From Karl May to Karl Marx: Ernst Bloch and the Native American Tribe as Concrete Utopia

Abstract

Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) was born into an assimilated Jewish family that converted to Christianity in the late nineteenth century. Although largely unknown today both outside and even to some extent inside Germany, he played a significant role in shaping the intellectual landscape of German and European theory, philosophy, and theology throughout the twentieth century. Many phrases he coined, such as “Concrete Utopia,” the “Principle of Hope,” and the “Upright Gait” (der aufrechte Gang), have gone into the German language as set idioms, even if few know their provenance. He was a friend, colleague, and interlocutor of Walter Benjamin, Georgy Lukâcs, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weil, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno, and many other interwar and postwar Marxist and Christian intellectuals. In 1949 he was one of those Left intellectuals who moved to communist East Germany in the hope that it would prove to be the better of the two German states. However, he very soon found that his unorthodox, humanist, and Hegelian Marxism did not find favor with the ruling party and he was removed from his post as professor of philosophy at Leipzig University in 1956 as a result of his role in the group of dissident communist intellectuals around Wolfgang Harich.