanks heading for Ukraine are not in front of Kiel, they are in Kiel.

In this matter an appeal is now pending, the “revocation of the teaching activity” seems to be unfounded for many reasons. Baab was not an election observer, he was doing his job: CAU has demonstrated a lack of due diligence in checking press reports on Baab’s trip. It has done exactly what Baab, as a journalist, urgently warns against—it has adopted unverified allegations.

Kiel University: Followers, by Tradition—and More

Without going into the historical misdeeds of CAU in depth, Kiel University has a tradition of having a rather divided relationship to democratic standards—to put it kindly. In 1914, for example, it excelled in jingoistic patriotism, and years later it supported the Kapp Putsch with a Freikorps (the author Axel Eggebrecht gave a very vivid account of this in his book, Der halbe Weg. Zwischenbilanz einer Epoche), and not only did not stand aside in 1933, but clearly encouraged professors to support the new rulers. Moreover, the author Katia H. Backhaus, in her work, Zwei Professoren, zwei Ansätze. Die Kieler Politikwissenschaft auf dem Weg zum Pluralismus (1971—1998) [Two Professors, Two Approaches. Kiel Political Science on the Way to Pluralism (1971—1998)], elaborated that CAU faculty worked closely with intelligence services (with German and also American ones) in the 1980s.

This historical dimension of CAU will be addressed separately in the near future, as it deserves further consideration. It should be remembered, however, that a professor by the name of Joachim Krause from the Institute for Security Policy at the University of Kiel recently attracted attention. He recently called for escalation and spoke of an “escalation phobia” in large parts of the German population. Krause has admittedly not even been reprimanded by CAU. In retrospect, there would be at least one more reason to do so.

Twenty years ago, Krause justified the war of aggression by the United States and the British against Iraq, which violated international law. Krause’s 2003 analysis bears eloquent witness; it can be read here. In the concluding remarks, one reads “that the U.S. policy toward Iraq (including the threat of regime change by force) is extraordinarily consistent with the international order of collective security and is also necessary.” And further: “The primary motive of U.S. policy is to put a state in its place that challenges the current international order like no other.” Obviously Krause let himself be influenced with this statement by those hawks of U.S. policy who at that time were already talking about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and whose insistence resulted in that lying appearance of Colin Powell before the UN Security Council.

War of Aggression by the USA: No Selfish Energy Interests

Critics, who even then spoke of an unlegitimized war of aggression, were immediately rebuffed by Krause. He wrote: “There is no evidence to support the assumption that U.S. policy is primarily guided by selfish energy interests.” The French and Russians, however, are different, being oriented “by very narrowly defined financial interests in oil exploration in Iraq.” The U.S. foreign policy, so Krause explained at that time quite unabashedly, acts for reasons of good intentions—just imagine if someone would want to accuse Putin or Russia in general of that today.

CAU accuses Patrik Baab of not doing his journalistic work properly because he is biased—at least, that is the quintessence that one has to come to, if one takes a look at the reasoning. But an academic who works in security policy and at the same time talks about “escalation phobia”: How does that go together? Is that the choice of words of someone who specializes in security policy issues? Why does Krause not accuse anyone of failing in their task?

If Patrik Baab had spoken of escalating the war to the point of a potential nuclear strike, he would be blithely lecturing in Kiel today. His offense was that he did not allow himself to be turned into an academic utility idiot, but pursued his work ethos—he does not postulate any ideological empty words, but does what he knows how to do: Reporting.

Basically, this seems to be—as already touched upon above—the worst accusation that one can currently be confronted with. For quite some time, journalism has been understood as something that constructively accompanies the structures of power. It is not implemented as a corrective, but rather takes up the banner of guiding politics through everyday life. If possible, without causing too much of a stir. Synonymous with this development are the legions of journalists who serve as so-called fact checkers. Their task is not to bring facts to light, but to create facts that support and back up political guidelines or decisions. By definition, the fact check should be open-ended: However, if you start with an intention, there can be no drawing back; rather, everything is already closed off and fenced in.

Real Journalism: Endangering the Way Things are Going

Journalists like Patrik Baab come from a different time, when it was still considered natural to even sometimes antagonize the powerful or even just one’s own editor. Of course, journalists are narcissistic, a fact that Patrik Baab himself confirms in his book mentioned above: They always want—and wanted—to make a big deal about themselves. In other days, this was achieved by an investigative coup, by a piece of information that was difficult to bring to light and that could be presented. Today, you make a splash by supporting narratives that business and politics want to establish. In this new sense, Baab is admittedly a bad journalist—precisely because he is a good journalist.

