Book review: The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960–1990

Abstract

The Summer of Theory is an evocative and brilliant account of the 1968 generation of Marxist/post-Marxist intellectuals in West Germany. The book was published in German in 2015 to largely positive reviews. Tony Crawford’s translation is a compelling read of the rise and decline of a German genre, subversive ‘theory’. Philipp Felsch, Professor of Cultural History at the Humboldt University, Berlin, has vividly captured the milieu of a generation of German writers and their publishers, from c. 1960 to the end of the Cold War, a period that roughly can be characterized as the ‘summer of theory’. The 1960s, especially in the Federal Republic, saw the birth of a genre of what can be simply called radical ‘theory’ in the humanities. In many ways, this was a product of the meeting of German Marxism with French post-structuralist philosophy and other currents in radical thought, including Italian Marxism such as Operaism (or Workerism). But it was initially a reorientation of German Marxist thought, shorn of some of its historical baggage, and a product of a booming left-wing book market that came with the student movement. Felsch’s book seeks to show how theory was produced and how it was read by a generation of left-wing intellectuals who sought to understand the times in which they lived by new ideas that fundamentally challenged the conservative post-war orthodoxies and the cultural sterility of the 1950s. The self-understanding of the new turn to ‘theory’ was that of a ‘counter-discourse’, which was neither pure philosophy nor theory in the scientific sense of the term as hypotheses to be tested in social research. Theory was also an expression of a dissatisfaction with literature and artistic writing in the 1960s. It was inspired by the Frankfurt School’s conception of critical theory as self-reflection and ideology critique, but had a more radical and political edge to it. The Summer of Theory is a documentary-based historical reconstruction of the Berlin publishing house, Merve. Through its founder and publisher Peter Gente, along with his partner Heidi Paris, it shaped the New Left in West Germany over several decades. The research that was the basis of the book was a treasure trove of Gente’s papers, which had been purchased by an archive in Karlsruhe, and several interviews with key figures of the 1968 milieu. Merve Verlag – named after Peter Gente’s first wife, Merve Lowien – was the radical alternative to the more mainstream Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt. For more than two decades, since the first publication in 1970, Merve was a part of the intellectual scene in Berlin and more generally the student movement in West Germany. Gente’s European Journal of Social Theory 2023, Vol. 26(2) 301–307 a The Author(s) 2022