Wolfgang Schivelbusch: “The other side. Living and researching between New York and Berlin”

From Helmut Böttiger

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Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s conversation volume is a contentious book full of spontaneity and directness. (Deutschlandradio / Rowohlt)

The cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has presented a stimulating intellectual autobiography in the form of a conversation. It’s an entertaining excursion into fields where cultural and intellectual history can be extremely exciting.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, who will soon be 80 years old, is a private scholar in the best sense of the word. He never had a permanent academic position, but his cultural-historical essays are full of esprit and erudition – and this probably has something to do with the fact that he deliberately did not want to get into the mills of a university. The path he could go was perhaps a generational privilege.

“The other side” is a kind of autobiography, a stimulating, entertaining excursion into fields in which the history of culture and intellectual history can be really exciting. The oral character of the text is amazing. In his foreword, the author explains that this was the result of “writer’s block”.

The result is a conversation tape with questions and answers – and Schivelbusch’s answers, which he then carefully edited, are very stimulating in their spontaneity and directness.

The Berlin of the 68 generation

He became famous for his “History of the Railway Journey”, which appeared in 1977 and in the midst of a highly politicized environment was a surprising historical field study with its sensual clarity, as it had not been known in Germany before. Schivelbusch initially seemed to be a typical ’68, he went from Frankfurt to West Berlin and immediately found himself in a reading group on Marx’s “Capital”, together with Dieter Sturm, the dramaturge of the “Schaubühne”, and the playwright Hartmut, who came from the GDR Longing.

Above all, however, he was shaped by the mythical Peter Szondi. His description of this unique comparative artist is fascinating, especially the central observation that Szondi sometimes forgot himself in the precise and inspiring text work and suddenly recited poems emphatically, like his friend Paul Celan, in the manner of the old Habsburg expressive actor Alexander Moissi .

Turning away from academic theory

This is part of the explanation for why Schivelbusch instinctively turned away from academic theory and repeatedly tracked down surprising everyday, technical and contemporary historical materials. “The other side” does not only mean the opposite pole to university operations, but also directly the USA.

For 40 years the author lived every six months in Berlin and New York, and his descriptions of the differences between America and Europe are very instructive. Democracy in the USA was created through a tabula rasa, in Europe through a centuries-long jumping procession. In the USA one is a democrat out of self-interest and not out of morality.

Like astonishingly many of his hedonistic-privileged peers, Schivelbusch also went through a conservative turn. He bumps into a hegemonic, liberal saturation, denounces cultural comforts and smugly shakes his head at certain excesses. A controversial book that inspires knowledge, archive and library ecstasies and intellectual delimitation.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch: “The other side. Living and researching between New York and Berlin”
Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 2021
335 pages, 26 euros

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