It must have been before June 1967, the Shah's visit to Berlin and the Six-Day War in Israel, when Karl Korn called me and announced that Karl Heinz Bohrer was visiting: I should give his talented young colleague the who's who explain the confusing cultural revolutionary scene in Berlin. Back then, the editorial team wanted to get first-hand information. The result was a friendly and lively discussion with an unusually curious journalist with a peculiarly flickering intelligence.
But I only remembered this trait of his character when I later read his article, a fiery account of his experiences. The fact was that it showed completely different sympathies and weightings than the author should actually have inferred from my description. If I remember correctly, the justification-conscious arguments of the circle around AStA chairman Häußermann in Bohrer's description took a back seat to the talented productions of Commune 1 and the "actionist" extensive ideas of the SDS around Dutschke and Rabehl. This aroused interest in a person who, like many others, not only led a literary existence. It seems to me that Karl Heinz Bohrer is one of those rare intellectuals whose work is to a certain extent verified by the erratic trait of their own way of life.
During the politically and culturally liveliest years of the “old” Federal Republic of Germany, Frankfurt, at that time probably the most intellectually flexible city, formed the milieu in which Karl Heinz Bohrer discovered and developed “literature and life” as the theme of his life. This process is reflected in those four essays that were published by Hanser in 1970 under the title “The Endangered Fantasy, or Surrealism and Terror”. Bohrer did not want to go along the path that Peter Weiss took back then from the surrealist "shadow of the coachman's body" to the disturbing "Marat" to the politically invasive "Vietnam discourse". He did not want to see the political impulse encapsulated in the striking aesthetics of Surrealism either released in an intoxicating dramatic staging or released from political engagement.
Commitment as treason
Although Bohrer never renounced his grumbling political temperament, the project of using art to revolutionize social life appeared to him to be a betrayal of the radicalism of the shocking, eye-opening aesthetic experience. The explosive and sudden onset of this experience might have a resemblance in the artistic imagination to the rare revolutionary turning points in history invoked by Benjamin; but art would only be able to break through the armor of normality, the ordinary and the continuity of the sticky everyday life as long as it remained the extra-ordinary, the utterly different in life. On the other hand, this moment of irreconcilability between art and life had to be lived.Compared to the Platonic worshipers of the pure form, Bohrer remained an existentialist. In the texts of Friedrich Schlegel he searched for the radical nature of this lived incompatibility of art and life; This is one of the reasons why early Romanticism has always remained an essential part of the Enlightenment for him.
On his way from journalism to literary theory, Bohrer did not withdraw into literature and theory.
He was skeptical, often polemical, against the leftist impulse to decipher those traces of reason in history that might give political criticism a direction.
He fought all round against Hegel and “the” philosophy of history.
But L'art our l'art was no more Bohrer's credo than “theory and practice”.
Because the explosive device of aesthetic experience not only remained theory, but was lived, it was also a sting for the criticism that the editor of Mercury made from a distance of the political conditions at home.
Recurring sense of home
The life of someone who had remained a stranger in France and England made it possible for Bohrer to make a political and polemical rhyme for the critically distant everyday life of his homeland - in order to enclose himself, existing as a foreigner, in the skin of the German language. That may have made the existential problem of the tension between art and life more bearable for him. In any case, in this way the scientist Bohrer of literary theory and the writer have brought an original and curiosity-arousing work to the public of his readers.
To avoid any misunderstanding: Bohrer was anything but an esoteric, he was a Rhinelander. I don't remember a situation in which Karl Heinz lost or even denied his Cologne tone. Once he confessed to me the feelings at home that seized him every time he crossed the Rhine on the way from Paris to his apprenticeship in Bielefeld. I have always trusted my Rhenish compatriot on a friendly basis across political distances.