Some students at Kiel University have also recognized this. They are demanding justice for Baab. Their statement on a small Telegram channel about the “Baab Affair” [Affäre Baab] reads” “Comprehensive research that illuminates all angles is a journalistic quality characteristic and not a moral crime. We therefore demand Patrik Baab’s immediate reinstatement at CAU.” Julian Hett, initiator of the burgeoning resistance against CAU’s actions also told me: “The t-online article gave false factual claims, which have since been corrected. Thus, it was clear for me: reputation before truth! The last three years of Covid politics at the university have already shown me in which direction the whole thing is developing. Therefore, there is an urgent need for reforms that put truth back in the center and allow debates, even if they are controversial. Instead, however, efforts are being made to introduce gender language in an all-encompassing way.”

The Baab case shows that journalism is an offense these days. But only if it is carried out with all due diligence. Those who play journalism from their desks because they are halfway capable of comprehending dpa reports are sitting on the safe side of a profession that is in the process of finally abolishing itself. To prevent this, it is imperative that the expertise of a man like Baab not be lost. He should not be one of the last of his kind—he still has a lot to show many young people whose dream job is journalism. To stop letting him teach ultimately means losing his expertise. Only people who see journalism as court-reporting can want that: And these are the forces of counter-enlightenment.

Roberto J. De Lapuente is a journalist who writes from Germany. He is the author of Rechts gewinnt, weil Links versagt [The Right Wins because the Left Fails]. This article appears through the kind courtesy of neulandrebellen.

Featured: Man in a Bowler Hat, by Rene Magritte; painted in 1964.

Research is Not Allowed: The Case of Patrik Baab

In the summer of 2022, I was a student in the seminar given by journalist and guest lecturer Patrik Baab at my university, Christian-Albrechts-Universtiät (CAU) in Kiel, Germany. We studied examples of investigative journalism in the seminar, through which Mr. Baab guided us in understanding the rules of the craft of journalism. One example that I studied was the scandal of star-reporter Claas Relotius from the German magazine Der Spiegel who faked up to 40 reports. The investigative work by Relotius’ colleague, Juan Moreno, revealed the scandal, while also serving as an example of proper research and fact-checking. Also, this showed to us students, what it means to put oneself into dangerous waters. Because researching a colleague was not well regarded by Der Spiegel, Moreno got threatened by his chiefs, that if he continued the research, he could be fired.

A similar thing happened to Patrik Baab. In autumn of 2022, he made another of his many trips to East-Ukraine to research the war on the ground, for his upcoming book. According to Mr. Baab, German media didn’t report meticulously and elaborately enough, so he wanted to get his own understanding of the war. He happened to arrive at the time of the election, by the Russian government, in the contested territories Luhansk and Mariupol, and wanted to report on the opinions of citizens who went to the election. Then, something unexpected happened to him. Surrounded by the local conflict, he had got a call from Germany. In it, he was told that his presence during the elections had somehow legitimized the Russian election. By way of an article in the German online magazine T-Online, this explanation became “settled truth” for the German press, that Mr. Baab was researching in East Ukraine and that he was supposedly an official observer of the election in Luhansk and Mariupol. The German university CAU revoked his teaching assignment, a mere twenty-four hours after the publication of the article in T-Online. [Read more here, here, and here]

Double Standards and Reputation

In German there is a saying: “Wasser predigen und Wein saufen,” which means “preaching [the merits of] water while guzzling wine.” This perfectly describes the double standards of CAU. Mr. Baab’s teaching content in summer 2022 gave us students a clearer understanding on how to research and how to check facts properly. But more importantly, he taught us what the main tasks of journalism are and how important proper research is for our democracy, since journalism is the Fourth Estate. This is vital, especially for research into areas that we only occasionally accept as plausible, just as this war when given a deeper look reveals errors, and at times entanglements.

