In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

PRESENT VS. PAST
The future occupies a subordinate position with respect to the past and
the present. There is little practical (and even less philosophical) optimism
left concerning the possibility of predicting the future. In the
opinion of some people, change is occurring so rapidly that any kind of
prognostication is impossible: "During the past five years, film has developed
at a pace that makes predictions dangerous, for it will probably
exceed even our wildest imaginations. Film never stands still. What was
invented yesterday looks old-fashioned today" (Lang, 222). In these
circumstances, the classical style of historico-philosophical speculation
and its Marxist applications rapidly lose their appeal. Traveling in the
Soviet Union, for example, the German Communist Ernst Toller encounters
a general frustration among his hosts because the long-awaited
German revolution has not yet arrived-and because Toller himself is no
longer optimistic enough to argue that such an expectation is still warranted
(Toller, 115). He feels that certain political concessions made by
the Soviet government-among them, sanctioning the official cult
around Lenin's embalmed corpse-jeopardize the possibility of transforming
the Communist utopia into a reality: "There are calculations
that just do not work in the long run. For a short while, they produce a
good yield-but one day it becomes clear that they have not accomplished
enough. One should not sacrifice the future to present concerns"
(107). Teleological arguments coming from the political Right and predicting
dramatic decay instead of society-wide contentment look no
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