A review by margaret45678
Heritage of Our Times by Neville Plaice, Ernst Bloch, Stephen Plaice

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

This isn't really a review, more of a place for me to collect my thoughts, in preparation for hopefully eventually coming back to this book. 
Some things that stood out to me: 

• fascist appropriation of communist aesthetics and rhetoric
• fascistic mythology, superstition, neopaganism (highly relevant in the age of QAnon)
• montage, surrealism, distorted childhood memories 
• the idea that we don't yet know what it is to be human, we have never lived fully human lives
• closedness, mustiness, dust vs openness, cracks, hollows, splinters

More review-like thoughts: this is an extremely difficult text, not helped by the fact that I read most of it on the subway on my way to work and I don't know very much about German literature, philosophy, or art. The syntax is completely insane, and it becomes clear that Bloch has his own vocabulary which can be sort of difficult to grasp at times. I think the translators/editors could have done a bit more to make the book comprehensible. There are a fair number of footnotes but most of them didn't really help me understand what Bloch was talking about, though to be fair they probably thought this book would mostly be read by academics with a dictionary of German national biography close at hand, and not by me falling asleep on the 2 train.