Introduction

Summary

Has the postwar period, its last outburst of Utopian energies since exhausted, come to be our modern antiquity? Current popular nostalgia for that age, especially among the younger, might remind one of the aura around the golden twenties, when, as Adorno put it, “as once again briefly after 1945, it looked like the open possibility of a politically freed society.” Despite warning against this idealized image as more wishful projection than reality, Adorno had to admit that “its own delicacy and fragility presupposed a reality that had escaped from barbarism” (502). The same might be said of the period from 1945 to 1980. Our present is separated from that postwar era by postmodernity, in its own way a traumatic experience, if not as harrowing as 1933 to 1945. Thus, as once before in 1945, the antitraditional “tradition” of modernism “is broken off, and half-forgotten tasks remain” (503). It is, however, paradoxically the amnesia surrounding some of the art of this period that may allow the latter to be more than an aureatic myth or an academicizedism. If Godard and Pollock have become canonical, the same cannot be said of other figures once prominent, such as stockhausen, or of now-forgotten movements like cybernetics. only with the passing of postmodernism, which contributed to consigning so much of the postwar period to oblivion, is it possible to look back at that time with fresh eyes.