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PARTISAN REVIEW
lution closely allied with politics, in art, music, theatre, film, and
literature, were self-satisfying hallmarks of our age. What remains of
the avant-garde (so-called) in 1982 is at best a species of minimalism.
In music, the work of Steve Reich and Philip Glass is reductionist,
utilizing simplified materials which evoke a dated sense of the
"primitive." In painting, the light colors of Judith Pfaff and the
expressionist sensibilities of this year's young darling of painting,
Julian Schnabel, echo the pre-1914 Berlin Secession, if not the
texture and colorings of Kokoschka. The survivors of the mid–
twentieth-century avant-garde have lost altogether the links to
radical politics; nostalgia and a vague spiritualism are the two
residues in today's esthetic.
Beyond art and culture and their relation to politics, the
challenge to routine politics in America in the sixties lent cogency to
the Weimar analogy. Turmoil in the streets and on campuses about
Vietnam and civil rights, the political assassinations, the aggressive,
idealistic challenge by the young, with its burgeoning stylistic
counterculture, and the sense of chaos in our democratic processes
all threatened stability. Activists sought the way for a new society. In
1982, the focus of activist attention is centered (as it has been for over
five years) on psychological and individualistic concerns, as was the
case in fin-de-siecle Vienna. Our search for growth and change has
been turned inward. We have come through a period of intense
obsession with self, visible in the career of feminism, the heightened
apolitical interest in sexuality, in fame and personality, and in
individual economics and material well-being-all phenomena
reminiscent of the literary and scientific manias of fin-de-siecle
Viennese society.
The extreme polarization by age and by political ideas in the
America of twelve years ago evoked good and bad memories of
Weimar politics. To some, the Weimar experience contained
explicit political lessons. "Uncivilized" political radicalism and
extremism in mores (notably in sexual behavior and in the dis–
paragement of monogamous romantic love) might lead to destruc–
tion of the very freedoms which made the political and cultural
challenge possible. America might, like Weimar, find itself reeling
toward the extreme right in a populist surge toward an authori–
tarianism intent on eradicating the new, the modern, and, by impli–
cation, the "decadent." After all, the Nazis considered Weimar
culture "decadent" and "nihilist," two words in common usage in the
sixties and early seventies. As in Weimar, respectability and
