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Introduction Introduction David Bathrick and Andreas Huyssen David Bathrick met Andy Rabinbach forty-two years ago this fall when the latter was a dissertating graduate student and the former a new assistant pro- fessor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. David remembers well their first meeting, partly because either that day or shortly thereafter he had what we have all come to call the Andy epiphany. There is nothing very compli- cated about it. It is simply the moment when you realize that you are in the presence of someone with an extraordinary amount of knowledge and an equally brilliant ability to move it around. When Andy left Madison to teach at Hampshire College in 1973, he was urged to look up a close friend who was teaching at UMass. Andy did so, and shortly thereafter the response of this friend in reference to Andy was twofold: “Gosh, what a great guy and what a fabulous sense of humor.” And then came the sentence: “This is another order of human intelligence.” Certainly a key stage in our collective friendship was the founding of New German Critique with Jack Zipes and Andreas Huyssen in 1973. Like a lot of changes occurring in those heady revolutionary days of the early 1970s, this one had its moments of improbability, if not out-and-out chutzpah. Here were four young guys—who among them had published a few articles and two dissertations—deciding to found what they pompously called the first American journal of Marxist culture. One reason that our lack of experience, not to say qualifications, did not deter us was our decision to use the journal as a kind of peripatetic symposium to educate ourselves by opening up a New German Critique 117, Vol. 39, No. 3, Fall 2012 DOI 10.1215/0094033X-1677210 © 2012 by New German Critique, Inc. 1 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-critique/article-pdf/39/3 (117)/1/446126/NGC117_01Bathrick_Fpp.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 2 Introduction venue for like-minded scholars/intellectuals with similar questions and aver- sions. But a second reason for forging ahead was an intuition that when push came to shove, Anson Rabinbach was the one who ultimately knew what our project was really all about. Now, we have never asked Andy whether he really did know what our project was all about, nor do we plan to do so now. What follows below are thoughts on things we have most admired and learned from working with Andy over the years. The first would be the extraor- dinary archival depth and breadth of his knowledge, which has enabled him to navigate with ease across traditional borders, be they within the field of history itself or the larger disciplinary boundaries of the so-called humanistic and natural sciences. Perhaps the most stunning example of such navigation is his book The Human Motor, which came out in 1990.1 This theoretically informed synthesis of social and intellectual history examines how developments in physics, biology, medicine, psychology, thermodynamics, politics, sports, and the visual arts came to employ the metaphor of a working body as a human motor. The work is encyclopedic for what it draws on and synthesizes just in terms of negotiating and connecting discourses coexisting in various dimensions of nineteenth-century European public and scientific life all focused on the human body. Yet what Andy also does is to take his analysis up another notch in the form of a critical-historical argument to the effect that what we are seeing at a deeper level represents a transition from a strictly work-centered society to one in which work has been abandoned as a source of self-fulfillment. This book was a tour de force and has been recognized (and translated) internationally as such. Another powerful thread in Andy’s work has to do with his heuristic interest in what it means to be—but also his own practice of being—a public intellectual. To put it another way, he is not only the person who has written the best piece that we have read on Hannah Arendt’s tortuous epic debate with the New York intellectuals after her controversial articles on the Eichmann trial, but in contrast to some of us cloistered in academe, Andy has also functioned over the years as a New York intellectual. He has been a regular reviewer and commentator for the Times Literary Supplement, Dissent, and the Nation as well as a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Phila- delphia Inquirer, and other venues. But what we find just as compelling is his own epistemological use or staging of texts and debates written by or involving public intellectuals that 1. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-critique/article-pdf/39/3 (117)/1/446126/NGC117_01Bathrick_Fpp.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 David Bathrick and Andreas Huyssen 3 have arisen in moments of crisis, catastrophe, or apocalypse. We are not just talking about his magisterial book In the Shadow of Catastrophe, in which texts by Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno, written in the direct aftershocks of World War I and II, represent, in Andy’s words, “their authors’ most powerful philosophical attempts to translate that experience into a philosophical lan- guage whose legacy still exerts a powerful intellectual and sometimes even political influence today.”2 For here we also mention any number of twentieth- century intellectuals and events that have served Andy as paradigmatic for a nuanced and erudite exploration of the deeper contradictions of the times and crises in which they and their texts had impact. Hannah Arendt, Otto Katz, the Brown Book conspiracy, Albert Speer, Rafael Lemkin, and the Historians’ Debate (Historikerstreit) are just a few examples that come to mind. Central to all of Andy’s writings has been a consistently critical voice. Just as in the early 1970s he challenged the pieties of both orthodox Marxism and the New Left, he has always provided a compass to navigate against the currents of idées reçues of any kind. His most recent book, on key concepts of the Cold War (antifascism, totalitarianism, and genocide), is only the latest example: a brilliant and new kind of Begriffsgeschichte (history of ideas) as political history.3 Today we look at Andy’s way of negotiating political and cultural issues as an early manifestation of anti-identity politics in intellectual and political matters alike. This comes out in his inimitable irony and sar- donic humor toward pieties of any kind, a quality both his very own and reinforced by his major and beloved teacher, George Mosse. Andreas remem- bers how Andy held his audience in thrall at the Leo Baeck memorial for George shortly after he died—just telling stories from George’s teaching and interaction with his students in Madison. The occasion was sad, but Andy lifted everybody’s spirits: another moving example of the extent to which Andy’s intellectual life has always also been an act of generous caring for his mentors and his interlocutors. In all of his work, Andy is a great storyteller, as the best historians are wont to be. Whatever theoretical or philosophical problematic may be at stake, there always is a telling narrative that shapes and supports reflection and con- ceptualization—a narrative that historicizes rigorously but remains attuned to 2. Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apoca- lypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 2. 3. Anson Rabinbach, Begriffe aus dem Kalten Krieg: Totalitarismus, Antifaschismus, Genozid (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-critique/article-pdf/39/3 (117)/1/446126/NGC117_01Bathrick_Fpp.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 4 Introduction the key questions our present asks of the past. After almost four decades of intellectual companionship, we know well how much our own writing and research owes to Andy’s work, to his contagious intellectual energy, and to his ability to think outside the box. In this spirit of gratitude, this issue, in addition to this introduction and a tribute by Jessica Benjamin, assembles ten essays by his friends, colleagues, and former students, most of which were first presented on the occasion of Andy’s sixty-fifth birthday celebration, held at Columbia University’s Deutsches Haus in New York in May 2010. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-critique/article-pdf/39/3 (117)/1/446126/NGC117_01Bathrick_Fpp.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021.
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