But what CAU has shown us with the revocation of Mr. Baab’s teaching assignment is that they neither research nor check facts and sources—although their students are taught this at their university. The article from T-Online was corrected immediately after Mr. Baab complained about their wrong claims. CAU could also have checked these claims easily, said Mr. Baab. But rather, they reacted emotionally, because the university won’t endanger its reputation. This is because every university is seeking a good reputation and won’t lose it by any means. A good reputation gives research funds, which the universities nowadays are dependent on. The story of CAU is full of such reputation-defending actions. [Read more here]

I was shocked to hear that Mr. Baab’s teaching assignment got revoked for the winter semester of 2022. But neither was this surprising to me. Over the past three years, critic of Covid, climate change and other “sensitive” topics in Germany are getting canceled. Now and again, one saw acknowledged scientists and academics criticize the political course—but shortly afterwards, they experienced shit-storm campaigns not only in social media, but above all in the German press, with the debate-disqualifying term “conspiracy theorist.” At the end of 2020, for example, Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, together with his wife and lecturer at CAU Karina Reis, had published their book, Corona Fehlalarm!? In it, they criticized the German Covid measures and explained why they think so on a scientific basis. Professor Bhakti was also a guest lecturer at CAU. After publishing their book, CAU reacted with a very concise statement which said that the book contains wrong claims, therefore the university distances itself from these claims—which also meant the revocation of Bhakdi’s teaching assignment.

Two and a half years later, the claims that were postulated in the book were right. The question is: Did those responsible at the CAU act against their better judgment in order to preserve their reputation? Because eventually, Bhakdi’s claims are based on biology and medicine. As in Mr. Baab’s case, it’s again what students learn in the university, while the University itself throws all this knowledge over board.

Student Opinions

Regarding the revocation of Mr. Baab’s teaching assignment, it is hard to get a read of the opinions of the students at CAU. Very few students have actually heard about it. This makes sense, because it gives the impression that CAU would love to delete everything that is related to Mr. Baab. On my demand, students that were participants in Mr. Baab’s seminar in the summer of 2022 like myself, showed mixed opinions. Most of the students didn’t respond. One wrote to me, that he fully understands the action of CAU and that he completely shares the opinion with CAU that Mr. Baab supports Vladimir Putin.

Then there was another response which tried to understand both CAU and Mr. Baab. On the one hand, the student said that understands why CAU reacted in the way that it did, because it was being emotional. For him, being associated with the aggressor (Russia) is not what CAU would want or need. But in the end, there’s also no way to end war, other than to negotiate with the aggressor. On the other hand, Mr. Baab’s research in the East-Ukraine can’t be seen as wrong behavior, because he’s a journalist and so he’s supposed to do this kind of research. On a human basis, he also assessed Mr. Baab as a person, who doesn’t want to support Russia and who knows what he’s doing.

Another response was fully on Mr. Baab’s side and argued that Mr. Baab did nothing wrong. He just did, what he is supposed to do as a journalist. That is what he taught us in the seminar. According to Mr. Baab’s research, it is also not evident that he supports the Russian side. The whole case should be seen as doubtful, because the statement of CAU is too short to justify their decision. If CAU had good reasons for their action, they could have stated them, in order to get any doubts out of the way. What has ended up happening is that the university doesn’t tolerate proper journalism.

Another picture was drawn in the student paper, Der Albrecht. Two authors who were also participants in Mr. Baab’s seminar in the summer of 2022, wrote an article about Mr. Baab’s trip in the East Ukraine and his accompaniment by the Russian-German Blogger, Sergey Filbert. What the two student authors express in their article is, “Kontaktschuld,” or “contact-guilt,” that is, “guilt by association.” So, the student article questioned why Mr. Baab was accompanied by the controversial blogger Filbert. But the fact that CAU terminated Mr. Baab’s contract because of this Kontaktschuld wasn’t even questioned. More than that, the article expresses that the authors support the canceling of investigative journalism.

A few students at the Campus of CAU also had mixed opinions. I informed them about what had happened to Mr. Baab and I described the accusations leveled against him. To make things as neutral as possible, I explained what CAU might have thought, when they revoked Mr. Baab’s teaching assignment. Some people said that they found such a thing happening very odd, and they wouldn’t want to say anything about it. The fact that Mr. Baab’s research in East Ukraine was sufficient to revoke his contract left most people I asked in confusion. But another student told me that she is ashamed about it, what CAU had done. She said that it was better not to continue studying at this university.

The Initiative for Patrik Baab

My fellow students and I founded in January 2022 a student group called “Dialog Grundrechte und Gesundheitsschutz” (“Dialogue for Basic Rights and Occupational Protection”). We seek to encourage a debate culture. Instead of debating about gender reforms, we want to tackle bigger topics, such as Covid, War and Democracy. Also, we connected with the student movement called, Studenten stehen auf (Students Stand Up). So, we are in good contact with the universities throughout Germany. Our student group and the student movement has stood up for Mr. Baab.

