#
Rainer Langhans drinks blood orange juice. He accompanies it with half an avocado and fried mushrooms, without bread. In the glass display case, plump tartlets tempt like the sensation of fruit on bare skin. Cake pops and colorful macarons, all strictly vegan. A tribute to a prudish zeitgeist, Patisserie Safer Sex.
Langhans, with his white curly hair and dressed all in white, fits into the pastel-colored ambience. „What was the experience of ‚68?“he asks himself, as if he didn’t know the answer. That‘s the question I came to Munich with, to the Maxvorstadt district; it’s less than two kilometers from the bright green macarons to the Feldherrenhalle.
The ‚68 experience.
“Of course we had sex, drugs, and rock ‘n‘ roll, all that stuff, but those are just crude, materialistic derivations of a much higher experience.“ Langhans, once the It boy of the revolt, says „we“when he means the commune. Kommune I, the West Berlin commune founded in early 1967, was a friction point and an incubator. It was a breeding ground for hatred of the bourgeoisie, and it gave rise to Spontis and terrorists.
LANGHANS MOVED there in March 1967. Last year, he told the respectable Apotheken Umschau magazine: “The commune was an invention to overcome the Western world with its end product, capitalism and fascism.“
Mission accomplished?
„Everything was there, everything was right, everything was love. We saw the future back then. Not just saw it, but experienced it. We were able to live like that for a whole year. And then we fell out again. Everything was worse than before, because now we knew what real life was like. I didn’t think I‘d survive.“
According to tradition, it was about emancipation and democratization. About left instead of right. About the identity of the private and the political. About Dieter Kunzelmann‘s claim to total public disclosure, even for his orgasm problems.
„Of course I was left-wing. As an autistic person, I was always searching for the right world. In the beginning, the left-wingers said that this wasn’t the right world, we wanted a better one. Today, the left wants to preserve the status quo. So, of course, I‘m no longer left-wing. The left has failed with its approach. The only thing that has proven itself to this day and that I live by is the search for spirituality. This deep inward journey. Away from materialism.“
Of course I was left-wing. As an autistic person, I was always searching for the right world.
The crescent-shaped tartlets in the display case, sensually glazed in red, keep the desire for this world alive. Langhans says: „The phrase ‚the private is political‘ is slowly becoming true. Today you can say: go inside yourself, into your private sphere, and you will see the new politics, the new life.“
The keyword: the journey inward. Now two great dead men should be sitting at the table, Alexis de Tocqueville and Sheldon Wolin. They were preoccupied with the degeneration and decline of democratic forms of government. Both would agree with Langhans – who is no intellectual revolutionary – when he says, „The great thing is that 1968 lives on in our memory as a new beginning, not as a gravedigger‘s work. Now the negative aspects are coming to the fore, the aspects of dying. This is also because we were unable to continue 1968 in the true sense of the word.“
Wolin, an American who died in 2015 and received little attention in Germany, applied Tocqueville‘s term „democratic despotism“not to the authoritarian ideologies of the 20th century, but to postmodern American democracy. In his late work, published in 2008 and released in Germany under the title “Umgekehrter Totalitarismus“(Reverse Totalitarianism), he dissects its characteristics. The concentration of power in the hands of a cartel of politics and big business, the breathtaking gap between rich and poor, the pacification of citizens with apolitical freedoms – consumption, sexuality, individual self-determination – and a media power that ensures desired opinions and approval of the status quo.
Participation, if it exists at all, is cosmetic. “In order to democratize the politics of the megastate even minimally,“ Wolin writes, „citizens would have to fulfill their civic role by doing more than passively supporting those in power.“
They call it the ‚net bubble‘ today,“says Langhans, „we called it the commune.
The recipe is manipulation instead of repression; dissent is tolerated and contained. Wolin writes of „democracy as a brand name for a product that can be controlled at home and marketed abroad.“ The discreet charm of reverse totalitarianism. 1968 was a milestone in the emergence of the post-democratic megastate. Langhans’ characterization of the era as grave digging is apt: where are the corporate, collective structures that once shaped Western societies? Where is the class consciousness or even the sense of belonging that is a natural characteristic of a society that sees itself as political? The decades since 1968 have swept everything away.
The communards, including Langhans, saw the future as liberation, as a new world. He continues to insist: „The nuclear family is now truly burned out, throughout history. It has produced enough murderers. That‘s why we said: commune, or we won’t survive.“
But breaking out of repressive structures came at a high price, in this case the price of politics. Politics is the physics of power; what counts there is mass, which no individual has access to. The liberated individual may be self-determined, but he is powerless.
This is another reason why the journey inward became a state religion, or at least a state-supporting cult. From emancipation to self-optimization, from rainbow politics to identity politics – a multi-billion-dollar business keeps the atomized selves enthusiastic and entire industries in work and bread. The state promotes this activity wherever and however it can. Those who seek salvation only in themselves will never question the question of power.
We are talking about 17- to 20-year-olds, about their retreat into the internet, the new, vast interior space. We are also talking about the fact that half of Berlin‘s clubs have closed down. „They call it the ‚net bubble‘ today,“says Langhans, “we called it the commune. With young people, you can only talk about bubbles. They don’t exist as creatures of old politics. Only in their internet bubbles.“
Individual self-conquest and the search for protection in virtual spaces are all that remain of late modern society‘s superstructure. Participation is a distant dream, politics is as meaningless as the res publica. This describes the paradise of the powerful in Wolin‘s repression-free totalitarianism.
HOW CAN DISRUPTION still be possible? The 85-year-old Langhans recalls the “thing with the climate issue.“ Our material civilization, he says, is going under, and so is our material consciousness. In fact, we are on a global suicide mission. People are trying to prevent this death. He himself is happy to die: „I‘m practicing, I‘m learning how to do it.“ With good reason: his cancer diagnosis is terminal. „And I don’t want to die so normally, in fear. I want the ecstasy of dying, the possibility of passing on to a better life.“
The climate crisis will bring about both: on the one hand, even more retreat into the inner self, and on the other, the return of politics. It will also trigger a third thing: impatience and panic. Like after 1968 with the terrorism of the Red Army Faction. Langhans is a witness: „I was friends with all of those who killed themselves. That impatience. They couldn‘t wait for their own development in a normal life. They said, ‚I‘m giving my life for the new life. I can’t live the old one anymore.‘ War is also an exercise in dying in order to find a new life.“
At the latest when the rich and powerful move to places where they can spend the summer unscathed even in a two-degree-plus world, war and revolution are just around the corner. The power structures have only one goal: self-preservation. A world that is two degrees warmer becomes the ultimate challenge. Hence the Green Deals and the rhetoric of sustainability, both flanked by the identity industry. Let the isolated run themselves ragged on their journey inward. Don‘t look up.
„NORMALLY, DYING is bad,“says the old man who played the clown of the revolt almost 60 years ago. “You never really lived, and now you‘re dying. Fortunately, I managed to escape that to some extent. We saw the future, the new life, and even lived it for a year. And when it disappeared, I was able to go in search of it. And I found it again: the great, all-encompassing love, spirituality.“
As he leaves, he asks for two of the brightly colored cupcakes to be wrapped up, one raspberry, one strawberry and basil. Food erotica. Sometimes it doesn‘t take much to be happy in life, wrote a Munich journalist about the patisserie.
Lesen Sie mehr zum Thema