Next, we wrote a statement, where we submitted our opinion about the revocation of Mr. Baab’s contract and we also made demands. Therefore, we got in contact with Mr. Baab and allowed him to present his point of view. Then, we wanted to publish our statement via round-mail to reach every student and employee at CAU. As a student group, we are allowed to send two mails via round mail in one year. But the committee at our university declined our demand. They explained that our content didn’t correspond with the guidelines and that such messages should not be used to kick off debates.

University policy is an important pier of democratic culture in universities. Debates are the momentum to get democratic involvement. Why should a student group use this e-Mail distributor, when it is not allowed to kick off debates? It seems rather that the university loves to avoid a debate like this one. Obviously, CAU wished to delete the chapter about Mr. Baab.

Here’s our statement:

Dear Students and Staff at CAU,

It is with regret that we have learned of the dismissal of journalist and lecturer Patrik Baab. Mr Baab was a guest lecturer at CAU and offered the seminar “Recherchieren—ein journalistischer Handwerkskasten zur Kritik der herrschenden Meinung” [Research-a journalistic toolbox for critiquing prevailing opinion], which he first offered in the summer semester of 2022 and which was to continue in the following winter semester.

Because of his visit to Luhansk and Mariupol, Mr. Baab was accused of legitimizing the elections, which should indeed be viewed critically. The CAU’s accusations are based on a T-Online article, which has since been revised for containing allegedly false facts. The original article alleged that Mr Baab was an official election observer. However, the CAU still stands by its original position. Here is the CAU’s statement:

“Patrick Baabs Auftreten als ‘Beobachter’ der völkerrechtswidrigen Scheinreferenden in den russisch besetzten Gebieten der Ukraine verleiht dem russischen Vorgehen den Anschein von Legitimität. Die CAU distanziert sich ausdrücklich von Herrn Baabs Reise und ihren Implikationen und wird keine Lehrveranstaltungen anbieten, die von Herrn Baab unterrichtet werden. Der Lehrauftrag wird gekündigt.”

[Patrick Baab’s appearance as an “observer” of the sham referendums in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, which violate international law, gives the Russian actions the appearance of legitimacy. CAU expressly distances itself from Mr. Baab’s trip and its implications and will not offer any courses taught by Mr. Baab. The teaching assignment is terminated.]

The use of the term “observer” still leaves room for interpretation that Mr. Baab was an official observer. According to publicly available information, Mr. Baab first visited Western Ukraine and then went to Eastern Ukraine as an independent researcher. His aim was to hear the opinions of local residents and report on the situation first hand. The journalist’s activities in Luhansk and Mariupol should be seen as unbiased reporting and not as one-sided support for Russia.

Furthermore, it is a principle of journalism to be present at the action, rather than researching from a distance.

Mr. Baab’s teaching post at CAU was then hastily terminated in an urgent procedure, without giving him the opportunity to defend himself. With this action, CAU wanted to protect its reputation. Regrettably, this action disregarded the democratic right to defend oneself from statements of fact. The university is supposed to be a place of freedom of science, freedom of speech and freedom of education and should therefore support investigative journalism. Terminating Mr. Baab’s contract conflicts with these principles.

We, the university group “Dialog Grundrechte und Gesundheitsschutz,” condemn the hasty action of CAU and demand the immediate withdrawal of CAU’s statement of September 27, 2022, and the resumption of Mr. Baab’s teaching post.

An anonymous group that was motivated by our protest, hung up a banner, with the inscription “Solidarität mit Patrik Baab” (Solidarity with Patrik Baab), on a bridge at the most transited street at CAU. Thereupon, a video was made about the action, which went viral on social media.

The next step of our student group is to spread our statement in printed form to the students of CAU. Aside from that, on April 11th our student group will host a lecture form Mr. Baab, where he recount in front of a large audience what has happened to him so far. We are hopeful and optimistic, that Mr. Baab’s “case” will get the attention that is necessarily needed for him and that our university regrets the decision they made.

Julian Hett is a student student in philosophy and sociology at the Kiel University CAU. He is one the founders and first chairman of the student group “Dialog Grundrechte und Gesundheitsschutz.”

Featured: Le Silence [The Silence], by Lucien Levy-Dhurmer; painted in 1895.